DEKKA HAD NEVER traveled through n-dimensional space, and despite Malik’s warnings, the effect was absolutely disorienting and shocking. She had never seen Malik in his charred and livid natural state. She had never seen her own veins and arteries seeming to float outside of a hand that was hers, not the morph’s.
And she had never seen inside Shade Darby’s head, seen her actual brain, like a cauliflower Mandelbrot video.
“Shade?” Dekka said, blinking in confusion. And had just enough time to wonder why Shade was with them.
Shade had leaped at the last moment and grabbed hold of Francis because Shade had remembered what everyone had forgotten: momentum.
The train was moving now at just over a hundred miles an hour. When Dekka, Armo, Francis, and Shade popped back into three-dimensional space from the stationary helicopter, they were not moving, but they were inside a train that was moving very fast.
They emerged back into 3-D space toward the front of the second car. Shade appeared at the exact same moment, but a “moment” to Shade was not a “moment” to the others.
The rearmost wall of the train car was moving at a hundred miles an hour, or a hundred forty-seven feet per second. The distance between the nearest of the Rockborn Gang, Armo, and that door was seventy-five feet.
Shade had less than half a second. And that was not enough, not even for Shade. She might save one, but not the others. Unless . . .
The car ended in a door. The next car would also have a door. Eventually, they would slow down.
Eventually.
Shade leaped, spun in the air, so that she flew backward, facing Armo’s back as the steel door rushed at her. She stuck out her hands and grabbed seat backs that tore away, row after row of blue upholstered seats, bam, bam, bam bambambambam!
Grabbing at seat backs had bled off only a little of their relative speed, and Shade hit the door at seventy miles an hour. She took the impact in her back and felt her chitin armor snap, crushed like a cockroach under a boot. Her head smashed into steel and the thick glass window, cracking her skull like a dropped cantaloupe.
The impact smashed the door open, and Shade plowed into the next door at a mere fifty miles an hour. Her hands were torn, some fingers ripped off and spraying blood, her back broken, her head caved in. She was reduced to a bloody mess of bone and chitin armor and blood.
The impact went: Shade, Armo, Francis, Dekka, and the shell.
Armo, Dekka, Francis, and the shell survived.
Shade looked like a lobster that had been cracked open and torn apart with a fork.
Armo knew only that he had flown through the air at fantastic speed, whooshing past blue seats before coming to a brutally sudden stop. The back of his head hit something hard and unyielding. His left arm had been snapped like a twig by impact with the bulge of the restroom bulkhead. He slammed into something crunchy behind him and took the momentum of Francis then Dekka in his gut, blowing the air from him.
And then he was out.
Dekka hit Armo, the best cushion possible, and her morphed body took a blow like being hit by a truck. Brutal, staggering, and fatal . . . had she been in human form.
Dekka saw stars, swirling lights, a blankness that came, then receded, came back again as she tried to move, then receded again, leaving her conscious and all too aware of pain throughout her body. She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t make her lungs work, like they were empty balloons, flat and hard to inflate. Then a gasp. Another gasp. A sudden, deep breath that was like needles inside her. But pain was pain, while suffocation was death.
Her hands and feet would not work at first, hands seeming disconnected, reaching out toward targets like seat backs and missing. Legs all wobbly. She was like a drunk, a brain confused and lost and unable to . . . But at last with great focus she managed to get her fingers around a seat back and pulled herself up. She stood, swaying, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. There were no passengers here, just the clickety-clack of the track and a pile of bodies.
She stumbled back and stepped on something soft.
“Armo!” she cried. “Armo!” The aisle was too narrow to let her get beside him, so she clambered over the seats till she could kneel down on an aisle seat and look at his face. There was blood coming from his nose and ears. Blood coming from his eyes as well. But he was moving, random, unfocused, groggy but alive, though maybe not for long. A puddle of blood too large to have come from Armo’s ears, nose, or eyes saturated the carpet.
“Armo! You have to de-morph! Now!”
