June is already free. I don’t know how she did it, but as the graysuits get lost in their panic, their fear rising to replace the flames of their dead fire, I catch sight of her slipping across the small campsite, dodging between the streams of light the breaking sun provides. She is fast and agile, the weight of her many years lifted by urgency. Even with the Artery closed, her purpose eclipses all else: she is going to save her babies.
“The walls are yellow and blue,” Rand cries, as if behind the delirium of the venom he still understands the fear. “The doors are falling!”
The third graysuit scrambles for a buzzgun. It’s the only thing they know to do. The Albaturean gwabi have risen from where they lay resting. Their blank eyes show no fear, but I wonder if threads of it are still sewn into their muscles, if inside they are twitching to run but are held in place by the Zoo’s bonds.
I struggle at my own. I’d risen to my knees at some point, shoving Captain Williams’s pin back into the fold of my suit with my grandfather’s map, the soil still clinging to my face and finding its way into my mouth. My hand throbs, wet with blood. What I’ve done seems to spiral down from the sky like a wide-winged oscree, down and down until it lands on my shoulder and whispers in my ear: It’s coming for you. You called it with your blood; now the dirixi will answer.
The graysuits are shouting and they shouldn’t be, but they’ve realized June is trying to free the eyenu and they can’t decide whether killing her is more important than saving their own skins. The dirixi could be a mile away, it could be five miles away. All we know is that it will be here soon.
One of my wrists feels loose. I stumble to my feet, unbalanced without my arms to help, and use all my strength to pull my hands in opposite directions. The bonds, whatever they’re made of, cut into my skin, and perhaps more blood emerges into the thick jungle air, but it doesn’t matter. One drop. A hundred. It’s enough.
The bonds snap just as June frees another eyenu. I start to move toward her across the clearing, but Rand whirls on me, his buzzgun aimed at my chest.
“The comet is too big!” he shrieks, delirious. His eyes are wild but as empty as the gwabi’s. The beasts don’t move. The third graysuit appears to be searching frantically for their remotes, hoping the gwabi will defend against the coming threat. He has no idea that what he’s hoping for is smoke. That the gwabi, if they had their own minds, would already be fleeing. Only humans think this is something that can be fought.
Frozen, my eyes move toward my hand, the blood wandering down from my palm to my wrist. Bloodshot with venom, Rand’s eyes follow mine, and when they settle on the red ribbon running from my skin, he stares blankly for a moment.
“You . . . ,” he starts, but can’t finish. He doesn’t need to. Despite the effect of the vusabo, he knows I did this.
Manx has attacked June. They wrestle on the ground, all but one eyenu free. The birds squall with terror, the nearness of the dirixi competing with fear for their mother. One rushes to where the two women fight, bringing its long beak down on the graysuit’s shoulder with ferocious speed. Manx screams, and the beak comes away red. Two more eyenu rush to help, and Manx falls away from June, who lies shaking on the ground. Without her cloak she looks small and frail, every bit of her almost two hundred years. Rand watches this scene over his shoulder, his mouth opening and closing soundlessly, the buzzgun still trained on my chest.
I leap forward, grabbing the long muzzle and shoving it skyward. I expect it to fire, but it doesn’t; Rand merely grunts in surprise and stumbles backward toward where the third graysuit fumbles with one of their packs. Rand and I are still struggling when the other man withdraws a square black remote.
One of the gwabi immediately becomes alert as a button on the remote glows red. Its eyes, still blank, narrow into slits. It moves forward, its gait as jerky and unnatural as it had been when it had tracked me to the Vagantur’s escape pod. If it’s even the same one. With their selves stripped away, there is no differentiating between the creatures Albatur has stolen.
The roar from the dirixi rends the jungle, turning everything static; the air ripples like water. My fist connects with Rand’s face in the moment he allows fear to make him still, and the impact makes me cry out, one of the knuckles of my already injured hand cracking, the blood still moving in a slow line from my palm. When the gwabi leaps, I find myself holding the buzzgun, and when it fires, the bolt of light leaving my hands and snapping through the air into the massive airborne body is as if all my worst dreams have flowed from inside my head and gathered in a swarm before my eyes. The gwabi falls, twitching, the eyes still blank but now somehow blanker, life leaving the grand muscles and traveling elsewhere, somewhere far. I drop the gun, my hands shaking like the ground. Everything is shaking.
