Act 3, Chapter 128: Zoe’s effort

Day in the story: 1st February (Sunday)

Gertrude Monkey

I put three bullets through something with six legs, no head, and a mouth running vertically down its torso, then kicked what remained of it away from the stairwell before it could decide that dying was fucking optional. Noxy crawled along the wall above me, the little monster of a weapon twisting its body toward another shape emerging through the smoke farther down the corridor. Its barrel flashed, and whatever had been approaching us disappeared beneath an explosion that tore chunks from the wall around it. I didn’t bother checking whether it was dead.

The Brain Web was stretched so far by that point that I barely knew where Gertrude ended. Some thoughts were mine. Others belonged to Alex, Alexandra, Elle, Maya, or Ali-Ani. Hundreds more were not thoughts at all, but tiny pieces of perception supplied by spy-ders crawling through every crack and duct they could reach. Most were filtered out before they reached me. Anansi had become absurdly good at that. A spider seeing another empty office did not need my attention. Neither did one watching some escaped Cryptozoology nightmare eat half of a security team on the opposite side of the island. Important things surfaced instead: survivors, routes, structural failures, anything related to Zoe, and every change in the battle large enough to threaten all of us at once.

That was why I knew what Elle’s spider had found before Elle managed to form the words. Zoe. The thought entered every connected part of me with enough force that I nearly shot the wall.

Through the spider’s eyes, I saw her kneeling in the middle of a ruined break room several floors above me. Her blonde hair was tied back badly, loose strands stuck to the sides of her face with sweat and dust, and the sleeve of her sweater had been torn open from shoulder to elbow. Blood covered one knee of her trousers, although from the way she moved, I didn’t think most of it belonged to her. Six people crowded around her. Two wore EoT employee badges, one was dressed in security armor, and the remaining three appeared to be researchers. One of those researchers was sitting against a cabinet with another woman’s belt wrapped around his thigh as a tourniquet.

Zoe, meanwhile, was drawing on the floor with a broken piece of whiteboard chalk. She drew a crooked symbol around a coin placed on the floor, then connected it to four smaller markings positioned roughly toward the corners of the room.

“Everyone inside the lines,” Zoe told the others, pushing herself upright and pointing them closer toward the center of the room. “Don’t touch the markings. Don’t move the coin. And whatever you hear outside, do not open that door until I tell you.” The wall outside the room shook. Something scraped its claws along the corridor. The security guard immediately raised his rifle, but Zoe grabbed the barrel and pushed it downward. “Don’t. The whole point is not being noticed. If you start shooting, I have no fucking idea whether that breaks it.”

He reluctantly lowered the gun. A creature passed directly outside their door. Through another spider positioned in the corridor, I saw it clearly: a long, skeletal thing crawling upside down across the ceiling with six arms growing from its spine and something resembling a horse’s skull where a human head should have been. Its fingers dragged across the walls, tapping one surface after another as if searching for hollow spaces.

It reached Zoe’s door.

She stood with one hand pressed against her stomach and the other extended toward the people behind her, signaling for them to stay quiet. Her face had gone pale enough that even beneath the flashing emergency lights I could see it, but her breathing remained controlled.

The monster tapped the door twice. Then moved on. I realized that I had stopped breathing too.

*Found her,* Elle finally said through our connection, the words carrying enough relief to make every thought around them tremble. *Gertrude, she’s in your tower. Nine floors above you and descending.*

I fucking know. I can see her.

Zoe had already dismantled the ritual. She picked up the coin, wound the thread around two fingers, wiped part of the chalk away with her shoe, and shoved everything she could reuse into her pockets. Apparently she had learned quickly that a safe room was only useful until something bigger knocked the entire floor out from under it. One of the researchers helped the injured man stand, and the group entered the corridor in a tight cluster with Zoe at the front. She was moving toward me.

Good girl.

