Horizon (32 page)

C
ALLI LEAPED INTO THE AIR
to escape Odd, Mags, and Pocket. She forgot that Nathif couldn’t follow her.

“Odd and I will get the snake,” Mags snarled. “Pocket, throw something at the girl. Knock her out of the air!”

Calli looked sharply at Pocket, but the boy only seemed confused. Mags pointed to the tracking device in his hands and repeated slowly, “Throw something at her!” Pocket hesitated a moment longer, then nodded vigorously, as if he finally understood.

Out of the corner of her eye, Calli saw Odd stalk toward Nathif, slapping his club into his empty hand. Mags already had a needle out, a clear liquid sloshing inside.

“Ooh, what’s in the needle?” Scorch asked. “I hope it involves disfiguring boils. They’re my favorite.”

“No boils. Old allies earn a quick death,” Mags said.

Scorch huffed. “Boring, but suit yourself.”

Calli flapped her wings and kept her attention on Pocket. She’d never seen the boy hurt anyone, but then, she didn’t know what he kept in most of his “pockets,” either.

“Don’t do this, Pocket,” she called to him. “You’re my friend! We’re here to save Vachir and Dash!” He pulled back his arm and whipped the device at her head. She dodged and managed to catch the tech in stinging hands.

“Throw something else!” Scorch yelled as if she were watching sport combat and not a group of friends trying to kill one another. “Shoot flames at her!”

“No flamethrower,” Pocket said, lifting his hands to show they were empty — of items and of tech enhancements. “I do what I can!”

“Well, at least throw something sharp,” Scorch commanded. “But I don’t mind a long show, as long as you get the finale right.”

Odd had Nathif in a hold and the two struggled back and forth. Nathif was clearly trying to maneuver Odd into the force wall. Calli was surprised that Odd hadn’t already beaten Nathif senseless with one blow from his club. And there was Mags, slinging insults but getting no closer to shoving her needle into Nathif’s flesh.

Calli stared down at the device in her hand. Dash’s dot blipped on its tiny screen. The small piece of tech wouldn’t have hurt her even if it had struck true. Why had Mags been so insistent that Pocket hurl it at her?

Unless . . .

“Oh, Mags, I could kiss you,” Calli whispered. She flew to the nearest wall and smashed the tech against the rock, careful to catch all the pieces.

The device’s innards were rudimentary. Calli started twisting wires out of the casing. The homing scanner didn’t have much power, but force shields — like the one trapping them by the door — were remarkably fragile when faced with a certain kind of conflicting current. She’d seen that again and again while helping Hoku with his force shield in the desert.

She felt objects hit her wings and back, but they didn’t hurt. A piece of fruit, a small rock, the tiny toys Pocket had whittled for himself. She cried out when Pocket’s next missile hit her, pretending that he’d damaged her wing.

“Ha! Stupid bird!” Pocket called.

Calli spared another glance at Nathif. Odd had him pressed up against the wall. Mags shoved her needle into his shoulder and pressed the stopper. Nathif hissed, his eyes wide and wild. Hopefully Calli was right and the syringe was full of nothing more potent than anti-infection syrum.

“Lady’s paying for pain,” Mags said. “Be a good snake and suffer for her.”

Calli threw the modified scanner at the force shield and covered her eyes with her fingers. As the tech arced through the air, she wondered if she’d been wrong about Odd and Mags and Pocket. If so, this fight was about to go from doomed to utterly hopeless.

The device hit the force wall and the wall exploded in sparks. Pocket yelped and patted down a fire in his hair. Scorch, who had almost had her nose against the force wall on the other side, leaped back and shook her head, dazed.

The force wall was down. Calli looked at Odd and Mags and held her breath. Had she been right? Had Mags been trying to send her a signal?

“Bright bird,” Mags said with a grin. “Now let’s show this bit what loyalty is and means and does.”

“For the kludge!” Pocket yelled.

Odd dropped Nathif and patted him on the shoulder. “Good show.” Then he turned, growled out a battle cry, and charged Scorch, his club already raised.

