Ren had one hand locked around Isaac's upper arm.
Mina stayed on his other side, not touching unless she had to, eyes moving between him and the street ahead like she was escorting a bomb with a pulse.
The security volunteer trailed half a step behind them, breathing too hard, one hand near the knife at his vest and the other flexing like he regretted following them into the underpass but not enough to admit it.
Isaac let them steer him.
That was the worst part.
No fight left in it.
No argument.
Just movement.
His face was still wet. He didn't know if it was tears or night air or both. The underpass lay behind them in a slick red ruin. The hospital lights ahead looked too clean to belong to the same city.
Ren tightened her grip once when he drifted.
"Stay with your feet."
He looked at her hand on his arm like it belonged to a different scene.
"Yeah," he said.
He didn't sound like he knew what that meant.
The security volunteer glanced back toward the underpass mouth one more time.
Bad instinct.
It saved none of them.
A figure came out of the broken storefront to their right so fast it looked like the glass had spit him.
Human shape.
Tall.
Lean.
Service jacket hanging open.
Aluminum bat in both hands.
Not fully human anymore in the ways that mattered. His head jerked once in a sharp little bird-motion. His mouth hung in a grin too loose for the face holding it. One eye was red-rimmed and watering. The other looked almost calm.
He didn't roar.
Didn't charge stupid.
He came in hard and low with the bat already moving.
The security volunteer reacted on training.
"Down—"
Bad call.
He stepped in front of Mina, one arm up, turning his body to catch the line of the swing.
The thing shortened the arc without warning.
No big home-run swing.
No wasted motion.
Just a savage tight shot under the jaw and across the throat.
The sound was meat and cartilage and something breaking wet in the wrong order.
The volunteer left his feet.
Hit the pavement on his back.
Hands flew to his neck at once, blood punching through his fingers so fast it looked black in the bruise-light. His heels drummed twice. Once more. Then nothing.
Mina shouted his name.
Too late.
The changed man's head snapped past the dying guard and found the next nearest living thing.
Her.
He shifted the bat.
Isaac moved.
Not because he had a plan.
Because some ruined animal part of him still knew how to put his body between two disasters and call that thought.
He shoved Mina hard enough to send her into Ren.
Both women went sideways.
The bat came around.
Too late to fully duck.
Too late to fully block.
It smashed across Isaac's left side high and ugly, clipping shoulder and collar, catching enough of him to lift his whole body off his feet.
For one frozen fraction of a second he saw the hospital lights upside down.
Then brick hit him.
His back slammed into the corner of the building hard enough to burst white across his vision. The left arm took the rest of it wrong. A hot crack ran through it and suddenly the limb was not a limb anymore, just pain hanging where an arm had been.
He hit the ground on one knee first, then both, then one hand.
The broken arm dangled.
He looked at it once and knew instantly.
Bad.
Very bad.
Air wouldn't stay in his lungs.
The cough tore out of him bloody and mean.
Across the sidewalk, Ren had already drawn.
Mina was up too, gun in both hands, face gone flat.
The changed man didn't care.
He came off the first kill smiling with blood still drying on his bat grip and turned fully toward Isaac like the others had become scenery.
Mina fired.
One round took him high in the side.
Should have spun him.
He only staggered and corrected.
Ren fired next.
Lower.
Hip line.
He twisted through it in a way no body should. The round chewed coat and maybe flesh and still didn't matter enough.
"Move!" Mina snapped.
Isaac tried.
The broken arm shifted.
Pain detonated so bright he saw nothing for a second except the shape of his own body trying to quit.
The thing was on him before his vision finished coming back.
Bat down.
Isaac got one forearm up on instinct.
The aluminum cracked against bone and meat and the world narrowed to one stupid hard point at the center of his chest. He rolled with it just enough that the strike didn't cave his skull in. It still sent him skidding across dirty concrete in a wash of broken glass and gravel.
He hit a curb and stayed there gasping.
The changed man stalked in.
No laughter.
No words.
The bat hanging loose in one hand like he loved that it made him understandable.
Ren and Mina were moving to angle a shot.
He saw them.
Adjusted.
Cut across Isaac's line so the women lost their clean lane.
Smart.
That was new.
That was bad.
He swung again.
Isaac got his good hand up, palm out, fingers splayed, and the bat slammed into his forearm and shoulder instead of his face. Pain ripped straight through him. The broken left arm bounced against the pavement and he made a sound he hated instantly.
The thing leaned in over him.
Breath sour.
Face wet.
Human enough to make it worse.
Then he grabbed Isaac by the front of the scrub shirt and threw him.
Not dragged.
Not shoved.
Threw.
Isaac hit the hood of an abandoned car hard enough to crater old sheet metal and bounced off into the windshield. Glass starred and held. He slid down leaving blood and sweat and hospital blue on the spiderweb cracks.
His left arm hung lower now.
Wrong angle.
Dead weight.
Ren hit the thing from the side with all she had in a body-check that would have folded a normal man.
He barely shifted.
Mina came in right after and drove the butt of her pistol into his temple.
That got a reaction.
Not pain.
Attention.
He turned on her.
Fast.
The bat whistled.
Mina got her forearm up in time to save her skull and not enough to save the rest. The impact threw her backward into a parking meter hard enough to bend the post.
Ren fired point-blank into his ribs.
This time he grunted.
Good.
Still flesh in there somewhere.
Didn't slow him much.
He drove forward anyway, one hand snapping out and catching Ren by the coat front. He swung her into the side of a parked delivery van so hard the mirror exploded off and bounced into the street.
Isaac pushed off the car hood.
His legs worked.
Barely.
His left arm did not.
He looked at it once more, hanging and useless and wrong, and the panic finally found a shape.
Not fear.
Hatred.
