They made it halfway to the gate, which seemed good, given how crowded the woods seemed to be tonight. At least, for variety’s sake, they managed to stumble over the next group of Anathema, rather than vice versa. Both Weir looked very surprised. The human — well, no, Alex reminded himself; the Anathema with them looked even more so.
Katya threw one of her needles at him, overhand, and he ducked to avoid it, reaching for his gun. It flickered out of sight in mid-air, holding onto the momentum when it reappeared somewhere inside of him, emerging, point first, from the right side of his chest, poking out from between his ribs. He dropped the gun he’d been holding and stared at it in horror. Alex held out his hand, measuring from there, and waited for the Weir to move. He didn’t have to wait very long.
They were faster than he anticipated, and he almost didn’t get the first one, on the way in, which would have been a problem, because Katya was still digging through her pockets. He had to try twice, in rapid succession, unpleasantly aware that every pinhole meant a few more hours of his life lost to dreamless, hollow sleep. His first attempt grazed the back of the Weir’s skull. The second one hit the mark, and the thing fell down in the same horrible convulsions. Alex spun to face the final Weir, knowing the he would be too late to stop it, wondering if Katya had worked anything out.
The Weir dropped to its knees in coughing, choking spasms, close enough that Alex could smell its foul breath. He turned and looked at Katya gratefully as the thing died.
“Fuck, man, I thought you were out of needles or something,” Alex gasped, his hands on his knees. “I would’ve been dead.”
“Actually,” Katya said modestly. “I did kind of run out of… accessible needles. I actually killed that one with a handful of dirt. Whatever works, right?”
“Accessible?”
Katya blushed.
“Yeah, can we not talk about that?”
“Right,” Alex said, turning back toward the gate. “You’re right. How do you think we should do this? Do we walk right in, or what?”
As they walked along, he could hear clothing rustle and shift behind him. He risked one quick look back, and caught her fussing with her skirt lining, and got a good idea about where the “inaccessible” needles were stored. Then Katya caught him looking and glared, and he sort of wished he hadn’t.
As much as Alex tried to keep his mind on other things, it returned again and again to Emily. He recalled the strange things she’d said, the water bleeding out of her skin, watching her disintegrate in his arms; it was like a sore in his mind, constantly threatening to occupy his attention. When he actually gave in and tried to think the whole scene through, though, Alex drew a complete blank. His mind fixated and recoiled over the sheer horror and impossibility of the situation. Alex remembered what she looked like in her white dress on a sunny afternoon not so long ago, on the other side of the Gate he and Katya were cautiously approaching now, and it caused pain that ran right through him, nestling in his chest as if it planned to stay. However, if he had been asked to explain, there would have been nothing he could articulate.
It got quieter as they approached the gate, and there were more bodies scattered around the trees and the road, some of them probably people he’d seen around, some of them maybe even people he liked. He tried very hard not to look at them.
The road broadened into a plaza, a roundabout with a stone pavilion in the center, directly in front of the Gate. There had been a bus stop and a rain shelter in its shadow, but now there were only fragments of torn metal bolted to the stone that reminded him of the way Emily laughed on a certain afternoon. Katya motioned for him to be quiet as they approached, and something about the gesture recalled the way it had looked — Emily’s lovely, well-proportioned head marred and violated by a thin, rounded piece of metal — and for a moment, he thought he that couldn’t go on any further. Then he saw them, standing near the Gate and talking in low voices. Anathema, dressed for battle, in face paint that he couldn’t identify but he knew indicated their cartel membership. He didn’t need to be able to read it to recognize them. He’d seen the same paint a half-dozen times tonight, and the people wearing it had always been trying to kill him. There were five of them, and all of them had guns.
Alex crouched in the brush, not far from the edge of the woods, where the road begin. Katya bent down beside him. The heavy skirt and jacket combo she’d worn had seemed unreasonably warm on the island. Now he envied her the heavier clothes.
“What do we do now?”
Katya opened her mouth to answer, and then she closed it again, and shrugged.
“I have three needles left,” she offered. “Can you take some of them from here? I’m going to have to get closer…”
As it turned out, she didn’t have to, after all.
Normally, an apport was delivered as close as possible to ground level. When Svetlana performed an apport, Alex noticed that he often had the sensation of falling slightly, on arrival, probably due to inexperience. But whoever put Grigori twenty feet above the huddled group outside the Gate did it on purpose. Apparently, the electric blue crackling aura that surrounded him was enough to be absorb the impact.
The two men who were caught below him, not so much. Alex sincerely hoped they were dead. They sure looked dead; with a whole lot of what was supposed to be on the inside suddenly squeezed out by Grigori’s telekinetic dive-bomb. A shallow crater contained the carnage that Grigori was still in the process of extracting himself from.
The first one of the survivors to react was a guy wearing one of those ski-mask things that people use to rob gas stations. He must have been a pyrokine, and he clearly wasn’t stupid. Apparently, he didn’t need to use his hands to operate his protocol, because the air around Grigori ignited while the man leveled his squat British bull pup SMG, flicked off the safety, and started pumping rounds into Grigori, who had gone up like a Christmas tree in February. Alex moved to help him automatically, before he even thought about what he was going to do, but Katya pulled him down by his arm, hissing her disapproval. She indicated with curt, angry gestures that he was to follow her. She crouched and then lead him off to the side, flanking the remaining men near one side of the Gate. Ten steps later, Alex realized why.
Grigori was invisible inside the Roman candle he had become. But he wasn’t flailing or falling down. He was moving toward the men, slowly but surely, and beneath the layer of livid orange flame, Alex could see brilliant blue undertones.
He had seen Grigori use his protocol before, once or twice, when he visited sessions of the Program, but he didn’t really understand it that well. Grigori was some kind of wideband telekinetic, as Alex understood it, powerful but with an extremely limited range and a blunt, dramatic dispersal. He couldn’t project or strike at a distance like Michael. Instead, he used his protocol almost entirely in contact with his own body.
Grigori crossed about half the distance between him and the remaining Operators before they had the good sense to kill the fire. Underneath, Grigori was sheathed in a shimmering blue field that ebbed and waxed around him, tidal fluctuations in high speed. He looked a bit cooked and unhappy, but otherwise unhurt. Two of the men had the good sense to start using their rifles, banana-clipped AK-47s. The last one had the even better sense to go for his radio. Alex could only assume that meant that the squad telepath had been one of the two unfortunates that Grigori had landed on.
Grigori got his hands on the closest one, the pyrokine. The air in front of his fist radiated a livid blue as he concentrated his telekinetic abilities down into a single point. Alex had seen him do this before, once, but it had been as part of a demonstration, on a block of concrete. The effect on the pyrokine’s abdomen was similar, but much uglier.