“She’s got swords in her arms!” Calli yelled, remembering the sick sound of flesh parting when Scorch had extended them during the Thunder Trials. “Be careful!”

She flew down to Pocket and helped him damp the last flame on his shirt. As soon as it was out, she grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the back of the room. “Vachir. Dash,” she said, but she didn’t need to. Pocket knew what to do.

Scorch smacked Odd in the face. It would have sent a normal person flying across the room, but Odd only smiled. A trickle of blood seeped from the corner of his mouth. He grabbed Scorch in a bear hug, trapping her arms against her sides, and yelled, “Now!”

Calli and Pocket scooted past and made it to Vachir. The horse lifted her head, stomped a chained hoof, and shoved Calli toward Dash’s cage with her nose. Calli pressed a gentle hand against Vachir’s forelock and nodded. “But you after, brave one.”

Pocket was already working on the locks to Dash’s cage when Calli knelt beside him. She snaked her arm through the bars and pressed her fingers against his neck, feeling for a pulse.

“He’s alive,” she said, and was surprised to feel tears spring to her eyes.

The metal bars sprang open a moment later. Pocket helped Calli drag Dash out of the cage and turn him onto his back, then hurried off to work on Vachir’s bindings.

Calli swept the hair out of Dash’s eyes and pressed her palm against his dark, bruised cheek. “Wake up, Dash. We need you. Wake up!”

Behind her, Odd grunted in pain and Mags shrieked. Calli saw Mags’s tall body slam into a wall and slide to the ground. Her hair billowed over her face, and Calli couldn’t tell if she was alive or dead. Nathif was by her side a moment later, lifting her chin and checking her eyes.

Dash groaned. His eyes fluttered briefly, but he fell unconscious again. Calli probed his ribs, looking for damage, and found his shirt stiff with dried blood. “He’s hurt. Nathif!” she called. “He’s not waking up! Help me!”

She glanced away from Dash and saw Odd fighting Scorch. Odd was losing. If Dash didn’t stand up and help, they were all going to die.

Calli squeezed the tears out of her eyes and tried to harden her heart. She pulled back her hand, took another breath, and smacked Dash in the face as hard as she could. His head jerked to the side.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Oh, Dash, I’m so sorry.” She hit him again. His eyes sprang open and he gasped.

“Scorch,” Calli said. “Scorch!”

Dash grabbed her arm and she helped him to his feet. He seemed unsteady but stable, his eyes darting around the room, taking it all in.

“Weapon,” he rasped, his voice barely audible.

Calli pulled out Seeker, extended the spear to its full length, and pressed it into his hand. He nodded once.

“Dash is alive!” Pocket shouted.

Odd looked up, an expression of hope on his bloodied face. Scorch used that moment to drive both her fists at his chest.

“No!” Calli yelled.

She heard the swords slide out of Scorch’s arms and into Odd’s flesh. His hope turned to wide-eyed surprise. The massive club slipped from from his hand and thudded to the floor. A heartbeat later, his body followed it.

A
LUNA CHARGED
, her head filled with Hoku’s screams, her arms straining with the effort of pulling herself down the path. How was she going to fight this thing? Strand’s enormous body was covered in thick scales, his four lizard legs ended in claws half a meter long, and his heads darted and twisted, lightning fast. Even his tail looked barbed and dangerous as it swished and swung behind him.

This wasn’t the first time she’d be facing a larger opponent. Almost everyone was bigger than her. Anadar trained her for this, even though he’d been thinking of sharks and Deepfell and Kampii at the time. She remembered his lecture well: “Larger opponents can strike from a distance; that’s their advantage. Your goal is to take that advantage away. You’ll want to run away — trust me, we all do — but you have to do the opposite. Get in close. As close as you can. Then the advantage goes to the
better
fighter, not the bigger one.”

She stared up at Strand and slowed, wondering how she could possibly get close with all those snapping mouths and wicked claws. The monster’s heads twisted back in openmouthed grins, and Karl Strand’s Human laughter echoed through the cave.