The thing turned back toward him with the bat lifting.
Isaac's right hand clenched.
Opened.
The thread under his sternum had gone berserk, not pulling anymore, just vibrating through him like a wire buried in the wrong place.
He remembered the pinkies.
The touch.
The answer.
No.
Not that.
Never that.
But fingers.
Any fingers?
The thought came stupidly, right in the middle of pain.
The changed man lunged.
Isaac threw his hand up in reflex, index and middle finger crossing for half a beat as he tried to shield his face.
The world snapped.
The bat stopped an inch from his forehead.
Not because the thing stopped.
Because he did.
His whole body jerked sideways in mid-motion like reality had grabbed him by the throat.
Then he flew.
Across the street.
Into a light pole.
Metal screamed.
Glass rained down from the streetlamp overhead.
The changed man hit the pole shoulder-first and bounced off it into the curb with enough force to leave a dent in the steel.
Isaac stared.
The thing stared back from the pavement.
Then got up.
Of course he got up.
But slower now.
Confused.
Good.
Isaac looked at his own right hand.
Index and middle finger still crossed.
His breathing changed.
Not calmer.
Worse.
Mina saw it from where she'd hit the meter and barked, "Isaac!"
He looked at her.
Then at his hand again.
Then at the thing charging him a second time.
This time he crossed the fingers on purpose.
The thing got three steps.
Then the air in front of Isaac hit him like a truck.
Not visible.
Not bright.
Just force.
The changed man went airborne again, smashed through the side window of the abandoned car, rolled over the roof, and slammed into a bus stop ad frame hard enough to fold the whole thing around him.
Isaac laughed.
Not because it was funny.
Because the answer had finally shown its face.
Wide-eyed.
Breathing hard.
Broken arm hanging.
Blood down his mouth.
He laughed and crossed his fingers again.
The ad frame ripped free of its bolts and launched the thing out of it like a ragdoll.
He hit the brick wall of the laundromat.
Dropped.
Tried to rise.
Isaac hit him before he could.
Not with his body.
With whatever this was.
Fingers crossed.
The thing shot sideways into a parking sign.
Then backward into the hood of the sedan.
Then up into the concrete support of the overpass so hard the entire beam rang.
Ren had gotten to one knee.
Mina too.
Both of them stopped shooting.
Stopped breathing, maybe.
Because Isaac had gone somewhere else.
He was walking now.
Toward the thing.
Slow.
Crooked.
Left arm hanging useless and wrong.
Every time his crossed fingers twitched, the changed man got hit by something that did not exist until Isaac wanted it to.
Pole.
Wall.
Curb.
Car door.
Bus stop frame again.
A dead mailbox torn loose from the sidewalk and driven through his ribs in a spray of rust and blood.
The thing kept trying to get up.
That was the part that made it monstrous.
Any normal person would have been dead six impacts ago.
This one snarled through blood and broken teeth and dragged one knee under himself anyway.
Isaac's grin spread.
Too wide.
Too raw.
All disbelief burned off into something ecstatic and ruined.
He was crying again too.
Tears and laughter and blood all over the same face.
He crossed his fingers tighter.
The mailbox ripped free of the body and the body followed it.
Up.
Then down.
He spiked the thing into the pavement hard enough to crater concrete. Bone came through skin somewhere in the shoulder. One leg bent under the wrong way. The bat skittered out into the street and rang once.
Still not dead.
It twitched.
Reached.
Isaac's eyes went wider.
"Stay down," he said, laughing.
The thing tried to crawl.
Wrong move.
Isaac crossed the fingers again and the streetlight pole he'd hit earlier tore halfway free of its base and came down across the thing's spine with a metallic shriek.
The body spasmed.
Once.
Twice.
Then Isaac did it again.
And again.
Launching what was left into the curb.
Into the van.
Into the brick.
Into the pillar.
He kept going until there was nothing left in the impacts but wet sound and broken pieces.
Only when the body stopped being a body and became meat and cloth and wrong angles did the force quit answering him.
His fingers came apart.
The street went still.
Not really.
But compared to the last twenty seconds, still enough to hear the blood in everyone's throat.
Isaac stood in the middle of it, chest heaving, left arm hanging dead, grin still split across his face like he hadn't been told yet that horror and joy were supposed to stay separate.
Ren stared at him.
Mina did too.
The volunteer by the hospital side had gone down beside his own blood and wasn't getting back up.
The changed man was gone in every way that counted.
Isaac looked at his hand.
At the index and middle fingers.
Slowly, like he was introducing himself to them.
Then he started laughing again.
Not soft.
Not relieved.
Manic.
Bright.
Too alive.
His eyes stayed huge in the bruise-light. His grin looked carved into him. Blood ran down his bare forearm and dripped off the good hand he'd just used to rewrite the fight.
Ren found her voice first.
Low.
Careful.
Like she was talking to a bomb with a heartbeat.
"Isaac."
He looked at her.
The grin stayed.
The tears did too.
Mina pushed off the bent parking meter, one arm tight against her ribs, and took in the whole scene one more time—the dead guard, the wrecked street, the thing Isaac had turned into ruin, the broken left arm hanging from his shoulder, the crossed-finger realization still fresh in his eyes.
There it was.
The mechanism.
Or part of one.
Not promises.
Not just that.
Any crossed fingers.
God.
Isaac swayed.
The grin faltered by a degree.
Pain finally catching up now that the enemy was pulp.
He looked down at the arm hanging loose and seemed surprised to find it still belonged to him.
Then he laughed one more time through gritted teeth and said, breathless and cracked and almost giddy from shock:
"Oh."
And the way he said it made Ren's stomach drop, because that was not the sound of a boy relieved he'd survived.
That was the sound of someone realizing he finally knew how to do it.