NOVEL NEXT Chapter 63: Corporate Overreach III
She felt Hobbes near to her, felt its presence, felt it throb against the surface of the table. Space became twisted and flensed and conjoined into intangible Möbius strips, and then the lower parts of the hooded figure were suddenly its higher parts, and its left parts became its right parts, so that its chirality was left in no doubt at all. Under normal circumstances, she would precede the use of her power by spending hours studying multidimensional matrices comprising a multitude of elements and carefully commit these to memory with the help of her eidetic-memory-feeder; in this case, however, all she required to do was to mix a random lattice-work of coordinates…
The next thing she knew, the body had become a spew of fluids and steaming sacs of lopsided, inverted organs, the sanguineous flows bursting out from exposed arteries in violent spurts every time that still-beating heart contracted.
She twisted round on her heels, grabbing Hobbes with her left hand and hugging it to her blood-soaked shirt, her right hand useless because it was still impaled with the blade; the next moment, another blade punched into her deltoid, and Marja grunted in pain and dropped to the ground, pressing a blood-gummed index finger to the carpeting.
'I could use a Power Magnifier right about now,' she thought, clenching her jaw and feeling Hobbes beat against her heart. With proximity came greater power, and she threw every ounce of intentionality she could summon at the carpeted surface—or rather, the space around it—feeling through the folds in reality to grasp at the framework of space time and bending it haphazardly to her inflamed will.
The floor scrunched and inverted, making a monstrous amalgamation of concrete blocks and metal sheeting and blacksteel rebar.
She felt the burbling floor give and fall, and she with it, and she tensed her abdominal muscles and brought her feet up so that her soles were placed flat upon that bulbous surface as it fell through. Everything was soaked in blood and pulsating bits of flesh were quivering about her and concrete dust obscured her vision of the assassins.
Light.
The block of concrete that had once been the floor slammed into the floor of the apartment below hers, and her right calf seared with pain as blood was forced out the fleshy tear still dammed up with the blade. Her leg buckled, her knee forced into the ground so that the skin was scraped off its surface.
Relying on instinct alone, she executed a side roll and thumped lightly into a softly carpeted surface, and when she regained her feet the pain in her calf flared again, causing her to stumble backwards into a vase and shatter it to pieces.
Noise filled the space, assaulting her eardrums with a disorienting cacophony that blared through the apartment. The Diplomatic Chambers' alarm system had been triggered. She blinked away the blood from her eyes to see, across the swirl of concrete dust, a wide-eyed Jegorichian couple lounging upon a sofa.
The man's face looked somehow familiar…
'That's… the majority-owner of Tower Hotel,' she recalled, realizing his picture had been shown to her during one of last week's briefings, though she couldn't quite remember his name…
"We need to leave, now!" Marja yelled hoarsely, plucking the blade from her right palm and grimacing in pain. The couple didn't react, and she yelled again, losing her voice to the siren-like blare of the alarm. She snapped her head upwards, noticing, in the hole through which she had fallen, movement in the shadows.
An object fell through the hole in the ceiling, and she squinted, then widened her eyes to realize what it was.
Flashbang!—
She turned and buried her face in the crook of her left arm, half a second before an immense wall of sound crashed into her and blasted all thought from her mind. Her mind raced with the thought that the surviving assassins, persistent as they were, would take the opportunity to come for her.
Not if I kill them first!
And she wheeled about on her trembling legs, finding the entire frontage obscured by a thick fog of dust; she raised her right hand, her mind still reeling, clenching her fingers into her weeping wound and stabbing out with a half-formed tendril of power.
The effectiveness of my power—the distance between the lattice of coordinates in spacetime I am able to connect—is proportional to the distance at which I am trying to operate. Without a Power Magnifier, all I can hope to achieve is…
It sounded like the shredding of a million sheets of paper; the frontage warped and crushed and balled one part into the other; the windowpanes shattered in overlapping tinkles, and the lights went out, plunging the space into darkness.
The droning blare of the evacuation alarm resumed its primacy as the chaos ebbed.
Marja could only just make out the contours of her environment by the dim purple hues filtering in from outside. A lazy breeze caressed her face and blew pain onto her wounds. She could tell that the hole above had widened, and a boulder made of a confused mish-mash of things now lay before her, blocking her view of the Jegorichian ambassador and the young, girlish woman whom she assumed was his wife.
Brrzt…
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The buzzing drew her eyes to her wrist-transceiver. She glanced at the lighted screen to see that it was Jirani.
Jirani! Did he manage to evacuate—
Something hurtled across the space and smashed into her, pushing her body backward into the wall. It was one of the mysterious assassins, moving with preternatural swiftness; it snapped its fist out and caught Marja in the abdomen, causing her to spit out fluid and double over in pain. She was barely able to keep hold of Hobbes, holding it tight to herself as she flailed her right hand painfully around.
A second fist flew at Marja's jaw, but she flopped sideways onto the floor out of reflex, dodging that wicked blow. She kicked at the assassin's shin, intent on sweeping its legs out from under it but only managing to elicit a dull grunt for her efforts.
