The Way of the Brother Gods (15 page)

"Leave him alone," Malja said.

Wuchev looked up, his face soaked, and spit at her. "This is my ship, and the boy is my property. And, by Korstra, nobody is going to order me around on my own ship."

In one swift motion, Malja slid Viper free. As Wuchev raised the leather strap for another strike, Malja cut his forearm clean off. Wuchev screamed as blood geysered from his open wound.

Malja swung Viper for the kill, but when she should have felt her blade hit bone, she sliced through air. Captain Wuchev was gone. The ship was gone. The ocean was gone. Malja stood in an empty field of waist-high grass.

A cool breeze crossed her skin. Meat roasted on a fire nearby, its savory scent wetting her mouth. She took three steps toward the aroma when she heard a young boy scream from the opposite direction.

Darting across the field, she scanned for any sign of the boy. He continued to cry out but she couldn't pinpoint where the sound came from. Every time she turned one way, the voice shifted to come from another direction. The field seemed to flow forever, and it all looked the same. The more she changed direction, the more confusingly similar it all appeared.

Breathing hard and getting nowhere, Malja stopped. Though she had never heard his voice before, her instincts told her it had to be him. "Tommy!" she called out, but now there was only silence. "Tommy!" The empty bottle in her pocket grew heavier with every passing second as if it could drag her under the ground, drown her in the grass, make her know that no matter what she ever did, she never would save the boy.

She gazed up at the passing sun. Three enormous winged-beasts circled the air in the distance. She had never seen such things before — wide, leathery wings attached to a furry torso; white spots dappled the fur while a long, feathered tail whipped in the air like a war standard; a blunted beak did little to mar an already hideous head.

One broke its circling pattern, folded in its wings, and dived. It disappeared from view for a few seconds, re-emerging several feet away. From its mouth, a tan cloth dangled — Tommy's shirt.

Malja tore off for the boy. Keeping her eyes on the sky so as not to lose sight of the winged-beasts or of her direction, she pushed her legs harder. Cawing, another dived toward the ground. She heard a painful yelp.

Breaking through the grass, she entered a cleared area. Tommy lay face down. The winged-beast perched on a fallen log a few feet away. It watched Tommy, waiting for him to die.

Malja raised Viper and let out her war cry. She shot forward, leaping over Tommy, and swiped at the beast. It shot into the air, but Viper caught its tail.

Except the blade found only emptiness. The beast had vanished. The field was gone. All had disappeared again. All was dark.

She heard the steady rumble of a ship's engines, the vibrations coming through the metal floor. Rain and thunder raged outside. Stale urine and rotting food assaulted her nostrils. As her eyes adjusted, she knew exactly where she had been taken. The battery room on Wuchev's ship — the place she had first met Tommy.

It was a small room with two large storage batteries composing one wall. Rusting pipes and thick wires decorated the rest. Chained to one pipe, huddled in the darkest back corner, Tommy whimpered and watched.

Malja took a step toward him, remembering how she freed him from this horrible situation. And she stopped. This was the point, the moment in time when she changed his life forever — sent him on a path to Barris Mont. Sure, she freed him, but was it worth it? His life had been in constant danger with her. He rarely slept with a roof over his head. Sometimes food was scarce. Worse, since being with her, he had been using all kinds of magic — not just producing electricity — and that magic had led him to the edge of insanity.

She didn't fool herself into thinking that staying on the ship would have been anything wonderful, but at least the only threat Tommy faced would have been Wuchev. Not the host of lunatics that confronted them all the time. Not the regular attempts to use, abuse, and kill them. She made the choice to take the boy — her decision. She could have left him. She changed the course of an entire life merely by acting on the thought that she could set him up for a better life. But why should she be the one to decide which life was worse for the boy? That's something a god would do.

Tommy leaned out as far as his chains would allow. He seemed to recognize her. He smiled, but the darkness crept in around them, and all disappeared.

