Chapter 13: No

  They tried going around.

  Marcus led them two blocks south, looking for a cross street that bypassed the intersection. They found a narrow service alley between a dry cleaner and a law office, both buildings half-melted into each other but leaving a gap wide enough to walk single-file. The alley ran the length of the block and should have emerged on Seventh Street, past the Gridlock.

  It didn't. The alley ended at a wall of fused metal and glass. The two buildings had sealed together at the far end, creating a smooth, impenetrable barrier. Dave pressed his hand against it. Warm. Humming. The buildings weren't just merged; they were alive in whatever way the transformed things were alive, and they had closed the alley like a body closing a wound.

  They tried north. Another alley, wider, between the vacant lot where the movie theater had been and the parking garage. This one looked clear for forty yards, then the wire nests started. Dense clusters of cable and wire woven into the walls and ceiling, leaving a passage barely two feet wide. Things clicked inside the nests. Shapes moved.

  Noor shone her penlight into the gap. Something inside reflected it back. Surfaces, metallic and angular, shifting.

  "No," Noor said. "Not through there."

  They tried a building. Marcus's Bulwark shield could hold a door, and the savings-bank-hardware-store hybrid had windows on both the Main Street side and the Seventh Street side.

  The door was open. The interior was wrong. The savings bank's lobby and the hardware store's showroom had fused into a single space where rows of power tools hung from teller windows and deposit slips were scattered among nail bins. It was navigable. Dave took two steps inside.

  The floor grabbed his boot.

  There were no hands, no tendrils. But the floor stuck, the way a magnet sticks to iron, and when he pulled his foot free the surface rippled like water and the building groaned around them. A long, structural, intestinal sound. The building was digesting.

  Dave backed out fast. The door closed behind him, slowly, with the peristaltic patience of something that would try again later.

  "Okay," Marcus said. He was standing at the corner, looking at the intersection. The Gridlock hadn't moved. It crouched in the center of the crossroads, mirror-surfaced, shifting. "Okay. So we go through."

  "We go through," Dave agreed.

  They gathered behind the corner of a dentist's office that had somehow survived intact, its cheerful tooth logo still mounted on the wall. Javi was pressed against the brick, skateboard clutched to his chest, breathing in quick shallow bursts.

  "What's the plan?" Javi asked. "Please say there's a plan."

  Dave looked at Marcus. Marcus looked at Dave. Neither of them had a plan. They had capabilities, and they had a problem, and the gap between the two was the space where plans were supposed to go.

  "I shield," Marcus said. "Big as I can. You hit it with the soap. Noor stays behind me with the kid."

  "That's not a plan. That's a list of things we can do."

  "Yeah, well. That's what I've got."

  Dave checked Emma. She was awake, alert, watching the intersection with that eerie intensity she'd had since they arrived. Her hands were still on Raf, but her grip was tighter, the way she gripped things when she was concentrating on something only she could see.

  "Emma," Dave said softly. "You okay?"

  She looked at him. Dark eyes, Sarah's eyes, full of something he couldn't read. She didn't babble. She didn't reach for his beard. She just looked at him, and in that look was a focus that made the hair on his arms stand up.

  The system text appeared. Brief. Clear.

  ~*~

  Stay close to her.

  ~*~

  A directive, stripped of filter, almost mechanical. The system itself, speaking through the thinnest part of Emma's consciousness.

  Dave tightened the carrier straps. Checked the crowbar. Checked the soap. It was three-quarters full, the enhanced Walgreens bottle. Sixty, maybe seventy shots if he was conservative.

  "Here's the plan," Dave said. "Marcus shields the group. I'm on point with the soap. We walk through the intersection. We don't run. Running triggers pursuit instincts. We walk at a steady pace, and we don't stop. Noor, you're behind Marcus with Javi, if anyone gets hurt, you stabilize while Marcus covers. Javi, you stay behind Noor and you do not let go of her bag strap."

  "What if it attacks?" Javi asked.

  "Then Marcus shields and I fight and you run. Seventh Street, past the intersection, keep going south until you hit the residential neighborhoods."

  "By myself?"

  "You're a Courier. You're fast. Use it."

  Javi's face was pale but his jaw was set. He was scared, shaking, actually, but he was there. He hadn't run. A sixteen-year-old with a skateboard who hadn't run.

  "Go," Dave said.

  They walked into the intersection.

