Read Twenty Palaces for Free Online Page B

heel and fell against a lamp post.
    The corner of the woman's mouth twitched upward as she threw an overhand right.
    I ducked, barely dropping under her punch and sprawling to the side. Her fist hit the metal post with an absurdly loud thoom . She had to have broken every bone in her hand.  
    A blue ribbon had been crudely sewn into the back of her coat. It had another strange, compelling design on it. Acting on an impulse I didn't quite understand, I tore it free, then scrambled away from her.
    My shadow was moving strangely. I looked up and saw the light pole toppling over.
    I rolled out of its way. The woman jumped aside, too, barely getting out from under it in time. The metal post crashed against the asphalt, scattering broken glass.
    "What the hell is going on?" I said to no one at all. None of this made sense. She couldn't have destroyed a metal lamp post with one punch, could she? She couldn't have felled it like a tree with a right cross. It had to have been damaged already. It had to be a set up.  
    I didn't know what to believe, but I knew I wasn't the victim of a prank. I looked up at that strange, grim-faced little woman and repeated myself in a voice gone shamefully high with fear and confusion. "What's going on?"
    She came toward me, supremely confident and completely pitiless. "You picked the wrong friends," she said in her tiny voice.
    Payton slammed into her from the side. It was a full-body blind-side tackle worthy of an all-star college linebacker. He drove the woman into the asphalt and for a moment she disappeared beneath his huge frame. My hair stood on end at the sound of it; I thought Payton had murdered her right in front of me. Then momentum carried him over and she rolled on top of him.
    "You, too," she said, her high, flat voice still calm.
    She held Payton's hand against the ground and punched his elbow. His sleeve went flat beneath her fist. She sprang to her feet and stomped on one of his ankles. It, too, flattened beneath her.
    Payton drew a breath to scream, but the woman shrugged out of her jacket--I glimpsed a huge, complex glyph drawn into the lining--then she draped it over the big man. Payton's eyes and mouth suddenly glowed, and he fell unconscious.  
    Echo slammed into the woman from behind, knocking her off her feet and smashing her head-first into the side of Jon's van. The panel buckled under the impact. Echo landed a blindingly fast punch to the woman's kidneys.
    The woman threw her elbow back, but Echo darted away. Then she pounced again, bouncing the woman off the side of the van and rocking the vehicle a second time.  
    I stared at them, unable to believe what I was seeing. Jon's van looked like it had been side-swiped by a car, but the little woman seemed unhurt. Echo whipped her fists against the woman's face and neck so fast I could barely see her move. She was a blur, but the stranger was taking the punches without much effect. She covered up to defend herself, then tried to counter with a punch of her own.  
    She couldn't connect. She was moving at human speed while Echo had gone far beyond that.
    I struggled to my feet, feeling dizzy. Either I was going crazy, or something terrifying, miraculous and obscene was happening right here in the parking lot. It was as if the veil had been parted just a bit, and I was seeing the freakishness and fury at the heart of the world. I hoped I was hallucinating. I hoped I was going crazy.
    The little woman threw a punch at Echo, missed, and struck the side-view mirror. It tore off the side of the van, spinning over my head and out into the darkness.
    Something sharp struck my cheek. I brushed at it. It was a tiny sliver of glass, beaded with blood.  
    The sliver fell away. I wasn't holding the blue ribbon anymore and I wasn't sure what I'd done with it. I studied the tiny red smear on my index finger. That's real. My blood was real. The scratch on my cheek, smaller than a shaving cut, was real.
    I looked back at Echo and the strange