The barrel clenched to a needle of light and cut.
Heat wrote a white line across the bus's grill and chewed the paint to bubbles. Glass in the corner of the windshield spidered and sagged; a strip of rubber curled back like a singed leaf. Kids hit the floor because instinct got there before instruction. The driver hunched behind the wheel and stayed there on purpose.
Hawke moved, not fast so much as clean—one step off the curb, weight under, hands up to make his body long without making it tall. The beam hissed past his front and hammered the asphalt into a glossed scar that smoked like a burn on skin. The seed overshot, annoyed, and corrected, sliding into a curve that brought it around the flagpole, low.
"Inside!" the driver barked. The word hit Hawke and didn't stick. He wasn't out here for heroics. He was out here because if the thing chose a line and that line intersected fifteen heads at window height, and he could be the nearer problem, he would be.
The seed tilted. An iris in its belly pinwheeled open; the throat behind it throbbed with that wrong color, thick as honey. Light licked the bus doorpost and left the metal sweating.
Peter's fingers curled harder around the door's edge from the inside. "Hawke!"
"I know." He didn't take his eyes off the barrel.
The craft's muzzle tightened; the light made a bead at the tip; the bead climbed into a line—
—and the Volkswagen he'd kicked the scrap into earlier wailed its alarm and gave him a ladder.
Hawke broke left the way a bag broke left if you told it with a shoulder. Two steps, heel-to-toe, then up onto the Volkswagen's front wheel well with a foot that trusted rust not to quit for one more second. Hood. Windshield frame. Roof. The car flexed and called him names in metal. He didn't listen.
Above, the seed tracked. Its beam shaved the corner off the hood he'd just left and turned it to hot confetti. He felt the heat brush his shin like a cat.
He used the height—three strides across the roofline—and threw himself to the bus's mirror arm. The mirror was already gone; the arm still jutted like a rib. He caught it with both hands, swung his weight, and landed on the lip of the bus roof in a stumble that he turned into a low stance on purpose. Tape rasped; grit bit through the cloth; wind made the hoodie flap and then remembered the lot wasn't a canyon and calmed down.
Inside, faces lifted from between seat backs, eyes big and wrong in the stray light. Flash's head popped up, hair flopped, mouth halfway to a sentence he hadn't built yet. He saw Hawke on the roof, and the sentence died of embarrassment.
"Down!" Flash shouted anyway, because it was all he had.
Hawke didn't wave. He set his feet where bus metal ran strongest and put one hand on the stump of the mirror arm. The other hand went to the edge of the roof to take the bounce out of the world. The seed flared brighter, annoyed his silhouette existed where a smooth curve had been.
"Move the bus," Hawke said, without lowering his chin. Not loud. Perfectly aimed.
The driver took a beat to understand the instruction wasn't disobedience. Then his jaw clicked and he dropped the lever to drive. The bus rolled slow, a creature learning to crawl again with too many legs on its back. Every kid inside leaned the wrong way and then righted.
Hawke rode the shift and let the roof teach him its sway. He could feel the bus's center of gravity like a bag's pendulum, feel where it wanted to fight him and where it would hold him up if he met it halfway.
The seed came low, just above the flagpole, muzzle strobing. It tried to draw a line that would cut between the mirror stump and him. He let it think he'd honor the line, then stepped into it at the last moment—not to meet the light, but to make the craft adjust and over-adjust. It dipped a fraction too far. The bus roof shuddered as something on the other side took a hit that had been meant for him.
"Hold!" the driver yelled to himself, like he was commanding a skittish horse. The bus straightened.
The craft banked again, more cautious now. The iris flexed; a sound like wire tensioned across a drumhead rode the air.
Hawke looked for a tool because the next pass would be smarter. The mirror arm's stump had a bolt proud inside it, finger-thick, sheared where the mirror had torn loose. He got both hands around the stump, braced his foot against a seam in the roof, and torqued. The bolt didn't want to agree at first. He asked again and meant it. Metal screamed. The stump gave with a sideways pop. He had thirty inches of hollow arm with meat on one end and a ragged mouth on the other.
The seed's belly opened, throat blooming to full.
"Go!" Hawke shouted at the windshield. The driver didn't argue this time. The bus lunged three feet forward; the nose dipped; the world shook like a shrug. The beam sliced where the windshield had been and took a badge-sized bite out of air. The scent of cooked dust raked his sinuses.
Hawke ran the last two steps he needed along the roof's rib so he'd meet the craft at the apex of its curve. He didn't plan poetry. He planned distance. The hollow arm weighed light for its size, good for speed, bad for punch; the jagged mouth might bite if he fed it right.
The iris rotated; the beam huffed and starved and huffed again as the craft wrestled recoil. In the beat where it picked its next line, Hawke made his. He lunged, long, every inch of reach rented for one purpose, and drove the jagged mouth up into the throat where moving parts had to stay exposed to keep being moving parts.
