Zarah dodges the first tendril, and the second, but the third and fourth come together and she only manages to get one of them, knocking it away with the shard of ghostlight but dropping it in the process. The other spears her through the upper arm, and she bites down on a growl of pain as she stumbles.

Then, the corona of blacklight around her flares, illuminating the raindrops with impossible radiance, and she grabs hold of the tendril that impaled her and uses it to pull Paose forward. It dissolves into tiny shards of blue after a bare second, but the momentum is enough to bring him into reach. She grabs the collar of his shirt with one hand and claws at his face with the other, rage bleeding out into a hollow, raw scream as bone crunches underneath her fingers and blood and viscera run down her arm.

Another tendril impales her in the torso, but the pain barely registers, and she squeezes tighter, until it whips to the side, tossing her away to crash into the mud. Something gives as she is pulled away, though, and when she gets to her feet, she finds shards of bone buried in her hand, the viscera already washed away by the rain.

Paose pulls himself to his feet, half his head caved in, leaving his face a sunken, malformed visage.

He’s not smiling.

“Kihri,” Zarah said.

“Yeah, yeah, one sec, I think-”

“Kihri.”

Silence. Then, “Oh.”

Young, dark-haired. Hole in the torso.

“Zarah…” Kihri started, voice hoarse.

Zarah ignored her, crouching down. She kissed the back of each of her hands gently, and reached out and closed the body’s eyes – or tried to. Her hands were shaking, so it took three tries.

She stood, letting her hands fall back to her sides. The thunder was getting louder, closer, but it seemed strangely muted.

She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.

“” Kihri said from beside her. “”

With a trembling hand, Zarah wiped impotently at her eyes, but didn’t look away. It’s not like she wouldn’t be seeing that image every time she closed her eyes.

“Zarah,” Kihri said hesitantly, “there’s… this body is a lot fresher than the blood back there.”

She’d noticed. Of course she’d noticed. That was her thing, wasn’t it? She’d seen so many corpses, so many brutalized and mutilated teenagers, that she was unflappable, right?

Carefully, she took the body by the shoulders and moved it to the side. She rubbed her hands on the raincoat, but they still felt dirty.

On the wall where the corpse had been resting, words had been written in blood, slightly smeared and uneven.

WHO DOESNT LOVE A GOOD TRAESURE HUNT?

“You know,” Paose says, his tone a hollow imitation of his previous cheer, “you really are one of the most annoying people I’ve ever met.”

Zarah doesn’t bother to answer, wiping wet strands of hair away from her face as she pulls herself off the ground.

“Who even are you?” he snaps. “What, did I kill some cousin of yours or something? What does any of this have to do with you?” For the first time Zarah has heard, he actually sounds mad.

A laugh bubbles out of her throat, raw and hoarse.

“…is it wrong that I’m almost more offended by-” Zarah looked at Kihri, and she snapped her mouth shut. “Sorry.”

Underneath the words, an arrow had been drawn, pointing to the right, and a street address.

Kihri said something, but Zarah couldn’t make out the words over the roaring in her ears. It felt like her veins were filled with molten steel, burning so hot it almost felt like freezing cold. He seemed to have a talent for inducing that in her, but this time, there was nothing she could hit, no obvious way to lash out or vent. So instead, she burned, using the feeling to drive herself forward even as it threatened to consume her. Not stopping the wave, but riding it out.

It carried her through the streets, nails digging crescents into her palms, as the first drops of rain began to fall. She didn’t bother to put her raincoat’s hood up, and the feeling of the water against her skin felt wrong. It felt like they should be evaporating on contact, before they even touched her, so great was the inferno that raged within her.

But she was a human, not a fire, and so they simply rolled down her skin like the tears she couldn’t find the energy to cry.

She wished she’d been surprised when they found the next body, exactly where the message had said it would be. She wished she’d been anything.

“” she asked quietly, voice hoarse.

