bookbashuk Act 3, Chapter 45: Going down, means going up
Act 3, Chapter 45: Going down, means going up
Day in the story: 15th January (Thursday), Still, no clueGertrude Monkey“I will go with my plan, whether you help me or not,” I told Penrose, letting him stand on his own. He stumbled briefly, but looked up at me with curious, methodically scanning eyes.
“There is something different about you, Ale… Gertrude,” he corrected himself in time. “Beyond the makeup and pretending,” he added, but I dismissed him with a simple hand gesture as the rest of the guys started shooting at the monster continuing its chase.
“Fire in the hole!” one of the mercenaries shouted as he let the grenade roll behind us.
The small metal sphere bounced once, twice, spinning lazily across the cracked office floor before disappearing around the corner.
A second later the blast came.
The explosion slammed through the corridor with a brutal wave of pressure, metal and glass shrieking as the structure absorbed the shock. Windows burst inward, cubicle walls collapsed, and the pursuing monstrosity was torn from its footing, if you can call slugging behind us that. For a brief moment we saw its massive form crash through the hole in the glassy floor behind, dropping into the office level below with a thunderous cascade of debris.
Dust surged through the bend in gravity.
“Move! Move!” someone barked.
We stumbled forward into the next section of the maze only to briefly freeze as movement of the ratmen erupted ahead of us.
A dozen of them poured from new corridors, their crooked spines hunched, yellow teeth flashing in the dim emergency lighting. Their shiny boots against the floor as they rushed toward us with fury.
Thomas moved first, with the power of the body-paint giving him strength, agility and durability to be in the center of the fray. He moved like a predator unleashed: hands and feet striking with brutal efficiency. One ratman’s skull caved under his palm. Another spun away as Thomas’s heel crushed its throat, when he kicked him standing straight.
Behind him Ramirez stepped into position, pistol raised with steady hands and started shooting into his blind spots.
Each shot snapped through the room with surgical precision, punching through rat skulls and dropping them where they stood. One creature leapt over a fallen body only to collapse mid-air as Ramirez’s bullet tore through its eye.
The mercenaries fanned out behind us, rifles coming up instinctively.
“Targets front!” one shouted.
Muzzle flashes lit the metallic frames, and bounced off the glass in violent bursts as they opened fire into the advancing ratmen, rounds tearing through their bodies. Another mercenary turned halfway back down the corridor, bracing his rifle against a shattered metallic frame giving him support.
Through the settling dust behind us came the sound of twisted metal groaning somewhere below—the distant, heavy movement of the colossal thing regaining its footing and climbing back up.
I used the anchor in the tattoo to summon our spellbook to me, along with the belt and the bag connected to it. It was freshly stuffed by Alexandra with all the spray cans, spiders and a stencil necessary for me to do what needed to be done.
Take the wheel, I thought back to her as the hell was long past breaking loose, and let her consciousness take over my body.
Alexandra May in Gertrude’s bodyGertrude loosened her grip on the body and let me take the reins. I remained in my own skin, and in Elle’s as well, and she remained herself, yet the hands we shared now answered to my instinct for color and shape. It was a strange harmony: those distinct notes forming a single chord.
The battle still raged behind us with sounds of a gunfire, shouting and the wet drag of something monstrous across polished floors, but in the small circle of space on the windows there was only us and our intention.
I slipped my hand into the inner pocket of the bag I summoned along with the Spellbook and drew out the folded spiders.
They were nothing more than creased and delicate paper at first when I scattered them across the ground like discarded sketches and reached outward with my aura.
Shadowlight answered blooming from me in strands of rainbow-like colors. It shimmered like a dew on the spider’s silk in the early morning light, as it threaded into the folds of the paper. The spiders drank it in. Their bodies swelled with dimensional insistence. Legs unfolded with the crisp whisper of parchment becoming real and they twitched in midair for a fraction of a second before landing softly against the vast pane of glass.
I tossed a black spray can to each pair—eight spiders in total. They caught them with delicacy, adjusting their stance. I took one can for myself as well.
And we began.
The first strokes were pure black.
We moved in concert, my spiders scuttling in clean arcs, their tiny limbs pressing nozzles with disciplined bursts. The glass darkened in expanding waves, as the men around me continued their onslaught.
