The entity tried to show us what Yuuka wanted. Its limited spread of emotions did include fear, and the bloody-eyed Radiance had instilled more than enough. I wasn’t sure if it could have even refused, plugged into her eye and Flame as it was. It had been co-opted as an extension of the magical organ, parasitized in turn beneath the brunt of Yuuka’s anger. She had access to the whole of its memory.
The problem was that it clearly did not remember Sugawara.
Murky, melty scenes manifested on the handful of screens that remained, signs of a clear struggle to remember. It showed us those strange ceremonies of macabre geometry I’d passed by, but they were incomplete, snippets cutting off randomly after mere seconds and melting into more familiar and blatant depictions of violent excess. The entity wanted to return to its comfort zone and its base nature, the simple recycling of harm for its own sake. We could immediately tell that even if it understood Yuuka’s demands, it could not grasp why it had been made. During the raid, Yuuka had labeled it a trap dangerous to Hina, but that hadn’t bore fruit; from having been in its stolen memories, I now thought it was more likely a horrible stockpiling of power with which to power Sugawara’s resurrection.
It didn’t really matter. The net’s purpose had been ripped out wholesale, leaving critical gaps in its amalgam of memory.
“Maybe that’s what brought it to life,” I muttered, virtual eyes flickering between the screens for anything that might lend a clue. I wondered how closely this resembled Yuuka’s usual stream of data from her eye when she sifted through half-baked echoes of timelines yet to come. “Power without purpose, had to figure out its own priorities.”
“Maybe,” Yuuka replied absently, focusing even harder than I was. “Fuckin’—there it is again, the triangles. You’re not getting anything from those? Weird-ass glyphs, gotta be.”
I shook my smooth-shelled head in frustration. Yuuka was clearly hoping, probably in vain, for a eureka moment where it would suddenly click and I would recognize them as especially esoteric glyph diagrams. She was right, that was the only sensible option, seeing as how the entity clearly thought they were important enough to keep bringing back. But I had a sinking feeling that if they had been glyphs originally, what we were seeing was only vague recollection. The specifics of their shapes were now lost, either by forcible excision or just by being incomprehensible and thus remembered only as shapes.
“The real thing could still be out there, in the actual building,” I suggested. “Maybe we should get out and try to see.”
“No. It knows something, and I will know it in turn,” Yuuka growled. “Sugawara. The Savior. A soul extracted from a body. Doesn’t that mean fucking anything to you?”
It didn’t. When Sugawara had escaped, he had taken everything pertaining to him along with. It made twisted sense that manifesting him had required the harvest of not just raw power but also his truest believers’ impressions and feelings. Theft and possession through and through, even in death and beyond. What remained here did not know what had been taken and only dimly remembered the fact that somebody had once cared.
“This won’t work,” I muttered.
“I’m not leaving here empty-handed! There’s something in this thing. I saw that we’d find what Izumi was looking for. Here. Right here.” Yuuka wasn’t giving in to despair, but I could hear her determination fraying. We were stymied by this virtual lobotomy our subject had undergone. It could not conceptualize that there was a point to all of what it remembered, only that it was being done, from weapon to animal, and even then barely an animal, essentially just a mouth and stomach—
“We’re looking at the wrong thing,” I realized. “We need to be looking at it, not into it. It does have a purpose: eat and digest. That’s what it remembers. That’s what we want. That’s what she’s looking for.”
“Is that what we want?” Yuuka asked. “Because it…”
“Look at it,” I urged.
She frowned in concentration and the handful of surviving screens changed once more, returning to the view of us from the cameras overhead. Then the view zoomed in, past us, at the image of the screens themselves. The view ate itself like a pair of opposing mirrors. And between them, down the infinite tunnel, was a truth, an intention, the magic underpinning this thing.
Yuuka gasped and retched, stumbling slightly; I put an articulated hand out to steady her, though I was also feeling dizzy myself.
