The windship came to an abrupt stop, and Nico banged her chin on the railing. Azan tripped into a pair of lines. Neema’s gourd-curves caught Suri’s reed-limbs as the two of them went sliding into the mast, rattling the clay lamp and dripping oil.
“This is it,” Rasia announced, both hands on her hips. She hadn’t so much as flinched.
Through the tousled strands of her hair, Nico squinted at the valley crawling with black shapes that gleamed red in the sun. Not a gonda in sight.
“Those are scorpions,” Neema said flatly.
“Congratulations. You can see.” Rasia stomped toward the bow and stopped as a gust of wind greeted her head-on, slapping her dry, tangled, wild mane of hair straight into Nico’s face. Nico coughed on the sudden onslaught and batted her way through the storm of hair.
“The gonda we are looking for has been hunting this band of gran-scorpions for a while now,” Rasia said. “All we need to do is wait, and it’ll come to us.”
“How are you so certain?” Neema asked. “It goes against everything we learned in school. Gonda don’t hunt in hard terrain.”
Rasia rolled her eyes so hard that her neck rolled too, sending hair flying full force back into Nico’s face, again. So. Much. Hair. “We aren’t the only ones starving. A gonda hunts in any terrain if it’s hungry enough.”
Nico finally fought herself free of the tangles and flung herself to the other side of the windship. To her right, Azan grasped his knees and his shoulders shuddered in barely contained laughter.
Nico gathered herself. She shook the sand from her pants, bright white and used to belong to Ava-ta. She straightened her top, combed back the strands of her hair that had escaped in Rasia’s mad dash across the Desert, and tightened them all into a clean, no-nonsense ponytail.
Then, all Nico’s effort was for naught when Rasia grabbed the corded end of the sail and jumped over the railing, taking the entire windship with her.
The deck lurched to the side.
Nico hit her elbow, slid down, and rolled into the rough, sandy ground. The interspersed rocks scraped and tore at her pants. Her hair popped loose, and every crevice crunched with sand. Nico spit grains from her mouth as she jumped to her feet, furious. She’s lucky she didn’t land wrong on the glaive strapped to her back.
It was common for kulls to make camp out of the windship sail by turning the ship on its side. The sail often doubled as shelter and shade from the sun, but who in their right mind staked the ship while their kull was still on board?
Enough of this!
Nico stomped over to Rasia who slammed her heel atop the stake and knotted the line in one efficient loop.
“What is wrong with you?” Nico asked. “Someone could have gotten hurt!”
Rasia leaned over the knee of the foot pressed onto the stake. Because their tahs were best friends, Nico had fuzzy recollections of what Rasia looked like as a budchild, specifically, because a toddler Rasia could never keep her shroud on. That wild and energetic bud had bloomed wilder and more maniacal with age. Her brows sprouted bushy, her hair was barely combed, and she wore sand like a second, sunburnt skin. Rasia’s lips curled into a hyena grin. “You really need to lighten up and have a little fun.”
“That was dangerous! It was selfish! You continually display a complete lack of regard for your kull!” Nico pointed to the others to further her point. Azan crawled, emerging out of a hill of sand. The ground flashed and glinted with all the knives that had fallen from Neema’s clothes. Suri inspected her crushed satchel of herbs.
Rasia shrugged. “They’re not dead, though.”
Dealing with Rasia made Nico want to wring her shroud, except Nico wasn’t wearing her shroud anymore. She had tied it around her waist as a makeshift belt. In substitute, Nico pulled at her face and water smudged her fingertips. Why did the bones have to choose Rasia?
“Relax. You all hang out here, out of my way, and I’ll handle the rest.”
“What are you talking about? You can’t kill a gonda by yourself.”
“Yes. I can.”
“That’s nonsense. How are you going to steer a windship and attack a gonda at the same time?”
“Multitasking.”
“That’s insane! No one can do everything!”
“I can,” Rasia declared, then spun on her heel. This time, Nico ducked under the hair.
Rasia rummaged through the inventory compartment of the windship. She grabbed a whetstone, an unstrung bow, and a spear to add to the curved khopesh swords strapped to her back. She threw a two-fingered wave behind her (a gesture equivalent to, “get sand in your cooch”), then walked toward a ledge off the rise to become a lone speck in the distance.
Nico had no words to describe the sheer vastness of Rasia’s audacity and ego. She hoped Rasia didn’t get them all killed.
