The rock was crawling.
Not blowing. Crawling. Aaron stood there watching it make that slow stupid journey toward the portal and his first thought was that it was scared.
Dumb thought. Rocks didn't have nerves.
But the air was doing things that didn't make sense either so maybe the rules had changed overnight.
Rei walked into his back. Looked up.
The sound he made wasn't a word.
The portal had tripled. The edges weren't rotating anymore. They were pulling. The smell near it had no direction, just present, the way something smelled when it had been sealed for a very long time and had finally opened. Aaron's eyes were watering. He hadn't blinked.
"Tell me someone miscalibrated," Rei said. He was shaking hard enough his keys were jingling. Small metallic sound. Regular. It made Aaron want to grab him just to make it stop.
"I can't."
"Aaron."
"I can't Rei."
Behind them a girl was crying quietly. The kind where you didn't know you were doing it. Nobody looked at her.
Moon looked at the staff member the way you looked at someone still talking after the ground had already opened.
"System's showing nothing."
Crack. Crack. CRACK!
"STOP." She turned to the students and something was moving behind her eyes that Aaron had no word for. Not fear. The thing that lived underneath fear after you'd had it long enough. "Anyone who can fight with me. Everyone else gets back. NOW."
"Proto—"
She looked at him once. He became irrelevant.
Marcus was already moving.
BOOM.
The portal split open and the sound went into Aaron's jaw. Not his ears. His jaw. His back teeth. The backs of his eyes. Like it had skipped the normal way in entirely.
Three things stepped through.
The black covering them wasn't clothes. It moved in slow rolling waves even when they stood completely still. Their faces had all the right parts in all the right places.
That was the worst part.
The aura hit and Aaron's lungs pulled and pulled and kept getting less than they needed and bodies hit the ground around him before he saw anyone fall. THUD. THUD. THUD. One after another. Like something dropped from height.
Rei grabbed his arm hard enough to bruise.
"Aaron tell me those are SUITS." Voice gone young. Scared young. "A demonstration. Something. PLEASE just say."
"Rei look at Aaron." Aaron grabbed his shoulder. "Don't look at them. Look at me right now."
Rei looked. His eyes were doing something Aaron had never seen in them before and didn't want to see again.
One of the three turned toward the main building. Slow. Like time was a courtesy it extended to lesser things.
Started walking.
"MOON!" Marcus.
"RIGHT SIDE WITH ME. MARCUS LEFT. YOU STOP MOVING YOU'RE DONE."
Marcus hit his and it stepped back half a step and looked at him the way you looked at a kid who'd surprised you in the smallest possible way.
Something happened in Marcus's face. Quick. Private. The specific feeling of being the best at something your whole life and finding the one room where that stopped mattering.
"DON'T STOP!" he shouted at the others. "ALL OF US COME ON!"
Three awakeners hit it from three sides simultaneously.
It walked through all of it and swung once and Sana went down.
The sound the girl next to her made wasn't a scream. Screams had shape. This didn't. Aaron felt it in his chest wall. Watched it hit Marcus like a door slamming. Watched something lock behind Marcus's eyes.
He went back in. Didn't stop going.
Moon fought like she'd been keeping it locked away for years and had just thrown the key.
Her monster drove her into the ground.
CRACK.
She came back up. Arm wrong. A sound leaving her nose she didn't know she was making.
"That all?" she said.
"No," the monster said.
She looked at her shaking hand for one second.
"Good," she said. "Come on then."
Three birds fell out of a tree near the fence.
No flutter. Just down. Like someone had turned them off.
Aaron stared at them on the grass and his body understood before his brain did and he grabbed the barrier post next to him because his legs had started doing something unreliable.
The wind didn't stop. It got pulled out of the air. The silence after had weight Aaron felt in his eardrums.
THUD.
Rei sat down on the ground without deciding to.
In the city behind the Academy a woman put her hand flat against a wall and stood there not knowing why. She'd think about it for weeks.
The Director walked out looking like someone's grandfather who'd heard a noise outside.
Old. Grey. Plain jacket. The ground cracked under him just from him choosing to stop being small.
The monster heading for the building stopped. Turned. Looked at him.
"Hiding." Its voice sounded like two stones finding each other deep underground. "All these years."
The Director looked at his own hands for a second. Something old and private moving through his face.
"I wasn't hiding," he said quietly. "I was giving you time to choose differently."
"We don't make different choices."
"No." He looked up. "I know."
"You can't hold all three."
Something cracked in his neck when he rolled it. Dry. Loud.
"Probably not," he said. "Come on."
BOOM.
They hit each other and Aaron felt it like a car door slamming on his whole body at once.
He tasted blood. Bit his tongue somewhere in it. Vision went white then grey then he was on his back looking at the sky with a piece of glass from a blown window spinning slowly above him catching the light.
He watched it turn.
His brain had decided that was easier.
He got up.
The Director was fast in a way that body had no business being. Hit the monster twice, it caught the third and threw him, he went down and came back up and his knees made a sound like dry branches cracking and he kept moving anyway.
Blood down his chin.
"We didn't come here for you," the monster said. "You know that."
The Director's jaw moved once.
"I know," he said.
"Then."
"No."
BOOOOOOM.
The other two moved simultaneously and the impact put everyone on the ground. No exceptions. The monitoring tower cracked and leaned sideways. Moon's barrier came apart. The ringing in Aaron's ears went so high it drowned out the screaming.
When it cleared the Director was on one knee. Both hands on the earth. Head down.
The field went quiet.
He raised his head. Nothing performed about his face. Nothing managed. Just an old man kneeling in the wreckage of eighteen years of preparation.
He stood up. Knees cracking loud enough to hear.
"Eighteen years," he said. To nobody. To the ground. "I built this so this wouldn't happen."
He looked at both of them.
"Here we are anyway."
He went at both of them and Aaron's brain stopped tracking it and the portal behind everything kept getting wider and darker and the thing that had been sitting in Aaron's chest for three weeks went from pressure to something with a direction.
Then the girl near the front slid.
Boots didn't move. Feet didn't move. But her body leaned toward the portal like her spine had quietly made a decision without her.
She grabbed the person next to her.
That person slid too.
Aaron looked down at the dust near his feet. It was moving in slow straight lines toward the portal. Patient. Like it had already accepted where it was going.
His heels lifted off the ground.
Came back down.
He looked at Rei.
Rei looked at him.
Neither of them said anything. Nothing fit inside the shape of a sentence right now. Nothing even came close.