Daniel Abraham - Unclean Spirits

It was a trap.

“Kim!” I shouted. “Run!”

She was already moving. She slipped over the murmuring man’s bed, putting one of us on either side of the false nurse. I tried to remember how to use the training Midian and Chogyi Jake had given me while I kicked at the man’s kneecap. He moved fast as a cat, taking the impact on his shin instead. He drew in a deep breath, and I felt a prickling that had nothing to do with the physical as he drew in his willpower.

Kim punched at his back. He staggered, surprise on his face. I shouted as I turned, kicked like something out of a martial arts film, and drove my foot into the bridge of his nose. Something gave, and the huge head snapped back, the man dropping to the floor like we’d Tasered him. Kim unclenched her fists. There was blood where her fingernails had cut into her palm.

“There are probably others,” I said, but she was already heading out the door and I was already following her. The black nurse was heading toward the room, with a look of concern and annoyance. We blew past her. At the intersection of two halls, I paused, drawing my qi up behind my eyes, feeling the shift in my consciousness, and then swept the halls before and behind us. The world had taken on an almost surreal level of detail. I could see the dust hanging in the air, hear the high-pitched whine of the computer monitors harmonizing poorly with the hum of fluorescent lights, smell the corruption and shit under the antiseptic hospital scent, feel my clothes grating against my body. Kim paused, looking back at me. She wore contact lenses. I hadn’t noticed that before. She looked at my eyes, and I could see she understood what I was doing.

“Well?” she asked.

“None here. None that I see.”

“Stairs or elevator?” she asked, gesturing down one of the hallways. A bank of brushed-steel elevators stood at the end of the hall like temple guards, a marked stairwell beside it. The leftmost doors began to open, and I caught a glimpse of tattooed skin.

“Stairs,” I said, “but not the ones down there.”

We ran. I felt things tugging at me, the wizards of the Invisible College pulling at me with their minds, the separation between reality and Next Door thinning. As we dodged angry doctors and confused patients, I tried to keep myself between our pursuers and Kim. I thought that if Eric had put some protections on me, they might shield her too.

We found another stairwell and Kim started down it, but I caught her hand.

“Up,” I said. “Let them pass us by.”

She nodded. We ascended. We’d gotten a floor and a half up when the door we’d come through burst open. I froze and then slowly turned back, ready to launch myself at any attacker. But the wizards’ footsteps retreated, heading down toward the first floor. Some grunting marked when they ran into some poor bystander on the stairs, and then we heard a metal door slamming open. The sound was so assaultingly loud, the echoes in the concrete shaft so disorienting, that my focus failed, my qi dissipated, and my senses began to return to normal.

I was shaking. Behind and above me, Kim’s breath was ragged.

“Let’s go find another stairwell.”

“Okay,” she said.

I led the way up another flight of stairs, but the door there required a pass code, so we kept going up. On the sixth floor, we got lucky. A nurse was going out the door, and we caught it before it could close. We stepped into the new ward, walking quickly but not running. We got a couple stares, but no one tried to stop us. I put my hands in my pockets, lifted my chin, and tried to look like I knew where I was going. We passed rooms with men and women lying in bed, the low-level murmur of televisions punctuated by groans and weeping.

As we turned a corner, Kim took a quick double-step to come next to me. At the end of the corridor, an exit sign glowed green.

“I shouldn’t have insisted that we come here,” she said. It wasn’t phrased as an apology. It was like she was telling me some trivial fact I might not have known.

“I shouldn’t have let you,” I said, and we reached the new stairwell. I opened the door with a clank, cutting off whatever she’d begun to say next. I went down the stairs quickly, leaning over at each landing to look for hands on the ascending rails below us. If there was anyone there, they were being quiet.

“They’ll be watching for us,” she said. “They’ll be watching the exits.”

“I know,” I said.

“You have a plan?”

“I’m thinking of one,” I said. It wasn’t true. Between immediate animal panic, concentration required by my still-unfamiliar magic, and anger at Kim, I hadn’t come up with anything more sophisticated than get down and get out. I wasn’t about to tell her that.

We got to the ground floor and stepped out into the wide lobby from a passage I had never noticed on my previous visits. The place was built like a labyrinth, which was probably why we’d gotten this far without being discovered. Weird architecture and blind luck weren’t going to help much now. Three men stood at the information desk, talking into cell phones, but their eyes didn’t have the veiled awareness that comes from being in a conversation. They were looking for something. For us. Two were young men, broad across the shoulders and thick in the neck. The third man was smaller, older, with his back to us. When he turned, I wanted to scream.

Power radiated from Coin like heat from a fire. His face was set in an expression of cold concentration. Bubbling panic rose up in my throat. He was here. He was waiting for me. I smelled something like burning.

“What?” Kim murmured. “What is it?”

I hoped Midian had been right when he’d said I was hard to notice. I took her elbow and angled her down a side hallway. I didn’t dare look back, but no one seemed to be coming after us. We passed a gift shop full of stuffed animals and snacks, the cashier looking at us incuriously as we passed.

“Do you think they’ve spotted your car?” Kim asked.

“Probably,” I said.

“My things are in it.”

“Yes, they are.”

We turned left. Signs offered us paths to the emergency room, the bathrooms, security. I walked toward the emergency room and slid through a set of doors marked HOSPITAL PERSONEL ONLY. Curtained cubicles lined the wide room, the sounds of crying and pain making a hellish background. No one challenged us. We weren’t an obvious problem, and we were in the land of great big obvious problems. I peeked past the intake nurse and toward the lobby.

The big man from Aubrey’s room was sitting by the emergency entrance, his expression deathly grim, black eyes still starting to form where I’d kicked him. Two men and a thin-faced woman were sitting with him. I backed up. The trap was sprung, and we weren’t getting anywhere. A soft chiming sound announced the arrival of an oversize elevator. I was trembling.

The wide steel doors slid open, and four paramedics pushed out a gurney. The woman being wheeled past was drenched in blood, her neck encased in a stabilizing collar like something from an Egyptian tomb. The shreds of her jeans trailed after her like rags. Her eyes were blank. The paramedics moved quickly, professionally, into the emergency room. The doors clapped closed behind them even before the elevator began to close. The feeling hit my gut, a fist of fear and hope that tried to take my breath away.

“Come on,” I said, pulling Kim into the elevator.

“What are…”

“That one,” I said, nodding to the injured woman. “She came from upstairs.”

The doors hissed closed and I slid my fingers over the worn plastic buttons until the numbers stopped getting higher. There was one unnumbered button at the top. It was marked H. I pushed it.