Nico’s head hurt. She didn’t know if it was the stress, the heat, Rasia, or a combination of all three. She pressed the heel of her palm to her forehead and cooled the gathered sweat. Nico turned to find Azan climbing out from the underbelly of the windship with a large supply of rations in his arms.
“What are you doing?” Nico hastened over and entered under the cool shade of the wing-sail. “We need to save the food until we absolutely need it. We don’t know if Rasia’s plan is going to work. We might be out here for days.”
“But I’m hungry now,” Azan complained.
“We need to be smart about this. Azan, start sharpening the weapons that Rasia didn’t take with her. Neema, help him. Suri and I will look for kindling to start a fire. The sun is setting quick.”
“I thought Rasia was doing this all by herself,” Neema said, sharp and biting. Several of Neema’s braids had unraveled, with many of the beads lost in the overturn of the windship. Seemed that she had found most of her knives, though.
“We are a kull. Get those weapons sharpened. We might need them sooner rather than later.”
Azan and Neema grumbled but eventually collected the weapons Rasia had left behind. Apparently, the Grankull had provided only one whetstone, which Rasia had taken, but luckily, Azan had brought one of his own.
There was so much to do in so little time. They needed to build a fire to ward against predators and the cold of the Desert night. They needed to establish a schedule for watch and turns at tending the fire. They needed to take an inventory of every item the Grankull supplied them with so they knew what they had on hand, something they should have done before they set sail, but Rasia hadn’t given anyone the time to do so! Regardless of whether Rasia’s gonda showed up, Nico wanted to be prepared for everything.
“Are you okay?” Suri, her best friend, asked as they hunted for kindling. Plenty of dried and cracked shrubbery littered the shadows and crevices of grand sandstone formations. They trekked through a small rainwater channel. Sand rolled into mud and pulled at their feet.
They were pretty far from the others, giving Nico the space to vent. “Rasia is just so, so, so . . . Ra-sia! She never does anything easy, everything always has to be her way, and she’s so inconsiderate of everyone around her. Rasia lives in her own world, and there is no room for anyone but herself!”
“Maybe you should tell them about Kai. Maybe they’ll be sympathetic.”
Nico could imagine how much of a shipwreck that conversation would be. She turned dawnward where she sensed Kai, oddly, walking in circles.
“They are not going to risk their Forging to help Kai. Especially not Rasia. Especially not Neema. You know Neema’s family history.” Nico broke the branches off a parched shrub. “What if he’s in danger? What if Zephyr never finds him?”
Suri placed a hand on Nico’s arm, and Nico flinched at the contact. Suri withdrew, and Nico immediately felt embarrassed by her childish reaction.
They’d been best friends their entire lives, ever since Suri’s tah was entrusted with Kai’s healing and care. It was ridiculous that every touch felt so new and unfamiliar.
Nico turned to Suri’s face; to her drapery of wheat hair; her soft, round expression; and unblemished bronze skin. Suri soothed, “Kai survived the Forging last year. He will be fine.”
“This isn’t how I expected the Forging to go. I thought we would have met up with Kai and Zephyr by now. Then here comes Rasia ruining all my plans. Now I’m stuck here, hunting her stupid gonda.”
“Have you thought about what we’re going to do if Rasia is right? What if we do kill a gonda tonight?”
Nico took a moment to pause. In all her mental preparations, she’d never considered what would happen if Rasia’s scheme did come to fruition. “Then you and the others can return to the Grankull, but . . . I can’t abandon jih. Perhaps I’ll convince the team to drop me off at the oasis on the way back. Then, I’ll continue. I’ll do it on my own if I must.”
Suri pressed branches and twigs and dry brush to her chest with one arm, then reached out with her free hand. Her fingers smelled of the herbs she had touched earlier. The fragrant scent wafted over Nico’s senses like a hit of incense when Suri caressed Nico’s cheek. Nico didn’t think anyone had ever touched her face as intimately as this.
“You don’t have to do it on your own.”
Suddenly, Suri’s lips were on Nico’s. Nico melted into the soft resistance and sucked in cloying air. Then, just as quickly, the kiss ended.
Nico felt unprepared for anything.
“Suri . . .” Nico felt herself tilting, off-balance. “I can’t.”
Suri scurried away.
Nico clutched the tinder to her chest and quickened her pace to catch up. Immediately, once Nico fell into step, Suri bowed her head and mumbled, “I’m sorry. I know you’re dealing with a lot. I didn’t mean to put that on you. But I’ve wanted to kiss you the moment we were freed of our shrouds.”