“” Kihri replied. “”

Zarah ignored her, ignored the writing behind the body, only looking long enough to absorb the next location before setting off again, breaking into a jog, and then a run.

It took her two more bodies, both fresher than the previous, to realise that at some point she’d stopped breathing.

By the sixth body, the rain was beginning to wash the message away.

The seventh was unreadable.

He was between her and the shard of ghostlight now, and while she was still managing to maintain a connection, it was a fragile one, liable to break. She dashed forward, the wounds at her side already healed over, mud spraying behind her. Tendrils lashed out again, but she hadn’t come off the ground empty-handed. With a flick of the wrist, the glob of mud and dirt she’d scooped up hit him square in the face as she slipped by, dropping into a slide to grab her makeshift weapon back.

Zarah didn’t even know where she was going anymore, she barely knew where she was. She couldn’t see further than a block, and the drumming of water against her skull would have drowned out Kihri’s yelling even if she’d been listening in the first place. But she was following- something, following the way her rage reached out, leaning forward to try and grasp something, to crush it and set it alight and wipe it clean from the face of the earth.

And, now that she was no longer paying attention, the rain did start to steam away from her skin.

The torrential downpour was starting to mess with Zarah’s sense of reality. The persistent rhythm against her skull drowned out even the sound of her own blood rushing in her ears and the impact of her feet on the ground, making her feel disconnected and adrift. It blocked out her sight, narrowing the world down to a few meters around her and the tiny islands of light underneath the streetlamps. Like walking in a dream, the spaces between the islands reduced to void. It almost felt like she would take a step out of one only to arrive immediately in the next, sidestepping the gap entirely.

A building emerged in front of her, manifesting out of the patches of blackness in the muted city lights in the distance. Lower than most around it, three stories at most, more wide and deep than tall. In another disorienting detail, the wall and gate surrounding appeared after the building, despite being closer, but they also brought with them recognition. Not a name, but it was a school, a private one.

She’d already known instinctively she was going in the right direction, but the hole torn in the metal bars of the gate was useful confirmation. The bottom of the circle of mangled iron was just below eye-level for her, so it was technically possible for her to jump through it.

The hammer was in her hand now, with no conscious effort on her part to take it out. She drew it back effortlessly, and, for maybe the first time since she’d touched it, swung it like a tool instead of a weapon. It smashed into the gate with a hollow gong that was audible even through the rain, impact vibrating back up Zarah’s arms, and the gates collapsed onto the gravel path behind them with a splash.

Zarah strode forward.

The ghostlight cuts into her hand, but the blood can’t make it any slicker than the rain already is. She rights herself, spinning around, and sees the tendrils coming for her more by the way they distort the rain than the shapes themselves. His ghostlight doesn’t glow, not like hers does.

Then again, it isn’t really hers, is it?

Instead of dodging, she holds out a hand and catches the fastest tendril with an open palm, letting the point spear through her hand and into the flesh of an arm. The hand with the shard flashes up and slices through the body of the tendril,

separating the part that impaled her, and as it loses form she focuses. Reaches out, in the same way she does when keeping her hold on the blacklight at a distance. The ghostlight is… slippery, evasive and hard to grasp in a way it had never been before, but after a struggle that feels like an eternity, something gives, and her corona of blacklight flares as the tendril reforms into a spike in her hand.

The doors of the main building had been ripped from their hinges, and water tracked inside, spilling across the wood. It had been a rich school, Zarah knew that much – if the gate and the high walls hadn’t been evidence enough, or the sheer amount of land it occupied in the inner city for that matter, the interior decoration certainly would have sufficed.

Before the blood, that is.

There were no bodies or limbs, thank the stars for small favours, but crimson had been splattered so liberally around the room that it almost outweighed the natural colours. Thick, broad slashes, still wet and dripping, spilling out like ink into the thin puddle of rain that had been tracked inside. At the end of the corridor, in front of the open stairs up to the next level, a large arrow had been sloppily painted, pointing to the right. Furniture, large bookcases and benches, had been dragged over and piled to block off the stairway and the corridor to the left, leaving only the one route.

