A Glitch in Reality - Chapter 0046

Chapter 46

Sofia Reyes was certain of one thing: neither of them was in a hurry.

She could see everything through the crack between the glass partition and the edge of the counter, her face pressed against the cold marble, and from that low angle the entire lobby looked like a stage seen from the orchestra pit. The enormous man with his face uncovered in the center of the stage, the floor cracked and starry under his boot, the fixed smile. And, coming from the entrance, skirting the yellow bus with the ease of someone skirting a flowerbed, the two newcomers. The blond man in the overcoat walked with his hands still clasped behind his back. The giant with the boar’s head came half a step behind, his hooves clicking on the marble in an almost polite rhythm.

“Look, look,” the blond man had said, his green eyes gleaming behind thin lenses. “So you have a trick up your sleeve. But I have one too.”

And then his hands were no longer crossed behind his back.

Sofia didn’t see the intermediate movement. Nobody did. There was a man with hidden hands walking, and the next instant there was a man with a pistol in each hand and outstretched arms, and the lobby exploded. The shots came so fast and so regular that the bursts blended into a single fabric of thunder, and she saw the bullets find the large man in the chest, in the shoulder, in the throat, saw the black fabric of his clothes tremble and tear into small rips, saw shreds of cloth fly, and saw, again, that thing she had already seen once that afternoon and which remained the worst of all: the lead flattening against the skin and falling. The deformed metal discs clinked on the marble around his boots like coins thrown into a hat.

The wild boar didn’t stay to watch.

He jumped. Two hundred and some kilos of muscle left the ground with a lightness that shouldn’t have suited that body, the arc of the jump passing over the hood of the bus, and the giant fell in the middle of the four balaclava-clad men guarding the cargo door. The marble sank beneath their hooves with a quarry-like crash. And what happened next, Sofia could only follow in fragments, because it happened too fast and in too many places at the same time: a man lifted by his vest and used as a club against another, the two collapsing entangled in each other; a third who opened fire from two meters away and received a backhanded slap that lifted him off the ground and sent him crashing through the partition of an empty box, the safety glass shattering into hail; the fourth who dropped his rifle and ran, and didn’t run far enough. The wild boar caught up with him in two steps, grabbed him by the ankle like someone catching a chicken by the foot, and deposited him headfirst into a steel trash can with a delicacy that was, somehow, more frightening than the violence.

The other men in balaclavas, those returning from the vault corridor, opened fire from the other side of the lobby. The giant turned his body towards them, lowered his head, and the bullets that found him did more or less what rain does on a bus: make a noise. He charged through the gunfire like a battering ram, like a steamroller someone forgot to turn off rolling downhill, and the men began to understand, too late, that the plan to escape through the door depended on a door that now had that thing in front of it.

And at the center of it all, in the eye of the storm, the large, uncovered man still hadn’t moved. The blond man’s bullets continued to rain down on him, and he received them like one receives a warm rain, his head pushed half a finger’s width to the side with each impact on his face, his smile intact. Sofia saw when he finally tired of waiting. She saw his body turn, not towards the blond man who was shooting, but towards the boar who was taking down his men, and she saw the first step, the marble groaning under the weight of the intention.

The second step did not happen.

The blond man crossed the hall. There was no other verb: he didn’t run, he crossed, like a chalk line crossing a blackboard, and when the big man realized it, the blond man was already in the air, bent over himself in a leap that passed over his head, and throughout the arc of the leap the two pistols were pointed downwards, at the man’s turned face, spitting fire at point-blank range. He landed between the man and the boar, his back to his friend, facing the giant with bulletproof skin, and even as he landed he was already speaking, in a tone of someone reprimanding a dog that tried to take food from the table.

“No, no, no, no.” He shook the barrel of one of the pistols from side to side, negating each negation. “If you want to go after the big guy, you’ll have to go through me.”

The entire lobby held its breath, Sofia included.

The big man looked down at the blond man who reached his chin, and his smile took on a new flavor.

“Well,” he said, “since you insist.”

…

Brad knew he was going to like this even before the first punch.

It had been three weeks since he’d faced anything that lasted more than a blow. Walls, safes, a pickup truck, a bank manager: the world had become a collection of things that broke at the first touch, and there was a boredom in that he hadn’t yet admitted, even to himself. That little man in the overcoat had just crossed an entire lobby in the blink of an eye and jumped over his head, firing. That wasn’t going to break at the first touch.

He lunged forward with a straight punch, putting in what he usually did: enough to rip a car door off. The fist sliced ​​through the air where the blond man’s face had been, and the blond man’s face simply wasn’t there anymore, his neck bending just enough, two fingers’ width of inclination, the punch passing so close that the wind from it ruffled his combed hair. And before Brad could pull his arm back, the world went up in flames. The butt of the pistol met his temple in a short, sharp arc, the steel hitting the bone with a crack that echoed through the lobby.