Bright daylight blinded her at first. At length, she found herself standing in the middle of city ruins. Once-tall buildings had collapsed to the ground. A few that managed to stay intact leaned into others like dead trees. Debris coated every inch of the city, piled high enough to block easy passage in most areas. In fact, Malja saw that only one path had been cleared away.

She wound her way along until the path opened into a strange scene. Frozen in time, Tommy and Barris Mont stood on opposite sides of an ornate pedestal. On the pedestal, Malja saw a pillow — clean and shiny, smooth like nothing that ever existed since the Devastation. And the pillow bore an indent just the right shape to match the bottle in her pocket.

This was it. Barris had said she would know when she got there, and she knew.

She walked straight to the pedestal, her chest lifting at the idea that she had reached the end of this experience, and pulled the bottle out. Though nobody else could move, she swore she heard Tommy's soft tones. She looked over and saw how he struggled so hard to stay sane. The toll was evident in the stressed lines of his face.

She looked at Barris Mont. He stared right at her as if urging her to finish her task and save the boy. But he also seemed hungry for her to act.

She let out a pitiful laugh. Here she was again, holding lives in her hand, deciding the fate of so many. Maybe Harskill was right. Maybe they were gods — just not in the mystical sense of Kryssta and Korstra. Maybe being a god meant having the power to make these choices and acting upon that power.

Lifting the bottle, Malja peered through the glass. She frowned. Of all things, why should a bottle represent Tommy? The places she had been — the ship's hold, the field, the battery room — were all from Tommy's head. Why would he choose a perfect bottle, something he had probably never seen in his life, to represent him?

She glanced at Barris. He also possessed some of Tommy's body and mind, and he had lived before the Devastation. He had seen bottles like this one before. Couldn't this bottle really be Barris looking to free himself?

She looked upon Tommy again. Fighting insanity? Possibly. But concern, worry, maybe even fear seemed to paint his face.

Malja let out a barrage of curses and kicked at the rubble on the ground. Why make her figure this out? This wasn't where she excelled. She knew Viper. She knew fighting. She knew how to read an enemy's intentions and counter the attack. She knew how to rate a weapon. She understood blades. That had always been the way for her. The blade.

"The blade," she whispered. "Is that what I am?
The Blade?
"

Uncle Gregor had taught her to seek out her true purpose in life. He often said that such things were never easy to find, that many never discovered what they really were, but that if she found it, she would know because it would make sense when all else was confusion. That's exactly how she felt and thought.

The Blade. She was a force of strength, of a warrior, of power. Of course, she always knew that fighting was her best asset, but now she saw it as more. It wasn't just fighting but the entire art of it all. It wasn't simply slashing at an enemy. Viper was an extension of her. And there was a purity in the fight, a clearing of all confusions. In those moments, the movement of the body, the strategy of the opponent, the precision of the strike were all unified into action without debate. No worries over the future, no regrets over the past, just that moment in time. That purity. That's what she thought of when she repeated
The Blade
in her head.

Fawbry read books and prayed to Kryssta, all in some effort to understand how he fit in the world around him. Despite her protests, Tommy explored magic for the same purpose. But she rejected those methods because they didn't make sense to her — they didn't feel right. She had hers all along. She just didn't know it. The Blade was her way. That was her power. And perhaps, like Harskill said, that made her a god.

She looked at Barris Mont. Her fighting instincts screamed that he was a liar. He had used Tommy to survive and now he wanted to take the boy over. She needed no other thought. All her life with Tommy, all her instincts, all her training, every aspect of her unified into knowing exactly what to do.

She threw the bottle to ground, happy to watch it shatter into countless shards.

Chapter 18

Malja slammed backward, her arm ripping from the tendrils that connected her to Tommy, and slumped to the floor. Every inch of her singed with pains both new and old. Her chest still ached where Harskill had struck, and her mouth tasted bitter with blood.

