Act 3, Chapter 123: The crossing

Day in the story: 1st February (Sunday)

Gertrude Monkey

Sunday afternoon, and traffic on the road looked more like Monday morning—whatever was happening on the other side of the bridge had brought the roads directly in front of it to a complete standstill. Fortunately for me, I was determined enough not to care.

Using the rotors painted onto the underside of the motorcycle, I launched myself into the air and landed on the nearest car, to the fucking protests of the people inside. Only one of my brains spared a moment to wonder how exactly waving a fist at me through the air was supposed to help them in this situation. I rode across the roof, dropped onto the hood of the car directly ahead of it, and kept going, riding up its windshield onto the next one. That way, I covered the last several dozen feet to the bridge, which had been blocked off by several police cars and a spike strip meant to puncture the tires of anyone who tried to cross to the other side.

About halfway across the bridge, the air shimmered with a strange glow that suggested a sphere of shadowlight surrounding the island. That sphere was what blocked teleportation inside and would probably make escaping from within just as difficult—something my brains were already working on at full speed, trying to find a solution before the problem truly closed its claws around all of us.

Through Alex’s and Maya’s eyes, I could see creatures flying on the other side of the barrier and attacking the mages and Edge of Tomorrow personnel directly on their own territory.

As I approached my first obstacle, however, I focused on getting past that.

The police noticed me riding over the cars just as, to another chorus of protests, I dropped onto the pavement almost directly in front of them, though still far enough away that they had the nerve to draw their guns, point them at me, and threaten to shoot if I didn’t stop.

Instead, I did what seemed like the most sensible thing under the circumstances and twisted the throttle.

It took them only a moment to fire the first shots—shots every mind currently connected to me through Anansi reacted to at once. The network was operating in literal overdrive, lending me processing power whenever I needed it, only to redirect it a moment later to someone else who needed it more.

The bullets left the barrels of their handguns in flashes and cracks, only to stop against paper shields masquerading as transparent platforms—the kind Elle had managed to copy from the magic enchanted into her artificial leg. I had pulled them directly from the still-fresh memory and suspended them in the air, stopping the volley before it reached me. My faux-Psyche was strained by doing so, and the Authority reserves within me dropped significantly, but Alexa within the luminal space reached for the link that was connected to me and manually forced a big chunk of the Domain’s Authority to fly directly to resupply me. Soon after that Ali-Ani joined her within and overtook that aspect of control, directing the flows to whomever needed it more.

Then I shot through between the cars, with the sphere of rainbow-shimmering shadowlight around me, launching myself into the air just before the spike strip stretched across the road. A moment later, I was on the other side, racing across the bridge.

I felt the passage into the archmage’s sphere of influence immediately. His Authority of Closed Spaces made me feel claustrophobically trapped and crushed. But the moment I crossed that magical line of demarcation, several other things happened that bothered me far more than mere feelings—something the Brain Web was perfectly capable of distancing me from.

First, on the bridge ahead of me, something that looked like a many-headed Nemean hydra was attacking people trying to flee the island on foot. The subway line running directly beneath the roadway had been brought to a complete halt and wrecked, while the bridge itself existed in a constant state of destruction and reconstruction.

Parts of it broke apart into their individual components—bricks, asphalt, concrete, rebar, and steel—in flashes of red shadowlight, only to dissolve moments later in a haze of violet shadowlight into even smaller individual fibers. Those fibers then began reconnecting with one another like neurons searching for synapses, rebuilding the bridge back into the state it had been in before its destruction.

That strange confrontation of powers came with the unmistakable sensation of a battle that never stopped. And what was interesting was that this counterforce to the destruction trying to consume the structure looked a lot like the first active example of magic I had ever encountered in my life—like the unravelling Shiroi used to destroy and deconstruct matter into individual fibers.

Everything caught in that strange fucking dance of the two powers at work here rippled like cloth whipped by the wind just before joining together in a way that looked like two pieces being stitched together. And from what I could see, it wasn’t happening only here—tendrils of those powers stretched across the entire island, including the five enormous tower buildings, which the Archmage of Architecture was apparently trying to destroy in his red shadowlight, breaking them down into their basic components, only for that other violet light to seize them like the tentacles of some sewing god and, in one fluid, elastic motion, bind everything back together almost exactly the way it had been in the first place.

It wasn’t happening perfectly everywhere. The building directly ahead of me was being rebuilt like a Jenga tower. Part of it gaped with a huge hole in the middle, exposing its floors, with desks still standing right next to the newly formed drop, while the rebuilt section had been placed lower down, joining with what had once been a smooth surface. Similar failed attempts at reconstruction were changing the layout of architecture all around.

Even the bridge, which was slowly coming to an end in front of me, seemed to be shifted sideways in relation to the section I had already crossed.

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I wondered how the hell Shiroi’s power had been used on such a massive scale, and whether he himself had somehow become an archmage in just a few weeks, or whether something else was happening here—and if so, what exactly, and how I could use it for my own purposes. I quietly hoped Akira hadn’t been hurt in the process, but I wasn’t holding my breath. I hadn’t been in contact with him for a long time and had no idea what was happening to him.

Instead, I focused on the immediate problem in front of me: the hydra, its enormous body still turned away from me, whipping its tail like some gigantic enraged cat while its heads snatched at people fighting for their lives and trying to make it across the bridge.

