Rhett opened his eyes one day a little over ten months after he’d first set foot on the Harbinger.
He was greeted by the same flat gray light and the same shush of the ocean as it seethed around the hull of the ship. Thunder grumbled from far off, like the sound of water gurgling down a sink drain. He was also greeted by the push, tugging at him, yanking impatiently at that invisible lasso.
Before he could even flip his feet out of bed, someone was banging on his door.
“You gettin’ it, mate?” Basil called from the other side.
“Yeah,” Rhett called back. “Be right out.”
He got out of his bunk and stared at himself in the mirror, the way he had that first morning. His clothes were now just shadows of their former selves, the plaid pattern faded out of his shirt, and the jeans, which had been blue denim, were now entirely black.
From behind him, there was the sound of water dripping against the floor. No, not just dripping—splashing. And he knew that when he turned around, there would be nothing there but the dry floor. He had never asked about the leak. Every time it might have come up in conversation, he missed his opportunity. It just didn’t seem like that big of a deal. Just another quirk of the ship.
When he opened the door, Basil and Mak were there, standing too close together, giving themselves away. Rhett noticed that as time went on, their caution had waned, giving way to something else, something that wasn’t quite reckless abandon but was pretty close. Either way, Rhett had kept his mouth shut about what he knew was going on between them, and he never mentioned to them that the captain knew, either.
“Took you long enough,” Mak said.
“Well I’m sure you guys had a head start,” Rhett shot back, smiling. Mak gave him a pissed-off look.
They hit the armory, where they met Theo and Treeny, and then the five of them followed the push through the quiet, mostly empty ship.
When they got to the room of doors, it was Rhett who stepped out in front of the group and closed his eyes. He had a particular knack for picking up on the push, and the others were happy to let him lead the way, waiting for him to mess it up. The new guy was still proving himself, even after ten months.
He let the push hum around him, plucking the unseen paths to the doors like guitar strings, trying to find the one that was most in tune. When he found it, he pointed it out, went to it, and opened it.
The room filled with a cacophony of blaring car horns and angry shouts. Through the door, Rhett could see headlights and wet asphalt and not much else. There was a dense fog that pushed up against the door. In fact, the fog actually started falling through the door into the Harbinger. But the push remained, and it would guide them to their soul, fog or no fog.
Rhett stepped through the door with the others close behind.
They came out onto the street. Rhett could barely hear himself think over the honking horns. The line of traffic stretched away in both directions, cars only visible by the pearlescent glow of their headlights in the fog. Farther up on the left, he could see warbling red lights. There was some kind of accident holding up traffic. That must have been their destination.
Rhett looked across the street, trying to get a read on where they were. But the fog was too dense to see more than a foot or so in front of him. He turned around. Maybe they had stepped out of a recognizable building or …
His mouth fell open. The door, which had a single word—MAINTENANCE—printed on it, was attached to a towering orange metal arch. The arch reached straight up into the fog, but lights of its own illuminated enough of the shape for Rhett to make it out. Dense cables swooped down and away from the arch, then swooped back up, connecting with another arch down the street, which he was quickly realizing wasn’t a street at all. Down the road, near the crash, the other orange arch dug into the cloudy air, splashing the fog with soft yellow light.
“We’re on the Golden Gate Bridge,” Rhett said, mostly to himself.
“Put that together, did ya?” Basil asked. “Don’t be such a bloody tourist, mate.”
It was hard not to be, though. Even with three-hundred-some-odd days of soul-gathering under his belt, Rhett was still amazed every time they turned up in a new place. They had been to San Francisco before, but never like this. The last time had been for a stabbing victim in the Tenderloin. Not exactly an exciting encounter with the city.
But the bridge, in the early hours of the morning, with the fog rolling in across the bay, smothering everything except for a smattering of out-of-focus lights, was one of the most beautiful things Rhett had ever seen. He wished he could stay and admire it, but the push wasn’t going to allow that.
And neither was Mak, who was snapping her fingers at him.
“You awake over there?” she said, putting as much snark into her voice as she could.
Rhett, Theo, and Treeny followed Mak and Basil down the side of the bridge, with the railing ticking by on their left and the traffic beeping and snarling on their right. As they went, the fog began to recede ever so slightly, exposing a little more of the bridge and the cars that were stretched out across it but not much else. Rhett could see the emptiness beyond the railing, where there was only the drop into the water.
There was an ambulance ahead, its lights dancing off the fog, looking like fire and smoke from a distance. Near the ambulance was a tangle of metal and leather that might have once been a car, but it was hard to tell now. The image jarred Rhett out of his sightseeing. The car wrecks were the hardest for him.
The mangled car looked like it might have been a Mercedes, maybe a BMW. It was something luxurious, either way. Gnarled twists of glossy black finish and shreds of tan leather circled each other in a gruesome dance of destruction.
As they got closer, Rhett overheard a conversation between two paramedics—something about how the car had been going over a hundred miles an hour. And once they were closer still, Rhett could make out the blood that was coating some of the jagged points of metal. He followed the blood, finding the places where there seemed to be more of it, until he found an arm dangling from the wreckage. It was pale, with small fingers and manicured nails. There was a diamond the size of a small asteroid on the ring finger. Wrapped up in all that carnage was a woman clinging to life.
Basil and Mak got there first, and Mak was looking for a way to get to the woman. Around the car, there were probably a dozen paramedics and cops but no firefighters. If anybody was going to save the woman, it would be them. But there was no fire truck in sight.