Fawbry rushed to her side. "This was stupid. I'm sorry. Please tell me you're okay."

Unable to open one eye, Malja lifted her head. "Better than ever," she said, and part of her believed it. Something wriggled along her arm. When she looked down, she saw the tail-end of a tendril slip under her skin.

She pinched her skin around the tendril, trying to squeeze it back out. It slipped in further. She dug her finger in, leaving a gash as she tried to get at the thing. But her do-kha moved in fast, sliding down her arm and under her digging finger, so that in seconds she could no longer touch her skin. The do-kha would heal her wound, maybe it would get rid of the tendril, too.

She snapped her focus up, ignoring the pain the sudden motion brought with it, and asked, "Is Tommy okay?"

Fawbry slid to the side, and they both looked across the room. Though his head hung low, Tommy opened his eyes — his real eyes. They glowed and shifted colors. His tattoos glowed as well. And there were more. Tattoos covered every visible part of him as if shattering the bottle had not only shattered Barris Mont's bindings, but released every spell within him.

Tommy opened his hands and swirls of magic pooled in his palms as if he carried puddles of steaming power. It dribbled between his fingers and wherever the substance hit the floor, small flames shot upward before disappearing. The bitter odor of magic engulfed the room.

"W-What happened?" Fawbry asked.

Malja looked to Fawbry but suddenly saw herself and Fawbry from across the room.
She was floating with her arms out, palms open, and magic seething through her body. She was seeing through Tommy's eyes.
Shaking her head, she returned to her own sight.

"Oh no," she said, looking at the tendril wriggling under the skin of her arm.

"Don't say
Oh no
and then nothing." Fawbry's voice raised pitch to near panic. "My Kryssta, what's going on?"

Malja looked upon her bruised body and saw all her injuries. Everything below the skin. She could see Fawbry's heart beating rapidly and hear her own rasping breaths. She strained to hear Tommy but heard the entire world instead and had no way of knowing what sounds belonged to the boy. She raised her hand filled with magic and pointed at her body.

"What's he doing?" Fawbry asked, his arms spreading out to protect her while his legs scooted him away.

"It's okay," Malja said. "I think he's going to help me."

A green-tinged light spiraled from Tommy's hand, stretched across the room, and layered over Malja. When it touched her, every nerve in her skin fired off. She screamed, her voice rattling the thin walls. She desperately wanted to switch back into Tommy's head but didn't know how it had happened before. Tears flowed from her and her body arched toward the ceiling. From the corner of her eye, she saw Fawbry curled in the far corner, crying out, reaching out but unable to get any closer.

And then it was over.

The green-tinged light fell apart like a breaking fog, and with it, so went the pain. She felt refreshed like she had enjoyed an uninterrupted night's sleep. Malja jumped to her feet, her body restored — maybe better than it had been in years. She looked up at Tommy. Had he destroyed the tendril, too? No. She could still feel it in her arm. She could still feel the connection to Tommy.

In his head, floating on the opposite side, she saw her own astonished face looking back.

"I'm not a god," she said. "He is."

Fawbry crawled over to Cole, asleep near the air duct entrance, and said, "Heal her, too. If you can do that for Malja, heal Cole, too."

A hard scrabbling sound came up the air duct. Fawbry peeked around the edge and jumped back. He didn't have to explain. One of the giant insects crawled in, its legs clicking as it reared back and hissed at them.

Casually turning, Tommy flicked his fingers in the insect's direction. It paused long enough for Malja to see a change overcome its body. If it were human, she would've thought it was confused and worried. Then it bent backwards with a loud snap. Its body lifted into the air and its sides folded in. What now comprised its torso, which included some legs and a bit of its head, crushed inward and it folded yet again. With every successive fold, it snapped and crunched. Blood and goo splashed out only to be caught mid-air and thrown back in. The same amount of matter continued to be shoved into a smaller and smaller space until the giant insect had been crushed into the size of a stone good for skipping along a quiet stream.