Still riding the motorcycle, I reached into my bag for Equinox, whose watchful eye was already scanning everything around us for artistic creations it could seize and fire forward. I jumped over a fissure that suddenly opened beneath me, activating the rotors under the bike at the last second, then landed with a screech of tires on a section of the bridge that now sloped steeply downward.

I accelerated, releasing the pistol I had just summoned and giving it the ability to move on its own. As it fell, it twisted in the air, its little limbs shifting until it caught itself against my leg instead of dropping away, while I reached into my memory for the moment Alex had fallen from a great height and started playing a song that reduced his weight.

Once again, using the new power offered by the Genuine Connection Soulmark, I summoned one of Alex’s Singing Blades, its form glittering with shadowlight and already beginning to dissolve as it appeared between my legs. A moment later, Catansi found it and played the same melody, which, through my Authority, made my entire motorcycle vastly lighter and sent it practically shooting into the air on its own newfound buoyancy.

By the time I reached the top of that arc, the blade had already vanished, but I had Equinox in my hand. Channeling the performance of the Gun’s Bitch—a person who understood firearms, could shoot like no one else, and became one with the weapon she held—I felt Authority settle over me, making my performance real enough that Equinox and I became a single complete body.

The rainbow shadowlight that poured from me as that identity shift took hold immediately changed color, becoming shades of gray, silver, blue, and electric teal characteristic of Equinox.

Then I summoned from memory a card depicting an explosion and quickly aimed Equinox’s eye at it. The weapon absorbed the image, its tiny legs working rapidly to paint it onto the canvas wrapped around its barrel.

Thanks to all those extra brains, I realized something then: despite the teleportation block, summoning things from memory was still incredibly easy. Which meant that, if necessary, sending someone into a place that existed only in my memories might also turn out to be a way of getting them out of here. Something worth testing sooner or later.

Already falling again—gravity pulling me down with exactly the same acceleration regardless of how little or how much I or the motorcycle weighed—I aimed my hand cannon and fired at the hydra, straight into its thick, slick body.

With Equinox’s characteristic disregard for reality, the weapon tore the space along the firing line to shreds, and the projectile slammed into the creature hard enough to throw its body against the ground. A manifestation of an explosion bloomed across its scales in the wake of the shot, and a moment later I reached for that manifestation through my Aura and made it detonate as well, imploding part of the creature inward while blasting chunks of bone and muscle outward. All dozen or so heads the creature possessed dropped to the ground at once, unfortunately crushing some of the people nearby, but most of them immediately surged forward, rushing around the fallen monster and sprinting onto the bridge.

I came down among them and accelerated with a screech of tires, shouting at them to get out of my way. In the chaos and panic, though, I had to slow down. They were moving like one human wave, barely noticing I was there, brushing against me and the motorcycle and ignoring my presence completely.

The Sp-eye-ders on the back of my neck warned me just in time about something resembling an oversized moth with human arms, diving straight at me from above. I killed the engine and threw myself sideways, knocking several nearby people to the ground and, in doing so, letting them survive the attack.

At the same time, however, I witnessed the dive of an even larger beast.

A massive red drake swept past with snapping jaws and tore the moth to pieces. Its remains rained down over us and the screaming people like a shower of meat and blood, while the young dragon continued onward, its huge leathery-scaled wings transforming in midflight into something more like monstrous, fluffy moth wings.

Suddenly, thanks to that change, it no longer needed to keep moving forward and simply hovered in the air above the hydra, whose body was already regenerating from my attack. The first of its heads was beginning to lift from the ground when, without landing, the drake grabbed it with its foreclaws.

It held on even as the neck writhed like a snake, then bit down and tore away a chunk of flesh and bone large enough that the hydra’s head dropped back to the ground. Apparently unconcerned with legends, the drake climbed higher on its newly formed wings and breathed fire down on the hydra with such force that even from several dozen feet away I felt the heat against my skin.

It looked as though a column of fire as thick as five mature tree trunks had fallen straight from the sky onto the creature, swallowing it like a burning waterfall so completely that, almost instantly, the second monster’s entire body became a mass of black-gray smoke that stank beyond belief.

During the attack, more of those mothlike creatures descended on the hovering drake, trying to stop it, but wherever they sank their claws in and tore away pieces of flesh, the flying beast regenerated almost immediately.

Everywhere except around its neck. There, instead of healing, hydra heads began growing from the new wounds and openings. Their necks writhed like snakes, catching and constricting the moths attacking them, before their jaws snapped down from above and bit the creatures’ heads off.

The moment that bizarre drake finished incinerating the hydra, it beat its wings once more and rose toward the buildings, where the sky was literally swarming with different creatures.

I knew only one person capable of transformations on that scale and at that speed, especially immediately after eating a piece of a creature he could almost instantly turn into himself.

There was another thing suggesting it was Damien. As he flew away, he was attacked in midair by a winged lion that looked like a sphinx. In response, he twisted around and his body bristled with enormous, razor-sharp bones, so instead of attacking the bizarre dragon-moth-hydra hybrid, the lion impaled itself on them and hung there in the air.

Dam, if that really was him—fucking high mage my ass—made the spikes erupt from his body in every direction, bombarding the creatures swarming through the air and charging toward him. Wherever one of the launched bones met flesh, whatever it hit dropped from the sky as if someone had swatted down a tiny mosquito.

I climbed back onto the motorcycle and started moving again, slowly forcing my way through the crowd, laughing inwardly at myself and at the fact that I had actually thought Dam had given me everything he had during the duel we’d fought earlier.