People streamed between buildings and down alleys, spattered with blood and sand and dust, fleeing in fear from whatever the being was. Another building toppled—another. A whole line of them smashed into the buildings beyond. Past them Avery could now more clearly see a dark shape, huge and strange and dripping.
Sirens screamed. People that could get to cars jumped in them, some hijacking them, and tore away from the beach. Though there were relatively few automobiles in the Azads, there were enough for vehicles to choke the lanes quickly, many slamming into each other. Twisted steel and flesh clogged the intersections. Buildings, whole lines of them now, collapsed into each other, falling towards Avery and the others. The spires toppled, one slamming into the next like dominoes. Soot and vaporized debris shot down the streets, and Avery choked, tears burning his eyes. He began backpedaling, Janx tugging him along. Hildra needed no prompting.
Too late. The building beyond the one Avery stood closest to was knocked into by the dark moving mass and propelled into the building ahead.
The building above Avery wavered ... began to list ...
—dear gods dear gods—
The building held, but shrapnel from the atomized building flew out in every direction. Janx flung both Avery and Hildra to the ground just as shards of glass and stone and concrete flew through the air where they had just been standing.
The Shape loomed above them. Dark and wet from the sea—it had risen from the ocean, was still rising from the ocean—it plowed toward them, higher than the highest buildings in the area, broader than city blocks. A great triangular projection, a massive wedge that seemed to be connected to something in the sea, part of something much larger, the wedge drove at them, sheets of water cascading from it, lightning crackling off its enormous mass. Vapor shot from various orifices, filling the air around it, and where the gas enveloped people they screamed and collapsed, writhing in agony. Lightning speared others. Most were ground beneath the Shape or died in the collapsing buildings it mowed down.
“What is it?” Hildra said, her voice raw.
The Shape reached the building ahead, which began to tilt ...
A small car, threading through the carnage choking the street, darted out of the fog of vaporized debris and barreled up the street toward the three, tires squealing.
Janx leapt to his feet, drew his gun and took aim at the driver. The car increased speed for a moment, as if prepared to run Janx down, but as it neared and the driver got a better look at the size of him, and of the gun, the vehicle slowed. Janx wrenched open the rear door and flung Avery inside the back, then squeezed into the front passenger seat, pulling Hildra into his lap; her top half stuck out the window when the door closed.
“Go go go!” Janx thundered, then repeated in Azadi.
The terrified islander hit the gas.
Avery realized he was sharing the back with a pregnant woman, her eyes wide. In her webbed hand she held a knife, pointed at his belly. He drew back, slowly, keeping his own hands visible. Janx said something to her, calmly, and she snapped angrily at him. The big man nodded and put the gun away. She lowered the knife.
Janx spoke to the driver, and they headed downtown, veering around stopped cars, driving on sidewalks when they needed to, but successfully putting distance between themselves and the sea. Between themselves and the monstrosity. Finally wrecks jammed the streets completely, and they had to abandon the vehicle. Janx stole a bicycle with a side-car and presented it to the driver and his wife, who took off, and then he, Avery and Hildra found three regular bicycles near a scattering of bullet-riddled bodies—not killed by the creature, obviously, but by the anarchy associated with its coming. Avery thought Janx’s weight would crush his vehicle, but somehow it bore up, and the three pedaled fast as the great Shape drove toward them, growing larger as it emerged from the sea—larger and broader. Longer waves of buildings up and down the coast fell before it, were ground beneath it. Avery’s heart beat so fast he thought it would burst, and sweat drenched him from head to foot.
“Think they’ll still be at the hospital?” Janx called, panting. “They might’ve gone to the docks.”
“No,” Avery gasped. “Layanna will have insisted on remaining at the last place we knew she was, at least until she was forced to leave, and the hospital’s on high ground, difficult for the Thing to reach. If the hospital’s still there, she will be.”
It took them over an hour to reach the hospital, which still stood, located as it was on a rocky thrust of land, and the facility was in chaos, doctors trying to evacuate all the patients they could. Some were in such bad shape that they couldn’t be moved and had to be abandoned, others were attempting to remove their IV needles themselves and limp out into the greater chaos of the city, blood leaking down their arms. Avery saw one nurse carrying a handful of medical supplies rush out the door and wanted to stop her, but there was no time, and little point. For all he knew, she could be helping transfer them to a temporary facility.
