Wallace

The sensation of being in freefall didn't stop when I landed among the rubble on the floor below, and I patted around blindly until I realized I'd landed on my back.

Just rolling onto my stomach was difficult, and the exertion made the world go black for a moment. I pressed myself against the ground, and though I could feel concrete dust covering the carpet under my face and palms, it still felt as if the floor was spinning.

More concerning was the fluttering in my chest, and each breath came at great effort.

There was a groan off to my left, and I reached out a hand, searching for the noise. My fingers were numb, but I must have found something because there was a sudden exclamation, and I felt it move.

I squeezed, and there was a wet crunching sound, and the movement stopped.

I need to make sure the other one's dead before my heart gives out.

The rushing in my ears drowned out much of what I heard, so I started pulling myself over the rubble towards where I thought the other fey might have fallen.

A piece of rubble shifted under me as I crawled over it, and I heard the sound of a pained whimper being forced from a man's chest.

I reached underneath the chunk of concrete, scraped my arm on a piece of rebar, and found something squirming beneath me.

I found the strength to make it stop squirming before the world began to draw away.

I heard a fire door open somewhere in the distance.

Fire?

Oh, that's what the smell was. My shield had failed. Thankfully I'd grown too numb for the smell of burning flesh to affect me much, though I did wish the spinning would stop. Shaking too, though it was hard to notice, and becoming harder.

And then the world snapped back into sharp focus, and I was painfully aware of just how tight my chest felt. I could smell burning flesh, hair, and clothing. The sudden change made the stench overpowering, but I had to get air.

I could still feel my chest fluttering. Something was very badly wrong in there.

With my vision clearing, I saw I was lying with my chest across a large concrete slab that covered a spreading pool of purple blood. I found somewhere to put my hands and pushed myself up, so my weight wasn't on my chest and began taking deep breaths. The pain was tremendous, and my stomach felt sick, though that might have been nerves.

Despite the pain and the ongoing worry about what the hell was going on with my heart, I felt as good now as I had before stomping up all those fucking stairs. Hell, I felt better now than when I'd woken up.

Focusing on my breathing worked to get my heart rate down and beating correctly, which was good because if that hadn't worked, it wasn't like I had a ton of other ideas.

I pushed myself up and immediately regretted it. Though most of it was flowing up through the hole I'd torn in the roof, the room was thick with black smoke.

I dropped back to prone, low enough to stay out of the smoke, and noted two things.

First, fire had stopped raining down, which was nice.

Second, Val was sprawled face down next to the piece of rubble I'd been lying on, which was not.

"Goddammit, Val," I breathed, "What did you do?"

I scrambled over the chunks of concrete and pulled a sheet of purple hair aside to feel at her neck. I felt a pulse and saw the concrete dust puff up, stirred by her breath.

I rolled her onto her back, and though I saw no injuries, she was covered in a cold sweat and shivering.

I paused only to jerk my axe free of the rubble and then crawled towards the fire door, awkward on three limbs while I dragged her by the back of her flight suit.

The crash bar was just visible at the edge of the smoke, and I hauled Val through as quickly as I could. A great deal of smoke billowed into the staircase, but I got Val's prone form through the door and shut it before more could accumulate than would float safely upwards.

Free of immediate danger, I set Val's limp body to sit against the wall and brushed her hair from her face.

I had some copper on me in the form of a few old-style pennies. I could heal-

I looked back towards the fire door. One of her pistols had been laying in bits by where she'd lain, missing all of the brass hardware.

I returned my gaze to Val. Surely she could have found another source for Body mana. But no, the collar of her flight suit hung open, and I could see plainly where her leather holsters had been torn away. Maybe she'd used it to strengthen herself? In any case, they'd been used up once it came time for her to heal me.

"Dammit, Val."

Gathering her up was like trying to pick up a cat, but I took her into my arms, arranged so her head rested against my shoulder, and began the long trip back downstairs.

As I met each landing and rounded the corner, I hoped each time not to see anyone waiting below. Short of kicking them to death, I didn't have a ton of options. Even if I had the time to set Val down, the head of my axe was bent. Whether the damage had been done in the fall or when I'd pulled it free was an open question, but either meant it would serve only as an awkwardly balanced staff until I could get it straightened out.

Val was breathing and her heart was beating, but I had to get her to Amity. Beyond what Cassius had mentioned to me about nearly passing out, I had no idea what drawing too deeply upon your own body for mana could do. She had less than ninety pounds of body mass to draw mana from and about a thousand pounds of body mass to fix.

I stomped through twenty floors before giving up on trying to run the numbers. Val was very small and had fixed someone very big. However you thought about it, it couldn't have been easy on her body, but at least she was still breathing.

I had time to get her to Amity, who, with any luck, would also be making her way to the agreed-upon meeting point. After all, something had put an end to the rain. I just hoped the girls had an easier time than Val and me.

I made it back to the atrium without incident, though I could hear sprinklers going off above. The hole I'd put in the roof had let the rain seep in, and though the fire suppression system was keeping the flames down, I wondered how long it could last.

Not just for this skyscraper, but the rest of the city.

The city's downtown, where everything was made in steel and glass and had commercial sprinkler systems, was one thing. But a city is more than just its downtown core. Right now, beyond these walls, the rest of the city was burning.

Suburban houses with plastic siding, wood frames, and asphalt shingles would be burning. Even with the fire-god dead- however Amity and Regina had managed it -the damage could not be undone. Even if the city's fire department had somehow been hiding out, there was little they could do.