I started upward. The tower shook before I reached the next stairwell, except this time the impact did not feel like something happening inside the building. It came from outside, carrying enough force through the structure that windows exploded three floors at once. My network opened the relevant senses automatically, and suddenly I was looking through Alex’s eyes high above the plaza while still running up a stairwell through my own.

Dam had finally gotten the giant ape down onto the ground.

Calling it an ape had become increasingly inaccurate. The thing was probably seventy or eighty feet tall now, with curling horns growing from its skull, a back layered in torn wings, and arms thick enough to wrap around sections of the surrounding towers. Dam was not much easier to classify anymore. He had become a red-scaled nightmare assembled from every biological solution he had found useful over the last several minutes. Four wings beat behind him in mismatched pairs. Hydra heads grew from wounds around his shoulders. His forearms had broadened into something between a gorilla’s limbs and a crustacean’s armored claws, while a long reptilian tail bristling with bone spikes anchored him against the street.

The ape grabbed him anyway. It wrapped both hands around his torso and slammed him through the lower floors of a nearby tower.

The building folded—its lower supports giving way while the upper section leaned sideways. Violet threads immediately erupted from within, Shiroi’s Authority trying to catch hundreds of thousands of tons of falling architecture and persuade all those materials to remain part of the same structure. For several seconds, he almost succeeded. Entire floors hung at impossible angles, connected by glowing threads stretched like tendons under enormous tension.

Then Dam came out through the other side. He tore free dragging the ape with him. One of the beast’s horns had gone completely through his abdomen.

He planted both feet against the wall of the failing tower, wrapped two arms around the ape’s neck, two more around the horn embedded through his body, and changed again. Muscles swelled across his back. The bones of his arms thickened. His jaw split wider and became something made for an animal several times his size.

He bit into the ape’s throat.

The monster roared and smashed him repeatedly against the building. The first strike destroyed three floors. The second broke what little Shiroi had managed to reconnect. The third brought half the tower down. Concrete, glass, furniture, steel, and everything else caught inside the collapse poured into the plaza like an avalanche. The violet threads holding the structure together stretched farther and farther before snapping in hundreds of places at once. Dam and the ape vanished beneath the falling debris.

Alex dove after them.

His Zweihander carried him straight through a cloud of dust so thick his borrowed view turned brown-gray. Dam had survived, the ape had not. Its head had been torn almost completely away from its body sometime during the collapse. Dam lay partly beneath it, still transformed and still trying to push several tons of dead monster away from himself, while the horn through his abdomen had broken off and remained lodged inside him. One of his wings was crushed beneath a slab of reinforced concrete. Several hydra heads growing from his wounds had gone limp.

Alex landed beside him, the Zweihander cutting through falling debris above them while the Sword of the Roses knocked another piece sideways.

“Don’t move!” Alex shouted.

“I am stuck beneath a building,” Dam growled, blood running between his teeth. “I had not planned to.” He added while his body quickly shed away all those transformations he’d acquired. Alex smiled to him briefly and sent him into the Domain.

Five floors above, Zoe’s group reached another dead end. The stairwell beneath them had collapsed between two levels. The lower landing still existed, but there was twenty feet of open air between it and the remains of the steps. One of the researchers immediately suggested going back.

Zoe ignored him. She crouched beside the break, pulled a small notepad from her pocket, and flipped through pages covered in handwritten symbols and ingredient lists. Apparently their homemade grimoire had gotten farther along than anyone had bothered to tell us.

She stopped on one page.

“No,” she whispered. Her head tilted after she turned a few more. “Yes.” She looked around the ruined stairwell until her gaze landed on a red emergency fire hose cabinet. “Break that open.”

The guard used the butt of his rifle. Glass shattered across the floor.

Zoe pulled out the hose, cut off perhaps three feet of it with someone’s utility knife, then asked everyone for something metallic. They produced two keys, a wedding ring, three coins, a screwdriver, and the metal clip from an employee badge. She rejected the keys, ring, and clip almost immediately, keeping the coins and screwdriver. Next she took a little blood from the injured researcher’s bandage, wiped it across the hose, wrapped the hose around the screwdriver three times, placed the coins beneath it in a triangle, and stared at the arrangement.

