“So, where’re we going, Fearless Leader?” Fir said, squinting at the city as if it were itself the sun shining off every window.
“Just up the road,” she said, then pulled her phone from her pocket and poked at it unhappily.
Fir grunted, his tone in agreement with her expression. Decon looked at Wes, expecting a sympathetic confusion. Instead, Wes had his chin tucked down, eyes wide and level with the sloping of the street as if he could take in the detail of the whole horizon that way. He blinked at Decon in unsettling confirmation of his attentions.
“It’s not good ground.”
“Where do you guys learn this? Is there going to be a course?”
“Yes, and lucky for you it’s a practical, St. Francis,” Firmament said. “You remember really well the first time you get shot, if you’re lucky enough to get to fear the second time.”
“Jeez,” Decon said, shrugging up his coat. The hill had a definite sea breeze, and he pretended that was the chill he’d felt. “Is this one of those inevitabilities I was supposed to confront before signing that little paper, because I’d really prefer not to be shot at all.”
“I’ve never been shot, Decon,” Seth said, turning to give him a smile.
“Wait until they know you’re in charge,” Firmament replied. “Lamb was shot eight times.”
“Jeez!”
“Four of those were the same incident,” Wes said, like this would help. It helped Seth; Decon noticed the way her knit brows eased, a small smile passing over her face. He also noticed Fir gave Wes the sort of sharp glance that would have made Decon quail. Wes stared back.
“You hit the gunman with a car,” he added, a deferential admiration in his tone.
Fir grinned. “But it was hitting the other car that killed him. So saith the court.”
“Wait,” Decon said, trying to picture it with the current street as a visual aid. He mimed driving. Fir shook his head.
“You hit a guy by flinging a car at him so hard he hit another car?” Seth asked.
Fir’s response was to grin.
“The Pinto was in production about that time. It was a subcompact and weighed a little more than a ton. Part of the goal of its production was to get the weight under two thousand pounds,” Wes said, clearly pleased he could share something only vaguely tainted by horribleness.
“I hit him with some kinda Buick,” Firmament said. “Heaviest thing I’d lifted up to that point. Making today’s lesson: don’t shoot my friends.”
Decon pointed at himself hopefully, and Firmament grinned and slapped his shoulder.
“That’s pretty comforting,” Decon said, “but I’m still uncomfortable with that... uh, that you’ve killed someone?”
“Acquitted,” Fir said.
“You want to know something about being shot,” Seth said, light and smiling. All three looked at her. “It’s really easy to shoot someone standing still.”
She started walking. Fir started laughing then jogged after. Wes pointed to the position Decon should take and fell into step himself.
“Seriously, though,” Decon said. “Will there be a class or something?”
“I’ll teach you,” Wes said.
“Have you ever been shot?”
Wes’ mouth twitched in a tiny frown. “Once. Grazed.”
“Jeez.”
“Sawbuck says Daddy did it,” Fir said.
“Can you grip the ether with scar tissue?” Seth asked, glancing back at Fir – but even she could see the nervous doubt on his face, the way once hand had freed itself from his pocket to hover where he could clap it over his mouth.
“Actually, no,” Wes said, sounding terribly relieved he could answer positively. “A crip.”
Fir looked up, brows knit. “Hey, that was on the list. Aren’t you not supposed to call them that anymore?”
“That’s a gang, Firmament,” Seth said.
“Jesus, what a terrible gang name.”
“I don’t think it comes from the same word,” Decon said.
“They were around in your day, Firmament,” Wes said.
“Didn’t pay much attention to affiliations,” Fir said. “Mostly hit guys with cars.”
“At least you were awake,” Seth said. She pointed up the road. “That, there. The hat shop.”
“We’re meeting a mass murderer at a hat shop?” Fir said.
She grimaced. “...Yes.”
Fir looked back at Wes, who looked impassive, then at Decon, who at least shrugged.
“Okay.”
“I didn’t ask why,” she said, a defensive note to her voice.
