“Sir,” he says, lowering his gun and looking directly at his superior, hoping to draw out some honesty. “Do we have any backup?”
Abbot shakes out of his introspection and his face resumes its glowering. “We have Goldman if they’ll fucking show up!”
“When I left Post, the merger was struggling. A lot of public firings, rumors of another branch break.”
“They’ve had some HR issues,” Abbot says sourly. “Locals aren’t merging as smoothly as we hoped, but I thought it was quelled by now.” He spits a glob of mucus onto the floor in front of him. “This is the goddamn Axiom Group! We’ve been doing this shit for decades! We don’t let a few religious nut-jobs walk in and take our—”
He cuts off. A smile creases his craggy face.
Two ancient, dented Apache helicopters have appeared in the sky to the west. They move in to join the three hovering over the stadium.
“About fucking time!” Abbot says, thumping the balcony railing. “If they brought their ground troops with them, we might have a—”
Missiles streak out from the Apaches, but not into the swarm of Boneys. The National Guard gunship spirals down in a swirl of smoke.
“No,” Abbot mumbles, but Abram feels oddly unsurprised.
The two news choppers turn to face Goldman’s Apaches. There’s an exchange of loud noises. Both news choppers fall in groaning masses of fire. One of the Apaches spins out of control and crashes into an office building, blasting a flurry of documents out over the street like parade confetti. The last one wobbles in the air for a moment before its rotors lock up and it drops to the ground like a stone.
Then the ground troops Abbot hoped for appear, pouring out of Corridor 2 with shouts of “For General Cinza!” They open fire on the skeletons, and on Axiom’s men, and the battle is suddenly very confusing.
So we stop watching it. We attune to Abram Kelvin, whose mind is also drifting away from the madness around him. How he hates it all. How he’s always hated it, even while he was making it. How he wishes there were other directions the earth could spin.
A small skeleton is climbing toward him. He has never seen a child Boney before but he supposes there’s no reason they wouldn’t exist. He locks eyes with its gaping sockets.
Is this what you want for her? whispers that maddeningly familiar voice, flickering on every syllable from boy to man and back. Is this the best you’ve come up with after all your years on this planet?
The skeleton is getting close. Abbot has retreated into the wall and he’s yelling at Abram to join him, but Abram doesn’t move.
If this is really all you can see, then let it eat you and be done with it, because this isn’t worth the pain.
Abbot is sliding the door shut. It squeals on its rusty track.
But we know you, Abram. I know you. And I know you can see more.
His bullet disintegrates the tiny skull, close enough to spray his face with bone chips. He ducks through the remaining gap and helps Abbot lock the door.
There are many distortions in Abram’s perception. Many scratches on his lens from a lifetime of rough handling. But one of his simplest mistakes is believing that no one is watching him. Many people are watching him, including the small girl five floors up, leaning over the edge and squinting, wondering if that’s her father down there.
Sprout Kelvin can see Abram perfectly well. Her special eye disregards the illusion of distance and sees every hair on his head, the grays here and there, the thinning patch at the back. But seeing his face does not answer her question.
Is that my father?
He disappears before she can decide. There are skeletons creeping up the wall. They advance slowly, wandering side to side in search of holds on the mostly smooth face of the stadium. It will be some time before they reach her perch, if they aren’t shot down first, so she doesn’t panic yet. But she is very, very scared.
She is scared of being eaten, of being imprisoned, of being pumped full of plague until she no longer has a self. But mostly she’s scared for the people around her, because she cares as much for each one of them as she does for herself, and there are more of them than of her.
We like this girl. She sees things. Sometimes, she sees us. She reads our fantastic tales of speculative fiction and projects them onto reality. And maybe someday, with enough projectors shining, someone will trace that image.
Sprout’s new friend Addis might have such talent, but the world has rapped his knuckles every time he’s reached out, and even with our voices inside him asking him to try again, he is not quite convinced. The world has much to prove before he will trust it with his hopes.
And yet here is his sister, who has given up everything for the people she loves. He can see the sludge coating her mind now, the puree of black worms chopped fine but still quivering, still sucking up her life and shitting out death. He can see her fighting to clean it off, spraying her soiled thoughts with a fire hose of will.
Nora stands up.
She blinks and shakes her head, swaying like a drunk. Her eyes manage to focus on Addis’s for just a second, communicating something like, I have to, and then she stumbles down the corridor.
Addis looks at Sprout.
“I’m going to stay,” she says. “I don’t want to get Julie hurt.” She glances down at the skeletons’ slow ascent, then at Joan and Alex, who nod. “We’ll be okay,” she tells Addis. “Go see what you need to see.” Then she smiles. “I think they’re almost ready.”
And she’s right. We are almost ready. We are fuel awaiting a spark.
I
ACROSS THE ROOF. Down the drain pipe. Through the balcony doors.
Julie’s bedroom is exactly how she left it. Her bed is there, but the sheets are gone. Her dresser drawers hang open, empty. Nails and thumbtacks mark the places where her art and mementos used to hang. The room is a gutted shell. A skeleton stripped of flesh.
It was a rushed moving day. It took her one hour to pack, stuffing her few meaningful possessions into boxes with violent haste, her eyes brimming but refusing to release. It was three hours after she watched her father die. Three hours after her father tried to kill her. But she didn’t want time to recover and mourn; she wanted to pull every trace of herself out of this place and wake up tomorrow somewhere new. She wanted to leave and never come back.
I see it in her eyes as we march through the wildly painted sanctuary of her youth, with its lingering scent of cheap incense and cigarettes. The struggle not to remember. To be here and now and nowhere else.
I know that struggle well.
I put an arm around her shoulders and pull her against me, forcing her to pause. She looks up at me, then buries her face in my neck. Just a moment. Just enough to acknowledge the thickly layered lives we’ve lived. Then she wipes her eyes and we move on.
The house is silent. I hear no gruff laughter or barked commands. The only sign of Axiom’s presence is the muffled noise outside the stadium, a jumble of shouts and explosions and inhuman roars, like all the world’s aggressors dumped into a blender.
We climb down stairs sticky with spilled beer and tobacco spit, past bunk beds, bean bags, TVs, and gun racks—empty, to my dismay and relief.
We reach the ground level. Julie stops in front of a separate staircase leading further down.