I thought there would be help from Nuphel-Don or her apprentices, but there wasn’t. I don’t know how to open that valve. I can’t even see it. I’m sorry.”
I swallowed. We would be beaten because we deserved to be beaten. Called Them to us. Handed Them the power to get in. Didn’t find help in time. And the world would never know. “Shit, son.”
She smiled at last. “Well, at least we’ll die doing what we loved.”
“Standing on a roof in a sandstorm?”
“Swearing.”
“Oh. Yes. That.” I looked down at her computer, protected from the sand inside a slipshod hut built of clay shards and tablets, its screen dimmed. Reference material for the spells to shut and lock the gate. Except could we shut it now, without an amplifier? Or would it fizzle out, like those fireworks that pop into the air and fall back to earth, charred instead of alight, while its fellows illuminate the entire sky?
“Got any last words?” she said after a minute.
“Nothing I’d want printed on my tombstone.”
“Me neither.”
We stared upwards, helpless, frozen, as the sky ripped open—tendrils of blackness parting like torn flesh, not light and air at all anymore, a membrane, shredding, and through it crowding nightmares. I cried out and shut my eyes, turning away, but it was too late, I had seen the legion of teeth and tentacles, eyes and brains, like nothing we had seen yet, nothing the Earth should ever have had to see.
The noise of Their side rose to a scream; I slapped my hands over my ears and sank down behind the wall, dimly seeing Johnny still standing, her hands up. The building we were standing on began to rock and sway with real violence, sending her down on her knees beside me, whimpering in pain from the broken brick. I looked over the edge to see a huge crater forming in the ruins below us, tentacles as thick as schoolbuses reaching up from there too, as if about to grasp the ones curling down sinuously from the sky, a deadly handshake of congratulations at overtaking the world.
Johnny was wrong; she did have last words, and they were about to be in the Old Tongue. She shouted into the wind, hands still up, palms out; a long crack of red lightning hit and enveloped her. For an agonizing moment she hung suspended in midair, and then the lightning blasted outwards into the sky with a noise like tearing metal.
The tentacles responded with a shriek and withdrew into the darkness; a moment of blazing hope, seeing two stars—ordinary, white, twinkling stars—in an ordinary black sky. Johnny collapsed next to me, her breath leaving her in a long, forced wheeze, as if she’d been punched.
I glanced down at her for just a second—because the building was rocking now, shifting sharply; her laptop slid to the lower edge, cracked against the brick, and flipped over, disappearing into the maw of darkness below.
Then the chanting faded and resumed even louder, pounding against my head. I screamed, barely aware of the noise coming out of my mouth. She wasn’t moving.
“Johnny! Get up! They’re coming back! It didn’t work!”
She muzzily rose, blood spilling from her nose and ears, and slid as the roof tilted even further, fetching up next to me with a boneless thud.
“Do it again!” I screamed.
“Can’t,” she said; I had to read her lips for that one. “Nothing left.”
“Not nothing,” I said, using her t-shirt to haul her to her feet. “Not nothing. You still have me. You always have me.”
She turned to me slowly, tentacles reaching not everywhere now but coming for us, a few tiny orange flowers bursting far away—someone must have gotten organized with a tank or an RPG or a fighter jet or something, to no effect, the scaly bubbles of skin weren’t even singed—and I heard a voice as clearly in my head as if we were alone in a silent room.
Whatever is in you that can fight
Whatever remains
Let it step forth and fight
Let it step forth from the darkness into the light
Take it, I answered, and snapped my arm out; Johnny’s hand locked onto my forearm and everything inside me lurched towards her, as if blood, soul, weight, mass, thought, were all on separate planes, dragged by different forces, blue light churning from her clamped fingers and up into her arm. Her mouth moved—nothing audible above the undiminished roar. Saying the spell? How would we know if—
I howled as it turned me inside out, heart, guts, everything,