Seeing him gasping for air, his pursuers suddenly found their courage: he wasn’t immune to paralysis—he could be restrained! The next simple conclusion popped up in their excited kyis: the one who will capture Abrian will get his reward from Zhan’s hand!
Completely forgetting their earlier fears, the tarjis rushed forward, each hoping to be the one to hang his collar on Gill’s neck.
A giant Antyran in front of the pack had the best chance of winning the great prize. One step… another one… He’d reach him in a moment. But then something weird happened: at his next step, the floor gave way as if a crevice had opened under his feet!
The perplexed Antyran found himself a good fifty feet in the air, near the ceiling, and the cries of horror trailing from above while he was tumbling down, although not consoling, were a hint that he wasn’t falling alone.
A cascade of twisted bodies opened in front of Gill, the last ones landing on top of their companions. At least three or four survived the fall, groaning in pain.
Looking angrily at the tarjis who came inside after the first pack, Gill roared like a wounded guval. Seeing the pile of Antyrans lying motionless in front of the mad archivist, they screamed in terror and ran out of the building, pushing aside the ones who were trying to enter through the broken door.
He was able to move again, freed from the invisible shackles—and it looked like he was left alone. Or maybe not, he had to admit grudgingly after he noticed the silhouettes of three Antyrans on the high gallery around the distribution floor, watching his moves from above. He looked at them, astounded by their boldness, but he quickly realized they were a different tail altogether—most likely trained killers from the Zhan’s Children coria. They wore headphones glued on their gills, on which they were feverishly reporting what they witnessed.
Why didn’t they flee for their lives? Reckless Antyrans… Without wasting any more time, he walked toward the two closer ones who were standing near the top of the stairs. Seeing this, they both pulled their weapons. To his surprise, they were not inductors, but lasers.
“Don’t let him get away!” the third agent screamed from the aisle behind him. “Shoot him in the legs!”
A blurry haze covered his eyes, and Gill knew, more than he felt, that his hearts were close to bursting. He saw them aiming at his feet, but at the same time, he perceived the painful expansion of the time continuum flowing throughout his whole body. Suddenly, the assassins started to move ridiculously slowly; he looked around for something useful—he felt he had enough time even for a nap—and spotted a long, solid pipe on the floor, a fragment from a destroyed jet.
He pulled the space to grab one of its ends, and in the same fluid move, he jumped thirty feet up to reach the edge of the pool. Still in the air, he made a step sideways to land on the aisle, not far from the attackers. His speed was faster than the shadow of a nifle,54 and the agents couldn’t see more than a flash of color.
Before they had time to figure out his intentions, Gill hit the air with the pipe in his hands while he was still some fifty feet from them. The Antyrans expected many things, but nothing prepared them for what followed: the bar savagely smote the head of the agent to the right, for Gill had deformed the space to ensure his skull was on the pipe’s trajectory. The agent flew a couple of feet, tumbled over the railings, and crashed with a thud on the floor as Gill made another two huge leaps, passing behind the other Antyran.
The second agent knew all too well what was about to happen, but nevertheless, he felt obliged to put up a fight. Trying to guess the archivist’s next attack, he turned swiftly to the left, gazed Gill from the corner of his eye, and leaped back to fend off what he thought was another invisible assault. The unfortunate move would cost him his life; he fell through a distortion trap that transported him some thirty feet above the aisle. He fell right over the handrail, broke his spine, and rolled another thirty feet to land facedown on the hard floor of the distribution center.
The last Antyran slowly drew his weapon, but he lost Gill from his sight. He hopelessly spun on his heels trying to find him, but the archivist made a couple of long jumps to stay out of sight. Gill landed quietly on the aisle forty feet behind the agent; he pulled the space between them, and with a loud groan, he struck him as hard as he could.
At first, the agent felt only a vague numbness, but when he looked down, he saw one end of the pipe coming out of a horrible gash on the right side of his belly. Gill released the space along with the pipe, which remained stuck in the Antyran like a thorn in a fleshy licant. The assassin dropped his laser lens and fell to his knees. Without a word, he collapsed on the floor in convulsions. The last thing he saw before darkness engulfed him was Gill’s merciless gaze, which had nothing of an Antyran anymore. It was Arghail, who won again.
The fight was over before it even started. The tarjis didn’t rise to Baila’s expectations. Gill grinned, imagining the Prophet’s disappointment. Well, if they had no intention of coming into the dome after him, he was going to bring the fight to them outside. The last charge of the Sigians! A few more piles of bodies and he could join his long-gone friends in the shadows. They would no doubt be proud of how he fought for their world!
On his way out, he looked at his hands, puzzled; they were covered in blisters. At first, he didn’t understand how it happened, but then he realized the pipe must have been hot and burned his skin. In his rage, he didn’t even notice this small detail.
He walked into the street nonchalantly, as if nothing happened, even though he was feeling like a compressed spring, ready to start the madness all over again. The tarjis, however, were waiting at a healthy distance from him, not at all keen to share the fate of their companions.
The ephemeral peace was shattered by the whistling reactors of two air-jets hovering above the domes. If he didn’t approach the barriers, the barriers were coming for him.
Just as he concluded that there was no way to avoid the inductors on the air-jets, his eyes were drawn to a manhole several feet from him, its cover blown away by the blasts. Why didn’t he think of it earlier? The network of magnets running under the streets! He had no clue how he would handle the darkness below, but he had a strong suspicion that anywhere would be better than where he was now!
Before the jets could raise their black spheres, he pulled the space and fell into the manhole, along its metal stairs. As expected, the landing was rough. He rolled a couple of times in the mud, but at least this time his knees managed to stay away from his ruined face. He stood up and hurried into the darkness, running on the plastoceramic grill that covered the stinky ditch of the city’s sewage system.
As he moved deeper into the tunnel, the light was fading quickly. He had to touch the huge pipe holding the magnets to move forward, not exactly the best way to run away from the tarjis.
After a few more steps, the darkness became too thick to see anything. He was again feeling the desperation growing inside his kyi, but after a left turn, he saw a glimmer of light in the distance.
The light couldn’t be coming from the tarjis. Thanks to the firewall, flashlights weren’t readily available on the Antyran worlds—it was hard to believe they could get their hands on some on such short notice.
When he approached the source of light, he realized that the glow came from none other than the ubiquitous purple bacteria of the Antyran atmosphere! Attracted by moist and warm places, it created a muddy, bioluminescent film around the pipe fittings. He should have expected this because they loved moisture more than anything and had the nice habit of growing in the most unwelcome places. Antyrans had used them since antiquity to find the damp spots in their domes, lately using ultraviolet lasers to search for their colonies.