He didn’t even feel it. He registered the sound, registered the contact, and the pain simply didn’t come, because pain was another thing that had been dumped out of his life three weeks ago. Brad twisted his torso and threw both arms into a bear hug, a trap that had already crushed ribs for far less, and closed his arms over nothing. The blond had passed underneath, his body bending in a dodge that looked like something an Olympic gymnast filmed at the wrong speed, and from the crouch he rose, his leg rising with it, the instep tracing an ascending arc that ended at the side of Brad’s head with scalpel-like precision.

The kick moved him.

That was what surprised him, not the pain, which again was absent, but the displacement: his body, the body that had stopped a pickup truck with its shoulder, took a step to the side to avoid losing its balance. A full step. Brad steadyed himself and looked at the thin man in front of him with a newfound interest. Whatever was beneath that overcoat, it pounded harder than its size suggested. Not enough to hurt. But enough to move, and movement was already more than forty-five bullets had managed.

“You hit pretty well for a toothpick,” Brad said.

“You’re good enough to hold a cupboard,” the blond man replied, and something changed in his hands.

One of the pistols twirled in his fingers and disappeared inside the overcoat, finding a holster somewhere in the lining, and in the same movement, as if the two things were halves of the same gesture, the other hand returned from inside the coat bringing a blade. It wasn’t an ordinary knife. Brad had seen knives his whole life, kitchen knives, trench knives, bar fight knives, and none of them were like this: a narrow, slightly curved dagger whose edge didn’t reflect the late afternoon light; he drank from it, and there was something written along the blade that wouldn’t stay still when he tried to read it.

“Cute,” Brad said. “Are you going to do my nails?”

The blond man didn’t answer. And it was Brad who stepped forward, because patience had never been a tool of his trade, and because up close, in hand-to-hand combat, no man ever backs down forever.

He was right and he was wrong, and both things at the same time were the most irritating experience of his new life.

Right, because the blond man couldn’t actually hurt him. Wrong, because the blond man didn’t seem interested in hurting him yet, and Brad was slow to notice this difference. They danced. There was no better word for it, however much Brad hated the word: he attacked, advanced, grabbed, and the man in the overcoat flowed through his blows like water through his fingers, and with each pass the dagger did its small, silent work. A shallow gash on his forearm when Brad missed a cross. A line on his side when he spun too heavily on an elbow strike. A scratch behind his knee, in the crease of his trousers, when he lunged forward, sinking into the marble and finding nothing. None of the cuts were deep. His skin, skin that flattened like lead, yielded to that blade only the bare minimum, a millimeter or two of dermis, scratches that on an ordinary man wouldn’t even require a bandage.

But they were bleeding.

Brad realized it on the fourth or fifth pass, when he raised his arm to block and saw the thin red trickle running down his wrist, and the sight hit him harder than any blow that afternoon. Blood. His blood, on the outside of him, for the first time in three weeks. The hotel room where he woke up feeling different, the razor test that bent the blade, the growing and delicious certainty of having left the line where the rest of humanity waited: all of this had a seal, and the seal was the closed skin, and that little man with glasses was scratching the seal with a crooked little knife.

Rage surged through him like water down a clogged drain, from the bottom up, filling everything. He felt his face heat up, his neck, his ears, and heard his own breath change texture.

“Be quiet,” he growled, and his voice came out deeper than he had ordered.

“Make me stay,” said the blond man, and he had the audacity to adjust his glasses on his nose with his finger, in the middle of the fight, like a teacher waiting for the right answer.

Brad stopped trying to hit him with his hands. Beside them, lying toppled since the beginning of the robbery, was one of the mahogany counters where customers filled out forms, two meters of solid wood bolted to a cast-iron base, and he ripped it from the floor by its metal legs like someone pulling a stake from a garden, the screws popping out of the marble like corks. He spun his whole body once, twice, the piece of furniture gaining speed at the tips of his arms like an athletic hammer, and let go. The counter spun horizontally across the lobby, a propeller of wood and iron at chest height, sweeping away the blond man and whatever else was behind him.

The blond man went down. Not sideways, down: his knees buckled, his torso plummeted backward into an impossible limbo, and the counter roared over him, close enough to knock his glasses off if glasses weren’t, apparently, part of his face, and ended its journey against a column at the back, exploding into wood, iron, and shards of rococo bank furniture. Before the last piece touched the ground, the man in the overcoat was already standing again, unbent, the dagger slowly twirling between his fingers.