Nothing happened. She moved one coin. She turned the screwdriver around. “There,” she whispered. The hose lifted from the floor.

She touched the improvised ritual construction and the entire fire hose began rising into the air like a living rope. It stretched across the gap, anchored itself against the railing below, and pulled taut. It would never have supported seven people naturally and yet they climbed down one at a time.

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Zoe went last. I reached the floor beneath them before she did. Not physically though. Another one of Elle’s spiders found the corridor first, and through it I watched the group disappear into an office immediately after descending. Zoe was repeating the first kind of ritual now, except she lacked chalk. Instead, she used dust from a broken drywall panel, tracing the protective markings with two fingers while someone else held a flashlight over the coin in the center.

The building groaned around me. Then every violet thread in sight vanished. It happened so suddenly that one of my extra brains initially treated it as a visual error.

One second, the walls around me were webbed with Shiroi’s Authority. Purple tendrils ran through cracks in the concrete, holding columns together, pulling a fractured ceiling back toward its supports, and threading broken pipes into something approximating their original positions. The next second, nothing remained. The tower dropped perhaps two inches and every window rattled.

Then the entire island seemed to scream and through Alexandra’s eyes I saw why. Alicia Bergman had made her decision.

The time-slowing field still surrounded her and Shiroi. The Swords of the Roses remained aimed toward her from every angle. Robert was still bound against the ceiling. Gerard no longer moved inside the decay trap. The workers nearest the Ideworld Gate were scrambling through as fast as they could, abandoning carts and equipment wherever they fell.

Alicia looked at Alexandra. For one slowed instant there was anger in her expression then resignation. After that, she simply ceased to exist. The world contained Alicia Bergman, and then it did not. Both stilettos vanished with her.

Shiroi screamed and Alexandra allowed Robert to drop from the ceiling at almost the same moment. She caught him, while summoning the original Usagear from memory onto herself, just for the moment of contact. Akira folded forward onto both knees, clutching the ruined eye where the blade had been, and the impossible amplification Alicia had forced through his soul disappeared with her.

Every violet connection extending from him collapsed.

“Don’t resist me if you want to live,” Alexandra shouted at Shiroi who convulsed on the floor. She moved toward him, planted a foot of her artificial leg on his chest, while sending unconscious Robert into the Domain.

Akira was more difficult. He looked around and saw the room coming apart around them. The ceiling had already split down the middle. One wall was bowing inward under a force no longer opposed by his empowered Domain, while the red Authority of Architecture crawled through it in geometric fractures, instructing concrete and steel to become something else entirely.

“Alexa?” he managed.

“Akira.”

“What the fuck is happening?”

“Later.” She grabbed him by the shoulders and he vanished too. A section of ceiling collapsed where he had been kneeling and Alexandra disappeared after him just before another followed.

That was the moment the rescue stopped being complicated and became fucking simple. We had Zoe’s position. We had no more reason to spread ourselves across the island. And the island was coming down.

Everybody to me, I thought. The answer arrived as movement.

Alex appeared first, stepping out of a wash of rainbow shadowlight beside me while still carrying the Roman sword. Dust covered him from head to toe, and there was enough blood on his clothing that I had no idea how much belonged to him. Elle came next, followed by Maya, whose body immediately lifted from the floor and settled onto Elle’s shoulder so she would not slow us down. Alexandra materialized last, the Waterflow Robe rippling around her and the Usagi mask still hiding her face.

For several seconds, there were five of us standing in one ruined corridor.

Five bodies. One soul.

