We ran for the stairs. My legs were moving but I still felt wobbly.
“How many of them do you think there are?” The question was ridiculous but I was still holding out hope that we could fix this somehow. My hope made me feel pathetic. Like a victim.
“How the fuck should I know? They’re loose and they’re spreading.”
“No, I mean, how many total? Like, are there fifty in the Empty Spaces? Fifty million? How many can come through at a shot, and what percentage of them did you take out with your green flame?”
Annalise didn’t answer for a moment. When she did, she said, “Just keep moving, Ray.”
But I couldn’t stop turning it over in my mind. I’d faced these predators before. They engulfed their prey, then fed on them slowly while they were alive. They didn’t open a passage out of this world until their prey was dead, and that could take days.
But if someone fell, or a car struck a victim lying in the street—one the driver couldn’t even see—the portal would open right beneath its wheels…
We ran down one flight of stairs after another, and I distracted myself from the horror of what was happening outside—comatose people being dissolved slowly and eaten—by trying to work out how many victims these predators would take if they were left alone.
I still wanted to minimize the harm that was happening. I still hoped we could win this fight, even though I knew we couldn’t.
On the ground floor, we burst into an almost-empty lobby. Firefighters in full gear stood beside a man in a blue suit who must have been the hotel manager, but they were standing at the window, looking out at the street.
Annalise pulled me back to the stairs. “Let’s get down to the garage. We’re going to need your skills for this one.” She took out her phone and I saw her press Elizabeth Tredwell’s name. “Who is this? I need Tredwell now. Right now.”
Annalise stopped running. She looked up at me with an expression I’d never seen before.
“What’s up, boss?”
“Repeat that,” Annalise said into the phone. She tilted it away from her face and I moved in close to hear.
“We have a runaway event,” the voice on the line said. “We believe it might be centered in Kolkata, but it has spread for many kilometers. Many hundreds of kilometers. Our initial notification was only forty-five minutes ago, but we cannot contact assets as far apart as Delhi, Jakarta, and Hong Kong. Planes are vanishing from the sky in mid-flight. News video—I’m sorry, but heads of state are involved now. Everything has blown up and we’re going dark so we can move to a secure location.”
“Don’t hang up,” Annalise said. “We have a second runaway event in Buenos Aires.”
“Are… Are you sure?”
“Pay attention. Review the reports I filed for Ray Lilly and me in Los Angeles, back in 2011, I think. It’s the same predator as that Los Angeles incident, but they were already public and widespread when we got here. This is a coordinated attack.”
“Do you need extraction?”
I wanted to shout Yes! but Annalise said, “No, we’ll make our own way out. We’ll reach out again in an hour. Stay safe.”
“You too.”
After disconnecting the call, Annalise started messing with her phone. I stood beside her, my hands hanging loose and useless at my side. Even my hope had dwindled to ash.
We’d failed.
Had we really failed?
She found a video and played it. It was a huge soccer stadium, packed with people, as a game played out on the field. There were network bugs in a foreign script in the corner of the screen, and a score along the bottom, which proved this was an official TV feed.
Then, as we watched, people began to vanish.
It was like they were doing the wave, except instead of standing up, they were simply blinking out of existence. It wasn’t a fast process, but it was unstoppable.
Then the wave passed over the cameraman, and I saw it, just before the image when to white noise.
“That’s the throat,” I blurted out. “That’s the throat of the Show. I mean, the Theater of Sleep. That’s the thing that had me trapped for seven years.”
“And someone just summoned it in a populated area.”
“Serrac…” I cleared my throat. “Lauren Woo told us that Serrac took a private jet to Salzburg, but we know that was a lie. A setup. He must have flown to south Asia instead, just like we thought. He could have flown coach with a fake passport and we would never have known.” I ran my fingers through my hair, fighting the urge to grab a fistful and pull it out. Part of me wanted more pain. “Annalise, Tredwell told me that half the world’s population lives in that part of the world, and the Show grows larger as it feeds.”
“Ray, get us a vehicle and get us to the airport before they shut it down.”
She pushed through the door to the stairwell and started down. I ran after her.
“Boss, we can’t leave. We’ve got to do what we can here. We kill predators, right? Well, they’re coming right here and right now. If we’re not going to fight them now, when—”
At the bottom of the stairs, she pushed through another fire door into the garage. “Pick one.”
I spotted a silver-haired guy in tan chinos and a sweater vest about to climb into a Lexus. “The best way to steal a car is to get hold of the keys.”
Tan Chinos didn’t speak English, but he was going to the airport and, with an air of boozy generosity, agreed to let us ride with him. Annalise sat in the back, looking tiny on that big bench seat. We passed police cars and ambulances with their lights and sirens going, and thankfully, we were headed in the other direction.
“We can’t stay here, Ray,” Annalise said, her voice quiet. “We’d have to fight the predators and the local military, and we can’t do that. The best solution would be that we were killed, and they took our bodies to the morgue and discovered that they couldn’t perform autopsies on us.”
“Because of our magic.”
“The worst option is more likely. They do lethal force to us, discover that we can survive it, and then capture us somehow. We end up in prison, and the locals convince themselves that you and I brought those things here. That’s what cops and bureaucrats do. Then they accuse us of being CIA. They learn about magic. They torture us.”
“Boss, shouldn’t these governments know—”
“Government have always heard talk about magic and monsters. Always. Before today, it was just crazy bullshit. Spells and monsters. No one with any real power would dare to talk about it openly. Now they’ll talk, and they’ll pull every lever they can get their hands on to deal with it. We can’t be those levers.”
“But—”
“A war just started, Ray. We can’t win if human beings are fighting each other. There’s a plan for this. Right now, we’re pulling back. When we step forward again, it’ll be on our terms, as allies to these governments.”
“What do we do?”
“We call the society in another fifty minutes. Then we do as we always have. We take a step at a time.”
I sighed. The driver glanced at me, then smiled. He couldn’t understand us, but he could see the misery on my face. He patted my knee in a grandfatherly way and said something that was probably meant to be reassuring. I forced myself to smile back.
Then I heard Annalise on her phone, and I knew immediately who she was calling.
“I’m sorry,” she said. I’d never heard her voice sound like that before, and it scared the shit out of me. “I’m sorry. I failed. I lost… I mean, we lost. You and Reggie are going to see some scary shit on TV. It’s all really happening and, Becca, it’s my fault. I’ll be in touch again soon, but for now, get ready. Bad times are coming. And… Apologize to your family for me, please.”
She hung up and looked at me. Then she stared out the window.
We’d failed. For real. And not just once. Things were going to come apart, and we were helpless to do anything about it.
I was helpless.
At the airport, people seemed to be moving quickly and talking louder than usual. Security personnel were nowhere in sight. Maybe they’d been called to a meeting or something. Annalise and I parted from Tan Chinos with a friendly wave, then hurried through the terminal. We pushed through doors and blew past security checkpoints at top speed, and no one bothered to challenge us.
Our pals were sitting in the plane, waiting for us with the doors closed, as requested. We told them it was time to go.
It didn’t take long before we were in the air again, heading north, as the sun dropped below the horizon and darkness closed in around us.
The End