Kihri said something from behind her, and Zarah almost started. She’d forgotten that Kihri… was.

With great difficulty, she forced the boiling blood back down, enough that she could process words. “” she rasped. It was a little easier to think, now that she was indoors and out of the rain. Easier to ground herself, without the noise and the darkness.

“Oh, you’re doing words again? Fucking wonderful. I said, it’s a trap.”

If she had the energy, Zarah would have fixed her with her most withering glare. “Obviously. Check for traps.”

Kihri rolled her eyes. “Yeah, cause-”

Zarah stepped towards her, and she flinched back, eyes going wide. “Check. For. Traps.”

Kihri’s form flickered, and for just a second, Zarah would have sworn her sister looked just like her – hair suddenly long, the long scar over her lips replaced with the thousand tiny pockmarks. Then, Kihri was back to her normal self, and she nodded silently before darting forward to inspect the barricades.

This time, Zarah makes no attempt to dodge the tendrils, standing her ground, red shard in one hand and blue spike in the other.

The first one is aimed straight at her head, but she brings the shard up just in time, the tendril’s momentum causing it to glance off the flat side just enough to whistle by her ear. Instantly, her other hand comes up, swinging the spike across the path of the tendril. It’s almost a surprise, when it meets no resistance – instead, it passes through effortlessly, leaving a gap behind it as it absorbs the ghostlight into itself.

There’s no time to process, and she sweeps the spike down to intercept the next tendril. Just before making contact, though, it recoils away, twisting out of the way of the spike.

“Ooh, look at you,” Paose snarls, the tendrils retreating to coil around him. “So fucking precocious, a new trick every day, watch her go!” His face has mostly reformed now, but the section of his beard where Zarah had grabbed him hasn’t grown back in, making him appear faintly ridiculous.

Zarah meets his eyes, and finds the anger burning bright, but with nothing beneath. Hollow, and empty – not because it had been carved out, but because it had never been there in the first place.

“I wanted,” she says hoarsely, not knowing or caring if the words were audible, “to make you suffer. I wanted to see you bleeding, broken. I wanted you to suffer like all you have done to others. But it is not that, really, is it. You have to be a person for that, and you are just…” she flicks her fingers dismissively. “Nothing.”

“Clear,” Kihri said, and Zarah swung the hammer down, tearing a path through the furniture blocking the stairs. A few more sweeps cleared things up, wood and metal crunching and tearing like paper, and then she stepped through, ignoring the cloud of sawdust even as it stung at her eyes, proceeding up the stairs.

There was another message, on the wall opposite the landing.

NAUGHTY, NAUGHTY.

Below it, a woman slumped against the wall, and Zarah froze. She’d thought it was a corpse, for the first half-second, but the rise and fall of her chest was evident.

Especially in the way it made the grenade tied to her bob up and down.

“Zarah,” Kihri hissed.

“I see it.”

“Not that, that.” Zarah followed her pointing finger, and found a thin wire strung across the landing at ankle height.

She froze.

She’d been about to rush over, incensed by the sight. She wouldn’t even have noticed the tripwire until it was too late.

“…thank you,” she said eventually, taking a slow step back.

“De nada,” Kihri replied. “Gotta admit, this is… pretty canny. Wouldn’t have expected it, from what we’ve seen of him so far.”

Zarah silently agreed. Something had changed, her blood had cooled enough now to see that much. It was a strange thought to have, while standing where she was, but true nevertheless. Her anger, the blinding, vicious rage, hadn’t abated, but it had shifted. The molten metal had cooled, but now instead of burning it could cut. And she had every intent of doing so.

Zarah stepped carefully over the wire as Kihri darted forward, inspecting the grenade from up close.

The woman seemed to be unconscious, thankfully, and there were no obvious injuries on her.

