Mord performed a maneuver I can only describe as skidding to a stop in midair, using his weight to reverse his position from headfirst attack to buttfirst scramble, now more vertical than horizontal. The missile adjusted, but with only a split second until impact, Mord’s maneuver was enough. The missile spiraled whistling past Mord’s head.
We thought it had missed because the missile kept going and gouged the ground on the desolate plain facing the Company building, exploding in a spray of flames and smoke. A sparkle of stars that quickly became a spreading fire.
But then we saw the side of Mord’s head burning, too, and realized the missile had grazed the side of his skull, the damage hard to gauge at that distance.
Mord let out a howl of agony, an almost-human scream of rage, but the Magician’s second and third missiles were already headed toward him, and Mord accelerated straight up, toward the sun. Up and up he went, and the missiles veered toward his heat signature, despite a creaking resistance from gravity, at a ninety-degree angle.
Would Mord reach the sun before the missiles found him? We watched, holding our breath. It struck me that the Magician might have succeeded in killing Mord. That Mord might die right now, right here, in front of us. And as much as we had all hoped for that day, some part of me, deeply perverse, was rooting for Mord to outwit the missiles, that it was too soon, we were not ready, none of us were ready.
Still Mord blistered up toward the sun until he was again just a dot, a satellite hovering above the Earth—and still the missiles followed, but at a slower and slower speed.
Until they faltered.
Until gravity began to weigh upon them, take a greater and greater toll.
Until they reached the moment of their greatest ascension, and fell off the trail.
Fell back, inert, to Earth.
That was an excruciating slow fall, too, trying to guess where they might land, these now-tumbling bombs, hoping and praying it would be nowhere near us. Thankfully, terribly, into that contested ground they smashed, exploded, and sent shock waves of flames shooting out to all sides. Some were extinguished immediately, but other fires crackled on and would for several hours, laying waste to what had already been half devastated, driving out those who had taken refuge and burning the rest.
The Magician’s forces had no more missiles, and soon no missile launchers, for Mord came down again, this time more cautious, in silence from a position over the desert beyond the city. Low and silent, claws scraping and sparking the tops of desert rocks.
Those still defending the observatory, the gun emplacements, could not have seen what we saw from our vantage. They might even have thought Mord had been killed by a missile high above, for from their position he must have seemed to disappear.
At speed, fur buffeted by his acceleration so that he looked furiously in motion across his entire body, Mord approached from behind the observatory—came up and lunged over, and with a guttural battle cry, crushed the gun emplacements to dust, and to pulp any who still manned them. Then he demolished the observatory so that no glass at all remained and the solid bands of steel that ringed it were left contorted and deranged as if by a meteorite or the warping of extreme time, but in fact only because of Mord.
Already the Mord proxies had begun to close in on the observatory, which did not bode well for the Magician’s future, and we could see their solid dark shapes clambering up the sides and tumbling inside as if to fill it up and render it down. I had an image in my head of that globe filling with blood until the Magician’s entire force had been reduced to a more essential form.
But Mord was not finished. The crackling flame at his cheek had been snuffed out by his accelerations, but his fur there was singed and bloody and blackened, and the mute openings of his muzzle, the agony in one frantic paw held to his face, made it clear he now sought sanctuary to heal it. As the Mord proxies poured into the observatory district, their leader flew south, and at the wide ponds of runoff and offal and abandoned biotech next to the Company building, Mord laid down his head, put out the pain with water, and remained there long enough for an evil mud to form over the wound.
But as he did so, some relic of the Company defenses lurking in the holding ponds, a leviathan gray with age and be-gilled and scaled, pulled itself up out of that murky water and attacked Mord from the side. It resembled more an iguana than a fish, with a gaping bite, an off-center lunge that seemed to admit to missing limbs. From our vantage it was a scene in some aquarium, a fight between random creatures that had been placed there by a god who had wanted to see if a shark could defeat a bear. But a brief fight, for Mord swatted the thing senseless with his paws and then ripped out the leviathan’s brain, and it slumped in the sand like something that had never been alive.
This was a scene that seemed scarcely believable, and yet I have not told you the most miraculous true thing, how the day progressed from myth to mythic, which no retellings can embellish. For Mord, thwarted it seemed by the derelict condition of the observatory and the poor fight put up by the leviathan, and still smoldering with rage and in search of an easier revenge, turned his anger on the Company building.
We watched in a shock I can barely describe as Mord tore open the top of the Company building like it was a sleek beehive and tossed the upper floors off to the far west, into the desert beyond the city. Now he was scooping out the contents and slurping his huge tongue through the maze of stone and plastic to get at the sweetness of flesh and blood, spitting out the rest. There was nothing human in his gaze in that moment, just the kind of hunger that could never truly be satiated. It was awful. People and creatures were jumping out of that exposed honeycomb to their deaths in the holding ponds, and he ignored them.
A desperate squadron of helicopters, long-hidden and clearly in bad repair, tried to rise from the upper levels, but Mord rose with them and swatted them out of the sky. Some of their broken remains, wings crumpled, lay around Mord and others became embedded in the surrounding desert, the desolate plains, as if they had always been there.
Then came, last defense, a swarm of flying biotech like locusts or wasps, so thick and dark it formed a vast cloud, but Mord only gave out a bellowing, huffing laugh and flew through that cloud again and again, with his mouth wide open like a whale filling its belly with krill, until almost none were left and the rest reduced to less than the sad comradery of tiny clusters on the horizon.