Therese coughed, trying to empty the water from her throat and lungs. Next to her, Riley was retching, convulsing. Alive, but not in any state to defend herself. And the larva was crawling towards them, its writhing mass of face-parts churning and thrashing, the sound of grinding teeth loud and appalling in the confined space of the bathhouse.
She grabbed Riley by the armpits and tried to drag her backwards, but the girl was dead weight, and no sooner had Therese gotten her feet under her and pulled than she lost her footing, finding no purchase on the wet floor. She landed on her tailbone, kicking her heels against the slick tiles, trying to scoot the both of them backwards.
From nearby she heard loud, familiar voices, alarmed but confident and assertive.
“Go for the lockers and get your pike,” Marta shouted. “I’ll hold whatever that is!”
“Fuck! Don’t let it get its mouth on you! It digs,” Brynn shouted, and Therese could hear her bare feet slapping on the slate tiles of the floor. And other feet, nearby. She tried to drag her eyes off the mass of approaching tentacles, and she realized the sound she was hearing was her own breathless scream, a whistle strangled by her empty lungs.
And then Himari was there, grabbing Riley, pulling, uncoiling some wiry strength Therese hadn’t expected. She scrambled back in relief as the two of them pulled the dazed Riley’s body back a foot, then another.
And Marta landed on the larval creature with all four limbs, clinging with her knees, grabbing its mouth-tentacles with her left hand, pressing its head against the floor with her right forearm. She panted with the effort of it, hissing in pain as something happened wherever her naked skin touched the hideous thing.
“Those, those are the things—” Himari was trying to talk through a clenched jaw, heaving again and again, pulling Riley back from the fight.
“From the City,” Therese said. “From the corruption.”
“Fuck. Let me—” Himari stopped, got a better grip on Riley. “Let me take care of moving Riley. You get the fuck away from here.”
Therese finally managed a full breath. “Fuck that,” she panted. “Not letting these fuckers get her.”
Marta shouted something inarticulate, like a war cry, and with a horrible wet pop the head of the larval creature tore loose from its body. From here, Therese could see the angry welts and blisters rising on the woman’s thighs and arms where she’d contacted the monstrosity.
Beyond her, at the open portal, a half-dozen more were shaking themselves free of the slime that coated their birthing process like lubrication. Marta, panting and holding her scalded left hand against her breasts, struggled back to her feet.
“Mar,” Brynn shouted from somewhere nearby, off to the left, and Marta looked up. Therese couldn’t follow any of what happened next, except that something like a short stick whirled through the air, Marta reached out for it almost absently, and then she was extending an arc-pike, its glowing blade dripping liquid gold fire.
Simultaneously, Brynn lashed out at one of the still-waking creatures at the Portal with another arc-pike, skewering it and detonating its bloated abdomen. The thick gelatinous gore sprayed out from it, hissing as it landed in the nearby hot tub.
Marta slashed with her less-injured right arm, and caught an advancing wasp-larva across its mouth parts. With those severed and cauterized, the thing began to violently curl and uncurl, like a wounded ant, leaking white hissing fluids onto the floor.
Himari and Therese had gotten Riley over to a bench along the wall of the bathhouse, where they helped her to a sitting position, as she continued to convulse with coughing fits and dry heaving. Himari was now looking around intently, and Therese could easily read her angry expression.
“You can’t fight those things, Himari!”
“I’ve got to do something,” she countered.
“Let Brynn and Marta handle them! They’re trained!” Therese said, her voice trembling with panic.
“They’re getting overwhelmed,” Himari countered, and stabbed her finger out at the duo, who were using the pikes at maximum extension to keep the four other creatures at bay; as they watched, another pair of them emerged from the wavering portal.
Therese became aware of distant shouts and screams; this attack wasn’t just local to their bathhouse. “We have to leave, Himari. We have to get Riley away.”
Himari looked back at her, eyes burning, and then down at Riley, who was finally able to draw a full breath. “Why? She’s okay now; we have to help them fight!”
“They’re here for her, Novice!” Therese shouted. “They’re here to kill Riley, okay?”
The larval wasp creatures were spreading out to either side of Brynn and Marta, flanking, and as Therese and Himari watched, the ones at the edges of the fight broke off to start crawling towards their little trio.
“Fuck,” Himari snarled. “Okay, but I want a goddamn explanation once we get out of this.”
“Fine, but can we focus on getting out of it?”
