I took another step forward, and he raised his head to look at me. His face was a stubble of caked blood, his one white eye shot through with red, spit flecking the corners of his mouth.
He rose unsteadily, the cage in one hand.
“Put it down.”
He bent over as if to comply but faked away from me and tried to run. I shouted and gave chase, but as soon as he disappeared around the lamp housing I saw the glow of Emma’s fire flare across the concrete. Golan came howling back toward me, his hair smoking and one arm covering his face.
“Stop!” I screamed at him, and he realized he was trapped. He raised the cage, shielding himself, and gave it a vicious shake. The birds screeched and nipped at his hand through the bars.
“Is this what you want?” Golan shouted. “Go ahead, burn me! The birds will burn, too! Shoot me and I’ll throw them over the side!”
“Not if I shoot you in the head!”
He laughed. “You couldn’t fire a gun if you wanted to. You forget, I’m intimately familiar with your poor, fragile psyche. It’d give you nightmares.”
I tried to imagine it: curling my finger around the trigger and squeezing; the recoil and the awful report. What was so hard about that? Why did my hand shake just thinking about it? How many wights had my grandfather killed? Dozens? Hundreds? If he were here instead of me, Golan would be dead already, laid out while he’d been squatting against the rail in a daze. It was an opportunity I’d already wasted; a split-second of gutless indecision that might’ve cost the ymbryes their lives.
The giant lamp spun past, blasting us with light, turning us into glowing white cutouts. Golan, who was facing it, grimaced and looked away. Another wasted opportunity, I thought.
“Just put it down and come with us,” I said. “Nobody else has to get hurt.”
“I don’t know,” Emma said. “If Millard doesn’t make it, I might reconsider that.”
“You want to kill me?” Golan said. “Fine, get it over with. But you’ll only be delaying the inevitable, not to mention making things worse for yourselves. We know how to find you now. More like me are coming, and I can guarantee the collateral damage they do will make what I did to your friend seem downright charitable.”
“Get it over with?” Emma said, her flame sending a little pulse of sparks skyward. “Who said it would be quick?”
“I told you, I’ll kill them,” he said, drawing the cage to his chest.
She took a step toward him. “I’m eighty-eight years old,” she said. “Do I look like I need a pair of babysitters?” Her expression was steely, unreadable. “I can’t tell you how long we’ve been dying to get out from under that woman’s wing. I swear, you’d be doing us a favor.”
Golan swiveled his head back and forth, nervously sizing us up. Is she serious? For a moment he seemed genuinely frightened, but then he said, “You’re full of shit.”
Emma rubbed her palms together and pulled them slowly apart, drawing out a noose of flame. “Let’s find out.”
I wasn’t sure how far Emma would take this, but I had to step in before the birds went up in flames or were sent tumbling over the rail.
“Tell us what you want with those ymbrynes, and maybe she’ll go easy on you,” I said.
“We only want to finish what we started,” Golan said. “That’s all we’ve ever wanted.”
“You mean the experiment,” Emma said. “You tried it once, and look what happened. You turned yourselves into monsters!”
“Yes,” he said, “but what an unchallenging life it would be if we always got things right on the first go.” He smiled. “This time we’ll be harnessing the talents of all the world’s best time manipulators, like these two ladies here. We won’t fail again. We’ve had a hundred years to figure out what went wrong. Turns out all we needed was a bigger reaction!”
“A bigger reaction?” I said. “Last time you blew up half of Siberia!”
“If you must fail,” he said grandly, “fail spectacularly!”
I remembered Horace’s prophetic dream of ash clouds and scorched earth, and I realized what he’d been seeing. If the wights and hollows failed again, this time they’d destroy a lot more than five hundred miles of empty forest. And if they succeeded, and turned themselves into the deathless demigods they’d always dreamed of becoming … I shuddered to imagine it. Living under them would be a hell all its own.
The light came around and blinded Golan again—I tensed, ready to lunge—but the moment sped by too quickly.
“It doesn’t matter,” Emma said. “Kidnap all the ymbrynes you want. They’ll never help you.”
“Yes, they will. They’ll do it or we’ll kill them one by one. And if that doesn’t work, we’ll kill you one by one, and make them watch.”
“You’re insane,” I told him.
The birds began to panic and screech. Golan shouted over them.
“No! What’s really insane is how you peculiars hide from the world when you could rule it—succumb to death when you could dominate it—and let the common genetic trash of the human race drive you underground when you could so easily make them your slaves, as they rightly should be!” He drove home every sentence with another shake of the cage. “That’s insane!”
“Stop it!” Emma shouted.
“So you do care!” He shook the cage even harder. Suddenly, the little red light attached to its bars began to glow twice as bright, and Golan whipped his head around and searched the darkness behind him. Then he looked back at Emma and said, “You want them? Here!” and he pulled back and swung the cage at her face.
She cried out and ducked. Like a discus thrower, Golan continued the swing until the cage sailed over her head, then released. It flew out of his hands and over the rail, tumbling end over end into the night.
I cursed and Emma screamed and threw herself against the rail, clawing at the air as the cage fell toward the sea. In that moment of confusion, Golan leapt and knocked me to the ground. He slammed a fist into my stomach and another into my chin.
I was dizzy and couldn’t breathe. He grabbed for the gun, and it took every bit of my strength to keep him from snatching it. Because he wanted it so badly, I knew it must’ve been loaded. I would’ve thrown it over the rail, but he almost had it and I couldn’t let go. Emma was screaming bastard, you bastard, and then her hands, gloved in flame, came from behind and seized him around the neck.