Dust swirling, and sky and sun lancing down through it.
Fallen rubble. More dust. Something heavy, pressing me down, trying to stop my heart.
A woman’s face, not Anaita’s, far more human, smeared in dust and dirt-caked blood, eyes half-closed.
And, distantly, the cry of a child, the hopeless, hitching wail of a child who cannot be comforted.
There’s no way to explain this without making it even more confusing, but I felt as though I’d been in a dark room for years, then for just a second someone had finally opened the curtains to let in the fierce, startling, all-revealing light of day. I knew I was feeling truth. It was something greater than power, greater than the glory of Heaven itself, and I wanted more of it. It wasn’t just bits of unremembered memory, I knew. It was Truth.
But Anaita sensed my resistance and pushed back, and that access to bright reality, a reality I’d never felt before and would always hunger for afterward, suddenly vanished.
With it went hope. For a bare moment I’d thought I had the strength to defy her, to beat back the things she was doing to me, but I had been wrong again. Her anger was as ancient and cold as pack ice, and she handled my soul like it was an ugly, broken toy. My very essence was being squeezed into oblivion. Nothing subtle now, no rearranging, no changing, just the pressure of oblivion, growing greater and greater as she crushed what I was, compacting what felt like the very molecules of my being until darkness began to bleed through everything, light and sound and thought dying. I was gasping for air and getting none, thoughts roaring with blood-red light, then fading into a black as silent as zero.
I could not speak, but I knew enough to call her what she was.
Liar! I thought. I know you now!
But I didn’t. I had already forgotten. All the bright truth that for an instant had seemed so clear had been sucked away into the vacuum of nothingness.
Nothing.
Then light and noise rushed back in on me, as though I had popped up from beneath an ocean of tar, back into the world. Alive!
Anaita lifted her hand. Her face, beautiful and terrible with living light, was twisted into a grimace of something stronger than surprise: sudden rage made her eyes blaze almost red.
Something had changed. Something black was now throbbing in the middle of Anaita’s chest, the swing of a metronome, a needle on Eternity’s dial, vibrating, slowing.
An arrow.
I turned my head, which seemed to take years. Halyna stood some twenty feet away, covered in the powdered remains of a fortune’s worth of antique statuary, tactical crossbow in hand. Everything was moving so slowly! Oxana limped up beside her lugging one of the AR-16s—those brave women, so brave!—and the flames from the gun’s muzzle unfolded like flowers, bloom . . . bloom . . . bloom . . . I saw the bullets stitch their way along the wall as Anaita actually staggered back, again with aching, unhurried gravity, like a building toppling. One step—her other hand came up—then another, and then she bumped against the wall beside the bare panel where her mosaic had been. The moment seemed to hang. The Angel of Moisture extended her arms toward the Amazons, as slowly as paint dripping in the sun, and I couldn’t do a thing.
Ten thousand shards of glass leaped away from her, flying across the intervening distance like a horizontal ice storm. They ripped into Halyna, the closer of the two. Oxana dove to the side, but I saw glass tear into her as well, freeing tiny rills of blood that lifted and spread like more flowers blossoming. It seemed to take half a minute before Oxana hit the floor.
Then suddenly everything was moving fast again. The glittering lions snarled and fell back beside their mistress, troubled for only a split-instant in the real world. Released from the power of Anaita’s hand, I had stumbled and almost fallen, but I caught at the wall and kept myself upright. For an instant I was confused, because I had been in that spot along the wall, that same spot, only moments earlier, as if time had looped around. But why did that seem so important? Why couldn’t I remember?
Anaita yanked the arrow from her chest, dislodging bits of glass and stone, and threw it away. Sam still lay sprawled on the floor, and both Amazons were down. In an instant Anaita would send the lions to finish them off, then turn back to me. I had resisted to my utmost, but it hadn’t been enough. And now she was angry.
The thing I needed to remember came to me then. I took a staggering step along the wall, reached up to where I thought, hoped, prayed it would be, and opened the Zipper I had closed only minutes earlier.
As I dove to the floor, angry bugbears spilled out of their prison, exploding back into the real world in great stretching globs of purple black, as if a dam had broken and released a river of animate goo. They flowed down onto the floor and over the nearest stone and glass lion in a second. They flowed over Anaita as well, and for a moment I hoped she too might vanish for good under a heaving blob, but instead I saw light and heat lance out through the pulsating waves of jelly. If there had only been one or two of the creatures it would have been over right then, but all the bugbears were out of the Zipper by now, furious at their imprisonment, and they followed the others in what looked like a feeding frenzy. The translucent glob that had swallowed the Angel of Moisture stretched and bellied out, and I could smell the hideous stench of burning bugbear, but they were old, strong things and they weren’t so easily beaten, even by someone as powerful as Anaita.
But she would win, that I was sure. We had seconds at the most.
I scrambled across the floor to Sam, dragged him to his feet, then staggered toward the Amazons. Oxana was on her hands and knees trying to get Halyna up, but one look told me that it was too late. Halyna was pin-cushioned with pointy shards of glass, many in her chest and throat, and had lost so much blood that it spread for several feet around her.
“It’s no use,” I said, dragging at Oxana, but she fought me.
“Halya!” she screamed, a heart-piercing sound.
We had no time. I put my fingers to Halyna’s throat where the pulse should have been, but it was only for Oxana’s benefit. “She’s gone. I’m sorry, but we have to get out of here.” I grabbed Oxana again, held her tight. “Come on!”
She wasn’t crying, but her face was lost, just lost. “No. Not go. Only with her!”
It was pointless—I could tell Halyna was already dead—but I knew it would be impossible to get Oxana moving without bringing her friend’s body. The burning smell was getting stronger. I scooped and levered up Halyna’s limp weight, then slung it over my shoulder.
“Where?” Sam asked. He looked as bad as the women, bloodied and ghostlike with dust.
“The door down in the office. The door to the Third Way.”
He shook his head. “She can follow us!”
“She can follow us anywhere else just as fast, but that door will get us out of here quicker. Come on!”
Stumbling through the shambles of smashed exhibits, skidding on broken glass, we waded past the seething, burning, bruise-colored swamp that was Anaita swarmed by bugbears. Something as bright as the flame of a welder’s torch was burning inside the mass, and I could tell things were going to get ugly in this particular vicinity real soon.
Halyna’s limp weight almost tipped me over going down the stairs, but I made it somehow. Sam was standing in front of the marble rectangle, the God Glove on his hand. He said, as if to nobody, “You realize if she’s locked it somehow, we’re fucked.”