Knuckles met the hard ring and the ring gave the wrong note.
Light didn't burst; it hiccuped. The iris tried to close on his fist and found tape and bone where vacuum should be. Heat burned through the cloth in a straight, honest way. He hit again with the left—short, mean, no windup—then ripped his right back before the mechanism could take it.
The seedlet's nose veered. The beam shaved the corner of the bus roof and carved a shiny stripe into air. Hawke fell forward because gravity had asked nicely and the craft had moved its floor. His chest hit the housing, his ribs yelled, and his legs windmilled at a height that preferred certainty. He punched a palm flat on smooth metal, skidding, found a seam with two fingers, and hung on.
The craft tried to climb. The bus lunged over a pothole at exactly the wrong time and turned rising into a stagger. Hawke's shoulder banged the lip of the hatch; pain went white and local. The emergency hammer he'd thrown earlier skittered by and vanished into the road behind them in one red blink.
"Hawke!" from the hatch below—Peter, hoarse.
"I'm fine," he said, and tasted blood where his tooth had nicked his lip.
He wasn't done with the seedlet. While it fought its own wobble, he jammed the heel of his burned right hand into the same ring and shoved down. The iris deformed a degree, then another, like a stubborn jar lid finally remembering how circles work. Inside, something sparked the wrong way. The craft lurched to the side and clipped the edge of a street sign. Metal screamed. A curl of its armor peeled like a fingernail.
The beam guttered and died. The belly glow dimmed to sick.
Hawke let go before sick decided to become mad again and rolled back to the roof ribs. Wind tore at his hoodie and made the tape tails slap his wrists. He planted his knees wide and sucked one clean breath deep into bone. His hands shook a little. He told them to quit that and they listened.
The seedlet didn't explode; it lost argument with gravity and dirt. It pinwheeled, bit asphalt, tried to be a skipping stone, failed, and slammed up against a low concrete barrier. A surf of sparks ran along the curb and died.
The bus tore out of the lot's mouth and onto the service road. The driver had found a lane and an idea and refused to revisit either. The tires stuttered over a seam in the pavement and then hummed as speed became a plan.
Hawke crawled to the hatch and dropped his forearms into it like anchors. Peter was directly below, eyes too bright, face streaked with sweat and things that weren't sweat.
"You burned," Peter said.
"Later," Hawke said.
Flash crouched two rows back, arms braced over two sixth-graders who had discovered that floor mats have uses. He looked up through the hatch at Hawke and managed, "You good?"
"Work in progress," Hawke said.
The big craft above adjusted again. The seam in the sky had grown from a slit to a wound you could see from anywhere. Wrong light pooled along its edges and dripped in slow motion. Two more seedlets flicked free, sleeker, hungrier. They found the silhouette of the bus like flies find a picnic.
"Left," Hawke told the driver. "Underpass."
He didn't know if there was one; his body wanted a roof between them and the sky. The driver yanked the wheel without asking questions he couldn't hear the answers to. The bus leaned. Bodies inside tilted, pressed each other flat, cursed without language.
There was a low concrete arc ahead where the service road ducked under the tracks. Not a true underpass, but enough to make a shadow. The bus hit the narrow lane and the roof scraped an old sign with a sandpaper scream that raised everyone's shoulders. Paint dust fell in chalk flakes. The world went half-dark.
Both seedlets overshot and hit daylight beyond, confused for half a beat by the sudden geometry. One corrected high. The other went low and came back smart.
Hawke flattened near the hatch, making himself a seam. The low seedlet's beam stitched light across the entrance and traced the top of the concrete like a ruler. Bits of flaking sign spun in the air like frantic moths. The bus broke out the far side. Sun—such as it was—hit skin again. The high seedlet dropped to level and settled into a predator's distance.
"Keep straight," Hawke said.
"Road ends," the driver yelled back.
"Then right."
"Right is bad."
"Left is worse."
The driver muttered something devout and did as told. The bus barreled toward a four-way where two cars had decided to occupy the same uncertainty. Brakes screamed. A bumper crumpled in a good, honest way. Kids on the bus made a barbershop chord of disbelief.
"Hold," Hawke said, not to any one person. He felt the bus's weight pitch as the driver threaded between stopped vehicles with a centimeter's faith. A mirror clipped somebody's side-view and made it a memory. They cleared. The bus took the right and bulldozed into a street lined with low brick and the kind of new trees that still needed straps to keep them honest.
The high seedlet fired. The beam bit the curb where the wheel had just been. A tree strap snapped and flapped like a broken guitar string. A window on the corner spidered its top half and kept the bottom half out of professional pride.
