26
REVELATION AND REGRET
BECAUSE she didn’t need to understand, grab weapons, or bark orders, Mac was first to the shelter. She tore back the flap that protected the occupants from the dust and staggered inside.
The screaming had stopped.
The lights were gone.
“Brymn?”
Air stirred wisps of her hair. “Goooooo,” it said. “Gooooo.”
Gooseflesh rose along Mac’s skin. She felt the flap open behind her and reached to stop Nik, knowing beyond doubt it would be him.
“Brymn. It’s Mac.”
“Goooo—ooo.”
That voice alone could give nightmares. No wonder they’d inherited legends of ghouls and monsters from the Chasm. Mac wrinkled her nose, smelling rot. “There are two people here,” she whispered to the man waiting by her shoulder. “We need light to find them.” When Nik hesitated, she pushed. “He won’t hurt me.”
He won’t want to hurt me, Mac told herself, trying to keep very still. She heard Nik ordering people away, calling for a light. Closer, she heard rain and pictured Brymn curled in agony, bleeding from his wounds. She could picture it, but something kept her at the entry.
A hand touched her arm, followed it down to put a light in her hand. Mac aimed it at the dust, then switched it on.
On Brymn. What had been Brymn. He—it—was lying on the floor, arms ending in a pool of bright green, a pool disturbed by drips from . . . Mac let the light trace the drips upward . . .
. . . from what had been a woman. Now, ribs dissolved as she stared, the mass turning into droplets as Mac tried to breathe, the droplets collecting in the pool, the pool where Brymn—drank.
The light had followed her gaze. The metamorphosis was complete. His hands had become mouths. His shoulders and sides had grown membranes that shimmered. His organs shone through his skin, including the stomach where green gathered with each sucking sound. A pufferfish Dhryn, Mac thought inanely, too terrified to move, unable to believe she’d seen this form before without screaming.
She had to help Nik. He’d yanked the other casualty from his bed, and was now dragging him to the door flap without care for anything but speed.
But Mac couldn’t move. She watched as yellow mucus trailed from Brymn’s nostrils. Grief? His eyes, lidless, their orbs sinking below the skin as she watched, looked at her. Knew her—even as the light of intelligence flickered and died. Still, his real mouth trembled around a word: “Promisssse.”
“I know, Lamisah,” Mac said, activating the ’scalpel even as she threw it into one sinking eye.
What had been Brymn filled its body with a single breath and launched itself toward the ceiling, green drops spraying outward from the mouths. One hit Mac’s hand as she covered her face. She screamed. Another. Somehow she remained conscious as Nik grabbed her around the waist to carry her outside.
Behind them, she could hear weapons fire and closed her eyes, sobbing with more than pain.