“Be careful with the property,” he said. “That was mahogany.”

And the dance began again, and it was around the tenth cut that Brad noticed something that calmed him and something that should have worried him, and he only paid attention to the first. The one that calmed him: the little man didn’t have a plan. He cut and cut, and the cuts didn’t accumulate into anything, scratch upon scratch, a count that would never balance, because Brad’s skin might yield a millimeter but never two. Sooner or later the stick would tire. No body could endure that ballet forever, and his, Brad felt with a furnace-like satisfaction, showed no sign of fatigue. He just had to wait.

What should have worried him: the blond man had come to the same conclusion, made two haircuts, and didn’t seem bothered by it in the slightest.

On the other side of the lobby, the last of his men bounced against a column and didn’t get up. Brad advanced again, and mid-advance he noticed that the man in the overcoat had stopped retreating. He stood there, erect, his free hand rising to his chest, fingers spread over his sternum above his shirt, as if making an oath, and behind the glasses the green eyes had given up following Brad’s fists. They looked straight into him.

“Good,” said the blond man, and something lit up beneath his shirt, a brief light sweeping across lines that shouldn’t be there, “enough warming up.”

And then Brad’s world cracked in two.

There was no flash, no smoke, no sound. There was only the instant when there was a man in an overcoat in front of him and the instant when there were two, side by side, identical down to the last strand of combed hair, and Brad blinked hard because the first explanation from his brain was the cheapest: double vision, some delayed blow, sweat in his eye. But double vision doesn’t work like that, and he knew it. One of the two men held the dagger. The other held the two pistols, including the one Brad had seen, with his own eyes, disappear inside the overcoat minutes before. Two shadows on the marble. Two reflections in the shattered glass door in the background. Two pairs of green eyes studying him with the same collector’s interest.

And when they spoke, they spoke together, their two voices falling on top of each other with a minimal delay, an echo that happened before the sound, and the sum of the two made something scrape inside Brad’s skull, like a fingernail on glass, somewhere behind his eyes.

“Well, why don’t we have some fun here?”

“What the hell is this?” Brad said, and took a half-step back without deciding to back down.

The man holding the pistols raised both at the same time, the barrels meeting Brad’s chest, and Brad did what three weeks of new life had taught him to do when faced with weapons of that caliber: nothing. He didn’t raise his arms, he didn’t turn his body, he didn’t protect anything. Bullets were rain. Bullets were coins thrown into a hat.

The shot exploded inside his head, louder than any gunshot he had ever heard in his life, loud in a wrong way, as if the bang had been born inside his ears, and along with the sound came the pain.

Brad had forgotten the pain. Three weeks was enough time to forget, and it returned uninvited, overwhelming, a red-hot iron piercing his chest from front to back, and the breath left him in a grunt he didn’t recognize as his own. He looked down. There was a hole in his shirt, to the left of his sternum. There was a hole in him. The burned edges of the fabric, the open flesh beneath, and the blood, his own, dark and abundant, trickling down his stomach and soaking the waistband of his pants, and the pain pulsed from within the hole in waves, each wave in time with his heart, and his heart was racing.

This doesn’t happen, Brad thought, or tried to think, but the thought found no ground. Forty-five bullets. He had received forty-five bullets that very afternoon, he had plucked one from his own smile with his finger, and now this. He looked up and the man with the guns was still there, both barrels pointed, smoke rising thinly from one of them, aiming again, ready to shoot again, and fear entered Brad through the same door through which pain had entered, wide open, and sat in its usual place, deep in his stomach, in the seat that three weeks of invulnerability hadn’t managed to remove from the furniture.

Because Brad had always been a coward.

He knew this as well as one knows one’s own address. His entire career had been built around this knowledge: the years choosing easy targets, the years beating those who couldn’t fight back, the years staying in the rear of every operation that had a rear guard. The force had arrived three weeks ago and lined it all with a layer of steel, and he had confused, as all cowards who acquire a large weapon do, the layer with the structure. Now there was a hole in the layer, and underneath it was everything exactly where he had left it.

That’s when the other one arrived.

The one with the dagger. Brad had forgotten about it, panic narrowing his world until it fit within a pair of pistol barrels, and the one with the dagger entered that narrow world from the side, the blade singing two short arcs, and this time the cuts came on the forearms that Brad had finally raised, too late, to protect his chest. Two thin lines of warm blood running down to his elbows. A slight pain, a scratching pain, almost a relief near the furnace in his chest, and Brad was still looking at his own arms when his knee came up.

It landed right under his chin with the full weight of the jump from behind, and Brad’s head, the head that had bent a crowbar, snapped to the side on impact. He staggered. He staggered.

