Chapter 19: The Montage (part 6)

  Ezekiel Starlight. He didn’t like his name, but he couldn’t change it. It had been written somewhere next to Jordan Dae and Shadrach Therst.

  No, he didn’t care much for names. The Dark Man had it figured out. With no name, who could identify him? Who could understand him?

  Here was a name he disliked in particular: Abraham Black.

  “He’s should be at the Lab by now,” he said into a telephone. His voice crossed dimensional boundaries to Jordan.

  “Y’know, it’s funny,” said Jordan Dae, “not here yet.”

  “Late, I guess.”

  “Y’know, yeah. Shoulda been here by now.”

  “I got some reinforcements,” said Ezekiel. One of them stood next to him, a tall black man wearing orange and grey like all the rest. This man wore a heavy rectangular box strapped to his back. A tall black man wearing orange and grey, like all the rest, stood next to Ezekiel. He had a heavy rectangular box strapped to his back, which was wired up to a rotary dial telephone. Ezekiel spoke through the telephone, resembling a soldier on the battlefield communicating via a portable radio. Except it wasn’t a battlefield. It was the Museum. He could have reclined on a nearby chaise velvet lounge chair within spitting distance of a grand piano polished to mirror shine in the warm light. Ezekiel wasn’t fooled, nor were his newfound armed allies from his original story. They were alert, weapons ready. This was enemy territory. This was the target.

  “Great,” said Jordan, though she didn’t sound enthused, “that’s great. How many?”

  “About a dozen, I guess. They came through from their side. Is Shadrach there?”

  “Y’know, it’s funny,” she said. “That Shade character came to talk. Talking with Shad now. Made it here ahead of Black. Wants to make a deal.”

  “Then make the deal, I guess.” Anything to improve their chances against Black.

  “That’s what Shad said. ‘We be alone here for long? Nohow.’ That’s what he said.”

  “Yeah, you’ll have plenty of company soon, I guess. Just don’t let them get in here. I’ll have my hands full with McFinn. But I’ll try to get back there and help.”

  “What about that Dark Man?”

  “He’s around. Just watching.” Ezekiel hadn’t ever seen him do more than watch, and he didn’t want to. He’d been worried about this operation, the reinforcements, intruding into the Museum. But they’d done it from their end, by the book. Ezekiel had broken no rules to help them. He didn’t think so. But who knew all the Museum’s rules? Only the Dark Man.

  “Y’know, it’s funny,” said Jordan. “I’m getting excited for this.”

  “I guess.”

  *

  It’s been over a week since Absolem zapped Eric into the present tense, but who’s counting? The whole concept of ‘week’ is pretty meaningless when they’re all on their different sleep schedules, anyway. Really, the only way Eric can know for sure is that Ardian time, the standard in the Narrative, is more or less comparable to Earth time, with 24-hour days and all that. It doesn’t have weeks, just like it doesn’t have months or seasons or years because it doesn’t orbit a star like a normal fucking planet, but Eric will take what he can get in the realm of temporal stability.

  And now they’re lying in ambush for these bug monsters somewhere in a stormy desert on Ardia, and Heidi’s telling him about this thing her guards do on the Metal Moon to pass the time.

  “So they make bets on how each other’s gonna die?” he asks.

  “Pretty much,” she says. “Like this: bet you’ll die by pissing off Kate.”

  “Oh, real funny. Yeah, here’s mine: bet you’ll die by fraternizing with a homicidal psychopath named Abraham Black.”

  “He’s not…” Heidi begins, but then she apparently realizes she can’t really deny that Black is either of those things.

  “He fucking killed Isaac,” Eric reminds her.

  “That wasn’t him,” she says. “Not this one.”

  Eric grunts in response. “Where the hell are they, anyway?” He picks up his mist-made binoculars and peers out into the desert. It’s barren rust-colored rock, crinkled and folded up into a maze of ridges and gulleys. Somewhere down below lies a hive of generic bug monsters that have been causing problems in this part of the world.

  He and Heidi sit on one of the higher ridges at the front of a battalion of Ardian troops, ready to ambush the shit out of some generic bug monsters once they are lured to the surface. Eric doesn’t know how the monsters are being lured. He doesn’t really understand why they’re doing this, why it’s important. Isaac knows all that shit, all the reasons and backstory. Isaac loves the fucking lore, because he is a nerd. But to Eric it’s just a by-the-numbers side quest. It might be fun, though. And he could always use more practice at manipulating the beat.