“I . . . it was nice.” It was Nico’s first, and she couldn’t have asked for anything sweeter. Perhaps it should be more of a shocking revelation that her childhood friend had a flame for her. If Nico were honest, she’d always known. But she had always been too busy treading water after tah’s death to pay it much attention.
“You shouldn’t let your feelings for me lead you down a path you’ll regret,” Nico said. “You are third-named, and the last-named of your siblings. You can’t afford to fail your Forging. If you choose to return to the Grankull with Rasia’s gonda, I won’t hold that against you. You need to make a name for yourself.”
Nico had never seen Suri angry. Nico had heard her anger, but she had never seen the flustered line on her brow, or the taut pull of her bowed lips.
“You’re the ohani, Nico. I care about Kai too, but you are far more important. I know you, Nico. You’d waste this entire Forging searching for Kai if forced to do so. You’d sacrifice everything for him. Despite how much you hate to hear it, you matter more. You are more important, and if this thing comes crashing down, I’m dragging you back home.”
Nico set her face to the wind, angry, frustrated, and conflicted by Suri’s promise of betrayal. Then Nico beseeched those steady brown eyes she’d known all her life. “If I make it out of this alive, and Kai doesn’t . . . I don’t know if I could keep pushing forward.”
Suri—soft-spoken, shy Suri, who had always been too afraid to raise her voice in class even when she had all the right answers—now spoke unwaveringly. “You will.”
Suri turned on her heel and walked briskly toward camp.
Nico hung back a few paces behind her. Nico could count on one hand the times she and Suri had disagreed. She understood Suri’s perspective, but if faced with the choice to abandon jih . . . Nico couldn’t do it. As Nico walked a half-step behind Suri, she promised herself that it would never come to that.
It wouldn’t. She’d save everyone. Nico promised.
They returned to the camp, and despite the lack of communication, Suri and Nico worked in a familiar tandem. Suri prepared the kindling, and Nico used the whetstone to spark the fire. Oddly, Azan watched all their actions with intense scrutiny, so close Nico felt Azan breathing over her shoulder.
The moment the first spark caught fire, Azan immediately asked, “Do you want to play rattle-bones?”
“Really?” Neema sneered. She studied a chip in one of her knives. “Out of all the things we’re able to bring, you brought a game?”
“You brought knives. What gonda are those going to kill?”
“There are things out here as dangerous as any gonda that my knives can kill just fine.”
“Whatever. My jihs agreed the most important item to bring for the Forging is something to pass the time.” Azan rattled a bag of colored black and white bones.
Rattle-bones was undeniably one of the most popular games in the gambling dens, the school yards, and the decks of windships. The pieces were created from animal bones, filed down and shaped into small pinky-sized squares. Each side was painted with a different combination of white, black, and one sole red face.
Azan looked at them all with round, shiny eyes and a practiced pout, an expression no doubt perfected as the last-named of four. It reminded Nico of Rae, her youngest jih, and she couldn’t help but to give in.
“Fine,” Nico relented. It was all worth it when Azan smiled. At rest, Azan had a plain face, but when he smiled, he was dazzling. Nico imagined he’d quickly learn how to use it to his advantage.
“I’ll play too,” Suri offered.
Not wanting to be the one left out, Neema eventually huffed over. Azan shuffled the bag of bones. He threw them into the redware clay skillet that came with the windship. They clanked and clattered. Quickly and efficiently, Azan pulled five from the fifty at the center, a standard practice to maintain the element of chance to keep the players from knowing which bones were in the game. You guessed the black faces.
“Twenty-five,” Nico called, choosing a number close to the bone average. Players could not guess the same number in the same round.
“Ten,” Suri said, cautiously.
“Forty-five,” Azan said, going extremely high even though he didn’t know if that number of black faces were available in the game.
“One,” Neema snorted out.
Azan threw the hand. Twenty black faces. Nico won. Nico swiped up the difference, grabbing five, and added the bones to her pile. Right of Azan, Suri threw the next hand, with each person either calling out random guesses or calculating the odds based on the number of bones Nico had pulled from the previous round.
Suri won the second round. Since she won the hand she threw, she collected double the bones. On Nico’s throw, Neema guessed the exact number of black faces and picked that exact number from the pile, then lost it all when Neema threw red. She tossed all her bones back to the middle.
They went around and around like that, collecting bones and often throwing them back.
Sometimes the game lasted several rounds. Sometimes it lasted forever, until either fewer bones were in the skillet per player or the red-faced bone was the sole piece left. The person with the most bones at the end of the game won.
“This game is stupid.”
