Repeated, reflected, reversed

  “It’s a fug S seventy-six,” Philip said. He could tell just from the sound. “There’s probably ten shooters on that thing. If they get over the roof, they shoot through it like tin foil.”

  He felt blood running down his body, pooling in one of his boots. He had dohe best he could with gauze and quickclot and focused now on trolling his breathing (which was always a little dicey when each breath came like a vortex) and telling his flesh what the Spirit already knew. He wasn’t done. He rolled up into a kneel and leaned against a shelf and started to reload.

  “My st bomb drone just went!” EP shrieked, like she would beat the chopper with her bare hands if she was close enough.

  “There’s a rebuilt the trailer,” Philip said, like a dying fession. “I fot about it.”

  “I’ve got it!” Sam zoomed below him on the bike Lindsey had brought in earlier. He had thought it was ridiculous watg her zip around on it, setting charges, but now he thanked whatever strange gods worked in these worlds for its existence. From the sound of the chopper, they couldn’t waste a sed.

  “God dam please let me hit it!” Sam screamed. She was almost sobbing.

  EP was watg the heliclide in. Horrifying. It moved through the air like a rock falling sideways. A vision of Sam shooting the rocket through the roof and hitting nothing but empty air pyed in her head, a vision that even in her mind’s eye was viewed through a drone feed. She really was losing touch.

  An idea broke out of the fear.

  “You will. I’ll make sure of it.”

  The engine whine came in through a rare gap in the gunfire, just audible enough to make Luke want to scream, right before the shelves exploded.

  High-powered white lights swept each other through dust and smoke. A grenade went off and something nudged him in the shoulder. The air cracked like invisible metal things were ripping each other to pieces just above his head.

  He poured bullets into everything. The gs and links spshed at his feet when he shifted his fire. The ressed his earbuds to their limit and the world was a dull roar over a shrill ring, and the smell was like fermented gunfire blended with the burning pstic smell of explosives and his own blood. Anrenade went off, the fsh just a warm sensation in his peripherals. Heat in his hand. A wethat flowed down his sleeve.

  Then the god damned gun stopped like aion. He almost threw himself over on his face, his body so used to pushing against the recoil.

  “Cover!” he yelled, like a reflex, like he had touched a hot stove and his scream came out word shaped.

  Something spped his face. An unmeasured time ter, he went down behind the cover pallet and it was like he had fallen into a cave. His eyes, adjusted to the bright fshing lights, saw nothing but shadow on the ground. He reached up reflexively for his NVGs and found jagged pieces of pstid metal attached to the mount.

  ht. He ughed. Lindsey held the trigger down on the PKP and screamed at him to fall back. He fumbled in the pool of brass, links, water, and blood for the box of ammo belts. His hands found something else.

  “Fug A.” He pumped it as he came up and knew, with that dream certainty that es to aor only when he’s oop of his game or close to death, that the round would kill. He pulled the trigger the moment he cleared his cover. The 43mm detonated in the ter of the path between the pallet racks, just meters away. The enemy had gotten cocky, pushed up the moment they saw him go down, suppressing Lindsey with overwhelming fire. Three of them died in an instant, and the bst hit him in his smile.

  His world was one of white-hot razors. He turned his head in a slow reflex and saw a blurr of white light and dark silhouettes towards the frorance. Munmen moving up from around the truck.

  It took years to pump the gun again, like the a weighed a thousand pounds, and every muscle from one palm to the other screamed iion. Something squeezed against his arm, and for a moment, he thought it was Lindsey grabbing him in a “you’ve been a bad boy” hold to take him to cover, but he remembered, distantly, that she was far above, saving his ass in another way.

  One of the advang shadows bent funny and the ground sparked all around him. The pump fis cycle. He pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. Ages passed. He gave up on it. Then the grenade exploded ihe truck. One silhouette bent fuhaher one, but the rest kept ing. Kept firing. Kept killing him.

