Evade. Run.
I stepped into the next swing, catching the golem’s sword arm. The blow was too powerful to stop and I let it lift me, pushing off the ground to let the golem swing me around like a roundabout. The golem stepped back, twisting, trying to bring its weapons to bear, and with the moment’s breather I pulled a condenser from my pocket and smashed it against the wall.
Mist rushed out, filling the room, and suddenly all I could see was the shadow of the wall and the construct’s golden body. It swung again and I ducked past; two steps brought me out of its visual range and I felt the futures in which it killed me fray and scatter. The futures opened up again and I could see where I was going.
Caldera was against the other wall, struggling to rise. I caught a glimpse of her side through her torn clothes; blood, a dark gash, something peeking through. I threw her arm over my shoulder, heaving her up. “This way,” I whispered. “Quiet.”
Caldera resisted for a second, then let me guide her. “Where is it?” she muttered. She was still half dazed and her voice was loud in the mist.
There was the sound of creaking metal and the floor shook as the golem zeroed in on the noise. I switched direction, pulled a stumbling Caldera to one side; a massive golden shadow loomed up, appearing out of the fog and disappearing again. The lines of its future didn’t turn to intersect ours; it hadn’t detected us. I held my finger to my lips and this time Caldera stayed quiet.
We’d reached the stairs. The golem was no more than ten feet away but it couldn’t see us. Constructs aren’t sapient, and they’re very bad at dealing with unexpected situations. The golem had been sent into the house with a simple directive: kill us both. Now it couldn’t detect either of its primary targets, and following the voices hadn’t worked. It paused, waiting for input.
I led Caldera up the stairs. A future flashed up of a stair creaking under Caldera’s weight, and the golem hearing and lasering us through the wall; I caught Caldera’s shoulder, signalled for her to place her foot to one side. Blessedly, she didn’t argue. The mist thinned and vanished as we made it up into the hallway.
The light was still on in the room where the icecat had attacked, and I led Caldera into the other one. She was silent and favouring one side. “How bad are you?” I whispered.
“Managing,” Caldera muttered.
I looked sceptically at Caldera. She wasn’t trying to order me around. Bad sign. “I don’t think that golem can get up the stairs, so if you don’t mind, I’d kind of prefer to stay up here. You might be able to fight that thing, but I’d just as soon not go another round with it.”
Caldera didn’t answer for a second and I wondered if she’d spotted what I was doing, but she didn’t push it. “Leo?”
“Panicked and ran out the front door.” I hesitated. “The force mage was right there. No way he could have missed him.”
Caldera glared. “I told you to stay with him.”
I looked away, stung. I wanted to make excuses—I’d been tied up fighting the icecat, I’d gone back to help her—but on the facts, she was right. Guarding Leo had been my job.
“Where are they?” Caldera said.
“Ice mage is in the back garden.” I kept my voice very low. The golem was really damn close, and that laser could easily pierce the floor. “Lost the force mage. Golem’s still waiting.”
“What if we make a break for—?”
“Bad idea,” I said. I’d been looking at the futures in which we did exactly that. “The street doesn’t have enough cover—with you hurt, they’d chase us down and pick us off. Only reason they haven’t done it already is they aren’t sure where we are.”
Caldera paused for a second, and I could sense her flicking through plans. “All right,” she said. “We’re going to have to stall them. I’ll—”
The futures shifted. I took one glance at them and my heart sank. I caught Caldera’s arm and pulled her towards the bedroom.
One of the few silver linings to these sorts of situations is that you learn pretty quick whether someone trusts you. Even wounded, there was no way I could have moved Caldera if she didn’t want to be moved, but after one startled glance she let me drag her inside.
There was a weird low-pitched noise, like a deep cough.
I twisted around. Through the doorway and out in the hall, where there had been carpet, now there was a big circular hole in the floor. Through it, I could see the mist-filled living room. As I watched, there was another cough and most of what was left of the hallway disintegrated into dust.
From below, I felt the vibrations as the golem moved and turned. The cough came a third time, then a fourth. There was nothing left of the hallway: if we stepped out of the bedroom we’d fall straight into the room below.
“Well,” I said quietly. “I guess now we know what that fourth weapon does.”
“What the fuck is that?” Caldera whispered.
There was another cough, followed by another. It wasn’t going directly towards us . . . yet. “Disintegration cannon. Wonder why it didn’t use it earlier. Maybe it’s got too slow a charge-up time. Or it could be one of those spells that needs the target to be stationary to—”
“Did you hit your head?” Caldera hissed. “Focus!”
“We all have our ways of dealing with stressful situations,” I said absently. Most of my attention was on plotting out futures. “It’s going to shoot the floor out from underneath us. Probably collapse the house.”
More coughs sounded. The golem was destroying the small guest room in which we’d found Leo, one section of floor at a time. We’d gotten lucky that it had decided to start there. Not too lucky, though. Our room was next.
Caldera hesitated one second, then lowered her head. “Fuck it.” Her voice was harsh. “We fight.”
“No.”
“We don’t have—”
I didn’t raise my voice. I often get calmer in really dangerous situations. “If you go down there, you’ll die.”
“You don’t—”
“I do know that, and that’s without the ice mage interfering. He wouldn’t have ordered the golem to force a confrontation like this unless he knew he’d win.”
“Then—”
“Our best chance is to wait for backup. And no, I haven’t seen it coming, I’m still looking. Please let me concentrate.”
“When are—?” Caldera started to ask, then stopped.
Another series of coughs. The light in the next room blinked out and the house went dark. One of the shots must have cut the power cable. There was a groaning sound and a rumbling crash that I could feel through the floorboards. The floor shifted under my feet.
Caldera snatched a look out into the hall. “Mist’s clearing,” she said in a low voice.
“I know.”
“Got another?”
“No.” I don’t stockpile condensers—they work best when they’re fresh. I’d lost two in the battle with Chamois, and the one I’d just used had been my last. I kept scanning through the futures. There was some sort of disturbance up ahead, something like . . .
. . . fire?
Now I just needed to figure out how to keep us alive until they got here.
The coughing sound came again and the wall ahead of us shuddered. “I think I’m going to have to go keep that thing busy,” I told Caldera. “Wait up here, okay?”
Caldera glared at me. “Screw that!”
The wall shuddered again. A few more shots and it would collapse. “Stay in the corner,” I told Caldera. “When that wall goes it’ll take down most of the floor, except for the far corner. As long as you stay there, you won’t fall.”
“If you—”
“You’re hurt, I’m not.” I kept my voice calm. “I’ve fought these things before; I can stall it for a little while. We just need to survive another forty seconds.”
Caldera hesitated. I don’t know much about medicine, and I hadn’t had a close look at Caldera’s wound, but I’d seen the futures in which she tried to fight the golem, and they’d been brief and messy. We didn’t have time to talk it through. “Stay back,” I said, and walked to the edge.