She was middle-aged, white, with salt-and-pepper hair, dressed in bland officewear, and the grenade had been clipped to her simple chain necklace.

“Okay,” Kihri said as she inspected the explosive. “Okay, this is pretty bare-bones work. Pin’s been pulled, but the wire is keeping the lever down for now. If you just make sure you’re holding it down when you cut it away, it should be fine.”

Zarah stepped forward to do just that, then stopped, hand just inches away from the grenade.

“Zarah?” Kihri asked, as she remained frozen there. “What is it?”

Truth be told, she wasn’t entirely certain what had prompted her hesitation. A whisper in the back of her mind, some instinct based on information her conscious brain had yet to process properly – whatever it was, she knew that something was wrong.

“The stairs,” she said slowly, her brain churning over the words as they came. “One obvious trap, to hide another.”

Kihri whistled.“You think there’s one more layer?”

She hadn’t been sure until Kihri said it, but the words slotted neatly into the ideas she’d been forming. “Check underneath, please,” she asked, drawing back from the grenade.

“…shit,” came Kihri’s voice seconds later, half her body submerged inside the woman’s and the floor. “You were right. There’s a mine down here. Can you get some light down here- without moving her?”

Zarah crouched down and held out a hand, flaring the blacklight around it.

“Oh wow that’s still fucking weird. Okay, yeah, it looks like it’s a pressure sensor, so it’ll go off if you move her. But… there’s also wire running up her back. Does it attach to the back of the necklace?”

Now that she knew what to look for, it only took Zarah a few seconds to find the tiny glint of metal running from the necklace down under her jacket. “It is… twisted in, I think. Inner twined?”

“Intertwined. Okay.” Kihri floated back up into view, emerging from the woman’s form. “I… think you should be able to remove the grenade without setting it off, if you’re careful, but it’s going to go off no matter what.”

“How far is safe?”

“How far away? Ten-ish meters, I think – you can probably just chuck it down that corridor there.” She paused. “After I’ve checked that there’s no-one else down there.”

“Good idea.”

Zarah sat back on her haunches as Kihri darted off to do that. They might be able to get rid of the grenade, but it was still going to be loud. That was probably what Paose had planned – no matter what happened, there was going to be an explosion, and he’d know exactly where they were. And they still had to deal with the mine on top of that.

“All clear,” Kihri said, fading back into view through the wall. “You ready?”

Zarah carefully snapped the wire connecting the grenade to the necklace, holding the lever down with her hand as the wire went slack.

“Not particularly,” she said, and hurled it down the corridor.

Paose’s scowl deepens. “You little-”

“Shut up,” Zarah snaps over him, the blacklight around her suddenly flaring to light up the ground around them. “Stop talking. I am done with you and yours, with your stupid whatever as if you are anything worth anything. Bare you neck, and I will be quick. That is all you will get.”

He snarls, teeth bared, and/

/Zarah casts the mangled mess of flesh and bone to the side as Paose stumbles back, clutching at the ruined remains of his wrist.

“Wait. Something’s changed.”

“I’ll kill you for that!” Paose spits, echoing oddly through the vast empty space of the hall.

“Oh,” Kihri laughs sardonically, “right. That’s why you’re going to kill her! It’s a totally new development!”

Zarah spins the hammer calmly, eyes ice cold. “You will try.”

“Yes, I’m sure. They’re indoors now, she has the hammer again, and the sister is there too.”

“Two o’clock!” Kihri calls out, and Zarah spins obligingly to shatter the tendril coming from that direction. “Twelve, three and one! Okay, three and two but multiple on three!”

With her guidance, Zarah dances effortlessly around the attacks/

/and slams into the wall with the crunch of broken bones.

“It happened again! You said there were no other Seers involved, so how is this happening?”

“I… don’t know. None of the others should be able to affect your readings like this.”

“You promised this would be a simple job, Khoura! I’m not rated to be handling another Seer like this, and even if I was I still wouldn’t do it.”

