and his impressions of her house, and then himself, Roger Middleton, who was supposed to be ordinary and turned out to be something . . . else. The gunfire continues. Some of it is close; Erin, holding back whoever has come to attack them. That Leigh woman, he assumes. She’s got backup. The cacophony is too much to be coming from just two firearms. There’s an army out there, or maybe only a small mob, and they’re so close, and these walls aren’t really here. These walls are thin. How long can this go on?
He knows the words: doubt, disbelief, skepticism. He knows their power. He hasn’t considered his own power, here and now and in this place where the walls glow mercury bright, where he’s feeding the words that make up the world to the sister-cuckoo who hatched with him from the same egg. He sees the walls flicker. Only for a moment.
A moment is long enough for him to begin to move, hands outstretched, mouth forming a word that will never come.
A moment is long enough for the bullets to break through.
Dodger screams.
SHOWDOWN
Timeline: 8:01 PDT, June 17, 2016 (and on).
Erin keeps her back to the pillar as best she can, ducking around it only to aim, fire, and retreat again. “It’s over, Leigh!” she shouts. “They’re going to manifest! Run now, and maybe you’ll be too far away to worry about by the time they get around to cleaning up Reed’s mess!”
“You stupid idealistic child,” Leigh replies. “They’re not going to manifest. Reed’s already taking the Doctrine from them. You’ve chosen the wrong side. I thought better of you.”
“I chose the wrong side when you killed Darren.” She ducks around the pillar one more time, fires one more time, following the chaotic threads of combat through the air. This time, her shot is followed by the heavy cement-sack sound of a body hitting the floor.
For a moment—a tiny, trembling moment—she allows herself to hope that this is it; that it’s over, that she’s won. Then Leigh says, in a voice dripping with disgust, “You just shot a perfectly good alchemist, and we don’t even have the facility to take him apart. This is why you’re useless, Erin. You’re wasteful. You were never going to be anything other than a tool.”
Her voice is getting closer. Erin breaks cover and runs for the next pillar, moving just ahead of the shining strips of chaos that would put her in the path of Leigh’s bullets. The battle is a grid. She can’t see her own shots true—that would be too much like order—but she can avoid the bright and biting places where the order breaks down. She can keep this up forever.
She hopes she can keep this up forever.
“Stop running and face me!” Leigh is starting to sound angry. Good. Angry people make more mistakes, more errors; they drop things, they lose their focus, they lose their drive. Leigh has been calm and cool for long enough. Erin is ready for her to stop.
“No!”
“I don’t understand why you have to be so unreasonable. I didn’t raise you like this.”
Erin stops, ducks around her pillar, fires two shots at Leigh, who somehow steps easily to the side. “You didn’t raise me at all!”
“I may as well have!”
Too late, Erin realizes she’s being herded. A heavy hand lands on her shoulder, and she looks up into the blank face of a manikin. She struggles to break away, watching Leigh Barrow walk toward her, calm and cruel as a hunting cat. She’s still struggling when the wall in front of her thins and all but disappears, becoming a shining screen of silver.
Erin’s eyes widen. She can’t stop herself.
Leigh smiles. In a motion so smooth it looks practiced, Leigh turns and fires through the thin golden screen of the wall, pulling the trigger twice before the stone snaps back into solidity.
“There,” she says, looking back to Erin. Her smile is smug and unwavering. “Looks like that may have cleared things up nicely, doesn’t it? Now. Where were we?”
Avery took a step forward. His knees were shaking. His teeth were chattering. His whole skeleton felt like it was coming apart at the joints, like it was going to fall into so many bones on the floor. He wanted to turn. He wanted to run away. He didn’t belong here.
But Zib was clinging to the bars of her cage, and he could see the black feathers pushing against her skin, trying to burst free, to turn her