Sancia stared over the sights of her espringal as the man screamed in agony, floating above the street, pouring blood from his knees. She was crouched on the remnants of a wooden walkway that ran the perimeter of the Zorzi’s upstairs, peering through the old windows. She’d assumed that shooting the flying men with the espringal would just weigh them down until they couldn’t fly anymore—she certainly hadn’t thought it would do that.
<Oh God,> said Clef, disgusted. <Did you mean for that to happen, kid?>
She swallowed her nausea. <You keep asking me that, Clef,> she said. She started reloading. <No. I never meant for any of this to happen.>
* * *
Gregor watched in dull surprise as the man’s feet and calves crashed into the earth, still wearing the density bonds. Then the man just hung there in the air, screaming as blood poured out of him onto the ground like a horrific water feature of the neighborhood…
And that, thought Gregor, is why scrivers so rarely fool with gravity.
Understandably, such a phenomenon got one’s attention. It certainly seemed to have distracted the man who’d injured Gregor—he was still standing on the building face across the fairway, staring at the sight, having seemingly forgotten all about Gregor.
Narrowing his eyes, Gregor took aim with Whip and flung the truncheon’s head forward at the man. There was a dull plonk! sound, and the thick weight cleanly connected with the man’s left temple.
The man’s body went slack and he dropped the espringal. Then, slowly, his legs slipped off the wall and his unconscious body started drifting over the street. It seemed his rig was set to keep him at a specific level—he neither rose nor fell. It looked like he was slowly skating over an invisible ice pond.
Gregor peered at the espringal lying in the mud. Then he got an idea. It was one of his favorite tactics: when outnumbered and outmatched, clutter up the battlefield as much as you can. Only this battlefield, he thought, is the very air above our heads.
He took aim at the unconscious, floating man, and hurled Whip forward. The truncheon’s head caught the man’s body in the chest and—just as Gregor had hoped—the momentum sent the man ricocheting off the building fronts, hurtling through hanging clothes, bouncing off his dying colleague, and generally wreaking havoc.
Gregor watched, satisfied, as the chaos unfolded. One of the men tried to get out of the way and leap across the alley, but the growing tangle of clotheslines caught him like a fish in a net.
Gregor scrambled forward, grabbed the espringal, raised it, and shot the tangled man, all in one smooth motion. The man cried out and went still.
Five down, said Gregor. Four left.
He looked up, reloaded, and saw two attackers flit across the street and twirl in midair. Gregor tried to draw a bead on one of them—but then both of them gracefully tumbled through the upstairs windows of the Zorzi Building.
Gregor lowered the espringal. “Oh hell,” he sighed.
* * *
Sancia saw them coming. She pointed the big espringal at one of the attackers just as they passed through the windows, and fired. But the shot went wide, and the density cords tangled around a rafter—which was, of course, already at rest, so that didn’t do much.
“Shit!” she cried. She leapt forward as a scrived bolt hurtled toward her. As she fell she reached into her pocket, grabbed a stun bomb, pressed its plate, and tossed it into the rafters.
She knew, of course, that in this terribly dark place it would blind her as well, along with whichever vagrants were still in there with her. But Sancia was pretty good at getting around without seeing.
The flash of the bomb was tremendous, as was the pop from its charge. For a moment she just lay there on the walkway, her head ringing and her eyes aching. Clef’s voice cut through all her sensory overload.
<There’s two of them in here with you,> he said. <Up in the rafters, hiding. They can’t see you now—but I’m guessing you can’t see them either.>
Sancia was keenly aware that wouldn’t last forever—though the effects might likely last unusually long, given the dark environment. Yet she found she could hear her attackers, or at least their rigs—there was a faint chanting in the blistering, flashing darkness, from their gravity rigs. I guess I don’t hear scrivings with my ears, she thought, which was a curious revelation. She also realized that these rigs must be terribly powerful for her to be able to hear them from so far away.