“I know, and I’m sorry; this is completely unprecedented. Your rates will be adjusted to match, of course.”

“Oh, well, why didn’t you just say that to begin with? You want me to try and find them, then?”

“…’not rated’, hm?”

“Oh, come on, Khoura. You know a girl’s gotta play hard-to-get sometimes.”

“Yes, but a professional should be clear and upfront.”

“Oh, for- do you want me to try and solve this or not?!”

“Only if you’re confident you won’t be detected in the presence.”

“Easy as. Unless I die. In which case… not easy as.”

“I almost hesitate to ask, but… easy as what?”

“You know what, just forget it.”

The woman jerked back into consciousness at the sound of the grenade exploding – if Zarah hadn’t been holding her firmly in place, she would’ve lifted off of the mine, and turned them both into giblets. Zarah might have survived it; she definitely wouldn’t have.

“Wh-what,” she stammered incoherently. “You- the-” She struggled against Zarah’s grip, more out of instinct than any specific intent.

“Stop moving. There is a bomb.”

“A bomb?!” Now there was intent.

“Smooth moves, ex-lax,” Kihri said.

“Yes, bomb. It goes off if you move, so stop. Moving.”

Thankfully, that did the trick. “Wh-what is happening?” she asked. “I remember… a man, and he was saying something about…” She trailed off as she properly took in Zarah for the first time.“Who are you? You’re not a student, are you?”

Zarah could have laughed, if it weren’t for… everything.

“No, I am not. Please, we do not have much time.”

“Understatement of the year,” Kihri said. “Zarah, I’m getting some serious bad vibes getting closer.”

“‘Bad vibes’?!” Zarah asked incredulously, remembering the woman’s presence too late to stop herself from turning to glance at her sister.

Well, when the well is dry…

“What?” Kihri said, annoyed. “You really think now is the time to start quibbling?! Bad fucking vibes, getting closer pretty fucking rapidly, so unless you want to end up splattered on the fucking wall, you better hurry it the fuck up!”

Zarah turned back to the woman, ignoring Kihri so she didn’t have to admit she was wrong.

“Ma’am, please. I need you to die what I say, or you will die.”

The woman paled.

“And now she thinks you’re going to kill her!”

“You are sitting on a bomb,” Zarah hastily clarified. “I can get you off, but you have to do what I say.”

Zarah heard Kihri snort, presumably at some innuendo Zarah had accidentally made, but she ignored it, forcing herself to make eye contact with the woman.

“…okay,” she said, voice shaky. “Okay. What do I do?”

Zarah nodded, moving to one side of her. “This… may become slightly awkward.”

“M-more awkward than dying?” she managed to joke.

“Honestly?” Kihri replied unheard, “Probably yes.”

“Kihri, hush. I need you to move to the side slightly, but without lifting off the ground, please. Can you do that?”

The woman blinked at her, vaguely goldfish-esque.

“Ask her name,” Kihri suggested. “TV says it helps.”

Oh, well, if TV says so… Then again, it wasn’t like she had room to be picky.

The woman turned out to be a Belinda, and after a bit of shuffling around that Zarah had to physically stop herself from hurrying along, she’d moved enough to the side to reveal the pressure plate, painted a dull green. Zarah pressed down on it firmly, holding it in place, and as soon as she gave the go-ahead, Belinda practically catapulted to her feet and sprinted away.

“Smart woman, that,” Kihri commented. “Can’t help but notice you’ve gotten yourself in a bit of a pickle, there. You know, considering that now you can’t move without exploding, and he’s getting closer?”

“No,” Zarah said, letting her backpack slide off her shoulder and onto the ground.

“…just ‘no’? Not even gonna try-”

Zarah opened the bag and raised an eyebrow at her.

“Oh. Right.”

“Okay, things seem to have settled now, but I’m not sure how long it will last.”

Zarah throws the hammer with both hands, sending it spinning through the air. Paose attempts to deflect it, but red ghostlight tears effortlessly through blue, and the head catches him solidly in the chest with a brutal crunch.