June is gone. Manx hauls herself from the ground, bleeding, screaming obscenities at her two comrades. Rand crawls away from me, afraid of the gun when he should be afraid of everything else. I scream too, but it doesn’t sound real: I don’t hear myself. All I hear is the echoing silence of the jungle, watching us and knowing that the noise I have brought is what will put us in the soil.
When the dirixi breaks through the tree line, it pauses. It’s smaller than the last one I had seen. I stare at it, empty. My fear is a planet—I live on it. The flaming eyes pass over the scene before it, blazing with gleeful hunger. Manx, streaming blood from the wound inflicted by the eyenu, is closest. She stumbles sideways, then backward, her escape slowed by her desperate need to keep her eyes on the thing that means her harm. Maybe she’s still screaming, maybe instinct has silenced her. It doesn’t matter because it doesn’t save her. I watch her disappear into that jagged mouth, shreds of her visible for only a moment before they are lost in the black hole of the dirixi. It rises onto its back legs, screeching victory.
Buzzguns fire and I am running. The jungle swallows me and I make my way down its green throat, even when something hot and sharp strikes my shoulder, sending me down into the dirt, the pain erupting like a scream. My suit screams too: I feel its pain, a thousand tiny fibers recoiling from the burn, trying to repair themselves against this unknown assailant. I stumble to my feet again, my breath coughing in and out, my legs wobbling as if I am not a creature made for land. Beneath me, that land shakes. There’s no way of knowing how far or how near I am to death, or how near death is to me. It is near enough. It is near enough for every roar to turn my skin into water.
Water.
The gentle sound of its movement had reached me when I’d awoken in the camp and now it reaches me again between roars. Soft. A whisper of a trickle, or the lap of a wave. In my mind, I imagine the river and its bowing plants, the noxious bubbles rising to save me from the death that hounds my heels. I can make it. I can make it there. I don’t hear the rush of other animals to this source of safety, but I tell myself they are already there, collapsing into nausea like a cool, safe bed. I force my legs onward. The river. I will make it to the river.
I think behind me I hear screams. One person. Two? I tell myself the screams don’t belong to June. Every time my foot strikes the ground I tell myself it is her foot, carrying her and her flock far up the mountain, back to the archives, underground where death can’t reach them. Every breath I take blows her toward safety. I smell the water now. It fills my nose with hope.
The pain in my shoulder screams louder and louder. The place where I cut my palm throbs. I think I can smell my own blood, mixing with the hope that drives me onward. I can still feel my suit trying to repair itself, but it’s struggling, and it can’t heal me, the hole in my body left open to the air.
Air. I almost run out into it. The ground ends. Something pulls me back, some last shred of sense that sends me scrambling backward, my butt landing hard on the rocky ground, pain lancing upward. Stones slide under my feet, pitching out into the nothing. There is no river.
I might whisper a curse, or perhaps something sadder, a groan that comes from my bones. The water I smelled was not the river. There are no clusters of bending plants here, no shaggy predators leaping from the trees to save me with their symbiosis. The air is devoid of bubbles. It’s devoid of everything except the smell of my blood, joined a moment later with the sky-shattering shriek of the dirixi. The heat rises on Faloiv, the sun’s crimson eye like a balm on my skin, but the fear clings to me like ice. I can’t move. I stare far down—far, far down, impossibly far. Water there at the bottom of the nothing. A vast blue lagoon laid like a disk across the land. Behind me there is only jungle, the smell of death creeping out like fingers over the soil, seeping through to reach my feet. The death smells familiar. It could be my own.
The dirixi hulks out of the trees on all fours, its nostrils flexing, taking in the fumes of the trail I left behind. The blood dripping from my hand is a breadcrumb compared to the soaking feeling of pain that is a red sponge on my shoulder. I wonder if the beast sees me, or if it sees only my blood, my body a mere vessel that contains what it requires. I breathe shallowly, not to be silent but because I know no other way. My breath is gone, leaking away like my blood.
“Thank you,” I say, the words falling clumsy and strange from my lips. The Artery is a wide hallway in my head: I lack the control to close it. Inside, the dirixi’s hunger and joy are unbearably bright. It’s almost beautiful, the perfection of its savagery.
Each step toward me shakes the ground, sending more stones flying out into space, where maybe they eventually fall. Or maybe they float. I’m too weak to care. When I find myself floating, my surprise is more real than the breath in my lungs. I don’t know if I jumped, if I fell. I float down. All I smell is blood. All I hear is the roar that rips the air and not my skin, and in the Artery, all the joy growing spines of rage.