Everyone jolted at the interjection. Suri scattered her throw, with several bones bouncing off the skillet’s edge. Azan scrambled after the pieces, and Nico turned to Rasia’s abrupt presence. Nico had been so focused on refining her strategy that she hadn’t noticed when Rasia came to loom over them.
“It’s nothing but luck. It’s too easy,” Rasia said.
Azan reached for a piece that had rolled under Rasia’s foot, and even when Rasia noticed him grabbing for it, she didn’t move at all. She just stood there, watching his futility with indifference. Why couldn’t she just move?
Eventually, Azan dug the bone from under Rasia’s boot. Azan blew sand and dirt off the bone piece and argued, “It only seems easy if you don’t know how to count faces.”
“Do you know how to count faces?” Rasia asked.
Azan pouted.
“If you don’t care for the game, why don’t you leave?” Neema asked. Ironic, since she hadn’t initially been invested in the game herself. But as they played, and began laughing, and competed against one another, a sense of camaraderie had strengthened between them. It was admittedly jarring for Rasia to come stampeding through it.
Rasia rolled her eyes, then stomped away, not away toward the distant ledge she’d claimed as her territory, but toward the windship underbelly. Rasia disappeared through the hatch door and climbed back out with the food rations.
“Wait, hey,” Azan sputtered. “We’re not supposed to eat those yet.”
“What?” Rasia looked at all the faces around the clay skillet. “Wait, are you telling me you haven’t eaten yet? Why the fuck not?”
Those faces turned to Nico. Nico lifted her chin and owned her decision. “In case this plan capsizes, I thought it best to save the food.”
“It won’t. And besides”—Rasia flung her hand toward the valley of lounging scorpions—“There’s plenty food right there. These rations won’t last but for a few days. The Grankull expects us to hunt for our food. That’s part of the fucking test.”
That . . . actually made sense.
But rather than admit her error, Nico doubled down. “We don’t know if your plan might fail; we should be cautious in our approach—”
Rasia popped a strip of dried apricot into her mouth, then chewed, slowly, mouth open to show the mushed pieces in the firelight.
Neema and Suri stilled, strengthened by the solidarity formed over a good game of bones, but Azan looked at Nico, back at Rasia, then Nico again. Azan scrambled forward to snatch the bag of food from Rasia’s hands. He blubbered and apologized as he ate. “I’m so sorry. I’m hungry. I’m so hungry.”
“I can’t believe my family paid money for this horseshit,” Neema grumbled.
“What money?” Both Rasia and Nico asked in unison. They also cringed in unison.
“The money our parents paid to put us on a team with you, the Ohan.”
Of course, the Council would be selling kull spots. Nico wished she could be more surprised, but as was often the case in the Grankull, the corruption dripped from the top.
Neema glanced around at all the confused faces. “Come on, you didn’t know? You thought this team was the bones’ doing? Rasia is the child of the Rib Councilor. Azan might be fourth-named, but his family is loaded. Suri is the child of the Neck Councilor and the most respected healer of the Grankull. Clean your faces. We’re the dream team. Or at least, supposed to be.”
“I knew it,” Rasia spat. She glared at Nico as if this were all her fault.
“I didn’t have anything to do with this,” Nico defended. She understood the desperation to have your child do well in the Forging, but it wasn’t fair to those families who couldn’t afford such advantages.
Besides, there were always consequences for cheating the bones.
Azan offered Nico a piece of jerky, completely interrupting her train of thought. With a sigh, and internally admitting that her stomach did feel a little hollow, she took the offered piece. Azan smiled and distributed the rest of the food to the others. They all gave up on the game to eat. (Nico had been winning.)
Now that she had Rasia here, they needed some sort of plan. Nico rubbed at the incoming headache. “Can we just . . . we need a plan for this gonda. We need some sort of strategy in case it does appear. I can use my magic to . . .”
“No magic.”
“What?”
“That’s cheating.”
Nico blinked at Rasia. “This isn’t some game of rattle-bones. This is our lives.”
“I’m not the one out here playing games.”
Nico bruised at the pointed judgment in Rasia’s voice. “Magic isn’t cheating.”
“Look, apparent-fucking-ly, this entire team is already an unfair advantage. My tah didn’t need magic to set the best record of the Forging. Neither do I.”
Azan, Neema, Suri, and Nico all looked at one another. At least with this, they were on the same ship.
“Yeah . . .” Azan said, tossing it out there for the team. “I vote for magic.”
“Same,” Neema agreed.