“Because,” said a voice to their left. A man tipped back his newsboy, staring up at them through sunglasses from the chair by the door of the cafe they’d just passed. “It technically has the best vantage of the street. And I don’t communicate my exact location very often.”
He cleared his throat, set down his tiny cup of espresso on the window sill, and very carefully stood. “Please tell your ninja not to kill me.” He tipped his head to his right where, indeed, Wes had slid noiselessly against the cafe window and stood poised to send the man through it.
“Wes–” Seth began.
“Sorry,” Wes responded.
“–is going to stay where he is.”
“Oh.” Wes sidled back into position.
The man in the hat smiled – not confidently, but like he’d been punched. Like he’d been punched, and so gentle a caress was more than he deserved. And so, beyond the mass murder, Firmament developed an instant dislike for him.
“What time is it?” Seth asked.
“Six thirty-two,” the man replied.
“It never is,” Seth returned, as each nodded as if secret code greetings were like the cheerios in their bowls every morning. “All right. So you’re you and we’re... we.” Seth swept back her hair and recovered gracefully. “Team, this is Ian O’Connell. Mr. O’Connell, this is the Tenor Group.”
“Nice to meet you,” he said.
They all waited. Decon looked around at Firmament and Wes. Wes shrugged, still managing to look ready to knock Mr. O’Connell’s head off. No repartee, then.
“So,” Seth said, “do you have any idea who it is who’s after you?”
“Someone with a lot of guns,” he replied, crossing his arms with a shrug. “I suppose I should say, some people with a lot of guns.”
A pert frown crossed Seth’s face. “Do you have any idea why we’re here?”
His eyebrows poked up over the rims of his shades. “That’s a good question.”
“Don’t patronize us.”
He hunched over, resigned. “I’m not going to do anything to you that you don’t tell me to do.”
Seth raised a brow.
“That didn’t come out right,” he muttered, glancing up in apology. “I won’t do anything I’m not told... Jesus – what I mean is, I haven’t the foggiest – none of this directly concerns me except the bullets that’ve whizzed by occasionally. I don’t know who they are, and I don’t know what they’re after, beyond me, dead, and they don’t have the exclusive rights to that desire. I’ve hardly had a free moment even after they released me thanks to one thing or another – I don’t know what your Mr. Tenor did that put me on the list for warranting protection. Come to that, I don’t know how Mr. Tenor got involved at all. Nobody’s seemed to care much up until now whether I’ve been shot at or not. So asking me anything isn’t going to get you anywhere, and I can’t offer you anything but the opportunity to get shot protecting someone you probably shouldn’t get shot for.”
“Inspirational, that’s what you are,” Fir grumbled.
“I’m the villain of the piece,” O’Connell said, looking over the tops of his shades at Firmament. “Or I was. It’s my job not to be inspiring.”
“This is not satisfactory,” Seth said.
The way the man miserably re-arranged his hunched form made Decon wish the poor guy had a shell. He could tell, after all – sort of, if he were being really forward about it – that Seth meant more the situation, but O’Connell seemed to take it personally. Briefly, he wondered how someone convicted of participating in genocide could be so sensitive.
“I think maybe we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot,” Decon said, but when everyone looked at him, he had nothing further to offer.
“Yeah,” Fir said, looking at Decon. “It was probably all the killing-people-like-us you’ve been convicted of.”
Wes cleared his throat delicately. Firmament glanced at him, scowled slightly, then couldn’t seem to maintain it again a concessionary grin.
“Well. Never charged. So,” Firmament said, rubbing his hands together and looking around. “Is this a good neighborhood for Chinese?”
“No,” Wes said, and hardly before they had time to register how weird it was he’d answered–
“Duck.”
Firmament threw himself to the ground. Seth fell like water. Ian looked at Wes. Decon opened his mouth and issued an incredible cracking roar.