Together, they pulled Riley to her feet. “I— I think I can— I can walk,” she said, her voice a rasp in her ravaged throat. She coughed more, and the cough was deep and wet and seemed to come from the very bottom of her lungs.
“Just focus on staying upright, okay? Lean on Himari and me, and let’s get to the lockers and get some clothes.” Therese called out, “Brynn! We’re going to try to get Riley to the lockers!”
“Got it!” Brynn called back, and she gestured to Marta, who nodded and took a more aggressive position.
Therese, Riley and Himari staggered along the wall, and off to their right, Marta and Brynn kept pace with them, keeping the pikes between the wasp creatures and their targets. Slowly, painfully, they crossed the room to the main locker entrance, and Himari took Riley’s weight while Therese got the door open.
“We’re in!” Therese called out to Brynn. “Get in here and help us block the door!”
“Fall back, Marta,” Brynn said, and the two backed away from the portal and its litter of wasp creatures. In the time it had taken them all to cross the bathhouse, four more of the larvae had emerged from the portal, and now wet caustic fluids were oozing from the opening in a continual stream.
As the fighting pair reached the door, pikes held before them, one of the creatures launched itself at Marta. Her automatic block with the pike’s butt end, followed by a pivot and throw, sent it over Therese’s head and into the locker room, where it landed in a wet heap next to a long bench, before righting itself and getting its clawed appendages underneath it again.
“Fuck!” Marta snarled. “I’m coming!”
They pulled the door shut as the rest of the creatures piled against it, and their reeking fluids began to ooze beneath the lower jamb. The sound of hard alien teeth grinding against the door’s surface was like nails on a chalkboard, grating and horribly loud.
The wasp larva in the room with them lurched towards Riley, and Therese was suddenly, painfully aware of the prickling across her skin, the awful electrical sting of Riley’s presence magnifying.
Riley was calling a Sigil.
“No!” Therese hurled herself at Riley, who was barely standing upright. She tackled into the dazed girl and bore her to the ground, and with their skin in direct contact Therese could feel the pulses of celestial power like a magical heartbeat.
Grounding, I need to ground her, I need to get a Working—
The creature lurched toward them, and its mouth-tentacles parted to reveal its inner lamprey-like mouth, which had begun to leak a yellow custard-like substance. It was only a meter and a half away—
Himari scooped it up in both arms, shouting in wordless horror, and tried to smash it down into the bench. Twisting, serpent-quick, the thing drove its mouth-parts into the girl’s left breast and shoulder, grinding. Blood and gore spurted from the point of contact, and Himari began to scream, her composure leaving her.
And then Marta was there, slamming her short spear into the thing, dragging it off Himari, pinning it to the floor and ripping it down the middle. The spray of fluids from its corpse spattered against Therese’s right leg, burning, sizzling, painful.
Pressing herself against Riley, she focused all her attention on their link, and dragged the celestial power of Riley’s aborted Sigil-calling through the aperture. It’s so much. She’s so fucking strong.
The Working she’d thrown together, a simple grounding knot, burst almost instantly under the flow of power, and she braced for the searing celestial fire to claim her—
And then Riley took the power back through the link and let it flow out into her own grounding, a crude but functional version of what Therese had just done, and the remaining celestial power dissipated harmlessly.
For the space of three breaths, the locker room was still. Then the bottom of the door to the bathhouse broke inwards, and the first of the creatures pushed its squirming mouth-tentacles through the hole it had chewed in the wood.
“Fucking— get— out!” Brynn sliced the tentacles off, and the creatures were distracted momentarily by the need to burrow through the corpse of their litter-mate. “We need to move. Marta, what have you got?”
The Logistics agent had pulled the contents of a cabinet out, and started throwing robes at them. “Therese! You gotta get pressure on Himari’s chest and stop the bleeding!”
Therese had forgotten, and looking over at the injured Novice, saw that her entire left shoulder down to her breast was a mangled ruin, and she was going into shock. “Shit! Yeah, got it!” She looked down at Riley, who was wide-eyed and panting, but alert and back in reality. “You good?”
“Yeah,” Riley gasped. “Go— help her—” she managed, and caught one of the robes with her outstretched foot. “Hurry!”
Therese scrambled on all fours over to where Himari had fallen, and grabbed for the nearest towel from Marta’s dumping of the cabinet. She pressed it against Himari’s chest, and Himari screamed through her clenched teeth, making the sound almost a growl. Pressure, need pressure, she thought, and then had an idea. “Riley! Your robe’s belt!”