“What is it?” said the voice, and it was the two voices again, overlapping, scraping inside the skull. “Are you afraid?”

And the second shot went off.

The shoulder, this time. The same impossible pain, the same burning sensation, the hole opening at the joint of his arm with butcher-like precision, the blood running down his sleeve, and Brad heard a sharp, continuous sound and it took him a full second to realize the sound was coming from him. He spun on his heels in terror, searching the lobby, searching for anything but the two identical men, and what the lobby showed him was the rest of the story: his men, the ten men who had entered with him, scattered across the marble in discarded poses, the last of them still standing, exchanging useless blows with the boar-headed giant, and losing, and the bus, yellow, intact, loaded, with its cargo door open like a waiting mouth.

Brad’s body decided before he did. It had always been that way in moments of truth, and the newfound strength only shortened the path between decision and action: he bent his knees and leaped, four meters and some change over the battlefield, and landed beside the last of his men standing, who was, by a chance that wasn’t a chance at all in Brad’s mind, the only one who mattered. Tyrell. The team’s best driver and, more important than any talent, the man in whose pocket was the only key to the bus.

“We’re leaving,” Brad said, grabbing him by the vest.

“Brad, what the hell, the others…,” Tyrell began, and the rest of the sentence turned into a crumpled protest as Brad slung him over his shoulder like a sack of cement and leaped again, the marble sinking at the start, the entire lobby blurring beneath them, and landed next to the back of the bus. He threw Tyrell into the cargo door, over the bundles of money, unceremoniously and without letting out his own panic, and when he turned to climb in after him, he saw.

The two of them. The twins, the clones, the mirrors—he had no name for it and didn’t want one—running side-by-side through the lobby toward him, the one with the pistols and the one with the dagger, their two open overcoats floating identically, and behind them the giant boar lifting the head of the man who had just passed out.

Fear did the job that strategy couldn’t. There was a fallen concrete bench by the entrance, half a ton of public seating ripped from the sidewalk by the passing bus, and Brad grabbed it by one end and hurled it at the two running men, the block spinning through the low air of the lobby like a bone thrown to two dogs. He didn’t wait to see the result. He jumped into the load, yelled “Go, go, go” at the front of the vehicle, and heard, blessed, the engine start.

The bus started moving. Slowly, panting, gaining speed with the reluctance of anything large. After all, it was a bus.

…

Jack watched the concrete block grow toward him, spinning, and the suit had already solved the geometry before he even finished looking: the throwing line, the rotation, the exact point where half a ton of city would cross its trajectory. He jumped. The block passed beneath him, close to his soles, the wind of the spin hitting his ankle, and Jack completed the somersault over the obstacle with the grace of a circus acrobat, landing without breaking his step, his eyes already back on the bus driving away through the broken facade. The illusion beside him jumped too, identical, mirrored, because he had commanded it to jump, and for a moment Jack allowed himself to appreciate his own work.

It had worked. Better than right.

He had been carrying that spell on his chest for days like someone carrying a sealed letter. Phantasmagorical Force, the record said, three charges a day, and the description he had read and reread in the early morning promised something none of his other tools promised: a weapon that didn’t attack the enemy’s body, but attacked the agreement the enemy’s mind maintained with the world. The tattoo planted an illusion directly inside the target’s skull, and from the outside the conjurer only defined the parameters, the script, the format of the nightmare. The victim did the rest. The victim provided the sound, the smell, the heat, the pain, all fabricated by their own mind with a fidelity no set designer could achieve, because no set designer knows the audience inside out.

Jack had chosen the simplest, almost lazy, format from his repertoire: a clone of himself. A second Jack, visible only to Brad, audible only to Brad, armed with the pistols Brad had seen and therefore believed in. And when the illusion fired, the damage that pierced that chest wasn’t lead. It was psychic damage, pure, direct, poured into the mind behind that armored skin without asking for passage through the skin, because the skin had no jurisdiction over what happened inside the skull. The most absurd armor Jack had ever faced, a durability that laughed like a rifle, and the spell passed through it like someone passing through an open door, and the man roared, bled from within his own conviction, felt the hole that didn’t exist with every nerve ending his memory knew how to imitate.

And nobody else saw anything.

This was the part that Jack, with a sincerity that perhaps should have worried him, found most beautiful. To any other pair of eyes in that lobby—to the hostages, to the cameras, to Kevin himself—the scene had been different: a huge man standing in the middle of the bank, screaming into the air, staring in horror at his own intact chest, bleeding only from shallow dagger cuts. No bullet holes. No wounds. The damage existed in only one place in the universe, inside Brad’s head, and that was exactly where Jack needed it to exist.