The sensation of it through the Brain Web was almost impossible to describe. Gertrude’s aggression, Alex’s rhythm, Elle’s curiosity, Maya’s impossible perception, Alexandra’s broader sense of self, all present at once without becoming one another. Through Ali-Ani, the Domain remained connected to us as well, pouring Authority wherever it was needed while Catansi managed the songs from somewhere safely beyond this hell.

The first creature reached us at the next landing. It resembled a bear whose body had been turned inside out and whose head consisted of several human skulls fused around a circular mouth. It came through a wall instead of using the corridor.

The Sword of the Roses struck first, opening the thing from shoulder to abdomen. I put four rounds through the mouth. Elle’s web-slingers crossed behind my bullets, fastening its limbs to opposite walls, and Alexandra threw one painted card beneath its feet. The floor became ice-slick for a fraction of a second.

The monster fell. Alex’s Roman sword finished the job from twelve feet away. We ran straight past the corpse before it finished hitting the ground. The next floor was worse. Part of it had already separated from the rest of the tower, leaving a tilted corridor whose windows faced partly downward toward the plaza. Desks and chairs slid slowly along the floor and disappeared through a broken wall. A flock of Pigeyeons erupted from an office as we crossed, soot-black bodies and pale third eyes filling the passage.

Maya saw their movement before any of us did.

Alex threw a Singing Blade. Music hit the flock like an invisible net, slowing their movement until individual wingbeats became visible. I summoned Equinox, threw him into the air and let him fire through the center. The weapon’s shot tore a path through space, birds, drywall, and half the corridor beyond.

Alexandra never attacked. She kept running toward Zoe, but a tremendous impact hit somewhere below us and the building shifted sideways. The entire section of tower containing us physically moved several feet relative to the lower structure. My stomach tried to remain where it had been while my body continued with the architecture. Walls split apart. A section of ceiling dropped between Alex and Elle, but both reacted before it finished falling. Alex’s Zweihander slammed beneath the slab and lifted it enough for Elle to slide through. I grabbed Maya from her shoulder and tossed her toward Alexandra, who caught the tiny Persona without breaking stride.

I jumped from a transparent platform across the widening gap while Alex used the Zweihander. Elle swung on spider silk anchored to a ceiling beam that immediately started breaking behind her. Alexandra projected our Domain and convinced a painted section of wall that it was a bridge long enough to cross. The whole thing failed the moment her foot left it.

We were almost there when Zoe’s sanctuary spell broke.

I felt it through Elle’s spy-der before I understood what happened. The wall surrounding the room had cracked through one of the markings. The arrangement no longer matched whatever magical memory Zoe had reconstructed. Authority disappeared from the pattern.

The monster outside noticed them immediately. It was another one of those fucking horse-skull things. It pushed two arms through the wall and the security guard opened fire.

Zoe shouted for everyone to move. She did not lead them toward the stairwell this time. That route had already fallen away beneath them. Instead, she guided them into the center of the floor, past office cubicles collapsing under pieces of ceiling and toward a pair of elevator doors.

My entire soul recoiled.

Of course. Of fucking course.

The woman we had spent the entire island searching for had chosen the one place Alexandra May had consistently regarded as an architectural death trap. The elevator—or, more specifically, the shaft.

Zoe forced the doors apart with the security guard’s help. There was no elevator car behind them. It had fallen somewhere far below, leaving nothing but cables, rails, emergency ladders, and darkness.

One researcher stared down.

“You’re insane.”

“The building is collapsing from the outside inward,” Zoe replied. “This is one of the strongest vertical structures in it. If anything remains standing for another minute, it’ll be this.”

She was right and I hated that she was right.

The guard went first, descending several feet before bracing himself against the ladder. He helped the injured researcher after him. The others followed until Zoe was the last person remaining on the floor. The horse-skull creature entered the corridor behind her. Zoe looked toward it, then toward the shaft.

She stepped inside and pulled the elevator doors shut. The monster hit them a second later and metal bowed inward.

“We’re almost there,” I said aloud, although Zoe could not hear me.