Then, from way off at the other end of the bridge, as if in response to Rhett’s thought, there was the sound of an angry, nasally horn. The fire truck was trapped at the other end of the bridge, caught in traffic with everybody else. There was no way this woman was escaping her vehicle without them.
Rhett took up his position, standing near the smoking wad of expensive steel, fingering the knuckle blade at his hip, sensing Treeny and Theo and Basil completing the perimeter behind him. He had yet to see anything out of the ordinary, but on a morning like this, with darkness and fog and chaos surrounding them, putting up their guard was the best thing they could do.
Mak was saying something. It sounded like “… can’t even get to her…” But Rhett wasn’t sure. There was a lot of noise. More honking from cars that were inching past the wreck, angry yelling from farther down the bridge, and the fire truck blasting its horn, trying desperately to get through.
He glanced over his shoulder. Mak was climbing on top of the mangled hulk, peering down through what used to be a window. And then Mak was climbing down inside the car, squeezing her narrow, muscular figure through the chewed-up gaps.
“Mak!” Rhett called. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” He was practically screaming to be heard over the din, and he wasn’t sure she heard him even then. On the other side of the wreck, Basil made eye contact. His face was concerned now. Apparently Rhett wasn’t the only one with a bad feeling.
He watched Mak disappear into the carnage. She was out of sight.
Traffic crawled past them, horns screaming to be heard. Slowly, one by one, the dim glow of headlights turned into actual beams that were attached to vehicles morphing out of the fog. Drivers were hanging out of their windows, hollering at one another as everyone tried to squeeze by the wreck. The fire truck horn sounded out of the void, over and over, wailing like a banshee.
Rhett squinted against the darkness and the fog and the lights filling up the fog, trying to see if the fire truck was getting any closer, in some weird way hoping that it would. He knew it was already too late—the push was enough to assure him of that—but at least then no one would be able to say that it had been hopeless, that a few hundred commuters were too impatient and frustrated to give the fire truck enough room to pass, to give it a fair shot.
The horns rang out like an overture of panic. But somewhere in there, Rhett thought he could hear something else …
A roar?
An actual scream?
Whatever it was, it didn’t sound like it was coming from a machine. It sounded like an animal, something predatory. Something hungry.
Down at the far end of the bridge, where the fire truck was making its desperate crawl toward the wreck, Rhett could see dark shapes. Tall shapes. Shapes that appeared to be climbing the cables of the bridge and moving across the roofs of the gridlocked cars.
All at once, the angry horns and irritated yells started to die down, and there was a sense of movement coming down the bridge, a wave of chaos.
“Oh my God,” Basil said, and Rhett heard him clearly now. “Mak, get your ass out of there! Now!”
But Mak was already midgathering. Rhett could hear her murmuring the words from inside the crumpled car. I will guide you to the clearing.
“Basil…?” Rhett started to ask. But after a moment, there was no need. They came out of the fog like phantoms, tall and shadowy, grinning like madmen.
Psychons.
Rhett had never seen one. In his months as a syllektor, the worst-case scenario—the thing that all syllektors armed themselves against—had never happened. He had only heard the stories that Basil and Theo told. These were the things that inspired nightmares of skeletons clothed in shadows.
The real thing was so, so much worse.
They were at least twice as big as a normal person, towering over most of the vehicles. The ones that were scaling the structural parts of the bridge looked like giant birds of prey, preparing to swoop down and collect their kills. The psychons were fleshless, arms and legs sinewy with muscle and cartilage, their hands and fingers made of knobby bones that were hooked into claws. Their faces were mostly bare skulls with a few ribbons of connective tissue strung here and there—up their necks, between the two halves of their jaws, deep down in their sunken, cave-like eye sockets, where beady white eyeballs looked out, vacant, starving. They wore cloaks that were tattered, hanging about their grotesque bodies the way algae hangs on to old shipwrecks, in ragged, fluttering tufts. The cloaks came up over their heads, forming hoods that did little to mask the awfulness of their faces.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Basil spat, and ran up to where Rhett stood. The two of them and Theo and Treeny formed a line in front of the car wreck, where Mak was still inside, gathering the soul of the driver. “Mak! Hurry it the hell up!” Basil reached over his shoulders and came back with a scythe in each hand. He did his drumstick spin with them. Theo, grinning, removed his battle-ax from its place across his back. And Treeny, trembling, fanned out a handful of her knives. Rhett gripped his knuckle blade, slipped it from its holster.
“How did they find us?” Treeny whimpered.
“I count six, boss,” Theo said. Technically, the “boss” was Mak. But he was speaking to Basil.
“Keep it together, Treeny,” Basil said. “You too, mate.” That last part was directed at Rhett, who was doing his best to process what he was seeing. The monsters, the soul-eaters. They were actually there in front of him.
“I’m good,” Rhett said. “I’m good.” He was repeating it mostly for his own comfort.
“Two of them are going up the cables, Theo,” Basil said. “They’re going to try and come down on top of the car. Make sure they don’t. Treeny, Rhett, and I will go after the others. Everyone try to divert them from Mak.”
“She should be done by now,” Rhett said.
“She’s stuck,” Basil replied quietly. “She’s got to be stuck.”