Riley saw Therese’s idea immediately, and she slid the belt out of its loops and threw it. Therese caught it, wound it quickly around Himari’s shoulder, then wound it a second time, and then pulled. Himari howled with pain, and seemed about to faint, and the towel tied in place immediately began to soak through with red.
“Time to go,” Marta called, and Brynn backed away from the pile of creature viscera that had accumulated at the hole in the door, where she’d been chopping through the things as they tried to push into the room. “Brynn, you’ll have to carry Himari,” Marta added, and looked over to Riley. “You okay to move, girl?”
Riley had let a hot, feral grin slip onto her face. “I told you once before,” she grated painfully. “I’ve had worse.”
Marta barked a laugh, and the group headed for the locker room exit.
# # #
The small auditorium had been turned into a triage center, and Logistics staff were moving in a dance of ordered chaos, stepping around each other with practiced efficiency, snapping out orders and hauling supplies.
Riley was holding Himari’s right hand, and the bleak and hollow-eyed look she wore was sufficient to keep the Logistics medics from trying to move her away from the cot Himari lay on. She’d been bundled into actual clothing, and the spattered redness from the caustic ichor of the bug creatures had been treated with a burn cream, and she’d had to confirm that her lungs were, in fact, not still full of water. But then, as soon as these basics were covered, the medics had moved on; shivering but basically healthy people were not commanding their attention at the moment.
The distortion-larvae had broken into the Mountain in five different places, and while the Logistics agents were tough and ready to fight, they were not professional monster hunters. They were not Rangers.
There had been casualties.
The worst had been in the Administration offices, which were largely occupied by analysts and project managers, none of whom were any more substantially trained than ‘basic firearms safety’. Twelve women were dead, unable to escape the initial rush of horrors bursting from torn-open holes in the world. Fifty more were seriously injured.
Himari, bandaged and drifting in and out of sleep, was not even near the worst of the injuries. The medics were moving from cot to cot with an assortment of Charms that Riley recognized as Worked only when they were activated, with that tickling goosebump shiver she’d come to recognize as nearby Celestial power. She assumed they each had their own specialized purpose, and she also could not imagine a specialty she found less appealing than the medic teams. She already felt the nightmares from this abattoir of pained groans and weeping settling into her memories, for later enthusiastic perusal by her sleeping mind.
They’re here to kill Riley, she thought. They’re here to kill me.
She wanted to squeeze Himari’s hand, but she looked so delicate in her woozy sedated half-consciousness. The cocky confidence and easy surety left her face in this unguarded state, and she was only what she seemed: a twenty year old girl, very far from home, very out of her depth, and very alone.
No, not alone. Fuck. Not alone as long as I’m alive, Riley thought. But then that circled right back to the trapped panicky feeling:
They’re here for her. They’re here to kill Riley.
She ached with the absence of Suli and Eve. She wanted them with her so badly right now. She felt like a broken part of a whole, without them, just her and Himari. The latter’s bluster could mask the feeling when she was awake; they could pretend like they weren’t missing half of themselves, like between the two of them they could face anything. But Himari was not awake anymore, and Riley was alone with her thoughts and the distant sense of Therese’s worry and fear.
Riley had asked, before Therese had been taken away for a debriefing, if Suli and Eve could come through to be with Himari, but the Logistics incident coordinator had said no. More first years in the Mountain was already skating towards the edge of regulations, and bringing inexperienced Novices into a crisis situation like this? “You’ll get your cadre back when we send you and Novice Sasaki home later tonight,” the haggard-looking woman had said, and Riley could see the exhaustion in her movements and hear it in her voice. She, too, was bandaged; almost everyone who could fight, had fought.
They’re here for me. They’re here for Riley. They came here for me.
She knew it was stupid to blame herself. She knew this wasn’t meaningfully her fault. She knew this was the same self-loathing that she’d lived with for all of her life. She knew this, and even if she didn’t, the swirling guilt and festering inwardly-directed hate was sufficient to draw a wave of reassurance from Therese, tinged though it might be with exasperation and scolding.
But that knowledge, and the physical reality of holding Himari’s hand while she dozed in painkiller-induced sleep, were very far apart.
She must have drifted off, because the light in the auditorium had changed, the overheads dimmed as the Mountain automatically moved into its evening schedule. Himari was awake, and it was her hand slipping from Riley’s that had brought Riley back to consciousness.
“Hey bitch,” Himari managed weakly. “Didn’t they have anything better for you to do?”