First time in combat. He filed the evaluation with the rest: passed with honors.

“Kevin!”, he shouted, already crossing the destroyed facade to the street, the bus twenty meters ahead and pulling away. “Let’s go!”

He commanded the suit to run, and the suit ran. There was a cost, he knew; that speed wasn’t his own, it was borrowed against the collateral damage of his own tendons, each stride exacting interest from his joints, the stress accumulating in places that would present the bill tomorrow. A necessary evil. He fixed his eyes on the yellow rear and kept the spell alive with a corner of his mind, his concentration divided as if balancing a glass of water on his head while running, because the illusion died the instant he let go of it, and he hadn’t finished using it yet.

Behind him, the sound of the last bandit hitting the ground, and then the sound of hooves.

Kevin stepped past the facade in two strides and leaped, and at the highest point of his jump, his body did something Jack hadn’t yet gotten used to seeing: it abandoned its form. The giant in military trousers dissolved into thin air like a decision being reconsidered, shoulders sinking, spine lengthening, arms already touching the ground like paws, and what landed on the avenue on the other side of the jump was no longer a man. It was a wild boar. A wild boar the size of a translation error, three meters tall at the withers and five meters long, its reddish fur ablaze from the late afternoon, yellow tusks the length of a forearm curving outwards from its jaw, and when all four hooves touched the asphalt, the asphalt protested.

The boar bolted. Its gallop didn’t seem like a race, it seemed like a continuous accident, an out-of-control tractor, a truck going down the mountain without brakes, each hoof the size of a manhole cover hammering the ground in a cadence that Jack felt rising from his own soles, and the distance between the two evaporated in seconds, because however much the suit lent Jack speed, this was a different category of engine. Kevin pulled alongside, slowed down half a pace, and Jack leaped sideways without stopping, spinning in the air, and landed seated at the base of his friend’s neck, his hands finding anchor in the thick fur.

“Come on, big guy.” He leaned over the withers, the wind already whipping around him. “I need to stay within his range. Eighteen meters, at least. Lose sight of that bus and my trump card will be useless.”

The boar squealed. It was an absurd sound coming from an animal that size, high-pitched, almost indignant, and Jack translated it effortlessly, because three months of friendship taught the language: understood, hold on tight, and next time warn me before jumping on me. Kevin didn’t yet speak in his full animal form. His throat went along with the transformation, and whatever produced words went along with it. But he squealed with remarkable eloquence.

The bus turned heavily around a corner ahead, its tires screeching, and entered the long avenue that descended toward the park and the lower neighborhoods. Jack did the calculation he needed to do, and the calculation said it was correct, but it also said something else, and that second thing was new. He focused on it.

The connection was there. Jack had never pulled the thread back. He had never needed to, and he suspected, as he suspected all his gifts without instructions, that pulling it would have consequences he preferred to experience under controlled conditions. The conditions weren’t controlled. But they were necessary.

He closed his eyes for a full second of galloping, gripped the thread intently, and pulled.

“Come to me.”

The air ripped open.

There was no better description, and Jack wasted no time looking for one: two meters to the right of the charging boar, the very air parted with a sound like canvas being torn by giant hands, loud enough to cut through the wind of the run, and from the crease he emerged, already running, already at speed, as if the race had started on the other side and the passage was just a door in the middle of it, the chest.

The dark wooden trunk with rusted hardware, the lid ajar revealing a crooked smile of teeth that were too white and too numerous, the long tongue undulating and drooling against the wind, and beneath it the four stubby little legs, a blur of tiny, frantic steps that somehow, against all the physics Jack knew and then some, kept pace with the gallop of a three-meter-long boar without missing an inch. He ran alongside them like a dog that had spent its life waiting for exactly that walk.

Jack laughed. He hadn’t planned to laugh; the sound simply escaped, carried away by the wind.

“It worked,” he said, to no one. “Look. It worked.”

Pet, walking arsenal, baggage with a mind of its own: he still hadn’t decided what category that creature belonged to, and the creature didn’t seem interested in being categorized. The bus ahead went another block. Time to work.

“Boy!”, shouted Jack, extending his arm to the side, palm open. “Machine gun!”

The trunk didn’t break the rhythm. The lid opened at an angle no hinge would allow, the wooden throat swinging open to a darkness that was larger inside than the piece of furniture was outside, and from within the darkness, a long, rapidly wound volume catapulted out. Jack followed the bow, adjusted his hand by half a palm’s length, and the rifle fit into his palm with a slap of leather and steel. An AK-47, loaded, the magazine full by its weight, the wooden stock worn by hands he preferred not to imagine. He cocked it with a sharp pull, unlocked the safety with his thumb, and rested his elbow on his thigh to match the aim with the sway of the gallop.

