Chương 189: Act 3, Chapter 41: Rat's maze

Day in the story: 15th January (Thursday), night-time Gertrude Monkey After a quick explanation, and a small demonstration meant to prove I wouldn't smash my face bloody when jumping onto the skyscraper's wall, all of us stood on its glassy surface. We were already a good few dozen yards above ground level.

"This is fucking unreal," Thomas said, turning to stare at the street that now looked like a giant wall in front of him. He spoke for almost everyone there, though he was the only one willing to say it out loud. The others just muttered under their breath, glancing around all the same. I relied on carefully hidden sp-eye-ders to keep a perfect view of everything around me, but I still peeked now and then to play my part.

Penrose was right about pretending, and as much as I hated it in this version of myself, I'd do it if it meant success.

"Just look at this."

"I'd trip trying to drive on a building," Ramirez said.

"There are people inside those offices, working. And we're walking on their windows, and they don't even care."

"It's probably not the first time for them," Thomas replied. Penrose was already looking ahead, toward the first obstacle in our path in this alien orientation. I saw it too. The smooth surface of the building's side shifted into parts that jutted out and others that sank inward, creating corridors through steel and glass for us to move along.

"That's a hedge maze without the bushes," he said, summing it up.

"It warrants checking if we can walk on the outer sections."

"Those sticking out toward the sky?" the mercenary captain, Tobias, asked.

"I'll check," I told them. I stepped closer to the first glass wall and jumped, reaching up to pull myself higher. I stopped midway and dropped back down.

"No fucking luck. I felt gravity snap back to normal up there. We'd fall straight onto the concrete."

"That's an unfortunate development. We'll have to go through the maze then, if there's no other way."

"I don't see any," I answered like a proper guide, while my eyes drifted toward the city below in all its night-lit glory. For some reason it reminded me of Paris. I briefly connected with Elle, who was clearly having a much more pleasant time there than I was here.

"Get on with it," Penrose ordered. Two of his men at the front raised their weapons and stepped straight into the first corridor of the bridge-building. We followed close behind. The surface we walked on remained made of windows leading into offices, while the walls were black steel frames. Above us there was no real ceiling. Just an invisible threshold where gravity shifted back to normal, ready to claim our lives the moment we crossed it. The first two minutes passed without incident.

We followed the only path available, moving through the corridor of steel and glass until the first split appeared. One path continued straight ahead. The other turned left. We stopped there to talk it through.

"We face a conundrum now," Phillip mused, stroking his beard.

"Do we have anything that could map this maze?"

"We have a drone, sir," one of the mercenaries said.

"Use it," Thomas ordered. He shifted from one foot to the other, impatience creeping in. The mercenary dug the machine out of his backpack, set it up, and lifted it toward the open ceiling with the remote in his hand.

"Whaaat…" he murmured. The moment the drone left the boundary of the tunnel and turned its camera around, it faced a wall of the building. Not the one carved with those artificial corridors, but a perfectly normal, flat surface with rows of windows. It stretched the entire height of the skyscraper. When the drone was called back, it struck a window that simply wasn't there. The rotors shattered, and the machine dropped.

"Is this how it usually works?" Thomas asked me.

"You climbed one of these before, right?"

"I did. But the other one was completely different. Just one flat surface all the way to the top, with gravity that let me run on it like it was the ground."

"Doesn't matter," Penrose said.

"This one was closer, and we don't know if moving through the city up there would be any easier." He pulled a roll of banknotes from his pocket. One bill slipped from the stack and drifted downward for a few inches before it shimmered faintly with silver and green. Then it dropped straight onto the glass beneath our feet, startling a Shadow inside the office below. She had been working behind her desk, but now she stood, walked over, and pulled the blinds shut.

"Increased weight?" I asked.

"I don't want the wind playing tricks on us. These will be the breadcrumbs in our little forest," he replied. Then he took out a silver coin and flicked it into the air.

"Heads, we go left," he declared. He caught it and flipped it onto the back of his knuckles.

"Tails. Here is me, hoping that it doesn't suggest what we're going to chase in here. Move." And we moved straight ahead into the unknown. A few things changed in our approach, though. The first was obvious. Phillip was leaving markers behind us now. The second was less so. Sounds began to echo along the steel and glass that hadn't been there before. Something between a careless whisper and the scratching calls of rats or mice.

"I don't like it," Ramirez said, reaching for his pistol. He checked the mechanism and kept the weapon ready in his hands. That was when I noticed the difference between me and Alexa after checking both my body and my soul. Her reserves of Authority, the power fueling both me and my magic, recovered far faster within her than they did within me. I was drawing it from her slowly and constantly, while she kept receiving more from the soul core no matter where she was. [You are about forty-five percent full, Trudy. At the current rate you will be full in ten to sixteen hours, give or take.] Thank you, Anansi. I need to conserve what I have more carefully. I sent the thought back. Luckily for my well-being, ordinary actions did not strain the power I carried. Or rather they did, but the loss was balanced by the steady flow Alexandra was sending my way. To balance that small bit of luck, misfortune finally decided to show up. It completely missed the memo on fucking moderation and arrived with far too much weight.

