Jubilee joins Tarver, pausing in her climb to draw her own weapon again, gasping to catch her breath as she fires once, twice; they’re barely making a dent in the mob surging up after us. I reach for the edge of a boulder-size hunk of cement—the bigger pieces usually move less—only to feel it shift and start to shudder toward me. I shriek and lurch to the side as it goes rolling down the slope, crashing into one of the husks and sending it sprawling.
I glance over at Gideon, whose eyes meet mine—and then we’re both reaching for whatever pieces of rubble we can find, hurling them down the slope at the mob, the sounds of shattering cement mingling with the shrieking of weapons fire. Flynn scrambles sideways so his concrete missiles won’t hit us, and joins the fight.
Then Gideon’s voice cracks in a shout, and I see him go skidding down the slope. I dive after him, grabbing at one of his arms just as my eyes pick out the hand wrapped around his ankle; a hand belonging to an old woman, her face horrifyingly serene as her thin, bony fingers dig into Gideon’s skin hard enough to turn it white. I give a wordless cry, wrapping both hands around Gideon’s and bracing my feet against a steel girder, as Gideon flails out with his other leg, trying to kick her off. Tarver’s there a breath later, unhesitatingly letting his gun drop and skitter away down the slope as he uses both hands to grab for Gideon’s other arm, helping me pull him out of the husk’s grasp, scrambling just inches ahead of the mob.
My arms wrap around Gideon and his around me, and my body’s no longer listening to the frantic staccato drumline of commands from my brain—climb higher—keep moving—run—fight—stay alive—and for a heartbeat neither of us moves, and I don’t have to look at him to know he feels it too, that this is it, and none of it should’ve mattered; the lies, the deception, the fake names and the false pretenses, none of it was real or true, and now we’re never going to have the chance to know each other as we really are.
A pulse of pressure explodes across us, erupting against my ears, leaving my head ringing with…silence. All I can hear is my own breath, tearing and gasping for air—my breath and Gideon’s, the force of it stirring my hair. And Tarver, a few feet away. And…I open my eyes to see Flynn with his arm around Jubilee, supporting her—she’s hurt somehow, I can’t tell how—and holding her gun in a shaking hand. He’s pulling the trigger and nothing’s happening, the gun silent and dark now, as dead and useless as an inert hunk of debris.
Everyone is still, like someone’s pressed “pause” on the playback of this moment, and my mind tries frantically to figure out what’s happened.
I turn just in time to see the husks—all of them, every single one in the mob of hundreds surging after us—drop in unison, falling like marionettes whose strings have been cut. Only after they’ve hit the ground is it possible to see the one figure still standing, only a few meters beyond the bottom of the rubble. It’s a woman, older than us but not by much, clad in a dirty, battered suit of some kind. One hand hangs useless and still at her side, the other clasped, trembling, around an object that, from this distance, looks like some kind of grenade. Something about her dark skin and hair feels familiar, though I know I’ve never seen her before. Something, something at the back of my mind…
“Hey, you,” she murmurs, voice thin and wobbly. I follow her gaze to see Tarver there, stunned, grip gone so nerveless he actually slides a few feet downward in a trickle of debris. The woman sways, and it’s only then that I realize not all the grime on her jumpsuit is dirt—there’s dried blood there too, spread across one side of her torso. “You guys make an awful lot of noise.”
Movement behind her makes my heart give an abrupt lurch—Tarver sees the husk at the same time, and suddenly he’s descending the pile of rubble without slowing, causing a landslide of debris and dust. But he’s not going to get there in time. There’s a boy stumbling toward the woman in the jumpsuit, stumbling because one of his ankles isn’t working right—he must’ve been so far behind the rest of the group that whatever took them out missed him entirely.
The woman, seeing Tarver’s sudden headlong slide down the rubble, looks back. She gasps, drops the thing in her good hand, and pulls something else out of the satchel at her side just as the boy reaches out for her. She jabs it into his ribs, and the crackling sound of electricity splits the air. The whisper-controlled boy jerks and seizes—it’s a Taser, the thing in her hand—and then drops to the ground, as motionless as the sea of bodies between us.
“Sanjana!” Tarver calls as he lands in a heap at the bottom of the rubble, then leaps unsteadily to his feet.
Recognition surges through me, as quick and sharp as the Taser blast. I’ve seen this woman’s personnel picture before—one of dozens I sorted through while making myself an LRI employee ID months ago—but I never knew who she was.
Sanjana. Dr. Rao. Our rift expert.
“You rang?” she retorts weakly, the Taser falling from a hand gone nerveless. She sways again—making Tarver lurch forward—then drops into a heap, Tarver diving for her barely in time to keep her head from hitting the shattered pavement.