Hawke looked for anything on the roof he hadn't already stolen. Nothing. Just the open hatch, a dent down the middle where earlier choices had been made, and the long ribbon of road knitting forward.
Footsteps clanged up the emergency ladder. Peter's head came through the hatch. He didn't climb out; he anchored elbows and chin and offered the cheap red hammer back up like it had turned into a totem. "I found the other one," he said, breathless triumph.
Hawke took it. "Don't come up."
"I wasn't planning on it," Peter said, eyes watering from the wind. "Thank you for the cardio, though."
"Down," Hawke said.
Peter dropped. The hammer felt like not enough and exactly right all at once. Hawke looked at the seedlets' approach vectors and counted backwards from a number that wasn't round.
The bus cleared a delivery truck that had tried to die in two lanes at once. The driver's shoulders were tremor-stiff where Hawke could see them through the safety hatch's reflection. He was running out of decisions. The road narrowed into the kind of gap where city planners had expected only bicycles.
The low seedlet tried a horizontal wash. Heat glazed the bus roof and made the paint sigh. Hawke crouched so flat his breath made a tent. When the line lifted for the next pass, he stood and sprinted three steps to the front seam again, every footfall measured so the roof's flex wouldn't buck him.
The high seedlet committed—dive, beam mouth wet, intent all the way visible. Hawke didn't have metal left to feed it. He had only angle. He dropped to a knee, set the hammer head against the lip of the hatch, and when the beam cut, he snapped the handle like a lever so the flat plastic face made a bright stupid plane. Light hit cheap polymer and slashed off at a slant, washing the far air. It wasn't physics any teacher would love. It was enough to make the craft flinch.
It flinched into the path of the streetlight at the corner. The light exploded, equal parts glass and artificial daylight. The seedlet kept most of itself and lost a fin. It yawed hard, regained, and climbed to reconsider its life.
The low one fired again—not at him, not at the roof, but at the front right tire. The line grazed rubber. The bus jerked sideways; the driver fought it back with both hands and a curse that had meat on it.
"Two blocks," Hawke said, because hope needs measurements.
"What's in two blocks?" the driver demanded.
"Something else," Hawke said. He didn't know. He needed the lie to be true.
A siren entered the street ahead, heavy and self-important. A cruiser swung into view at the far end, nose hot, lights shouting red and blue in a language the sky ignored. The cruiser saw the bus and the bus saw the cruiser and both of them realized too late they were on rails made of decisions already made.
The driver laid on the horn as if loud could lift physics. The cruiser tried to tuck into a cutout and found a parked van sleeping there. Brakes howled. The cruiser stopped skewed across the lane with just enough room on the left for something narrower than a bus.
"Left," Hawke said.
"Left is a cruiser," the driver said.
"Then thread it."
"That's not a thing."
"It's today."
The driver didn't argue further. He angled into the narrow should-be impossible slot. Mirrors tensed inside their housings like shy animals. Hawke lay flat and gripped metal so his weight would be a quiet passenger.
They made it. Paint kissed paint anyway. The cruiser's antenna whipped and wheel covers cried out. A cop behind the glass went statue-still, eyes too wide to decide which sin to choose first.
The high seedlet dropped for a punishing swipe at the gap. Hawke had no more tricks. He brought the hammer up with both hands like a priest raising a book and let the craft see that he would take whatever came standing. Sometimes that changes math. Sometimes it doesn't.
The beam didn't cut. It blinked. The craft veered hard—distracted, corrected by something Hawke couldn't see.
He saw it a breath later: a shadow that didn't belong to any cloud, crossing the road from right to left. The big craft above had shifted in earnest. Plates along its belly unscrolled and nested like armored eyelids. A throat opened in the center large enough to swallow a city block if it got greedy.
Wind stopped having direction. It just pressed.
"Under!" Hawke shouted down the hatch, voice raw.
Inside, kids went flatter. The driver's hands pushed the wheel in a way that wasn't steering anymore so much as pleading.
The big throat gathered light—thicker than the seedlets' threads, layered, patient. The street lost shape. Color filtered out of the air until shadow had taste.
Hawke felt the bead inside him slide to a place it hadn't found before. Not a reward. A position. His burned knuckles pulsed. He set his stance on the roof's rib, feet bridging the strongest lines of steel, and made his body small where tall would be stupid, long where reach would matter.
The bus roared toward the mouth of an overpass he hadn't planned on but would take. Fifty yards. Forty. Thirty. The big craft's light deepened, narrowing into intention.
Twenty.
Ten.
The world chose which thing would happen first.