The first shot blew out the left rear tire of the bus.

The rubber shattered into flying black strips, and the bare rim bit into the asphalt, spitting out a trail of orange sparks that swept across the street behind the vehicle like the tail of a cheap comet. The bus swerved to the right. Jack was already aiming again, the barrel dropping a finger’s width to compensate for the recoil, and the second shot ate up the right rear tire, and now there were two rims scraping the ground, twice as many sparks, and the back of the bus began to zigzag across the avenue, five tons of vehicle and money dancing on top of two metal plates.

And it didn’t fall.

Jack watched, with a pang of professional respect, as the zigzag narrowed, narrowed, and died. Inside, the driver had tamed the vehicle with the steering wheel, fine-tuned reading and nerves of ice, and not only stabilized it: the engine roared deeper and the bus accelerated, rims and all, sparks and all, pushing what remained of the front tires to their limits, and ahead of him the avenue descended to where the city was most vibrant, an intersection, shop windows, a bus stop with three people who were already turning to watch the yellow comet descending the street.

Jack’s calculation shifted. A runaway bus traveling at sixty miles per hour into civilian areas was no longer a chase, it was a countdown, and every second the chase lasted was a second wagered with the life of someone who hadn’t chosen to play.

“Big guy.” He gave the boar two firm slaps on the side of the neck. “Go faster.”

Kevin’s legs became a blur.

The world on both sides lost its outline, buildings melting into strips, the wind tearing through the wall, and Jack pressed his torso against his withers and squeezed his knees as the boar devoured the distance in five-meter bites, the trunk beside him keeping pace with its impossible little steps, its tongue fluttering like a pennant. The back of the bus grew. Twenty meters. Fifteen. Twelve. Within the radius.

Through the sheeted rear windows there was a sliver of glass, and through the sliver Jack found Brad.

The man sat huddled amidst the bundles of money, examining his own chest with both hands, his fingers groping around a wound with the terrified care of someone holding a grenade, his face contorted in a grimace of continuous agony. From Brad’s point of view, Jack knew, there was a bullet hole there, open flesh, blood soaking his shirt, the pain pulsing with every heartbeat. From the point of view of any other pair of eyes in the universe, including Jack’s at that moment, there was a large, intact man feeling his own shirt, torn by dagger cuts, half a dozen shallow cuts and nothing more. No perforations. No bullet wounds. The entire devastation resided in a single address, inside that skull, invisible and unreachable to the rest of the world, and Jack kept it alive there with the chant of concentration, like someone keeping their finger on a piano note.

It was while looking at that grimace that the idea came to me.

It arrived fully formed, the way his best and worst ideas always did, and Jack twirled it in his hands for two seconds of galloping, searching for the flaw. Risky. Yes. The kind of idea that Kevin, if he could speak in that way, would veto with three words and a screech. But the bus wasn’t going to stop willingly; the driver was too good to lose control and too stubborn to give up, and ahead the city was only getting more crowded.

The quickest way to stop a vehicle has never been with the tires.

He’s the driver.

Jack smiled, alone, against the wind, and played the piano note.

…

The first thing Brad felt was the pain going away.

Not all of it. It receded like a tide, leaving his chest, his shoulder, leaving in the sand the outline of where it had been, and Brad gasped atop the bundles of money, his hands still flat on his shirt, and looked down.

There was no hole.

He pulled at the torn fabric, searched with his fingers, squeezed. The skin was intact. The fine cuts from the dagger still burned and still darkened the shirt in lines, but the hole, the red-hot iron, the sheet of blood running down his stomach—none of that was there, none of that had been there, and the realization dawned on Brad in two stages, and each stage hurt in a different way.

The first feeling was relief, and it was so great that it brought a laugh to his face, a trembling, wet laugh like someone crying on the other side. Illusion. Trick. The bastard in the overcoat had somehow put that into his head—the clone, the gunshots, the holes, all theater, all smoke and mirrors—he was never hurt, his skin never failed, he remained what he had woken up being three weeks ago, untouchable, and the laughter grew, and Brad punched a wad of cash in pure celebration, the plastic bursting, hundred-dollar bills flying down the bus aisle.

The second stage came later, more slowly, and silenced the laughter.

Because the pain in his mind didn’t recede with the pain in his body. The memory of the two shots remained etched somewhere behind his eyes with a clarity no memory should possess: the sound emanating from inside his ears, the metal piercing his chest. And every time he touched upon that memory, it responded with an echo of real, present pain. And along with the echo, his head began to ache, a dull pressure growing from his temples to the center, as if his mind, discovering it had been broken into, was now rummaging through its own rooms to inventory what else had been disturbed. If that was a lie, what else was a lie? How much of what he was seeing now—the bus, the money, his own hands—was being designed on the outside and delivered ready-made to him?

