“So not only did you hear the voice too, but your whole family heard it?”
Melody glanced down at Leo as they continued along Broadway, carefully picking their way around a sedan that had been shoved halfway onto the sidewalk. The strange dagger looked oversized in the boy’s hands, its curved fang blade nearly the length of his forearm, but he held onto it tightly with both hands as though letting go might leave him with nothing else to focus on. He hadn’t said much since they left the pizza shop. Most of the blood on his face had dried into dark streaks along his cheek and jaw, and every so often his eyes drifted somewhere far away from the ruined street in front of them.
Leo nodded. “Yeah.”
Melody waited for more, but when he just kept walking she tried again. “And you all said yes?”
“I guess.” Leo’s eyebrows pulled together as if he was only now thinking about how it had happened. “My...” His voice caught. He stared down at the dagger for a second before continuing. “My dad asked if we all heard it too, and we said yeah. Mom said yes, Lilly said yes, and I said yeah too. I guess that was enough because that weird feeling went away right after.”
He stopped there.
Melody watched him for a moment, then looked ahead rather than making him feel like she was waiting for more. Their shoes crunched through broken safety glass scattered across Broadway. Smoke rolled lazily over the street from the burning edge of Van Cortlandt Park, where patches of grass and entire groups of trees were still burning. Somewhere deeper inside the park, wood cracked loudly and a heavy branch crashed down through the undergrowth, sending a burst of sparks into the smoky morning air.
Leo drew in a shaky breath.
“And then...” He swallowed. “Then everything went bad.”
The way he said it made Melody regret how casually she had asked.
She frowned as they continued walking, thinking about what he had told her. His family hadn’t actually agreed to anything, not intentionally. The strange voice had asked if they wanted to Awaken, then Leo’s father had immediately asked whether everyone else had heard it too. They had answered him, not the voice, yet whatever force had been listening apparently decided that a yes was a yes.
“That’s a pretty loose definition of consent,” Melody muttered.
Leo glanced up at her, but his expression was too exhausted to ask what she meant.
For a brief moment Melody had entertained the idea that perhaps the voice had chosen her specifically. She had died, somehow awakened in Melody Rosethorn’s body, and then an unknown supernatural entity spoke directly into her mind just as the heavens tore open. If this were really an anime, that sounded suspiciously like chosen-protagonist behavior.
Maybe she had been reincarnated specifically to save the world.
Then she remembered that her first encounter with an actual monster had involved her cowering beneath a car and screaming until the United States military turned the thing into airborne meat with a missile.
So much for being humanity’s destined savior.
They went another few steps before Melody asked, more carefully this time, “Did anything happen after you answered? Anything different? Did you feel something change, see anything weird, hear the voice again?”
Leo shook his head. “No. I mean, besides being scared because...” He looked toward the smoke-filled sky. “Monsters started falling out of it.”
“Yeah, except that.”
Melody looked down at him again. His eyes were swollen and pink from crying, with old tear marks running through the blood and dust on his face. There was something determined in the way he walked, though, especially in the death grip he maintained around her dagger.
For a second she wondered if he was quietly working himself into some kind of revenge-fueled suicide mission.
Maybe he was imagining himself leaping onto the snake and stabbing it until either the monster or he stopped moving.
“Hey,” Melody said gently. “No jumping into the snake’s throat when we find it, okay?”
Leo’s head pulled back in a double take. “Huh? I... why would I do that?”
Melody stared at him.
Apparently not.
“Never mind.”
She kept walking with as much dignity as she could manage.
Leo jogged a few steps to catch up. “You’re weird, lady.”
“Thanks. I kind of agree.”
They followed the trail for several more minutes before Melody decided to try something less directly connected to his recently murdered family.
“Do you live around here?”
Leo shook his head. “No. We were just here visiting my aunt and cousins.”
He went quiet for a moment.
“We were supposed to go see them.”
“Your aunt lives in New York?”
