weight of stone, but that's not the way water works. Close off one way, and water will always find another. Alex could feel it seeping up through the cracks and crannies, feel the weight of power moving up through the hill.
She knew what must happen. She didn't want it, but she knew it must come, and she would not flinch from it now. Groundwater oozed onto the surface, pooling around Eve's feet, soaking up into her jeans, even as she struggled against it.
Chipper glanced from Alex to Eve, and back to Alex. He could see Eve was losing. Chipper hands bunched. Then he extended his fingers into a pistol, miming the cocking of the hammer, extending his arm until his fingers pointed at Alex's forehead. His eyes flared with anger and hatred. He was doing this execution style, pistol-grip held sideways, arm straight.
'No!' shouted Sparky.
Alex squeezed her eyes shut, curling herself into a ball. Momentarily, she pushed the water back from her skin, giving herself an insulating layer of dry earth, surrounding herself in a thin mist to direct the force away to the ground.
Beyond her eyelids, everything went white. The flash etched into her brain. The shockwave was simultaneous, a physical blow. There was a double sound wave, Crack-Crack! Her bones shook, her teeth ground together, the blood pounded in her ears.
For a while she couldn't seem to breathe. She opened her eyes slowly, green and purple spots floated in her vision. Uncurling her body, she heard the crack rumbling back in echoes from the distant hills.
The first thing she noticed was the grass, splayed out in a radius from the still smoking hole where Chipper had been. Behind him, Sparky's face was frozen, staring at the thing on the ground near the hole. The clothes had vanished, leaving something that looked like a flayed corpse with burned and blackened skin. As the smell of cooked meat steamed into the frozen air, Alex's gorge rose. Mercifully the body blackened further as Chipper's magic consumed his body, leaving only his outline in ashes, soaking into the wet ground.
Eve didn't look much better. She had finally earned the release she was looking for, though not in the way she wanted. Her eyes were open, but had turned milky white and stared sightlessly up into the black sky above. Her hair was in spikes where it stood out from her head and it looked like every muscle she had was in spasm, pulling her lips back from her teeth in a rictus grin with her fat tongue protruding, her twisted body arched over onto its side so that she looked like she was sticking her tongue out at the vanishing remains of Chipper.
'Too highly strung,' Alex said quietly.
Then, to Alex's astonishment, Eve's leg kicked out in a spasmodic twitch. Her body was racked with pain, but somehow, for a few moments, she held on to life. Could it be that at the end, Eve wanted to survive? Then Eve's clawed hand reached out towards the orb, as if she wanted to hold it one last time. Her hand slowly crept across the grass.
Alex walked around Eve's body and stood on her fingers, preventing her from crawling forward, feeling it sink into the wet earth beneath her shoe.
'No more,' said Alex. 'It's over.'
Eve convulsed, her entire body gave one final spasm and she lay still. Beneath Alex's foot, Eve's hand crumbled into dust. Alex watched as her corpse slowly collapsed in on itself, falling into dust that mixed with the wet earth.
Alex asked herself what she felt. She ought to feel sympathy. She ought to feel relief, shouldn't she? What she actually felt was glad. Eve had earned her fate, and had sent enough people to their deaths to deserve it.
It was the orb that pulled her attention from the fading shape. It was spinning faster, the objects turning around it orienting in random directions as if they had lost their compass north. She watched it momentarily and then realised what it meant. She scrambled over to grab Sparky's arm.
'We have to go,' she said, shaking him.
He continued to stare at where Chipper's corpse had been.
'Now!' she shouted.
She wrenched at his arm, making him stumble forward. She pulled him along as the sound of rushing air built behind them. She glanced back and the objects were a blur where they whirled in perfect symmetry around the orb.
'Come on!' she shouted, as the sound from the orb rose like the buzzing of a million flies.
They hit the slope of the hill and gravity kicked in, taking hold of their feet. There were people ahead, Alex thought she recognised Blackbird. They started running towards her, converging on her and Sparky. She screamed at them, 'The other way! Run!'
They hesitated, then looked up and turned as one.
Alex risked a glance backwards and saw the clouds had funnelled down towards the orb, flickers of lightning pulsing randomly within the column, giving it a sense of hunger as it spiralled down.
She ran on and saw a growing shadow run away from her, growing taller by the second as the light grew from behind. She yanked at Sparky's arm, tumbling him over, and leapt to land on top of him. A sound like a giant oven door slamming hit them from behind them, and for a second Alex thought she could see not only her bones through her skin, but Sparky's too.
The two of them were picked up by a wave of force and hurled down the hill, tumbling and turning together until they hit the grass and rolled, over and over, one entwined in another, over the grassy bumps and hummocks, until they finally bumped to a halt.
Alex opened her eyes to see Sparky staring up at her. His eyes didn't change. They stared at her silently, mute and still. She shifted her weight, wanting to disengage from this dead thing, and he blinked.
'You're alive!' she said, and kissed him full on the lips.
He lay still and then responded so that the kiss turned into a longer one than Alex had intended. She disengaged. She hadn't meant it like that. Sparky's face was filled with… what? Beneath her, where her body lay across his, something stirred between them.
She pushed herself upright. 'How! How can you possibly think of sex now? We nearly died! We nearly worse than died!'
Sparky grinned up at her from his position laid out on the grass.
'We're alive,' he said.
It took a moment to disentangle myself from the hedge where I'd landed. Snagged by thorns, I had to pull myself out. By the time I was free, Blackbird was brushing the grass from her clothes, watching as the sky changed.
The clouds that had pulled into a spiral were flattening out, erasing the strange distortions caused by the orb. The giant hole in the centre was fading into a uniform grey. A few muttering rumbles of thunder drifted overhead, like memories of what had been, but all the anger had gone from it. The light was changing and the clouds no longer had a luminous quality of their own, but faded to a night-time gloom, reflecting only the orange of street lights from nearby towns.
'What happened?' I asked Blackbird.
'Something good,' she said, taking my hand in hers and squeezing it.
Around us a new sound emerged. From all over the hill, tiny springs emerged, running in rivulets of muddy water down the hill.
'What the… Alex!'
I ran up the hill in the dark towards the place where I had seen Alex running down towards us. I found her halfway down the hill with a boy not much older then her. She was standing while he lay on the grass, but I couldn't escape the feeling that I had just interrupted something between them. Something was amusing the lad because he had a big grin on his face, while Alex scowled down at him.
I stopped a few paces short. 'Alex?'
Now she was here I didn't know what to say to her. Even in the dark, I could see she was filthy dirty, her hair was in disarray and her clothes were torn. She looked battered and bruised, though even through the grime I could see that she had gained elaborate tattoos down her arms. When had she had that done?
She looked thinner, leaner and more hungry. The Alex that stared back at me was another version, a different Alex than the one who had sulked and refused to get out of bed. This one stared back defiant and independent.
'Alex?' I repeated.