I weaved between them, even with bullets cracking in the distance that kept on closing with each passing second, my lines remained steady. Art demanded devotion for me that It rewarded with silence inside the noise; in the process of creation.
As soon as the darkness was wide enough I reached for color, while my little helpers continued the expanse of black.
From another pocket in the bag I pulled the stencil I had cut minutes earlier, when the idea had sparked at first. I pressed it flat against the painted surface. My spiders shifted around me without instruction, widening the night.
I sprayed and the stars appeared.
Pinpricks of white and pale blue burst through the black. I moved the stencil again and again, turning the dark glass into a field of distant suns. The spiders adjusted their rhythm, leaving faint, wandering traces in the paint.
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Behind us, the slug-rat advanced.
Gunfire hammered into it. Men cursed. Something heavy struck a wall.
“What the fuck?” one of the mercenaries muttered, staring at us as if we were the madness and not the thing attacking his comrades. “Is this a joke?”
Only then did he truly see eight small spiders working in perfect tandem, each carrying its can like a brush. His mouth fell open and ironically he shut the fuck up.
Penrose stepped close behind me, “How long?” he asked. “And what’s it supposed to be?”
I didn’t answer him. I was adding an image of Mars already with the little potatoes it had for its satellites when I decided it was right enough—when the balance between darkness and light hummed in my soul—I called the spiders back.
They scurried across the painted cosmos, leaving delicate trails that resembled comet paths. Shadowlight tethered them to me in shimmering threads, each movement guided by intention alone. I could feel them as extensions of myself; eight precise impulses completing a single vision.
They leapt from the glass and I caught them in quick violent outburst of the shadowlight that left their frames.
Gertrude Monkey“It’s fucking outer space,” I shouted back at Phillip, finally answering his question as soon as Alexa let me back in. “So move the hell back and let this creature reach it.”
Each of the men shot me a glance, but as soon as they noticed Penrose retreating toward one of the corridors, they were quick to follow that silent order.
“Are you going to suck it into this?” Thomas asked, retreating carefully to join me and Penrose. Noxy was hidden now while he fired his submachine gun in short bursts at the beast. Each bullet struck the armored, muscled frame of the creature with little more than mild inconvenience. It slowed it down, but there wasn’t a single visible scratch on its body.
“Are you crazy? I can’t do that,” I answered as we watched it reach the painting.
I closed my eyes briefly and found the image within my aura.
Become up.
When the paint answered my command, the world understood the metaphysical concept we had created instantly. There was no resistance from the creature in the Authority’s sense; it held no power over what this part of the building believed itself to be.
The swollen, armored ratman made of interlocked arms shifted upward from the ground, its flailing limbs desperately trying to grasp something as it realized that what had been ground a moment ago had become something entirely reversed and it was now falling in the opposite direction, toward some distant, nonexistent floor.
We all stood there watching as the gravity of that thin slice of reality hurled the monstrosity into the actual sky.
“I should have let you do this from the start,” Penrose said as we watched the thing finally succumb to the world’s true gravity, the forces locking into place. It traced a slow arc before plunging toward the Mirrored City below or rather, above us. Gravity was bloody warped in this region by more than just me.
“I don’t think that will kill it. I hope it does, but probably not.” I told him, but Penrose didn’t intend to wait to see whether I was right.
“Move, people. We don’t have all night,” he said.
We pressed on into the maze as the Authority I had granted the painting flowed back into me.
**********
“I still don’t understand what happened,” Thomas said for what had to be the second or third time, his voice thin from exhaustion. “Why did this thing fall into the sky?”
I exhaled through my nose. “Because the ground believed it was the celestial fucking ceiling, Tommy. And when you’re standing on a ceiling, you fall down. In this case—up. You get it?”
He frowned. “But it followed a curved path.”
“Because my authority only holds for so long. I forced the orientation, not the universe. After a certain distance, real gravity reclaimed it and bent the trajectory back into something that obeyed physics again.”
“That’s fucked up,” he muttered. “That kind of power. You just… repaint reality. Redirect gravity with a mural. It shouldn’t be possible.”
