A Wild Light by Marjorie M. Liu Page B

ran to the doorway. I looked down the hall and saw a hulking figure beyond the wall of flames.
    One of the firemen. Coming to look for the stupid woman who had run into the building and punched one of their own. The fires raged around him, thick and hot, snaking up the walls and licking the ceiling above his head. I stared, torn. I wasn’t certain he had seen me. I couldn’t let him see me.
    But my feet vibrated, then my legs, and a groan rolled through my ears into my muscles and bones. This floor was going down.
    I ran toward the fireman. He was already backing away toward the stairs, but he was too slow, too late. He noticed me coming at the last moment, and I don’t know what he saw, but his eyes widened behind his mask and his scream was louder than the crack of the beams above our heads. I slammed into him just as the ceiling collapsed.
    I had been hit by a bus once before, and this felt the same. I didn’t feel pain, but the weight dragged me down on top of the man, and for a moment I saw my face reflected in his mask.
    Except I had no face. No mouth. No nose. Even my eyes were lost in black scales and mercury knots, every inch of my skin covered in demonic bodies. Scariest thing I had ever seen. And I was bald.
    I looked past my reflection into the fireman’s eyes. He was still staring, screaming, and his fear had nothing to do with the ceiling crushing us, or the fire. I rolled my right hand into a fist, and the armor tingled.
    A moment later, we slipped into darkness.
    Lasted only a heartbeat, a heartbeat a thousand years long, but in that place between I felt smashed with the old horror; lost, forever, in darkness: no body, no heart, no ground beneath my feet; feeling nothing but the boys on my skin, the boys who were the shell around my emptiness, and my mind, screaming.
    We were spat out into another part of the Coop, a hall near the lobby, where children had painted the walls with rainbows and castles. We slid across the floor, and I rolled off the man. Naked, except for the remains of my cowboy boots. The leather was still on fire. His yellow suit smoked. He scrabbled backward, staring at me with such horror.
    I couldn’t even tell him it would be okay.
    I slammed my armored fist into the ground, thinking of Byron, Jack—Grant.
    And I was gone.

CHAPTER 8
    T HERE was no such thing as magic.
    Miracles, maybe. But not magic.
    Arthur C. Clarke said it best, that any sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic. Matches, mirrors, even the force of a magnet might be voodoo to a caveman, capable of being used, but without any understanding of what the object was or how it had come to be. Just a gift, maybe, from the gods—an invention of spirits and lightning, and the ghosts of bloodied ancestors.
    I might as well have been a caveman, a Neanderthal, even a slug still crawling from the sea. The armor was that far ahead of me, a piece of another world where reality was shaped by possibilities, and dreams, and the force of free will. A key that not even time could bind.
    But it was mine. Mine until I died.
    God help us all.

    WHEN I entered the world again, I found myself in the apartment. Books, brick walls, and my grandfather on the floor, covered in a blood-soaked sheet.
    I was not alone.
    I saw Mary first. She stood by the couch, clad in a housedress embroidered with sunflowers and butterflies, cinched tight at the waist with an old leather belt. Her legs and feet were bare, spidery with dark veins. Old track marks covered her sinewy arms. Thick gray hair stood out from her head, bristling, wild.
    She clenched a butcher knife in each hand. Standing very still, watching the woman from the fire.
    I watched, too. The woman knelt beside Jack’s covered body, her head bowed so low her brow nearly touched the blood-sticky floor. Her palms lay flat and still, her spine curved in a perfect arc of obeisance. If she was breathing, I couldn’t tell. If she was alive, then she’d had a lifetime of