Wes’ foot at his hip shoved the man aside and the cafe window shattered with a shearing scream. Torso suddenly strewn across the threshold, Seth’s hands slapped on the pavement. The ground got so hot by Firmament’s face he thought the rocks might pop from the cement like kernals of corn. The two nearest city wastebins burst into sudden, virulent and roaring flame.
“Decon,” Wes muttered, standing inches from Decon’s face, but not touching. “Decon, Decon, Decon...”
Fir kicked Decon’s legs out from under him and Decon and Wes both fell to the ground – Wes, admittedly, more gracefully. A sound once, and then again, a terrible whistling and the world’s slowest jackhammer, tossing up bits of asphalt. Firmament dragged Decon bodily into the shelter of the car currently guarding him, whose windows shortly after exploded. Wes crawled, flat on the ground but disturbingly confident in his degree of shelter, at least to Decon.
“They didn’t send an assassin,” Seth shouted, and it took Decon the whole of the moment in which she threw herself across to where Ian cowered on the other side of the doorway, pushing him unceremoniously further into shelter to register that she was furious. They hadn’t sent an assassin!
“All the better to kill us with,” Fir shouted back. “What building?”
“Can’t tell,” Seth shouted, a small noise of distress escaping as another burst of bullets traveled up the sidewalk to drill into the wall of the cafe presumably at her back.
“Smoke,” Wes said, as his excuse. The two trashcans had begun with alarming swiftness to set up a thick screen of black and stinking smoke.
“Good one, Fearless Leader,” Fir said. “But I can’t crush a building without knowing it’ll do us some good.”
“You won’t crush any buildings,” Seth said, her voice oddly muffled thanks to everything that had assaulted their ears in the last few seconds.
Seconds! Decon thought. Had to be only seconds.
“We don’t know who’s in them and we won’t hurt anyone we don’t have to.”
“You realize that seriously hampers my effectiveness,” Fir shouted.
“Then be fucking useless instead, that’s much better,” Seth snapped back. Her next words, though, she said with mollifying evenness. “Do something flashy, Fir. Make them scared to shoot us. Wes, where do we put him.”
“Other side of the road,” Wes said, without hesitation. “But he won’t make it if they’re worth anything.”
“If it’s been who’s been after me up to now,” said Ian, “then they are. They’re just waiting to scare us out. They want me, they’ll take any of you, and they’re aiming for anyone they can get.”
“Why didn’t they just set a bomb?” Wes asked.
“They still want to be seen as if they’re trying for something. Bombs mean they’re going for anything. Makes ‘em terrorists,” he said. He’d made himself small, refusing even to check over the edge of the door the way Seth was. “You don’t want to be a terrorist.”
“All right,” Seth replied, her voice quiet and comforting.
“’S loud,” Decon finally said, as if the words were being pulled out of his chest as he cowered by Firmament’s side. He could smell sweat and burning trash and the strange gritty air of destroyed pavement. “Jesus, it’s so loud.”
“And the sirens will start any second,” Fir said, voice very calm in his ear. He tightened the arm over Decon’s shoulders, giving his chest a reassuring set of thumps. “And this is all very normal. This is all exactly as you would think it would happen, right, Decon? What would you expect from someone firing guns in the street?”
He waited, the reassuring thump of his hand on Decon’s chest matching the rhythm of his heartbeat – and the rhythm Decon’s flailing pulse should aim for. It took a long moment of silence between them for Decon to swallow and swallow again, and find his voice.
“Police indifference,” he said.
“You did grow up in the city,” Firmament said.
“Are we all here?” Seth asked, hearing Firmament’s laugh.
“St. Francis is with us, Fearless Leader. What do you want us to do?” Fir said.
“I don’t like the set-up. The manner of weapon on this side of the street speaks of backup. If they were after just killing O’Connell, they would have had a sniper waiting here. I think it’s an error because he apparently didn’t reveal his actual location. This will be an attempt to drive us somewhere else. I can see from here there’s and exit to an alley behind this shop – I suspect they mean to herd us there. We have to move, because no doubt they’re putting their people back into position to catch us out here in case we hunker down. Firmament, I need you to create some kind of cover. A debris field, a car, anything. Wes, I need you to scout – go down the street, the way we came, stay out of sight, try to warn us of anything trying to sneak up on us. Decon, I need you to stay behind Wes, and give yourself enough time to get to a car that can hold everyone. You’re going to break in and get us a means of escape. O’Connell, you stay with me. Clear?”