The psychons moved in, four of them on the road, weaving around some cars, going over others, all with unsuspecting drivers behind the wheels, drivers who knew nothing of the fight that was about to break out between two factions of the dead. The other two were slinking up the cables of the bridge. They were moving faster now, closing in, their torn cloaks billowing limply behind them. One of them opened its mouth and a peal of vicious noise escaped it, something like a roar and a scream combined, the noise a beast makes right before chomping into its freshly hunted meal.
“Here they come!” Basil called, glancing one last time over his shoulder, the hope in his eyes that Mak would be there. She wasn’t.
All six of the psychons cried out, and all six of them rushed forward, their skeletal claws splayed and their mouths spilling some kind of white goop. They were salivating.
Theo took off first and leaped into the air. He caught one of the bridge cables, where a psychon was clawing its way toward the car wreck. For a second, Theo just hung there by one hand, massive feet dangling above the sidewalk and the protective railing. Then he swung his other arm, the one with the ax held at the end of it, and sliced through the cable with a single blow. The whole bridge jerked as the disconnected cable sprung back, colliding with another cable, the one with the other psychon on it. The cable swung through the air and came down on top of the still-unmoving traffic, smashing several cars. Drivers screamed and abandoned their vehicles. To them, a support cable had just inexplicably snapped, possibly as a result of the car crash. The paramedics and cops were running, too, staring up at the bridge cables, preparing for more to come down on top of them. Everyone scattered, fleeing into the dense fog.
The two psychons that had been climbing the bridge plummeted back down. One of them smacked into the asphalt and lay still for a second, then jerked back up, looking angrier than ever. The other one dropped down on the other side of the railing and disappeared, its roar fading rapidly.
Theo landed on his feet, swung his battle-ax around, and went back for more, running at the psychon that had fallen back onto the bridge.
After that, there was no more time to react.
Basil took off sprinting, head down, toward the oncoming psychons on the road. Treeny took a hesitant step back, then gripped the knives in both of her hands and held her ground, waiting for one of them to come to her. There was a fire in her eyes that Rhett had never seen before. He was impressed.
Rhett had a split second before one of the psychons, its eyes homed in on him, cutting through him like lasers, was on top of him. He took that split second to give one more look over his shoulder at the pulverized Mercedes—or whatever it was. The woman’s arm still hung limp and pale out of the mess, her ring winking at him with the glow from the headlights.
Then the second was up, and suddenly Rhett was upside down, the psychon’s skeleton claw wrapped around one of his legs. The bridge, still mostly obscured by the fog, flipped around in his vision like a pancake. Rhett hung tight to his weapon for as long as he could, with the psychon flinging him around like a human tassel, until the velocity became too much and the blade slipped from his grip. He saw it flip away into the fog.
Rhett tried to kick out of the psychon’s claw. He snapped his feet out, pushing and squirming as the world spun around him in a whirlwind of lights. At one point, his face passed right above the pavement, his vision filling up with the black rock and yellow lines.
Then he was looking at the psychon itself, right in the face. But it was shrinking, getting smaller by the second, and Rhett’s feet were no longer caught in its grip. The psychon had thrown him.
He smashed into the side of a car, crumpling the door with a metallic crunch. Glass from the shattered window rained down on him. He slumped to the ground, with his back against the severely dented car and his legs stretched out in front of him, one of his pant legs torn and the ankle beneath it gouged. There was very little blood, but Rhett could see the pink muscles, sliced and splayed open, exposing part of the bone.
Something wet plopped into his lap. It was thick and mucus-y. A string of it glistened in front of him, still caught between the glob on his pants and its source. Rhett followed the string up and saw the ugly, grinning face of another psychon perched on top of the car, looking down at him.
“Shit, shit, shit,” he murmured, echoing Basil.
There was one above and one across the bridge from him, and Rhett had no weapon to speak of. The one that was across from him, the one that had tossed him like last week’s garbage, took a menacing step toward him. At the same time, he heard the one on the car growl above his head, not in a hungry way—they didn’t want to eat him, after all, they just wanted to get him out of their way, probably in the most violent manner possible.
Rhett tested his legs, pulling them toward him. The one that had been massacred was the right one, and while the left one curled up with no problem, the right one stayed where it was. He couldn’t feel any of the pain and wouldn’t dare force his senses to feel it. But the leg was no good now. Even if he wanted to make a run for it, he couldn’t.
The psychon that stood facing Rhett took two or three more steps in his direction. Meanwhile, farther down the bridge, it looked like Basil had taken the arm off another one, but they were still circling each other, the psychon down an arm and pissed, Basil spinning his scythes cockily, ready to remove more appendages.
Theo was beating one of the monsters with his bare hands, his ax either lost or forgotten. And Treeny was fending one off from inside the backseat of a now-ruined sedan, the psychon clawing at the outside, popping in windows, shrieking in frustration while Treeny kicked at it with her feet and swiped at it with one of her knives.
When Rhett brought his attention back to his own shitstorm, the psychon that had thrown him was still closing the distance between them. And the one above him was crawling down the side of the car, its face unsettlingly close, its cloak hanging down around its pointed cheek bones, drowning most of its features in shadow. Its eyes were still bright, though, staring out of that darkness with raw intensity.
The lights began to flicker. All of them. Even the headlights on the cars. They stuttered on and off in random patterns. The shroud of fog that still hung about the bridge looked like it was performing some sort of light show, the golden sparks dancing around inside it. All up and down the bridge, the lights were seizing, creating a war between the darkness and the light.
The psychons were messing with the lights somehow. Or maybe when Theo cut that cable, something else snapped, causing an electrical malfunction. But that didn’t explain the headlights.