“Indoors now, still fighting, the hammer is there. Think it’s a… gymnasium, or whatever they’re called around here.”

“Wouldn’t know, I’m afraid.”

Zarah strides forward, much calmer and more composed than the previous visions. Fury still burns in her eyes, but it’s tempered now, leashed.

“The colour commentary isn’t strictly necessary, is it?”

“…no respect for the art, I swear to god.”

Paose is still struggling to remove the hammer from his chest as Zarah draws closer. Unlike before, when the force of the blows had sent him flying, the hammer’s head has pulped his chest on impact.

He manages to lash out at Zarah with a tendril, but her corona flares as she catches it, tearing off a section and taking control of it.

“Oh, interesting. Seems like she figures out the authority trick no matter what.”

“Figures out?”

“Definitely – I mean, before, in the rain one, that was the first time for sure. This still seems… pretty new. Makes you think, huh? About determinism and shit. Maybe it was fated to happen or whatever.”

“I’d advise you to think about your paycheck.”

“You really know how to sweet-talk, doc.”

“She does, actually. This just ain’t it.”

“Gag.”

Paose almost has the hammer out, but Zarah makes the point moot as she grabs the handle and wrenches it free, seemingly effortless despite the difficulty he’d been having. A quick blow pulps his head like a grape, and although it’s started to reform before he even hits the ground, it’s clear that /

/ she hasn’t got much left in her. Her left arm is missing below the elbow, and it’s not growing back.

“It happened again!”

“Mehsahl.”

“No, no, this is good. Now that I was watching for it, I should… be able.. to…”

Paose steps into the room /

Paose stepped into the room /

looking around with a frown /

on his face. The body was gone, and / there’s / no / sign / of-

“Got it.”

-Zarah.

“It’s her? That’s… that can’t be right.”

“Well, it is, so I don’t know what to tell you. She’s the one breaking it up, for sure.”

“Keep watching her, then. No predictions, just the present. Myra, keep me informed – I have to make some calls.”

“Well,” Paose said, corner of his mouth quirking up. “Run away again, huh? Shocker.” He was covered in blood, but unwounded, his clothes undamaged. For once, he was standing on his own feet, instead of being conveyed around by his tendrils.

He took a step forward, entering the room-

-and froze, foot hovering in the air.

“…clever,” he said, grin fading slightly. “Almost got me.” A sweatshirt had been draped across the floor, and a tendril whisked it away to reveal the mine underneath, plate held down by a chunk of rubble.

As the sweatshirt moved, there was a faint click, and the light glinted off the wire that had been attached to the fabric as it was suddenly pulled taut. Only for an instant, though, because in the very next instant, the mine that had been hidden under a dust-covered sheet on the other side of the room was activated, and the storm of shrapnel tore Paose to shreds.

“Oooh. Nasty.”

Three rooms over, Zarah uncovered her ears, and shot her sister a smug little glance.

“Yeah, yeah,” Kihri said, rolling her eyes, “fine, whatever. I still say it was dumb.”

Zarah could see the results as soon as she stepped back into the corridor, a brutal painting of crimson and blue, and she couldn’t stop her lips baring slightly. Not a smile, never a smile, but the simple, animalistic baring of teeth, the vicious satisfaction of pain inflicted. Under other circumstances, she’d feel guilt over it, guilt and piercing self-loathing, but right then… no, in that moment, she couldn’t bring herself to feel any other way. He deserved it. If anyone did, it was him – him, and the woman he worked with.

The raincoat fluttered around her legs as she strode down the corridor towards Paose’s mangled form. Kihri’s criticisms of the hasty plan hadn’t been entirely unfounded – if he’d moved the shirt the wrong way, if he’d noticed the second mine like they’d noticed his attempt at a double-blind. If he’d come through the wall instead of through the door, like he’d shown a habit of doing. Zarah hadn’t been able to refute any of them, but for one, they had been pressed for time. And for another, she just… knew. Not the initial bones of the idea, the structure – that part they came up with together, on the fly. But the details, those she could feel in her bones. Maybe she’d gotten a sense of him, now, maybe it was sheer blind confidence, but her hands had moved automatically to move the mine to where his foot would fall, to cast the sweatshirt over the second mine in a particular way.

