Later, in memory, it would be a fractured mix of shouts and screams and bullets flying and Finch running into the back of Wyte to keep as close as possible. Tripping over the things crawling off Wyte’s legs. Wyte exploding out from their shelter, overcoat thrown aside to reveal a body become other. A garden of fungus. Arms ballooning out into sudden wings of brilliant purple-red-orange. Legs lost in shelves and plateaus and spikes of green and blue. Back broader and insanely strong and gray. Head suddenly elongated and widened. As he ran a high-pitched scream came from his mouth that frightened Finch and bloodied the ears of the Partials.

The bullets. Wyte kept taking them like gifts. They tore through his limbs, lodged in his torso. Leaving holes. Leaving daylight. That closed up. And running in the shadow of that magnificence, as Wyte’s scream became a roar again and they were assailing the ramparts of the Partials, he felt as if he were following some sort of god, his own gun like a toy as, from the shelter that was Wyte, he shot back at the chapel to keep the rebels pinned down.

Wyte’s voice came out incomprehensible and strange now. Guttural and animallike. No part of him in those moments that was human. Once he looked back at Finch to make sure he was still there. The whites of his eyes colonized. His pupils looking like something trapped. Trapped forever inside its own flesh.

For a while it was as if Wyte had lent Finch that kind of vision, because he could see the bullets coming. As if Finch were floating overhead, watching. And it was ecstasy or some kind of odd heaven. The surprise that eclipsed the Partials’ pale faces as Wyte overran their positions. Wyte trying to outrun something he couldn’t outrun. Tendrils from his chest racing out to impale them. The weeping muzzle of his gun taking them in the legs, the heads. Faces trampled under his charge. Fungal eyes still clicking and clicking as the bodies lay dead. While even the rebels’ fire had become scattershot from the shock of the new. From seeing the glory that Wyte had become. The monster.

Then it all came crashing down and Finch was in his skin again. In that one last look back he saw it all as a crazed tableau of men fallen, falling, firing, or running at an impossible speed. Almost distant enough as they made it to the warren of streets beyond to think of them as the silhouettes of broken, spasming dolls.

Realized he was roaring, too, like Wyte. As the tears ran down his face. As he kept firing behind him long after the enemy had faded into time and distance.

4

Breathless. Aching. Side hurting. Wyte trailing bits of things into the rubble behind them. Waiting for a bullet in the back of the head that never came. The acrid smell of spent ammo. A shambling halt under the shadow of the arch. The boat still tethered in the canal. The sky dark gray.