A Maze of Glass, Chapter Twenty, Pt. 1
At the top of the stairwell, they took the blind corner opening into the lounge and half-bath limping. In the closing darkness, Zoe heard the bathroom door bang open and something multi-limbed and fast scurry out. Turning to track the Manifestation, Zoe saw its narrow limbs cling spider-like to the wall, saw the monster scuttle up to the ceiling insectoid and chitinous. Its limbs curled beneath it and shivered, taut.
It erupted through the air bullet-fast and slammed Sung-ho into the wall. Framed photos crashed to the floor. It recoiled from him, grabbed his half-bent body, and slammed it into the wall again. As Sung-ho dropped to his hands and knees, Zoe pushed Jill ahead and reached for her knife.
Jill tumbled and crashed. The Manifestation blurred past Zoe; Zoe leapt back from clawing limbs and drew her blade.
The Manifestation plucked up Jill easily, twisting one arm behind her back and pulling her close. The monster’s other bladed hand gripped the back of Jill’s neck, needletips and razor edges poised to pierce skin.
Zoe pointed the knife at the creature. Behind her, Sung-ho grunted himself upright again.
The Manifestation titled its head, craned low so its distorted features mirrored Jill’s. A film of something greasy flicked across its all-white eyes. It pushed Jill forward and took a step. Zoe countered, stepping away.
If she’d gone for her gun, instead…
“What is it waiting for?” Sung-ho murmured, inches behind her.
The realization filled Zoe like a heave of air after panicked strangulation. The Manifestation hadn’t neutralized Jill because it couldn’t. Maybe it couldn’t kill any of them. At least not yet. Whatever victory conditions existed for the Manifestation to meet, it needed Jill to survive until it met them.
“When I move, cover me,” Zoe whispered.
Sung-ho grunted in the affirmative.
The Manifestation read the epiphany in Zoe’s stance. It charged forward using Jill as a human shield and Zoe backed up away from it. It spun, its back to the darkened lounge, and grinned a face-splitting, shark-toothed grin at Zoe.
It threw Jill aside with so much force that she toppled over a lounge chair and ragdolled across the floor. She screamed, something broken, and groaned in the vague dimness outside of Zoe’s sight. Zoe swiped her knife and the Manifestation recoiled. Jill panted, shuffling in the background, impossible for Zoe to see clearly. She hit the ground again with a yelp, putting too much weight on whatever bone had come apart in her tumble of impacts.
The Manifestation rolled a series of ticks against the roof of its mouth.
Almost at once, they charged each other.
Zoe and the Manifestation met in a clash of sharps. Zoe swatted aside the monster’s first blow. The second peeled material from her armor and scored the shirt underneath—but it left the creature’s guard open. Zoe buried her combat knife in the side of the thing’s neck and white foam bubbled up from the wound. The Manifestation hissed, cracking Zoe in the gut with an elbow. The knife tore free, serrated edge ripping flesh on its way out. More bubbling froth poured from the creature’s throat. It backpedaled.
Sung-ho opened fire. Four bullets, alternating armor piercing and frangible, howled through the Manifestation’s mass. Grease and tar slopped on the floor; foam gushed and sizzled. Zoe prepared to run for Jill, expecting the Manifestation to blur into the darkness again.
But even as Sung-ho fired a fifth and six shot—it didn’t. It jerked and spasmed, taking the bullets, and more viscous and frothing fluids spattered the hardwood. A seventh round pierced it and it half-collapsed, limp from the waist up, its torso folded down in a tangle. Sung-ho stopped firing, halfway through the extended mag. His back pressed to the wall, he stepped sideways toward Zoe. Liquid poured out of the Manifestation.
Zoe could hear Jill get to her feet in the darkness beyond their enemy, but couldn’t see her.
The butane hiss in the walls grew to a frenzy. It dopplered and multiplied, becoming again a crowd of whispers. Sung-ho jumped as the plaster behind him flexed and oozed. The voices mingled in a wheezy snarl, something maybe-recognizable as laughter if laughter came from a squeezebox.
Slowly, Zoe reached down to sheath her knife and draw her pistol instead.
“Where do you think you are?” the not-Jill voice asked from every direction.
Zoe hesitated.
“We need to get to Jill’s room,” Sung-ho muttered, just a few inches away. “Now.”
“We didn’t summon a Manifestation,” Zoe said, realizing.
“No shit. Even more reason to move before—”
A series of cracks rattled the Manifestation back upright, its shattered bones renewed and its wounds sealed shut. It grinned its sharkmouth grin at them.
Sung-ho grabbed Zoe’s arm, turned toward Jill’s bedroom, and started running.
They didn’t have a chance.
Zoe’s rebel smoke hadn’t changed the nature of the villain because it hadn’t changed the nature of the spell—all she’d done was make it stronger. Because the Confrontation didn’t happen on the material plane. It happened in the magic, in the spell, itself, and in the war raging inside Jill’s mind. They hadn’t brought the Manifestation into their world, they had entered its world.
Then they’d hurt it. An entity built out of manifested trauma. And trauma feasted on pain.
The floor ripped apart, wood trying to move like a wave. Splinters sprayed the air. Tumbling forward, Zoe and Sung-ho shielded their heads. They landed on ragged, uneven boards, sticks and sharp debris angling up at every direction. Zoe had her feet, first, and grabbed Sung-ho’s offered arm as he pushed himself from all-fours to upright.
“How could you do this to me!?” the Manifestation shrieked.
The outside-facing, boarded-windowed wall next to them unraveled. It exploded in slow motion, shards and detritus melting into thick semi-liquid. The structure crashed and whiteheaded, unfolding to become a rocky beach. Heroin shores lapped a short, sharp cliff. A butane flame hissed in the sky.
The new light spilling down from the butane sun made it easier to see, giving them thirty feet of clear vision in any direction. They didn’t like what they saw.
To their left, the first bedroom door broadened and stretched. Before them, the shattered field of corridor elongated. Jill’s room fled toward the horizon, no longer twenty feet away over hardwood but much farther, from light into dimness, over rubble and wreckage.
“We can still make it,” Zoe said, maneuvering the span of obstacles.
“Not if it catches up.”
“It’s blowing through resources.”
“It has a lot of them.”
“We don’t know that.”
Sung-ho snorted. “How many times has it sent Jill to rehab?”
A spike of wood erupted from the ground inches in front of them, stabbing air. Zoe leapt back more from shock than reflex. Sung-ho reared up, cursing. Losing balance, he used his momentum to whirl himself around it. On the other side, a second lance speared up from the ground, as well. Sung-ho made the least flattering sound Zoe had yet heard him make.
“Okay,” Zoe admitted, “it has a lot of resources.”
“Don’t touch the beach.”
“Huh? Why?”
“Because it wants us to.”
“But the beach doesn’t have spikes,” Zoe said.
“We don’t know what the beach has.” Sung-ho pursed his lips, brow creased with his own considerations. He muttered something in Korean and shook his head. Muttered something else that sounded like a curse. “We have to try for Jill’s room.”
Zoe squinted behind them. “We have to try for Jill.”
“We have to try for Jill,” Sung-ho agreed.
“Into the breach, then.”
“Into the breach.”
The enormous bedroom door next to them swung in all-at-once. The Manifestation grabbed Sung-ho by his gunhand and his collar and wrenched him into the dimness beyond. Sung-ho shouted something that echoed into senselessness—how big was the room beyond that threshold?—and Zoe froze with a mouth gaping in soundless scream.
She rushed after Sung-ho.
Turn Back
...coming soon...
Table of Contents