Leo nodded. “Her and my cousins. We came from Maryland yesterday. Mom wanted us to stay at a hotel first and then go see them this morning because...” He swallowed, and Melody saw the muscles in his jaw tighten. “She hadn’t seen her sister in a long time.”
His voice cracked on the last few words.
Melody didn’t interrupt.
Leo looked down at the road. “We never got there.”
Something tightened painfully inside Melody’s chest.
They kept walking.
Leo wiped beneath his nose with his sleeve, smearing dirt and dried blood farther across his face. “Traffic stopped when the sky started doing that. Everybody was honking and getting out of their cars, but Dad kept telling us to stay inside because he didn’t know what was happening yet.”
His fingers tightened around the dagger.
“Then those things started falling.”
Melody watched his expression change as he reached the part she already knew was coming.
“Dad tried to turn around.”
Leo stopped.
Melody stopped with him.
He stared at the scar carved through the middle of Broadway. His mouth opened slightly, but nothing came out.
Melody already knew the rest.
She had seen his family’s car.
She had seen his parents in the front seats.
She had helped carry Lilly into the kitchen.
“Then the snake came,” Melody finished quietly.
Leo nodded once.
“Yeah.”
That one word sounded smaller than he did.
Melody didn’t make him say anything else.
They started walking again, and for a while neither of them spoke. The devastation left by the snake gave them plenty to focus on anyway.
Broadway looked as though something enormous had been dragged straight through the middle of it. A groove carved through the asphalt stretched ahead of them, shallow enough in some sections to resemble an enormous scrape and deep enough in others that chunks of the road had been peeled apart. Cars had been shoved onto sidewalks or spun sideways into other vehicles, while some had been sliced open along strangely clean lines that made Leo’s earlier description of the snake having swords sound considerably less childish.
A delivery van sat diagonally across two lanes with its rear cargo compartment nearly severed in half. Cardboard boxes, plastic wrapping, and dozens of brightly colored drink bottles covered the street around it, already coated in a thin gray layer of ash. Farther ahead, a traffic signal hung upside down from a bent pole, continuing its normal rotation from green to yellow to red over an intersection where almost nobody was left to care.
Melody glanced toward Leo again.
He looked strangely calm.
At first she found herself thinking that he must be the strongest kid in the world to look like that after losing his entire family. Then she noticed how rigid his shoulders were, how his eyes rarely settled on anything for long, and how tightly he held the dagger.
No.
That wasn’t calm.
That was shock.
His brain had apparently reduced the world to one manageable fact.
There was a snake.
The snake had killed his family.
He needed to know the snake was dead.
After several more minutes, Leo finally spoke.
“How are we supposed to kill it?”
Melody looked down at him and pursed her lips. “Weeell...”
She looked toward the thin white contrails crossing the smoky sky overhead and dramatically crossed two fingers.
“I’m hoping the military has already filled it with enough bullets and missiles that we don’t have to.”
Leo frowned. “You said we were getting revenge.”
“I did.”
“How is finding it already dead revenge?”
Melody winced. “Damn, kid.”
Leo continued staring at her.
She sighed. “Wouldn’t it still feel good to see the thing that killed your family lying dead in the street? Whether we did it or somebody with a twenty-million-dollar fighter jet did it?”
Leo’s expression changed slightly. He looked toward the massive trail running ahead of them and thought about that for several seconds.
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “It would.”
He walked a little farther before asking, “But what if it isn’t dead? Can we actually kill it? It was huge. It crushed our car like it was nothing.”
His voice lost some of its steadiness as he said it.
Melody looked toward the contrails again. “Then we don’t fight it.”
Leo’s jaw tightened.
“We find somewhere safe and let the people with fighter jets handle the giant murder snake.”
“But you said...”
“I know what I said.”
Melody softened her tone. “I want it dead too, Leo. Especially after seeing what it did. But wanting something dead and actually being capable of killing it are two very different things.”