We saw it plain as day: it had been made to digest. That wasn’t a byproduct of it having come to life, it was the point, the original purpose. It had eaten Sugawara, turned him from a living soul into a high-fidelity reconstruction of himself and his memories rendered in pure ripple. He had torn out the implementation details, but this entity remained as the process itself, and afterward it had continued its work and its nature. It had just happened to develop a taste for suffering in its consumption, but when you looked past that horror, this thing’s digestive tract was fundamentally the mechanism to digitize souls that Izumi needed to escape her body.
Yuuka pushed off of me to stand under her own power. “Yes. Yes! This is it. Just look at it, damn, it’s all there. But, Ezzen,” she said more haltingly. “It’s also not there. Fuck me, this is weird. Do you…can you do something with this? It’s so…raw. How would you even weave this? Or even write it down?”
“I see it,” I said simply, staring into the truth and knowing that with enough time it was achievable. Not right this second—I’d reached the end of my rope with off-the-cuff glyphcraft and needed to sleep for a week once we got out of here—but it was tractable now. “I can—I’ll figure it out. I know I’ll be able to. I’m smarter than him.”
“Ha! Abso-fuckin’-lutely you are. Lucky you’re around, I don’t know how I’d even explain this to the others.” She coughed awkwardly. “Er. This thing reeks of him, fucker never knew how to make anything but a suffering-in-power-out engine.” Her voice dripped with hate. “He must have told them how to make it, and then they got more help somehow. He—wait, yeah, of course he did. He was in Izumi’s dreams for years, wasn’t he? And she can’t have been the only one. If I can just find some of those memories, some of his other sympathizers, we can grill them and…” She wobbled, cupping a hand over her bleeding eye of jagged crystal.
“There’s more?”
“There has to be.” Her voice deepened and she thundered a command. “Here I see all, even dreams. Show me.”
The view shuddered, trying to change once more, away from its essence. Fog coalesced into a half-seen figure, formless and faceless but gesticulating with blurry arms and clearly speaking into the camera. He was angry and erratic, hardly noble or divine in these vaguely remembered moments, yet something ineffably regal was superimposed over it. The collective memories of his worshippers were filtered by adoration so potent that it leaked out of the screens and oozed over the dream. For the briefest moment I felt a twinge of the unnatural urge to kneel, to abase myself before this higher being and bend myself in service to his glory.
It was not nearly enough to buckle my knees, nor Yuuka’s. The Spire stood. I believed in something higher than him, one which demanded nothing like this. She spat at the image. “Go fuck yourself.”
”Does he…he didn’t have actual mind control, did he? The Vaetna would have destroyed him for that years ago.”
”Yeah, that’s where they draw the line, not all the kidnapping and murder and open intimidation and the soft coup of our entire country,” Yuuka sneered. “But it’s true, he didn’t. But all the rules probably go out the window in dreams, if he’s fuckin’ gotten his hooks into you magically and you’ve already spent years being…ugh. Vile. No wonder Izumi had no choice but to go after you.”
At this new mention of Izumi’s name the image sharpened. Blurred features became a clean-shaven, angular face, and the misty mass below clarified into familiar yet subtly different robes. His expression was stony as he drew a hand back and struck the camera in a slap that shook the world.
”You are mine,” he proclaimed.
The words carried no more of that psychic compulsion, but there was a power behind them all the same. Simpler, more brutal power, the kind that made you comply when somebody pointed a gun at you, that from which all other power descended if you were to trace back far enough. The same power the Vaetna had mastered, but they would never use it for domination like this. He was the very model of the worst kind of flamebearer. From those three words alone I knew that killing him had been the right thing to do—my hands itched for my spear to finish the job.
”N—no longer,” stammered a new voice, heavy with exhausted fear, like that strike had been the twentieth rather than the first and she no longer had much to give. We both jumped; it sounded like it had come right next to us.
I turned to Yuuka. “We have to stop. These are her memories, we’re making it pull her in.”
”Oh, shit. Stop!” She commanded the cameras above us.
The memory on the screen did not dissipate. If I’d had hackles they would have gone up.
