The walk back felt longer than it should have.
Melody kept one hand lightly against Leo’s back, not really supporting him so much as making sure he was still there. He moved with the careful stiffness of someone whose body remembered something his skin no longer showed. The golden fleece sat on him like an ordinary oversized hoodie again. His axe rested across one shoulder.
The snake sword was strapped across her back in the improvised sheath. The lynx dagger hung at her hip.
Neither of them had spoken much since walking through the now-abandoned building. Melody wondered where all the other people had gone and whether they had come to their senses or not.
Dead vines still clung to the sides of buildings, gray and brittle. The wind broke pieces loose now and then and sent them scraping across the pavement. The air smelled of dust and old smoke. Somewhere above them a bird called once and then went quiet.
Melody glanced at Leo.
“You okay?” she asked, checking if he was actually at a hundred percent.
Leo gave a small shrug without looking up. “Yeah.”
She didn’t believe him. He didn’t seem to expect her to.
They cut through a narrow alley between two damaged apartment buildings. Melody had just started thinking about actual food, something hot, something that wasn’t a protein bar, when the ground shuddered.
She stopped.
Leo looked at her.
The ground shook again.
A shadow passed over them.
Melody looked up in time to see something enormous come down on the roof to their left.
“Leo!”
Brick and concrete exploded outward. The upper floors of the building collapsed with a grinding roar. Melody grabbed the back of his fleece and yanked him hard against the opposite wall, throwing one arm over both their heads as debris hammered the pavement.
Dust filled the alley.
Melody coughed into her elbow.
“You good?”
“I think so,” he said, his voice returning to its natural volume.
The dust thinned.
Something moved at the far end of the alley.
At first it looked like more of the building was still falling.
Then the rubble stood up.
The golem was five stories tall, a lurching mass of broken brick, concrete slabs, twisted rebar, and chunks of asphalt held together in the rough shape of a person. Its head was a misshapen boulder. Two uneven holes glowed dull red inside it.
Those lights turned toward them.
Leo went very still.
“I... Melody, I just came back to life.” His frustration with their luck was obvious.
“I know...” she said, guilt slipping into her voice.
The golem took one step. The alley shook.
Melody stared up at it.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Leo’s voice was quiet. “We are gonna die.”
“Well, dying made you way more pessimistic,” she chided, looking at the monster.
The golem raised one arm, half a collapsed wall pretending to be a limb, and brought it down.
Melody shoved Leo aside and dove the other way. The impact cratered the pavement and sent brick spraying past her head. She rolled, came up on one knee, and reached over her shoulder. The snake sword came free with a short snag against the improvised sheath.
Green light stirred inside the metal.
She ran under the next swing and drove the blade into the golem’s lower leg. Acid hissed across concrete and mortar. A few chunks cracked free and fell away. The cut was deep enough to matter on a person. On this thing, it looked like a scratch.
Melody’s jaw tightened.
She slashed again, higher, dragging the acid edge across its thigh. Same result. Smoke. Burned stone. Barely any noticeable effect on the golem.
“Bullshit,” she muttered, already moving as the golem’s foot came down where she had been standing.
Leo had backed farther up the alley, axe in both hands. His face was pale under the dust.
“Melody...”
“I know!”
The golem raised both arms over its head.
Leo didn’t move.
Instead, he stared at the axe.
Blue light appeared beneath the skin of his hands.
Melody took a step toward him, noticing the glow. “Leo?”
The glow crawled up his wrists and disappeared under the fleece.
Then he started growing.
At first it was slow enough that her mind tried to reject it. Then his head passed the second-story windows.
Leo looked down at himself, eyes wide.
“Oh.”
His axe scaled with him. The fleece and jeans simply grew as if they had always been the right size. Melody was grateful for that much. She had already seen enough body parts unwillingly for a lifetime.
He kept rising.
Twenty feet.
Forty.
Sixty.
“Leo!”
“WHAT’S HAPPENING?!” His voice had already deepened into something that vibrated through the pavement.
By the time the growth stopped, he stood nearly a hundred feet tall. The golem looked small beside him. Cars looked like toys beside his shoes.
Leo stared down at his own hands, then at the golem, then carefully at Melody far below.
For a few seconds nobody moved.
A shaky, almost disbelieving expression crossed his enormous face.
