Foundryside (The Founders Trilogy #1) - Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,73

she felt him.

A tight, warm bundle of a person, pressed up in the crevice between the wall and the ceiling, like a bat in its roost. Waiting for his vision to return, probably. But the second she felt him…

He moved. Fast. Speeding down.

He must have felt me coming! she thought. I hit the damned rafter too hard!

But she still felt what the wall felt—and the wall had felt him push off, including how hard and which direction he was going.

Sancia gauged his likely position and blindly jumped into open space.

For a moment she just fell, and she was sure she’d cocked it up, sure she’d missed him, sure she would just plummet three stories down into the vagrants’ nest, where she’d break a leg, or her skull, and then she’d just die there.

But then she hit him. Hard.

Sancia instinctively threw her arms around the man and clung tightly to him. Her hearing was coming back, and she heard him scream in surprise and anger. They were still falling, but as someone who was somewhat used to falling in space, the way they were falling was so strange: they suddenly, rapidly decelerated to a curiously steady rate, like they were trapped in a floating bubble, twisting through the air.

Until they hit the ground. Then the man shoved off, hard, and they went rocketing throughout the old paper mill.

The man smashed Sancia into walls, into rafters, and, once, into what she guessed was his floating, unconscious comrade. He hurtled back and forth throughout the building, trying to shake her off and struggling with her grasp.

But Sancia was strong, and she held fast. The world was tumbling and twirling about them, the vagrants were screaming and shrieking, and her sight was slowly, slowly coming back to her…

She saw the fourth-floor windows flying at them, and realized what was going to happen.

“Ah, shit!” she cried.

They crashed through a pair of shutters, and then they were outside, flying through the open night air, still tumbling over and over and over. Now he could fly up a mile and dump her off, or have one of his comrades pry her off and slit her throat, or…

Clef shouted at her.

Sancia clung tighter to him, gritted her teeth, and started swatting at the man’s stomach with her hand, clawing and tearing at anything she could find there.

Then her hand felt a small wheel—which she managed to turn.

They froze, hanging in midair.

“No!” screamed the man.

And then he seemed to explode.

It was as if someone had filled a huge water skin with hot blood and jumped on it. The spray of gore was unspeakably tremendous, and totally shocking to Sancia.

More concerning, though, was that the man she’d leapt on was no longer…well, there. It was as if he’d simply disappeared, leaving only the scrived gravity device behind.

Which meant Sancia was now falling.

She tried to grab at something, anything. The only thing to hold on to was the dead man’s device, which was covered in blood. She grabbed it purely out of instinct, yet this did nothing. Everything seemed to slow down as she fell to the fairway below.

cried Clef.

Sancia had no mind to answer. The world was sliding by her, every ripple of the bedsheets and twist of the undergarments frozen in space…

And then Gregor Dandolo was there, beneath her.

He cried out in pain as Sancia landed in his arms. Sancia herself was still dumbfounded, her mind reeling as she tried to understand what had just happened. Then he dumped her in the mud, cursing and rubbing his lower vertebrae.

“You…you caught me?” she said aloud, still stunned.

He groaned and fell to his knees. “My scrumming back…Consider my debt repaid,” he snarled.

She looked at herself. She was trembling, absolutely covered in blood, and she still clutched the gravity device in her hands. It looked like two plates connected with cloth bands—one for your belly, one for your back—and one plate had a series of little dials on it.

She stammered out, “I…I…”

“You must have sabotaged the device he was using to float,” said Gregor. He looked up at the bedsheets above, which were all spattered with gore. “Causing his gravity to collapse, crushing him. Somewhere in the street is probably a fleshy marble that was once the whole of that man’s body.” He looked around. “Help me up. Now!”

“Why? That’s all of them, right?”

“No, that was just seven! There were nine in tota—”

Gregor never got the