Page 26 of All Out of Flux
My blood thumped in my ears, the thunder of my pulse like the ticking of a clock. But now the clocks had stopped, and we were still caught within the Quartz Spider’s blast zone.
I couldn’t keep my mind off the three Brillante goons from the Habibi parking lot. They’d disintegrated into piles of dust, the Quartz Spider accelerating time in an isolated space, aging them decades, if not centuries within the blink of an eye.
My breath came in ragged spurts, my legs pumping as I dragged Leon by the hand behind me, as Guillotina did the same with his other arm. My fault. All my fault, this hubris of coming to see Tío Gustavo, of secretly believing he valued me too much to really hurt me or anyone I cared about. Yet somehow I’d forgotten about the greatest actual threat to Dos Lunas, to me, to the people I loved.
“Show yourself,” I shouted, furious at him, furious at myself. “Show yourself and fight fair for once in your sorry life.”
In a movie, in an epic, sweeping story, this would be the part where the villain made his grand appearance, sweeping in to punish me for speaking out of turn, to gloat about his evil plan.But the spiders were different. This spider, more so, preferred to work subtly, tugging at invisible strings.
“Where are you?” Guillotina shouted, wanting to bait the spider as badly as I did. “Step into the light and fight like a man.”
No answer. Total silence. And that made him so much more dangerous. It wasn’t cowardice that kept him in the shadows, more his awareness that he could gain and maintain the upper hand by keeping his cards close to his chest. Everything we knew about Brendan Shum had been learned through research, interrogation, observation. Here was a bad guy who wasn’t prone to delivering evil monologues, and my God was it going to drive me crazy.
That tiny, awful detail about why he’d wanted two Aqueous Elixirs for himself, for example. Not for the precious liquid held within, but for the bottles themselves, each serving as one half of a strange, deconstructed hourglass.
What did he stand to gain from haunting our meeting with Tío Gustavo? The statuette was useless to him — the statuette that was no doubt absorbing the nervous sweat of my hand still gripping it tight. Who knew if sweat stains would decrease the value of our reward from Vera’s client? If it came down to it, I would gladly use the statuette as a blunt weapon, bring it crashing down upon the Quartz Spider’s head.
If only we knew where the fuck he was. I glanced over my shoulder, checking to see that Leon and Guillotina were still running with me, gauging how far we’d actually run from the warehouse, if it was safe to stop.
Horror clenched at my stomach, twisting as if my intestines were caught in the grasp of ice-cold fingers. We’d barely made it away from the warehouse, like we’d spent all our time running on an invisible treadmill. But how? My legs were on fire, my lungs so starved for breath it felt like I’d been shredded from the inside.
“He caught us,” Leon cried out. “We’re stuck in one of his anomalies.”
We stopped running, then, muscles begging for mercy. I nearly fell to my knees, swallowing huge gulps of breath.
Guillotina turned in a slow circle, glaring at the darkness, chest heaving as she caught her breath. “That — that rat fucker. That absolute bastard. Where the fuck are you, Shum?”
“We can’t give up,” Leon muttered, his fingers clenched, eyes searching the night. “Blow it all up, if that’s what it takes to stop this. I’ll call the dragons if I have to.”
“Don’t,” I barked, my hand squeezing over his. I didn’t say the rest, feeling horrible for just thinking it — that maybe, at worst, as a last resort. Only then should he consider the dragons.
Guillotina shrugged off her jacket, tossing it onto the grass. “This isn’t over, Shum. Come out. Wherever you are. Just you and me. I’ll enjoy breaking every single bone in your body.”
And there it was at last, a blur of motion in the darkness, something stepping out of the shadows. The Quartz Spider wore the same crystalline goggles as the night we first encountered him, the same iridescent oil-slick garb that helped him blend into shadows, and yet marked him as something unnatural. Supernatural. In strange, jerking movements, parts of him slipping in and out of the currents of time, he approached.
“You don’t actually want us dead,” Leon said. “Not really.”
I wondered how he came to that conclusion, whether this was only Leon’s attempt at delaying the worst. But there was a ring of truth to it. Even with the deadliest of his anomalies, the Quartz Spider had always left the tiniest openings in his plans, little gaps that allowed us to get away and live. Why?
The Quartz Spider pulled the mask off his head, his hair falling in wisps over his eyes. Handsome as ever, handsome as before, and yet he looked even older somehow. He hadn’t agedat all, not really, but the hollows under his eyes seemed even deeper, the stubble on his chin both thicker and grayer.
“It’s never been about killing you,” the Quartz Spider said. “That wouldn’t accomplish anything. Not really. And why would I kill the people who’ve helped me the most?”
I gritted my teeth. And help him we did, always through some twisted accident, whether it was by allowing that pouch of quickening sand to fall into his clutches, or by losing both the Aqueous Elixirs to him and his trickery.
“You tried to kill us,” I said, thrusting an accusing finger at his face. “Back at Habibi.”
His lips pressed into a tight line, his eyes going distant. “Habibi?”
I threw my hands up. Why was he playing with us? Always with these games. “The Amethyst Spider’s club. His home bar? Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of it.”
Brendan shook his head. “I know about the Amethyst Spider, and I know where he conducts his — his business. But I haven’t been near Habibi in ages. I have no business with Faizan.”
“Then you deny it.” Leon stepped forward, his fists shaking at his sides. “Just earlier tonight. Three Brillante thugs, all of them turned to dust when you triggered your anomaly. You froze time around them, then you sped it up and murdered them. Just like that. Why?”
Again Brendan shook his head. “I have no recollection of any of this. If I killed someone — if I killed three people, and tonight, as you put it — I certainly would have remembered.” His gaze fell to the ground. “I always remember.”
Guillotina rolled her eyes and groaned. “He’s lost the plot, or he never had it to begin with. That’s what we get for trying to reason with killers. Come on, Shum. You and me. I’d love to get a turn before the Masques come and haul you away for good.”