And when Rhett glanced back up at the psychon that had been slinking toward him from on top of the car, it was retreating slightly, hesitating. It looked around at the flickering lights, obviously just as confused as Rhett was.
Rhett could still hear the grunts and clangs and angry yells coming from the other three, but they had to be seeing this, too. He looked back down the bridge for them. What caught his eye, though, wasn’t their ongoing fights but a wave of darkness that was passing over the bridge. Where the lights at this end were still sputtering and dancing, the ones at that end were going out completely, the fog making it that much more difficult to see.
The shadow rolled toward him.
It fell over Basil and Theo and Treeny and the other psychons, squashing them into blackness, seeming to take the sound of their battles with them. Rhett made eye contact with the psychon standing in front of him. Those bright little eyes were still angry, but now there was something else. Could it be fear? Rhett was sure that it was. And that made him terrified.
Then the lights went out around him. There was an audible click as they did. And darkness descended. The psychons were somewhere in that black abyss, but he couldn’t hear them, couldn’t hear anything. The rest of the lights across the bridge went out. The dark was complete, impenetrable. Not even the lights from the city were making it through the fog.
Rhett waited. The killing—or, he supposed, the ghosting—blow would be coming. If there was anything that was going to work to the psychons’ advantage, it was this.
Time stretched out. He didn’t know what to do. He was about to try to get to his feet (or at least to his one good foot) when a handful of the lights snapped back on.
Only a few of them came back to life—some of the headlights, a smattering of the bulbs high up on the bridge’s arches. It was enough light to see by, but most of the bridge was still obscured by darkness.
And when the light returned, everybody was gone. There were no psychons, no Basil, no Treeny, no Theo. No drivers who had abandoned their vehicles when the support cable broke. Rhett couldn’t see anybody … except for the girl standing right in front of him.
Only, she wasn’t a girl. Rhett knew that from the start.
She was standing only a few inches away from the soles of his shoes. She was maybe a couple of inches shorter than he was, but from this angle she seemed to tower over him. Her skin was pale, sketched with blue and purple veins that warbled down her arms and legs. The only thing she was wearing was a ratty hospital gown, faded by time—eons of it, probably—and hanging loosely around her. Her neck was ridged, corded and straining, but the face was soft in an intimidating sort of way, like she had nothing to lose. There was dark hair that hung down to her shoulders in knotted clumps. And her eyes … her eyes. They were entirely black except for tiny white pinpricks for pupils, like distant suns in a vast wasteland of space. Those little white dots stared into Rhett, stabbing into his severely exposed soul. He recognized that stare somehow and pushed himself back against the car, wishing he could go through it, trying to get away from her penetrating eyes.
She was also sopping wet. From head to toe. The water dripped down along her arms and came off the hospital gown in fat drops. It splashed to the ground around her feet, making sharp, wet pecking sounds against the asphalt. It was just dripping water, but Rhett knew it was the same as what he’d heard aboard the Harbinger, alone in his quarters, all those times that he’d chalked it up to a leaky pipe. This girl, this thing, had come to see him before.
Rhett opened his mouth but found no words there. His throat was empty. All the reserve energy he had was now dedicated to fear, a thrumming, panicking knot of it that was locked inside his mind.
He didn’t need to speak, anyway. The girl, still staring at him—into him—opened her own mouth. And when she spoke, her voice was cataclysmic. It was a gentle young girl’s voice but surrounded by others. Not one voice, but a thousand. Like the whispers that came out of the tank in the steam room when the door was open, only amplified—shouting instead of murmuring. It dove into Rhett’s mind, flooded all his channels of thought, pulverized his memories, overtook every picture and word and sound. If she spoke for too long, he would surely go insane from it.
“I am the speaker of languages. You are the keeper of souls. The decider of fates. The Twice-Born Son. If you do not heed me, I will obliterate you. If you do not abide, if you choose to act in dignity and courage instead, then the souls of your parents will be forever lost. These are your last days, Soul Keeper. Find your power. Then I will come for it. I will come for you. Know this—if you fight me, you will fall.”
She stopped speaking, and in the haze of his disorientation, Rhett caught sight of the overturned car behind her. It reminded him so much of the car he’d been driving the night he and his parents died, the way it was crushed, the way it had flipped so easily under the force of someone’s carelessness. And yet, staring at the girl-thing on the road, surrounded by the carnage of ruined vehicles, he questioned whether it was carelessness at all …
Before he could follow that thought, the few lights that had come back on went out again, blotting out the world. Rhett was left in the shadows, in delicious silence, the memory of her voice echoing through his head, threatening to send him into madness. He could still see those eyes. The sheer black emptiness of them, with just those little white holes for pupils. The only light that seemed to exist within her—within it—existed in those holes.
The lights began to flicker again, all of them this time. The yellow and white glow stuttered up and down the bridge for a moment, until the lights came back on in full, illuminating the fog and the road and the towering orange structures of the arches.
The psychons that had surrounded Rhett before the blackout were back, one above and one across from him, and when they saw him again, they dove. Their claws were splayed, their boney mouths hung open in mock laughter.
Rhett didn’t think, just reacted. He fell to his side, letting his bum leg fall limp while he kicked up with the good one. His foot connected with the jaw of the psychon that had been reaching down for him. The bottom half of the jaw broke off with a sickening crunch and went spinning into the white curtain of fog. Whimpering, the thing fell to the ground beside the car and squirmed there.
