The first strip of metal came at Eli fast enough that he barely saw it.
His hand moved before he could think about it. The shard stopped inches before his palm, shuddering in the air for a second before he sent it into the wall beside him. The impact rang out loud through the hallway. He felt the force of it travel back up through his wrist like a current that had nowhere else to go.
The rest of them did not stop.
Locker doors, broken hinges, bent strips of metal, torn screws, all of it came flying down the corridor in a widening spread. Volkov did not rush forward. He stayed where he was, cane in one hand, sending debris forward with the same quiet patience he had worn when pretending to limp through the school. There was something worse about that than if he had been shouting. The calm of it. The complete absence of urgency on his end while the hallway came apart around everyone else.
Eli shoved the next fragment down into the floor. A second one clipped off a locker and sparked past his shoulder. A third came in lower than he expected and passed by his hip before he could get to it.
It went straight into the student frozen right behind him, a boy who looked barely old enough to be a sophomore. The sound was a wet ugly slice that was followed almost immediately by a scream that filled the hallway.
Eli flinched hard at the sound.
The students were moving now. A half second ago most of them were frozen where they stood, staring at Volkov and the flying metal like their minds refused to catch up. Now panic had fully taken over. A girl near the lockers shoved through another group of students and ran for the corner of the hallway. Someone else had dropped to the ground and sat with their hands over their head. One boy tried to drag his friend into an open classroom, slipping as he hurried. The noise was everywhere at once, shoes on tile, voices overlapping, a locker door swinging open and banging against the frame as someone grabbed for cover behind it.
Lila was still against the lockers to Eli's left side, one hand clamping hard onto the wound on her thigh.
"Eli," she said, her voice unsteady. "Eli."
He wanted to look at her. He wanted to get to her, get her out, stop the bleeding, do anything except stand here in the middle of a hallway waiting for the next thing to come at him.
He didn't have that choice.
Volkov lifted the cane and gave it a quick turn in his hand. A locker door divided itself off the floor and shot forward.
Eli planted his feet and caught it in front of his chest. The force slammed up through both arms. He tried to throw it aside and saw the metal split in the same instant, the single door peeling into several thinner pieces that fanned out around him.
One of them sliced across his hoodie and scored his ribs beneath it. Another slammed into the lockers beside Lila and showered her with paint chips and twisted metal. Two passed him completely.
A boy farther down the hall turned too late. One piece punched into his shoulder and spun him hard into the wall. The other sliced a girl across the throat while she was trying to pull open a classroom door. She instantly dropped where she stood, both hands flying to her neck, her knees striking the floor first before the rest of her followed.
For one stupid second Eli just stared.
He had never seen somebody die from a few feet away. He had seen blood. He had seen bodies. The station had been chaos and smoke and panic, too fast to really register. This was clean enough to see. Too clean. The hallway had the particular stillness of something that had just changed and hadn't finished changing yet. The girl gave a small gurgled cough before going completely limp. Her hand was still on the door handle.
Something hit the wall near his head and snapped him out of it. He knocked a steel fragment down and sent it skidding under a row of lockers. His heart was racing so hard now it felt more like pain than panic.
"Move!" he shouted at the students behind him. "Get into the rooms. Shut the doors and stay down."
Some of them listened. Some did not. A teacher who had been crouched near one of the classroom entrances started waving students toward her. She had blood on one side of her face and kept blinking like she could not understand how it got there. Three kids stumbled toward her room together, one of them half carrying the girl beside him.
Volkov came forward a few steps.
He did not hurry. He moved like this hallway belonged to him.
His cane tapped once against the floor and Eli's crow ring burned against his chest beneath the shirt. He felt the pull of it before the next wave even came, a specific pressure that built at the center of his sternum and spread outward, like his whole body was being tuned to a frequency he hadn't asked for.
The cane swung toward him.
The strike looked simple when it started. By the time it reached the air in front of Volkov it had split into several motions at once. Eli saw the separate arcs only as they were already reaching him.
He caught the one aimed at his face and felt the impact jar both shoulders. The second hit him across the side before he could turn. The third passed close enough to his back that he heard it crack the lockers behind him. A fourth reached the students.
More students stumbled and cried out.
Eli stumbled, got his footing again, and brought both hands up just as a cluster of metal strips came hurtling at him. He stopped one, shoved two into each other, and just barely missed the last one. It hit the classroom door behind him and ricocheted sideways into the side of another boy's head. The boy collapsed instantly. The girl next to him screamed and dropped to her knees beside him in the middle of the hallway with debris still flying.
"Get down!" Eli shouted, and the words tore out of him harsher than he meant them to.
He heard himself and did not care.
Volkov's face had not changed.
He looked interested. That was worse than anger would have been. Anger meant something was at stake for him too. This was something closer to observation.
Eli caught a long shard in front of his chest and this time did not throw it away right away. He held it there for the briefest moment, the metal trembling in the air, the stored force trembling through his hand and up his forearm. He could feel it in his back teeth. Then he snapped it back down the hallway toward Volkov.
Volkov shifted a few inches and the shard split apart right before it reached him, the pieces slamming into opposite walls and dropping harmlessly to the floor.
Of course, Eli thought.
Eli's breath came rough now. His hands were starting to shake every time he had to stop something. The strength in his shoulders had a hot, frayed feeling to it, like muscle stretched too far, like something that had been asked to do too much for too long and was starting to say so.
He heard Lila trying to breathe through clenched teeth.
He risked half a glance.
She had dragged herself lower against the lockers and was pressing both hands around the wound in her thigh. Her face had gone pale, the color of it wrong in a way that made his stomach tighten.
