IF RIDING A satellite like a grank through the space battle had put Sabira on edge, stalking through the blind curving passages of Godsfall without armor pushed her nerves to the tip of the knife blade.
Why the hell didn’t one of them stop me?
She rubbed at the long scar across her breast. Her fingers came away wet and sticky, dripping red. Of the three, this was the chosen robe least shredded by Abomination Zika’s brutality, yet it was still soaked with blood. Every glyph of the Gods’ names decorating the robe had been splattered with scarlet.
Glyphs.
She’d almost forgotten her own. Wiping her hands across her cheeks, Sabira covered her tattoos with blood. The whole point of wearing the robe would be tossed down a shaft if a warseer noticed she had the wrong glyphs on her face.
She took a breath to focus, tucked the palukai beneath the bloody robe, and started forward again. She had left the weapons processing hub minutes ago and hadn’t run into a drone, chosen, or warseer yet. Orion-lem and Abomination Zika were farther back, unseen around the tight, rising curve of the helical corridor. The echoes of their footsteps let her know they still followed.
Sabira turned the bend and came to the fork Abomination Zika had told her about. She needed to keep right and spiral up until the next fork. A small machine clung to the ceiling where the passage branched, watching her. It remained perfectly still at her approach. Sabira wasn’t sure if that meant her disguise worked or not. She stepped into the right-hand passage at the same moment three warseers descended around the curve. Pushing herself against the wall, Sabira shrieked and pointed back the way she’d come.
“They’re down there! They’re killing everyone!”
It worked. The three warseers ran past her, barely casting a yellow eye her way.
Except for the last. He stopped running and turned back as the others charged ahead.
“Chosen,” he growled in Ihziz-Ri, “what are you doing with a palukai?”
“Shooting you in the face.”
The helmet’s visor was the weak spot, the one part of the armor not made from grank plates. At this close range, the visor completely vaporized. The warseer fell back like a toppled stone, reeking dark smoke from where his face had been.
“What was that?” called a female warseer from down the corridor. She barely finished speaking before laser fire flashed bright blue across the walls, and the heavy thuds of Abomination Zika cracking into warseer armor echoed up the passage.
Sabira looked at the warseer dead at her feet. The ashy ruin of his horned skull. She had killed him without hesitation. Yet when it had been chosen, she had fired wide. When she could have ended Abomination Zika, she had paused.
Not long ago, she killed Vleez and Humans without a second thought. The Vleez, especially, she had slaughtered without hesitation or remorse, while calling them vermin, infidel. After the eon sacrament, killing Humans and Vleez wouldn’t be easy, couldn’t be mindless. But Gohnzol-Lo Warseers had enslaved and tortured Humans for thousands of years. Of course, she should kill them without pausing a heartbeat. Shouldn’t she?
Would a time come when she changed her heart toward Warseers, too? If she drank the eon again, if she became the open-hearted warrior Gabriel called her to be, would even the loathsome Gohnzol-Lo be worth saving?
Or was her hatred rooted too deep?
She resumed her ascent of the helical passage. At the second fork, a strange, low sound pulsed through the air, throbbing in her chest. In her teeth. Wwaawuum. Wwaawuum. That was new.
The rising corridor ended, intersecting another wider passageway that encircled the upper tier. Across from her, a balcony opened to the heart cavity of Godsfall. The pulse emanated from within. The balcony’s vaulted arch framed the view of a nude woman hanging suspended in the air. A stream of cables from the back of her skull and spine held her aloft. Sabira recognized Daggeira’s heavily muscled body, though she couldn’t see her face. Standing on a nearby hover platform, High Godseer Atu Madzo was stuffed into a multilayered complexity of robes and sashes, with a tall mitre glowing cobalt blue atop ahns head. Beside them floated a trigonal pyramid of holy ore. Every few seconds, a rusty-orange sphere of gods bones orbited past.
The High Godseer’s back was to her. She had a clean kill shot, if she timed the passing orbits of gods bones correctly. Aiming her palukai rifle, Sabira registered a flicker of movement from the balcony. Her node wailed a shrill warning, and she dove to the floor. Plasma bolts sizzled overhead, vaporizing chunks out of the crystalline walls. Keeping low, she retreated around the bend, firing back as she went. Volleys of plasma fire burned the air and walls all around her. The air grew hot and thick, choking with smoke.
Drill me, that was close.
Finally out of the line of fire, she tore off the bloody robes and reactivated her armor. Rivulets of forma streamed from her belt and congealed into a protective shell. Creeping back up the curved passage, she darted her head out to try and locate the source of fire. Another barrage sizzled past. Hot embers fell on her scalp. Stinging fumes irritated her sinuses. She snapped back and fired blindly up the passage for cover. After tapping her collar to assemble the helmet, she triggered its comms.
“I’m pinned down. Can’t reach the upper balcony.”
“Be right up,” Orion answered.
“No,” said Abomination Zika, with Subaru’s dry and flat intonation. “Our tactics have been negated, but our strategy remains. You need to reach my primary iteration at the base of the cavity. I’ll help her.”
Sabira preferred Orion come up, but Subaru had a point. Another deadly spray of plasma bolts torched the passageway ahead, scattering hot ashes and fumes in her path. She needed whatever help she could get, and drilling fast.
“Sabira, I’m coming. How many opponents?”
“Spotted one on the balcony, taking cover on the left.” Sabira stayed tight against the wall, ready to spring around the bend to lay down supportive fire.
Heavy clanging steps echoed from below, followed by the charging undead cyborg. They ran with their exoskeleton arms crossed protectively in front of their head and torso. As soon as they rounded the final bend, a storm of incoming fire blasted them, machine and flesh.
The huge body absorbed most of the attack but never slowed. Sabira never had a chance to help with suppressive fire. Abomination Zika bulled through cross passage and onto the balcony, scooped up the warseer in their terrible embrace, and jumped. They arced out into the open air of the heart cavity, bounced off an orb of holy ore, and plummeted out of sight.
“Godsdamn.”