“Resisting the truth is the source of pain.” Sugawara’s voice was careful and articulate. “You know this. I helped free you from that pain, built who you are. And that makes you mine, forever. Say thank you.”
But, much to my horror, the entity was fascinated by what it was pulling out of Izumi’s memory. We were losing control. This was so much more personal than the skinnings. It watched as a rapt member of the audience, and I feared we were jogging its memory in the worst way—
The screen imploded from a roundhouse kick delivered to its side. It happened in more of a smear of light than the distinct motions of martial arts; Yuuka had struck it not with human frailty but with the remembered power of a mantle. “I said stop.”
I took her lead. Spear in hand, I moved light as a feather and smashed and skewered the remaining screens as efficiently as I could with moves straight from my daily training routine. Haft strikes and sweeping lunges took the final eyes of the panopticon to bloody pieces.
That was enough to stop this thing from accessing and recreating Izumi’s trauma, but it was also the end of Yuuka’s control over the entity, and now it was injured, afraid, and cornered. The dream around us changed far more violently than anything before. Everything began to melt and shift, blood seeping out of the walls, the ceiling rising as high as an arched cathedral as the blinded cameras retreated. I felt a presence on the medical bed behind us and whirled in alarm—it was empty, but I knew what the dream was trying to do. I turned to Yuuka. “We need to leave.”
“You’re sure we have what we came for?”
I nodded firmly. “Enough. See a way out?”
She looked sharply up at the freshly vaulted ceiling, as if daring the cluster of cameras to come back down. “This thing’s all about memory and ritual.” She pointed down at the medical bed we’d been sitting on. “It lost its lunch last time we killed him. It’ll do it again if we bring everything full circle. Gimme your spear.”
I tossed it over. It was longer than she was tall, but in the dream, that didn’t matter, and she caught it easily and raised it as though preparing to stake a vampire. Every ounce of her conviction drove the tip of the spear into the bed, through Sugawara’s heart.
The lights went out.
When I had woken from my Flame-dream conference call with the Vaetna, I’d been soaked in a high-fever sweat and I had been fundamentally unsettled in my body, disoriented and displaced, until the following morning and then some. It had been awful. Returning from the net-entity’s dream brought back those symptoms—except I had also set myself on fire before going in, and had been burning the whole while. I was groaning in pain before I was even fully awake, my awareness of my surroundings almost completely smothered by the feeling that something was on my skin and it hurt in a primal, get-it-off-me way. The fire was already out and my armor vanished, but all my nerves knew was that terrible harm had been wrought. That sent my dysmorphia and disgust at this meat-body into overdrive, overwhelmed by the experience of even being in my flesh, let alone the alarms blaring throughout my nervous system.
I was a complete sitting duck. I’d displayed incredible ingenuity and determination in getting this far, but I was no Vaetna endowed with limitless capacity for violence and magic. And even if I’d had the faculties to try to start weaving immediately in order to flee the interior of Yuuka’s pod, my willpower had run out and I was spent. Cooked, if you will; a piece of charred, overdone meat in the most literal sense, all potential squandered to the point of insult to the animal that had died to make me, repulsive to all five of the senses.
Fortunately for my sorry ass, Yuuka came out firing on all cylinders. Through bleary vision—were eyes supposed to itch?—I beheld a scintillating constellation of obsidian shards that scattered out of the breach in the pod toward a mass of skin. The shards detonated into blinding ruby and for one brief and blinding moment I saw dozens of meters of the net effortlessly torn apart like a hand through cobwebs before my retinas overloaded and I had to squeeze my eyes shut again.
Things were quiet for one or two more seconds other than the faint shuffling of Yuuka moving beside me. Then I was subjected to a full-body force as though somebody had just floored the accelerator and I had been lying in the backseat. I was thrown in a direction that didn’t exist, pursued by a bone-shaking roar—
I landed on a floor. Cheap, scratchy carpet, to be precise, but it might as well have been silk sheets beneath me, so grateful I was to be back in something resembling reality.
“Oi, Ezza, roll over, quick. To your right, toward me.”
