3MA

3MA | Chapter 31

31
LADY OF THE LAKES

Terror. Pure and fully conscious and uncontrollable. It tears through me like hungry fire, from clenched feet to thundering heart to wide screaming mouth, as the maze of sleet covered streets rise in a flash to meet me. To end me.

But I can't let that happen. If I die, then there's no hope for Fisher.

I hold my shaking palm out to the distant, glowing facade of the King's Spire, and I scream using every ounce of air remaining in my lungs.

P-u-l-l.

My body propels through the air, zipping headfirst back to the Spire. A frail sense of hope blossoms in my chest as my groping fingers inch nearer and nearer to the blood-red landmark.

Pullpullpull

Fear quickly reasserts itself as I note with a sickening dread the tops of buildings becoming alarmingly clear. Sketchy tree tops filling with detail. The shocked faces of pedestrians pointing at me as I plummet to the street like a meteor.

PULLPULLPULL

My fingertips cling to the side of the King's Spire, my palms desperately pressing against its static-laced windows, creating a high-pitched screeeeech as gravity tears them down the wet, maddeningly slick surf--

My body collides with the pavement. Far too hard. A white hot pain tears through every inch of me as I crumple in a broken heap and roll uncontrollably away from the King's Spire, landing face down in the middle of the street.

I pry my bloody face from the pavement. A taxi barrels toward me with neck-breaking speed. It screeches to a halt an inch from my broken, gushing nose.

I peel myself from the ground and push up to shaky, unstable feet, my palms ripped raw and studded with pebbles, my breath coming out in panicked gasps.

Miraculously, I think I'm still in one piece.

"Midrazi hexloma!" the cab driver screams at me in a Jerseytown dialect.

We both flinch as something hard slams into the cab's roof and bounces off to my feet.

A filet mignon. Well done.

I pick it up and hurl it uselessly at the thrumming crimson base of the King's Spire. I turn back and catch a glimpse of the television embedded in the back of the taxi's headrest. The title TUNNEL TRAGEDY animates across the screen and fades to a video of bodies being unearthed from the collapsed passage. Burnt bodies. Crippled bodies. Dead bodies.

There is no magic word to undo it. No collection of divine syllables powerful enough to save my best friend.

All I can do is run.

I hobble on a sprained ankle toward the hospital's pale blue neon sign, hovering over the southern bank of the Kilgharrah River; a ghostly woman in a billowing dress holding her hands out to the city below, offering refuge to the wounded and weary.

As kids, the joke Fisher and I always made about the Lady of the Lakes was that she was holding her hands out, not to offer support, but to collect all the money for the hospital's notoriously unaffordable services. I've always hated her guts. But tonight I make a silent plea to her.

Protect him.

I bust through the entrance twenty minutes later and press through a horde of shouting hospital staff, their white lab coats and plastic name tags smeared in fresh blood. Squeaky stretchers whiz by shamelessly showcasing what is left of the victims of the tunnel collapse. I search through the twisted faces, the pulverized limbs, terrified of finding Fisher among the dead.