Free Fury by Rebecca Lim Page B

Ryan’s way — the human way — is always going to take longer.
    I march him on ruthlessly while I warm his icy hands in mine. I describe all the buildings we’re passing in a low, cheerful voice while I scan the rooftops continuously for any hint of demonsign. Ryan eventually ceases to respond, and my sense of quiet desperation grows.
    As we turn right into Via Ulrico Hoepli, I catch glimpses of faces and forms moving about at upper-storey windows. This late-rising city is beginning to stir. I get the sudden buzz of a middle-aged man in an elegant overcoat, scarf and suit exiting a coffee shop just across the street, something about the end of the world in his thoughts. Then I pick up the ambient thoughts of a couple of men wrangling a new armchair into a delivery van outside a furniture store we’re passing. They hate each other, hate the armchair, and can’t understand why, after everything that’s happened in this city, they still have to deliver it. Today .
    I turn left up Via San Paolo, with Ryan braced tightly against me, his every footstep dragging. As we move along the upper edge of the Piazza della Scala, I begin to pick up a tangle of human energy: thoughts expressed in a multitude of languages, emotions that grow louder and more insistent the closer we get, amplifying in timbre, volume and complexity, all the time.
    Then I see the crowd of shouting people gathered around a police roadblock at the southern end of the square, a larger crowd milling around another roadblock on the western side.
    Something else across the square makes me freeze in my tracks. Ryan sways against me, exhausted, his fringe of straight, dark hair falling forward over his eyes, body on autopilot. I’m staring directly at the northern face of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, the building we’ve been trying so hard to go around. Two banners hang one on either side of the giant archway that serves as an alternative entry point to the vast shopping arcade. The left banner is badly damaged; you can barely make out the playful model with the striking eyes and sky-high beehive wearing an evening gown from the 1960s in Giovanni Re’s signature red, rosso Re . But the right banner is largely intact, and I stare at the mesmerisingly powerful image of a warrior-sorceress with her burnt caramel-coloured hair wild and loose, wearing a long, flowing gown of molten gold, her hands wrapped around the pommel of a bejewelled sword. I gaze into Irina Zhivanevskaya’s huge, smoky, smouldering eyes and feel for a disorienting moment as if I’m staring into a giant mirror, so recently have I fled her body.
    I’ll take it as a sign that I’m doing the right thing.
    The air smells of burning. If I concentrate hard enough, I can actually taste ash on the air. As Ryan and I stagger on past the roadblock facing onto Via Santa Margherita, the handsome, copper-skinned, hard-faced policemen behind it wave their arms dismissively, shouting, ‘Go back! Go back!’ in Italian, in English, as people try to argue their way into the restricted zone.
    The street we’re moving down now is packed with banks and insurance houses that occupy elegant, towering mansions standing shoulder to shoulder. A few people begin filtering past us, afflicting me with their thoughts, their random energies. The dark-haired woman is only a little ahead of us now, and her gait has grown so slow and torturous that we finally overtake her.
    ‘Not much further,’ I tell Ryan distractedly as I glance at the woman’s shuttered face in profile, note her youthful features and strangely clouded blue eyes.
    It hits me a few feet later. The wrongness about her. The way her old-woman shuffle doesn’t sync with her smooth skin and shining hair, her robust frame and fashion-forward clothes. I stop and look back at her over my shoulder, wondering why I get no sense of her at all: of what she’s thinking, or feeling, or even any sense of her peculiar life force, her human energy. What I do