Chapter 116: The Fastball

I had built this morning like a goddamn cathedral. Four Mk 19s, three miniguns, a hundred and sixty drums, two hundred charges, every roof measured, every fallback walked in the dark at three in the morning with my eyes burning, around seventy-two million credits sitting on the shoreline in neat, countable, walking increments.

And all of it, every hour of it, got deleted by a grudge.

Not by a flaw in the plan or bad math. A monster looked across two kilometers of burning city through smoke and fire and half a million bodies, and picked one face out of it, and decided that today was about that face.

"WHAT DID I EVEN DO TO YOU!" I screamed down at it, hauling myself up the next arc. "I gave you a LAKE! I gave you a five-star all-you-can-eat buffet and a four-day NAP, you ungrateful, roof-swiping, purple SHIT-BAG!"

"Mrrh!"

"You’re right, the skin color thing was rude. Fine. THE SKIN COLOR THING WAS RUDE! IT IS NOT BECAUSE IT’S PURPLE!"

-CRASH-!

An air conditioning unit the size of a sedan blew apart against the parapet beside me, and I ate the gravel it made.

Then, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed it stopped chasing.

That was worse. That was so much worse, since it had watched me travel for four minutes and worked out the one thing that actually kept me alive, which was never the grapple gun and never the glide.

It was the roofs.

So it started taking the roofs.

It went ahead of me and put its shoulder through the top three floors of the block I was aiming for, and the buildings instantly folded in on themselves, and I had to burn a hook and a TK shove to bend my line before I flew into a building that no longer existed.

Then it did it again.

And again.

-BOOM-!

-BOOM-!

Every option ahead of me came down one at a time while I bled altitude and speed and TK, my map shrinking street by street, the drill between my eyes turning into a hand pressing down through the bone, my vision smearing at the edges every time I flared.

I cut south. It collapsed the south. I cut west toward the boat club road and the whole facade came down across it.

Not even ten minutes into round two, and I had six buildings left standing in my whole quadrant.

Then five.

Then three.

I put my last clean hook into a rooftop water tank, came off the swing with my ears ringing and my hands wet, and lined up the only gap that remained, sixty meters of open air onto the roof of a corporate block with a helipad on it.

Nothing under that gap except bodies, forty meters down, packed so tight the asphalt had stopped existing.

Nothing to hook. Nothing to trade. Just one line that needed to be committed.

[Come on... come on...]

"Mea."

"I know, booger! I know! Just hold-"

Tikki’s claws went in through the jacket, through the skin, into the flesh the same instant as every hair on me stood up.

It came from the right, from an angle no jump on this earth should have covered, twenty tonnes of muscle already airborne and already level with me, arm out, claws open, the whole sky filling with it.

There was no time to dodge. There was no dodge left in me to spend either.

So my subconscious pulled the only trigger I had.

-Whoop-!

The Barrier bloomed out of the middle of my skull, the biggest one I have ever made, closing it around me and around the cat on my shoulder in the same instant.

Then the hand shut.

Five claws, each one longer than me, folded around a sphere of nothing with me sitting dead in the center of it.

The daylight came through the gaps between those fingers in bars while its palm pressed in from below and every single knuckle stopped a full hand’s width off my body.

[Shit!]

Then it squeezed.

I felt it arrive as a draw, a pull out of the middle of my forehead, my reserves going down the way a bathtub goes down when somebody pulls the plug. I could not stop it, nor could I let go of it, since the second I dropped the Barrier I’d be paste.

But the pressure kept coming, while my skull began to fill with white noise.

And through the gaps of its fingers, a red eye the size of my head came in close and looked at me.

It knew what it had. It had held a man in a bubble it could not open, so it turned its wrist, and it examined the problem, and every drop of blood in me went to ice while it did.

Then it solved the problem.

[No, no, no, no-]

It cocked its arm back, hauled that whole two-story frame around like a man throwing a stone across a pond, and hurled me into the district.

The force went into the Barrier first, all of it, every last unit I had left going out the plug in one white flash.

-FWOOOM-!

The world became speed.

I got one arm across Tikki and dragged him out of the pocket and into my chest and curled around him with my chin down, and my spine bowed while eight hundred meters of burning city went past me in one grey smear, and I flew like a bullet somebody had fired at a city block.

[Sorry, booger-]

-KRRRASH-!!!

The wall burst apart around me.

Concrete and rebar and a curtain of glass, a hole punched clean through the outside of a building, and the last of me went out of me the instant the Barrier met that wall, spent, popped, gone, nothing left in the tank to pay for the second meter of it.

I went through an office in pieces of time.

A desk exploded somewhere against my shoulder. Something metal folded. A ceiling grid came down in sheets, chairs went over, carpet burned past under my back until a load-bearing column finally agreed to end the discussion, and I hit it with the helmet taking what my skull could not.

All the while my mind detonated into a burning white flash.

Everything went white and perfectly silent at once, the drill between my eyes collapsing into a single point and then bursting outward through the whole of my head.

The white drained into a smear. Shapes with no edges, light with no source, a grey circle somewhere that had probably been the hole I came in through.

Then the hearing came back wrong, cotton and deep water, my own breathing arriving from the far end of a tunnel, everything else drowned under a high flat ring.

And where thirty meters of constant living information should have wrapped around me in every direction, straight down included, there was nothing.

Awareness was simply gone, like a limb past the point of feeling.

Then the agony arrived.

It came up out of the third-eye spot and unfolded through my entire skull, pure and unbridled and total, and it took my body with it, hands, jaw, spine, every muscle locking while I curled tighter around the only thing in my arms while a copper liquid filled my mouth.

[Ti... kki...]

Two and a half kilograms of cat pressed against my chest with his claws locked into my plate carrier, his chest heaving fast under my palm, his mouth open right beneath my chin.

He was screaming.

But I could no longer hear a single wail.