Riley’s breath hitched in a half-sob and she leaned over to kiss Himari’s forehead.
“Hey whoa, hold on there, don’t get so grabby—”
“Shut up.”
Riley stayed there for a moment, her face pressed against Himari’s forehead, and then she sat back up and sniffled.
“So did we win?” Himari blinked to clear her eyes and looked around the auditorium. “This is a lot of tech shit so I guess we’re still on Earth.”
“Yeah. Yeah, we’re waiting for a medic to deal with your shoulder.” Riley fought the urge to shake Himari. “Why did you have to attack it with your bare hands, you idiot?”
“You were about to be lunch, bitch. I was keeping it off you!” Himari gave her an incredulous look, or at least as much of one as she could manage while lying on a cot in an auditorium. “Want me to just let you die next time?”
Riley let her anxiety escape in a massive exhalation, like a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice low enough to be just barely audible. “But you heard Therese. Those things were there because of me. They were after me. You got hurt because of—”
“Shut the fuck up.” Himari’s voice was still light and ironic, but there was a tension in it now. Riley could hear the genuine annoyance there. “Right now, here’s how I feel. Okay? I got to be a hero. I got to save someone I care about. I got to matter.” She looked away, breaking eye contact with Riley. “It scared the shit out of me. I’m going to have nightmares. I feel like I want to throw up just from how afraid I am of ever seeing another one of those things, okay? And I fucking hurt. I can’t even describe how bad this hurts.” She gestured vaguely with her right hand towards her left shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Mari, I’m—”
“Not done, bitch.”
Riley subsided. Himari was warming up to her main point, and her sense of pacing and drama wouldn’t let her skip ahead.
“This fucking sucks, okay? But it sucks because I decided to do something and it worked. I saved you. I got to be a badass in front of Brynn and Marta. I—” Her voice cracked, but she swallowed and kept going. “I don’t think I’ve ever been that scared in my life, Ry. I don’t think I even knew you could be that scared. Just thinking about it makes me want to cry.”
Riley could see that ‘crying’ had been taken out of Himari’s control; her face was streaked with glistening tracks of tears spilling from the corners of her eyes.
“I don’t know if I can, I don’t—” She took a deliberate, steadying breath. “I don’t think I can do that again. Fight those things.” She shuddered as she exhaled. “Fight. Like, at all. I’m so fucking scared, Riley.”
That unlocked the tears completely, and for a few minutes, Riley held Himari’s hand and brushed her hair back from her forehead and pressed her cheek to Himari’s and whispered “Shh, shh.”
“Ih-Ih-If you made me. Give up fighting. Give up being a badass. If you took that away from me.” She took a ragged breath. “And I don’t even get to be the fucking hero, and it doesn’t mean anything, and somehow it’s your fucking fault that I’m here like this, that it’s not something I decided to do—” She paused. “Then fuck you, Hawkins. Fuck you.”
Riley wiped her own tears away. “No, I don’t— you were—”
“Just fucking say it, Riley. Say I saved you.”
“You, you.” Riley swallowed. “You did, Himari. You saved me. I don’t, I don’t know how to thank you. I would be dead without what you did.” This had the benefit of being entirely true, and it also felt like such a relief to say out loud.
“Good.” Himari nodded. “I did save you, and I did it because you’re worth saving, Riley. Don’t fucking forget that.”
They were silent, hands tangled into each other, Riley close enough to Himari’s face to watch her eyes flicking under her closed eyelids, close enough to hear her breathing. They stayed like that for a long time, neither speaking, neither feeling the need to speak.
Eventually, the medic arrived with a hollow-eyed look of exhaustion and a tapered, polished stone nestled in her palm. She did something to wake the stone up, and it began to throb with an inner light which, holding Himari’s hand, Riley could tell was in time with her pulse.
“We’re pretty tapped out on resources right now, okay? So what you’re going to get is enough to get you started healing, and back to the Tower. You can hit up the Infirmary there once things have settled down.” She frowned. “Don’t try to fight or do anything athletic till then, though. Got it? I’m not fixing you here. I’m getting you mobile.”
Himari nodded, and so did Riley. Whatever the Adept did must have been unpleasant, because she hissed between clenched teeth as she passed the stone over Himari’s shoulder.
“I don’t think I’ve ever hated anything as much as I hate the things that did this,” the medic said.
“Yeah well, me too,” Himari muttered.
“Okay. You’ve got a debrief with Adept Koval, so let’s get you up and on your feet.”
