I glide forward, pushing past—
I see her.
She is standing dead center in the midst of them. She is the only one who is perfectly still, her body rigid, her dry lips stretched taut below the Visor. I see her flinch—barely perceptibly—as someone hisses right over her shoulder. Pale faces swing in her direction, crescent moons turning horrifically full. She’s trying to mimic them, but she’s got everything all wrong. Her gait, the angles of her limbs against her body, tension and stiffness in all the wrong places. The nuances of her body language are completely off.
The master of ceremonies stops speaking mid-sentence. With the abruptness of a person who’s given up any pretense of normalcy.
I push through until I’m next to Sissy. She turns, and her body literally sags with intense relief. Our hands discreetly touch under their line of vision, and I squeeze her hand for just a second, to reassure her. Her skin cold and clammy. Then I let go, and when her fingers try to find mine again I reluctantly push her hand away. She starts to shake with relief. No, not relief. Fear. Fight or flight, fight or flight written all over her. She’s too wound up.
Someone hisses right over my shoulder, a blubbering snort, uncomfortably close. A line of sweat slicks down my back like a finger tracing my spine. I flick my head to the side, hiss, and spit. I’m trying to show Sissy how to release the tension, through movements that won’t draw attention.
But she either won’t or can’t catch on. Her body is stock-still, her exposed lips an awful confluence of dread and horror. If one person sees her mouth, it’ll be over before she can exhale her next breath.
Tse-tse-tse-tse! the person next to me clucks, a staccato sound that shatters through his slippery teeth. “I smell more than one!” he yells.
And at that, something unbuckles in the group. Whatever restraint has been holding it back completely disintegrates. The crowd closes the gaps, cements the cracks with the black tar of its bodies.
Sissy’s hand drifts down to her waist. Where her handgun is tucked under her shirt. Now or never, her move tells me.
She’s right. It’s now or never. Wait another five seconds and we’ll be found out. Dead in seven seconds. It’s now.
But something halts me. I close my eyes, searching for the answer. It’s somewhere in the dark of my mind, some—
It’s already too late. That’s what I realize. They’re too many bodies clumped around us. There’s no way the two of us—even armed—can blaze our way out of here. Even if every fired bullet inflicted a fatal wound, we’d be able to plug a dozen of them at most. Leaving thousands on the floor still alive, and tens of thousands more in the arena.
If we want to live, this plan can’t be now. It has to be never.
There has to be another plan.
I swing my gaze to the stage. Nothing there to help us. Left and right, nothing. Look up. Only the flotilla of balloons assembled above us. Nothing. There’s nothing.
A wail breaks out from balconies on the higher levels. Our odor rising, spreading. Heinous screams of hunger fling out. From the luxury suites. From the upper crust of society. They’re not used to being deprived of choice action, and they want in. I see dark shapes, men in suits, women in upscale dresses, scaling down the walls like ribbons of saliva drooling from the luxury suites.
Sissy turns to me. Her hand is pulling up her shirt, revealing a glint of metal from the handgun. She’s pulling off the Visor now for better vision, her bangs arching over her forehead like a pulled bow. She’s ready. To go down fighting, to cut holes into as many as she can on her way down.
The TextTrans buzzes manically in my pocket. So hot, it’s burning a hole into my thigh.
Sissy starts pulling out the gun.
It comes to me, right then. The plan. An imperfect, deeply flawed plan. But the only one we have.
Sissy is cocking the handgun. And I’m reaching out, snatching it away. Her eyes widen with surprise as I aim it toward the roof.
And fire off six quick rounds.
Thirty-two
THE FLASHES OF light—six in quick succession—sear through even my shut eyelids. White splats of blinding brightness. Again. And again. With each flash, the gun recoils in my hand, the violent jolt felt all along my upright arm and shoulder. By the sixth shot, the handle of the gun is hot enough to brand my palm.
Fully discharged, I fling the gun away. It sails over the crowd; they lie collapsed like windswept grass completely flattened. Screams and cries of pain. Their corneas are burning.
Sissy grabs my arm. “Now,” she says. “While they’re all down.”
But she’s wrong. Only the people closest to us are incapacitated. The majority of the people, especially those on the outer rim who were shielded from the bright flashes, are already pressing forward. Toward us.
Instead of taking off, I grab her, pull her to the ground. “Not yet!”
“What? We’ve got—”
“Wait for it, wait for it!”
“Gene! For what?”
Then I hear it. The most glorious crack of glass, the sound of a thousand ice cubes thrown into boiling water.