“Clear,” said Fir and Wes in disturbing unison.
“Seth,” said Decon. “I can get us in a vehicle...”
“If you’re about to say you can’t guarantee a hotwire, save it. Fir’s the only one who’s going to call you ‘Saint’.”
Well, he wasn’t going to say that exactly, but something about how they shouldn’t be stealing, but it was close enough a guess that Decon blushed. In the middle of getting shot at, all the screaming, sirens blaring their way towards them, he blushed. Firmament chuckled; Decon could feel it against his back as his chest moved.
“All right. Go.”
Wes was up and off before any of them had registered it, his steps silent as a cat’s – the gunfire that spat out after him wasn’t.
“Firmament.”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” he muttered, sliding out from behind Decon before he stood.
Seth had said ‘anything’ – afterward she would wish she’d been more specific.
Firmament planted his feet, heels firm just past the breadth of his shoulders. He looked at something; he’d never said he could see anything anyone else couldn’t, but his eyes fixed as if on something in the air, just past his reach. And his reach – filling his chest, tucking his chin, he threw his arms out like a falling man might seize a rope. There was no mistaking the effort, the strain of muscle and burn of skin, even with his baggy clothes and the air’s emptiness. One arm turned up, palm facing the sky, and the other on top, on some invisible line, both slowly dragging towards his chest as everything that was struggled against him.
Wes made for a good distraction, at first, but Seth had asked Firmament to make their enemies too scared to shoot. The gunfire died before they’d even had a chance to turn it on where Firmament stood. None of them, not even in the little outings Decon had taken him on, had seen a full scale application of Firmament’s power.
The street curled up like a wave sucked the water from a riverbed. A great sheet of black, the grinding, flaking asphalt simply rose in defiance of all of its nature, liquid as the tar that bound it but groaning and shedding chunks of itself like it shed its inflexibility. Firmament’s teeth gritted. Cars slid away like playing cards. The street rose and the bullets stopped in awe.
Mad at herself, Seth growled. “Let’s go.”
It took Decon more than a second to realize he was supposed to be in front of them. He had to tear his eyes away from it. He started to run, trailing sadly behind Seth and Ian.
A car. He was supposed to find a car. He started to scan the ones he could see for one that would hold them well enough. He got the idea that crossing the street wasn’t a good idea, though there was one there that would do. Another was just past the intersection between the hat shop and where the trolley left them – a small SUV.
There was a terrible noise, a groaning and crashing, and he had to remind himself – a car, a car, a car, that car – so he wouldn’t look back to see what Fir had done next. Though he could blame the way he froze up on how absorbed he was in his task, he doubted he would have known what to do anyway when he felt the air move oddly behind him. Something hot flashed past his side a moment after shards of glass pelted him. A body shoved by him, throwing him off balance, but he managed not to fall by directing his stumble towards a nearby car. His hands burned as they hit warm metal, the grazes from where he’d hit the sidewalk earlier embarrassing him with this second sting.
Through the corner of his eye, he could see a black tongue of asphalt dissolving – the great upheaval of road surface finally remembering its place and rebelling against its unnatural position by tumbling apart into a graceless field of self-destruction.
Before him, however, he saw something dark and swift. A form, almost human, among a group of people – people-looking people only holding a lot of guns. He heard noises he was certain were related to the street disobeying its nature, but some animal part of him recognized as the sound of the hunt – bone and blood, all too squishy to be concrete.