That seemed to reach him.
At least a little.
They continued walking, and the farther north they went, the stranger the city became.
The screaming had grown distant enough that Melody only heard individual cries every now and then. Sirens still echoed through the Bronx, but no longer as one continuous wall of noise. Even the fighter jets seemed to have moved somewhere else, leaving behind only distant explosions and the occasional groan of some damaged structure giving up and collapsing.
Everywhere Melody looked there was death.
Bodies lay between cars, beneath broken masonry, or half-hidden beneath drifting smoke. Some looked almost peaceful from a distance. Others did not. An overturned city bus rested against the curb with several windows shattered outward, one tire still slowly turning in the air even though nobody stood anywhere near it.
Melody found herself staring at a woman lying beside an open car door.
If the armored cat had moved a little faster, that could have been her.
If the missile had landed slightly differently, that could have been her.
Then Melody looked at Leo.
A thirteen-year-old from Maryland whose parents and sister had died less than an hour ago.
And she had handed him a magic knife and started taking him monster hunting.
Melody stopped walking.
Leo went several steps farther before realizing she wasn’t beside him anymore. He turned around.
“What?”
Melody stared at him.
What the hell am I doing?
She sighed and waved him back.
“Leo, hold on.”
He approached cautiously, and Melody crouched down so she could look him in the eyes without towering over him.
“I’m sorry. I said all that stuff about revenge earlier because I wasn’t thinking straight.”
“What?”
“This is insane. I can’t take you monster hunting.”
Leo blinked.
“You said your aunt lives here, right? Do you know how to get to her house?”
“No.”
The answer came immediately.
Melody blinked back.
“You don’t know the address?”
“I'm only a kid; I don't even know my address.”
Melody’s stomach sank. “Do you know what neighborhood?”
Leo shook his head.
“Her phone number?”
The boy stared at her.
His face began to crumple almost immediately, and Melody realized where that question was going a second too late.
“Okay. No, never mind.”
“My phone was in the car,” Leo whispered.
Of course it was.
Melody stood slowly and looked north along Broadway, then south, then toward the unfamiliar buildings surrounding them as if one of them might politely offer directions.
Edward had never lived in New York. Melody apparently had, but whatever memories belonged to the original owner of this body had not conveniently transferred along with her apartment lease.
So Melody was lost.
Leo was lost.
The one person who apparently had his aunt’s address was dead, and Melody couldn’t exactly point a grieving thirteen-year-old down some random street during a monster apocalypse and tell him to have a nice life.
“Crap.”
Leo frowned. “What?”
Melody sighed and motioned for him to follow. “Nothing. Come on.”
“What happened to not taking me monster hunting?”
“Apparently I’m responsible for you now.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Neither did I, but here we are.”
Leo stared at her for a second, and the tiniest hint of amusement appeared through his exhausted expression before disappearing again.
They continued north.
A few minutes later Melody unconsciously rubbed the left side of her ribs.
Then stopped.
She pressed her fingers harder against the place where the metal railing had struck her after the missile explosion.
Nothing.
Melody slowed.
She pressed again.
Still nothing.
Leo glanced over. “What?”
“My ribs.”
“Are they bad?”
“No. That’s the problem.”
Leo looked understandably confused.
Melody twisted at the waist.
Nothing hurt.
She bent slightly to the side and straightened again.
Only an hour or two earlier she had been lying in the grass barely able to breathe because every expansion of her chest felt like someone sliding a knife between her ribs. She had been almost certain that at least one of them was cracked.
Now there wasn’t even soreness.
“What the hell?”
She drew in the deepest breath she could manage.
Smoke immediately caught in her throat, and Melody doubled over coughing.
Leo waited patiently until she finished.
“Good test.”
“Shut up.”
His mouth twitched.
Melody rested a hand against her chest and actually concentrated on how her body felt.
The more attention she paid, the stranger it became.
She wasn’t tired.