“Urrhh?” He was groggy, barely conscious, and yet heard an order and instinctively thought, No.
“De-morph, now!”
He blinked bloody eyes and half raised a bloody paw. Dekka realized she was crying only when his face was blurred by her tears.
“Armo! Armo, you . . . I . . . Armo, maybe you should consider de-morphing!”
“Urr.”
Slowly at first, then faster, Dekka saw the white fur receding and the bear man being replaced by the man.
And then she saw what lay beneath Armo.
“Oh, God! Shade! Shade!”
Shade Darby looked far too much like a huge grasshopper that had been stepped on. It was impossible even to make sense of the lower half of her body. Bones, strips of chitin cracked like lobster shell, pink flesh protruding, and ripped arteries that pumped blood far too fast.
Dekka shot a look forward. The shell lay in the aisle, rolling sluggishly back and forth. Red numbers read 00:24 . . . 00:23 . . .
Dekka had to climb over the last row of seats to get to Shade, and she knelt over her and yelled, as she had with Armo, “De-morph, Shade, de-morph!” Again and again.
She glanced back, looking for the shell and its timer. Red numbers swam in her tears. Fourteen seconds!
“Francis!” Dekka cried. She found the girl curled up under a seat, her broken leg bleeding freely, blood coming from her nose and trickling from one ear.
“Francis! Francis!”
00:09 . . . 00:08 . . .
“Unh?” Francis moaned.
“I need you. Right the hell now!” Dekka shouted. “Get Shade out of here!”
00:07 . . .
Seven seconds.
In the helicopter Sam turned his wind-whipped face to Malik, Simone, and Cruz. “Something’s wrong. They should be back by now.”
“Where’s Shade?” Simone demanded suddenly.
“Dammit,” Sam snapped. The plan was already falling apart. The train was still racing at speed, not its full one fifty, but very fast. The Anacostia River sparkled just ahead, their target area, the very last relatively unpopulated space before the city proper.
Looking ahead, Sam saw the dome of the Capitol building, and the white needle of the Washington Monument. He’d never been to Washington. This was a hell of a first visit.
“We have to stop that train!” Simone said.
Malik erupted. “Oh, God, Shade must have grabbed Francis as she was . . . No, no, no!”
“Why would she do that?” Simone cried.
“Momentum,” Malik said grimly.
“If the train hits the inside of the dome, everyone aboard, including our friends, will die!” Cruz cried.
“If my father isn’t stopped . . .”
And just like that, Sam was back in the business of making life-and-death decisions.
Francis’s brain was a swirl of images and shouts and pain.
Get her out of here!
She fumbled for something to hold on to, felt her hand sink into flesh like hamburger studded with shards of glass.
“Now, now, now!” Dekka’s voice cried from far, far away, and Francis knew Dekka meant her, meant that she . . .
In an instant Francis and the wreckage of Shade were back in the helicopter, which had blessedly turned to match speed with the train.
“Shade!” Malik cried. He and Cruz knelt beside the gruesome horror of Shade’s barely alive body, yelling, “De-morph, de-morph, Shade!”
Sam was yelling something different. “Four seconds! Francis!”
“You have to do it, Sam!” Simone cried.
Sam staggered to the door and gripped a handhold, leaned out, and extended his free hand.
“Look!” Armo yelled, and tried to point with a hand that was not exactly obeying his brain’s instructions but wavered like a drunk pointing the way to his car.
Dekka looked. And saw.
00:04 . . . 00:03 . . .
A dark swarm was rushing toward Dekka, and she thought, If I have to die, I’m taking some of you bastards with me, and fired her shredding beams into the mass.
She was still firing when she suddenly found herself back in the helicopter, narrowly missing Sam’s head while shredding the sill of the helicopter’s door.
The train was well past the open space of the wetlands by the river. They were not a mile from the station, and now the train’s brakes were squealing.
A big freeway interchange to the right.
A college campus to the left.
Sam whispered, “Forgive me.”