CHAPTER 17
Emma’s feet found their way before her memory did.
She would double back down a side passage as if at random and only afterward realize that she had once known that bookshop, or sat in that churchyard with a coffee.
At last, when her lungs were at bursting point, she stumbled into an open space filled with the hum of ordinary life.
Sunlight bounced from colored awnings. She was in Market Square, and the chill in the air told her it was a crisp winter’s day.
The market was bustling with the last trade of the day.
A student whirred past Emma on a bike, close enough to clip her as he went by.
She debated shouting after him but found herself grinning instead.
She was back where she belonged. Lightness flooded through her at the beautiful normality of it all.
As she wandered the stalls, the events since she awoke began to seem like a dream.
In her last clear memory, she had been lost after—was it a dinner of some kind?
But there had been something else. She had been running.
A picture surfaced. Red coats in the dark, faces twisted with hunger.
One face more beautiful than the others, but she wasn’t going to think about that, about him—
The name sprang from her memory, fully formed.
Turnbulls.
And the memory was all around her now. She tasted the blood in her mouth, heard the boots pounding behind her. Her breaths were ragged plumes of mist as she ran, and ran and ran…
She stumbled, and she was not on a dark street but in a sun-warmed square. Her borrowed, too-large boots had tripped her. She came back to herself, breath by breath. And it all made sense now.
That night, wandering the streets in the cold, she must have become ill.
Her feverish state could have called up all sorts of wild visions.
Like being a fox, of all things. Perhaps the Librarian and his sister really had found her, shivering and delirious, on the street.
And if she had memories of them saying strange things about foxes?
Well, that would be part of the hallucinations too.
But now her fever must have broken. And here she was, back at the heart of normal life.
She scurried along the pavement, barely pausing when a lecturer walked straight into her and bounced off, muttering apologies.
Gabriel College glowed in the afternoon sun. Its entrance was always manned by bowler-hatted porters, poised to defend the college from marauding tourists. Emma sprinted past them and tumbled into Front Court, but none of the porters even turned to look.
She was home. The world, which had been making so little sense, righted itself. She let her hand trace the walls as she hurried through the college, the touch of the golden stone an anchor. She only had to reach her staircase in Gabriel Tower, and the nightmare would be over.
She could already imagine the way Nat would squawk with laughter at the visions of her fever dreams and the strange clothes her rescuers had given her.
She knew how his brows would snap together when she told him about the Turnbulls, and the horrible hunt through the streets. About Jasper, and how wrong she’d been.
She bounded up the last step. “Nat!” she said, banging on his door.
The silence stretched out eerily. “Nat?”
Her breath came fast and shallow. Someone else’s name was above Nat’s door. There were, she told herself, reasonable explanations. That none came to mind just now did not, in fact, invalidate their existence. She turned and almost cried out.
Her name was gone. The sign above her room had been painted over in thick black strokes. Emma pushed back her hair with shaking hands.
“I don’t understand,” she whispered. “I don’t, I don’t, I—”
She needed her mother’s voice. That practical, warm voice that made everything all right. She had to call her.
Wandering from the bell tower, she heard the buzz of voices and cutlery. The Great Hall. This close to dinnertime, it was bound to be heaving with people.
The first person she tapped on the shoulder seemed reluctant to be disturbed. He was a square-shouldered rower type, quietly shoveling protein from plate to mouth with only a book for company. It was only after she’d tapped him three times that he turned around.
He seemed friendly enough when Emma asked to borrow his phone.
But then he turned back to his dinner, his phone untouched by his elbow.
When Emma tapped his shoulder again, he turned around with the exact same expression of polite inquiry.
As though—Emma’s stomach dropped—as though he’d never seen her before.
The same thing happened with the next person she tried. And the next. Emma felt panic rising. She returned to the first student. Half hoping that somebody would catch her, that somebody would see her, she snatched the phone from his tray. No one in the dining hall reacted.
The calls wouldn’t go through. She dialed the number and then—nothing. She took more phones, from pockets and bags. None of the phones would make a call. Dinner was over by the time she admitted defeat.
She pushed her way out of the college, buffeted by bodies who tried to walk straight through her.
Sunset bloodied the face of Granville College.
Shadows stretched across the cobbles. It was time for a new plan.
She only needed time to think, somewhere quiet and alone.
In Market Square, the crowd had thinned.
The traders were packing up, stripping the awnings from the stalls.
Leaving. They all got to leave and to go home. Where would she go?
Someone collided with Emma with enough force to set her staggering.
Her wavering control snapped. The tears lying behind it flooded up.
It was only a small hurt, physically. She’d been shoved against a shop window.
Her shoulder ached. But that was not what made the sobs rack her chest until she could not breathe.
She was crying like a small child: helplessly, hopelessly.
Lost on a street corner. Invisible. As though erased from life itself, devoured whole by this Night City, the thing the old woman had spoken about with such fear.
She ducked into one of the alleys that branched, capillary-like, from the bustle of Market Square.
It was dark and dank, but it was quiet. Emma put one foot in front of the other and tried to breathe in time with her steps.
Her sobs started to slow. She almost felt in control of herself.
If she hadn’t been so absorbed, she might have noticed sooner.
The snorting came from the shadows behind her.
run run run run
Something moved. Emma ran.
The animal part of her knew in an instant: The thing was behind her and closing the gap.
It was fast. Faster than a human. She felt a breath of air rake her back.
As if a set of claws hadn’t reached quite far enough.
Grimly, she set a swifter pace down the alley.
The snorting was as loud as a train. If she concentrated, she could place it.
Muscles around her ears twitched, as if by habit.
two leaps
four foxlengths
behind
closening
three foxlengths
She could see the end of the alley. A sunny patch.
A bench and an old water pump, leaning together like confederates.
She sped into the tiny courtyard. Sunlight spilled across her back, sudden and warm.
Emma risked a glance behind and fell hard, scraping her palms against stone.
Face down, she fought to free her ankle from the water trough she hadn’t seen under the pump.
It was too late. The thing would be upon her any second.
When no attack came, she looked up. It was there, at the end of the alley, glaring at her. It had stopped a millimeter before the courtyard, where sun and shadow made a sharp dividing line.
It had the head of a boar and the muscled torso of a man. Wickedly sharp tusks sprang from its snout. Two weapons belts crossed its bare chest. Trousers hid its lower half, but Emma couldn’t miss the powerful muscles of its thighs.
Its eyes fixed on her, vicious and glinting. It slammed one meaty hand against the alley wall—no hooves, she noted with numb interest, just human nails filed to a point—but still didn’t take the single step that would have carried it over the threshold of shadow.
Maybe it couldn’t.
Then a cloud crossed the sun, plunging the courtyard into gloom.
The boar-man swung one booted leg into the half-light.
Triumph gleamed in its eyes. It moved slowly through the lighter shadow in the courtyard, as though wading through water.
But still it came, inexorably, toward her.
The razor tips of its nails reached for her with yearning.
Emma wriggled back on her elbows, her breath coming in gasps.
From somewhere behind, hands wrapped around her arms and lifted her upright.
“Come,” murmured a voice in her ear, velvet as summer moss. “This way, and we shall outrun it.”