Fearful Symmetries Read Online Free Page A

It’s just that things are gonna start to move fast from now on, so you need to know that;
somebody
in this crap-pit does, aside from me. And I guess—” Stopping and hissing, annoyed with herself, before adding, quieter: “I guess I wanted to just say it, too—out loud, for once. For all the good it’ll probably do either of us.”
    They stood there a second, listening, Goss didn’t know for what—nothing but muffled wind, people murmuring scared out beyond the passage, a general scrape and drip. Till he asked: “What about Hynde? Can we, like,
do
anything?”
    “Not much. Why? You guys friends?”
    Yes, damnit
, Goss wanted to snap, but he was pretty sure she had lie-dar to go with her Seven-dar. “There’s . . . not really a show, without him,” was all he said, finally.
    “All right, well—he’s pretty good and got, at this point, so I’d keep him sedated, restrained if I could, and wait, see who else shows up: there’s six more to go, after all.”
    “What happens if they all show up?”
    “All Seven? Then we’re fucked, basically, as a species. Stuck back together, the Maskim are a load-bearing boss the likes of which this world was not designed to contain, and the vector they form in proximity, well—it’s like putting too much weight on a sheet of . . . something. Do it long enough, it rips wide open.”
    “
What
rips?”
    “The crap you think? Everything.”
    There was a sort of a jump-cut, and Goss found himself tagging along beside her as Camberwell strode back up the passageway, listening to her tell him: “Important point about Hynde, as of right now, is to make sure he doesn’t start doin’ stuff to himself.”
    “. . . like?”
    “Well—”
    As she said it, though, there came a scream-led general uproar up in front, making them both break into a run. They tumbled back into the light-sticks’ circular glow to find Journee contorted on the ground with her heels drumming, chewing at her own lips—everybody else had already shrunk back, eyes and mouths covered like it was catching, save for big, stupid ’Lij, who was trying his level best to pry her jaws apart and thrust his folding pocket spork in between. Goss darted forward to grab one arm, Camberwell the other, but Journee used the leverage to flip back up onto her feet, throwing them both off against the walls.
    She looked straight at Camberwell, spit blood and grinned wide, as though she recognized her:
Oh, it’s you. How do, buddy? Welcome to the main event
.
    Then reached back into her own sides, fingers plunging straight down through flesh to grip bone—ripped her red ribs wide, whole back opening up like that meat-book Camberwell had mentioned and both lungs flopping out, way too large for comfort: two dirty grey-pink balloons breathing and growing, already disgustingly over-swollen yet inflating even further, like mammoth water wings.
    The pain of it made her roar and jackknife, vomiting on her own feet. And when Journee looked up once more, horrid grin trailing yellow sick-strings, Goss saw she now had a sigil of her own embossed on her forehead, fresh as some stomped-in bone-bruise.
    “Asakku, the Terrible Zemyel,” Camberwell said, to no one in particular. “Who desecrates the faithful.”
    And: “God!” Somebody else—Lao?—could be heard to sob, behind them.
    “Fuck Him,” Journee rasped back, throwing the tarp pinned ’cross the permanently open doorway wide and taking impossibly off up into the storm with a single flap, blood splattering everywhere, a foul red spindrift.
    ’Lij slapped both hands up to seal his mouth, retching loudly; Katz fell on his ass, skull colliding with the wall’s sharp surface, so hard he knocked himself out. Lao continued to sob-pray on, mindless, while everybody else just stared. And Goss found himself looking over at Camberwell, automatically, only to catch her nodding—just once, like she’d seen it coming.
    “—like
that
, basically
,
” she concluded,