The PowWow

I want to tell you we had a plan. I want to tell you that somewhere between the envelope and the fountain, one of us had produced a strategy worth the name, something with contingencies, something Curtis would have approved of if he'd been standing there with his laptop instead of standing amongst six other bodies on the other side of the park. Jacob and I had built off the bones of Curtis's working notes in an afternoon neither of us had wanted to spend that way, and between the two of us, whatever was left of thirty years of learning how to fight.

It was not enough. I want to say that plainly, up front, because I spent most of that night discovering exactly how not enough it was, one wave at a time.

They didn't run at us. That was the first wrong thing, worse somehow than if they had — they simply started walking, all forty-some of them at once, the same unhurried, economical gait I'd watched Nathanial Lim use in a parking lot two weeks and a lifetime ago, and the ground ate the sound of it, no footfalls, no rustle of grass, just distance closing at a pace that gave us exactly enough time to be afraid and not one second more.

I got the canister up as the first line reached the fountain. It was Jacob's idea, built off the exact line Curtis had opened on his own final night in that office — something small enough to carry and aim, contained enough not to take the whole park with it, a controlled breath of fire rather than a wall of it. It worked exactly once. I put it into the chest of the nearest one and watched it actually catch, actually burn, actually stop being a threat in a way nothing else we'd tried against these things had managed — and then the canister sputtered, coughed, and died, some fitting the housing hadn't been built to survive under real conditions instead of a workbench, and I was left holding an expensive, useless piece of pipe while thirty-nine more of them kept walking.

After that it was just us.

Jacob stood tall, raised his right hand and barked out a command, “In the name of Yeshua Hamashiach, I command you to begone!”

It did not do nothing, but it created little more than a slight pause. I saw Jacob go white as a sheet. Fear clawed its way up through me.

I want to tell you Jacob and I are formidable, because we are, because eleven years of this life has made us both into something most people would not want to meet in a hallway. I want to tell you that mattered more than it did. These weren't Mara's-door instruments, one at a time, contained by a doorframe. These were built for us specifically — I understood that within the first thirty seconds, watching one take a blow from Jacob that should have put a normal man through a wall and simply absorb it, watching another close the distance on me faster than I have ever been closed on by anything that wasn't already trying to kill me with intent. Suriel had watched us for longer than we'd known to be afraid of being watched, and whatever these were, they were not generic. They were as strong as my brother and as fast as me, and there were forty of them, and there were two of us, and I did the math on that ratio somewhere in the first minute and made myself stop doing it, because finishing that particular equation out loud in my own head was not going to help either of us survive it.

What we had, that they didn't, was technique. Jacob doesn't fight like a strong man swinging strength around — he fights like a man who has spent thirty years being taught exactly where strength stops being useful and precision has to take over, and he used every inch of that education in the first two minutes, putting instrument after instrument down not by overpowering them but by finding the one place strength alone couldn't compensate for a joint bent the wrong direction. I did the same with speed — not outrunning them, because I couldn't, not anymore, but reading them, the same gift that's kept me alive since I was seventeen finding the half-second gap in a thing that moved like a machine and not like a man, the same tell every single time if you were fast enough and calm enough to actually look for it.

It bought us time. It did not buy us enough.

There is a version of a fight where you're losing and don't know it yet. This was not that. I knew it in my hands before I knew it anywhere else — the specific, sick knowledge that lives in your arms when you've thrown every real punch you have and the thing in front of you is still standing, and there is another one behind it, and another one behind that, an assembly line with no end I could see from where I was standing. Jacob went down once, briefly, three of them on him at once, and got back up bleeding from somewhere near his hairline in a way I didn't have time to properly be afraid about because two of them had turned their attention to me the second his back hit the ground.

And then — I don't know how to explain what happened in my head in that exact moment except to say that some part of me had apparently been counting the whole time without telling the rest of me it was doing it, because in the middle of putting an elbow into something that used to have a face, I registered, all at once, the way you register a chord resolving, that there were seven of them at the field's far edge. Not six.

I looked. I shouldn't have — looking cost me a half-second I couldn't afford and a graze along my ribs that told me about it immediately — but I looked, and there she was, exactly where I hadn't let myself check since we arrived: Naomi, upright, one arm locked around David held tight against her chest, standing in front of the others the way you stand in front of something you'd die before letting anyone reach.

"JACOB." I didn't recognize my own voice. "They have Naomi. David's with her. She's — Jacob, she's here."

I have fought beside my brother for the whole of both our lives, and I have never, not once, seen what happened to him in the next ten seconds. Something came off him that wasn't strategy and wasn't technique and wasn't anything I had a clean word for — grief and fury and something underneath both of those, older, load-bearing, the specific violence of a man who has just been handed the one piece of information capable of making him stop calculating entirely. He didn't fight smarter after that. He fought like the ground itself had decided to stop tolerating what was standing on it. Three of them went down in the time it had taken one to go down before. A fourth. A fifth, thrown clear enough that it didn't get back up before Jacob was already past it, cutting a channel through that crescent that hadn't existed a minute earlier, and for about ninety seconds — I timed it later, in memory, the way you time the good parts — I actually believed we were going to walk out of that field.

Then the numbers reasserted themselves, the way numbers always eventually do. Mathematics is the perfection of God expressed in formula. Unfortunately, perfect formulas have no mercy.

However many Jacob put down, more replaced them, filling the gap he'd cut before it had finished being a gap, and I understood, watching it happen, that we had never actually been fighting a battle we could win by being better — we had only ever been fighting one we could survive by being lucky, and luck, like everything else that night, was running out on schedule.

I don't remember the exact moment forty against two became five bodies closing on every direction we had left. I remember Jacob's shoulder against my back, both of us upright only because we were holding each other up, past technique now, past strategy, down to the last, ugliest version of fighting there is — the kind where you're not trying to win anymore, only trying to still be standing at the end of the next second, and then the one after that.

I went down first. I felt my knee go wrong under me and then the ground was closer than it should have been and I was still swinging from flat on my back because stopping had stopped being a decision I was allowed to make. Jacob went down trying to reach me, which I will hold against him exactly as much as he'd hold it against me, which is to say not at all, not ever.

We ended up on the ground, together, surrounded on every side by things that didn't breathe and didn't tire and had never once, in the whole span of that endless night, needed to hurry, because they had known from the very first moment exactly how this was going to end.

I couldn't get up. Jacob couldn't get up. There was nothing left in either one of us to spend, no reserve, no second wind, no clever thing left to try — only the wet grass under my back, and the fog pressing close and colorless in that impossible moonlight, and my brother's hand finding mine in the dirt and holding on like it was the only weapon either of us had left.

We had come there standing. We were going to finish it on the ground.