The floor between us collapsed and the corridor ahead dropped away like someone pulling a carpet from under a room. Alex caught the edge with the Sword of the Roses. Elle threw webbing around Alexandra’s waist. I jumped straight into the falling section because the fastest way forward was now down, not across.

Noxy followed me and we fell one level. Then I pushed off from a wall, caught the edge of another broken floor, and pulled myself upward.

The others arrived around me, convincing the universe that we were one and the same. The elevator shaft was thirty feet ahead. The horse-skull monster stood between us and it. It had ripped the doors partly open and was reaching through.

Alex’s Sword of the Roses entered through the wound and came out through its shoulder. The horse-skull thing stumbled backward and dropped into the hole in the wall. I heard it crashing through something somewhere below.

We reached the elevator. Alexandra hesitated—she looked into that narrow metal shaft and every part of our shared memory reminded her exactly why she hated these things. A vertical hole designed to kill anyone stupid enough to be inside it when something failed.

And there, perhaps twenty feet below us, Zoe Harper looked up.

She had one hand wrapped around the emergency ladder. The other rested protectively over her stomach. Her face was streaked with grime. Blood had dried beneath her nose. Her sweater was torn. Six people crowded around her on the ladders and maintenance ledges below, exhausted, injured, terrified, but alive because she had taken them from one ridiculous little ritual sanctuary to another all the way down this collapsing tower.

“Alexa?” Every part of us stopped when we heard her voice.

Alexandra grabbed the elevator frame. Rainbow shadowlight surged around her hands.

“Yeah,” she answered, and her voice broke just enough that every version of us felt it. “It’s me.”

The tower groaned then and a cable snapped somewhere above us.

“Everyone touch each other!” Alexandra shouted down into the shaft. “Zoe, make sure nobody is separated. Hands, clothes, whatever you can reach. I’m taking all of you somewhere safe.”

The researchers obeyed immediately. Nobody asked questions anymore. Zoe reached down and caught the injured man by his wrist while the security guard grabbed her ankle. Others locked hands or seized clothing until the entire little chain of survivors became physically connected.

Alexandra jumped down, landing on the remembered Zweihander that appeared beneath her.

The Archmage of Closed Spaces resisted again. This time I felt how weak that resistance had become. The tower surrounding us was no longer meaningfully a closed structure. Walls were missing. Floors had separated. Rooms opened directly into sky. Doors led nowhere. Architecture had been torn so thoroughly apart that the concept of contained space itself was becoming difficult to defend.

And against that weakening claim stood all of us.

We all disappeared together.

My knees bent automatically when my boots touched grass, and one hand went down against the ground to steady myself, even though nothing around us moved. There was no screaming concrete here. No monsters. No red shadowlight tearing architecture apart. Only the meadow beneath the sky of our soul, the distant lake, hundreds of creations turning toward the sudden arrivals, and Ali-Ani standing farther away.

Zoe looked up at Alexandra and her face just crumpled. The rest of us felt the hug when it happened. Through the Brain Web, through our shared soul, through every connection between every one of us standing there, I felt Zoe’s arms wrap around Alexandra’s neck and Alexandra squeeze her so carefully it almost hurt more than if she had used all her strength. Zoe buried her face against her shoulder.

“I knew you’d come,” she whispered.

Alexandra closed her eyes.

“I was fucking terrified I wouldn’t make it.”

I turned away enough to give them the illusion of privacy, even though privacy had become a pretty ridiculous concept for us.

There were so many people in here that, even without us, it would have been way too fucking overcrowded. Dam was alive somewhere nearby, already being tended to. Robert de Marco and Shiroi Akira were alive. The feathered elf Elle had freed was alive. Dozens upon dozens of people who should have died inside Edge of Tomorrow were standing beneath the sky of our Domain because some part of us had reached them in time.

Outside, Edge of Tomorrow Island could collapse for all I cared. Let there be a war, if need be. We had found who we came for.