A Maze of Glass, Chapter Eight, Pt. 1
Out of the grocery store parking lot, a broad traffic’d avenue, four lanes. The man raced across pumping arms, overstuffed rucksack clanking cacophonies on his back. Zoe chased. With a population just under two hundred thousand, few cars rode along the afternoon lanes. One of them blasted a horn, swerving as the man rushed and whirled around it. Zoe slowed for a second, losing the gain she’d made on his head start, and started sprinting again around the vehicle’s trunk.
They raced through a strip mall lot. A learning center, an arts and crafts boutique, one of the city’s fancier Goodwills. The man turned west, toward the Numbered District, the rectangle of blocks with numbered streets, and beyond that the Oceanrest Historic District and its narrow roads and cobbles, its alleys where cars couldn’t fit.
Did he know the city?
He cut into the Numbered District, sprinting south. Zoe tailed him. She gained, at first. His fifty foot lead grew to sixty, shrank to fifty, grew to seventy, shrank to fifty, shrank to forty, to thirty, to twenty…but after five minutes of sprinting and darting and avoiding cars and pedestrians, seventeen years of smoking started to slow her down. She still had better pace, but not ‘better’ enough.
At the edge of 1st and 1st, he crossed southwest over a set of tram tracks toward the industrial district and the docks. Zoe caught a foot on a rail and stumbled. She caught herself, balanced, and kept chasing. She’d only lost about two feet, but now she was only gaining six inches per second. And losing air.
He knew his way around. He knew the city well.
That was a bad sign.
His twenty foot lead shrank to eighteen, to sixteen, to fourteen…
A chainlink fence separated the years-unused tram tracks from the industrial district and docks proper. The man climbed. Zoe caught up before he’d reached the top of the fence. She leapt up and started after him. He rolled over the top and fell, landing sloppy and stumbling. He crashed to hands and knees, scrambling back bipedal. Zoe dropped down five feet behind him, landing cat-like, rolling with the momentum.
Fifteen feet ahead, someone had already pried open the back door to a condemned factory. The man rushed for it. Zoe rushed for him.
His five foot lead shrank to four, three…
A lance of sixth-sense cool shot down her spine. She yanked her sidearm out of her coat pocket, slowing her pace. The man cut sharply right at the yawning factory door. A monster leapt out from the darkness within. Zoe thumbed the safety and pivoted her momentum into a sidelong strafe, a spin away from the monster’s first flailing attacks.
Sculpted from inanimate objects lashed and given locomotion by magic, the thing swung arms made from sawblades and hammers, rattled legs unstably on mystically-enhanced captive bolt pistols. It pistoned a body of cinderblock and oil drum and spare parts clumsily toward her. It seemed to have no organic parts. It had no visible head or nervous system, no ligature or biological attachments.
Only amateurs built Constructs without organic parts. If the only thing that made a Construct ‘living’ was the magic, itself, that made the Construct pretty easy to kill. Biomass mattered. Even mud beat out steel as Construct materia.
Zoe kept her head low and threw her bodyweight into the thing’s center mass. Its sawblades sliced at her winter coat but didn’t graze skin—she barreled into it and sent it crashing to the ground. It struggled on its stubby bolt-pistol legs and sawblade-hammer arms to push itself upright again. The weldwork connecting its limbs to its body was weak, Zoe noticed. With a couple well-placed kicks, she tore its unreal shoulders apart and left it armless and dying on the ground. It buzzed and clattered, its bolt-pistols hissing and firing at the air. In such a state, the spell giving it movement and motivation would soon collapse to mundanity and the Construct would cease to exist.
But in the seven or eight seconds she’d spent killing it, the man—the Summoner—had vanished inside. She reached for her purse.
Paused.
She’d left her purse in the car. Obviously. Because of the running.
“Goddammit.”
Keeping her pistol close, barrel pointed groundward, she approached the gaping factory threshold. She crossed from half-fallow grass to half-ruined cement. Broken plywood boards littered the ground where someone had pried them loose from the door. The door, itself, rested in rust and dust in the dimness beyond the entryway. Zoe took a deep breath and stepped inside.
Concrete floors, dust, and rust; sunlight sliced in from tears in the structure, shining age on steel curves. Detritus strew everything, the factory’s innards tangled and torn by years of scavengers, its entire electrical system long-harvested, its valuable scraps denuded. All the vague and distant sound of the outside world fell away.
Zoe crept down a cement corridor. In the vast chamber ahead, she heard the scraping of shoe soles. How far? She couldn’t tell; they echoed, obscuring distance.
