Unknown

“From you?” he asked, and yawned, showing needle-sharp teeth. “Why ever would I? No. Never.”

“Someone called me,” I said. “Someone pretending to be you. I was provided with a map. I came to save you.”

“Amusing,” he said. “But not really important. I’m not so sensitive as all that, to take offense to something not even done to me.”

“You should,” I said. “If you’re not Pearl’s creature. She’s using you to lure me. Doesn’t that offend you?”

The weight of his boot lifted from my back, and Rashid sank into a smooth, almost feline crouch, staring at me with inhuman intensity. “I am no one’s creature.”

“So I believed,” I said. “Yet you just attacked me.” And I was hurt, although not devastatingly so. I just didn’t allow him to see it. “If you aren’t hers, why?”

Rashid shrugged. “I didn’t attack you, I just saw your crash. Why would I strike out at you? What does it get me?”

I rolled over on my side in a crunch of broken glass, staring up at him. He cocked an eyebrow.

“Then who was it?”

“You have a truly impressive number of enemies,” he said. “I, however, am not necessarily one of them. I came to see if you were dead, that’s all. I was curious.”

Curious. Of course. I felt a cold, sick wave of anger, and pushed it down; anger wouldn’t help me in dealing with Rashid, or any Dji

“Some human.” He said it as if they were all interchangeable. From his perspective, most likely they were.

“Help me stand,” I said.

“It will hurt.”

“I’m well aware of that, thank you.”

He leaned down, hooked a hand under my arm, and hauled me up to a standing position. I braced myself against the wall. Blood sheeted down my sides and pattered on the floor. I concentrated hard on slowing the flow from the wounds—hundreds of them, small and deadly slices that would drain me dry—while at the same time trying to clear my head.

“You’re standing,” Rashid said. He sounded surprised. I opened my eyes to look at him. “Well, for the moment, perhaps.”

“Listen to me,” I said. “This war isn’t against the humans, do you understand? It’s against the Dji

“You’re giving me a choice to fight at your side? Considering how well you’re doing so far? I’m flattered.” His attention strayed away from me, out to the dark, as if he was listening to something far away. “Something’s coming for you. You should leave.”

“Rashid,” I snarled, “fight with me, or get the hell out of my way. The New Dji

He froze, face going immobile, eyes blazing, and then I felt a growl echo in the air around me, starting from low in his throat but building in the very bricks and concrete around us. What glass hadn’t already shattered did so, with a sharp, concussive pop.

Then he turned and put his back to the wall beside me. “If you die,” he said, “I will not be overly sorry. But I won’t let you survive to tell your lies of my cowardice.”

“You may assume that I won’t be sorry if you fall as well,” I said, and coughed. Blood sprayed the air in a fine mist, but I felt better, after. “Who is it coming for us?”

“Not who,” he said. “What.”

With a scream of fracturing rock, the street outside erupted, pulping metal and stone in a geyser of smoke and dust, and something . . . stood up from the wreckage.

No. Built itself from the wreckage. Piece by piece, stone by stone. A vaguely headlike piece of boulder. Twisted metal for arms, ending in sharp prongs that sparked with random electrical current from the underground power lines. A body amassed of hot asphalt studded with trash, metal, and a single screaming face embedded in the torso, an unfortunate pedestrian caught up in the insanity, frozen in his moment of death.

Another soul on my conscience.

The thing turned its head toward us. As it lumbered for the building, it struck the twisted wreck of the Harley I had been riding, and the frame and tires re-formed and warped, then were sucked into the creature, reinforcing its armored coating.

A golem, straight out of the ancient days. It was held together by a simple, massively effective self-propelling, self-powering seed that had, in its heart, a single purpose. It would rebuild itself, over and over, so long as that core of purpose existed.

Destroy the seed, destroy the golem.

But finding the seed would be like finding a needle in a hurricane of knives.

“That’s not good,” Rashid said. “You understand how to stop it?”

“In theory.”

“Theory is all you have,” he said. “It will come for one of us and ignore the other; whichever of us it is focused on, the other must take action. And no more talk of cowardice, O disgraced one, or I will slice off your other hand and feed it to you.”

It seemed to me he was quite serious on that point. “If I fall—” I said.

“Then you’re dead,” he said. “And I am free to leave without incurring any further insults on my courage. So I think it would be advisable for you not to die, if you wish to keep me fighting your enemies for you.”

I bared bloody teeth at him.

Rashid, for no reason that I could understand, laughed, and then plunged away from me, meeting the oncoming monster head-on. With each step, he gained in size, expanding himself without any regard to human rules of conduct.

By the time he reached the golem, he was almost its equal.

He ducked a sweep of the creature’s wicked, jagged talons, put his shoulder against its chest, and shoved, driving it backward with a deafening screech of metal on stone. The golem was still forming itself, still learning its strength and balance, which were shifting as it sucked up new wreckage, new mass from the destroyed street. As it bumped against the slender metal stalk of a streetlight, the light flared, flickered, and the entire structure folded and twisted, wrapping around the golem like a vine. For a second I believed that it was trapped, that Rashid had leashed the thing, but then the golem simply absorbed the metal, ripping the post free of its concrete bolts.

It feinted for Rashid with a deafening crash, like a building coming down, and when he retreated, it turned and came toward me at a ground-shaking run.

I was its true target, after all.

And a golem couldn’t be killed.

Rashid had said it: As the target of the golem, my only job was to stay alive. It was Rashid’s task to use the single-minded focus of the golem to destroy it. In theory, it should have been a comfort that, even as I ran and fought for my life, there was someone working to ensure my survival.

In practice, that someone was Rashid, and I had no real guarantees that he would go at his task wholeheartedly. It did not encourage me to linger.

The typical Earth-based defenses I might have put up to repel an attack would be useless against a golem; whatever I threw at it would simply be absorbed, used to power it even more. So I ran, blowing a hole in the wall at the rear of the wrecked store—a clothing store, I realized belatedly, with the ghostly still shapes of ma

I was dangerously weak now, and I needed healing. The energy I pulled from Luis in a trickle was enough to sustain me under normal circumstances, but these were far from normal. I needed more.

It was going to hurt him, but I had to have it. It was now a matter of survival.

I paused, leaned against a wall, and opened the co