The other one was coming for him, its fearsome gait turning into a trot, then a run. Rhett had one option, and that was to keep kicking. He turned himself into position, his mutilated right leg dragging across the asphalt. He tried to imagine what the pain would be like if he could actually feel it, but couldn’t. He assumed it would have been astounding.
The psychon was sprinting toward him now, weaving around some of the unmoving cars, vaulting over the tops of a few. Rhett braced himself for the impact, staring deep into the monster’s shiny-slick throat.
But there was no impact. The psychon stopped short, skidding to a halt at almost the exact spot where the girl-creature had appeared. It had its head cocked, listening to something. After a few seconds it took a step back, its tiny, buglike eyes boring into Rhett with a knowing glare, a look that seemed to say it would have its chance at ripping Rhett apart soon enough.
Rhett heard something else then, too, coming from the belly of the wrecked car, the thing that had drawn them all here in the first place. It was Mak.
“Hey!” she cried. “Hey assholes! What the hell is going on? I’m stuck! Caught on … something!” She grunted, and there was the sound of something metallic being punched or kicked.
The psychon turned toward the sound, eyeing the wreck, its thick saliva oozing through the gaps in its ever-smiling teeth. It was the soul the psychons had come for. And now the soul was inside Mak.
In some far-off reality that existed only in his peripheral vision, Rhett was aware of Theo and Basil dispatching the psychons they had been fighting. Theo finished pummeling his with his fists, leaving a bruised, scraped, dented mound of gross muscle and bone, veiled slightly by its tattered cloak. Basil had left behind a pile of detached limbs, all dripping some sort of black sludge that must have been the psychon’s blood.
In the span of a few brief moments, Theo moved on to the psychon that was still going after Treeny. He hopped onto the roof of the car that she was in, ax now somehow returned to his hand, and leveled it at the psychon. It quit lashing at the vehicle and made a bizarre sound, a sound that was full of pleasure, as if to say, Bring it on. Then it leaped at Theo, and the pair fell backward together, vanishing behind the car.
The psychon that had made a run at Rhett stormed toward the original car wreck, where Mak was still trapped. Basil caught sight of this and made a noise that Rhett had never heard before. It was somewhere between a howl and a battle cry. He ran at the psychon but wasn’t fast enough. It jumped high into the air, bounding over two lanes of traffic at once, and landed next to the smashed, overturned vehicle that Mak was still battling to escape. It took hold of the wreck with both of its powerful hands and tossed the entire thing.
The whole balled-up mess flipped through the air. Rhett caught sight of the lifeless arm that still jutted from the confusion of metal and leather and glass. It wobbled from side to side as the car rolled through the air, and it reminded Rhett of his own body, how it had seemed to almost wave good-bye to him back on the highway in New York.
With a booming crunch, the car crashed onto the sidewalk and the railing at the edge of the bridge. The railing gave way, breaking off the concrete and bending down into a mangled curve. The car scraped and skidded, one end edging out over the drop to the bay waters. It teetered dangerously. Metal groaned and bits of concrete came crumbling off the smashed sidewalk.
The psychon leaped again and landed near the destruction. But Basil was there to meet it. He had run full force toward the car when it came down and now was barreling toward the psychon. Rhett could see what was about to happen, and from his place on the ground, leg useless, all he could do was scream.
“Basil, NO!”
Basil collided with the psychon and sunk the curving blades of his twin scythes into the creature’s body. It shrieked, falling backward under the force of Basil’s tackle. Basil held on tight as the two of them, a tangle of skeleton limbs and dark clothes and flailing legs, went careening over the side of the bridge. They plummeted into darkness, with the fog quickly dampening the sound of the psychon’s screams.
There were only two psychons left now—the one whose jaw Rhett had broken, who was still on the ground nearby, whining and wheezing, clutching at its reduced face, and the one that Theo was still working on. Rhett could hear them brawling behind the car that Treeny had been hiding in. Treeny herself was nowhere in sight.
From the tottering wreck hanging over the side of the bridge came Mak’s voice: “Someone get me out of here!”
Rhett looked around, hoping Treeny would show herself and at least go help Mak. He was surprised to find that he didn’t care if they all left him here as long as Mak got back to the Harbinger with that woman’s soul still intact.
Treeny wasn’t there. Maybe she was helping Theo, but Rhett didn’t think so. Wherever she was, she was scared, and he hoped she was okay, almost as much as he hoped—willed—for Basil to be okay. But they were about to be down two team members instead of one if someone didn’t help Mak.
Ignoring the writhing beast beside him, Rhett gripped the opening in the car he was leaning against, where the window had been. He pulled, heaving himself up and putting all his weight on his good leg. He attempted to distribute some of the pressure to the right one, but he nearly collapsed. The leg would take no weight.
So, using the stopped cars as leverage, Rhett hopped his way back across the bridge. He leaned on hoods and clung to side-view mirrors. What he would have given for a damn crutch.
As he made his slow way across the road, he glanced over to where Theo had taken on the other psychon. They were rolling around on the pavement together, Theo throwing punches and the psychon slashing at his face in return. Theo’s face was purple with blooming bruises and covered in angry red claw marks. His ax was buried in the passenger door of a nearby Honda. Rhett wanted to help him. But there was no time—not with only one good leg.
He kept going for Mak.