“Stop,” Brad said to himself aloud, pressing his temples together. “Stop. It’s over. It was a trick. It’s over.”

And then he heard the laughter.

It wasn’t his. It came from the front of the bus, low, restrained, the polite laugh of someone enjoying a private joke, and Brad slowly raised his head, because some old, cowardly part of him already knew what he was going to find and was trying to negotiate one more second of ignorance.

In the driver’s seat, where Tyrell should have been, where thirty seconds ago Tyrell had been sitting with his hands on the enormous steering wheel in the relaxed posture of someone driving on a Sunday, was the blond man. The beige overcoat draped impeccably around the seat. The thin-rimmed glasses reflected in the windshield. His face turned back to Brad, in the casual twist of a rideshare driver checking out a passenger, and a smile.

“Sit down and fasten your seatbelt,” said the blond man. “It’s going to be a long ride.”

What happened inside Brad in that instant didn’t go through any of the usual places where decisions go. Terror took a shortcut, going from his retina straight to his arm, and his arm responded with everything it had, and what it had, three weeks after that night in the alley, was enough to double a safe. His fist crossed the bus aisle and met the blonde head squarely, and the head came out.

It came off his neck. Clean, whole, with a damp crack that the engine muffled, and flew out the open driver’s window onto the street, disappearing in the speed, and the overcoat-clad body remained seated behind the wheel, hands still resting on it, a stalk of neck ending in nothing.

Brad stared, his arm still outstretched, his breath held, and then relief came for the second time, and for the second time he laughed.

“He’s dead,” he said, to the empty bus, to the bundles, to nobody. The laughter rose, toothy, hysterical. “I killed him. I killed the bastard, it’s over, I…”

The sound came through the window.

Beneath the engine, beneath the wind, a four-stroke rhythm pounded the asphalt, heavy, enormous, growing louder, a gallop, and there wasn’t a horse in the world with that kind of weight per stride. Brad turned to the side window of the bus, his neck stiff, inch by inch, the way someone praying to be wrong turns.

Alongside the bus, galloping down the adjacent lane as if sixty miles an hour were a warm-up trot, came a reddish boar the size of a moving truck. And mounted on the boar, his beige overcoat billowing, his blond hair combed so neatly it didn’t even bother to come undone in the wind, his thin-rimmed glasses sparkling in the last afternoon sun, came the man whose head Brad had just ripped off. Whole. Smiling at him. And he waved, two fingers touching his temple, a mocking salute.

Beside the wild boar, in a flurry of tiny steps, ran a trunk.

A wooden chest, with little legs, with teeth, with a long tongue wagging out and drooling against the wind, chasing the school bus with the enthusiasm of a stray dog ​​after a mailman, and it was perhaps the chest, among all the impossible things piled up that day, that finally broke something in Brad’s internal accounting. The world had rules. The rules had been bent for three weeks, but bent by him, in his favor, and now the world galloped beside the window showing that it knew how to bend the rules itself, against him, and that it had a much larger stock of bends than he did.

If that was the real one.

So who was there?

Brad swiveled to the driver’s seat.

The headless body stood up.

He stood up calmly, without haste, his hands abandoning the steering wheel of the moving bus like one abandons a handrail, the back of his neck turned towards Brad with its obscene absence, and the lack of a head made no difference when the hand of the body plunged inside the overcoat and returned bearing a sword. A long, narrow blade, dark silver, emerging from the lining of the coat in a way no coat ever did, and Brad was still raising his arms, still choosing between fighting and retreating, when the body crossed the aisle in a single step and plunged the sword into his stomach.

Pain erased the world.

It was bigger than the gunshots. It was bigger than anything he had to compare it to, a mast of ice and fire piercing him from front to back, and Brad heard himself roar from a distant place, his hands clenching around a blade that burned his palms, his knees buckling, and the pain didn’t stay in his stomach, it rose, lodged itself inside his head and made a nest, pulsing behind his eyes in waves that whitened his vision, and in some remote, small, abandoned realm of consciousness, a voice registered the technical detail that the bus’s steering wheel was turning slowly on its own, to the left.

The bus, after all, was driverless.

Five tons of vehicle, money, and panic crossed the median diagonally, the rear rims leaving a final signature of sparks on the asphalt, jumped the curb on the other side with a thud that threw Brad and the bundles half a meter into the air, ripped through low-hanging wires that whipped sparks, and invaded the dark lawn of a park. Wooden fences shattered against the bumper one after another, stakes flew, a trash can exploded in an arc, the world outside the windows turned to grass and shaking tree shadows, and ahead, planted in the center of an ornamental flowerbed as if it had been waiting for this since the park’s foundation, was a stone. A granite boulder the size of a small car, placed there by landscapers to give the lawn an air of untouched nature.

