CHAPTER 18 ADRIA #2
“I won’t just leave while you—” But Kori’s comeback is cut off by an involuntary scream. She staggers sideways, terror struck, as freezeshot fire obliterates the ground where she knelt only a moment ago. “I’m still alive because of you. I won’t let you die protecting me.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, heiress.” I wrestle another rebel for control, breaking two of the fingers that weakly clutch their freezeshot pistol.
“This is about protecting my ransom”—another crack, this one a knee—“and my kingdom.” I hate the familiarity of my boot crashing through their skull.
“Now get behind the strongest obstacle you can find”—I could crush the pistol, too, but instead I shoot it at a loose piece of the ceiling, sending the stone hunk careening down on another pair of rebels—“before I take you by the ankle and fly you there.”
At that, Kori seems to reluctantly get the message. In my periphery, I watch her dive behind the nearest intact target mannequin, hands over her head. Briefly, my panic ebbs, as I’m convinced the situation is under control.
Then … an unholy harmony of metallic screeching and canine barking.
With six eyes blazing crimson and three mouths snarling in unison, Russ tears around the corner, with a new rider astride his back—none other than Aspect the mech. One of their metal hands buries itself in Russ’s midnight fur to maintain balance; the other pumps a fist into
the air as Aspect shrieks, “ASPECT—AND TRIPLE DOG—PROTECT EVERYONE!”
And just like that, my beloved pet becomes a cannonball of fur, teeth, and newfound metal friend, charging directly into the closest rebel foe.
“TAKE THAT!” Aspect roars. As Russ uses two mouths to seize the rebel from either end, they add, “AND THAT!”
But when Russ moves to gore the enemy, viciously shaking them with multiple sets of jaws, the motion becomes too much. Aspect tries to hold on with two hands instead of one, too late—tumbling to the ground, yelling at a painful pitch all the way down.
The string of curses that slips from my mouth would make even the most battle-hardened of my soldiers blush.
I’m still fending off attacks—a kick caught by my knee, a freezeshot blast deflected by a supernaturally energized sweep of my wing, a thrown punch caught by an open palm that crumples the knuckles—but at the edge of my vision, I watch in muted disbelief as a robot programmed for simple mining runs and basic greetings hurls its entire lopsided body into hulking hunks of nightfolk muscle.
For all the memories Kori may have illegally installed in Aspect, clearly even a flicker of self-preservation was not among them.
In the clamorous confusion, Russ struggles not to trample his friend.
Padded canine feet scramble for balance as Aspect loses theirs, good leg tripping over peg leg once again, dragging the mech back to the floor.
While two of Russ’s heads continue mauling the rebel, the third head leans down to check on Aspect, even licking Aspect’s head with a big, slobbery tongue of concern.
Reenergized, the mech stands, head held high but peg leg wobbling—and then full-blown leaps at the nearest rebel, arms and legs pinwheeling like a windmill and a buzz saw’s unholy offspring.
Aspect is spare parts sewn together in the approximation of a friend, not a true flesh-and-blood companion. I know that. But I swear I hear Kori’s wince from across the room when, within moments, a slug of
freezeshot spins Aspect’s only remaining knee 180 degrees, the kneecap crashing into their own butt as they fall to the floor with a squeak.
“We can fix that, Kori,” I shout over the din of continued combat.
I crouch and then leap, borne to a dizzying height by my outstretched wings, then plunging like a batbeast onto the soldier that maimed Aspect, ripping and tearing as I land.
Frankly, I wouldn’t have had the chance for such a boldly lethal maneuver if Aspect hadn’t distracted the soldier in question.
In her own roundabout way, Kori did help.
Kori’s masked face pokes around the side of her target practice mannequin. “Do I want to know what that was?”
“It wasn’t … not … Aspect’s knee,” I sigh, flicking blood from my claws, shaking it from my robes.
I’ll be a sight when this is over. If proximity to my claws and fangs and unnatural breadth wasn’t enough to terrify Kori into staying away from me, maybe a scarlet shower will do the trick. I hope so for both our sakes.
Kori fully emerges from behind her shelter then, freezeshot shotgun raised once again. “What in the hell is Aspect doing here?”
“You didn’t call them?”
“That’s not in their program.”
“But the pinwheel of death was?”