“I’M HUGE!”
“I noticed,” Melody mumbled more to herself than to him. He probably wouldn’t hear her anyway.
The golem punched him.
Leo stumbled sideways. One foot came down through the roof of an abandoned sedan with a long metallic crunch. He windmilled the axe for balance, clipped the corner of a building, and tore a section of brickwork free. Melody dashed out of the way as rubble crashed down around her.
“SORRY!” he exclaimed.
He gripped the axe with both hands and swung properly this time.
The blade crossed the street in a massive arc and slammed into the golem’s chest. The sound was less like metal hitting stone and more like a building coming down. Brick and concrete exploded outward. The golem staggered. A rough crater opened in its torso.
Something glowed inside, a dense core of compressed stone and molten-looking mana.
Leo leaned closer.
“MELODY! LOOK AT ITS CHEST! IT HAS SOME KIND OF CORE!”
“I see it!” she yelled up at him.
Melody looked at the core, then up at him.
“You’re freaking ninety feet tall!”
“I KNOW! THIS IS AWESOME!”
The golem was already trying to pull itself back together.
Melody ran.
She drew the lynx dagger. Heat answered immediately. A spectral wing flashed and the dagger launched her upward. She shot past Leo’s knee, past his waist, and hit the ragged opening in the golem’s chest hard enough to jar her teeth. She caught herself on a length of exposed rebar.
The core pulsed in front of her, light shifting beneath the surface like something trapped inside.
“Melody!” Leo’s voice rolled over her. “Be careful!”
She braced one foot, gripped the snake sword with both hands, and drove it into the core.
Green mana erupted. Cracks raced across the glowing stone.
It shattered.
The golem stopped.
Every piece of it simply forgot what it was supposed to be doing.
The entire body collapsed.
Melody dropped with the falling rubble.
Mana hit her first.
It poured into her all at once, hot, clean, and overwhelming. The exhaustion she had carried since the botanical institute vanished so suddenly she almost lost her footing. Bruises faded. The deep ache in her back disappeared. Even the pressure behind her eyes cleared.
She landed hard among the broken stone. Her knees bent. Nothing broke.
She stood there breathing.
Something warm sat in her palm.
The core was gone. In its place was a small white stone, almost clear, smooth as if it had been polished. Roughly the size of her palm. Completely ordinary until she turned it slightly and something inside shifted, not light exactly, but the feeling of it.
Above her, Leo was still enormous.
“MELODY?”
“Yeah?!” she yelled up to him.
“How do I turn this off?”
She looked up at him.
“I don’t know! Try to focus on shrinking? Think small thoughts?!”
The blue glow under his skin began to fade on its own. His body shrank fast. Melody stepped back just in time as a rapidly diminishing Leo dropped through the air and landed awkwardly on both feet. He stumbled forward. She caught him by the shoulders before he went face-first into the rubble.
For a few seconds they just stood there.
Leo looked down at himself, patting his chest and his arms like he needed to confirm everything was still the right size.
“That was...” He just stood there staring at her, apparently too overwhelmed to finish.
Melody raised an eyebrow.
“Awesome?”
“YES! I was freaking a hundred feet tall.”
“That was really impressive.” She sighed, looking at the axe and wondering how it felt. “Okay, I’m kind of jealous about the axe now.”
He laughed, then glanced past her at the missing corner of the apartment building before looking back at her more carefully.
“Did I hurt you?”
The question landed heavier than the rest, considering the damage she had just done to him earlier.
“No. No, I’m fine. I got out of the way.”
He studied her face for another second before nodding once.
Melody looked down at the white stone again. Leo leaned closer.
“What is it?”
“A rock.”
He blinked. “Thanks,” he muttered.
“What? I can be salty right now. You turned into Paul Bunyan and I got a rock.”
A small, almost reluctant smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. She held the stone up toward the daylight. It stayed nearly translucent. Something about it tugged at the back of her mind, but the thought wouldn’t settle.
She closed her fingers around it. It stayed warm.
“Come on. Let’s get back to the pawn shop before something else decides we look tasty.”
Leo picked up the axe. The weight of it looked normal again in his hands.
They started walking.
For the first time since they had left the basement, the silence that followed them was a little less heavy.
“You think the golem wanted to eat us?” Leo asked.
“I don’t know. Probably,” she replied.