Slowly, carefully, Riley and Himari made their way to the exit, and as they emerged into this floor’s elevator lobby, Brynn sprang to her feet. She’d been sitting on a long row of chairs, stretched out across all of them, and Riley noticed that she still had the arc-pike in her hand, held loosely but also ready for use.
“Oh, hey, you’re out already! Good, okay, let’s go talk to Marta and Therese so I can get you both home.”
Was Brynn nervous about something? She seemed worried. More worried, anyway.
“Come on. We’ve got an office down the hall that we’re using.” She hesitated. “Coordinator Sengupta is going to be leading the debriefing. She’s, um. She can be a lot. Just remember that she’s on our side, and she’s very good at what she does.”
# # #
“This is your fault, is what I’m hearing from everyone,” Coordinator Sengupta said to Riley, who flinched again. Flinching from the small, intense woman had been most of her contribution to the debriefing so far.
“That’s not—” Therese started to say, and Sengupta shot her a narrow-eyed look that silenced her.
Coordinator Sengupta was the head of Logistics. She was enveloped in a black sari with intense purple edge detail, and she was no more than 160cm tall, and yet she loomed. Her face was unreadable. Was she angry? Was she suspicious? Was she forgiving? Riley had not the faintest idea. Her expressions seemed unmoored from her tone of voice and her attention snapped from one of them to another like a whip.
Riley remembered thinking Gaveny was intimidating. Gaveny seemed like a kindly schoolmistress right now. Sengupta was terrifying.
“What I am hearing right now is that you, Novice Hawkins, performed some sort of Working here in my Mountain. That working made portals appear all over the facility. Things came through those portals and now sixteen of my people are dead.”
She had brought her gaze back to Riley’s face, and Riley felt transfixed by it. She was also aware that Coordinator Sengupta had not asked a question, and very early on in this interview Riley had learned that when Sengupta had not asked a question, she did not want to hear an answer.
“Does anyone have anything to add?”
Therese cleared her throat.
“Adept Lasalle. Go ahead.”
“She um. She didn’t.” Therese swallowed, and Riley could feel her anxiety, and she did her best to radiate gratitude. “She didn’t do the Working. I did. She just called the Sigil.”
“You created a portal from one location on the Primary to another? Is this something you’ve known how to do before this moment?”
Therese shook her head. “I inferred most of the structure from Novice Hawkins’ recruitment. She used a similar portal to escape a car accident.”
Is that what it was? A portal? The accident was still just fragments in her memory, and some of those fragments hurt to examine too closely.
Sengupta paused to consider this information. “Let’s then assume that whatever the source, the Working was performed by a competent Adept.”
Riley was still struggling with the prior revelation, but she could feel a lowering of Therese’s tension. Slight, but present. Something about her taking the blame for the Working was important. Maybe Adepts were allowed to fuck up this badly? It seemed unlikely.
“The Sigil. Novice, how did you know to call this Sigil and make use of it?”
“I um.” Riley cleared her throat, tried to get her voice back into the proper register. “I didn’t. Know, I mean. I usually don’t.”
“Explain.”
Riley looked at Therese, who gave her a helpless shrug.
“I um. Sometimes, when something bad is happening, or I’m in danger, or someone I love is—” She saw the impatience on Sengupta’s face. “Uh. A Sigil kind of, calls itself?”
“What you are describing is not possible, though.”
Riley spread her hands. “It’s happened to me a few times. It’s um. It’s how I got to the City three months ago.”
Sengupta paused again, thinking. To Riley it seemed like she was solving a puzzle, but she also realized the Coordinator was in somewhat the role of a prosecutor here.
Eventually, having filed this latest information away in her mental model, Sengupta continued. “The Sigil was… Torn Asunder by Taloned Wings.”
Riley nodded. “I think so. That sounds familiar. I um, I don’t always remember their names.”
Sengupta turned to Therese. “You say there is something wrong with the Sigil?”
Therese wobbled a hand back and forth. “Sort of. More that there’s something wrong with the whole region. The Sisters. That’s where… that’s where the anomaly is. The one we encountered in the City.” She paused, and Riley could feel her deciding to abandon caution. “The Headmistress tasked us, uh, Riley and I, to investigate the anomaly.”
“Mm. And this anomaly is what caused the Working to… distort?” If Sengupta had any reaction to Gaveny’s name being deployed in their defense, Riley couldn’t spot it.
“I don’t know. I think so.” She looked down at the floor. “It should have collapsed on its own, grounded naturally. But something kept it open.”