"You're alright, just stay with me," he said.
She gave a short bitter laugh that almost turned into a gasp. "Yeah. I'm trying my best."
Volkov was much closer now, close enough that Eli could see the real shape of him. Nothing fragile in the way he had seemed before. Older, yes, but not weak. Everything about the limp had been a lie. The cane fit him too naturally now. It was not support. It was a weapon. It had always been a weapon.
He drove the tip of it into the floor.
The tiles broke outward in a line toward Eli.
The crack ran fast across the floor, splitting the polished surface into plates that lifted and cracked loose. Pieces of ceramic kicked up into the air between them.
Eli knocked the first chunk aside with the back of his hand. Another struck his forearm and spun away down the hallway. A third burst apart when it hit the lockers beside him, spraying white dust across his hoodie and into his eyes. He blinked hard and kept his hands up.
Volkov stepped through the broken line of tile without even looking down.
The cane came up again.
This time Eli moved first.
He shifted a step closer, planting himself farther into the middle of the corridor. The movement pulled him away from the lockers and opened more space on either side of him, but it also meant more of the hallway ran straight through him.
If Volkov wanted to reach the students, the debris had to pass him first.
The next strike came fast.
The cane cut sideways and split before it finished the motion. Eli caught the nearest arc and shoved it down toward the floor. Another slammed into the lockers behind him with a heavy bang that made the metal doors rattle in their frames.
The third slice cut a shallow groove in the tile near his foot.
Eli felt the impact of it through the sole of his shoe.
He shoved a flying hinge into the wall and turned just in time to see two students sprinting down the hallway behind him.
"Stop!" he shouted.
The students kept running.
One of them made it three more steps before a thin strip of metal caught him across the back of the knee. The boy's leg folded instantly and he crashed forward onto the tile, sliding hard into the lockers.
The second student stumbled over him and went down with him.
Eli felt his teeth clench. He had been right there. He had been right there and he hadn't gotten to it in time.
Another sound came from behind Volkov.
Metal groaned as the old man turned slightly and brought his cane down against the side of a full section of lockers.
The impact rang through the hallway.
At first it looked like the metal had simply dented inward. Then the lockers began to pull away from the wall in one long shudder. The doors bent outward. Hinges tore loose. The entire bank of lockers twisted as the frame separated from the wall.
Eli watched it happen.
Instead of breaking apart in chunks like the debris before, the metal kept dividing as it tore free. Large panels split into thinner sheets. Those sheets fractured again into long narrow strips. The strips split again, smaller and smaller, until the air around Volkov filled with hundreds of thin jagged pieces of metal. The fluorescent lights above caught the edges of them and threw small flickers of light across the walls and ceiling.
For a moment they hung there, trembling.
Eli felt his stomach drop.
He understood what was coming before it started. He understood it the way you understood something falling before it hit the ground, not fast enough to change it, just fast enough to know.
Then Volkov moved the cane forward.
The mass of metal shot down the hallway.
Eli stepped directly into it and threw both hands up.
The first wave hit his reach and stopped hard in front of him. Metal shuddered in the air, vibrating violently as he absorbed the force of it. The pressure slammed into his shoulders and drove through his arms, down into his spine, through the soles of his feet into the floor. He had never tried to hold this much at once and he could feel immediately that he wasn't going to be able to.
He forced the largest pieces down into the floor and sideways into the lockers.
But there were too many.
Blades slipped past his reach on both sides. Some struck the lockers behind him. Others tore through the classroom doors.
A few hit students who had been too slow getting to cover.
The sounds behind him were worse than the metal.
He kept his hands up.
More pieces struck the space in front of him. His arms were shaking now as he held them there, trying to stop the ones headed toward Lila and the students closest behind him. His vision had gone slightly narrow at the edges. He was aware of it without being able to do anything about it.
The rest spread through the hallway.
The storm lasted only a few seconds.
Then the metal finished passing him and clattered across the floor.
Eli lowered his arms slowly.
His shoulders burned. His hands were still trembling and he couldn't make them stop. The shaking ran all the way up to his elbows and sat there, a deep persistent vibration that didn't have anywhere to go. He looked at his hands for a second like they belonged to someone else.
He looked down the corridor.
Volkov was gone.
The torn locker frames hung crookedly from the wall behind where he'd been standing. The hallway looked like something had chewed through it. Tile cracked in long irregular lines. Classroom doors hanging open or punched through. Pieces of metal lodged in walls, in door frames, in the floor itself.
For a moment Eli didn't move.
He stood in the middle of it and tried to find something to do with what he was looking at. There wasn't anything. It had happened and it was over and the part of his brain that wanted to go back and do it differently had nothing useful to offer him right now.
Then the noise behind him hit him all at once.
Students crying. Someone shouting for help. Someone else yelling for people to get down.
Footsteps pounded into the hallway from the far end as BSI officers pushed through the wreckage and began clearing the corridor. Several of them dropped beside injured students immediately while others started moving people away from the walls.
He turned toward Lila.
She was still against the lockers where he had left her, pale and breathing hard while blood soaked through the fabric around her leg. The sight of it landed differently now that the fight was over and there was nothing left to stop.
Two medics reached her a second later and began working quickly.
More responders filled the hallway behind them.
Brad forced his way through the crowd and stopped when he saw Eli standing in the middle of the wreckage.
He crossed the distance quickly.
"Eli."
Eli didn't answer.
Brad put a hand on his shoulder and turned him slightly away from the center of the hallway.
"Come on," he said quietly.
Eli let him guide him a few steps down the corridor while the teams behind them continued pulling the injured away and covering the ones who hadn't survived.
He didn't look back again.