  He doesn’t know where exactly everyone else is, except that Kate is keeping away the clouds and Isaac is somewhere up in the atmosphere coordinating everything with ARKO, and Liz is elsewhere with one of the Ladies, and Jim opted out because he’s not really down with killing things, even basic bug baddies, despite being the most powerful of them all.

  “Hey,” he says to Heidi, “have you, like, killed anyone yet?”

  Heidi is silent for a moment. Her helmet is off, so he’s looking at classic Heidi with the red bandana headband and big brown eyes. Except she’s also got all the badass hi-tech armor. She’s playing with a flat metal stick, rolling it around her fingers. Her surfboard. “Have you?” she says.

  Eric doesn’t know, and he tells her so. “There was that cyborg thing.”

  “I remember,” she says.

  “And there are these, like, machines or whatever in my moon. I don’t think they’re alive.”

  Heidi nods.

  “And I’ve killed a few monsters, but I don’t know if those count as people. But I’m just thinking, you know, cause Jim…like, what things are okay to kill?”

  “Do questions like that actually matter?” says Heidi. “You just do what you have to do, whether it’s okay or not. Right?”

  She says ‘right?’ like it’s an actual question, like she doesn’t really know if it’s right. And Eric doesn’t know either. “Sounds right,” he says. “Isaac thinks even the ‘people’ here aren’t real like we are.”

  “But it doesn’t seem that way, does it?” says Heidi. She looks back at her current selection of friendly monstrosities brought down from the Metal Moon. The comparatively uninteresting troops of Ardia give Heidi’s guards a wide space to themselves.

  Eric thinks about Jacob Hollow and others he has met here: Lords and Ladies, the Lockbreaker, Eranex, Theians, Yvethians. Some of them seem real enough, like people who might actually exist on Earth were they given a human form. Others are caricatures who might as well have labels like BAD GUY or COMIC RELIEF written on their fucking foreheads.

  “Where’s the fucking metric?” Eric mutters. He doesn’t want to care about this shit. But he kind of has to, because what if he legit kills someone, someone with a soul, and what if Isaac is right and there is a God and Eric’s going to meet him someday with blood on his hands? And what if that’s what he has to do to get back to Leah?

  Such thoughts, he can see, do not trouble Heidi. She is practical. She does whatever she thinks she needs to, and for her it’s as simple as that.

  He changes the topic. “Jim’s birthday is soon,” he says. Jim’s birthday wish hasn’t changed: he wants all six of them to be together. It seems very doable now. In fact, Jim would have pretty much gotten his wish today if he had decided to show up to the bug monster extermination fest.

  Heidi gets weird like she always does when the subject of Jimothy comes up. She shuffles uncomfortably and she obviously wants to say something, but she holds herself back. Eric has discarded the idea that Heidi has a crush on Jimothy. It’s more like she’s fascinated by him, but embarrassed about it.

  She works up her courage and says, “Why does he care so much?” she says it like she’s not really expecting an answer. And sure enough, Eric has no answer to give. He just shrugs. But he smiles, too, because he remembers Elizabeth asking a similar question long ago. Why is Jimothy so…kind?

  It is one of life’s great mysteries, but it probably has something to do with the best big brother in the world.

  Finally, it happens. Movement down below. Heidi points it out to him: figures crawling through the folds in the landscape. Even though it’s morning (sort of, technically) it’s pretty dark out and stars crawl overhead because Kate is keeping the clouds away. The bugs don’t like light. She’ll bring the clouds back in once the trap is sprung. But Eric has to admit that the red desert in the weird half-light of clouds on the distant horizons, with a couple moons visible overhead and the occasional star falling and exploding from the dark sky, it all looks pretty fucking cool.

  He calls it in to Isaac. “AMs inbound,” he says. He pings the coordinates.

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  “Copy,” says Isaac, who tries and fails to sound serious. “Threat level?”

  “The fuck is that?”

  “Just say something.”

  “Fine. AMs inbound, threat level 4, please advise. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

  “You should say ‘over and out’ or something.”