Finally, after the most cumbersome walk he’d ever taken, Rhett made it to where the car—which was about to be Mak’s tomb—sat half on and half off the bridge. He heard Mak screaming in frustration. There were also sounds of her beating and kicking and squirming inside. The car groaned and seemed to tilt slightly toward the drop.
“Hey!” Rhett called. “Mak, stop! You’ll send the whole thing over the edge!”
“Rhett?” she yelled back. “What’s going on? Where are the psychons? Where’s Basil?” Her voice sounded almost frantic at the end.
Rhett peered over what remained of the railing at this section, staring down into the fog-covered black. There was no sign of any movement.
“The psychons are mostly taken care of,” he said, loud enough for her to hear. “Basil is … gone.”
“Don’t you tell me that!” she screamed. “Get me out of here, goddamn it!” She was flailing again, attacking whatever it was that had her trapped. The car really did tip this time. With a stuttering, metallic groan, it tilted like a seesaw toward the water.
Rhett stood on one foot and stuck his hands into a crease in the metal of the car. He pulled. The car tipped back onto the bridge and nearly crushed the only useable foot Rhett had left. He used that foot to haul himself up to the part of the vehicle that was once the passenger’s side but was now the top. He crawled across the length of it, to the warped passenger window. When he looked down inside, he could see Mak, wedged between a shredded leather seat and a jagged shard of metal that had come out of the dashboard and was pointing right at her, aimed like a knife at her rib cage, at her heart. If she moved the wrong way, if that torn piece of metal happened to stab into her …
There’s only one way to destroy a syllektor, Captain Trier had said.
“Lean up against the seat,” Rhett said. Mak looked up at him, startled. She gave him a skeptical look. “Just do it! Suck everything in!”
She took a deep breath and pushed herself as far up against the seat behind her as she could. When she did, Rhett could see behind her, could see an expensive purse and the keys dangling out of the ignition and the lower half of the woman who had died in the crash, her body white. Beneath him, Rhett felt the car leaning back toward the bay again. He took his shot.
Sitting back, letting his injured leg dangle over the front of the car, over the fog and the water below, Rhett stuck his good leg through the window and kicked down as hard as he could. His foot connected with the sharp, angled chunk of car that had blocked Mak’s escape. It bent downward, giving her just enough room to pull herself out.
Except she wasn’t going to be able to pull herself out. The car was slipping down toward the bay. Metal scraped across metal. Rhett yanked his leg out and reached back in with his arm. He felt Mak grab on to it. He pulled up with all he had, lifting her up and out. He had Mak in his arms without even having to think about it. They rolled together, off the back end of the car, and slammed onto hard concrete. There was one last metallic shriek as the car slid over the broken edge of the bridge … and then heavy silence, the car rocketing down into the black water.
Rhett and Mak lay side by side, staring up through the fog, which was beginning to thin out, at a sky of disappearing stars. The sun was rising as the spinning world finally came to a stop around them.
Mak sat up first. She looked around at the aftermath of the battle. Her eyes settled on something and got wide. Rhett sat up and followed her gaze.
It was the psychon with the broken jaw. The jaw was growing back, bone emerging out of the taut muscles of its throat with an ugly squelching sound, like shoes in mud. The psychon was doubled over, clawing at its own face. The process of growing back missing body parts was obviously painful.
“You didn’t kill it?” Mak hissed. Her hand crept over her shoulder, finding the handle of her machete.
“I … thought it was injured,” Rhett whispered back.
“We have to run now,” Mak said, slipping the machete out of its sheath and slowly pushing herself up onto her haunches. She never took her eyes off the psychon. “Can you run?”
“I can try. But why? Can’t we just fight it? There’s only one of them and two of us.”
Mak tapped her chest, not taking her eyes off the psychon, and Rhett understood. She had the soul. The psychon wouldn’t stop until it had its meal.
“Get ready to run. NOW!”
She was up in a second, reaching down and yanking Rhett up with her. Any harder and he would have been down an arm, too. They ran together between the lanes of cars, heading toward the city. Rhett moved as fast as he could, using the cars as support again. His right leg still wouldn’t take any weight, but he forced it to at least stay up and out of his way.
Ahead, Rhett could see Theo and the other psychon on top of a car farther down from where they had previously been. Their fight had gotten much worse, and both sides looked beat to hell. Rhett watched as Mak approached the car from the front, hopped up onto the hood with one stride of her long legs, and sliced through the psychon’s middle. Its two halves went tumbling over the side, smacking onto the road and staying there.
From behind them, the last psychon let out an angry, agonized scream that rattled the cables of the bridge. A couple of car alarms started going off. There was a crash and crunch of metal behind him, but Rhett didn’t dare look back. He focused on Mak and Theo in front of him, focused on hopping after them with as much speed as he could muster out of his numb muscles. He was moving, gaining momentum … and then he was facedown on the asphalt. He had tripped over something.
Looking back, Rhett flipped over and saw an arm sticking out from under one of the cars. It was pale and dotted with freckles, quivering. Treeny.
Rhett clambered over to where her arm was. He glanced up, hoping not to see the psychon charging at him. There was nothing there. The thing was after Mak now, and it was Mak it was going to chase.
Underneath the car, Treeny was shaking, staring with wide, wet eyes, her glasses close to falling off her face. She was letting her senses through, or maybe she couldn’t help it. Rhett put his hand out for her.
“Come on,” he said. “Treeny, we have to go. I’m right here with you. You just have to take my hand.” She shook her head. Rhett groaned. “Treeny, I’m not going to leave you here, okay? I won’t. You have to come with me!”
