But the first of the three obstacles was ready for her—blades in hand, and scowl on face. Indigo went in low, counting on her weight to carry her smack into the woman’s knees. Indigo crashed into her like a bowling ball, knocking her hard without sending her flying. The Androktasiai flailed but rallied, snagging one blade on the rough Berber carpet and swinging the other one around at Indigo’s head.
Indigo ducked, rolled behind the nun, and shoved her forward—directly into Selene’s sword. Maybe the woman gasped, maybe she cried out. Indigo didn’t watch, and she didn’t listen. She didn’t have the attention to spare, not when the second and third nuns were bearing down and closing in. When one of them tried to sweep her legs, she leaped aside, bounced off a metal desk with a loud clang, and slid on her ass to a more defensible position against a cubicle.
From there, she kicked with both feet and caught the first woman in the chest—propelling her back into the third. It was only a little save. Indigo was still on her heels, and then on her feet.
Selene got a grip on the nearest nun and seized her by the tunic, then flung her back down the aisle toward her friends. One of them tripped over her, and another jumped. They did not stop. They did not close ranks. They trickled around the mail carts and the printers and advanced at a graceful, terrible speed.
But the EXIT sign was still calling, and now it was closer. Twenty feet away, maybe.
For twenty feet, Indigo scrambled, and with Selene breathing down her neck she slammed into the emergency bar and leaned on it. IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, HOLD LEVER: DOOR WILL OPEN IN TEN SECONDS.
The slaughter nuns were going to close the gap in a whole lot less than ten seconds.
The alarm began to wail, starting at a low whistle and working its way up to a hard scream. Everyone on that floor who wasn’t fighting for her life popped up and looked around. Women grabbed purses and men collected satchels. Several stayed cowering in their cubicles, but most of them made a run for the elevator alcove and the main stairs there.
Indigo wondered what they were thinking now, those people. She’d been an urban legend, and now they’d all seen her. What would they remember?
Selene sliced, chopped, and stabbed, using her body to shield Indigo’s while they waited those ten interminable seconds. The press of the sisters’ bodies was a crush of wild limbs and sharp blades, but finally the emergency exit door gave way, and they all collapsed into the corridor in one vicious tumble.
Indigo could breathe again. There were shadows again.
She seized Selene and pulled her into a corner beneath the stairs, gaining a few feet of distance. But it wasn’t that easy, not against these women. She knew it would be bad, and she knew that Florence had almost been too much—and now she was in even closer quarters.
But she had shadows. She slipped in and out of them, popping free when she had to, slicing and thrusting unseen when she could … and in the face of more blades, more fury, when she couldn’t.
“Up or down?” Selene asked with a pained gasp that worried Indigo as much as anything else in the stairwell.
Indigo made an executive decision. “Down!”
In the basement there would be more shadows, more darkness. Down there, she’d find the old archives in a storage space with rickety bulbs, and a boiler room, and below that a crawlspace where no one except workmen in overalls ever dared to go.
“Down?”
“Yes!”
If they went up, they’d land in the sunlight on the roof, eventually. Fewer shadows. Worse odds. Their odds were better if they headed below. If Indigo could only find a shadow deep enough, dark enough … if she could only steal a moment to think, to wrap herself up and build up some proper defenses …
“If wishes were fishes,” she muttered, falling backward and taking Selene with her, into one shadow and out from another. Selene went feral, and two of the nuns screamed. Indigo didn’t see what Selene had done, but those two women quit following them, so it was a big fat win as far as Indigo was concerned.
She was breathless. She was afraid, for herself and Selene, too.
Selene was slowing down.
Down. Always down. Everything was going down.
Selene was bleeding. Indigo was bleeding, too, but it wasn’t bad enough to drag her down yet. Not all the way.
Down. She took another shadow, and Selene hopped the banister to the next level. The slaughter nuns followed their descent, shrieking like Harpies, their tunics billowing like wings in the unrelenting chase.
“We have to get ahead of them!” Selene whispered frantically. “This is too close, too much!”
“Down!” Indigo insisted. “Trust me!”
But when she caught Selene’s eye, she saw fear. When she glimpsed Selene’s arm, she saw a slash. When she looked lower, she saw a puncture in her companion’s left shoulder, and what looked like a wound in her belly. “Something is wrong here.”
“They aren’t alone,” Selene agreed. “One of them…” She cocked her head toward the charging cluster of nuns. “Caedis rides on one of them.”
“Well, shit.”
Indigo didn’t dare take inventory of her own situation. Hers wasn’t much better, and she knew it. She refused to think about it. She insisted to herself that the fire along her right flank was just a scratch. The bleeding down her thigh was only a flesh wound. Never mind the stumbling. Never mind how Selene’s hands were slipping on her blades. Or how she dropped one.
Indigo’s breathing came harder and harder, and so did Selene’s.
“Down won’t cut it,” Selene wheezed.
But they were already committed, so Indigo pressed onward, a little slower. Fewer sisters were on their tail, but it might as well have been a thousand. There were too many, and Indigo and Selene were running out of floors, running out of shadows.
They were running out of options.
They burst through one particularly dense patch of darkness at the very bottom of the very last flight of stairs, and then they were in the basement. It was dark, but not as dark as they’d hoped—and the slaughter nuns were right behind them.
“This won’t work. It can’t work, they’re coming, they’re coming,” wheezed Selene.
Indigo was frozen with uncertainty. Where could they go where the sisters couldn’t follow? After Florence, they seemed almost invincible and immortal. They weren’t. It wasn’t possible. Only the gods were immortal, and that wasn’t a sure thing either.
“The gods…,” she breathed.
“What?”
Indigo closed her eyes. She only needed a few seconds.
“What are you doing?”
She almost responded, but stopped herself. No, Selene might not go for it. She might interfere. She wouldn’t be wrong if she did, but this is what it had come to. Indigo retreated to the shadows in her mind, in her soul. She felt around on the walls and floors of the rooms she’d built, and she found the trapdoor that led some place much, much deeper than the basement.
There was always some place farther down, if you knew where to look.
Damastes, she breathed to the blackness. I know you’re in here.
Time did not quite stop, but it stretched, slowed, and waned.