“Has this happened before, to your Workings?”
“No.”
Coordinator Sengupta had been pacing, her apparent energy exhausting Riley just by proximity to it, and it was a relief when she finally sat down in the chair at the head of the oval table.
“What, exactly, took control of the Working?”
Therese and Riley locked eyes. Then Therese said, “I don’t know. Some kind of hostile being. It um.” She paused, and Riley could feel her uncertainty. “It might be part of the Spike. Or related to it.”
Sengupta’s face was impassive. “Your evidence for this?”
“The um. The Tower has spoken to me before.”
“Personally?” Riley thought the Coordinator sounded skeptical.
“I um, yes. I reported it to Magister Perez.” She hesitated. “The Magister told me not to speak of what it said.”
Sengupta rolled her eyes heavensward. “Magisters. Regardless, what has this got to do with the Spike, or this… hostile being?”
“It spoke like the Tower. The same kind of, um. Abstraction. When it spoke to us. Um, me, and Novice Hawkins. So my conclusion was—”
“Yes, I see.” Sengupta seemed annoyed, now, and Riley wondered why. Was she hoping that one of them had betrayed the Tower somehow, that the whole thing had been the result of one of them being a willing participant in the attack?
Or maybe she just felt her room to maneuver to some kind of resolution narrowing as ‘explicit instructions from Gaveny’ and ‘reports delivered to the Magisters’ were brought into the picture. It had to be frustrating, Riley decided, after all that had happened to the people this woman thought of as her personal responsibilities, to be unable to reach the real author of her pain.
“Adept Koval.”
Marta sat forward. She was bandaged lightly; her burns had been unsightly but superficial. “Ma’am.”
“Your evaluation of the skirmish.”
“We were unprepared for close combat with the creatures, which seem to be specialized in it.” She took a breath, looking like she wasn’t sure if she should continue, but then did so anyway. “Brynn’s experience fighting Banes, and Therese’s experience fighting these specific creatures, allowed us to protect the Novices from them.”
Sengupta looked pointedly at Himari, who was enveloped in bandages all across her left side.
“It was a near thing, ma’am,” Marta said carefully.
Sengupta snorted quietly, and Riley’s view of her shifted. Did she have a sense of humor?
“When we discovered their target was Novice Hawkins, we shifted our tactical focus, and moved to a more defensible location. During the regrouping, Novice Sasaki was injured protecting Novice Hawkins.” She gestured. “Hawkins and Adept Lasalle gave her first aid, and then we retreated.”
Riley was aware of the gap in the story. She was very, very aware that another Sigil had started to climb up from her unconscious into her mind’s eye, that a Sigil had been actively trying to take control from her when Therese had knocked her down. She didn’t know what it had been, but it was a nightmare tangle of projecting lines and spikes that she shuddered to even consider. Whatever demon would have been loosed by that would have been… catastrophic.
“Adept Keelan. Your estimation of the creatures that attacked the Mountain?”
Brynn cleared her throat. “They’re low-threat individuals, ma’am. Arc-pikes are easily able to dispatch them. They are a threat en masse, when it’s more difficult to keep them from flanking you. At close range, they can be lethal before you can react to them.” She looked at Himari. “Surviving close contact with one is noteworthy.”
Riley saw the corner of Himari’s mouth twitch up slightly. Ranger praise could still pierce through her misery, it seemed.
Therese held her hand up to signal she wanted to speak, and Coordinator Sengupta sighed and nodded towards her. “Yes, Adept?”
“There are at least two more forms of the creatures we fought, and there could be many others.” Therese was rubbing her arms, and Riley could feel the waves of nausea and remembered terror coming from her. She tried to project calm back at Therese, but the torrent of horror was so loud. “One of them killed my escort and put me in the hospital for a couple of weeks. The other was even larger and it uh. It nearly wiped out the entire Ranger patrol.” She shivered. “They come from the City.”
Sengupta nodded. She pushed her seat back from the table, and sat quietly for a time, while the Adepts and Novices waited. After perhaps five minutes, she pulled herself back to the table.
“First, Novices Hawkins and Sasaki. You will return to the Tower and you will not leave the Tower for the remainder of your first year. You, in particular.” She jabbed a finger at Riley. “You cannot be trusted to leave the safety of the Tower. Sigils do not simply call themselves, Novice. This pattern is profoundly disturbing and strikes me as a risk to my entire operation in the Primary.” She paused, considering. “Actually, let’s simply make it your entire cadre. None of you are to enter the Primary until you finish your first year. No exceptions.”
