Three more were off to the far right, hovering in the shadows. They saw him. Screamed. Flashed forward, close. Flashed again, closer.
Two more blinked in, flanking the Shifter fifty feet from Jack. Roared.
A third blinked in behind them, spread its arms, and the three Shifters flashed aside.
He recognized this one. It threw its head to the sky and loosed the sound of a hundred horses with slashed throats. Shining Palm.
“Hey,” Jack said, very carefully. “You brought me here.”
Every single Shifter lost its shit completely. The three to the right charged, flashing in and around the frozen, jigging corpses, on a killing path straight for him.
Shining Palm wheeled on them, shrieked. The three braked, rounded on him, and screamed right back.
Jack took his chance and ran.
He sprinted right, then warped past the reception area, giving the three clustered Shifters a wide berth. The exertion took it out of him, dropping him almost back to zero.
The three reacted, spun. Shining Palm leaped, slamming into their cluster, sending them scattering.
Jack pivoted, facing them.
Shining Palm retargeted.
“Hey now,” Jack said, reasonably. “Back off.”
It charged.
Jack leaped boots-first onto the bent knee of an inanimate Monarch trooper who was arched backward in death-
“Ugh.”
– and jumped up, clawing for the falling trooper as he hurtled at half speed for the atrium floor.
“Time to be lucky,” he gasped. “Please be lucky.”
Jack’s fingers scrabbled against cloth that was utterly immovable, managed to loop one arm around the man’s midsection, the back of his flailing legs punching Jack in the face.
Froze. Jack almost came loose with the jarring stop.
Shining Palm swept both killing paws upward, as the trooper rewound.
At speed.
For Jack the next ten seconds were a lot like falling off a cliff while being punched in the face. When the flailing trooper hit his parabola, Jack’s grip slipped. He continued upward, briefly, while the trooper redocked with his past. Jack missed the thirty-fourth floor entirely while sailing toward a slow-approaching thirty-fifth.
He grabbed for the glass-and-steel balustrade as if it were all he had ever wanted. Got his forearms across, fell, bashing chest against the flat of it and his chin against the rail.
Stars. Flailing. Didn’t let go. Felt nothing beneath his feet. A terrible and total nothing.
He let himself hang for just a moment, gasping.
Slipped his boots onto thirty-five and rolled himself over the rail. His back hit the ground hard. Just breathed as if he’d forgotten how to.
“Kill him!”
Ah, shit.
He slapped both hands against the slate-gray carpet, popped a shield, almost blacked out from the effort. Heard a ton of bullets thwip against the carapace.
He was done. Running on fumes.
“Fuck off,” Jack said to the ceiling, flatly. “Whoever you are just fuck off.”
“That shield has a half-life of about, what, ten seconds? Fifteen?”
Jack heard the snick-snack of weapons reloading. The subtle pneumatic hiss of German-engineered microhydraulics. The question mark whine of servos.
He sat up beneath his bubble.
“That’s Jack Joyce,” someone else said.
There were thirty guys and two Juggernauts-all of them rigged for stutter mobility. They’d been hauling ass and braked to a halt when Jack flipped over the railing. The ones bringing up the rear were swinging assault rifles back and forth like they were expecting to get jumped any second.
“Who gives a shit?” another said. “We’re almost there.”
The leader-a clean-cut kid with a movie-star complexion-shook his head. “Uh-uh. Shifters can’t pass through the stutter shield, but he can. We can’t leave him wandering around.”
The kid opened up, barking a thirty-round mag into the shield, wide coverage. Hundreds of bullets waited for permission to splash Jack to paste, while the squad kept him covered with everything they had.
“Figure that half-life is down to about five,” the kid said.
If Jack stepped outside, he was going to die; if he stayed put, he was going to die. He didn’t have enough left in him for a warp.
“Four,” the kid said.
Jack looked left and right: He was on a curved mezzanine, with the Monarch crew in front of him. There was cover behind the elevator bay to the right. To the left was all glass-walled meeting rooms along the full line of the gallery. Not enough charge in him to cover a warp of ten feet.
The shield trembled. So did the bullets.
“Three.”
Jack glanced behind him. “Over the side,” he mumbled to himself, thinking back to Paul’s panicked face at Bannerman’s Overlook six years ago. “Legs first.”
The kid smiled. His buddies braced weapons.
Jack backed against the rail, got a firm grip.
The stutter watered down fast.
Jack tensed…
“One.”
The top half of the kid tore free and flew a messy twenty feet toward Jack before freezing mid-air, trailing wet red machinery.
Mad light. Howls.
The stutter shield collapsed as Jack leaped to the right, instead of backward, the designer railing blasted to slag by the simultaneous impact of a cloud of military rounds and at least one micromissile. Something hot-slag, shrapnel, or a bullet-blazed through his hamstring. The entire squad had now forgotten him, going full auto on opponents far more lethal than Jack.
Rising to one knee he came face-to-upside-down-face with the kid’s shocked expression. He shuddered. “Tough break.”
The squad had scattered like billiards.
Shifters were tearing them to pieces. Back pressed to the elevator bay, chest pounding, Jack scanned the mezzanine for a way to Paul’s office on forty-nine… and found it. Security elevator-black-and-chrome edged. He fumbled in his pockets-trying to ignore the pain and keep the weight off his crippled left leg-and found Sofia’s security laminate.
He glanced around the corner.
A trooper flew past at waist height and hit the railing, where his spine snapped like a gunshot, before flipping slackly into the void.
One Juggernaut wheeled in an awkward forty-five-degree three-step, targeting laser drawing a bead on one monster approaching at speed. The pilot spat his entire missile pod at the thing, a dozen micro-missiles vip-whoosh-ing in rapid succession down seventy feet of office hallway, clothing the thing in shrapnel and blooming flame clouds. To no effect.
The Shifter raised both arms, brought them down and through the Juggernaut’s only protection: the front armor plate.
The man tried to wrestle free, had no chance.
A second Shifter zapped in from behind, grabbed the guy around the face and waist. And pulled.
The Juggernaut froze in a position of alarm, the trooper inside the suit froze mid-air; pilot and frame violently disarticulated.
A second Juggernaut pivoted and cut loose with its auto-cannon-pointlessly; 7.62mm rounds sprayed into the Shifters, wild rounds mowing down a handful of his workmates who were still alive.
Realizing he was a drowning man strapped to a multi-million-dollar anchor, the pilot activated the emergency release, stepped backward out of the exoskeleton, and ran-straight toward the elevators.
“No,” Jack hissed. “Not here. Not here.”
A seven-foot fractal silverback dropped on the pilot, crushing him.
Jack breathed a sigh of relief.
The Shifter snapped its head up, roared, and reached for him-palm filled with starlight.
“Oh fuck.”
Jack warped. He didn’t make it far, but he cleared the distance between elevator bays and the glass-walled rooms, the nearest of which were now bullet-riddled and shattered. He came out of the warp and kept running, old-school, his left leg bright red with pain. The security elevator was a hundred feet away and closing, the sounds of carnage behind him dwindling as the Shifters began to run out of people to butcher.