That should have been impossible.
She had run down thirty-three flights of stairs, sprinted through streets full of monsters, been thrown through the air by a missile explosion, slammed into a railing, moved part of a car, helped carry Lilly into the kitchen, and then continued walking through a city actively falling apart around her.
Edward’s old body would have filed for divorce from his brain hours ago.
Melody’s felt ready to run again.
Actually, she felt better than when she had woken up that morning.
Her muscles carried a strange tightness now, not painful or stiff, but responsive, like there was more strength waiting behind every movement than she was accustomed to using. Her legs felt light beneath her. Even her breathing recovered quickly once she stopped coughing from the smoke.
“The cat.”
Leo looked at her. “What cat?”
“The giant armored one I told you about. The thing this dagger came from.”
Leo glanced down at the weapon in his hands.
“When I touched it after it died, all that glowing stuff came out of it and went into me. Then the dagger appeared.” Melody flexed her fingers slowly. “I think whatever that stuff was healed me.”
Leo’s expression shifted from confusion to fascinated disgust.
“So you ate its soul?”
Melody turned toward him.
“No.”
“But it went inside you.”
“We are absolutely not calling it eating.”
“That sounds like eating.”
“Absorbing.”
Leo thought about it. “That sounds like fancy eating.”
Melody pointed at him. “You’re twelve. Your opinion has been rejected.”
“I’m thirteen.”
“Even worse.”
For the first time since Melody had found him, Leo actually smiled.
It was small and disappeared almost immediately, but it was there.
Then his eyes returned to the scar carved through Broadway.
Melody followed his gaze.
Whatever she had absorbed from the armored cat was the secret to surviving this new world. She didn’t know exactly what it was yet, but she was almost certain of that much. The energy had healed injuries that should have taken weeks, strengthened a body that had already been healthier than Edward’s old one, and somehow produced the dagger Leo was carrying.
If one monster could do that...
Melody stared at the enormous trail ahead of them.
A much bigger monster had come through here.
Edward’s gamer brain immediately began doing exactly what gamer brains were designed to do.
A massive early-game enemy, hopefully already killed by something considerably stronger than her, leaving behind free power for anybody smart enough to claim it.
Maybe another weapon.
Maybe more strength.
Maybe enough of whatever that energy was to make surviving the next monster considerably easier.
A smile slowly appeared on Melody’s face.
Leo noticed.
“Why are you smiling?”
“If the military already killed this thing, I might be able to absorb whatever is left inside it.”
“And that makes you stronger?”
“I think.”
“You think?”
“Well, nobody gave me an intro episode with a narrator that vomits the worlds lore and magic scaling system, okay!”
Leo stared toward the trail again.
“If it makes you strong enough to fight these things...” He totally ignored my Otaku outburst, thought Melody.
“That’s what I’m hoping.” She said regaining her comporsure.
He tightened his grip around the dagger.
“And I want to see it.”
Melody looked down at him.
There was no excitement in his voice.
No dramatic rage.
Just a quiet need.
“I want to see it dead.”
That hurt considerably more than if he had shouted about revenge.
Melody nodded.
“Okay.”
They kept going.
Broadway near Van Cortlandt Park looked less like New York now and more like somewhere that had already lost a war. The park stretched along their right side, large sections of grass and forest visible beyond the roadside through smoke that moved lazily between the trees. Fires crept through dry grass and climbed low branches, occasionally flaring orange whenever they found something new to consume.
A fire hydrant had been torn open ahead, blasting water across Broadway in a continuous shallow stream. The current carried ash, broken glass, scraps of paper, and thin pink streaks that Melody deliberately chose not to identify.
The farther they walked, the quieter the neighborhood became.
Melody didn’t like that.
The screams were barely audible now. Sirens echoed from farther away, and even the roar of military aircraft had faded until the occasional distant explosion was the loudest reminder that the city was still fighting for its life.