They found Layanna and the others picking their way down a stairway; the elevator had stopped working when the city power grid had been smashed, and evidently the backup generator didn’t move the elevator. Two whalers flanked Layanna, hurrying her on. Ani perched on one whaler’s shoulders—Captain Greggory himself.
“She was shaking so bad she couldn’t walk,” Greggory said as he lowered her to the floor, whereupon she flung herself at Avery.
“Papa! Papa!” The rest of her words were muffled where she’d shoved her head into his chest. He hugged her tightly.
Layanna embraced him, too.
“I was worried I’d never see you two again,” Avery told them, as Ani wept and he felt his own eyes sting.
“Let’s get to the docks,” Janx said.
“No,” Layanna said. “Wait for the bedlam to die down. I think the thing will veer aside the highland. Fighting our way through the city amidst this chaos is too risky.”
“We should head to the roof, then,” Avery said. “Where we can see the creature, or whatever it is. That way if the thing does veer toward us, we’ll have warning.”
They mounted the stairs and came out on the roof, where a cool wind blew, and with heavy hearts they watched the obliteration of Ethali as fires limned the horizon. The Azadi military had been roused, and bombers from nearby air bases filled the air, smoke from their payloads’ explosions rising up past where the planes lumbered in formation.
Then Avery couldn’t see anything but ... It.
It filled the world, the mind.
For a start, it was massive, a great being stretching miles wide and hundreds of feet tall, perhaps over a thousand. In aspect, it looked, absurdly, like a great starfish, seven-sided, an orange-beige in color. What Avery had seen coming out of the sea near the tattoo parlor had been one of its arms. Vast, a living glacier encased in rough-textured exoskeleton, the starfish—the Starfish, Avery amended; it deserved the honorific if anything did—rolled out of the Atomic Sea, one of its limbs still trailing in the water, sheets of crackling fluid gushing off it as it plowed, seemingly very slowly, into the city, knocking over tower and dome, spire and steeple. Building after building toppled, bursting into showers of metal and glass and cement and stone, killing countless people that had been trapped by disorder in the structures or on the streets still fighting to get out. Avery was witnessing the deaths of thousands, tens of thousands. Maybe hundreds.
Column after column of bombers dropped their armament on the miles-long back of the Starfish, but it didn’t seem to feel the explosions in any appreciable way; it didn’t slow, or shudder, or veer. Smoke rose from it, and black patches showed on its exoskeleton when the smoke cleared, but that was it.
Coral reefs, the quickly growing Atomic kind, covered the creature in tiered, colorful shelves and mountains. The Starfish had been traveling for many miles under water, and life had grown onto it, into it. Millions of fish would be flopping, dying on its back between the reefs. Small floating gas-squid numbering in the thousands or millions drifted across the Starfish’s back and sides, snatching at the dying creatures when they could. Avery saw all this activity only as tiny motes infesting the vastness of the great being, but he could see enough to know that the Starfish had become its own ecosystem.
Janx was the first to speak:
“A starfish. A fucking starfish ... as big as a city ... gods below ...”
Avery opened his mouth to add something but couldn’t force his mind to take any coherent form.
One by one the columns of bombers launched their assault on the Starfish, and plumes of smoke obscured the sky. Other than obliterating great chunks of living reef—and perhaps, Avery thought, some small pieces of Starfish exoskeleton—the bombs produced no visible effect. The Starfish kept destroying wave after wave of buildings, knocking them into each other and then sliding over them. Avery and the others watched as it swerved around the rocky uprising in the land on which the hospital sat (land grew higher away from the sea, eventually flowering into mountains north and east of the city) and continued on, devastating block after block, unstoppable. The planes could do nothing.
“So,” Layanna said quietly. “This is how they respond.”
Avery tasted bile in the back his throat. “We knew they’d retaliate somehow. I just didn’t think it would be so ... so ...”
“Big.”
The others were looking at them strangely.