That gave her an idea. She slipped out her bamboo pipe, which was loaded with a single dolorspina dart. <Clef—can you see in here?>
<Sure. Why wouldn’t I?>
Clef seemed to not understand this was disturbing, since it suggested his method of seeing things was different from human eyes. She lifted the pipe to her lips. <Tell me if I’m pointing this thing at one of their rigs.>
<What? Are you serious? This has to be the worst way t—>
<Just do it, damn it, before they can see again!>
<Fine…Walk down the walkway about five feet…Wait, no, four feet—just stop. Stop! Okay. Now. They’re on your right. No, God, your other right! Okay…Now, keep turning. That’s it. Stop. All right. Put the pipe thing in your mouth. Point it up…Up more…Too far, back down. Down more. That’s it! Now to your right just a little—okay. Now. Hard.>
Sancia took a deep breath in through her nose and blew as hard as she could.
She had no idea what happened—she still couldn’t see or hear much. It was like firing the dart into the blackest of nights in here. But then Clef said, <He…He moved! Just a touch…And now it…it looks like he’s drifting, maybe? I think you got him, kid! I can’t believe it!>
She could see blurs in the darkness—her vision was coming back, but only slightly. <Let’s assume I did,> she said. <Where’s the other one?>
<On the far wall, to your right. You don’t have a shot.>
<I don’t need a shot.> She touched her bare hand to the wall beside her, then the rafter above her, and she listened to both of them. She let all the rafters and the supports and the beams overhead pour into her.
It was too much, far, far, too much. Her head felt like it was going to break open. I’m going to pay for this later, she thought. But she kept going until every inch of the ceiling had made an impression in her thoughts, every beam of wood and every brick fixed in her mind.
Then, still mostly blind and deaf, Sancia leapt up, grabbed a rafter, lifted herself up, and started crawling through the rafters of the Zorzi Building with her eyes closed.
She couldn’t see any of the dangers underneath her, but Clef could. <Oh my God,> he said. <Ohhhh my God…>
<It would really help,> she said as she blindly leapt from one rafter to another, <if you would shut up, Clef.>
She kept going, hopping from rafter to rafter, beam to beam, until she felt like she was getting close. <Are we almost there?> she asked.
<I thought you wanted me to shut up.>
<Clef.>
<Yeah, we’re almost there. Reach out with your left hand after this next jump…You should feel the wall.>
She did so, and found he was right. And as she touched the wall, she felt him.
A tight, warm bundle of a person, pressed up in the crevice between the wall and the ceiling, like a bat in its roost. Waiting for his vision to return, probably. But the second she felt him…
He moved. Fast. Speeding down.
He must have felt me coming! she thought. I hit the damned rafter too hard!
But she still felt what the wall felt—and the wall had felt him push off, including how hard and which direction he was going.
Sancia gauged his likely position and blindly jumped into open space.
For a moment she just fell, and she was sure she’d cocked it up, sure she’d missed him, sure she would just plummet three stories down into the vagrants’ nest, where she’d break a leg, or her skull, and then she’d just die there.
But then she hit him. Hard.
Sancia instinctively threw her arms around the man and clung tightly to him. Her hearing was coming back, and she heard him scream in surprise and anger. They were still falling, but as someone who was somewhat used to falling in space, the way they were falling was so strange: they suddenly, rapidly decelerated to a curiously steady rate, like they were trapped in a floating bubble, twisting through the air.
Until they hit the ground. Then the man shoved off, hard, and they went rocketing throughout the old paper mill.
The man smashed Sancia into walls, into rafters, and, once, into what she guessed was his floating, unconscious comrade. He hurtled back and forth throughout the building, trying to shake her off and struggling with her grasp.
But Sancia was strong, and she held fast. The world was tumbling and twirling about them, the vagrants were screaming and shrieking, and her sight was slowly, slowly coming back to her…
She saw the fourth-floor windows flying at them, and realized what was going to happen.