“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Maddie said.
“Leave me alone.”
“Looks like we’re stuck in this room together until the end; being left alone is a luxury you’re gonna have to get used to doing without.”
“Great.”
“I’m serious, though. Quit whining. Our time’s not up yet.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You feel like a failure, but right now there’s really nothing for you to do. You’ll know when it’s your turn to step up, I’m sure. This machine needs both of us. If you weren’t important, the gods would have left you to die in London, don’t you think?”
“Suppose. What about you?”
She grinned at Jenny. “Oh, I know I’m important. It’s always been about me!”
“Your ego knows no bounds.”
“Damn right. Just do me a favor and remember one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“There’s a difference between defense and offense, but they’re equally important. One person can start a war—I know you did—but that same person can just as easily stop one, too. We’re in control of a piece of tech that has everything but weapons, as far as I can see, and you’ve said yourself before that we can’t attack the Bleed. Maybe we’re not here to fight it. Maybe that’s somebody else’s job.”
13
SURFERS PARADISE, AUSTRALIA
“What’s this?” Maddie asked. The clockwork room’s display had abruptly switched to a new view. The Bleed hammers were continuing to wreak havoc on the forcefield shield, but the perspective of the image the machine was presenting to Jenny and Maddie had unexpectedly changed. There was relative calm on the streets outside, from what they could tell, so why had the god-tech suddenly decided to show them this apparently random scene?
They were, according to the machine, looking at a densely forested region northeast of Bobong, Indonesia. It was strange to see lush green again after staring for so long at either the crimson death of the Bleed, the blue-green of the ocean, or the patchwork greys of the last remaining cities on Earth. The orb had cut an arc across the top of Taliabu Island, a sparsely populated regency. On one side, normalcy. On the other, nothing but death.
“What are we looking at?” Jenny asked, peering deeper into the image. She could smell the freshness of the forest as she looked out over mile after mile after mile of uninterrupted green. But even out here, at a distance of thousands of miles, the effects of the massive Bleed hammers could still be seen. The tops of trees shook then were still, shook, then were still. Leaves and branches thrashed with the constant shockwaves.
But beyond all that, nothing.
On the other side of the forcefield, the forest had been destroyed by the Bleed. Where there had once been thousands of trees and deep masses of vegetation, there was now a single undulating layer of red. So far, so horrific, but not totally unexpected.
“Think the machine’s starting to struggle?” Maddie suggested. “Been running this thing at full throttle for a while.”
Jenny wasn’t so sure. “No, it has to be more than that.”
Their view was continuing to change. They were now watching from much lower than before, moving through the undergrowth and leaf litter towards the wall of the orb. Their perspective was just about knee-height, close enough to the ground for them to be aware of scores of creatures taking part in a mass exodus away from the Bleed.
“Why now?” Jenny asked.
“What?”
“Why are these creatures only choosing now to get away? Did they not think they were in trouble before?”
Then they reached the barrier.
“Shit,” Maddie said. “The Bleed tricked us. We thought the hammers were where it was attacking.”
“But they were just a distraction. They were too obvious. This is the real attack.”
The room zoomed in close. Through the forcefield, they could see sections of the Bleed elongating and mutating. Jenny had seen this before, when the forcefield had first gone up around them. The Bleed’s extrusions seemed infinite, starting out several centimeters wide and roughly circular, then drawing down to a pin-sharp point, still a distance from the outside of the orb. The points continued to refine and sharpen until they disappeared to nothing, then the room zoomed in again, showing them what was happening at a cellular, then a sub-atomic level.
“It always bleeds through,” Jenny said.
“Fuck, this is unbelievable. It’s trying to get in through the gaps between molecules.”
Maddie tried to divert the power of the machine to stop the Bleed’s microscopic incursion, but it was too late.
The moment the tip of the Bleed’s microneedle had fully punctured the orb, everything changed. It swelled and stretched the entry hole wider and wider, reaching a centimeter in diameter in no time at all. And then it continued to grow and expand. Ten centimeters, twenty…half a meter. Maddie tried to block it but realized quickly that there was no point. “We don’t have the power to stop this. The forcefield is stretched too far. If we protect this section, the hammers will break through elsewhere.”
The Bleed’s protrusion looked like a tentacle now, thrashing and writhing on the inside of the dome. It began to whip around furiously as the forcefield attempted to close the breach, but the sheer strength of the demonic entity was too much. As it had steadily consumed the planet and everything living on its surface, so it had absorbed the world’s energy and had become ever more potent, powered by everything it had killed.
It was fucking unstoppable.
The tentacle stretched again, then hollowed and became a tube-shaped sluice which allowed more of the Bleed to pour through. The pressure its liquid mass was under outside the vast forcefield was unimaginable, and it gushed through, spilling onto the forest floor whilst at the same time filling the air with bloody spray. In seconds, a huge swathe of green had been soaked with crimson gore. The blood began to run up the inside of the dome, defying gravity
