"Other!"
Someone was screaming below me. Valya? I scrambled into shoes and dragged on pants and a woollen shirt as I leapt down the tightly wound, unsteady stairs. The front door had been shaken from its lock and I pushed it open, plunging into the food-fragrant hallway.
Valya was in her bedroom. Her screams led me to her, and in the radiance from my suit she was pale, mouth wide and eyes darkly terrified. She snapped into silence as soon as my light touched her.
"Are you hurt?" I shouted over the ringing in my ears and the oppressive echoes of her screams.
"Did you feel it?" she breathed out a whisper, forcing me closer, forcing me to lower my ear to her mouth. "Did you feel it hurt?"
"Where?" I tried not to shout. "Where are you hurt?"
But she shook her head. "Not me." She stared into the suit's brightness, unblinking. "This is what they are doing, do you see now? Splitting us open. He can't stop them, not any more." Her shaking hand reached for my wrist. "Can't you feel his pain? He needs you, girl. So we have to protect you. He needs you."
I couldn't feel pain, but I could feel a need. An urgency, sharper than the light on my wrists, ankles and neck. I could feel it somewhere in my bones, in the insect legs scratching away below my muscles, the silver kicking in my blood.
"I'm not going until I know you're not hurt." What an effort it took to say that.
"We are all doomed if you don't go, girl. If you can't help him." Valya held a patchwork quilt to her chin like a small, frightened child. "Hurry."
I left the house, plunged into streets that should have been dark and empty. Ruddiness lit cobblestones with a fireside light, dull and red, hanging on the bottom of clouds like a pooling stain. It lit terrified faces as the people of Movoc-under-Keeper spilled from buildings like blood escaping skin. I pushed through a growing crowd – ignored the screams of children, the barking commands of men, the imploring hands of women – and felt vivid against their dull fear. Felt purposeful. Necessary.
I didn't bother casting the map, not this time. Instead, I followed the symbols on my wrist, wound around streets and buildings and potholes without watching my feet, trusting in the suit, the guiding movement beneath my fingers.
Then Lad's cipher rose vivid and insistent, pushing against my forefinger. I skidded to a halt. Lad and Kichlan stood at a corner, on the other side of a sea of milling people. Kichlan had cast his wavering map on a building wall. Lad, bag full of metallic jars hanging from one shoulder, gestured to me.
I waded across the street. An old woman clutched at my elbow, her hand too much like Valya's. It made me shiver. "What's happening?" she screeched at me, two rotting teeth pale stumps in a dark and gaping mouth. I shook her off and pushed forward.
"Tan!" The suit and the firelight combined to give Lad's cheeks a youthful pink. It jarred with the tension within me, with the light on the heavy clouds. I had no idea where in Movoc we were, only how close the debris was, only that we needed to be there. Now.
"We need to hurry." I grabbed Lad's hand and drew him into the mass of people. "It's this way."
Kichlan flicked off his map and followed. "How do you know?" he shouted. Were his ears ringing too? Had Eugeny woken screaming in the night? Somehow, I couldn't imagine it.
"It's here." I lifted my wrist. "The map, it's all here."
A moment's hesitation I put down to running, to his being out of breath. "You can read the suit? On your wrist?" Even against the ringing I could hear his surprise.
"Yes." Surely he expected no explanations now.
"How? Who taught you?" Kichlan demanded.
"No one taught me." The suit had shown me. Those wiggling worms I had seen kick out from my skin. They had taught me.
Lad squeezed my hand as we ran. I squeezed back.
I said, "I worked it out myself."
"Ever considered sharing?"
"Now is not the time" hovered on my lips. But then the world was rocked again and flames leapt above the tops of buildings, throwing huge chunks of stone into the air as though they were no more than balls tossed in play.
"Shelter!" Kichlan roared, barely perceptible as chaos erupted around us.
Together we dragged Lad to the nearest building and pressed him into the wall. Bodies pushed us, forced my shoulder onto the cement so hard I was glad for the sturdy uniform. And in the screaming, the press of bodies, the roar and light of flame, Lad watched, captivated, as parts of Movoc-under-Keeper fell from the sky. A wall smacked down into the throng that filled the street. Somehow, over everything, I heard the crack of each bone, the squelch of flesh, and had to fight very hard not to be sick. A column, a great cylindrical pillar, slammed into the roof of a building, shattering tiles, crushing stone. It slid to the street in an over-slow avalanche of brick, cement and – my stomach lurched again – bodies. Dead like dolls, limbs loose. Scorched. Broken. Thrown.
I started to sink against the wall, one arm wrapped around my middle. But Kichlan yanked me upright. "Don't! If you get under all this, you'll never get up again!"
The bodies against us were fierce now. Running, screaming, wailing. Forcing like the current of a rapid, angry river.
I swallowed bile. "We have to get to the debris." The words came unbidden. What I really wanted to do was join the senseless, panicked screaming. It seemed a lot easier that way. "We need to stop it." Was that really me, so calm, so sensible?
Kichlan's mouth firmed, his face grew determined. "You're right."
That made me feel better. I wasn't the only one.
He said, "That means going toward the fire, though."
I touched the suit, nodded. "It does." The dead didn't show up as symbols. The crowd was nothing but a low, indistinct rippling. I swallowed hard. Didn't seem fair.
We ran into the street, both gripping Lad's hands, pulling him forward. His head tipped back and he stared with wonder at the red sky. The crowd thinned as we ran. Some of them tried to stop us.
"Not that way!" a young man screamed. Blood soaked the front of his pale nightshirt. A gash in his forehead painted half of his face red. "They're all dead, and it's getting bigger, and they can't stop it! Don't go that way!"
We pressed on. But his voice echoed in my head, and I feared what it was, though somewhere in my gut I already knew. Could debris really do all this? Debris that wriggled, bug-like, through the air on a course of its own?
"Kichlan!" Sofia called from an intersecting street and hurried toward us. Her face was pale beneath dirt, smudges and a fine layer of sand. The collar of her jacket at been torn, bloody handprints smearing the fabric.
"Are you all right?" Kichlan asked, fear in his voice. "Have you seen the others?"
Sofia shook her head.
"Sofia?" I glanced at her hand. It shook and reflected our suit lights with something wet. Something red. "You're hurt!" I reached for her, but she turned away. Her expression hardened.
"Something hit me. Stone, I think." She gestured to her shoulder. "It's not serious."
I bit back an argument.
"We need to get closer." She turned to Kichlan, all business. "The others can find us. We need to work out what's going on."
"Can you keep him close to you?" Kichlan asked Sofia, placed Lad's hand in hers. "Stay here with him. For now. Tanyana and I will see what's happening."
"Tanyana and you?" Sofia asked. And despite the chaos and the blood and the fear the look she gave me was one of betrayal, of hurt. It lasted only for a moment, disappearing so quickly I began to doubt that I had seen it at all.
"Don't worry, Tan," Lad said, as we gave him over to her care. "It will be all right. In the end."
I knew he believed every word.
Kichlan and I left Lad with Sofia, where they huddled under a wide awning that seemed to have maintained some of its structural integrity. Lamps shuddered beside us as we ran, flickering high, then dying, only to burst into painful brilliance.