Yuuka’s voice was a little bit away from me, like she was in the same room but facing away. The urgency in it was just barely enough for me to muster what energy I had and heave myself sideways across the carpet. Ow. Scratchy carpet on burned skin. I peeled my eyes open to look at her.
“Good ‘nuff?”
“Yep, stay there. We’ll be out of here in thirty seconds when I get this thing to give us an opening.”
Her clothes were ragged. She’d come straight from class to join this whole adventure, and now her stylish outfit was in tatters, shredded and charred by combat that must have happened moments before I’d woken up. Her heavy overcoat was intact, though, and that gave the short woman a reassuringly solid presence above me.
She was weaving faster than I’d ever seen anybody but the Vaetna or Hina, and with perfect economy. There wasn’t a single wasted movement or lost millisecond of hesitation; her hands danced around each other to bind dark, oily thread in three dimensions. She snapped off the lattice, took two deliberate steps backward, and began to weave something else, staring down at her hands with blazing gemstone in one eye and pure focus in the other.
A twitch of motion from the ceiling above her drew my gaze, in time to see a knurl of twisted rebar emerge and reach down at her like a waterfall. I twitched and reflexively called for my Flame—no chance, even if I’d been fresh and not half dead, it was happening too fast to even take a breath to call out. Yuuka didn’t even flinch as a shadow in the corner of the room expanded impossibly and punched the wave of steel off to the side with an ear-ringing bang, striking so hard it shattered into shrapnel that shredded the far wall of the former waiting room we’d holed up in. Distant rumblings ensued, what must have been more of Yuuka’s traps going off, somehow keeping the entity’s assault at bay even though we were still plainly in the belly of the beast.
I groaned and put my head back down, unwilling to muster fight-or-flight energy any further when my precog companion clearly had things under control. I mostly wanted to sleep to escape the pain; it felt like somebody had used me as a pincushion and then dumped a bucket of especially murderous hot sauce over my head. But blissful unconsciousness just wasn’t happening. In hindsight I probably would have indeed passed out from the pain even a few weeks prior, but my tolerance had gone up just enough for me to remain awake so I could wish I was dead instead. It didn’t particularly feel like an upgrade.
I resigned myself to helping in what ways I could that didn’t involve me leaving the floor, which mostly meant being an ideas guy. Ideas Vaetna-thing-suffering-too-much-to-articulate-a-better-label-right-now. Whatever.
“It’s got Izumi,” I managed to slur.
“Way ahead of you. This room is gonna fold up on us and align the membrane to give us a clear shot right to her pod.”
I was intensely jealous. I’d had to chance it to get my spear across the fourspace barrier; she could just pick the moment ahead of time.
She flicked off one more lattice that fizzled and vanished, then lowered her hands to look at me. “Now we’re just waiting. You’ve done enough, leave it to me.”
The gears were turning in my brain, gummed up by pain but grinding along nonetheless. I was having an important thought, which I located after a few seconds longer than usual. “Whatif…we let it eat her?”
“So it can digest her?” She frowned, her eye sparking with light as she chased down that possibility. “Nope. Pain’s making you stupid, it happens.”
“Buh,” I conceded.
“Neat idea, bad idea, we wouldn’t be able to pull her out when the big guns roll up.”
“Buh?”
“This thing should be setting off ripple alarms all over the country at this point. I give it fifty-fifty whether the girls or the Peacies get to us first. Can’t see that far,” she admitted dourly. “But I’ll take the help. Without mantles we don’t have the firepower to finish this thing ourselves, so we’re just going to play keep-away for a little bit.” She trotted over to me and knelt down. “You’re gonna want to be on your stomach for this—whoa, shit, what the fuck happened to your stomach?”
It took me a moment to recall. It felt like it had happened days ago. “Stabilizer melted.”
“Right, shit, well…” Worry crossed her face and her eye flashed again.
“Hate being meat. ‘zit bad?” What I really meant to ask was how bad it must have been to provoke that reaction when she didn’t seem overly concerned about the more recent and painful burns covering much more of my body.