Her sixth sense itched. It told her that danger waited nearby. Sometimes a person’s sixth sense could be uncannily unhelpful.
She entered the larger, central chamber of the structure.
A spell jammed through her. At the mouth of the threshold, the Summoner had painted a sigil, charged it with magic, and imbued it with his will. Luckily, the Summoner still seemed like a relative amateur. The restraint spell tried to freeze Zoe in place but the Summoner lacked the expertise, focus, and sheer, trained willpower to make that happen.
Zoe’s will shred his in a fraction of a second. She shuddered for a moment as the spell still triggered, but its practical effects were maybe a hundredth of the desired ones.
She ducked just before two gunshots erupted from the factory dim. If the Summoner’s spell had actually worked, they’d have struck her center-mass. Since it hadn’t, they whizzed over her head and sparked against old, rotten architecture.
“Shit!” the Summoner yelped, his shoe-scrape rushing toward another exit on the opposite side of the enormous room. He was smart enough to know when he’d been outmatched.
Thumbing off the safety on her own pistol, she leapt up and gave chase.
She skidded over iced cement, leapt over some malformed piece of scavenged steel, and caught herself moments before falling. The Summoner gained ground, slamming open another door a dozen paces ahead. Rebalanced, Zoe started running again just as the man flew out into the winter light.
A rush of calm came over her. Her sixth sense spiked. Time dilated.
She slowed her pace for part of a second.
A creature flew out of the dimness to her left, another Construct, sometimes capitalized.
She pivoted, bringing her body’s momentum in an arc toward the thing, leading with the butt of her gun. As her perceptions of time accelerated to normalcy, she felt the impact. The butt of her sidearm and the length of her forearm made contact, the construct feeling like twenty-five or so pounds of solid animal muscle.
It hit the floor and rolled, hissing.
Zoe stomped on its foremost head. As its numerous claws and hardware appendages scraped at her boots and legs, she fired two silver bullets and one armor piercing round into its grotesque body. It shivered and squeaked, losing strength. She fired a final frangible round into it and the thing went still.
She sighed, out of breath. If the Summoner knew the city as well as he seemed to, she wouldn’t catch up to him now.
Removing her boot, she examined the Construct’s carcass. The Summoner had stitched together two stray cats, four rats, and two screwdriver-tipped, mechanical arms to create the three-headed, dozen-clawed grotesquery. Judging from the lack of other vermin, Zoe assumed the monster had eaten most of its convenient prey already. She left it, following the Summoner’s lead out the back door.
Far-but-not-too-far, sirens warbled toward the factory. Even in the slouched dereliction of the half-abandoned industrial district, gunfire invited scrutiny.
And scrutiny meant risk.
Scrutiny meant danger.
Zoe jogged south-southeast, first, through the industrial district and harbor’s most dilapidated and gutted avenues. At the southernmost end of the docks, broad signs advertised a marina under construction. There, the property values had dropped so low that they’d become wise investments for unwise business ideas.
Slowing to a speed walk, she cut east toward the nearest suburb. The sirens arrived at their destination, six minutes behind her. Zoe knew what they’d find—a scattering of tools, evidence of recent looting, a handful of dead animals, and signs of a struggle. If they could put a narrative together from all of it, that narrative would stick.
Slowing from speed-walk to casual stride, Zoe pulled out her phone, flipped it open, and dialed.
“Hey,” Sung-ho said. “What’s the news?”
Zoe realized she was still out of breath. She stopped walking. Inhaled.
“Zo’?” Sung-ho asked. “Hey, Zo’, you there?”
“He’s here,” she said, breathing again. “In Oceanrest.”
“What?”
“And I think he knows who we are.”
Sung-ho didn’t bother asking ‘how.’ In their world of shadows and secrets and literal magic, the question rarely garnered answers at all—and when it did, they seldom proved useful. Instead, Sung-ho’s voice dropped low and solemn. “We have to finish your ritual tonight.”
“I’m heading back now.”
“I’ll get Omar prep’d for his first dreamer vision.”
Zoe wanted to start walking again but couldn’t. “He’s not ready.”
“Well, momma bird, there’s something hungry circling our nest, so ready or not, it’s fly-time.”
“Sung-ho—”
“My daughter lives here,” his voice lost all cleverness. It became a lethal thing, a thing that cuts clean and all the way through. “And a madman might know who we are. So Omar is taking the dreamer.”
Zoe swallowed. Nodded even though Sung-ho couldn’t see it. “I’ll be there in forty-five minutes.”
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