Aluna could tell he was watching her from seven sets of eyes. Well, from at least five, since two of his heads seemed asleep. Were they? Or were they simply occupied doing something else? This creature may look like a beast, but it was no natural thing. Karl Strand had made it for himself, then transferred his mind into it. The ultimate upgrade.

“So this is what became of Sarah’s little Kampii?” Strand said, his five heads speaking together. “How singularly unimpressive.”

Aluna ignored him. Let him talk, work himself into a fury. She needed to stay calm, let her battle-mind take over. Another one of Hoku’s shrieks cut through her ears and she cringed.
Push
, she told herself.
You can’t help Hoku if you let yourself get killed.

When she got within range, Strand stopped talking long enough to attack. One of his heads struck at her, fast as a snake. Aluna rolled left. The serpent snout smacked into the ground. Another head darted in from the side. Aluna hopped onto her hands and vaulted out of the way.

She pictured the cappo’ra circle in Coiled Deep. The drums echoed in her head, giving her a rhythm and a power she’d never have on her own. She spun. Twisted. Dodged. Tried to get closer even as Strand worked to keep her at a distance.

The heads kept coming, their mouths snapping shut just centimeters from Aluna’s face. One long fang caught the point of her tail and ripped through the delicate membrane of her fin as it lay wrapped against her scales.

“So fragile!” Strand said. “I would have designed you far better than
she
did, not built you from bubbles and fairy tales.”

Aluna clenched her teeth. The only thing saving her right now was Strand’s incessant talking, and the fact that he used all of his functioning heads to do it. She couldn’t get any closer on the ground. She needed to try something new.

His central head tilted to the side, a distinctly Human motion. “So many advancements in polymer technology back then. So many building materials to choose from. And yet
she
chose flesh and hope. A failing proposition from the start.”

Aluna rolled onto her back, pushed off, and hopped up onto her bleeding tail. Before the next head could strike, she unclipped her talon weapons and whirled them on their chains.

“Such a silly little thing to have caused so much trouble,” Strand said, and three of his heads snapped at her at once.

Aluna leaped to the side of one of the heads and unleashed her talons. The thin metal chains wrapped around the sinuous neck and hooked into place.

Strand jerked the head back, then swung it back and forth. Aluna dangled from it, her breath coming in gasps, her body whipping around wildly. Another head snapped at her, trying to pluck her off the first. She clubbed it with her tail, pleased to see its eyes roll back into its skull from the pain.

When a neck swing brought her close enough to another head, she used her momentum to swing onto its neck. She dropped her talons and gripped the scaled trunk with her arms. If only she still had legs!

The head bucked and screeched, trying to turn on itself. Aluna grabbed the blue ridges over its eye sockets and hauled herself up even farther toward its face.
Get in close
, Anadar had said, and she planned to.

“Insolence!” the heads yelled. “Futility!”

Aluna secured her left hand, then unsheathed her knife with her right. It would never penetrate the creature’s thick skull, so she drove the blade into its eye. Pushing, twisting, then pulling out and plunging it in again.

Blood drenched her hand. Aluna’s grip on the knife started to slip, but she couldn’t bring herself to clamp it in her mouth. Not when it was covered in so much gore. If she gagged now, she might lose the knife and fall.

Her hesitation cost her. The wounded head dropped suddenly, and she lost her hold. A second head snapped her out of the air. Its needle-sharp fangs slid into her tail and she screamed.

But she didn’t drop her knife.

Aluna folded at the waist and wrapped her left arm around the serpent’s maw. She couldn’t reach its brown Human eyes, so she shoved her blade into its nose slit instead.

The creature’s jaw opened instantly, releasing her. Aluna dropped five meters and crashed against the stone floor.
Tides’ teeth.
She was back where she started.

“You’re just like
her.
Selfish!” Strand’s chorus hissed. “I know what’s best for the world. I’m here to save it! Defying me is akin to spitting on Humanity. I am our best hope for the future.”