Geir didn’t know how long he lay there, if he slept or if shock rendered him catatonic. His mind refused the memory of what had just happened: it was a nightmare, he was still in bed with Samuel and when he opened his eyes the maned wolf would still be beside him, and there would be no pain. He vacillated interminably between thinking so and knowing the truth, and maybe real dreams as well.
It was still dark when his eyes opened and were not clouded, his breathing was even. It wasn’t a cold night, but the warmth felt sapped from his body. Children looked out from windows across the street, watching the naked zoan laying on the fire escape. He’s still there.
The assassins were likely long gone, back to report to whoever had ordered Geir’s friend killed. Maybe some police had come to investigate the shooting, probably not. No one but the curious children had bothered even soaring a glance to Geir.
He stood, stiff and sore, feathers matted with dry blood from at least three different sources. Glancing down, he was still dozens of stories above the ground.
Public nudity wasn’t nearly the taboo for a zoan that it was for a human, not one whose features were obscured by soft down, at least. Still, Geir wasn’t going to wander the city openly in this state, and he wasn’t about to let himself be taken to a hospital. The building to whose side the fire escape clung was abandoned, so Geir ducked in through an unboarded window in search of something to cover himself. He had to stop frequently, whenever he thought of the hawks, of their employers and their victims. Any squatters in the vacant apartment husk had to have heard him shouting and pounding his already bloodied fists against the walls. And indeed he found a camp recently abandoned inside a door poorly blocked with a chair. He stole the blanket from the ancient mattress and coiled it around himself, aggravating his damaged ribs as he did so.
Back on the fire escape, he made the agonizing descent over at least half an hour, before slipping off the final ladder and hitting the pavement below hard. He had to rouse himself again with great effort to get back to his feet after that.
He was on the lowest of inner Terrace’s three levels, most of the sky blocked out by roads above. Brief glimpses of the pristine towers beyond teased him with madness. They made him think about Palmer, about Sike’s money.
Had it been Palmer who gave the order? It could have been. As Geir limped to the street, he imagined his hands on the aeronautics heiress’s head—or some stand-in human figure’s—driving his thumbs into her eyes. The thick blood, eye and brain matter pooling and overflowing up to his wrists.
Or had it been Grouch? Had the gangster avoided punishment and avenged himself with a blow much worse than killing his traitor?
Or Sike, reasoning who had stolen from her?
It could have been any of them. It could also have been none of them. It could have been NABI, ready to give up the pretense of investigation. Or the real bomber. It didn’t matter; the visions of violence that swam in Geir’s mind were universal, undiscerning. Anyone connected to Samuel, he would have fallen on them with beak and talons and all his remaining strength, had they appeared in his path. And it would have gotten him killed, because he was weak and injured and raving.
He didn’t have any intention in his walking. He only kept going, immune to the worried and sometimes amused looks he received, because stillness focused his mind too much on what had happened. On the way he found himself a shirt and pants on racks set outside a thrift store, for which he paid with a snarl that no one contested. When he was clothed he picked up into a run. Each percussive step was a flare of pain in his cracked ribs. No one stopped him when he crossed into the sterile, unpeopled streets of Uptown, or another hour later on the median of the turnpike that led out of town.
In the evening, Terrace was behind him. From here it was a sky-high wall of pristine spires and statuary, alone in the plains and obscuring the mountains beyond. It was both the smug barrier put up by the rich around their playground, and also the teeth of a demon leaping up from under the earth, chewing up everything it touched. Before now, Geir realized, there had been something alluring about it. He couldn’t say what precisely, but for all the evils it represented, it had still felt like a lively chemical soup, full of activity and possibility. A place worth coming back from the dead to. Now he saw no life, he felt no possibility. Sterilized, a dead machine digesting itself and the land around it. Geir turned away from it.
The turnpike was cracked and disused; the demon-machine-city was fed by aircar. Off it, the scattered remains of ruined suburbs stretched for kilometers. Everything had been drawn inside the luxury ring, there was no more city out here. Geir descended an off ramp and picked through some swampy grassland that had been a neighborhood some decades ago. He was in the towers’ shadow, and wouldn’t get out of it tonight. The still pools and tall grasses among the old foundations teamed with insects, making every intact house a bad prospect for a place to rest.
Some ways away from the road, there was a two-story house on what had been a sizeable plot of land, surrounded on three sides by woods. The sun was far below the city’s skyline, so Geir settled on it, whatever it’s state.
The house was long empty, though some faint smells lingered that suggested it had been squatted in not too long ago. No furniture, holes punched in the walls to get at its copper wiring. Hardwood floor dusty, but intact. Geir crept room to room, and found no signs of current occupation. Empty beer bottles in one room, a naked and mildewy mattress in another. Geir chose a room with no windows and lay down on the floor. He hadn’t realized how much his body still hurt until he was stationary.
He moved to set his glasses aside, and realized only now that they were still on the end table across the bed from Samuel’s body. In a way he was glad to have left something of himself there with him.
The last thing he thought before he slept was that: no, he’d been wrong. Maybe an assassin had pulled the trigger, and maybe some kingpin or federal officer had ordered the hit, but none of them were really to blame for Samuel’s death. Terrace, the all-devouring demon, had eaten Samuel up. The merest morsel; it would hunger for more and more, until there was no one left to feed it.