  Eric clicks off the headset without replying. Heidi says, “He can’t take anything seriously, can he?”

  “Nope,” says Eric. Then, in fairness to Isaac, he adds, “well, some things. Sometimes.” He sees doubt in Heidi’s eyes. She’s never been a big fan of Isaac, and Eric can see why. But he feels like he needs to defend his bro, so he says, “when he does take things seriously, he gets shit done. Like, when that happens, you can relax. Just kick up your feet, grab a soda, watch him go.” Eric has seen this many times: in school projects, childhood adventures, and more recently in Isaac trying to figure out what the fuck is going on with this Narrative.

  But here, now, Heidi has a point. This bug-hunt sidequest is a game to Isaac, just another part of the story.

  That’s what he’s thinking when he notices that the ground below him is trembling. That’s all the warning any of them get, but it’s enough.

  The monsters cleave up through the rock and hard-packed earth, claws and carapaces rusty with red dust, multifaceted eyes gleaming in the starlight. Each monster is the size of a rhinoceros. They’re bigger than Eric expected.

  Eric, of course, has plenty of time. He has become used to the ticking of the Narrative’s time, the heartbeat which he suspects belongs to the Bright World. He slows it down, heaving himself against its momentum until the bug monsters are barely moving; fountains of dirt freeze in midair as they erupt from below. He puts on his helmet and gets out his weapon.

  His latest weapon no doubt has a much cooler name than what he calls it: sword-on-a-stick. It is great at cutting things, and it is also some kind of laser assault rifle that can shoot out arcs of the blue energy that dances over the blade.

  He cuts up a few of the bugs before he starts to get tired of holding back the metronome. He has enough time to do the most important thing: turn on the music inside his helmet. The music is everything. He can match its beat, and he can use it to stutter the big ticking pendulum, the beating heart of time itself. Or, alternatively, his own personal heartbeat. Or anything else’s.

  The initial assault from the bugs, though it did catch them off-guard, does not last long. The troops of Ardia and the guards of Orpheus make quick work of these low-level stock grunts. But Eric, looking out over the starry desert, can see that there are many more bugs than expected, and some of them are, in a word, big.

  Heidi is down the hill, struggling with a couple of the bugs. Eric steps closer and stands by to watch. It doesn’t take long. Heidi reaches up with one hand and makes a fist. She collapses one bug in on itself like she’s a goddamn sith lord, and she doesn’t need to worry about the other one because suddenly Bahamut is all over it, rapidly and systematically dismembering its shiny carapace.

  “Thanks for the help,” Heidi says as she gets up and wipes green goop from the visor of her helmet. She doesn’t have speakers in her helmet like Isaac, so her voice is muffled.

  “Hey, remember what I said about assuming monsters were on your side? That guy looked friendlier than Ruth, c’mon.”

  “Fuck you.” He can’t see her face, but he thinks she’s smiling.

  Light pours over the desert as cloudbanks sweep back in, rushing over the sky like a flood released. Lightning crashes within the strangely bright thunderstorm. Eric and Heidi can see that someone, somewhere, has fucked up. They, and the troops with them, are supposed to ambush and destroy an unsuspecting horde of bugs. But in the grand scheme of things, it looks like they’re being mostly ignored. Most of the bugs, including the really fucking big ones that no one told Eric about, are several miles off, down in a broad valley of flat rock scattered with boulders.

  “Isn’t that where Elizabeth is?” asks Heidi, beside him.

  “Guys,” says Isaac, “we got a Sizeable Problem. They’re all on Liz for some reason.” There is a brief pause, then he continues, “Get over there; I’m gonna get some help.”

  “Some help?” Eric asks. “What is ‘some help?’” But Isaac only says, “If you die…” And Eric gives the required reply with a sardonic grin, “…die with honor.”

  Heidi has already enlarged her metal surfboard. Eric turns and scrambles back up the slope to his fallen laserbike. Up here at the top, troops and guards are surveying the landscape just as Eric and Heidi had a moment before. They aren’t stupid; they can see that their ambush has already failed.