Metal spoke a sharp syllable. The arm bit. A spray of green-white lit his wrists. The seed coughed—there was no other word for it—and skipped its own air like a record. The beam farted sideways and chewed a crooked notch into the light pole. The flag above jerked and agreed to behave differently now.
The arm snapped in his hands and became two worse tools. The seed wobbled. That wrong color inside it flickered, then went stubborn again. It pulled up, furious-precise this time, and chose height.
Hawke didn't chase it into stupidity. He threw the broken halves aside and flattened, palms hard to the roof to stick, letting heat run over his back without inviting it in. Shards hissed past, small as lies, hot and immediate. One kissed the edge of his ear and drew a line that his body would admit to later.
Inside, the driver didn't breathe for three seconds. Then he did, harsh. "You done?" he wheezed to the ceiling, not to Hawke.
"Not yet," Hawke said. The seed edged into a higher circle. The thigh of the bigger craft moved above, casual as a cloud. More of the wrong-colored sky showed. The seam ticked wider. Seedlets kept coming through like a bad habit—two straight, one listing, one that went nowhere and fell away trailing sparks.
Peter's face appeared at the top of a window, eyes wide, mouth set. He lifted his hand with the bus's emergency hammer, a plastic red thing meant to love glass. He shook it at Hawke like a joke he was proud to have found in a terrible hour. Hawke allowed the corner of his mouth to move by a millimeter; then the world took his face back.
"Duck!" someone inside yelled, helpful and late. The seed had made up its mind again. It settled to roof level and came in nose-first, iris a hard star, beam mouth nursing a drop it wanted to spit.
Hawke slid backward on his soles to buy half a step and tore the roof's emergency hatch with both hands. The latch didn't like him and then it did. The square lifted. Air arced through the new hole and made paper inside the bus take flight in small wings. Hawke jammed the hatch up until it kissed its stop. Then he hooked his forearms into the opening and let his weight hang a second to make himself lower, less a target, more a hinge.
The seed fired. The line of it cut the air above the hatch, shaved paint, left a pucker in the roof skin that would be there the rest of the bus's life. He felt the heat flash the hair on his wrists into smell. Didn't matter. The beam passed and folded back into itself like a tongue.
"Hey!" Flash's voice from directly under the hatch, raw. He was braced over two smaller kids with his arms as bars and his own head down like he'd finally decided what it was for. He looked up, found Hawke's forearms wedged in the frame, and his face twitched around relief and insulted pride in one motion. "You—don't fall in. I don't have jokes for that."
"Keep them down," Hawke said.
"I keep them down," Flash said, and proved it by pressing a palm to a head that refused to accept advice. The hand was gentle and enormous.
The seed banked for another run. It had learned something about his height. It would try to split the difference between roof and hatch. He needed to be somewhere it didn't want to have to shoot because the angle got stupid. He planted both hands on the roof lip again, kicked backward to the mirror stump, and let himself fall to the bus's hood.
The hood didn't meet him so much as give under him; the metal popped and dented, much too soft for his dignity. He rode the dent to the grille, dropped to asphalt, and cut under the bus's chin to the far side. The world there was all tire rubber and the long underbelly of a machine that had done too many miles. He breathed coolant and dust.
The seed ripped the space he'd just left and hit nothing useful. Its beam wrote a white quill across the windshield and then skipped off the emergency hatch lip into sky. Light stuttered. Hawke counted the stutter without thinking. One. Two. It would want a third. Things liked three.
He came up the bus's other side by the rear wheel, using the half-shadow the chassis made as a moving wall. He looked for the mirror arm twin. Found it. Still attached. He jumped, caught it at the elbow joint, and swung his weight until the joint argued itself open with a pop. He had another thirty-inch lever. He'd asked the first one to bite. He would ask this one to steer.
"Floor it," he told the bus through his teeth. He didn't know if the driver could hear him. The driver heard something, because the engine lugged and then delivered; the bus crawled forward into a turn, angling its nose toward the road that skirted the field instead of the direct exit that would currently be a mouth for a beam if anyone tried to use it.
The seed slid into alignment on the bus's long side, plan forming. Hawke ran parallel to its line, matching it step for step like he was pacing a runner on a track. The craft thought in straight lines; he made a crooked one.
The iris opened again. The throat colored up.
Hawke didn't attack the muzzle this time. He jumped at the last instant and shoved the lever into the seam along the craft's left fin where two plates met and hated meeting. The mouth of the lever wedged; the fin jerked; the craft yawed hard and went exactly where it didn't want to—down.
It clipped the parked Volkswagen's roof and turned it inside-out with an angry squeal. It ate the top two feet of a stop sign post, took the sign with it like a dinner napkin, and then pancaked into the lot at a low angle that turned rolling into skipping. Sparks went long. The iris spasmed, then died to a dull ring. The craft hiccuped and went still in a whine that faded by degrees.
