Unknown

I could feel Luis’s pain from what I’d done. I’m sorry, I whispered through the link. I’d left him vulnerable, almost damaged.

He had no more to give.

I used another burst of power to blow concrete blocks and debris outward in a hole approximately the size of my body, knocking a door in the back wall, and I plunged through the cloud of choking dust, stumbled on the tumbling bricks, and came out on the other side, in a narrow back alley. The back of the building was featureless, with a scraped and dirty sign naming the business just to the left of a massive, battered metal trash container. I raced down the alley, moving as fast as I could, dodged down another side street into almost total darkness, and continued to run.

Behind me, I heard the grinding crunch of the golem chewing and absorbing its way through everything in its path. The giant metal trash container gave an almost organic shriek as it was ripped and torn, malformed and put to use to build the golem’s own body. With every single moment, it was becoming bigger, stronger, heavier, and deadlier—to me, and anything that stood in its way.

There were cars passing on the street ahead, and I ran for the motion and lights, threw myself off of the curb and in front of an oncoming vehicle, a van. It shrieked and shuddered to a halt in a thin veil of white, acrid smoke from its scorched tires, and through the windshield I saw the shocked face of a well-groomed man and a much younger girl who was almost certainly not his wife.

I yanked open the driver’s-side door. “Out,” I told the man. He gaped at me, started to sputter, and I snapped the seat belt holding him in the car, grabbed him by the collar, and hauled him out to a sitting position on the road. He scrambled up and out of the way, ru

“You owe me fifty bucks, bitch,” she said. “He didn’t pay me yet.”

“I give you your life,” I said. “Consider that a tip you don’t deserve.”

She bailed out as I slammed the driver’s-side door, and before she was a step away I hit the gas, sending the van into a burst of acceleration. I rolled the windows down and watched the rearview mirror. I saw sparks as power lines fell, blue-white flares as transformers exploded behind me.

The golem was a black, lurching shadow against the stars, the more terrifying because it was so featureless.

I wheeled the van into a turn and accelerated again, heading north. Rashid clearly had not been successful yet at his assignment—finding and destroying the seed that powered the golem—so I needed to have some kind of alternate plan. Quickly.

A fresh breeze brought the scent of the ocean with it, and the sound of waves hitting the coast.

Water. Of course.

I wrenched the wheel again, taking the first possible turn west, toward the shoreline. I was close, which was fortunate; glances in the rearview mirror showed me that although the area behind me was hidden in darkness, inky and deep, there was movement there. Glints of metal. And a constant, grinding roar, as if a powerful engine behind me was systematically ripping apart the world.

Rashid suddenly appeared in the passenger seat of the van. I knew he wasn’t bound to a physical body, but Dji

Rashid looked . . . beaten. There was a long slash across his bare, indigo chest, and blood splashed over his face, hands, arms . . . none of it the golem’s. The golem wouldn’t bleed.

He sat, limp and gasping for breath, and then leaned his sweat- matted head back against the seat and said, “I can’t get to it. It’s too strong.”

“You’re giving up,” I said. “You. Rashid the mighty. Rashid the arrogant.”

“Save your contempt,” he said, and swiped irritably at the blood on his face, then made a disgusted expression and wiped the spilled crimson on the seat of the van. “You have mighty enemies, for one who’s already fallen far. Why do they need to kill you so badly?”

“My charm.”

“Ah, that would explain it.” Rashid shuddered a little, and I saw the cut across his chest draw together into an ugly scar. He was healing, but not nearly as quickly as a Dji

“It will just follow, grow larger, and destroy anything it comes against,” I said. “I’m not a Dji

Rashid closed his eyes for a moment. “Then you can’t win.”

“I’m not giving up.”

“Then how do you plan to—” Rashid fell silent as I wrenched the wheel, tires screaming, and almost crashed the vehicle into the side of a building as I sped down another side road. It was the last of the industrial district. Beyond it was a long stretch of straight asphalt ru

“Hold on,” I told Rashid, and jumped the curb with a hard bang and scraping metal to get into one of the deserted parking areas. There was a sturdy metal barrier between the parking and the walkways, where in su

I pushed the van’s accelerator flat to the floor, picking up speed as the engine roared. The van hit, bounced up, and its mass and momentum overcame the metal barrier at the end and threw it down. Tires grabbed and propelled us forward, over the mangled steel; I felt one of them shred and blow, but the others held firm.

Behind us, the golem lurched out of the night, huge and inconceivably only a step behind us. It was as tall as a downtown building now, a teetering mass of ripped road surface studded with absorbed wreckage, cars, and unlucky humans who’d wandered in its way. A nightmare, reaching out for the van and slamming down an appendage that was only vaguely hand-shaped.

Metal spikes the size of girders slammed into the roof of the van and drove all the way through, biting into the ground and rock beneath. The van came to a sudden, lurching stop, engine screaming, tires burning, and I realized that it was over.

We weren’t going to make it.

“Out!” I screamed at Rashid, and bailed from the door next to me. I didn’t wait to see if he’d obeyed; I knew I didn’t have time. The golem was a heartbeat away from achieving its goal, and it wouldn’t give up. Not now.

A fist made of metal and stone slammed down on the van, drove it all the way to the pavement, and destroyed any sign that it was ever a vehicle at all.

I was five feet from the rocky edge of the cliff. Waves pounded on stone below.

I ran.

The golem crouched, an ever-shifting mass of destruction, and absorbed the wreckage of the van. I didn’t see Rashid as the metal, plastic and glass shattered and deformed, as the golem devoured it, but I knew I had no time to gawk. He’d live, or not. I couldn’t help him in any way.

I dug deeply for every ounce of strength inside, and sprinted hard for the edge of the cliff. As my feet touched the last of the rock, I let my power explode out, driving me up in a graceful arc toward the moon, a shallow trajectory that rose, hung for a second, and then rapidly slipped down into a dive.

I broke the surface with my outstretched hands, and arrowed deep into the water. The shock of the cold was enough to drive all thoughts from my head for a few seconds, as momentum carried me deeper and pressure built around me. It was so dark beneath the waves that I felt lost, suspended in icy night, and my body began to cry out almost immediately in protest. Too much cold, too much pressure, no air. I was no Weather Warden; this was not my environment, not even a little. There was a vast feeling of wrongness to it, of the very primal powers interacting to my detriment.