“We should use everything we have at our disposal,” Nico argued, but as was so often the case, reason never worked with Rasia.
“How can you take her side?” Rasia demanded. “Our parents hunted their gonda and came of age and earned their faces on the strength of their own skill. In fact, the magic-born are the only ones in the entire Grankull who aren’t required to live by the strength of their feats. She gets to be the Ohan, the person who leads us, because she was born with magic. How fair is that?” Rasia turned to sneer at Nico. “You’re the chosen one. What have you ever fucking worked for?”
Rasia’s words flayed at Nico’s skin, cutting to the heart of all Nico’s doubts. Because Rasia wasn’t wrong. Who was Nico? What had she done? Was it fair that Nico was born as heir to the Elder’s magic? Was magic wrong if others weren’t afforded the same advantage?
Was Rasia . . . right?
“You’re wrong,” Nico insisted. “I can’t become Ohan if I don’t complete the bloodrites. It’s not a title I automatically inherit. It’s a title I too have to earn.”
“Right. A ceremony no one knows anything about. How scary.”
“Heirs have died during it, Rasia.”
“How pathetic were they?”
Nico choked on Rasia’s cruelty. So many ancestors had died in the bloodrites. That fate could be hers. Then, where would her family be without her? Where would the Grankull or the Tents be without her? Nico couldn’t afford not to be chosen.
Suri came to Nico’s defense. “I thought you were hunting this gonda all by yourself, Rasia? What do our opinions matter anyway? Go hunt your gonda. We’ll be here playing our bones.”
Rasia threw up her hands, then twirled on her heels. She dug into her shirt and adjusted her wrap as she stalked away.
“She’s such a fucking kulo,” Neema said.
“We’re not supposed to use profanity,” Nico chided automatically.
Neema shrugged. “I’m just calling it like it is. Besides, it’s not as if there are any adults around to censor our language.”
“Regardless, no matter how we feel about her, we do need a plan in case the gonda comes tonight,” Nico said.
“After all that, you still want to help her?”
“Yes,” Nico said. “We’re stronger together. She’s still our kull.”
“Except she doesn’t consider us her kull,” Neema argued. “She doesn’t even know our names. It is no wonder no one likes her. We shouldn’t have chosen her plan in the first place. There’s nothing out here. There’s no gonda. This is nothing but an empty fucking hunt made up by the delusions of Rasia’s rabid mind. Fuck. Her.”
A vibration shook the ground.
They all froze, in a moment of disbelief, as the realization swept over them. The next vibration came stronger. All in that frozen warp of time, Rasia sprinted through the camp, leaped the fire, stabbed her sword against the sail stake like a shovel, and popped it free with ease.
It was that audible pop of reality that finally scrambled everyone into motion.
Azan scooped all the bone pieces into his draw-pouch. Neema scrambled for the weapons. Nico and Suri collected the supplies loitering around the campfire. They worked in panicked chaos while Rasia single-handedly righted the windship and reconnected the sail with practiced, calm efficiency.
“Last chance to jump ship,” Rasia warned as she grabbed the tiller. Everyone had managed to throw themselves on board and, despite being in way over their heads, no one moved.
“Then you might as well be of use. We’re going against the wind. Double-up on the oars and zag the ship,” Rasia commanded. She pushed down on the tiller and, traumatized too many times, everyone leaped to grab for the railing.
The ship lurched, stuttering slow in the opposing wind.
“The oars.”
Nico and Suri grabbed one set of the clawed bone oars, while Neema and Azan grabbed the other. They tacked the ship forward. Once they reached the lip of the valley, with just one strong stroke, the ship was off on its own, plummeting at an indescribable speed toward the bottom.
The ground cracked and crumbled, then powerful tentacles rose forth and constricted the giant scorpions in their clutches. The hard-shelled scorpions bent, folded, and burst.
Nico had harvested a gonda before and thought she understood the breadth of their size. She’d prepared its meat, oiled its skin for leather, extracted its venom, and processed the sharp beak at its frightening center. But nothing could have prepared her for the power of a gonda’s limbs in motion or the heft of its weight bearing down to crush her.
Nico nocked an arrow to her bow, fighting the wind to stay on her feet. “Steer us around.”
Rasia steered straight toward the carnage.
“Grab the steer!” Rasia yelled.
So many sounds at once. Nico barely heard Rasia over the roaring wind, the cracking carapaces, and the gonda’s whistling hiss.
“What?!” Nico turned to ask, then a blur raced across the deck.