“Duck!” I shout, and pull her into a crouch. Shards of glass rain down. As do massive plates of glass, slicing down and penetrating bodies like an axe head into wood.
Don’t get cut, I think. One tiny slice and blood will pour out. It’ll send this arena into a suicidal rampage.
Thousands of balloons drift down. Red, white, yellow, and green orbs floating down in slow motion. Thousands of discrete moving parts. The kind of cover we need.
Sissy starts to move.
I grab her arm. “A few more seconds, let the balloons reach us.”
“They will reach us before the balloons,” she spits out, pointing at the dark tide of people. “Damn it, Gene!”
“Wait for it. . . .”
The thousands of balloons flow down, spread along the arena floor. And then. An unexpected gift. Moonlight, no longer impeded by the thousands of balloons, or, more important, the tinted glass, cascades into the arena, flooding the floor with light.
The effect is immediate. Every eye in the arena shuts, every arm is flung across every face, every mouth cries out in pain. The sudden flush of moonlight is more startling than dangerous. But it’s bought us cover, distraction, and maybe fifteen, twenty seconds.
We move.
Not back the way we came. The entranceways are too clogged with people rushing in from other levels. But forward, toward the stage, Sissy in the lead. Balloons still falling, bouncing every which way. We shove people aside. Our odor, our sweat, our fear, our desperation, wiped full bore on them. But we’re past caring. A few swing back, arms slashing through the air, hoping to catch us with one swipe. But still blinded by the bright glare of moonlight, their aim is off.
Sissy slaps her palms on the stage, swings her legs sideways, up and over, clearing it easily. I’m right behind her, hoisting myself up. I glance back. What I see from this higher vantage point turns my insides cold. The whole floor is churning with the turbulence of thousands of shifting bodies, balloons bobbing in their midst. Pale moonlight layered on everything, casting everything in a sickly glow. And thousands of people streaming toward us like a turbulent river.
We stay low on the stage, and duck under the heavy train of the velvet curtains. The heavy, suffocating weight of the compressed folds pushes down on us as we crawl, disoriented, in the murky black.
And then we’re through, on the other side of the curtains, backstage. It’s empty, everyone having rushed out onto the stage moments before the moonlight poured down. Sissy is up and out first, turns to help me to my feet. No longer needing to pretend to be a dusker and allowed to be herself, she’s in her element.
“Quick,” she whispers. Already the stage is beginning to shift and move. The masses. They’re climbing onto it. The curtain begins to stretch and pull from the other side.
“Where to?” I ask.
She looks left and right, her eyes burning with panic. She doesn’t know. We have to move, to create distance. No, we need more than distance. We need bottlenecks and barriers. We need doors that open pull-ways, that lead to narrow corridors. We need a bottlenecking network of capillaries and valves of more doors and intersecting corridors and stairwells. A dozen duskers chasing us down would be logjammed by these doors and intersecting corridors; a horde of thousands would become clumped into impassable clots. “This way,” I say, leading us through the nearest door.
Sissy gets it, immediately. Every doorway we run through, she’s slamming the door shut behind us, locking it. The walls tremble as we run. Despite our best efforts, they’re still coming at us. Right on our heels come the sounds of doors smashed in, wails and howls. The clatter of claws.
We stop. Chests heaving, legs burning. Sweat pouring down our faces. We stink. We absolutely reek.
“We’re too easy to find,” I say between pants.
Sissy sucks in air. “C’mon, we got to go faster.”
I feel suddenly tired. It’s not just a physical exhaustion from all the running, but something deeper, something wedged between the chambers of my heart. “Or not.”
She looks at me. “What?”
“Maybe it’s over, Sissy. Maybe it’s finally over. We can’t keep playing this cat-and-mouse game. They’ll catch up with us. Within a minute at most. It’s inevitable.”
She shakes her head adamantly. “No, Gene. We keep running. We find a way out to the streets, we find a horse.”
“A horse, even at full gallop, will be too slow. You know that.”
Her face hardens with anger. “Okay, so what’s your plan?”
“Maybe we just give up. Stop the running—”
She reaches forward. I think she’s going to do something tender, like brush my bangs to the side, or caress my cheek, or touch my arm. Instead, her hand smacks me on the side of the face.
“What the—”
“Save the feel sorry for me while I gallantly commit suicide speech for someone else.” She thumps me in the chest with her fists. “Stop thinking about only yourself! Think about Epap! Think about David!” Her eyes blaze hot. “Think about me!”