‘Bollocks,’ he said. ‘Right in the same damn place.’ Then he fainted.
‘Doc!’ Harkins cried.
‘I saw,’ said Malvery, who was busy firing off shotgun rounds. ‘Ain’uo; Ain amp;rt got time to deal with that shit-wit right now. Even if he has just invented self-cauterising bullets.’
‘You did warn him not to shoot anyone by accident,’ Ashua said to Frey. ‘You should take up prophecy.’
‘Just playing the law of averages,’ Frey replied.
‘S’pose it wasn’t victiming after all,’ Malvery commented.
Jez crammed herself back into cover. Bullets pinged and scuffed around her. The crew’s casual quips didn’t fool her; it was cheap bravado. She felt the beginnings of panic taking hold. The breather mask felt suddenly confining – a remembered response from the days when she used to breathe – and she tore it off and threw it away. Damn it, there had to be a way out. Half-Mane or not, if they shot her in the right place, she’d be dead for real.
The Manes.
She realised she could hear them.
She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate. They weren’t here, not physically. Their howls were phantom echoes on the edge of her consciousness. But they were distressed. They sensed her fear and shared it. All this time they’d stayed away, respecting her wish to be left alone, but now they couldn’t help themselves. Like a mother unable to resist the cries of her child, they flocked to her, offering her their support and solidarity, lamenting their inability to help.
Why didn’t I want to be one of them? She couldn’t remember now. There was a feral simplicity to their love, the call of the pack. They were intelligent, they were people, but the daemon in them had made them primal. Like animals.
Like animals.
Her eyes flew open. Once, when she hadn’t been long on the Ketty Jay ’s crew, she’d found herself in a situation like this. Pinned down on a landing pad in Rabban, defending the craft with Silo and Harkins, surrounded by twenty of Trinica Dracken’s men. She’d heard a man’s thoughts that night, sensed where he was, and shot him through the head at forty metres in the dark. While he was running.
She could jump in and out of the cat’s head. Why not these guards? She’d tried and failed before to force herself into a human’s thoughts, but she’d had more practice now. If she could feel where they were, she could shoot them.
If she could do it. But any chance was better than no chance at all.
The chaos all around her was no obstacle. These days, she could slip into and out of a shallow trance easily, even while doing something else. But she needed to go deeper now. She’d been tentative while trying out her new abilities, afraid of what might happen. But there was no time to be careful any mcareful ore. She needed to plunge .
It was as if she was falling into a deep well, dropping like a stone towards her own core. Her head went light and then she couldn’t feel her skin any more. Suddenly, she wasn’t there, no longer in the body of Jez but limbless and loose in the void. She fought to find the path she’d learned to take when she rode inside Slag’s skull, the route her instincts had carved. She knew how to do it; she just didn’t know how it was done.
She felt herself slipping, felt a change in her mind that sent it flowering open, thrown wide to the world. And she could hear voices, a dozen voices, then ten times that, the babble of a crowd. Frantic snatches of thought invaded her head, cramming in, a bewildering muddle. She heard three languages and understood them all. She felt the screams of the dying as if they came from her own throat. She was all the people everywhere in Gagriisk, she was inside their skins: her friends, the Daks, the Murthians, all at once.
And suddenly it was too much, this overwhelming tide, but it kept on coming, relentless. Terror surged within her as she realised she was out of control, losing her grip. She fought against the pandemonium and madness but she was no longer sure who she was or if she was a she at all.
She was a Murthian, shot and killed; she was the triumphant Dak marksman. She was the Cap’n, frightened; she was the guards overhead, grim, predatory, waiting for the moment when their targets would break cover. She was a slave in the pens, watching the fighters battling in the sky, daring to wonder if long-dreamed freedom had finally come. She was She was She was lost.
Harkins, as a veteran of being afraid, could identify the fine distinctions between different states of terror in a way that non-cowards couldn’t. The stock phrases that people used to express how scared they were seemed woefully imprecise to him. He may not have had the smarts to put his wisdom into words, but he knew what he knew.
The creepy silence of the fogbound quarry had been a slow, constant kind of fear, like a child waiting for a monster to push open the wardrobe door in a darkened bedroom. The sharp alarm of the gunfight was different to that, a barrage of shocks that unmanned him and made him want to cringe and gibber. But the thought of Jez’s scorn pushed him to courage. He’d recovered himself enough to send a few wild shots in the direction of the enemy. Maybe it was his imagination, but he fancied he was getting a bit braver lately.
Fear came in many forms for Harkins. But nothing came close to this moment. The moment he heard an unearthly blood-freezing screech, from right by his ear, as he crouched behind the metal bulk of Bess. A sound that issued from the blackest hell of his subconscious. And even that came a distant second to the moment which followed, when he looked over his shoulder and saw what had made the sound. It was Jez.
Jez, and yet not Jez.
She’d changed. Not physically, but in some other way that Harkins couldn’t understand. Where there had once been a woman he adored was a creature of inexplicable horror, something that wore Jez’s shape but which radiated the cold dread of a nightmare. There was a senseless savagery in her eyes that he’d never seen before; her teeth were bared in a crooked snarl; she was coiled in the tight hunch of a hunting cat.
Her face was inches from his.
Harkins’ throat closed up. His heart stopped. His eyes bulged.
Then she leaped past him in a blur, the wind making the ears of his pilot cap flap against his head.
He stared at the empty space where she’d been. Then something unjammed inside him and he screamed, because it was impossible not to.
‘ Gaaaaaaaaaaaah! ’
Wet heat spread down his inside leg. He’d pissed himself. He didn’t care.
‘ Gaaaaahhaahhhhhh!!! ’
She was a daemon and she’d been right there in his face!
‘ Gaahhaarrrghhahahahhhh -’
He was interrupted by a brutal impact that knocked his head sideways.
‘Better?’ asked Malvery, raising a meaty hand to give him another slap.
Harkins whimpered and nodded, holding his cheek.
‘S’pose you weren’t there the last couple of times she flipped out, eh?’
Harkins shook his head, still making wounded eyes at the doctor.
‘Well, she’s sure as spit flipped out now,’ said the Cap’n, who was peeking out over Bess’s shoulder.
The screams of the guards were terrible to hear, but Harkins couldn’t help looking, if only to make sure that thing didn’t come back towards them.
The bulldozer was very close now, and he could see silhouettes in the backwash of its lights. Guards flailed about, frantic, aiming their weapons every which way. Darting among them, almost too fast to follow, was the small figure of Jez. If not for her ponytail, he wouldn’t have known it was her. She leaped and sprung and seemed to flicker, although that could have been a trick of the fog. Where she landed, the guards crumpled, or were flung away. Frey ducked as a forearm, torn off at the elbow, went wheeling past him, end over end. A Daver end. k staggered out of the gloom, tripped, and went under the bulldozer’s plough with a wail.
As Harkins watched agape, Jez jumped up on to the side of the bulldozer and was lost in the glare. There was a desperate shriek – whether from the daemon or her victim, he couldn’t tell – and a cracking sound like an ogre chewing bones. The bulldozer turned, its headlight sweeping away from them, and then tipped alarmingly as its tracks found the drop at the lip of the ledge. Metal groaned, tracks sped into empty air, and the massive machine slid over the side of the tier and crashed to the ground twenty metres below.