Riley nodded, ready for this ordeal to be over. She’d barely survived all this, and being scolded for it as well seemed unfair, at the very least. Himari, who hadn’t said anything the whole time, seemed unconcerned. Riley wished she felt comfortable reaching across the table to take her hand, but she imagined doing that under Sengupta’s watchful eye and decided against it.
“Adept Lasalle. I will forward my recommendation to the Headmistress. I want you working with Theory to map out the precise nature of the Working you completed, because I want to know how a hostile actor was able to use it to bypass all our defenses. And I need to know if it will happen again.” She narrowed her eyes. “I can’t prevent you from coming to the Primary, because you are not part of my department, but I would strongly encourage you to stay near Novice Hawkins. Perhaps one or both of you can keep the other from trouble.”
“Adept Keelan. Please coordinate with Adept Koval. I want a threat assessment for these creatures here in the Primary specifically. If you need Captain Ianthe’s time or resources, come to me first, and I will make the request.”
Coordinator Sengupta took a long, slow breath, and then exhaled it with just as much deliberation. “I have funerals to plan. I have families to contact. I have memorials to write. Please believe me when I say that if any part of this had been your fault — any of you — we would now be having a very different conversation. But the way I feel about it? About what happened?” She looked down at the desk. “It’s the same, regardless. The sooner I am not looking at your faces, the sooner I can start to deal with that.”
She didn’t look up again. After a pause to let her words sink in, she continued. “I’d like all of you to leave, now. Marta, please escort our guests to the Portal.”
And with that, the meeting was over.
# # #
The center of the atrium in the Tower was a hive of activity, as medic teams moved between the bottom of the vast spiral staircase and the open Portal to the Mountain, carrying stretchers laden with the injured in, and healing Charms out.
Riley, Himari, Therese and Brynn staggered through the black void and emerged into the Tower at night, with the faint glow of the shattered moon framed in the skylight far, far overhead. Riley was almost entirely supporting Himari, whose strength had been largely used up just getting to, and through, the Portal; Therese and Brynn were quiet, giving each other unreadable looks that Riley had no point of reference to understand.
“I’m taking her to the Infirmary,” Riley said, as much to Himari as to the two Adepts. Therese nodded and waved, her eyes wide and dark with some worry.
Brynn said, “Need help?”
“No. I’ve got help.” Riley gestured with her head, to where Suliat and Eve were rushing across the atrium floor, Eve pale with worry, Suliat striding purposefully with the clear intent to Take Charge and Kick Asses.
Brynn smiled. “Oh, yeah. Good idea.” She looked at Therese, who didn’t say anything, and then together the two of them headed for the stairs. “Let me know when the medics are done with you two. I still want to talk about all… all of that shit.”
Riley nodded, privately exhausted by the thought of having to talk about it any more, with anyone.
Well, maybe not anyone, she thought, as Suliat reached them first, taking up Himari’s other arm to support her, and then Eve arrived to touch first Riley’s face, and then Himari’s, gently and carefully.
“Will you— Will she be—” Eve’s voice was trembling.
“Okay? Yeah, I’ll be fine.” Himari tried to grin. “The fucker tried to bite off my tit.”
Suliat said, “Let’s go. We want to hear everything, but I want you in an infirmary bed before we talk.”
“Yes, mother,” Himari said, but even her irony sounded forced and exhausted.
They walked, and Eve slid her hand through Riley’s arm, resting lightly on her back. “They wouldn’t let us through. We tried to follow you, but the Logistics people said we couldn’t go in.”
Himari tried to laugh, but it was more of a faint cough. “Yeah, uh, sorry about this, but we’re all banned from the spa for the next couple of years. You included.”
“Hush. I don’t want to hear anything else out of you,” Suliat said. “Eve, stop encouraging her to be a smart-ass.”
Riley grinned. “She doesn’t exactly need encouragement.”
Himari stuck her tongue out. “Yeah, I love you too, bitch.”
Which gave Riley a very odd surprise, at the shiver that passed through her and settled in her chest like a little thrilled pulse in her heartbeat.
The Infirmary was busy but not chaotic; most of the treatment was still happening in the Mountain, where they could Work as much as they wanted without risking Tower intervention. They were shown to a bed, and the medic looked them over. “You’re her cadre, I’m guessing.”
Riley nodded. “We’re not leaving.”
