M.L.N. Hanover - Vicious Grace

I had felt the insectile press of riders pushing in against reality from the Pleroma or Next Door or whatever we called the abstract spiritual place they called home. At best, it had been like standing in a lake where fish sometimes blundered into me. At its worst, it was like being the egg in biology class videos about fertilization. This was different. Instead of the almost physical pressure, I felt like I was floating inside something, like if I pushed off from the concrete and steel landings, I could almost swim up into the air. Even the immediate solid touch of the railings and walls seemed unconvincing, and I heard voices talking just outside the range of hearing. Fighting. Weeping. Begging.

At the landing halfway to the ground floor, we paused. Oonishi looked winded, but he was the only one. He held up a hand, silently asking the rest of us to stop and let him catch his breath. I wondered for a moment what exactly we’d do if he had a heart attack or something right there. I didn’t think I’d be taking him to the ER or dropping him with the night nurse at the Cardiac Care Unit. The thought skipped ahead of me into unsafe territory.

“Kim,” I said. “How many people do you think are in the hospital right now?”

“We’ve got about five hundred beds,” Kim said. “With night staff? I don’t know. A little less than a thousand.”

A thousand men and women—kids, infants, newborns—who didn’t know what was going on, only that all the familiar things around them were changed and changing. Would they think they were going crazy? That the sense of the hospital shifting, rusting, cooling around them was a kind of hallucination? Something rumbled deep in the earth, then a sound like metal shrieking.

“Okay,” I said. “Anyone know what that was?”

“At a guess?” Ex said. “Our hive-mind is figuring out that it’s still trapped. May not be happy about it.”

“I can go on,” Oonishi said, still gasping. “Really. I’m fine.”

The door marked G for ground level was green-painted steel with a bright crash bar. The exit sign above it looked like a promise. I pushed through. The hallway wasn’t quite dark, but the lights were flickering and hissing. Something black was welling up through the paint and dripping down the walls, and the air smelled hot and close as breath. A heavy-set woman in pale green scrubs stood in the middle of the hall under a sign pointing us toward the Pediatric ICU. Her hair and clothes seemed to float, as if she were underwater. Her eyes glowed a cold, deepwater blue.

I didn’t think. My body leaped toward her almost without me, swinging through my shoulder, and sinking a stiff-fingered hand in her belly even before she screamed. Her breath went out of her in a gasp, and she folded over.

“Sorry,” I said, moving her to the side so the others could walk past her. “Really, really sorry.”

“You think you can hold me, Santur?” she spat, her gaze skittering across me like she couldn’t quite get me in focus. “I owned you once, and I will own you again.”

I gathered the vital energy of my qi, drawing the heat from the base of my spine, up through my belly and my heart, and into my throat.

“Sleep now,” I said, pressing the words into her. Her eyes closed with an audible click. She started breathing deep and slow.

“Nice trick,” Oonishi said.

“You should see me get droids through Imperial checkpoints,” I said. “Come on, let’s . . . Hey.”

I pointed to the sign. Pediatric ICU.

“Isn’t that on the third floor?” I said.

“It is,” Kim said.

“Aren’t we on the ground floor?”

“I thought so,” Kim said, her voice uncertain.

Something screamed off to our left, huge, inhuman, and soaked in rage.

“If we’re on the third, the walkway should be over here,” Oonishi said, gesturing down the corridor at a set of closed staff-only doors.

I followed him, the others close on our heels, but as soon as we were through the doors and into the passage beyond, Oonishi stopped, his eyes wide and staring. A T-intersection offered us the choice of Nuclear Imaging to the left and Gastroenterology Clinic to the right.

“It’s right here,” Oonishi said, putting his hand to the blank wall. “The walkway’s right here . GI and Imaging are on the second floor. They’re nowhere near Pediatric.”

I pushed the fear and rising panic away. My hands were shaking, but I could ignore them. I’d break down later, if there was a later.

“Guys?” I said. “Any thoughts? Is this the rider?”

“Could be,” Ex said, but he sounded unconvinced. “The haugsvarmr might be changing the physical connections in the hospital or controlling our perceptions. Not my first suspect, though.”

“No?”

“More likely, the hospital is working in its aspect as a prison. The trap’s sprung, so now it won’t let the rider out. Or us. Or anyone. It’s folded in on itself. There won’t be a way out.”

There was a rushing sound, and a searing anger that wasn’t mine washed over me. The others staggered under it too. And then just as suddenly, it was gone. Kim was weeping silently, but her expression was perfectly focused, and her voice didn’t shake when she spoke. It reminded me why I liked her.

“Is there someplace we can hole up and make new plans? A secure area?”

“There’s a locked ward in Children’s Psych,” Oonishi said.

I felt a little sting of impatience.

“Because being locked in a haunted asylum for insane children is just what we need right now,” I said. “Have you ever watched a horror movie? I mean, ever ?”

“If we can get to the chapel, I think I can insulate us from the worst of this,” Ex said. “For a little while, at least.”

“Beats standing here,” Aubrey said. “Let’s move.”

The nightmare maze of Grace Memorial opened up before us, shifting like something alive. I moved carefully, peeking through the wire-glass windows before I passed through the doors, glancing around corners before I turned them. The others followed behind, quiet and careful, going from closet to closet, hiding in the empty rooms, and scuttling for the stairwells. We were a handful of mice in a box with a thousand cats. We passed by wards of the sick and the dying, their eyes panicky, the alarms of their monitors sounding and being ignored. Twice, a nurse or doctor with glowing blue eyes appeared far down a corridor, head shifting and swiveling as they swam through the air, searching for us. For me.

The new, dreamlike architecture seemed not to have a pattern: a door that should have led to the staff cafeteria opened into a suite of empty examining rooms; the corridor leading to the ER dead-ended with a red exit sign glowing over the bare brick wall; a stairway leading down to the ground floor didn’t have doors leading out. And with every turn we made, every new direction we set out in, the sense of the rider’s seething rage and our own aching panic threatened to overpower us. If I’d had any other plan, I’d have called the whole thing to a halt. Instead, I pushed on. And then we turned a corner that promised to lead us to Women’s Health and found ourselves facing the wood panels and metalwork holy symbols of the chapel. Ex actually whooped and jumped for the door.

He grunted.

“Locked,” he said. “But under the circumstances, I think God would forgive us for kicking it in.”

“Relativist,” I said. Ex looked at me, his eyes wide with surprise, and then he laughed.

“Wait,” Chogyi Jake said, stepping forward.

He looked at the lock and the door frame, shaking his head like a car mechanic surveying an unfamiliar engine. He took out his wallet, plucked the American Express black card out, and bent it neatly back and forth on its longer axis. The plastic turned white and broke, leaving a thin, slightly hooked length that he slid between the frame and the door. He rattled the handle for about ten seconds while the rest of us watched. The door swung open.