SAIKON Chapter 2: What The Wound Remembers

Read chapter 2 of SAIKON by SoraIkigai on NovelPedia.

Ryo ran. Not the way you run from something. The way an animal runs when the sky turns a color it has no name for — legs first, the rest of him trailing somewhere behind, his own breathing louder in his skull than the buildings folding apart two streets over. Yua ran beside him. One arm dead at her side, the other fisted in his collar, hauling him left whenever he drifted right, the way you'd correct a dog that didn't know the road. Her gait was wrong — hitched, one leg dragging a half-step late — and she was still faster than him. 'Broken arm. Whatever else is wrong with her. And she's still faster than me.' 'That should scare me more than the thing behind us.' The thing behind them wasn't chasing. That was the worst part. Its legs came down on the rooftops one at a time, unhurried, each step a small final sound, like a clock deciding what o'clock it was. Where they landed, the buildings went grey and gave up — concrete crumbling, steel flowering rust, a whole block folding inward on a hundred years it had never lived. But it never sped up. It held the gap between them exactly where it was, as if it had already measured how fast they could run and saw no reason to do more. 'It's not chasing us.' 'It's walking us somewhere.' ----- Ninety seconds earlier. She'd been looking at him before he understood she was alive. One blue eye. One violet. They found him at the lip of the crater and held — not the dazed stare of someone who'd fallen out of the sky, but something level and exact, a soldier counting the only tool within reach. "Stop staring," she said. Her voice came scraped raw, the pain kept out of it on purpose. "You're no use to me up there. Down. Now." He half-slid into the crater before he'd agreed to anything. Up close she was worse — blood at the hairline, one arm folded under her at an angle that turned his stomach. She put out her good hand. "Stand me up." "You shouldn't—" "I know exactly what I shouldn't do." Each word cut to length. "Do it anyway." He took her forearm and pulled. She set her teeth — the only thing she let show — and rose, swayed, then locked. For half a second her weight leaned into him. Then it didn't. Her eyes were already moving. The crater. The street. The sky. "That hole isn't from me," she said. "I came down through it. Something came down first." She looked at him, and for a moment something flickered behind the flat of her gaze, there and gone. "Look up. Slow." He didn't want to. He looked. The sky was coming open — not cracking, not tearing, but parting, the way a thing held shut for a long time finally gives. Through the seam, an eye. No lid. A pupil that drank the light instead of giving it back, ringed in violet and rust, and it was looking down at the two of them in their hole in the ground like something deciding what they were. Then the legs began to come down out of it. Her hand closed on his wrist, iron in a broken grip. "Whatever you're feeling," she said, "feel it while you move." "What—" "Run." ----- Yua wrenched him sideways into the gutted shell of a storefront, glass gone to slag underfoot, the air thick with burnt plastic and something sweeter beneath it that sat at the back of his throat and wouldn't leave. She pressed a finger to her lips. The clicking stopped. He could hear his own heart in his teeth. Her eyes moved in slow sweeps, counting something only she could see. Three streets over a building sat down into itself with a groan, and the Spider's shape rose against the cracked sky — eight legs splayed wide, the eye turning across the ruins the way a cat looks at a room it already owns. It wasn't hunting them. It didn't have to. Everything in the radius was already caught. 'It keeps destroying buildings.' 'But it never looks inside them.' 'It's not searching.' 'It already knows where everything is.' Yua let her breath out through her nose. Her knuckles had gone white around the sword at her hip. "Move," she said. "Quiet." The streets had stopped being his. He still knew