“We are already living inside a catalogue of impossibilities,” Penrose replied coolly as we stepped out of the suffocating corridor of metal and glass and emerged onto the wide, flat expanse of the bridge structure leading into the streets of the Mirrored City. “The only difference is that this one has aesthetics.”
The surface beneath our boots shimmered faintly, reflecting a blue sky. Above us—or below us—clouds bled into mirrored architecture, messing with the perspective.
Thomas glanced around uneasily. “This thing was thrown somewhere here, right?”
“Yes,” I said, scanning the skyline. “But fortunately it’s not here.”
He rubbed his temples. “This whole sideways gravity, ceiling-ground nonsense is messing with my head. I don’t like it.”
“You don’t have to like it,” I told him. “ But it’s here to stay, so get used to it.” I replied to him while I found the hotel we were supposed to reach within my field of vision. We moved quickly across the exposed span.
After ejecting the armored monstrosity into the sky, we’d clashed with several smaller packs. We burned through most of our remaining ammunition putting them down. Luck had compensated us though where logistics failed; not one of us had taken a serious hit.
The sun was rising somewhere beyond perception now. We couldn’t see the star directly but we felt it and seen the light.
“It’s past seven,” Penrose noted, glancing at his watch. “So much time wasted on that armored brute and the eye-bug.” He didn’t mention the dead. “At least we’re almost there.”
“Almost,” I echoed. “Feels like that word’s been stretched across the entire night for us.”
Ramirez shot me a sharp look. “Don’t jinx it, for the love of God.” He traced a quick sign of the cross over his chest.
Alexandra MayI teleported straight to the Domain of the Water the moment his sorry ass appeared there. The entire cavern surrounding his soul core shimmered with teal, blue, and white Shadowlight as he approached the crystal, about to press his hand against it.
“Zoe’s pregnant!” I shouted from behind him, stopping him dead in the middle of the motion.
At first glance, he looked like hell—clothes barely clinging to him, torn into shreds. Underneath, though, his skin was clear, his hair messy but full, his face tired yet without a single scratch.
He turned to me, letting me see him with my own biological eyes as well.
“Where the fuck are you?” I asked in a firm tone. “…brother,” I added for emphasis. “She needs you.”
“This can’t be,” he replied. “We always use protection.”
“It’s not enough for your swimmers. Where the hell are you now?” I repeated when he looked down at his hands, as if searching for something in them.
“I’m in the Shadow World. Training. It’s a special course for me. I saw the future, Alexa. I need to be strong to stop it.”
“You fucking moron. There’s no future set in stone. You were fed lies by those FBI idiots. Come back home. She needs you, and I could use you too.”
“I’ll return as soon as I can, Alexa. I promise. I have to do this.”
“You lied to us.” I looked into his eyes. “You might call it something else in your head—an omission, not saying anything—but it was a lie. You broke your principles for them. Is it worth it?”
“I don’t know,” he answered. “Probably not. But I have to do this.” He turned back to the crystal.
“She’ll hate you when I tell her you chose not to return to her.” That made him pause. His hand hovered inches from the swirling mass of water trapped behind the glassy surface reflecting his face. “I lost a leg,” I added. “I’m wearing a prosthesis, but I’d toss it away in a heartbeat for the real one again. Come back to us. Be a brother, be a partner, and a father. Don’t be this upside-down version of yourself.”
He looked back at me, sadness in his eyes. He had already made his decision.
“Only I can do it, Lex. Only I alone in the whole world can stop what’s coming.”
“No, that’s not true. Tell me, and I’ll help you,” I pleaded, stepping closer. “I can bring you home right now. I’ll drop you back here later when you explain what’s happening. Does it have to be this urgent?”
“I’ve lost too much time already. This can’t wait. I’ll be back in a few weeks for a while, Alexa. I’ll heal your leg then. I’m sorry.”
“Fuck this,” I said, and with a flicker of thought materialized the spellbook around my own waist, pulling it away from Gertrude. I focused on the image of this very place and willed the world to move me—not where I stood, but closer to the crystal, right in front of this moron.
One breath later I pushed off with the power of my legs, Usagear materializing around me. I slammed into Peter, catching him in my arms and driving us both away from the crystal.
I’ll put him down if that’s the only way to make him look up at me.