  He tried to let himself fall behind the cover pallet, now a crumpling mound of sand and ptes near colpse, but gravity was taking its time. Their muzzles fshed like red carpet cameras while he was still in the air, and it felt like he was getting jumped by ghosts.

  The ground came up to meet him, along with a pool of gs and links and blood, and he groped for his MG with one hand and another ammo belt with the other. A strange deja vu, duplicated infinitely like he was being crushed between opposing mirrors.

  As sudden as death, the PKP went silent and other oed to fill in the gap.

  EP watched the helicopter e in low towards the highway less than half a mile from the DC. It was a civilian purchased surplus that was surely fitted with all kinds of illegal shit by now. She had it tagged with an IR beam and overid the ping on the warehouse map, then rendered a straight liween the helicopter and Sam, but she had to take a visual guess where the liersected the roof. She pushed out the idea that she could be wrong and guided the droo pce.

  Sam was off the bike before it came to a stop and caught the ground in a run, sprinting into the trailer. Gunfire and gres echoed down the shaft of metal like someone was watg a movie with the sound too high. She opened a taiucked frustratingly in the very bad found it; Beautiful, cartoonish, a tube with a fred end and a big rocket already loaded. The helicopter roared above her, rattling the roof like it was right inside.

  They had moved up like dogs smelling blood.

  Philip made sure the cap was on his white light, then pressed the smaller touchpad on his AMG, and sure enough, one of EP’s droill l on the rafter bzed a e of fifty thousand lumens in the dire he was aiming, probably using one of his attats as a guide. Clever.

  The grenade was already flying through the air as he started firing. His aim wasn’t as good as it had been even a minute ago, but the surprise made up for it.

  Two of them fell before the metal mesh walkway exploded up at him in a shout of sparks. The grenade went off, and he was remihat he had ed to duck. Fragments caught him full in the arm and chest and he slumped down hard, but the AMG spoke through it all, like a dictativing a speech. It still had a lot to say, but the enemy wasn’t listening. They were doubling down on their return fire or slipping into cover. Like roaches in the light. He knew he’d see them again.

  A bullet ripped through the vas ammo box and skipped off his chest pte, crag his jaw and turning his vision into a shuddering blur. A small sotion was seeing Lindsey in his peripherals, putting the finishing touches on a PKP reload.

  “Zoey, you got it?” Sam sprinted out of the trailer while flipping the cap of the scope.

  “Yes! Aim at the roof and wait for my signal!”

  Sam slid to a stop just outside the trailer and raised the CG to the roof, now r like it was going to fall in o any sed. Fshlights and reflected gunfire broken by skeleton beams danced oal ceiling. She stared at the unnaturally illuminated darkhrough her NVGs, and breathed.

  It felt like forever, and just as the roar of the helicopter sounded like it was right over her head, the dro up like the Christmas star, a ring of red lights h in the dust. Sam felt, suddenly, that the rocket in her hands had a life of its own. She rolled with the idea, imagining that the explosive round wao touch the helicopter, that it was born for it, like mag and iron separated at birth. All she had to do was let it go.

  She pressed the trigger.

  A light went on and someone kicked her. The fire ball shot off towards the roof like a fre strapped to a bullet. She felt the shot in her nose, chest, and back. For an instant, it was like she was held in the air by a great invisible burning hand, squeezing her from all around.

  The roof exploded inward in a shower of sparks while she was still looking through the scope. There was a moment of brilliant, bzing horror as a fireball bloomed into life, outlining the helicopter like a spotlight, the se made all the more horrifying by the sudden silence as her earbuds went into full dampen mode.

  Then the Helicopter fell.

  It sounded like the entire warehouse was being tossed irash. Philip saw the roof shake like liquid metal above him as a massive k of burning helicopter crashed through the ceiling. One bzing piece tore through the forest of pallet racks right into the armored SUVs, while the rest of it, a molten e fireball the size of a house, flew sideways as if still propelled by ghosts of the long-gone engines and propeller, crashed through the far wall like all the crete and rebar were only suggestions, and exploded into rising angry fire in the front lot, like the sun had risen early beyond the turnstiles.