  The Gridlock was bigger up close. It filled the crossroads like a plug in a drain, its mirror surfaces reflecting everything around it in warped, sliding fragments. Dave saw himself approaching in a dozen distorted copies, each one slightly wrong, slightly delayed. The creature had no visible anatomy. No head, no limbs, no eyes. It was geometry given mass. A shape that kept almost resolving into something recognizable and then shifting, the way a cloud looks like a face until you blink.

  It was also, Dave realized as they got closer, not actually blocking the road. There were gaps. The Gridlock's body didn't quite touch the buildings on either side. There were four feet of clearance on the north edge, maybe three on the south. Enough to squeeze through. Tight, uncomfortable, but passable.

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  "North side," Dave murmured. "Four feet. Single file."

  Marcus nodded. Adjusted his shield, covering the flank closest to the Gridlock. They edged toward the gap.

  Thirty feet. The reflections in the Gridlock's surface sharpened. Dave could see himself in perfect detail now. Every scratch on the crowbar, every line on his face, Emma's dark eyes in the carrier behind his head. The reflection was exact. Too exact. The images moved a half-second behind reality, tracking them, learning them.

  Twenty feet. The warmth in Dave's chest was screaming. Screaming, a continuous burn that he felt in his teeth and his fingertips. Emma's aura was at full output, pushing outward, and the Gridlock's surface rippled where the aura touched it. Rippling. Tasting.

  Fifteen feet. They reached the gap.

  "Go," Dave whispered.

  Marcus went first, shield up, his big body filling most of the gap. Noor followed, pressed against the building wall. Javi behind her, one hand on her bag strap, the other crushing his skateboard. Dave brought up the rear, walking backward, the soap raised, watching the Gridlock's surface for any change.

  They were in the gap. The Gridlock was three feet to Dave's left. This close, he could hear the low, crystalline hum, like a wine glass being stroked, sustained and perfect and deeply wrong. The surface wasn't smooth. Up close, he could see it was made of smaller pieces, interlocking, shifting, like puzzle pieces rearranging themselves continuously. And in the spaces between the pieces, in the cracks where light didn't reach, things moved. Small, fast, glinting.

  Eight feet to go. Marcus was almost through. Noor was halfway.

  The Gridlock moved.

  A section. A panel of mirror-surface, roughly the size of a car door, detached from the main mass and swung toward them. Smooth, fast, silent. It caught the light and threw it into Dave's eyes, a flash so bright it whited out his vision for a full second.

  Marcus roared. The shield flared. The panel hit it and skidded, screeching, throwing sparks that weren't sparks. They were tiny mirror fragments, shrapnel, and they peppered the building wall like buckshot.

  "MOVE!" Marcus bellowed.

  Noor grabbed Javi and shoved him forward. He stumbled, caught himself, ran. Noor followed. Marcus held the shield with both hands, his arms trembling, his boots grinding backward on the asphalt.

  Another panel detached. A flat, gliding shape that dropped toward them like a blade. Dave got the soap up and fired. The bubble stream hit the panel at its leading edge and the surface dissolved, the mirror material breaking down into gray flakes that scattered like ash. The panel, missing a third of its mass, tumbled sideways and crashed into the building.

  Good. The soap worked. But the Gridlock was producing more panels. They were detaching from the main body like cells dividing, each one moving independently, each one targeting a different member of the group.

  Dave fired again. Noor was through the gap, pulling Javi. Marcus was still holding, but his shield was flickering. The panel grinding against it was heavier than the others, pressing harder.

  "Marcus, GO!"

  Marcus turned and ran. The shield dropped. The panel surged forward.

  Dave fired the soap point-blank into its surface. The bubble stream punched a hole clean through it, a ragged circle of dissolved material, and the panel wobbled, lost cohesion, collapsed into fragments.

  But the others were coming. And the main body was moving now, shifting in the intersection, rotating to face them. The hum climbed in pitch. The mirror surfaces blazed.

  Dave ran.

  He made it through the gap just as the Gridlock's bulk closed it, sealing the passage. They were on Seventh Street. Through. But the panels were still coming, rising over the buildings now, gliding shapes that caught the orange sky and threw it back in fractured pieces.

  Marcus got his shield back up. A panel hit it and shattered. Noor pulled Javi behind a mailbox, which was absurd cover but better than nothing. Dave fired at the panels, pop, pop, pop, burning through soap at a rate that made his stomach drop.

  A panel got through.

  It came from behind, from an angle Dave wasn't covering, and it hit him across the ribs. Blunt, like being hit with a sheet of plywood. He went down. The crowbar skidded. The soap bottle bounced from his hand.