If she’d been wrong, it could have been as catastrophic as Kihri had worried.

But she hadn’t been wrong.

Paose was sprawled out on the ruined floor of the corridor as she approached, trying fruitlessly to clamber to his feet. His ghostlight was gone, his clothes ruined, and every inch of the corridor that wasn’t utterly destroyed was covered in his blood or viscera. She could already see the exposed muscles fibres twisting and growing back together, but it was slow – definitely slower than her own regeneration, she could see now. White had started to fill back into his eye sockets, but his vision hadn’t returned yet, which made it pathetically easy for Zarah to haul him off his feet, holding him up in the air by his neck.

“Wait,” he managed to rasp through his ruin of a throat. “You didn’t-”

“No more talking,” Zarah said, and the hand around his throat exploded.

Paose was sent flying backwards down the corridor, reaching the end in an instant and smashing straight through it with a hoarse scream. Zarah staggered backwards, staring down at her hand. It had been absolutely ruined, skin and flesh peeled back like a flower unfurling, but it was already starting to stitch itself back together.

“Dude!” Kihri yelled. “What the fuck was that?!”

“Not sure,” Zarah responded as she moved to follow Paose’s flight path. “I could feel something, earlier, when I threw the grenade. I was trying to channel it again, but it did- that.”

Kihri whistled. “Good thing you can heal, then. Is it ghostlight?”

“Not sure. Does it matter?”

“Guess not. Give him hell, then.”

The brand-new hole at the end of the corridor led out into a large hall, floodlights reflecting off the glossy wooden floors. There was a stage at one end, chairs stacked against one of the walls and folding tables against the other. It was the latter that Paose had crashed into, a trail of blood spray across the floor serving to track his arc – the corridor had been two stories up, so Zarah was currently slightly closer to the rafters of the ceiling than the floor.

Without hesitating, she stepped off the edge, heartrate steady and calm.

Her raincoat caught the air as she fell, and slowly draped itself down over her as she landed, settling slightly onto the floor as she bowed her knees to take the impact. After all the experience she’d had with it over the last few days, she was starting to get the hang of taking a fall without just breaking her ankles and waiting for them to heal.

Then again, there probably wasn’t any amount of technique that could have made her fall from the Aruspex building less painful.

Paose’s upper body was still a wreck, head lolling oddly to the side, but his lower body had recovered enough to support him. The mangled visage of his face dropped into a snarl at the sight of her, and his corona flared, lighting up the hall in dim, ghostly illumination as blue threads began to spin themselves out of the air around him.

No you don’t. Without missing a step, Zarah swung her free hand behind her as she bent her legs and sprung forward. Like before, her hand exploded, but this time it catapulted her forward, almost perpendicular to the ground. It was the same trick she’d pulled in the morgue, but vastly more powerful now that she was doing it consciously rather than instinctively. As a tradeoff, though, her barely-healed hand was destroyed once more in a spike of pain, along with about half of her forearm.

She hit Paose shoulder-first, hard enough that a wet crack echoed through the hall, followed immediately by a much heavier crunch as they both hit the reinforced concrete wall. Paose’s body protected her from the worst of the impact, but she felt her shoulder jar out of place, the bone cracking and splintering.

She staggered back, gritting her teeth against the pain as Paose’s aborted attempts at summoning ghostlight faded away around her. The man in question was more of a stain at this point, smeared into the cracks in the concrete, but already beginning to come back together. Zarah squinted, and after a moment, his shade flickered into view around his neck, the main body of the spectral corpse disappearing back into the wall and out of sight, which wouldn’t do at all.

