Wrath-Part 3

Wrath went in for the kill.

It was the right moment, and he knew it. The thing was still on its back on the road, one leg half grown, the sand creeping to it a few grains at a time. Cut it apart now, faster than it could drink, and there would be nothing left to put back together.

He crossed the ten metres in one step and brought the sword down.

The thing did not block.

It did not even look at him. It rolled, not away from the blade but toward the side of the road, where a slab of rock from the slide lay against the barrier, flat and thick and the size of a door. The sword took its left arm off at the shoulder. It did not seem to notice. Its right hand closed on the edge of the slab.

Then it threw.

Not at Wrath.

The slab went past him, turning end over end out of the dust, and hit the black car on its front corner.

The sound was enormous. The front of the car folded in. White airbags burst open behind the windscreen. The car spun a half turn, tyres shrieking, its back end swinging round, and its front end went through the steel barrier and tore it open.

It stopped.

The front wheels were over the edge. The whole front half of the car hung out over sixty metres of air, and the torn barrier scraped against its sides.

For a moment nothing moved.

Then, slowly, the car began to tip.

The thing was right there. One-armed. Kneeling on the road with its hand flat on the concrete, drinking. One step, and Wrath could reach it. One step, and it was over.

The car tipped further. Something fell from it and turned over and over, all the way down into the gorge.

Wrath let the thing go.

He was at the back of the car before the thought had finished. He drove the sword into the road beside the rear wheel, through the surface and into the concrete underneath, until only a hand's width of blade was showing below the scarf.

'Flat side to the pull. Or it cuts its way out.'

He turned the blade in the concrete, and the concrete groaned. Then he grabbed the back bumper with his free hand.

The car stopped tipping.

It did not stop easily. The bumper crumpled under his fingers like a can. The torn barrier screamed along the car's sides. Glass from the broken headlights slid off the front and fell, small bright pieces of it turning in the light, for a long time.

Wrath held on.

The weight was not the problem. The problem was that he weighed what a boy weighed. Without the sword in the road, he would have gone over with it.

He did not see the thing get up.

He felt it. A stone fist, between his shoulder blades, hard enough to crack the road under his feet.

It did not hurt him. Almost nothing could.

But it drove him forward into the back of the car, and the blade held, and the concrete around it did not, quite. It cracked. It crumbled. The sword leaned in its hole. The car slid another half metre out over the gap, and its back wheels lifted off the road.

'No, no, no—'

He kicked backward without looking.

His heel caught the thing in the middle, and it went skidding away across both lanes and hit the far barrier hard enough to bend it.

That gave him two seconds.

Wrath set his feet, took a better grip on what was left of the bumper, and pulled.

The car came back.

Its belly dragged over the edge with a long metal shriek. The front wheels caught the lip of the road, slipped, caught again. Then the whole car dropped back onto the deck, nose first, rocked on its springs, and was still.

He pulled the sword out of the road. It came free easily.

The back door on the near side was jammed. It was also bent. Not inward, the way the crash should have bent it. Outward. Two bulges in the metal at the height of a hand, as if someone inside had already tried to push it open, very hard.

Wrath did not have time to think about that.

He tore the door off its hinges and threw it away.

The driver was slumped over the wheel, his grey head resting against the airbag, one white-gloved hand still holding on.

In the back seat was a girl.

She was fifteen or so, in a dark coat, her hair come loose around her face. There was a scratch along one cheekbone. A school bag had fallen at her feet. Her seat belt was still on, pulled tight across her chest, and she was looking straight at him.

She was not screaming.

He snapped the belt with two fingers and took her by the wrist.

Skin on skin.

It came the way it always came, all at once, without asking.

A river in summer.

Warm stones under bare feet. The smell of wet rock and cut grass. Dragonflies hanging over the shallows.

A boy sitting on the bank beside her, picking a flat grey stone out of the water. He flicked it, and it skipped seven times.

The boy turned his head and smiled.

Wrath knew that face.

It was younger than he had ever seen it. Much younger. But he had knelt to that face a very long time ago, in a place that was not this world, with the other six kneeling on either side of him. It was the face of the one they had all sworn to.

Origin. As a child.

Smiling at her.

'...My young lord?'

Behind him, stone ground against stone.

Wrath pulled the girl out of the car in one movement and put her behind him.