Leo stayed close enough behind her that she could hear his shoes grinding against debris.
Then they reached West 246th Street.
Melody stopped.
Something enormous lay across Broadway.
For a few seconds her brain didn’t understand what she was looking at because there was no context in normal life for an object that large and biological lying across a city street.
Leo walked up beside her.
His breathing changed.
“That’s it.”
Melody looked down at him. “You’re sure?”
Leo nodded immediately.
“The scales.”
The snake’s tail lay perhaps twenty yards ahead of them.
It was enormous.
Melody had imagined a giant snake when Leo first described it, but apparently her imagination had been embarrassingly conservative. Even the tapering end of the creature’s body was wider than her waist, and it became substantially thicker as it stretched across Broadway before curving around the corner onto West 246th Street.
Heavy overlapping scales covered the body, shifting from charcoal black to a deep metallic green depending on how the smoky light hit them. Several were cracked or scorched along the edges, while others carried circular pits and small craters that looked suspiciously like bullet impacts.
Most importantly, it wasn’t moving.
Melody looked at Leo.
Leo looked at her.
For the first time since the pizza shop, something almost bright appeared through his grief.
“It’s dead.”
Melody grinned.
“They got it.”
They ran.
It was probably inappropriate to be excited.
Melody knew that.
The thing had murdered Leo’s family. Dead people were scattered throughout the surrounding streets. Van Cortlandt Park was still burning beside them, and Manhattan and the Bronx were being torn apart by monsters falling from the sky.
Still, the part of Edward’s brain trained by years of video games looked at the largest monster corpse he had encountered so far and immediately screamed one very simple word.
Loot.
Leo had a much better excuse.
He wanted proof.
They splashed through the shallow stream flowing from the destroyed hydrant as they hurried toward the tail. Melody reached the creature first and only slowed when she was close enough to appreciate just how massive it actually was.
The scales were almost beautiful.
Dark green dominated their surface, but thin metallic streaks ran through them like veins of silver trapped inside stone. Each plate was larger than Melody’s palm, and some looked thick enough that the military rounds had barely penetrated.
Melody reached out.
Then stopped.
Something was wrong.
The armored cat had shimmered after it died. Even from several feet away, she had been able to see those strange blue-white particles crawling through the corpse and drifting above it.
The snake didn’t.
There was nothing.
No glow.
No floating specks.
No strange pressure pulling her toward it.
Melody’s excitement disappeared.
“Oh, come on.”
Leo looked at her. “What?”
“There’s no sparkle.”
He blinked. “It’s supposed to sparkle?”
“I think so. The other monster was glowing after it died.”
She stepped closer.
The snake remained completely dull.
Melody frowned and crouched beside the enormous tail.
Maybe the energy naturally vanished if a monster had been dead too long. Maybe another Awakened person had already discovered the same thing she had and gotten here first. Maybe the military had some way to extract it from jets.
Or maybe the armored cat had been unique and Melody had built an entire imaginary progression system around one freak accident.
She reached toward the scales anyway.
The hair along the back of her neck rose.
Melody froze.
It wasn’t a thought.
It wasn’t logic.
Her body reacted before Edward understood why.
Goosebumps raced down both arms beneath the sleeves of her blazer. Every muscle tightened at once, and something primitive deep inside her screamed that she was being watched.
Melody slowly turned.
Across West 246th Street, an alley opened between two damaged buildings. Smoke hung inside it, turning the narrow passage into a dark tunnel where she could barely make out overturned garbage cans, broken brick, and scattered debris.
For half a second there was nothing there.
Then the darkness moved.
Melody’s eyes widened.
“Leo.”
He turned toward her. “What?”
“Move.”
The alley exploded.
A massive head shot through the smoke.
It resembled a snake only because Melody’s brain desperately needed something familiar to call it. Its head was long and wedge-shaped, covered in the same metallic green scales as the enormous body beside them, but on either side of its mouth projected two curved structures several feet long.