The medic held up her hands in surrender. “Wasn’t even considering asking you to. Just making sure there wasn’t anyone else I needed to go get. I’d want to know if it was my cadre-mate in the Infirmary.”
Suliat had eased Himari into the bed, and between her and the medic, they got Himari’s legs up, and the loose white robe she’d been given in the makeshift hospital in the Mountain off her. Riley was shocked at how drained and pale she looked, but remembered her own Charm-based healing from the forgotten dream. It took something from you, to be healed like that. It left you smaller, somehow. Himari looked smaller.
“Stop staring, girlfriend. It’s okay, I have two tits, so I have a spare.” Himari grinned.
Eve had slipped her hand into Himari’s, and gave it a gentle squeeze. “Can you tell us?”
Himari inclined her head to Riley. “Let her do it. I’m gonna pass out pretty soon, I think.”
So Riley started with the tour of the Mountain, and by the time she got to the bathhouse, Himari had fallen asleep. The three of them went out of the Infirmary, down the hall to the central shaft and the common area overlooking the atrium, and took over an overstuffed couch, with Suliat and Eve on either side of Riley. She hadn’t realized just how exhausted she was, and just how much she’d been operating on adrenaline and worry, but with soft and comfortable girls holding her in place, she could feel herself slipping into drowsy relaxation.
“Then, I guess, I fell asleep? I had a nightmare of drowning. And there was this voice, this awful fucking Voice, like, I don’t know. Like if sewage could talk. And it was really loud, like the voice of the Tower, and made just as much sense.”
The problem was explaining the multiplied words. It was impossible to capture the sensation of knowing all the possible meanings at the same time, if you hadn’t heard it. Like hearing a dozen different musical tracks, but you can listen for each individual instrument and separate it out from the rest.
“And this voice, it… threatened you?” Suliat asked.
“It, um. Sort of?” Riley waved her hands around to indicate her helplessness. “I mean, just existing, it was a threat. Like if the world had an infection, and that infection could spread by talking to you. So yeah, a threat. But I guess also…” She tried to remember what the Voice had said, what she’d understood of it. “It seemed to think the Tower was supposed to be doing something, and I was supposed to be part of that, and it talked like I knew a lot more about all this than I did. But it—” She remembered the breathless ache in her lungs. “It was definitely trying to kill me. It felt like a dream but it was real water I was breathing.”
“But you could manage a Working?” Eve asked.
Riley shook her head. “No, I… A Sigil just showed up in my head. Again. Like what’s happened before. And then somehow I handed the Sigil off to Therese?” She still didn’t understand the mechanics of that. It seemed to be, strictly speaking, impossible. “Anyway, she did the Working.”
“Maybe that connection you have with her,” Eve said.
“Maybe. Probably. Since nobody seems to know what it is or how it works, it’s like being able to say ‘a wizard did it’ except, you know. Wizard school.”
Suliat laughed softly. “We’ll need something even more alarming than ‘wizard’. How about ‘a Sigil did it?’”
They all considered that for a moment, and then Eve and Riley both spoke.
“No, that’s—”
“Yeah, too real, I think—”
“Way too real.”
They all giggled, and Riley felt herself slipping further into exhaustion. “I want to stay here to be with Himari when they treat her shoulder, but—” She yawned and sighed and snuggled against Suliat’s arm and breast. “Also I’m really having trouble staying awake.”
“That’s why there are three of us, you idiot.” Suliat’s voice was warm and suffused with care and love. “Eve will stay here with Himari while I put you in bed, and we’ll wake you when Himari wakes up. Yes?”
Eve nodded. “We all care about Himari, you know. Just as much as you do.”
Riley felt herself dissociating from her body — not in a trauma-coping way, but in a dreamy unreality way. Probably why she felt comfortable saying, “I love her.”
Thankfully, because everything was quickly turning into a dream, nobody heard her say it.
“I— I love her, too,” Eve said, in the dream.
“We all do, Riley,” Suliat said, in the dream.
And then, in the dream, Eve kissed her thoroughly to say goodnight, and Suliat kissed Eve to say goodbye, and then Suliat helped Riley upstairs to the suite and tucked her into her own bed, which had acquired a new pink comforter that Riley thought might have belonged to Eve, and certainly smelled like her, and which she felt warm and safe underneath as Suliat kissed her and pulled it up under her chin and turned off the lights.
yeah! it's getting exciting starting to see the "real" players on the scene a bit now, especially after the gradual build-up.
by all means please take the time you need to do it right. there's no point burning yourself out. <3