City of Ruin - Mark Charan Newton [202]
At one point, she defended them both against a couple of Okun who skittered across the rubble so clumsily that she wondered how they could have inflicted so much damage in the first place. She employed whips made of light that fizzed and sizzled across the Okuns’ shells, flinging the vile creatures across the desolate street.
‘Oh, well done,’ Bellis trilled. ‘Very good use of energy.’
*
The two women had been walking for miles now, their feet aching and legs growing weary. Fast-moving clouds brought sleet but nothing worse. They’d been moving slowly for at least three hours now, taking occasional stops to sip from bottles of water.
Beami checked the map again, but the further west they moved, the more meaningless the lines on it became. Former streets had reorganized themselves into intermittent chaos. In places navigation became guesswork. Luckily Bellis had been studying the topography of this city for years, and soon felt confident that they were heading in the right direction.
An hour later, they were approaching the area where the warehouse should have been.
‘Where is it then?’ Beami asked. ‘I can’t see anything that looks likely.’
‘It’s just possible that our cephalopod friend managed to destabilize some of the buildings.’
‘You mean your fucking squid flattened the warehouse,’ Beami snapped.
‘Oi!’ The voice echoed across the street. A unit of rumel – citizen militia by the look of them – came trotting across the snow-strewn rubble. Two black-skinned men and a brown-skin arrived, a troop behind them, all equipped with cheap armour and swords. ‘Ladies, get off the street.’ They ushered the women behind a broken terrace of housing, then explained to them who they were and what they were doing.
Beami turned to the Rumel Irregulars. ‘What happened to the Night Guard?’
There was an awkwardness to their expressions, a tentativeness about their manner, and Beami had her worst fears confirmed. One of the citizen-soldiers, a young brown-skin by the name of Bags, explained, ‘Roof came down, miss, when they were all in there. They’d been clearing the place of civilian hostages – over a thousand – then fuck-knows-what comes flying across the city and heads out to sea. Wasn’t the thing itself what knocked it down, more the rumblings, if you see what I mean.’
Swallowing, Beami suppressed her concerns for the moment. ‘I need to go inside there.’
‘Impossible, miss. We’ve been looking all around there, but there ain’t nothing but rubble.’
‘They’re Night Guard. They’re enhanced soldiers. The collapse may not have killed them all. That means some of our best soldiers might still be alive.’
There followed a swift discussion amongst the Irregulars, whispers and nods. Bags then said, ‘We can lead you up to the building, and pick off any of the enemy that are still around while you go in.’
*
As they approached the wreckage of the warehouse, her heart sank. How could even Lupus survive this? Rubble was strewn far and wide, where the structure once stood, chunks of masonry of varying sizes, brick and slate and tile scattered haphazardly. Jagged knuckles of stone jutted skyward.
In this corpse of a building, its broken pieces scattered over hundreds of yards, where could they possibly begin?
‘Watch out for any Okun, miss,’ Bags called out as his troop disappeared behind the ruins.
‘Let’s get started,’ Beami sighed.
She first deployed the Brotna, intending to break up all the stone around them so they could more easily scour the site. She unravelled the tendrils of the large metal cone, then aimed the top of it across the first cluster of rock. As she charged the device, a humming sound could be heard, before a bolt of energy disintegrated the entire mass. Bellis assisted with some extraordinary fork-like implement that expanded to lever up larger segments.
Presently, citizen soldiers began to gather and, once they realized what they were doing, even offered assistance. Where they came from, Beami didn’t know, but soon other tools miraculously