had attempted to activate some sort of protocol, but whatever he had attempted, it was too late. Edward’s screaming was mercifully brief, his mauled body dragged back to disappear in brush and darkness.
Alex watching in numb horror, as a surging wave of beasts crossed the empty ground between them, his empty submachine gun hanging useless from one hand, paralyzed by a feeling that had not quite had time to coalesce into fear. The part of his mind that was still capable of thinking was consumed with the hope that he would not wet himself before he was devoured. For some reason, this seemed very important.
He assumed that he was dead when Renton grabbed him, pulling him forcibly back toward the ruined building by the collar of his shirt. It took a little while before his brain processed what he was seeing, before he stopped struggling against Renton and started running himself, away from the howling, away from the teeth and hot breath he imagined was on his heels.
Alex was thrown to the ground by the force of an explosion, and then there was a lost interval, dead time.
He opened his eyes, when he remembered how to do that, and his vision slowly returned to him, in the form of crudely defined silhouettes, then a semblance of the world he remembered before the concussive wave. If there were multiple explosions, as he had been led to believe there would be, then Alex could not tell — there was simply a terrific force that knocked him and everything around him to the ground, the trees nearby bending and cracking, and one huge noise, a sound for which he could find no comparison. It must have echoed, in the valley between those hills, but Alex couldn’t hear anything at that point. When he recovered enough to find his way to his feet, he did so, wondering if the nanites inside him would be able to repair his hearing, or whether he would stay deaf forever. The silent, smoky world that confronted him was so different from what he remembered that he was tempted to dismiss it as some sort of violently surreal dream. Then he saw Mitsuru.
Though he would have been too embarrassed to admit it, Alex had in fact had a few dreams about Mitsuru. But, they had never involved her bleeding so much, or fighting a great silver wolf-monster.
Something in Alex’s brain tripped, and finally started working again, and the scene came into focus. Mitsuru moved oddly, jumping out of the way as the Weir charged, firing the pistol she held at its back as it passed, and Alex wondered about the extent of her injuries. The Weir spun to face her again, apparently unhurt, while Mitsuru regarded it calmly, and bled. Alex felt his feet start moving before his brain became aware of the plan, which was probably for the best — had he been thinking clearly, he probably never would have done what needed to be done.
She had not dodged the Weir’s strike, Alex realized, not wholly, and the resulting wound on her chest was deep and ugly. He wondered how long she had been fighting the thing, and if it was going as badly as it looked. He could see other, more minor wounds on her left arm and the back of her head, and he realized that her left leg was stiff and the foot was dragging on the ground. She looked as collected as ever, her blazing red eyes fixed on the monster, a 9mm in one hand, a long knife in the other, but Alex saw something he didn’t like in her stance, and ran even harder toward them, tossing aside the useless submachine gun as he did so.
Anastasia’s arm smacked into his chest, bringing him to a stumbling halt ten meters away from Mitsuru and the Weir. She was covered in a layer of fine dust, and her dress was in shreds, but she looked otherwise unhurt. She looked over at Alex, and he was surprised to see pity in the look. She put one hand to the side of his head, and when she pulled it back, it was bloody. Alex reached up himself, and realized that he was bleeding from both ears.
Anastasia tried to say something to him, but all Alex could hear was a painfully insistent ringing sound. She looked frustrated, and then tried yelling, with no more effect. Alex shrugged helplessly, distracted by the blood leaking from the side of his head. Anastasia stomped her foot, then grabbed Alex by the back of his head, and yelled directly in his ear. Alex couldn’t be sure, but he thought he heard the phrase ‘Black Protocol’. For a moment, this made no sense to him, then he looked over at the fight, and realized what Anastasia had in mind.
Mitsuru was slowing down, there was no doubt about it now. The Weir leapt at her, crossing the distance between them in an instant, arms spread wide, savage talons stained red. Mitsuru rolled clumsily to the side, barely avoiding being torn to pieces by the monster’s claws. She didn’t even bother to try and counterattack this time, either because she lacked the energy or the opportunity, Alex couldn’t tell. He was already busy, tearing frantically at the Black Door in the recesses of his mind.
For a panicked moment, he scrabbled against the dark, frosty wood of the door helplessly, the surface cold and unyielding. Then he remembered the protocol, and the instructions Rebecca had left for invoking it. Alex exhaled, not even aware that he had dropped to his knees, or that Anastasia was crouched beside him, holding him up. With a tremendous effort, Alex activated the Absolute Protocol.
At first there were no obvious changes. Then Alex went stiff, his limbs and back rigid, his eyes rolled back in his head, and his body temperature began to drop dramatically. As Anastasia watched, his lips and eyelids started to turn blue, and she had to hold a hand up to confirm that he was still breathing. Then she felt the Ether seethe and roil, and she knew that a Black Protocol had been activated.
The Weir didn’t appear any the worse for wear, not at first, but when he charged Mitsuru again, he was not nearly as fast, and even in her debilitated state, she managed to dodge the attack by dropping beneath it, almost crumpling. The Weir landed in a heap, striking the ground with surprising force and then whining. Mitsuru wobbled her way back to her feet, and looked at the huddled Weir curiously.
“You…”
The Weir snarled through a jumbled mass of teeth and tongue, holding its frost covered paws out accusatorially.
“What is this? What is it that you’ve done?”
Mitsuru said nothing, standing on the balls of her feet, waiting and ready.
The Weir lumbered forward, moving much slower than it had earlier. As it moved, the sheen of frost that extended across the majority of its arms and torso cracked and bits of ice fell to the ground around it. One paw clutched at its chest while it attempted a sort of shambling run in Mitsuru’s direction, howling in outrage and pain.
Mitsuru stepped to the side almost casually, her wounded leg dragging behind her. She tucked and rolled, then came up firing, emptying her pistol into the side of the Weir as it passed. In some places, the bullets impacted normally, but in other places, the flesh seemed to shatter on impact, leaving behind great cavities that sparkled with pinkish-red ice crystals.
The Weir dropped to its knees, clutching at its wounded side and moaning, its other arm still clutching at its chest.
“Trickery,” it hissed at the advancing Mitsuru, even the slobber at the edges of its jowls frozen and sparkling, “this fight was mine, whore.”
“Was,” Mitsuru said lightly, limping toward the Weir, “maybe. Sure isn’t now.”
The Weir fell forward, catching itself with one paw, and coughing slushy, partially frozen blood onto the ground in front of it. It blinked and tried to look up at Mitsuru as she stood over it, its eyes blinded by a rime of frost that stretched across the tissue, one of the eyelids sticking to the surface of the retina. It hissed something, perhaps it tried to speak, but all it managed to do was expel more of the thick reddish slush from inside its mouth. Mitsuru stood above the Weir, its silver pelt now thoroughly covered with a thick coating of frost.
Anastasia watched as Mitsuru brought down the knife, Alex already fast asleep on the lap of her ruined dress.
Twenty Nine
Alex woke with a start, not sure where he was, not sure how long he’d been asleep, but seized with a formless anxiety, a sense that he’d missed something important. He reached to wipe the sleep from his eyes, and heard the rattle of the IV stand and felt the tug of the tape and tubes that were strapped to his arm.
Even in the dim confines of what he now recognized as a hospital room, Alex could barely keep his eyes open, the light spilling underneath the door seemed impossibly bright. Alex tried to sit up, and managed it after a certain amount of coaxing and waiting out his cramped muscles. His back was impossibly stiff and sore and his whole body ached, and he was alarmingly thinner than he remembered being.