“It won’t be safe,” she whimpered.
“It will be safe. I promise. Just take my hand.”
She hesitated for another second, then reached out and took Rhett’s hand. He helped her out from under the car, and together they sped down the bridge, using each other as support.
There was a roar from above. Rhett looked up and saw the dim shadow of the psychon racing across the uppermost cable that swooped down to the end of the bridge, right where Mak and Theo were running far up ahead. Rhett hobbled faster, leaning on Treeny for support. He could tell she was struggling, but she didn’t say anything. They pushed on, closing the distance between themselves and the other two.
They passed the fire truck, with its lights still warbling. There was no horn now. And the truck was empty. Everyone must have evacuated the bridge when the cable broke, apparently not wanting to stick around to see if the bridge would hold.
Up ahead, Mak had stopped running and was looking into the windows of cars, cupping her hands around her eyes. Theo was behind her, eyes locked on the psychon that was rapidly descending toward them.
The sun was rising, casting a blue glow across the bay and the bridge. It was going to break over the horizon soon, and there was a silly part of Rhett that hoped the psychon would burst into a cloud of ash when it did. He didn’t think he would get that lucky, though.
Mak found what she was looking for, shouting “Ah-ha!” when she did, and yanked open the driver’s-side door of a big SUV. “Get in!” she yelled at Theo and Rhett and Treeny.
Rhett and Treeny were neck and neck with the psychon as it moved down the cable, preparing itself to lunge at the SUV. They rounded the other side of the car, hearing the engine turn over as they went. Treeny pulled open the backseat door on one side while Theo opened it on the other. They jumped inside together. Rhett hopped into the passenger seat. In some recessed part of his mind, he realized that this was the first time he’d been in a car since his own accident.
He pulled the door shut and said to Mak, “Can you drive this thing?”
She eyed his mangled leg. “Can you?” she said.
The psychon smashed onto the roof then, crushing most of it in on top of them, digging its claws into the metal. One talon stopped just short of gouging Rhett’s eyeball.
“Go, go, go!” he yelled.
Mak threw the car in reverse and slammed on the gas. The tires spun and screeched and protested, spewing smoke. But they found purchase. The car launched backward. The psychon fell over, crashing onto the hood and rolling off onto the street.
There was only one car behind theirs, and Mak swerved the SUV around it, squeezing between two lanes with a shower of sparks and a squawk of collapsing metal. Once they had backed off the bridge, Mak swung the car around, put it in drive, and pushed the pedal down to the floor.
They screeched away, zigzagging between other cars, narrowly missing pedestrians who were still clustered near the bay, watching to see if the bridge was going to collapse. Mak avoided streets that looked crowded with morning commuters, and Rhett kept checking the rearview mirror, trying to see if the psychon had followed them. But there was no sign of it.
He glanced over at Mak. She stared ahead, face blank, betraying nothing of whatever torment was going on inside her.
Basil was missing. They’d all just gotten their asses handed to them by a pack of monstrous beings. And the soul of the dead woman was still inside Mak. They had no way of knowing if there would be more psychons coming after it, especially with one of them left alive.
That was Rhett’s fault, along with the fact that he’d lost his knuckle blade back there. He thought of something else. He shifted in his seat so he could look back at Treeny. Theo was holding her hand, tilting his head so he could fit under the crushed-in roof. His face was a disaster of scratches and bruises, but he was watching Rhett, waiting for what he had to say, ready to keep fighting if he had to. Rhett suddenly had a newfound respect for the big lug.
“Treeny, do you have your tablet?” he asked.
She waited a moment before shaking her head. “I lost it back there,” she said.
“Shouldn’t we go back and get it? I mean, what if one of those things gets a hold of it?”
“It’ll destroy itself,” Mak said quietly. “And even if it didn’t, the psychons aren’t smart enough to figure out how to use it. Right now we just need to find a way back to the Harbinger.”
“What about Basil?” Rhett protested.
“You said it yourself.” Her eyes shifted just slightly. “He’s gone.”
They drove on, the city scrolling by around them. Rhett didn’t have time to admire it. His thoughts were back on the Golden Gate, with Basil, with the psychons, with the thing that looked like a girl but was clearly something else. These are your last days, she had said. Find your power. Then I will come for it. For you.
* * *
Even without her tablet, Treeny knew where a door that led back to the Harbinger would be. It was one the team had used on a previous outing to San Francisco not long before Rhett had arrived.
They dumped the car where Treeny directed, in a tiny lot on the corner of Mission Street and Eighth. Rhett wondered briefly about what it must have looked like to see a big SUV driving itself. But nobody seemed to notice. The major news, according to the TV that hung just inside the window of a corner deli, was the cable break on the bridge and the damage that was done to hundreds of vehicles (including the one that had inexplicably fallen into the bay). They kept saying it was an earthquake, lacking any better explanation for what had happened.
After they left the car behind, it was slow going for Rhett. He hobbled along in the comforting brilliance of daylight with Theo’s arm around him. It almost would have been better if he could feel the pain of his injury. At least then he wouldn’t have felt so pathetic.
Treeny led them a block or so up to an abandoned laundromat. The windows were dusty and edged with cobwebs. There was a crooked CLOSED sign that hung against the inside of the door. Through the grimy windows Rhett could see an expanse of dirty blue and white linoleum, broken occasionally by weedy nests of electrical cords and tunnels of vacant pipe that jutted out of the floor and walls.