We stopped in place after finding the source of the sounds. They were Shadowspawns. Humanoid shapes with hunched, bulging backs and long, ratty tails. Their faces were mostly human aside from the ears, noses, whiskers, and teeth. The strange part was their clothing. They were dressed like office workers, though it clearly wasn't casual Friday. They were crouched over a badly torn corpse of one of their own, gnawing at it.

"Are we going to move past them?" Tobias asked, turning back toward us. Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

"They're in the way, and they don't look awfully fucking reasonable," Thomas countered, then raised his voice toward the rats in human skin.

"Hey! We're just passing through." Phillip watched the situation calmly, a coin rolling across his knuckles. The situation looked new to him and he was calming and steadying himself. He was used to knowing whether someone was an adversary or not. The killing he arranged usually happened behind closed doors, not out in the open on the windows of a fucking skyscraper. There was hesitation in his movements. A certain stiffness. One of the creatures stood up, its ears and whiskers twitching as it looked at us.

Blood dripped from a piece of intestine it slurped down before it hissed in a harsh, inhuman way and pointed at us. The rest of its group rose with it, long curved claws snapping out from their fingers.

"Kill them," Penrose whispered. The coin left his palm in a single curved motion, slicing through the air toward the first ratman that had stood up. It punched straight through the creature's skull and buried itself in the metal wall behind it, glistening with blood and evaporating shadowlight. The mercenaries raised their weapons and opened fire. The gunshots echoed through the corridors for several seconds.

Bullets struck heads and torsos, dropping the creatures onto the glass floor and staining it with their dirty brown-red blood. The men rushed forward with their weapons still raised, closing in on the fallen shapes. They aimed down and fired quick bursts into the heads, making sure none of the creatures survived the attack. And yet the noises we had heard before did not stop entirely.

They carried through the corridors, bouncing from wall to wall with growing intensity, as if the gunfire and the slaughter had stirred something bloody wicked back to life in this place.

"It feels weird," Ramirez said once the movement stopped.

"They were kind of people. We knew nothing about them."

"They reacted in preparation for violence," Penrose replied, placing a hand on his shoulder in a gesture of reassurance.

"We responded to what they were looking for." He glanced at the mangled bodies.

"It may look like something out of the wild west, but this is not our world. It seems to follow the rule of the stronger. And they are not people, despite stealing our visage. This is a pretend world shaped by our thoughts, my dear Ramirez. You do not cry when you lose a thought or forget a dream. Do not shed tears or ache for them." Ramirez nodded. The hirelings searched the bodies for anything worth taking, but found only office supplies. Pens, notebooks, staplers, phones.

The phones were useless to us, so we left them behind and, at Penrose's request, ventured deeper into the labyrinth. I wondered about Ideworld itself and Phillip's view of it. It matched what people had said about this shadow world so far. But those shadows, at least some of them, had souls the same way we did. The truth was definitely not as simple as he made it sound. Alexandra's thoughts about the nature of it all lingered in the back of my mind as well.

She wondered about the giant we had seen in the city and what it might represent. The life of the city was the first thing that came to her. Cars, lamps, scaffolding, raw materials, all the elements that formed the building blocks of urban life. Its constant rebuilding mirrored construction, renovation and growth. The silence, she thought, could represent the slow, unnoticed progress of it all. People lived beside it.

It was loud, ever-present, yet it quickly faded into the background of their minds until the new image replaced the old one, and remembering how things had looked before became harder with every passing day. Elle joined the thought with a different explanation that made just as much sense to me. Maybe the fragments forming the giant represented individual lives, routines stitched together into one body.

A whole shaped from many smaller parts that was ever-changing, the way society and a city formed from individuals. In that case the silence could stand for the way collective systems worked without a single voice, sometimes without any voice at all. I used the cue I had learned from their shared, internal discussions about art and silenced them both. Now was not the time for that. At least not for me. Instead I stayed close behind the main group, while every turn we took turned into another bloodbath.

It did not take long to realize the rat-people were almost everywhere. Whenever the narrow corridors opened into wider spaces with several exits, they were there. Sometimes arguing, sometimes fighting among themselves, sometimes chasing something through the halls. Something we never saw, but whatever it was drove them into madness. They ran over one another, trampling the unlucky into bloody pulp. We were just as ruthless.

Bullets tore through their bodies without hesitation while Penrose kept marking the path behind us.