Commercial buildings or warehouses clad in sheet metal and mid-rise brick apartments would fare a little better, and some might survive. But it would only take a single building being compromised. Maybe it was a leaky roof or fire spreading from the street. Either way, one vulnerability would doom an entire street.

Smoke clung to the outside of the building, streaking the atrium windows with soot as it rose into the air. I looked down at Val. She was still breathing, thank god, but I wasn't going to press my luck by taking her outside.

I carried her carefully down the frozen escalator and back through the way we'd come, across the bridge and back into the food court.

I slowed my pace as I entered the food court. It's hard for a thousand pounds of anything to move quietly, but I did what I could to keep it down as I twisted my head this way and that, on the lookout for any more fey or zombies that may be roaming the city.

There could only be so many fey left alive. There were nine at most, and I'd been present for the death of six now. If Amity and Regina had also run into a pair while fighting the fire god, that left only one. Likely the leader, who would be sticking as close to Lady Death as was reasonably healthy.

I adjusted Val's positioning to free up my arm as I approached the next bridge. I held my arm out like a rifle, occasionally switching from one side of the far opening to the other, ready to loose a spell at anything that stepped into my line of fire.

I gave a little start as I heard a crash, and whipped my arm towards that side of the bridge, but the sound was more distant than I'd realized.

It wasn't until I crossed two more pedestrian bridges, heartbeat steady but urgent, that I saw the cause.

I was crossing the final bridge that would take me into the building we'd arranged to meet at and looked down onto the street to see zombies smashing their way through the windows on sidewalk level.

That wasn't the least of it, as the glass in the doors that secured the far end of the bridge had already been smashed out. Inside I could hear the raspy groaning and shuffling of feet as they beat on... plastic, maybe metal?

I took each step carefully, sliding rather than lifting my feet so as to brush aside the glass rather than come down atop it. I held Val tight to my chest as I pushed open the door and leaned inside.

Cosmetics stores, shoe stores, stores that sold handbags, and a dozen other establishments selling upper-middle-class nonsense lined the gently twisting hallway. A crowd of zombies, maybe two dozen, filled the hall, and I got my answer as to what they were trying to batter down.

Most of the stores had their security shutters closed, and the noise I'd heard was their fists thumping against the metal and plexiglass.

Though it appeared they had figured out Regina and Amity were here, the group wasn't all trying at the same shutter. Instead, they were grouped around the stores halfway down the hall and seemed to have narrowed it down to three shops on the left side.

I raised my arm, ready to lay into them, but stopped myself. Yes, maybe Regina and Amity were hiding out, waiting till we made ourselves known. And yes, perhaps they'd spring out and help me once they knew I was here. But it was also possible they had fared as poorly as we did.

I stepped into the hall and hugged the wall on the left, advancing as quickly as I could and hoping the hall's gentle curve would hide me from view.

I found the door helpfully labelled "Employees Only", and tried the handle. It was locked, as expected, but I'd taught myself how to pick locks in high school, so it was little trouble to lift the pins and turn the cylinder with the same Move Metal mana I'd been about to unleash on the zombies.

Using the same movement spell, I took care to shut the door noiselessly behind me, though despite my best efforts, the sound still felt like a gunshot in the cramped, echo-prone hall.

Figuring whoever was going to hear me already had, I murmured, "It's me," and was answered when Amity leaned out of a doorway further down the access corridor. She withdrew, returning a moment later with Regina, before shutting the door to the store.

Amity moved quickly, running on tiptoe to meet me, "What happened?" she whispered.

I knelt and laid Val out as gently as I could on the hard tile floor, "I blew the head off the lighting god. He turned around and blasted me with a lightning bolt. It didn't kill me, but it fucked up my heart. Val threw him off the roof, and finished off his buddies, but then a couple of fey showed up. I did something tremendously stupid and got myself hurt even worse, but it killed the two fey. I was about to check out, and I kinda thought Val was done for as well, but she got to me somehow and healed me."

"Where did she get the mana from?" Regina asked, though her tone suggested she knew the most of it. Even at a whisper, I could feel her voice resonating in my chest.

"Healing from her pistol, the brass components. Body from herself."

"Oh dear," Amity grimaced.

"Yeah, and we were both already pretty fucked up by that point."

"Didn't she have your enchanted paint?"

"Yeah," I replied with a shrug, "But it only goes so far."

Amity's fingers found the zip at the front of Val's suit, and gingerly drew it down. She pulled the flap aside, and there was a sudden twisting sensation in my stomach as I saw the dried blood on her shift.

Amity cut it away, revealing cracked and burnt skin in the shape of the heart I'd drawn.

"This looks bad, but it's hardly life-threatening," Amity assured me, "I'll clean it up and get it bandaged, but her real problem is exhaustion, and I can't do anything about that."

"Exhaustion?"

"I can only sense so much with the enhancements I have, but that's how it appears."

"And without the paint, she's got to handle all that on her original fey biology," I nodded grimly, "Fuck. Is she going to be okay?"

"If she gets a chance to rest, yes."

I covered my face with my hands. Maybe I should have covered my ears. Then I wouldn't have to hear the zombies beating on the shutters outside.

"Did you guys at least knock off a few more of the fey?"

"No," Regina rumbled, "There were only the fire god and a number of the animate corpses."

I leaned back against the wall and stared up at the ceiling, "Fuck."

"Lord Wallace," Regina purred, "We have done our part. Those we left to defend the mall could not have possibly expected to destroy the risen demi-gods themselves. The same can be said for the fey we have slain. With the weather clear, surely we can find a vehicle the flames did not reach. No one could fault us if we left now."