  “Get over there,” says Eric. He jerks a thumb over his shoulder at the obvious mass of bug-monsters teeming toward Elizabeth’s location. For once, he isn’t too self-conscious about the fact that all these badasses take orders from him even though he’s just this stupid fucking kid with no idea what he’s doing. “Clear ‘em out on the way.” Then again, it’s not rocket science here. These badasses came here to kill bug monsters.

  He rights the bike, hops on, thumbs the switch that brings it to life. Frisby perches at the front like always, crouched like some adorable hood ornament up on the headlight. Eric’s helmet interfaces with the advanced computerized systems of the bike, assessing the layout of the surrounding terrain by downloading the scan that ARKO just ran seconds previously from Isaac’s ship up in the sky. It determines the optimal path, highlighting allies and enemies along the way. Heidi is already up and away, surfing through the air.

  Eric peels out and zooms toward Elizabeth’s location. The terrain is rough, but the laserbike has this interesting way of just ignoring that. It can skate along on tracks of light that it lays down as it goes. It can’t fly, but it can glide a bit, and it’s pretty good at jumping. It’s fucking awesome, in other words, and even the terrain of the desert canyonlands poses little challenge. He rides toward the sound of ringing chimes—chimes so deep and loud they shake the earth.

  He arrives at about the same time as Heidi, and not a second too soon, because Isaac’s ‘Sizeable Problem’ was a fucking understatement.

  There are bugs here—thousands—their bodies making small hills as Ardian troops gun them down by the truckload. Cannon fodder for miles. But there are also bugs the size of houses, new varieties with more legs and more claws, and tougher armor that shrugs off the bullets and lasers and strange possibly magical beam weapons of the Ardians. A knot of these behemoths swarms around Lady Chimes, the source of the cacophonous ringing sound. She is small by comparison, but she lays into them with tubes of metal that look like pipes pried from a gigantic organ, and every blow cracks their armored shells with a sickening crunch in time to the chime. But it is clear there are too many. It is clear, from a glance, that everything is fucked.

  Some of the bugs, the really big ones, are covered in ribbons of purple fire, fire that actually looks like words when Eric gets closer. They are doing something near Lady Chimes, and Eric realizes all at once that Liz is there, in among them. She shoots out from between two of the monsters as though launched from a sling. One of the giant insects follows her with a great spring that clears the seething mass of insectile bodies. It is like a double-decker bus chasing Elizabeth through the bright sky at maximum speed. She stops suddenly as though striking an invisible wall. She reaches out a hand behind her, and the giant flaming bug monster also comes to a dead stop, paused in midair just behind her. Elizabeth turns and delivers a spinning downward strike with her heel. The action itself doesn’t look all that impressive, but the bug slams to the ground and shakes the earth with the crush of its impact as though God himself had given it the fucking People’s Elbow. Lightning crashes dramatically overhead.

  Eric is moving now, not sure when exactly he abandoned the bike. More bugs are coming, bigger and bigger ones, and some are just too fucking big, insects the size of whales burning with deep purple words branded onto their gleaming carapaces. Eric gets it now—they’re after Liz because she has the words too. Heidi’s voice filters into his ears from the comm channel, but he can’t tell what she’s saying because at his current speed it will take her about half a minute from his perspective to say a single word. She’ll have to wait until the heartbeat of time thumps again.

  He runs toward Liz, all the bugs around him moving like they’re stuck in cold molasses. But the beat can’t be stopped, so he leaps up into the air and lets it go again. Everything flicks back into the default tempo, and his slow-momentum launches him up into the air. Heidi speaks: “Have to reatr—” He catches the rhythm again on the next beat, like reaching out and easing a swinging pendulum to a halt, and he’s getting pretty damn good at that. And just like that, he’s back in the groove, in-sync with the music thumping inside his helmet. Slowwww - normal - slowwwww - normal. When he’s slow, he’s pretty much untouchable. When time beats back into standard tempo for that split second, he’s vulnerable. He needs to observe, to be careful, to predict how things are moving lest the rhythm put him right in the path of a laser or one of those snapping claws. It is exhilarating and terrifying.

