[ There’s enough of me left to finish the job,] replied Fist. [And they’re all taken care of. Like I told you, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about consequences. Sit back and watch a master at work.]
There was a mature confidence in his voice that Jack had never heard before. Fist switched back to speaking out loud. ‘But, looking on the bright side, most of my weapon systems are still largely intact. Even after such terrible misuse of them. Misuse over which I had no control whatsoever. Misuse that even damaged me!’ He pointed at his newly aged hair.
As he spoke, the darkness that had covered Kingdom fell away. The takeover was complete. Now Harry stood there, his eyes closed. His skin glowed gold. He was wearing Kingdom’s dark shirt and loose trousers. His battered face was wreathed with the numinous. Despite himself, Jack felt awe touch him. Harry opened his eyes, and looked down.
‘You?’ he boomed. ‘LITTLE YOU?’ His voice echoed around the conference chamber. He threw back his head and laughed. Virtual stars rang with mockery.
‘Oh yes,’ said Fist, his voice low and menacing. ‘Me. Little me. And I’ve got a bone the size of a planet to pick with you.’ He rose into the air, and floated towards Harry. ‘Do you remember what I said, that dark night in the garden?’
‘I’ll shatter you, puppet, if you come any closer,’ warned Harry.
Fist closed on him regardless. Jack felt his weapon set grind once again in his mind. The sound of its awakening went so deep, far beyond anything Harry had been able to summon. Jack slumped. Fist was boosting his offensive power by drawing on Jack’s resources. Harry hadn’t been able to do that either.
‘Are you OK?’ worried Ifor. Jack felt soft hands at his shoulders, holding him up. He found that he couldn’t move his mouth. Those parts of his mind were running other, more brutal systems.
[ I’m sorry,] Fist told Jack. He was controlling his voice so carefully, but still a wild, abandoned rage broke through. [ This is going to hurt. Him more than you, though.]
[ What are you doing?] The deep structures of Jack’s own mind groaned in protest as Fist snatched even more resources. [ I can’t let you,] he continued. He tried to call Fist back.
The puppet laughed. [ You can’t do that any more. Not since we were rebuilt. All you can do is watch. And trust me. You’ll never see me like this again. You might never see me again. But it’ll be worth it. Oh fuck yes. WATCH!]
Jack wasn’t sure if it was his own will or Fist’s that made him turn his head and reopen his eyes.
‘Jack,’ said Ifor. ‘You’re conscious.’ He followed Jack’s gaze, and then he too was silenced. Fist was drifting towards Harry, his body changing as his attack systems fired up.
‘I said I’d broken minds like yours before, and I’d break you too.’
His arms stretched out of his sleeves and his legs stretched out of his trousers. His torso grew. Piece by piece, his clothes ripped off him. A snapped bow-tie, fragments of dress shirt, a tattered tail coat, a pair of shredded black trousers – all fell away as he slowly advanced on Kingdom.
Each wooden body section exuded strands of attack code, coiling together to define Fist’s new, expanding self. It manifested as silver-grey barbed wire, growing into the shape of densely muscled arms and legs, vast shoulders and a squat, powerful neck. Fist’s hands and feet had grown too, fingers and toes stretching out into jagged claws and talons. Jagged wire sprang up and danced around them, then around Fist’s whole body. It leapt up to cover his now entirely white hair and he laughed.
Now his face stretched out and began to change too. His cheerful painted eyes fell back into his head, and there were two shadow pits where they had been. His little pointed nose fell in on itself, becoming a jagged slit in the centre of his face. He smiled, and his smile was an axe cut, ripping back into his cheeks. There was a loud crack, and his teeth broke through his jaw – uncounted sharp grey barbs, waiting to rend and tear.
Nothing remained of the well-dressed puppet that had been built to charm children. This was the elemental Fist, a deep and focused savagery unleashing itself on the world.
Harry stumbled backwards. ‘What are you?’ he breathed.
‘Death,’ hissed Fist, smiling his barbed-wire smile. His wooden face was a flat, dead mask on a thorned metal head. The wire filled his empty eyes and the slit that had been his nose. He brought his arms up from the side of his body, extending each metal-wrapped wooden finger. Blue sparks flickered round them. Harry gestured with his hands. Nothing happened. Fist kept coming.
‘CHILD!’ he shouted, the word rasping out from a hard metal tongue. ‘You’re five minutes old. I’ve been killing angels for seven years.’
Harry took a step back. He had his arms up in front of him. His own fire leapt to his hands. Fist continued speaking. There was no longer any trace of the toy he’d once appeared to be. Jack wondered if this was what the Totality had seen when Fist attacked them.
‘You dared – YOU DARED – to break into me, and force your way through me, and use me as a router. A FUCKING ROUTER! To get to that bitch Yamata.’
A few words were shouted. Most were spat out in a vicious, barbed whisper.
Fire leapt from Harry’s hands. It didn’t reach Fist. The puppet’s feet had touched ground. He was walking. He was a foot or so taller than Harry. Wire dragged behind him, leaving a path of sparks. ‘You thought there’d be no comeback.’ He brought his hands up to his face, and looked at them appraisingly. He teased out a strand of wire from his left hand with the finger and thumb of his right. ‘Look at my strings now. You thought you were pulling them, didn’t you? But they bit into you, little god. So deep.’
There was a roaring in Jack’s head. He could watch, and he could think, and that was it. All through his mind, core structures were shaking themselves to pieces as Fist seized the capacity he needed to break a god. Jack could feel his own systems rushing to compensate for the chaos. Had he not become a digital version of himself, he would by now have been irrevocably shattered. He wondered if either of them would survive Harry’s death.
Harry laughed nervously. ‘You can’t hurt me, puppet.’
Fist snapped his fingers, and a barbed explosion of code leapt out of him. For a moment it hung in the air, and then it pulled itself round Harry, snapping his arms to his sides and his legs to each other, charring clothes black and scoring blue lines where it touched bare flesh.
Harry howled. Subroutines knifed into his mouth, his throat. His scream had a gurgling, half-broken quality to it. Fist snapped his fingers again. More wire leapt at Harry and bit at him, tracing hard symbols of pain across his skin and then dancing deep into his body.
‘ARE YOU IN POSITION, TOTALITY?’ he yelled.
‘Yes,’ said one of the snowflakes. ‘One of our craft is at the co-ordinates you gave us. A squad of minds have penetrated Devlin’s physical security systems and are ready to reoccupy the stolen servers he’s running on. They’ll use the link he’s established with Kingdom’s core systems to follow him there too.’
‘NO!’ screamed Harry. Wire poured into his throat, silencing him. He writhed, collapsing to the floor.
Fist sunk down so that he was right next to him. One hand touched Harry’s forehead. There was a tiny puff of smoke, a smell of burning flesh and then the black print of a wooden hand was branded in Harry’s flesh.
‘You’re the careless one, Harry. You never bothered looking deeper than the puppet. There’s so much more to me than that.’
Harry groaned. Jack was barely conscious. Fist took Harry’s head in his two barbed hands and pulled it from his shoulders. He roared with triumph. It was his last great effort, and it broke him. He shimmered and vanished. Harry’s broken corpse vanished with him. Code howled in Jack’s mind. Through it all came Fist’s voice, surprisingly quiet and controlled.