  Pain. Real pain. Dave curled around Emma, protecting the carrier with his body, and the second hit came across his back.

  Emma screamed.

  Screamed. A sound that came from somewhere deeper than a baby's lungs should go, a sound that Dave felt in the bones of his face, in his teeth, in the roots of his hair. The system text exploded across his vision — white. Pure white. Burning.

  ~*~

  NO.

  ~*~

  One word. One syllable. No baby voice. No playful filter.

  The light came from Emma herself, a golden-white radiance that poured out of her in a sphere, expanding, accelerating. It hit the mirror panels and they unraveled, the interlocking pieces separating, spinning apart, losing their cohesion and structure and falling as a rain of dull gray fragments that pattered on the asphalt like hail.

  The sphere hit the Gridlock.

  The creature that had blocked an intersection, that had deflected Marcus's shield and tanked Dave's soap and produced panels faster than they could be destroyed. The Gridlock came apart. It just stopped being a thing. The mirror surfaces went dull. The interlocking pieces separated. The hum cut off like a switch being thrown. The shape that had filled the crossroads lost its geometry, its intent, its thereness, and what was left was a pile of dull gray rubble in the middle of an intersection, steaming faintly.

  The gold light faded.

  Emma went limp in the carrier. Dave could feel her breathing, could feel the tiny heartbeat against his back. But she was profoundly, completely unconscious. Gone. The warmth vanished. The system text vanished. The aura vanished. Everything Emma was to the system, every connection and pulse and broadcast, went dark.

  Silence.

  Dave was on his knees in the middle of Seventh Street. At least two of his ribs were broken, maybe three, he could feel them grinding when he breathed. His back was a sheet of pain. Blood from somewhere, his scalp, maybe, was running into his left eye.

  He reached behind him and touched Emma's hand. Warm. Alive. But her fingers didn't grip his. They didn't do anything. She was deeper than sleep.

  Marcus was beside him. Hands on Dave's shoulders, gentle for a man his size. "She okay?"

  "I don't know."

  "You okay?"

  Dave tried to stand. His ribs said no. His legs said maybe. He compromised by getting to one knee.

  Noor was there, penlight out, checking Emma's pupils while Dave stayed still. "Pupils reactive. Heart rate slow but steady. Breathing regular. She's not injured. I think she's depleted. Like a battery that dumped its entire charge at once."

  "How long?" Dave's voice was strange. Flat and far away.

  "I don't know. I don't have a manual for whatever she is." Noor looked at him. Her face was the medical face, the one that didn't show what she was feeling. "I need to look at your ribs."

  "In a minute."

  Javi was sitting on the sidewalk. He was just sitting and crying, the skateboard across his lap, tears running down his face. He wasn't ashamed of it. He was sixteen and he'd just watched a baby unmake a monster and he was sitting on a sidewalk in the apocalypse crying, and nobody thought less of him for it.

  Dave got to his feet. Marcus helped. The world tilted, then steadied.

  The Gridlock's remains were already fading, the gray rubble dissolving into the asphalt. In another minute, there would be nothing left. Just an intersection, empty and passable, with scorch marks on the buildings and a mailbox with a dent in it.

  Dave looked at the rubble. Looked at his daughter, unconscious in the carrier, her face peaceful and pale.

  "Don't be scared, Daddy," the system had said, once, in a time that felt very far away.

  But Dave was scared.

  He was scared of what was living in his baby. He was scared of what she could do. And he was scared of the people who would want her to do it again. Of himself needing her to do it again.

  Noor taped his ribs. Two cracked, one bruised. She gave him the enhanced painkillers from the pharmacy bag and they worked fast, the sharp edges of the pain rounding off within minutes.

  "Don't fight anything for at least four hours," she said. "Your ribs need the ointment to work."

  "Four hours is a long time."

  "Then don't get hit."

  They walked south on Seventh Street, away from the intersection, away from the Gridlock's grave. Emma didn't stir. The system stayed dark. Dave's chest was empty where the warmth had been. A hollow, cold space that felt like missing a limb.

  Javi walked beside him. He'd stopped crying but his eyes were red and his grip on the skateboard hadn't loosened.

  "She saved us," Javi said.

  "Yeah."

  "Is she going to be okay?"

  Dave adjusted the carrier strap. Touched Emma's hand again. Still limp. Still warm.

  "Yeah," he said, because that was what you told a sixteen-year-old. "She's going to be fine."

  He didn't know if it was true. He carried her anyway.