Gill followed a narrow street leading to another large avenue, parallel to the first one. His plan was to reach his magneto-jet on the eastern outskirts, but several vehicles appeared in front of him from the side streets. He had no intention of confronting the proximity inductors, even though it crossed his kyi to twist the space in front of the jets and make them crash into one another. Unfortunately, from fifty feet and without an armored wall, one single core blast would surely kill him, so it was smarter just to step out of their way. Therefore, he turned on his heels and ran in the opposite direction.
The pack of tarjis swelled with every moment. A quick change of direction was enough to lose them, sometimes leaving piles of smoking debris in his wake, but a couple of times, he felt the passing impact of a neural inductor whipping his tortured muscles when some hidden tarji jumped from a narrow street, right on his tail. Luckily, the painful touch was always too short to be effective because the difference in speed quickly pushed him outside the paralysis cone.
An unimaginable ruckus was taking place in the western part of the city. Unbeknownst to Gill, a million tarjis had marched back to Alixxor to take part in the final battle and fulfill Baila’s prophecy. The first ones to arrive rushed to raise barricades around the district, some climbing to all sorts of dangerous places to make sure they didn’t leave any holes in the net.
Although the Security Tower lay in ruins, the same couldn’t be said about its redoubtable weapons: Baila’s agents were using the Shindam’s orbital platforms to track his steps in real time. A detailed hologram of the sector was rendered in a huge holotheater installed in Belamia’s pyramid dome; about two dozen initiates gathered around it followed Gill’s every move, shouting orders to the leaders in the streets.
An ominous thud followed by a loud hissing shook the windows of the surrounding domes. The armored chameleons captured by the initiates were coming for him, jumping over the domes raised in their way, and even the slightest chance of escape would be gone when they turned on their powerful inductors. He could only imagine the chaos—hundreds of unshielded tarjis would jump to their death from the rooftops or air-jets under the ruthless commands forced into their hearing lobes, just to capture one foolhardy archivist.
Sometimes Gill found his path blocked by barriers even on the side streets. He felt the noose tightening around him. The tarjis probably realized they couldn’t simply paralyze him on the run, so they forced him to move in circles to exhaust his muscles.
Gill had just entered a narrow street, apparently deserted, when two jets jumped in front of him. He was about to turn back, but the noise of several charged turbines coming from behind told him that he fell into a new trap. The vibration was growing so quickly that his tail contracted involuntarily, expecting the whips of the neural inductors. He had to find an escape, and quick! Without thinking too much about how stupid the thing he intended to do was, Gill grabbed the space over the dome on his left and pulled it at his feet.
He stepped into the void, aware of what to expect next—namely, a free fall, in which he would have only a fraction of a second to frame a piece of land and drag it under his feet before his speed would become too great to land in “one piece.”
As he headed straight toward the dome’s ornate cornice, he realized, to his horror, that the ground was moving too fast to be able to see anything. After a moment longer than eternity, he finally spotted another street running parallel to the one from where he had taken off. He quickly dragged a plastoceramic tile under his feet and braced for the landing. He didn’t have to wait for long. He felt a strong punch in his face—it might have been one of his knees—and he lost consciousness.
Gill opened his eyes, panicked, expecting to see tarjis bent over him. There was no one nearby. A warm fluid was leaking on his face, and he needed no holophone to know he was losing blood in abundance.
Wobbling on his feet from exhaustion and shock, he walked toward a large avenue. He recognized it at a glance, if only by the smoldering craters dug in the magnetic pavement and the flaming debris spread everywhere. It was the place of the first chain collision. A couple of domes were in flames, their automatic fire systems trying hard to extinguish them, splashing pink foam on the walkways.
He stopped at the edge of a crater, completely exhausted. Several dozen magneto-jets appeared on the avenue. The tarjis sensed that the hunt was drawing to an end; they approached slowly with the inductors in their hands, ready to paralyze him.
The vehicles stopped less than seven hundred feet from Gill—the fire sensors had deactivated their reactors when they came too close to the disaster area. The tarjis looked at one another, disconcerted. They stepped out of the jets and moved toward him in quick steps, trying hard not to seem to be running.
At the other end of the avenue, Gill could see the elusive silhouettes of other jets through the thick smoke coming from the craters. Surely the side streets were also blocked.
He feverishly sought a way out, although he knew that the situation had become hopeless. He wasn’t afraid. He didn’t want to be afraid anymore. The sight of the titanic struggle of the Sigians, so abandoned by hope, so outnumbered, instilled in him the power of their despair, which now became his.
With the tarjis approaching fast, Gill decided where to make his last stand. He sprung toward the huge dome close to him, which was the center of acajaa-flour distribution for the neighborhood. Several decorative windows were smashed by the blast wave. He pulled the space and jumped inside through the nearest one.
Seeing this, the horde burst after him, howling like a pack of guvals.
The orange dome, perfectly transparent from the inside, covered a large room thirty feet below the ground level. This was the place where the flour distribution had taken place before the madness. Now everything was gone—the shelves for the partially cooked meal, the AI funnels for smelling the flour quality, and the seeds for tired nostrils. The only thing left was the orange floor, strangely smooth and empty, which could be reached from two large white staircases at its ends. It looked like a deep pool, bordered by ornate handrails resembling acajaa spikes, also painted orange.
The shards of the broken windows lay scattered around the place, tangled with various remains of jets and moulan statues. Even though the air was full of smoke, the fire extinguishers were silent.
Gill jumped the stairs in one step and reached the middle of the pool. He had nowhere to run from there, but he didn’t intend to. He quelled a shudder of fear that tried insidiously to seep into his kyi. Gill remembered the thought of the bracelet bearer before the final battle: “The ark is lost anyway. The only thing that matters now is to bring a rich harvest with us to the river of shadows.” The ritual words would finally fulfill their meaning, for there was no Sigian fleet to save him this time. The war didn’t end when the beautiful town of the desert fell. Today is the last battle of the Sigians, he thought, smiling bitterly. It looked like he wouldn’t stand a better chance than the Sigian fleet fighting the gray armada around their homeworld, but he was proud to fight like they fought, to fight until the last breath defending the secret hidden on Mapu. He felt a wave of warmth and peace flooding his kyi. It will be a battle worthy of you, he promised.
The tarjis ran down the stairs to the lower level, but they slowed their steps when they saw Gill immobile in the middle of the floor, waiting for them. They readied their inductors, weighing every step and fending their eyes. They knew they were fighting Arghail himself, who was surely hiding in a dark crack somewhere, eager to gaze into their eyes. Victory or defeat depended solely on them. If they made a mistake now, they could jeopardize not only their feeble lives—for which they didn’t care much anyway—but the very eternity of their kyis!