Thirteen came at her from the left rail.
She let him come. She had learned, somewhere around the eighth, that letting them come cost her less than meeting them — and she turned inside his swing and opened him from hip to ribs and did not watch him fall.
Fourteen and fifteen arrived together.
That was worse. Two meant she could not give ground and could not hold it either; she took the first one's blade on her crossguard and let it slide, stepped through, and put her shoulder into his chest hard enough that he went into the second one, and both of them went down in a tangle of robes and lit catalysts.
She killed them on the ground. It was not clean. Nothing had been clean since the ninth.
Sixteen.
Seventeen.
Eight— no. Eighteen.
By twenty she had stopped counting out of any tactical need and was only counting because the numbers were something to hold onto.
By twenty-four her left leg had begun to answer late.
The cut above her knee had gone from a hot line to a deep dull weight, and every time she pushed off that foot the whole limb reported back a half-beat behind where she needed it, and she had started — without deciding to — favoring the right, which meant her stance was wrong, which meant every parry came from a worse angle than the last.
By twenty-seven the hilt was slick.
Not with sweat. She had bled down her own arm from the wound at her waist and it had run into her palm and dried tacky and then been wetted again, and the katana had begun to shift a few degrees in her grip on impact. She adjusted her hands. She adjusted them again.
Don't drop it. Whatever else. Don't drop it.
Twenty-eight put a bolt through the meat of her shoulder from thirty feet out and she went down on one knee and got up before he had closed, and killed him for it.
Twenty-nine and thirty came at the same time from opposite ends of the span.
She chose the one nearer her mother.
And then the world went out.
Not the fighting. The lights.
Every gaslamp in the eastern district died at once — the whole grid, street after street, block after block, going dark in a single soft collapse that took less than two seconds from end to end. The glow behind the rooftops guttered. The lamps along the bridge rail dimmed to blue, to nothing.
Evelyn stood in the sudden dark with a body cooling at her feet and no light at all except the catalysts in the fists of the people trying to kill her.
That wasn't a failure.
She knew what a grid failure looked like. A grid failure cascaded — you lost a district, then the district beside it, sputtering, uneven. This had come down like a hand closing.
Someone shut it off. On purpose. All of it—
And then she saw why.
Far off to the north, near the central's wall and along with river, a single point of light was burning. One. Bright, hard, deliberate — floodlamps and fires and the moving shapes of men, the only illuminated thing in a city that had been swallowed whole.
For a moment she just looked at it.
A lamp, she thought. They lit a lamp and killed every other light in the district.
The corrupted things in the street below her — the ones that had been spreading outward through the residential lanes, house by house, door by door — had stopped spreading outward.
They were turning. All of them. Drifting west, toward the only light left in the world, the way moths climb a lantern.
There's a line. Her chest went tight in a way that had nothing to do with the blood loss. There's a line at the river. Someone's built a line—
"Eve—! Eve, behind you—!"
Thirty-one had gotten past her while she was looking at the light.
She turned into him too late and too slow and knew it as she did it.
Her left leg answered a half-beat behind, exactly as it had been answering for the last several minutes, and the parry that should have taken his blade on the strong of hers took it on the weak instead, and the impact tore the katana halfway out of her ruined grip.
He was inside her guard. His second hand was already coming up with a lit catalyst in it, and the light in his fist was the pale searing white that meant it was going to go straight through her.
Ah, she thought, with a strange clarity. That's the one, then.
Mother—
The man's head came apart.
Not cut. Not crushed. It simply burst, wetly and completely, and half a heartbeat later the sound arrived — a hard flat crack rolling in from somewhere far down the lane, the report of something fired from a distance no bowman could have managed.
The body dropped against her and she shoved it off and staggered back and did not understand.
What—?
Another crack. Another. Two more of the robed figures came off the rail and did not get up. Whatever was hitting them was hitting them hard — not a clean piercing hole but a burst, a detonation inside the body, the kind of wound that turned a man into an obstacle for the man behind him.
Down the lane, at the corner where the side street met the bridge stair, muzzle-flashes were blooming in the dark in a ragged line.
Six of them. Eight. A dozen.
Men in Military Police grey, kneeling and standing in two ranks, working the bolts of rifles that did not look like any rifle Evelyn had ever been issued in her life.
"COVERING FIRE — KEEP IT ON THE BRIDGE—"
The robed figures broke.
Not all at once, and not far — they scattered off the span to the flanks, into the alley mouths, out of the fire lanes. But they came off her, and for the first time in what her body insisted had been an hour and her head knew had been perhaps eleven minutes, nothing was trying to kill Evelyn Lan.
She did not fall down. It was a near thing.
She put the point of the katana into a seam in the stone and leaned on it and breathed, and the breathing hurt in three separate places, and she catalogued them the way she'd been trained to and then stopped, because the list was getting long.
Someone was running toward her up the bridge stair.