The assassin was upon her, crouching and throwing a palm strike at the hilt of the blade still embedded in her calf and managing to catch it and push it sidewise. The sharpened metal sliced up at an awkward angle, severing her muscles and notching into bone. Marja screamed wretchedly, kicking frantically but unable to achieve any specific effect.
'Calm yourself!' she thought to herself, clamping down on her lip hard enough to bite halfway through her lower lip. She squeezed her left arm over Hobbes and raised her right arm again, drawing upon her wavering reserves of strength.
But before she could do anything, the assassin was there, bringing down a hammer fist upon her face. She let loose another wordless scream, bringing her arms up reflexively over her head but receiving the strike in her rib instead; she wriggled herself several inches back, but the figure was relentless, advancing calmly, ruthlessly targeting her weak spots. Somewhere in that frantic struggle she lost her grip on Hobbes.
This can only go on so long… I must attack!
With one final spurt of energy she forced herself up and forward, her arms outstretched, attempting to catch that slippery creature in a bear hug.
Empty space. She grabbed at nothing and fell, slamming her forehead hard into the floor.
The world was a tumble of pain and spangling artifacts of consciousness. She moaned and turned her face so that she could see, above her, the assassin; in its hand was held a bloodied knife, and she saw the sharp tip angled over her fading vision—
I am going to die.
She felt calm as she realized this. The hopes and dreams of a life beyond the grasp of her suffocating family. The promises she'd made to Ortrud. Her mistakes, her negligent killing of Eugene…
It was all coming to an end.
Time seemed to slow. The glint of the bladed edge cast a hypnotic spell upon her, and she could think of nothing but how it would feel to have that piece of matter thrust into her brain. Maybe they would cut off her head and take it back to her father and mother. Maybe they would cry for her, maybe they wouldn't. Maybe the senile Presbyter would incinerate her head after he confirmed her death, so that her parents would never see her again.
One moment the blade was there, the next it wasn't. Where was the assassin? It looked like… it had been replaced with a puddle. Blood was pooling thickly outward from that quivering mass of meat, edging closer to her face. She could smell it, the sickly syrupy sweetness of death with a pungent stench mixed in. Or perhaps all of it was Death, smelling of blood and iron and fecal matter.
The oozing pool reached her, and she could feel her lips come into contact with that warm and flowing ichor. She stuck out her tongue, curious, and found the taste tangy and not altogether bad.
Everything felt so surreal and viscous that the question arose in her mind as to whether she was already dead. Another figure, ghostly and incorporeal, had come to lean over her face, the face that was twitching and grimacing and deforming in all the ways that were not her own. And that figure cast a long and imaginary shadow over the smooth rivers of blood she could trace many miles out into that crimson sea, where blots sailed backlit in purple over a deep and clotting question…
Was it all worth it?
"... Marja!"
Jirani was stooped over her, his fingers placed against her neck, trying to feel a pulse.
It was there, but losing strength quickly. She needed medical attention, fast.
He retrieved her Incunabulum, half submerged in the detritus of that figure he had flattened into paste, and, secreting it away into his pouch, put his arms underneath Marja's armpits and dragged her, slowly, out into the lighted corridor.
Her feet made twin trails of blood upon the smooth marble floor. Once he'd managed to get all of her out athwart that corridor, he lay her down flat upon the ground. Her eyelids were fluttering and her mouth gaped half-open. Marja sported a vicious gash in her calf that was really a large tear he could see clean through, and her body—her torso entirely naked now, because her shirt had been torn off sometime in the furious melee—had been brutally battered, so that large and blossoming bruises could be seen covering her breasts and stomach.
Jirani winced to witness Marja's body in such a general state of brokenness.
The blare of the emergency evacuation alarm was louder here and so obnoxious it felt like someone was hammering a nail into his head. He took off his cotton shirt, carefully wrapping it around Marja's torso so that her breasts were covered. The fabric immediately patched red, soaking up blood and ichor.
He sensed shuffling movement from out the corner of his eye, coming from inside the room. Jirani snapped his arms into ready position, eyes peeled, ready to call upon the power of gravity—
He blinked, observing a fair-complexioned man whose cheekbones were wide as his forehead picking through the rubble and edging slowly toward the light. An over-young, petite girl trailed behind him, dressed in little more than a short and underwear, her eyes wide and brimming with fear.
The man had raised his arms over his head and appeared to be shouting something Jirani couldn't quite hear over the keening sirens.
Isn't that the Tower Hotel guy? What was his name… Bramisa? Bramisha?
"Get out of here!" Jirani yelled, motioning down the corridor. The man understood his meaning from his gestures, wasting no time in shimmying past Marja's supine body and making down the corridor at speed, dragging along the girl beside him.
Jirani refocused his attention on Marja.
I have to get her downstairs and to a hospital.
Jirani angled himself beside the unconscious woman and hefted her up over his shoulders in a fireman's carry.
Shit, I'm not as young as I used to be…
He tramped down the corridor, his bootsteps lost in the welter of noise.