Chapter 7: Bad Luck, Little Lamb

The screen on the case had changed on its own.

The goat was on the left side of it now, small and flat, cut down to an icon. On the right, where nothing had been a minute ago, numbers had come up out of the dark and started to move. 10:00. 09:59. 09:58.

He walked, and watched it get to 09:55, and said nothing into the microphone.

The change in his face came next. The thing in his left socket had stopped hurting. Not faded — stopped. The pain had been sitting on the front of his skull, and now it was fitted behind it instead, warm where his hand wasn’t, and the surface of the core had drawn itself in and settled.

He knew the shape. He’d seen it on the goat standing in the doorway of the second-floor exam room, head tilted, listening — a pupil laid on its side, a rectangle with the corners knocked off.

It moved when he moved.

He put two fingers on it, low and quick. It felt like an eye, and like his eye, which was a thing he was not going to think about yet. He put his hand back down and kept walking and did not report it.

“You linked with it.”

The voice came up through the earpiece and settled behind the bone, and it wasn’t a question. Then, right behind it, the thing underneath the question:

“You couldn’t have asked me first. Before you went and—“

Something took the rest of the sentence off him.

A bleat came up the corridor and through the earpiece at the same time, and it was too long, and it came out of a throat that had not been built for a sound that size. Then the floor took a hit. Then hooves, a lot of them, fast, going away from him.

He’d said it out loud. Standing in the dark with the channel open, he’d said morph core, like an idiot. Then he’d said something a lot worse. The man had been on the other end of all of it.

He ran.

He came up on them at a bend, a hundred feet and change from where he’d been standing.

Around the corner was a run of windows with iron bars welded across them, and the moon came through the bars in pieces and laid the pieces down on the floor at angles. Two of the doors had already come off their hinges. There was wall lying on the floor where wall wasn’t supposed to be.

Ash stopped at the corner, put his shoulder into it, and looked down forty feet of hallway at the man.

Sol Whitlock was up on the ceiling pipe, both hands on the steel. The hang was the trick — he didn’t hold on so much as swing, and the goat went under him with its horns leading and buried them in the wall on the far side, and six feet of that wall came away and dropped.

He wasn’t on the pipe anymore. He was on the animal. He came down onto its chest out of the dark and his left hand went forward and in, and there was no resistance in it anywhere — a hand going into a pocket. The hand turned at the wrist and came back out with something small and round caught in the fingers.

Blue. Wet, vivid, and darker than the core in Ash’s own head. A cobalt that took light and gave none of it back.

The animal did not stop.

It took the hole in its belly and the missing core and put its head down and came forward anyway, and the man was still standing on its chest when the horns went into the wall the second time.

The hit came up through the floor and into Ash’s feet. Dust came off the ceiling in a sheet. The man went into that wall half a beat behind the horns, back first, and the wall took him and kept taking him, and the sound of it arrived after the dust did.

He didn’t fall. He stayed up. He had the blue core in his left fist and the front of his shirt had gone dark from the belt to the ribs, and the dark was still spreading while Ash watched it.

There was a dressing under there.

That was the part that landed wrong. Gauze, taped low across his side, white at some point tonight and not white now. The goat hadn’t done that. The goat had been at his back. The wet was on the front of him, low on the left, under tape, and nobody tapes a wound in the middle of a fight.

He put it where he put things and left it there.

Two, he thought. It’s carrying two.

An animal with a hole in its gut and no core in it was still standing up. One animal, one core — that was the whole of what the little screen had told him, and the screen had been wrong about it, or the goat had.

He looked at what was left of the hallway. The man, up off the floor with both feet in the air, one hand wrapped around a horn that had gone into the plaster to the root. The animal under him, breathing. Forty feet of floor between all of that and Ash.

Then the earpiece clicked, and gave him nothing.

Not static. Just the flat hiss of a line that was open with nobody on it.

He waited three seconds. Nothing came.

The man had the mic off. He was talking to the animal.

“Wrong night,” he said. Low, and almost gentle with it. “Of all the nights.”

He had one hand wrapped around the horn where it entered the wall, and the blood on the glove was still moving, working down the fingers and off. His eyes had gone red. His mouth came open along one side.

“Bad luck, little lamb,” he said. “Wrong animal.”

Then the animal went heavy. Its hind legs came off the floor and worked at the air under it, slow and patient, a leg paddling at something in a dream, and its head came down and turned and it looked along its own chest at the floor. Under it there was tile, and a strip of moonlight, and under that the dark.

It hung on the horn and worked at that, and then it stopped, and did not go anywhere.

The man laughed. Shoulders first, and the sound of it wet at the bottom, his head back against the wall.

Ash watched it happen from the corner with his shoulder in the wall.

He couldn’t account for any of it. He had a case that read 08:12 and a knife on his hip and a core in his head and forty feet of dark hallway, and the animal was hanging off its own horn and the man was laughing, and none of it was anything Ash had done.

He put two fingers on the earpiece, pressed it, and said it once, flat.

“Mister Whitlock. Get off its head.”

The man’s head came up and hit the wall behind it. He didn’t ask what for. He got his free hand onto the drywall and pulled himself flat against it, chin up, and turned his face down the corridor toward the dark.

Ash took the long knife out of the back of his belt and found the balance of it with his thumb, and threw it forty feet down a dark hallway at the animal.

The knife went spinning, and it went fast — faster than his arm had ever moved in his life, and the shoulder that sent it did something he hadn’t asked it to do and then told him about it afterward.

It hit the animal above the eye, at the temple, where the skull turns under the horn, and went in to the handle.

The animal came off the wall sideways. The horn tore out of the drywall and took the rest of the wall with it, and the whole thing came down at once — horns, animal, dust, and the man.

The man landed on his toes. Two steps back, and on the second step the leg went out from under him for half a second and then came back, and he caught the wall with his hand and stayed up. Then he turned his head and looked down the corridor at the place the knife had come from.

Ash came out of the dark.

The coat was heavy on him and wet at the hem, and the blood on his face had gone tacky, and he came down the hallway at a walk, because his legs had stopped being a problem around the time the pain did, and they had not started again.

His left eye was a goat’s eye now. Pale blue, and open, and it turned and took in the light off the buckled doors and the bars and the broken end of the corridor, and it did not hurt at all. When he moved, the light followed, a thin trail of blue left hanging in the air behind him and closing over after him.

The horns were the other thing. They had come up through his hair and through the hood of the coat, black and wet and curled back, the left one sitting further out than the right, and they were not going anywhere.

The man found him and stopped moving.

Ash stopped at the front edge of the light, four feet short of him, and let him look.

The case on his hip read 07:58.