“Don’t worry, ’Dette, it’s not poison.”
“You — you are going...” And she collapsed into his arms. He hoisted her over his shoulder easily and set off down the street.
“No,” said Felicity weakly. No. Even through all the pain, a simple fact presented itself: There was no way she could let that man take her charge. Not unless Felicity herself was dead. She dragged herself to her feet. The gun, where’s the gun? She scraped away at her eyes, but they kept weeping. Everything was a blur.
“Help me, help meee,” moaned one of the people near her, and that spurred others, those who were still conscious and capable, to call out for help also.
“Help!”
“My eyes!”
“Please, oh God, pleeease.”
It turned her stomach, but Felicity forced herself to ignore them and take a step forward. And another. The figure of Simon was a distant blurry shadow in the mist, and it was fading. Follow. Half blind, she shambled after them and stumbled into the road. Her feet were heavy and awkward, and she leaned on the cars that squatted along the street. Something shifted limply under her shoe, and she realized that she had trodden on a person. Hurry!
She could barely see the shape of the Antagonist as the fog closed around him and the body slung over his shoulder. They were gone, and she could no more track them down than she could find a missing set of keys in the Indian Ocean.
“No!” She groaned. “Bloody fuck shit bastard!”
She’d had doubts about Leliefeld. Hell, she’d had doubts about all the Grafters. To her, the excuse of the Antagonists had seemed too convenient. It allowed for strikes to be made even as the Grafters insinuated themselves in the heart of the Checquy. She’d been prepared to believe that Odette was secretly an agent of the Antagonists and that the Antagonists were secretly agents of the Grafters. The strategist in her had mapped out all the possibilities.
All those options should have been dismissed when she was given the order to kill Leliefeld. She was a soldier and she followed orders. And yet, they had remained in her mind, including the possibility that Odette — the girl with whom she’d spent the past week, the girl she’d seen at her best and her worst, the girl who’d bickered with her brother and worried about her hat and had brought her an apple — was innocent. And so she’d hesitated.
But the conversation she’d heard between Leliefeld and Simon had wiped out all her doubts. The Antagonists had no reason to leave Felicity alive and lots of reasons to kill her. No one could have known that she would be conscious during Odette and Simon’s argument or that she would be able to understand them. That conversation had not been staged for her benefit.
Felicity now believed, now knew, that Odette was innocent and that the Antagonists were working against the Grafters. The problem was that no one else would believe it. The attack was bad enough. But if Odette Leliefeld, the most loathed member of the delegation, vanished without a trace into the fog that had harmed hundreds of British civilians in the center of London, then all of Rook Thomas’s efforts at reconciliation would be swept away. The hate was there. War would ensue. The Antagonists would win.
“Damn it!” She fell to her knees, scraping her hands on the asphalt. Her Sight expanded out of her skin like ripples in water. All around her was the wreckage of a terrorist attack. Abandoned cars. Spilled purses and shopping bags. And people, lying helpless. She shuddered away from them and pulled her Sight back in.
Then she took off her shoes and socks.
*
Felicity ran through the streets.
She couldn’t see with her eyes anymore, they had swollen completely shut, but with every step, she drank in a fleeting impression of the area around her. She read the road beneath her, letting the images well up through the soles of her feet and into her mind.
The world was strobing. For a brief moment, she had an image of the space around her as her Sight spread out to read the present and the past, and then she had to snap back into her mind so as to keep herself running. The pain of her skin and eyes flickered in and out of her senses as she flickered in and out of her body. She was conscious that as she ran, she was gasping in big lungfuls of the fog, and it grated in her chest.
It was not a situation that lent itself to analysis. If Felicity had stopped to think about how she was doing it, she wouldn’t have been able to do it. The conscious, meticulous part of her mind had stepped back, and instinct and sensation were controlling her.
She was tracking. Images from a few seconds ago of Simon the Antagonist guttered in front of her. He walked tall, with Odette over his shoulder, her hair hanging down his back. Felicity saw him pick his way down the road, fastidiously stepping over bodies and litter, talking on a mobile phone. She followed in his footsteps.
Other ghosts bled in and out around her as she took in the very recent past. She saw men and women looking up at the cloud as it erupted and then falling down, clutching their eyes. She saw a car crash into another car ten minutes ago, and then she vaulted over the wreckage in the present. She flinched as a man with blood dripping from his eyes staggered in front of her, only for him to vanish when she plunged back, blind, into her own skin.
Then, in the here and now, Felicity heard the Antagonist ahead of her say good-bye and put his phone away. She held her breath so that he would not hear her gasping approach and slowed so that her foot remained on the ground a second longer. She drank in the picture and knew exactly where he was, just a few feet in front of her. Then she screamed out and threw herself at him, driving her shoulder into the small of his back and sending him flying.
Felicity rolled and came to rest down on one knee. For two heartbeats, her hand was flat to the ground as she mapped the scene — Odette lying there and walls there and the Antagonist sprawled there — and then she pushed up like a sprinter in the starting block and moved toward him.
The Antagonist had barely opened his eyes and turned over when he saw the heel of Felicity’s bare foot hammering down toward his windpipe. His instincts flared, and he flailed his hand in front of him and swept her leg away. She was thrown off balance and fell on him but managed to drive her knee into his rib cage. He howled and shoved her off. She rolled and came up into a crouch.
“Gruwel!” he snarled.
Felicity didn’t answer, but she paused, flexing her toes on the ground. Then she darted forward and struck out with her fists. He stepped back hurriedly, out of reach, and she jabbed at empty air.
She dipped into the past again and saw him in the moments that had just occurred. Her powers could not see him in the present, but a second ago he was standing in front of her, two steps back. He was wheezing, but he smirked at her blind flailing. She saw those long spurs slide out of his wrists and he was stepping forward to attack her now! She jerked her body back and heard the movement of his attack missing her. Felicity reached forward and caught at where his arm should be. She felt his forearm and braced herself automatically, then gripped and twisted and pushed. She sent him staggering.
You can see him only in the past, the analytical part of her mind observed from the backseat. You’re operating with a delay, so you’ll need to act faster than he does. A second, half a second, can make all the difference in this game.
“So, you’ve got a few little tricks up your sleeve,” she said. She flinched at the feeling of droplets spattering across her face.
“I’ve got a few up my throat too,” said the Antagonist.
What the fuck is this stuff? she thought, and she scruffed at her face with her sleeve. She looked into the past and saw him breathing out a spray into her face. He spit on me? That can’t be good. She wrenched herself back into the present. The Antagonist was still speaking.