  In an instant, half of the warehouse seemed made of fire and a thick smoke rolled out across the ceiling.

  Philip ughed a every bit of shrapnel, every wound, every broken bone.

  “God damn, girl! I haven’t seen anything like that in years!”

  Someone shot at him as he sat there recolleg and Lindsey guhem down. She crouched o him and wiped her face. It was covered in blood. She tightened one of his tours above a wound he hadn’t even noticed and gred at him, her dainty frown so out of pder her blood-spattered night vision tubes.

  “An! You find it yet?!” she yelled like it was him sitting in Philip’s pce.

  “An?!”

  “Where is he going!” EP screamed.

  “What? Who?!” Sam yelled. Engines roared out i, and munfire broke out amidst the groans and cra warehouse.

  “Last two cars. Fug reserves moving in!” EP hissed. Drones zipped over Philip’s head as he finished iing a shot of Epinephrine and brought up his gun. Part of him hoped the kid had dropped out and run off. At least that way he’d never have to work with him again.

  Is there a fw in my soul? It had seemed so easy. The clothes in the car. The gentle light of m. The victory i gunfight. Here in this dusty dead darkness, everything seemed frozen still, a rigor mortis of a world that had died when he wasn’t looking. He had three pallets left. Nothing seemed less possible than the being in one of them. So then, what?

  The Warehouse had fallen apart while he stood there, doing nothing. His friends, or whatever they were, were dying somewhere out of sight. Explosions shook the walls and turhe air into something that spped and pushed. A bullet would skip out of the darkness and smack against the wall or plink off some metal. A box of charge cords exploded a foot from his hand and rolled off the stack. He felt he was being mocked.

  “It’s not here.” The words settled on the dusty boxes ying corpselike uhe ghostly cellophahe voice was a double. It was his, and not his. In his mind, and from outside. It was the Self he had been ign for three days, afraid he would drag the real him down into the abyss of ignorance, into a different kind of slumber where the Hardworlds froze up like a trap.

  “It’s not here.” He k was the truth. He let it be the truth, and his Self khe same way he had made his forturading worthless tokens, sensing the unspeakable while others chewed on fuals and teicals until they starved. His Self was of this world. His Self khis world.

  “It’s not here,” He spoke. He listened. He believed. He knew.

  The st three pallets stood there in bd white, looking like found pieces of a sunken ship in his white phosphs. He knew he would never cut them open. He dropped the knife and brought his rifle around off his back. He felt it in his hands and his heart raced. The gunfire grew louder.

  “This is not my body. This is not my life. This is my dreamworld. This is my Spirit.” The words came naturally, like breath. The ahat had built up with every cut bit of pstic ing, every disassembled box pile, dropped away. There were only two options now. Either he would find the his own way, or he would never e back to the Hardworlds again.

  He would challehe gods of gual with rifle in hand, bendiy to his will, and find victory like a true astral warrior, or he would fade away into that glittery neon dreamworld forever. But he would not spend another mome over, digging through boxes, praying to an ung fractaled universe, begging like a sve.

  He looked around. There was a small square office built into the er o the shredded recyg door.

  Instantly, it all made sense. He saw what had happened as clearly as if he had been there. His Self nodded somewhere behind him. Yes, obviously. It was the only thing worth a fu that pile.

  He got into a low crouch with his rifle up and moved towards the office, ughing as quietly as he could.

  The whine of a helicine bounced in from the lot and something fshed o the gear trailer. A few moments ter the warehouse was ripped apart. The crash was so loud it seemed proof his entire reality was colpsing.

  How far you push the Hardworlds, before they push back? How much of what they are is only in your mind? ime, fire isn't always final. episode, Cremation.