A young officer. Younger than her, maybe — hard to tell, everyone looked young than her. MP grey. One arm strapped tight across his body in a sling that had clearly been improvised out of somebody's uniform shirt, and he was still running, and he still had his sidearm up in the other hand.
First to approach her was a man, same sized as her. Blue hair, Blonde.
"Are you—" he started.
"Palace Affairs," Evelyn said. "Special Operative. Fourth."
The boy's mouth closed.
Then it opened again. "F-Fourth!?"
"Yes."
"Ma'am, that's—" Emil and his squad's eye lit up with hope.
The fourth!
Yes, Yes!
They then notice what is at the bridge behind her. He looked at what was on it.
"And you are the police?"
"Military Police, Emill Weiss."
Evelyn did not turn around to see what he was looking at. She had been there for all of it and did not need the review.
"How many of you," she said.
"Twenty Four.. All new recruit except me."
"Where are you going."
"River. The line at the river. There's a camp we, RMO and army gathered up along the— ma'am, are you bleeding from—"
"Yes." Evelyn straightened off the sword. It cost her. "My mother is behind me in the covered span. Her name is Suyin Lan. She is fifty-eight and her knees are bad and she will tell you she can walk further than she can."
The officer blinked. "...Ma'am?"
"Take her with you."
He said it while he was helping her mother down off the span, one-armed, awkward, and Evelyn's mother — who had spent the last hour screaming her daughter's name from behind a stone rail and was now, abruptly, in the presence of a polite young man — thanked him four separate times in the space of thirty seconds.
"You're coming as well," her mother said to Evelyn. It was not a question. Her voice was wrecked.
"I'll follow."
"Eve."
"I'll follow, Mom." She could not make it sound like the truth. She did not try very hard. "They're turning toward central. All of them. If nobody slows them at the lanes they'll reach the river before your people do."
Her mother stood in the dark, in her nightclothes, with a strongbox she had not let go of once, and looked at her daughter.
She did not say you're all I have. She had already spent that one, an hour ago, and it had worked, and she seemed to understand that spending it twice would only make it a smaller thing.
"Come back," she said instead.
"Yes."
Emil was already turning to shout the column into motion.
And it was then — mid-word, mid-turn, with his good hand raised to wave the front rank forward — that something crossed the very edge of his vision, down at the far end of the lane where the dark was thickest.
A shape.
Small. Moving fast, low, and away.
And in the half-second before it was gone, the last of the light from somebody's lit catalyst caught in the hair of it, and the hair was the colour of turning leaves.
Emil's hand stayed up in the air for a moment longer than the gesture needed.
"...Senior?" said the recruiter beside him.
"Go." Emil said.
The column went.
Evelyn's mother went with it, in the middle rank, wedged between two MP corporals who had been quietly instructed not to let her fall behind.
Evelyn did not go. She turned back toward the bridge, where the robed figures were already flowing out of the alley mouths again now that the rifles had stopped, and she got the katana up in both ruined hands, and she went to meet them.
And Emil stood in the road.
He did not follow the column. He stood exactly where he was and turned his head, slowly, to the left. Then to the right. Then back the way the column had come, toward the interior of the district, toward the dark.
His good hand had closed into a fist somewhere in there. He did not appear to notice it.
He stood there for perhaps four seconds.
Then he ran.
"SIR—?!"
"NO!" Emil did not slow down or turn around.
"Senior, where are you—"
"Report me if you want!"
He took the outer road.
Not the river road — the outer one, the long cracked service street that ran the rim of the district well east of the water, the one nobody used because it went the wrong way for anywhere anyone wanted to go. It curved north along the edge of the residential blocks and then bent west, eventually, toward the Central District gate.
It was the wrong direction. It was the direction everything else was running away from.
He ran it anyway, with rifle in arm, past dark houses with their doors standing open and their plate still left uncleaned at sink, through streets where the only sound was his own boots and, somewhere behind and to the south, the slow rolling percussion of a city being taken apart.
Autumn leaves, he did not let himself think. That colour of hair.
He ran for a long time.
The outer road opened out, eventually, onto the wide dead ground where the residential blocks ended and the approach to the Central gate began — a long flat expanse of paving stones that had been built to hold a market four days a week and was now holding something else.
Emil came around the last corner at a dead run and stopped.
The Rifle was still in his hand. He did not raise it.
In front of him, filling the square from the shuttered stalls on the left to the collapsed frontage on the right, standing in ranks that no animal has ever stood in, were the beasts.
Not a dozen. Not fifty.
They stood shoulder to shoulder and back to back in the dark, their misshapen heads all at the same height, all facing the same way, breathing in a rhythm that had synchronized somewhere along the line — and the front rank of them was perhaps thirty feet from Emil's boots, and not one of them had moved when he came around the corner.
And in the middle of them, small and still and completely unharmed, stood a girl.
She looked at him.
Her eyes went wide.
Emil looked at her — and then past her, and out to the left of her, and out to the right, at the ranks and the ranks and the ranks of them standing patient in the dark around her, and his eyes went wider still.