“You don’t feel it? Ah, fuck, time’s up, we gotta move. Close your eyes and I’ll tell you when you’re good to open them again.”
This time I was able to brace for the fourspace transition. Vertigo flipped my stomach, air turned to oil, light through my eyelids turned to darkness, and the temperature plummeted. There was an awful buzzing noise, like a bandsaw had fucked a swarm of locusts, from directly next to me, some unidentifiable attack from Yuuka directed at either the entity or Izumi’s pod. It was joined by a bassy thrum, then I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“Got her,” Yuuka confirmed as we accelerated sideways. “One more transit, we’re getting the fuck out. Three, two, one…”
We kicked across the membrane again. Light returned and fresh air hit my nose, telling me we’d made it outdoors. I opened my eyes to see blue sky above me—being rapidly swallowed by a grinding flood of concrete coming up from below us.
I’d shown the building that there was an outside and now it was intent on pursuing us there.
Our trajectory pitched, Yuuka’s hand left my shoulder, and I tumbled onto the rooftop once more, my fall cushioned by some invisible force Yuuka had conjured up in preparation for this moment. Izumi groaned next to me, having landed on the magical cushion as well. She looked physically unharmed but clutched her head in lingering psychic pain from her contact with the entity, unable to help. She and I were just dead weight for Yuuka to defend—and as the latter had said, she lacked the firepower to meaningfully beat this thing.
She did what she could. She stood before us and grimly wove even more, silhouetted against the roiling mass of the building’s shape as it mutated and grew over us to blot out the sun. A shimmering, prismatic forcefield grew from her hand to stretch over us in a protective dome. It closed around us and seemed to create more space than there should have been—probing flaps of skin peeking through the animated rubble touched it and diffracted into smaller shapes that couldn’t reach through. Suddenly Yuuka sagged, defeat in her voice.
“That’s all I’ve got.”
Fear clutched my heart. “Checkmate?”
“Stalemate, as far as us and this thing are concerned. This kind of shit is the problem mantles exist to solve,” she sighed, watching the entity attempt to brute-force its way past her shield, hands idle at her sides for the first time since we’d escaped the dream. “It’d take me about seventy seconds to weave a big gun that could really take a bite out of it, but firing it would collapse this shield from leakage interactions and I can’t get all three of us out in what comes after. A gun that wouldn’t do that would take me six minutes, even with your cleverest ideas, and we only have five until the shield goes down on its own.”
“…Sounds like checkmate to me.”
Suddenly she turned on her heel. A slightly mad grin had spread across her face and she posed like I’d seen in the dream, hand over her eye, her signature look.
“Heh. If it were just us, sure. But the power of friendship—and incredible violence—always prevails. This shield is built for a very particular kind of firepower. Tell her it’s mode three.”
“Huh?”
On cue, my phone buzzed in my pants pocket. Or more accurately, it shivered—ripple exposure had turned its internals to flesh, and it was a viscerally uncomfortable experience to wrap my fingers around it and dig it out of my pocket, like grabbing some wriggling vermin from its hidey-hole. The screen still worked, at least, and the caller ID immediately told me that the day was saved.
I picked up and put it on speaker. Radiance Opal’s voice came through the voicebox, crushed up by static but audible.
“Oh, thank God. We’re just getting visual now. Is it as bad as it looks?”
Words rushed out of me at once. “Alice, it’s bad, I’ve—we’ve—building’s alive, mantles are down, we’re in a bubble inside. Mode three, Yuuka says.” I wished I knew what that meant.
“Ah. Mode three, huh? Knew I was coming, good on her.” There was a smile in her voice. “Peacies are here, by the by, and they’re about to get front-row seats to why they haven’t tried to fuck with us. Beginning attack run, danger close.”
The dragon of Todai struck the possessed building like a cruise missile.
Author’s Note:
At last, the light at the end of the tunnel, and it’s dragonfire. This might actually be the first engagement in the entire story where Yuuka’s eye hasn’t gotten completely punked, I’d say she’s acquitted herself as well as she can under the circumstances. Now her girlfriends can do the rest.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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