“This is the place,” Treeny said. “Remember, Mak?” Her tone was fraught with sweet, ignorant innocence, like a child looking for the pride of their parents.
Mak nodded. “Yeah. We go inside, right?”
“Yes. It’s the supply closet.”
Mak pulled the door, and even though Rhett expected it to be locked tight, it opened just as smoothly as if the place had never been closed. Rhett had another one of those mind-warping moments of debate with himself, considering the idea that the door wasn’t actually opening at all, that when Mak stepped inside the laundromat, she was passing through the door in a splash of ghostly mist. He preferred the alternative reality, where things appeared as they should.
The four of them stepped inside, into a different, dimmer light that gave Rhett the heebie-jeebies. He half expected another psychon to come stepping out of the gloom. Or worse … the she-thing.
But there was nothing except the dingy aftermath of a doomed business venture: crumpled receipts, empty soda cans, tiny boxes of detergent, a lone folding cart. There was a mouse nibbling on the bulbous end of a stale Cheeto.
Mak and Rhett and Theo followed Treeny to the back, where two doors faced each other in a cramped nook. One was marked RESTROOM, the other was marked EMPLOYEES. Treeny pointed to the latter.
“That one,” she said.
Mak took hold of the doorknob, leaned into the splintered surface, listening. She jiggled the doorknob a couple of times. The sound was enormous in the empty space, like gunfire. Then she finally turned the knob and pushed the door open.
It swung away, revealing the room of doors on the Harbinger, but the room was not the quiet, solitary place it normally was. Rhett had originally thought of the room as Grand Central Station but had come to think of it more as a library, with syllektors passing through mostly silently, taking a moment to find what they needed but ultimately minding their own business. It was a library that literally allowed them to travel the world.
Now, though, the room was more like his original comparison, crammed with people all trying to be heard over one another. Doors on the other side of the room opened onto streets that looked weirdly familiar. And then Rhett caught a glimpse of a cable car jingling past one of the thresholds. The other syllektors were searching San Francisco, for them.
Captain Trier was there, too, bending at the waist to give orders into a young girl’s ear. She was nodding, mouth open and eyebrows knitted together in concentration. When the captain was finished, he stood back up and the girl ran off, disappearing through another door. That was when Trier spotted Rhett and the others.
“Everybody hold it!” he bellowed, and it was loud enough to come rolling into the laundromat and rattle the front windows. “They’re here,” Trier said when the noise had faded.
The other syllektors looked in the direction the captain was staring. Then Mak and Treeny and Theo and Rhett were swept through the door. Once on the other side, Rhett allowed himself to fall to the ground, giving in to his mutilated leg and his overwrought mind. Somebody he’d never seen before started examining his injuries.
Mak asked, “How did you know where to look?”
“Treeny’s tablet,” the captain replied. “It gave off a distress beacon.”
“Not bad technology for a ship that’s as old as dirt,” Rhett said from the floor.
The captain grinned crookedly, but the grin quickly faded. “Basil?” he said.
“Missing,” Mak replied, folding her arms, looking away. “He went over the side of the bridge.” Then she turned and tried to disappear into the crowd of syllektors that were making their way out of the room.
“Mak,” Trier called after her. “Mak! Makayla!”
Mak stopped.
Rhett found Treeny and held her gaze. He mouthed a single word at her. Makayla? Treeny only shook her head, as if to say that further investigation into the matter was a cautionary tale waiting to happen.
“I know you’re hurting, even if your face doesn’t show it,” the captain said gently. By now the room had mostly cleared. The mumbled conversations of syllektors either going back to other parts of the ship or following the push out through the doors was dying away.
Mak stood with her head down. Her shoulders were hitching, and her hands were balled into tight fists, quietly in need of something to obliterate.
“Blimey, what’s all the bloody fuss about?” a voice said from the far corner of the room, where a door was just snapping shut. He came limping out of the shadows, dripping water into huge puddles that he left in his wake. “That damn bay is a disgusting moat of a thing.”
Basil had one scythe in his hand, lathered with black pus. His clothes had been clawed into strips, with long scrapes and slices in his flesh underneath. His left leg hadn’t been gouged at all, but it was cocked from the knee at an unpleasant angle. And yet his grin was unaffected, still tilting across his face as if it had been permanently fixed that way.
Mak spun around and found his eyes. Rhett saw her face crumple, the barriers of her bitter facade coming down, her emotions finally allowed to roam free across the landscape they were best suited to exist upon. She ran to him, and they collapsed together in a heap on the floor, her face buried in his shoulder.
The captain looked genuinely relieved. He turned to Treeny. “Very good work setting off the distress signal, Treeny,” he said.
Treeny nodded with a thin smile. She still looked shaken, but she exchanged a quick wave with Basil, who gave her a thumbs-up, then she turned and practically ran out of the room.
Theo cocked his finger in Basil’s direction, his own crooked grin carving its way across his brutalized face. He took a few steps in Treeny’s direction—probably wanting to go after her and make sure she was okay—before losing his balance and sitting down hard, with his arms resting on top of his knees.
Rhett wanted to worry about Treeny. He really wanted to worry about Theo. Instead he lay back on the floor, staring up at the high ceiling, at the ornate woodwork that curled like smoke across it. The image of the she-thing’s eyes invaded his view. Those black holes with only the tiny specks of light in the middle.
“I don’t mean to be a pain,” he eventually said. “But can someone get me off the floor?”