By the time Decon was looking, Wes had already taken down the first one – probably having surprised him as he ran out of the alley mouth. Wes was always talking about the advantages of surprise. The second was near to finished; Wes was putting the second between himself and the third in a way that suggested the second had little ability to resist. It seemed cruel, the way he crushed the second by throwing him over the knee of the third, then used them both as a vault, like a child climbing a jungle gym, to launch himself at the fourth. The way the third screamed couldn’t be good, nor was the wet way Wes’ hand rose from the third’s face and seized the fourth’s. Theirs was probably the most straightforward fight, but even Decon could tell that it wasn’t the meeting of two equal forces. The fourth thought fighting was something to do with fists and bones, and Wes thought it more a matter of eyes and skin.
One shot rang out through the whole of it, swallowing a terrible scream, right at the very end, almost as an afterthought. The bullet missed. Decon found himself thinking about the grace of an angel and the savagery of hell, but when Wes glanced back at him, checking his position, worried about the gunshot, it was all too easy for Decon to recognize his friend. A moment later, Wes looked nervously down the alley and started to sprint back to Decon.
At once, Decon was worried (more worried, he supposed). Something that had done that to four grown men shouldn’t be that concerned about what was following him. The way Wes instinctively threw hands behind his head as bullets began to whiz out of the alley mouth at him woke Decon up again.
“Please, Decon,” Wes said, calm though shouting, “Find a car.”
Decon turned away. There was a muffled squeal, like rubber against pavement, and then a roaring crash behind them, and laughter.
Neither Wes nor Decon looked back.
Seth had stopped up the road as the shot ran out, and now turned towards them. She walked cautiously, but still – she walked. Decon couldn’t conceive of anything less sensible than not running away from what was behind them, unless it was walking towards what was behind them.
“Wes,” she said, and seeming to receive instruction from her glance, Wes ran ahead to take over the escort of Ian. She, though in front of Decon, had fixed her eyes beyond him. It was not at the terrible destruction of the road, nor at its cloud of black confusion, or approaching architect (Decon could tell Fir was coming because his delighted laughter was getting louder), but at the alley mouth, and the impertinent mortals who had emerged therefrom.
Seth sent fire along channels. She had to feel along to something to properly burn it. After she passed Decon a terrible heat rose behind his back, its creation a sharp exhale against his ankles. It twisted and rose and behind him he could feel the speed at which it spread along the polluted street surface by the strength of the wind at his back. As if denying Decon’s sea breeze, it was warm as deepest southern summer.
People started screaming. It wasn’t the same screaming as the panic the bullets had caused. At least one of the screams was Firmament, growing ever nearer by the volume of it, saying “Gas tank, gas tank, Jesus-God girl, the gas tank.”
Something burst terribly, and the heat behind them got a lot worse.
Decon found his way to a black eco-friendly, bumper-stickered SUV. He put his hands to the door, hearing the footsteps of Wes and O’Connell, and from the other side, Firmament, as they approached.
In turn, the machinery was cool. It was ordered. He put his fingers to the door and felt for the lock mechanism, and it spoke sense to him. It was cold and settled. He felt small, but he always did, when he fixed his mind to tiny bits of metal, flashing thin wires – tiny things. What he would do was tiny; no rising street, no rolling car, no shaking flame. He let himself feel it for a moment, indulge in it, let it be the physical comfort it was to him. They would not know the difference between that indulgence and how long it took him normally to disassemble.
The screaming continued but seemed to be quieter. He could hear another set of steps approaching. The sirens had stopped, perhaps because there was no road that way.
The door popped open. Decon hit the button so the others would do the same. The team smiled at him – like all at once, as if he’d done the most amazing thing – trundled in, looked relieved. He waited.
Seth approached at a jog, occasionally glancing back where the street still smoked. Her eyes filled with the ever-shifting fire, only now, he understood it – or a part of it he hadn’t quite understood before. He could glance up in the rearview and see the same thing on Fir’s face. Something settled. Something cold.
Both satiated, for the time being, like a cat at its stretches.
Still, her glance was cool. She packed in next to Ian and grabbed the ceiling handle.
“Let’s go home,” she said.