I have heard that falling into water from a sufficient height is like falling onto concrete. I honestly don’t know if that’s true. I’ve had the good fortune of never being hurled from a sufficient height into water.
Falling onto concrete, however, from any height really, sucks balls.
The detonation throws me like a rag doll. I come down hard on my left side, arms splaying out. I roll, like a bowling ball waiting to hit the pins. My sword’s gone. My chin grinds over and over. My skin tries to dissociate itself from a fool like me, to stay behind scraped over the asphalt.
I come up bleeding, bloody, raw. I’ve replaced my palms with lacerations, my sense of hearing with a high-pitched whining sound. Blood keeps getting in one of my eyes.
And I’m smiling, because I’m still doing way better than Ivan Spilenski.
That said, so is pretty much anybody who’s not smeared over the base of a crater like strawberry jam.
I see my sword embedded in the roof of a classic red telephone booth. Apparently that’s as close as this Arthur is going to get to a sword in the stone. I hobble over to it. Wrench it free.
Felicity, Devon, and Clyde all slowly pick themselves up. Their clothes are ragged, their skin blackened by ash, crisscrossed by cuts. Clyde is double-checking the straps of his mask. I hobble towards them.
“You OK?”
“Yes,” Clyde says. “I am. This body is taking a beating though.”
This body. Not his body. Not him. That wipes the grin off my face.
Felicity is checking her watch. “Big Ben,” she says. “We have to be there. Now.”
And she’s right. This is hardly the time to rest on our laurels. It’s just that resting on anything would be really nice right now.
Devon bends down, scoops something up from the street. Her mess of wires. Blasted out of my hand but still intact. She tosses it to me. “You’ll need this.”
To me. She throws them to me. And for a moment everyone looks to me. All of us moving together. All of us fighting for the right thing, the right way: together.
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s finish this.”