I hear the scrape of her stool as she jumps away from me. I’m frightening her. I was so sure I’d never frighten her again. Memories of airports and screams and smears of black blood fill my head as my hand moves.
Jagged concentric shapes. Angles swallowing angles. A grotesque mandala with nothing in its centre.
I open my eyes.
I have carved a design—a logo—into the surface of the bar. Its deep lines cut through lovers’ initials.
The door rattles.
“Atvist,” my mouth says.
The door cracks open.
A TALL BUILDING. A dim room. An old man. A grin.
A briefcase. A plan. I hesitate. I accept.
I board a plane. I watch a screen. A nature show. A worm and a wasp. I watch. I recoil. I keep watching.
The worm burrows into the wasp. The worm seizes its brain. Tells it where to fly. Feeds on its guts. Builds a home out of its corpse. The worm is small, clever, twisted, mad. The worm wins. The worm knows no beauty, no pleasure, no purpose. The worm knows nothing but what it does. The worm wins and the worm feasts. Wasps, wolves, poets, presidents. The worm feasts.
“Trust me, kid.” Brown teeth. Spotted gums. A bony hand on my shoulder. “I know my business.”
• • •
“R!”
The sting of a slap. Frightened blue eyes searching for mine in the darkness. I slam the basement door shut and pull the Orchard back into view, and in all the shadowy fragments spinning through my mind, I see one clear imperative.
I shake Julie off me and I run.
“R, stop!”
I shove the heavy door open, knocking over two soldiers who topple back into the deck railing. Julie is in the doorway, calling to me, but I can’t stop. I run, stumbling, gripping the cables to keep from falling off the catwalk, slipping down the staircase and caroming off the walls, finally bursting out into the street. I feel my badly lubricated joints creaking, my stiff ligaments protesting as I push them into a sprint.
The surprising weight of the briefcase. The cold metal in my hands. The decision I insisted I hadn’t made.
I see the Armoury door at the end of the street. Towers of metal and plywood loom over me like judges, but I’m so close. I can fix my mistake before anyone notices. I can—
A flash. A hammer of air.
I’m flying.
The moon glares down at me as I sail backward, arms spinning, a lazy summertime float down the river. Is this still your preferred position? the moon asks me. On your back and half-asleep, drifting away from the fight?
I hit the wall of an apartment and crash through the sheet metal into a child’s bedroom. A girl jumps up in her bed and I see her face contort into a squeal of terror, but it’s silent. I hear only the high ringing of a tuning fork. I free myself from the debris; I stumble back onto the street and into a silent nightmare.
Chunks of concrete rain from the sky, silently cratering the asphalt and punching holes through walls and roofs. Silent rockets streak out from a cloud of smoke and pinwheel madly through the stadium, blooming into silent fireballs that incinerate buildings and tear chunks out of the stadium wall. Support cables pop out of the concrete and rickety apartment towers sway. Silently, two of them fall, crashing into each other and splitting open in the middle, dumping streams of people out of their beds and onto the street. Those who survive the fall have just enough time to raise their hands in a futile defensive gesture before being buried under their own homes.
The darkness pulses red with countless fires. Crates of grenades go off in bursts of white flashes. I run past dead bodies that are beginning to twitch, but I leave it to someone else to decide their second fates. I can’t stop. I am running toward a smoking hole where I abandoned someone who believes in me, and as my hearing returns, I notice that I am screaming.
THE RAW EDGES of shattered concrete are still hot enough to burn my hands as I dig my way through the debris, but I feel the sensation more distantly than ever. I hear salvos of gunfire from somewhere in the wreckage, but this is not a battle, it’s just ammunition going off, bullets firing themselves without waiting for the trigger, as if they know what they were made to do and are eager to get on with it.
I heave aside a slab of concrete and slip through the gap into what’s left of the Armoury. It’s dark, but cut electrical wires light the cavern in blue flashes, along with the dim red glow of burning supply crates.
“Rosso!” I shout into the flickering darkness. “General Rosso!”
The path is littered with jagged concrete and spears of sheared rebar, but I start to run. I don’t get more than a few paces before I trip on something soft. An electric pop from an overhead wire illuminates a body with most of its flesh blasted away, revealing a scorched, cracked skeleton, identifiable only by the shredded tie around its neck.
Black Tie says nothing.
I push further in, past the garage and into Grigio’s beloved war room. In the sickly orange glow of a few burning tyres, I find the other two pitchmen. Blue Tie grins up at me from the floor, his impossibly blue eyes attempting to establish trust with the ceiling while his mangled body slumps in a corner ten feet away. A steel beam runs through Yellow Tie’s skull from temple to temple, pinning her head to the floor, and I search her final expression for any hint of comprehension, any realisation of error or betrayal, but it remains locked in that blandly cheerful mask.
What are these people?
A ragged gasp from somewhere in the shadows. I force myself to move.
He’s lying slumped against a pile of rubble. His chest isn’t shaped right and his grey jumpsuit has turned dark purple. Perhaps he has spilled wine on himself. Overindulged at a tasting party, embraced life a little too hard. He’ll have a headache in the morning but good stories to go with it. Julie and I will sit by his fireplace and listen, glancing at each other and smiling while Ella shakes her head in the kitchen. He is old but still vital, with plenty of days left to read his books and drink his wine and teach me how to be a person.