  He severs the legs from a bug monster; he climbs up onto another and gives it a good stabbing. But his blade is small now compared to these beasts, like fighting a rabid dog with a butterknife, and his projectiles are pretty much useless. This isn’t his fight, he realizes. Big guys like this are not his ideal type of foe. The matchup is bad. There’s not much for the percussionist to do in this song except maybe play support. He can’t hurt these fucking things, but he can protect Liz and get her the fuck out of here. He wonders if Jim would be able to clean house here. Maybe. Elizabeth said she’d seen him tear up a giant sea monster like it was nothing. But he must have limits.

  Eric is catching up to Liz, but she’s constantly moving and she’s as fast as he is even with his tempo advantage. She’s gotta keep moving, because otherwise she gets swarmed. Eric tries to think: how the fuck are they getting out of here?

  He’s getting close to Liz, and if he can just get a hold of her then he can take her along for a ride on his little journey through the heartbeat of reality. That is when Isaac reappears overhead, his sleek black ship cutting down through the clouds. His ship has lasers, of course, and those rain down a spray of precision shots like a glowing blue rain that strikes down a swath of bugs to one side, but the lasers are insignificant compared to the other thing dropping from Isaac’s ship. It looks like an enormous person, clad in full armor and holding an absurdly massive sword.

  Holy shit, Eric thinks, is that Lo—

  As the sky is torn asunder by Lord Fierce’s wrath and thunder, so shakes the barren rocky ground on which Lord Fierce’s feet be found. He calls aloud, his voice a sounding clarion cry: no Hero on this day shall die. He strikes the earth; the stone recoils; the bugs that burrow in the soil shrink back to their dark home below, for they have met their fiercest foe. The mighty Lady Chimes he sees, who strives to reach the hero, and decrees Lord Fierce: it shall not be. Says Lord to Lady: your treachery shall not go unmatched by this my blade whose wrath you know. No chime shall mark the grave of she who scarred the bark of my brother tree. Flowers his eyes, now burned in Script, with scrivener and ice for crypt!

  Then does Lord Fierce lay her low, his sword aswing into his foe, and crush her—wing and chime and bone. Nor are the beasts more fit to live who dare emerge beneath this sky, whose scriven words in cursed script doom all who read to never die. And so he strides, his blade adance, a harvester in ripened fields, advancing to cleave the burning dross and so avenge his fairest loss.

  Eric, until this moment, had thought that he’d become used to the way the Lords narrated, even so much that he could interrupt them if he had to. Fuckin nope. Not here. Lord Fierce descended from the bright skies, cut down Lady Chimes, and cleaved a grisly path to Elizabeth directly through the worst of the swarm all before Eric could get a voluntary action in edgewise. Fierce must not have known that Lady Chimes was on their side now. Or else, given that Chimes had sort of caused Lord Fair’s death, he didn’t fucking care. He had swatted her like a bug, and the word “DEAD” may as well have appeared in blinking neon lights where she lay crumpled in the impact crater she’d made in the cliffside.

  And speaking of swatting bugs, not one of the titanic burning monstrous insects stood a ghost of a chance against Lord Fierce. He and his sword were a pair; that sword was approximately the size of a fucking surfboard, and Lord Fierce was built like the Incredible Hulk; he would have gotten the net in his eyes by walking under a basketball hoop. His armor was dull and tarnished, like the blade of the sword. The sword tapered to a blunt tip, worn and stained. It didn’t look very sharp. It was a sword for battering and crushing, not stabbing or slicing. Lord Fierce swung it around like it weighed nothing, but it hit like it weighed everything. Nothing slowed it down: not the armor of the giant bugs, not the boulders it clipped into rubble, not even the ground itself when a swing took it down that way. The entire world might as well have been rice paper.

  The bugs soon caught on to this concept and beat a chaotic retreat. Eric let go of the tempo, the beat, the music. He pulled off his helmet, feeling weird and lightheaded, then instantly regretted doing so because the stench of bug guts was overwhelming. And the bug guts were everywhere. Eric stepped through the corpses, still wary of stragglers, toward Elizabeth. He found Lord Fierce kneeling in front of her like he was about to be knighted, though him kneeling didn’t even bring him down to eye level with her, and the thought of her lifting that sword was laughable. But they were quite a scene together, surrounded by dead monsters under a bright and stormy sky.

  Only then did Eric realize, belatedly, that Lord Fierce’s overwhelming narrative presence had jolted him right back into the past tense. But he didn’t want to think about that.

  [end montage]