Armor aside, Kori covers her masked face with a gloved hand. “I may have installed a memory, a while back, of my jumping off the bed when I couldn’t sleep as a kid. But it was supposed to trigger creativity.”
“Well, it was definitely a creative way to lose a kneecap,” I admit, sweeping another soldier’s legs out from under her. “Again.”
Briefly, Russ pauses gnawing on a rebel to observe Aspect’s new injury. Amidst all the spit and blood, all three canine mouths release soft, sad moans at the state of their mechanical friend.
“You do realize a sentient mech has never been born,” Kori counters, firing off another blast of freezeshot. This time it connects with one of her targets—a shoulder, not a chest, but it’s enough to make the rebel in
question drop his blade, leaving him open to my boot through his ribs. “There’s no blueprint for this.”
Even as I duck another freezeshot blast, I crack a smile—the kind I haven’t managed in ages, let alone while fighting for my life.
Since my own overcharge, since laying my parents forever to rest, battle has been a crimson current that carries my whole self away, without even debris to keep me afloat.
But Kori’s voice amidst the maelstrom is a rock above the red, red waves, solid enough to grip, keeping just enough of me above the bloody flood.
This feeling is strange and hot and pulsing where I’ve slowly fallen into icy stasis, and I should shove it away, focus on the battle. But it’s proof that beneath my enhanced capacity to kill and to break … part of me still knows how to laugh. So, despite myself, I indulge Kori.
“You’ll just have to write the blueprint, when Aspect finally achieves sentience.
” I spread my wings wide to catch a freezeshot blast that would certainly have missed me, but arched perilously close to one of Russ’s precious heads.
I would rather see my own kneecap blown off than watch the light of life leave my companion’s deep-black eyes.
I give him a quick scratch under one chin before moving farther away, lest a shot intended for me strike my pet instead. “Add it to our records.”
Kori saunters cautiously forward, gun raised, gaze steady on our enemies but voice stable and tethered to me. “And what makes you think I won’t save it for the Daylands library?”
“I think you feel you owe me,” I say without thinking.
Kori’s own laugh is wicked. “Oh, there are other ways I can repay that debt.” Her next shot misses the rebels entirely, nearly freezing my own hairline and horns as it whizzes by.
But I don’t think she was talking about combat, anyway. The heat in my face and sudden rigidity in my body have nothing to do with adrenaline anymore.
I’m so distracted, in fact, that when the next rebel launches herself headlong into me, freezeblade great sword steadied with both hands,
I react a whole instant too late. I twist, shift. Start to raise an arm to guard my throat.
Not enough.
Cold splinters through my sternum, then a hot, liquid flood that I know must be blood.
A curse slips through my teeth. The alloy of nightfolk blades is of similar composition to freezeshot canisters, except it’s been heated in a Passage lava crater forge to a stubbornly solid form.
Solid, that is, until it’s plunged into an opponent’s flesh, and the rapid shift in temperature turns the blade back to liquid freezeshot that immediately floods the veins.
Given the many gifts of the nightfolk, from energy blasts like my own to telekinesis to telepathy to empowered healing—not to mention our evolved battle reflexes, vital for surviving in the dark—it’s rare for a blade to actually get close enough to break the skin.
But I know, from military demonstrations by my father that I was forbidden to look away from, how terrible a way it is to die.
At first, I think I’m screaming, but I know my own screams to be guttural, animalistic things, and what I hear is a high, thin, splintering sound. Kori. I should tell her to fire again, her terrible aim aside. I should tell her where to go to signal my soldiers for help.
The only word my tongue can form is “run.”
Pain lances through my body, followed by chills.
I roar, incoherent. Something is slamming, heavy and relentless, like a battering ram into my side, and it takes a long, cloudy moment before I recognize it to be Russ’s heads, desperately fighting to keep his master awake and out of death’s encroaching claws.
Language failing me, I try to wave him away, but my arms feel—no, my whole body feels—like a memory.
Then there are cold hands on my chest, neither the stubbornly armored hands of the rebels nor the necessarily gloved hands of the Daylands’ heiress.
I blink to clear splattering black spots from my vision.
When the room comes back into focus, I’m lying on the floor, one hand pressed weakly against my spurting sternum, while Thaane
towers above me. The formerly knife-wielding rebel coughs and kicks as he holds her aloft, squeezing the breath from her throat.