The rotten-egg smell of concentrated sulfuric acid stung Silas’s nose. He cupped a hand over his mouth, gagging. The fumes burned his eyes, blinding him. The gladiator’s howls continued, rising to an agonizing screech that hurt Silas’s ears. Wood crunched as the gladiator thrashed in agony, knocking the counter from its base.
Silas fell backward, snatching air painfully through his cupped fingers. The gladiator lashed out, spinning like a tornado, slamming into the walls, knocking equipment across the room. Silas crawled along the floor to the wall and scrambled to his feet. He found Vidonia through squinted eyes and pulled her toward the door by her hand. The gladiator’s screams continued as they burst into the hall.
Though concentrated sulfuric acid looks like water, it has a consistency closer to that of maple syrup. It sticks to what it touches and, with a pH approaching 1.2, can carve out a hole in flesh.
The screams continued, changing, shifting from pain into rage.
They ran.
They sprinted in blind panic, any thought of exiting the way they entered erased.
They paused for breath at an intersection.
“Which way?” she asked, hands on her knees.
“I’m not sure.”
“Do you think it’s going to follow?”
Silas didn’t answer.
The screams stopped. Silas looked at Vidonia and realized neither of them believed the gladiator’s injuries had been fatal. It was coming again.
Silas looked down the forward hall. In the distance, starlight cast hazy runnels of shadow into the lobby.
“We can break out one of those windows,” she said.
“It would hear us. We’d never make it to the car.” He thought of when he’d last looked up to the stars for Orion. He hadn’t been able to find the constellation in all the wash of light. But the cities were dark tonight. The archer would be out as he hadn’t been for a very long time.
“No, not the car,” he said, pulling her down the side hall by the arm. “I have another idea.”
“What is it?”
“My office. We need to get there. We’re going the wrong way.”
“Your office?”
“This way.”
They backtracked a short length of hall, and Silas pushed through a door.
“Another stairwell?” she said.
“Can’t be any worse than the last.”
And it wasn’t. At the top of the landing was a single shining emergency light. One flight up, Silas pushed into another dark hall. This space he knew by heart. He’d walked it every day for the last twelve years. His office door was locked. He dug for the key, but his pockets were empty except for the eggs.
Vidonia followed him into his office, shutting the door behind them. Silas went to the window and looked out. Darkness. Swaying trees. Above, Orion with his crooked belt.
Silas opened the closet and pulled the bow from the top shelf. Two arrows leaned against the corner. The first, he knew, was bent beyond use, knocked crooked by the corner of the target he’d used on the property behind the lab. The second arrow would have to do. He picked it up and ran his thumb over the field point. It was not so dull as a spoon, but it was close.
Silas decided not to think about it. It was the only weapon they had. It either would or wouldn’t be enough.
They waited.
“This isn’t how I wanted it to end,” Vidonia said.
“Who says it’s going to end this way?”
“I mean, if it does. If it does end like this …”
“What?”
“I wanted more time,” she said.
“We’ll have it.”
After a short while, they heard the clicking. It had tracked them.
“Get in the closet,” Silas said. “No matter what, stay there.”
She nodded and slipped inside. “Silas,” she said from the shadows, the beginning of a question.
He motioned for her to shut the door. She did.
SILAS MOVED behind his desk, bow slick in his sweaty hands. The clicking talons moved steadily closer, the sounds growing louder as the creature progressed down the hall. It was almost there. Silas touched the dull tip of the field point again, hoping it could still bite. It had to. But he’d have to be close in order to make sure that he didn’t miss. He didn’t trust his nerves.
The footsteps halted just outside the office door. Silas dropped to the carpet behind the desk, gripping the bow tightly. His heart beat in his ears. His mouth was bone dry, throat closing in on itself.
The doorknob did not turn this time.
The door exploded inward and splintered against the wall. Silas heard the creature enter the room, heard its breath coming in long, ragged drafts. Silas waited. The talons were silent on the carpet, so he tracked the creature by its breathing. It stank of sulfuric acid and burned flesh. It moved along the far wall toward the closet. The breathing stopped.
Wood crackled, and Vidonia screamed. The creature yanked her from the closet by her leg.
“Hey!”
Silas jerked to his feet and cocked the arrow back. The gladiator held Vidonia upside down by the calf, shaking her violently. The skin on its face and chest was a tattered ruin, sprouting great white sheaths of dead flesh that drooped like potato peelings.
One eye looked out from the wreckage of its face, wheeling toward Silas.
Aiming for the eye, Silas released the arrow.
He knew immediately that it was high.
The shot went wide and imbedded deep in the upward arch of the gladiator’s wing. It screamed and dropped Vidonia to the floor. She landed on her head with a thump, then rolled away toward the wall.
The creature turned its head and reached over its shoulder, gripping the arrow in its hand. It snapped the shaft off, and Silas could see that the wing was torn. Dark blood poured from the wound. The single remaining eye rolled on him again, filled with rage and pain.
It roared loud enough to shake the room, and the useless bow slipped from Silas’s hand and thumped to the floor.
It came for him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Ignoring the pain in his fingers, Evan twisted the last wire tightly. He was finished. For better or worse, the link was made whole again. He dropped the cord to the floor and stood, easing the kinks out of his thighs with the palms of his hands.
When he looked up at the screen, Pea was lying back on his elbows in the sand, gazing out over the water into the gloom. He hardly seemed godlike anymore. The long black hair showed streaks of gray, and the body had wasted, becoming thin and frail. Ribs stretched the skin at his sides, and dark crescents arched under each eye.
The light had gone out from those eyes, and Evan couldn’t put a name to what had crawled in to fill the space.