The thing was coming. Its left arm was back as far as the elbow, rough and unfinished, and its right fist was already swelling into a club. It came across the road at a run. The sand through the concrete was slow, but it was enough. Enough to keep it coming.

Wrath looked at it. Then at the bridge under it, and the shapes of the cars in the dust, and the girl behind him.

He was done with ten minutes.

He caught the end of the scarf in his teeth and pulled.

It came loose in three turns.

His bare hand closed on the handle.

It was like the first time. It was always like the first time.

The sword woke.

It went into his palm like lightning into a tree: up his arm, through his chest, down through his legs and into the bridge. Every hair on his body stood up. His heart missed a beat and came back twice as hard. And far above, Eden's hold on him tightened at once, a hard weight on his chest and behind his eyes.

It was not enough to stop him.

The dust in the air turned and began to drift toward the blade. On the hillside above the tunnel, the cedars that were still standing leaned, all of them, the same way. Far below, the surface of the river shivered.

For a moment, the whole valley seemed to lean toward the sword.

'Up. It has to go up.'

The thing swung at his head.

Wrath stepped in under the swing, so close he could feel the cold coming off its stone chest, and cut upward.

Hip. Ribs. Throat.

Out through the top of the head.

The blade went through it and kept going, and everything the sword had in it went after the blade. Not out. Up. Past the thing, past the lamp posts, straight into the sky.

The body opened down the middle.

The stone in it stopped being stone. It went to sand, and the sand went to dust, and the dust fell.

Somewhere inside it, the piece of the mountain went out like a light.

High above the gorge, the one cloud in the morning sky came apart in two clean halves, from one side to the other.

The bridge went quiet.

What was left on the road was a man.

Not much of one. The Chūkū had used up most of him. A face. A shoulder in a torn office jacket. A left hand lying open on the road, the little finger and the ring finger missing.

Wrath looked at the hand for a moment.

Then the burn reached him.

He wrapped the handle again fast, the scarf going round and round, his fingers clumsy, and only when the knot was tied did he open his right hand and look at it.

The palm was red and blistered, with dark lines across it where the grip had been.

'Ow. Ow. Okay. Ow.'

Inside the car, the driver moved.

He lifted his head off the airbag slowly, the way people do when they are not sure which parts of them still work. There was blood on his lip. He looked at the empty back seat, then out through the hole where the door had been.

"Miss Hoshino?" His voice was thin. "Miss Hoshino, are you hurt?"

The girl was standing on the road behind Wrath, three metres away, in her dark coat, with dust settling in her hair.

She was looking at him.

Not at the car, or the hole in the barrier, or what was left of the man on the road. At him.

Wrath sighed.

He let the red come into his eyes.

It did not take much. It never did. He bent to the window, met the driver's eyes, and said quietly, "A rockslide."

The driver's face went slack and calm, like a man half asleep.

"Rocks came down off the hill and hit the car," Wrath said. "You braked. You hit the barrier. That's all. That's all there was."

"A rockslide," the driver said slowly. "That's all."

"Good."

Then Wrath straightened, turned, and looked at the girl.

He gave her the same thing he had given the driver. Authority over will and memory, laid on her as lightly as he knew how. A rockslide, and nothing else.

It went into her.

It did not come back.

Nothing happened. Her face did not go slack. Her eyes did not go calm. It was like pouring water onto dry sand and watching it disappear. She stood there in the dust with her hands at her sides, and kept looking at him.

Wrath stared at her.

The red had never failed. Not on a human, not on anything that called itself more than human. Two years on this side, and a very long time before that, and it had never once simply gone into someone and vanished.

And this was the girl with his young lord in her memories.

'...What are you?'

Her eyes moved for the first time, from his face down to his right hand.

"Your hand," she said.

Wrath looked down at it. The palm was still burning. The blisters had already split.

He looked back at her.

He did not say anything.

From the far end of the bridge came the sound of engines.

Not ordinary traffic. Big engines, more than one, coming out of the south tunnel too fast and too sure of where they were going. Headlights swept through the dust.

He had to go.

He looked at her for one more second.

Then he put a hand on the broken barrier and went over it.

Sixty metres down, the river took him in to the knees, cold and fast over its grey stones.

He stood in it and looked up. From down here, the bridge was only a dark line across the sky.

His palm hurt.

He closed his hand over it and started walking along the stones, upstream, the way the car had been going.

Behind him, the river kept running.