For an instant Melody thought they were blades.
Then she realized they were part of the creature.
Pincers.
Their inner edges narrowed into bright metallic lines, sharpened so finely that they looked like enormous swords fused directly to either side of the monster’s jaw.
Leo hadn’t exaggerated.
The monster lunged.
For the smallest fraction of a second, everything seemed to slow.
Melody saw the pincers spreading apart.
She saw Leo standing directly between them.
She saw the instant his expression changed as he realized the monster they had thought was dead was coming straight for him.
Those are the swords.
Her body moved before Edward consciously decided anything.
Melody pivoted and brought her right leg up.
Leo barely had time to turn toward her before her foot slammed squarely into his side.
“Sorry!”
He went flying.
“WHAT THE HELL!”
The enormous pincer snapped through the exact space his torso had occupied less than a second earlier.
Melody should have been next.
Instead, her body continued moving.
Her planted leg compressed beneath her with a strength Edward had no memory of possessing. Her muscles tightened instinctively, and for the final fraction of a second her other foot used Leo’s body for leverage as she shoved him farther from the strike.
Then Melody jumped.
The pavement vanished beneath her.
Her stomach lurched as she shot upward with enough force that for a second she genuinely lost track of how high she had gone.
“What the fuuuuck!”
The snake’s head passed underneath her.
Its pincers slammed together with a metallic CLANG that vibrated through the street and up into Melody’s shoes.
She was above it.
Actually above it.
Her crimson hair and pleated skirt whipped violently upward in the rush of displaced air while the monster’s armored skull streaked beneath her feet. From this height she had a clear view down the creature’s body as more and more of it poured from the alley.
It was gigantic.
The section lying across Broadway wasn’t a corpse.
It was the rest of the snake.
Its body curved around the corner, stretched across the intersection, and continued into the huge motionless mass they had mistaken for something dead.
It hadn’t been dead.
It had been lying still.
Waiting.
Melody twisted instinctively in midair.
Below her, Leo rolled across the pavement but somehow kept both hands around the dagger. He stopped several yards away and stared upward at Melody with his mouth hanging open.
Melody’s body rotated with a grace Edward had absolutely never possessed. One knee tucked toward her chest while the other leg extended, her crimson hair streaming behind her as she cleared the snake’s second pincer by inches.
For one completely inappropriate moment, a thought entered her head.
This probably looks awesome.
Then gravity remembered her.
“Oh, crap.”
Melody dropped onto the hood of an abandoned car.
Metal buckled beneath her shoes with a heavy THUNK, leaving two deep dents as she landed in a crouch. One hand slapped against the hood for balance while the other stretched behind her, and for perhaps half a second she remained there in what felt like the most unnecessarily dramatic pose of her life.
Leo stared at her.
Melody slowly stood and looked at the crushed metal beneath her feet.
Then she looked across the distance she had just jumped.
“That...” She stared at her hands. “I’m fucking Batman.”
A heavy scrape of scales against asphalt wiped the grin from her face.
Melody looked up.
Leo was still lying on the pavement.
On the other side of the snake.
The creature’s enormous head turned toward him.
Its two pincers spread apart again while the actual mouth between them stretched open, revealing rows of thin needle-like teeth and a long black forked tongue that flicked through the smoky air.
A deep hiss rolled from its throat.
Melody’s amusement vanished.
The massive body lying across Broadway began to move.
Scales scraped across the roadway with a sound like stone grinding over metal. Abandoned cars rocked as thick coils tightened beneath and around them. One vehicle was shoved several feet sideways before tipping onto its doors with a crash.
The section they had mistaken for a corpse slowly began rising from the street.
Leo looked at the monster.
Then he looked at Melody.
Finally, his eyes dropped toward the dagger still clutched in his hands.
Melody saw the snake draw its head backward, muscles tightening beneath its scales as it prepared to strike.
“LEO!” she screamed.