“Don’t look for me, move!”
Move. Right.
I headed down the stairs.
“They’re coming,” Evan said.
They? Who were they?
“Blake!” Rose said, trying to snap me to reality, maybe doing the opposite.
But I focused. Bloody feathers on the stairs and the landing before the next flight…
Again, I used my toe to draw a line. Residual blood from standing in the pool of it made it easier to do.
Officers and a man with a first aid kit came running up the stairs, running right past the disoriented guy with sliced up arms.
I smirked.
“Get moving.”
I wasn’t sure if it was Evan or Rose saying that. I listened all the same.
As I set foot on the landing, I saw golden diagrams spiral out from scribbles on the wall. I’d mistaken them for gang tags, but they were runes.
One connection fixated on me, all the more noticeable because my connections to everything else were so thin.
An alarm. Duncan Behaim was on his way to intercept me.
“The front door is one floor down,” Evan said. “Very close. But you have to pass through a gate to get there. If you go that way, there’s a back door to the parking lot.”
He was more lucid. Because we were closer to his body?
“The parking lot has a fence, but you can climb on a car to go over.”
If I’m strong enough.
“Okay,” I said. “Did you find the objects I told you to hunt for?”
No response.
“Objects?” Rose asked. I saw her face reflected in the glass of a framed award, hanging in the stairwell. Odd, that it was as easy to make out as it was.
“Duncan Behaim. Nephew. He’s borrowing spirits or something,” I said. “Chronomancy tricks. Reset my day to keep me here until I’m out of time. I sent Evan out to see if he could find it.”
“Did you find the things Blake asked you to find?” Rose asked.
“It’s in the basement, I think. Behind a fence, a man sits there.”
I rounded the end of the stairs, and made my way down the next flight.
“Evidence lockup,” Rose said. “That’s kind of clever. We can’t get to the stuff without drawing attention.”
Her voice got further away as I got away from the nearest reflective surface only to jump in volume as I got to the next spot.
“I could do with going to evidence,” I said. “They have June’s hatchet and supplies. I think.”
“I still don’t know what’s going on,” Rose said.
“I’m being framed, I said. “For murder. Laird’s aiming to win round three, and he’s set his nephew on me…”
More feathers, as I hit the ground a little too fast. I was moving a little quicker, talking a little more coherently, yet something else was giving way. It was my focus that was narrowing, a kind of tunnel vision, but it seemed like a damn good deal. Being able to function, just a little more, for some loss of peripheral vision?
“…backed by all the power the Behaim circle can provide at range,” I said. I caught some feathers out of the air, jamming them in a pocket.
I had no idea if they were useful or abstract, but I liked having something on hand. I felt naked without my tools and trinkets. Exposed, oddly enough.
“Okay,” Rose said. “Let’s think rationally about this. Is the hatchet really that useful, worthy of the time and effort?”
Duncan Behaim was closer now. I was still making my way downstairs. Time. That was the question. If I made my way to the basement, I could very well run into him. Maybe before I found my things, maybe after, as I made my exit. It depended on how easily I could find my way through the area, get past the man at the gate, and all the rest.
“What did you bind Evan to?”
“I didn’t,” I said.
“He died in the police station?”
“He died in the woods, where the goblin-Hyena-wolf-thing was. He survived it. Escaped,” I said.
“Are the woods close?”
“Evan came with- with his body,” I said. “Cops brought it.”
“That still doesn’t make sense, Blake. He’s apparently aware.”
“I know,” I said.
“He’s not a ghost, then?”
“I don’t know what he is. But he’s a help, and I’m not about to second guess that,” I said. More feathers came loose as I made my way down to the next landing, taking stairs two at a time and hopping down.
“It kind of matters.”
“Getting out of Duncan’s way matters more,” I said. “I… tell me what I should do. I’m compromised. Not thinking straight. Do I go for the exit or-”
Duncan turned. No longer making his way to me.
“-nevermind. Okay. Evan. He… he’s still there. The echo, yes, but there’s the consciousness, and he’s still got the consciousness. It never moved on. He doesn’t want to move on.”
“He’s a soul?”
I winced. “Don’t know.”
“Actually using and leveraging a soul is a little different than using a ghost, Blake.”
As before, Rose’s voice fell away as I made my way down the steps, then resumed at full volume as I passed another frame.
I stopped in my tracks, quickly enough that more bloody feathers stirred.
“Blake?”
The cadence, the timing of it… something was wrong. I said as much.
“Something’s fucked up,” I said. I was slurring my words a bit.
“What something?”
Rose, too close? Too clear?
I stopped to focus on my environment, and I felt other things slipping away.
I was incomplete, broken up. Focusing in one area meant sacrificing in others.
I felt that tunnel vision focus begin to fall away, but I also felt weaker, as if I was feeling all of the exhaustion of the last day and all of the effects of the blood loss hitting me at once.
The recovery of my overall awareness was slower, going this way. I was losing strength and gaining awareness at less than half the speed things had changed, going the opposite way.
Was there some prevailing wind, metaphorically speaking? Was I working against some general effect that was meant to confound me?
“You’re giving me a really screwed up read, Blake. I can’t really make things out, especially as they get further from you and the mirrors. I’m supposed to use you as an anchor, and I don’t think there’s nearly enough tying you down.”
Or holding me up.
The stairwell looked just a little bit distorted, and it wasn’t my perceptions being twisted.
“Something’s wrong with the stairwell,” I said.
“I don’t think- ever get home,” Evan whispered, agreeing.
“Yeah. It’s a trap,” I said.
“You’ve been heading downstairs for way too long,” Rose said. “What floor were you on?”
“Third,” I said.
“I thought it was the sixth or something,” she said. “Shit.”
My progress down the stairs was slower, this time. I tracked my location relative to Duncan’s…
One section of stairwell, connected Escher style, top to bottom.
“Find-” I winced at the pain in my arms. That pain joined my hearing and eyesight among the things that were getting muddled, hard to compartmentalize or stop focusing on. “Find the rune.”