"I worry about the hotel," he told me as we walked through a corridor that looked exactly like every other one we had passed so far. Even the cubicles visible through the windows below us had begun to blur together.

"This endeavor is taking far more time than I anticipated."

"It's still night, so we're still faster than if we followed my suggestion. How long ago did Rei make contact?"

"It's been over eight hours now."

"What was the exact message he sent?"

"I gave him a few options. He chose almost the most dire one," Penrose replied as we slowed to a stop behind yet another turn. This time it opened into a large, open space, and the strangest ratman we had seen so far waited there.

"He hasn't used the last one yet, but I'd rather not have this operation turn into a waste of time and resources." We both stared at the thing in front of us. One of the mercenaries covered his mouth and ran back behind the group to throw up. The smell alone drove two more to follow him, Thomas among them. He could stomach the worst massacres, but the scent of vomit broke him every time. Honestly, I could hardly blame any of them.

The creature had a vaguely human-looking face, its whiskers twitching as it noticed us, but the resemblance ended there. The skin of that face looked stretched and damp, as if it had been pulled over something that did not quite fit beneath it. Its mouth hung a little too wide, the lips split at the corners where they had torn and healed again and again, exposing slick gums and blunt, yellow teeth still grinding slowly on a mouthful of meat.

Mouse-like ears sat on its head, but that head rested on a grotesque, swollen mass of flesh that barely resembled a body anymore. It bulged outward like a colossal grub, folds of pallid fat and twitching muscle sliding over each other beneath the skin. Veins crawled across its surface, pulsing lazily, while lumps shifted inside it as if organs were drifting through the flesh without proper places to settle. Somehow it was still stuffed into a business shirt stretched to the absolute limit.

The fabric had long since surrendered to the shape of the thing beneath it—buttons strained, seams warped, and dark stains spread across the cloth where grease, blood, and mucus soaked through. The shirt had even been grotesquely tailored to accommodate the fifty or so arms sprouting from its body. They pushed out at irregular intervals—some long and skeletal, others short and bloated—each arm slightly different from the next, as if they had been grown separately and then crudely grafted into the creature's sides.

Fingers flexed constantly, clawing at the air, tapping against the glass, or crawling across its own flesh. A few arms ended in hands with too many joints; others had swollen knuckles that cracked and twitched as they moved. There were no visible legs beneath the mass. Instead, the creature dragged itself along the glass like an enormous slug, the underside of its body rippling wetly as it moved.

Thick ropes of translucent mucus smeared behind it, glistening with streaks of blood and half-digested matter that sloshed inside its sagging flesh. The creature finished chewing on the arm of another ratman. Tendons stretched between its teeth before snapping with a wet pop. It swallowed with a slow, grinding motion of its throat that made the entire mass of its body quiver. Then it growled at us.

The rest of the body was tossed aside with a careless flick of several arms, the corpse rolling across the restless wave of limbs that carried the monster forward. Partially eaten bodies lay scattered all around it—some missing faces, others opened like butchered animals—filling the air with the thick, sweet stink of rot, blood, and the creature's cloying slime. The mercenaries opened fire as soon as they recovered from the shock. But even direct shots to the head did nothing.

The bullets simply sank into the fatty mass and were pushed back out through the folds as the creature kept sliding toward us. Penrose sent three spears made of banknotes toward it, hoping they would pierce through. The creature caught them with a few of its arms and snapped them in half.

"Retreat," he said over the rising panic.

"We'll take another path. It won't squeeze into the corridor with that size." We all turned and rushed back the way we had come, retracing our steps toward the last intersection.

"Sorry about that," Thomas said, wiping his mouth with his sleeve.

"I hate that fucking smell."

"I told you that you should sit in a room filled with that foul stench," Penrose replied.

"Fuck," Ramirez added, glancing back at the monster chasing us. The creature compressed the main mass of its body, filling the entire corridor. Parts of it bulged outward, several arms pushing through the openings toward the outer surface of the building bridge, using them to pull itself forward.

"Move faster!" Penrose shouted. He grabbed a few coins and tossed them behind us onto the glass. The moment they struck, the windows shattered into a violent storm of jagged blades. Glass collapsed inward, raining down into the offices below along with the creature, which slammed into the interior walls with a heavy thud. Shouts echoed from the shadows working in those rooms. Through the broken windows we watched it slide across the office floors, gravity pulling it sideways relative to us.

One of its arms shot out, catching a few of the unlucky workers and dragging them closer. The mass of arms tightened around them, crushing the life out of them like a boa constrictor made from dozens of limbs. Bones cracked with a sickening sound. As the creature unfortunately climbed out of the pit, we kept on retreating, following Penrose's markers until we reached the nearest intersection.