Air filled the space where noise had been and discovered it was too big now. The lot went weirdly quiet. The bus's engine became the loudest thing, laboring. The driver let it labor. He didn't stop because stopping is what prey does when it wants to be numbered.
Hawke's lungs argued about priorities. He told them to line up single-file: air first, then heat, then the copper battery taste on the back of his tongue. He trotted toward the downed seed because you go see the thing you knocked down before it decides it hates lying there.
The craft's belly had split where the lever had made the plates swear at each other. Inside was mouth and machine: a tangle of dark matter he didn't have words for and a smell like burned coins. Nothing human-sized moved. Smaller mechanics jittered and died as if deciding to stop was philosophically complicated.
A shape twitched behind the split. Not a machine. Not a person, exactly, either. He saw a limb with too many joints and a glove made out of something that had never seen a hand. The glove flexed and spat a line of that wrong light that did nothing, a cough rather than a strike. It died halfway between target and weapon.
Hawke didn't put his face in the opening. He crouched low, took up the lever in both hands like a long hammer, and brought it down on the iris ring. The ring folded with a sound like a cheap cymbal. He hit it again to make sure. Then he backed away because he didn't know what a wounded thing did when you weren't its first problem and he didn't want to learn with his teeth.
"Move!" the driver yelled, louder and different now. The bus was turning past him, big and clumsy and graceful in the way big clumsy things can be when they commit. The road opened ahead, dark and arguing with its own potholes.
Peter had his face at a window again, hair pasted to his forehead with sweat. He banged the heel of his hand on the glass twice and pointed at the seam. Hawke looked.
The bigger craft had shifted, curious. The slit in the sky widened, not fast, not slow, like a mind changing. Two new seedlets zipped out on a vector that took them straight toward the bus's line. They were smaller than the one he'd put down and maybe meaner for it.
Flash popped up in the rear window for exactly one second, eyes bright, mouth open on a thing that wanted to be "go," and then flattened again to make it happen without having to watch it. Inside, seat backs became walls. Kids became cargo that would try not to shift.
Hawke took three steps and grabbed for the emergency ladder bolted to the back of the bus. His palm slid on chipped paint; he reset, grabbed again, and climbed. He didn't think about what he would do when he got to the top; he would meet whatever was there with hands.
The bus picked up speed. Wind came at him now with a voice. The lot blurred to the right; the chain-link fence along the field approached like a skinny horizon. The driver laid on the horn because sometimes you say what you can with the language you have.
The two seedlets streaked in low, one high on the left, one low on the right, a pincer that had never seen a school bus solve a corner before.
Hawke reached the roof lip and heaved himself up. The emergency hatch was still open, breathing heat and paper. He planted his feet in the same strong places he'd found five minutes ago but felt like a year ago. He took stock: no mirror arms left to rip, no long levers for steering, only his hands, the hatch door, and the cheap red hammer Peter had left balanced on the hinge like a message.
He grabbed the hammer. Plastic. Light. Not a weapon. A decision.
The left seedlet leveled. The right seedlet dropped lower, as if it planned to shear the bus's wheels out from under it like you trip a table.
"Hold it," Hawke said to the roof, to the driver, to himself. He planted, bent his knees, set his shoulders, and fixed on the left because two things at once is a lie.
The left seedlet's iris snapped open. The muzzle drew down a tiny hurricane. Hawke threw the hammer—not to hurt the craft, not to break anything, but to make math. The hammer hit the beam mouth at the exact fraction where light becomes line and knocked it a degree. The light carved the air and missed. The seedlet didn't understand shame; it understood aim. It corrected into rage and drove closer.
The right one fired. The beam shaved the edge of asphalt in a white knife that ran ahead of the bus like a line judge, found the chain-link fence, and sliced it at knee height. The fence's top half slumped forward in a tired wave.
The driver swore, committed. The bus hit the hanging fence and shouldered it aside in a screech of metal hair. The world got a spark shower. Hawke rode the jolt and didn't fall.
The left seedlet dove to wash the roof with heat. Hawke took a single step into it like it was a punch, and with his empty hand he snatched the emergency hatch lid down and up, down and up, making a flashing plane in the beam that had nothing to do with protection and everything to do with reflection. The light wobbled. The seedlet hesitated, confused by its own science pinging back wrong.
The bus cleared the fence and found road. The driver fed it throttle he hadn't found in years. Tires yelled and then grabbed. The world became forward.
The left seedlet committed to close range, anger over wisdom, iris yawning so wide he could see the mechanics inside tremble. He had nothing to throw and nowhere to go that wasn't off the bus and into a mistake.
He didn't choose. He moved.
He ran three quick steps along the roof ribs, planted at the front seam, and jumped—not for distance, not for height, but for angle, to change a line the craft thought was fixed.
Air took him. The seedlet rose into him like a bad handshake.
Hawke tucked his chin, brought his elbows to guard, and let his taped hands find metal. The throat flared to fire.
He drove his right fist straight into the iris ring.