Her first attempt at pulling him free failed when the arm she’d grabbed came off entirely with a sickening squelch. She tossed it to the side, flicking the blood off her hand with a grimace, and tried again, tearing out a few chunks of the concrete so she could get a better grip on his torso before levering him free with her hammer. He collapsed, but Zarah caught him before he could hit the ground, hooking the head of the hammer around his neck and pulling it back up, straight into the path of a punch with all her bodyweight behind it.

Or, a punch was what she’d intended, at any rate. But she’d forgotten about the damage she’d done to her hand earlier, and so instead of the collision of fist against face she was expecting, there was an almost-surprising lack of resistance, as the exposed, jagged end of her forearm bone speared straight through his mouth and out the back of his skull.

Huh. She’d been so focused that the pain had faded entirely, but it returned now, a dull throb that felt like it was coming from a hand that currently didn’t exist.

Still, she was nothing if not adaptable.

She let the hammer fall, freeing up her other hand, and focused her corona around it, not quite understanding what she was doing but trusting in her gut. It began to glow with blacklight, brighter and brighter, until it was almost hard to look at, and then she reached out and grabbed Paose’s shade with it.

Her hand closed around the corpse’s wrist, and met resistance. It had the same cool, dry texture as ghostlight normally did, but softer, closer to the give and density of actual flesh. Which was… unnerving. Her fingers dug in, tearing through the false flesh as she secured a grip on the formless mass beneath, and then she lifted her other arm, Paose’s head still impaled upon it.

Kihri would have said something.

She wasn’t Kihri.

The explosion tore through her arm, stripping it down to the elbow, but that was nothing compared to what it did to Paose. His head was completely obliterated, a thick mist of red and white filling the air as he shot backwards across the room. The shade stayed attached around his neck, but the arm Zarah was holding tore off, and almost immediately dissipated in her grasp, gone before Paose even hit the ground.

He rolled to a stop, and for a moment, the room was still and quiet. The shade had begun leaking, thick wisps pouring from the shoulder before fading away like the arm had. Paose wasn’t moving, but Zarah had to be sure – Kihri said to destroy the shade, and she’d only managed to wound it. It looked it to be destabilising on its own, and Paose didn’t seem to be healing, but it was better not left to chance. She picked up the hammer with her remaining hand, and managed to take two steps towards him before there was a loud chunk, and the floodlights blinded her as they turned on.

Zarah staggered back, trying to cover her eyes but forgetting that the hand she in question was currently in a fine particulate mist all throughout the room.

Still, her vision recovered almost alarmingly quickly, and she managed to locate the light switches, and with them, the new arrivals. A teacher, a young white man in a dull blazer and slacks with neatly-combed hair, and clustered behind him, a small group of students, more than a dozen but not by much.They all wore the same navy uniform, in various states of tidiness and disarray, and the expressions on their faces ranged from curious to fearful to excited.

Zarah looked down at herself. The right arm of her raincoat had been torn away up to the elbow, and arm below it was still in the active process of repairing itself, muscle fibers growing and twisting together even as she watched. Blood had splattered all over her clothes, and on the head of the hammer, and a few feet away lay a bloody and mutilated corpse, the head turned into a pulp.

Zarah looked back at them., and then the screaming started.

The teacher had gone ashen, and was frantically dialing at a phone, some of the students were yelling and pointing, and it was all too much, going from the sudden silence to this cacophony. She almost closed her eyes, hands raising to cover her ears, but something stopped her.

They’re not pointing at me, she realised, brain catching up with her instincts. They’re pointing behind me. She spun around, hammer coming up, and froze.

Paose’s body was hovering in the air, still mangled but healing rapidly. Extremely rapidly – far quicker than it had been before, far quicker even than Zarah’s own healing. The shade around his neck was still missing an arm, and was still leaking, looking thinner and weaker than it had before, but as Paose’s eyes returned, they were full of a manic, unstable rage.

He opened his mouth, and screamed.