Inside the bus, the headless body disintegrated.

It turned to smoke all at once, without transition, the sword evaporating from inside Brad’s stomach along with the hand that held it, and the pain of the wound evaporated with it, leaving behind only the other pain, the pain in his mind, the pulsating nest behind his eyes, and Brad fell to his knees in the hallway, panting, and looked at the driver’s seat, trying to understand, needing to understand, and what was in the driver’s seat was a body.

A real body. In gray overalls, the same size as Tyrell, with Tyrell’s hands hanging off the steering wheel, slumped sideways against the door. Headless. The driver’s window open, the wind streaming in.

Brad’s fist still ached from the punch.

He had just enough time for a second to hold that entire thought in his hands, to feel the full weight of what he had done and how they had made him do it, before looking ahead through the windshield and seeing the stone.

Coming towards him at high speed.

No. He was the one heading towards it.

The school bus hit the granite boulder head-on, and the granite, true to two hundred million years of experience, did not budge.

Brad’s world went light. Physics ripped him from the aisle and threw him against the windshield, and the windshield, designed for far less, gave way, and Brad flew out the front of the dead bus in a high, swirling arc, the park spinning around him, sky, grass, sky, the lampposts of a lit court rising to meet him, and he went through the basketball court fence without feeling the fence, the metal tearing around his body like wrapping paper, and he hit the ground.

The concrete of the court cracked like a web under the first impact. Brad bounced. On the second impact it was his left arm that snapped, bending in a place where an arm doesn’t bend, and on the third it was his legs, and he rolled and scraped and stuck to the painted floor in a trail of peeled paint and blood, his ribcage collapsing inward with a series of muffled cracks, something in his neck making a small, final sound, until the fence on the other side of the court caught him, the metal bending around him in a twisted embrace, and the movement ended.

Brad lay motionless, sprawled against the fence like clothes on a fallen clothesline.

His chest rose and fell. Only that still functioned, and barely at that. He registered the pain in its entirety, a complete census, limb by limb, each bone reporting its condition: the broken arms, the broken legs, the sunken ribs squeezing his lungs, and inside his lungs a liquid heat rising, filling, bubbling with each short breath. He knew what it was. He had seen men drown from the inside.

And he didn’t die.

It was the final piece of the joke, and Brad understood it lying there, looking at the purple sky of the early evening through the hole his own body had torn in the fence: the same thing that had prevented him from feeling the bullets now wouldn’t let him leave. The armored body held the door shut. Pain had free entry, death did not, and he was trapped in the hallway between the two, breathing blood, listening.

Listening to the galloping.

The four-beat rhythm increased, slowed, and the giant boar entered the court through the gap in the fence, its hooves clicking on the cracked concrete, its hot breath sweeping across the floor. It stopped three meters away. And from atop it, in a leap that ended with him crouching beside Brad, light as someone stepping off a sidewalk, descended the blond man.

The overcoat remained impeccable. It was, of all the details, the most offensive.

“Wow,” said the blond man, looking around at the smoking bus clinging to the rock behind it, the trail of destroyed fences, the torn wire fence, the cracked court. “I didn’t imagine our first mission would be so intense.”

Beside him, the boar shuddered and abandoned its form. The reddish mass rose, shrank, rearranged itself into shoulders and arms and that head of yellow tusks, and the giant in military trousers rolled his neck until it cracked, his deep voice emerging with the usual stone rolling inside it.

“I didn’t think it would be this chaotic either.”

“Chaotic is kind.”

“That’s good,” said the boar-man, crossing his arms as he contemplated the scene with the quiet satisfaction of someone who won’t have to fill out any reports, “because I won’t be the one who has to explain to the chief and the mayor what we did here today.”

The blond man sighed. It was a long, deep, bureaucratic sigh, the sigh of a man receiving an extra pile of work from his boss on a Friday, as if the bus on the cobblestones, the plowed park, the eleven men scattered across a bench in the city center—all of that was nothing more than work, paperwork, office routine.

“Sometimes,” he said, “it’s really bad being the boss.”

Brad’s vision darkened at the edges, the purple sky narrowing, the sound of the world receding like a volume descending, and the last thing that fit into the funnel, before it closed completely, was the blond man leaning over him, his face entering the little light that remained, his green eyes studying him from behind thin lenses with that calm, collector-like interest, and the smile.

“Good evening, Brad.”

And darkness.