With a spear in hand, Rasia caught the metal tip between the railing, then pole-vaulted her way into the sky. The spear clattered backward. Rasia caught her double swords in the tough hide of a swinging tentacle.
Nico stared, shocked.
They all stood there, slack-jawed, as Rasia jumped from one tentacle to another, rending entire limbs apart as she went. It occurred to Nico at that moment that nothing Rasia claimed had been an exaggeration. She was going to take this thing down, by herself, if she had to.
The windship tilted to its side. Nico shook out her shock and ordered Azan, since he was closest. “Grab the tiller!”
Azan lunged for it and whined, “I don’t know what I’m doing!”
He did enough to keep them from crashing over the shattered remains of a dead scorpion. The ground shifted, creating an unexpected hill. Rasia had angered the gonda enough for it to break ground and show its mouth.
This was the moment that had been drilled into all of them by various instructors—when you saw the mouth, the gonda was most vulnerable but also at its fiercest. Nico lifted her bow but didn’t trust herself not to accidentally hit the tentacle Rasia was currently bucking and riding.
“Suri,” Nico commanded. “Can you make the shot?”
“I think so.” Suri drew back the string of her longbow. She stumbled when the ship dipped and squished over a grubworm.
“Azan, keep the ship steady!”
“I’m trying!”
Again, Suri pulled the string taut to her lip. She released. The arrow struck true, flying through the tangle of tentacles to land a piercing shot to the gonda’s soft inner flesh. It released a sharp whine. Nico covered her ears at the piercing sound.
Everyone except Rasia.
Rasia jumped at the opportunity. With swords curved like fangs in each hand, she lunged toward the gonda’s mouth.
A tentacle flailed right in front of the ship. Azan lost control. The windship careened to its side.
Nico instinctively caught her fall with a wave that discolored the ground. She grabbed her glaive, which had landed in reach, and took stock of the situation. The bulk of the stern had landed on top of Azan, pinning him underneath. Both Neema and Suri picked themselves up from where they had rolled against hard gravel and sediment.
Rasia flew out of the sky, feet flopping as she landed with an oomph. She looked at Nico with a wicked smile. “Think I made it mad.”
A tentacle swung toward the ship. Nico feared for Azan and worried if they lost the windship beyond repair, their Forging could be over. Nico ran to meet the swinging limb head-on. She planted her feet and thrust out the sharp point of her polearm. The force almost snapped the glaive out of Nico’s hand, but the glaive sliced through the tentacle, clean, severing it.
The gonda lifted out of the sand with a hissing roar. No eyes. Along its body were two deep, bloody wounds. No doubt with one more hit, it’d be dead.
It launched toward them.
“Don’t move!” Rasia shouted.
Nico’s limbs locked painfully in place, holding position. The gonda carved waves of sand as it rammed closer and closer. Neema, staring wide-eyed, broke. She turned and ran.
A tentacle swung, cleaving the air, and snatched Neema off the ground. The gonda opened its chitin mouth to rend Neema whole.
“Neema!” Nico yelled.
“Throw me the glaive,” Rasia shouted at Nico.
Nico froze with Rasia’s prior words ringing in her ears. If Rasia slayed this gonda on her own, then what had Nico earned?
This was Nico’s chance to prove to herself, to Rasia, and to the others that she knew what she was doing. Nico tightened her grip on the glaive and ran forward to put an end to the gonda. She aimed for the hearts.
And never saw the tentacle coming.
Nico should have counted the tentacles before her attack. She hardly had time to brace before it slammed into her. Nico fell head over feet, landing hard on rough ground and dashed hopes.
The tentacle that was wrapped around Neema moved to throw her to the gonda’s beak . . .
—and jerked to a stop.
Neema hung precariously, her life hanging in the balance, with a sole arrow punctured into the tentacle. A piece of rope had been tied around the arrow’s shaft, holding the tentacle at bay, with Rasia pulling at the rope’s other end.
Rasia braced herself against the tentacle Nico had severed earlier and pulled hard. Suri rushed forward to join Rasia. Nico picked herself up from the ground and limped over to help. But even with all three of them pulling at the rope, the tentacle still moved forward.
“This isn’t working,” Suri said, worried.
“I’m going to use magic.”
“No. Fucking. Magic,” Rasia gritted out. Before Nico could take a breath, Rasia had stepped onto Nico’s shoulder and began shimmying up the rope. Once Rasia reached the gonda’s tentacle, she gripped it halfway around with her legs, then stabbed it with her knife, again and again.
The tentacle dropped Neema.
Nico heard herself gasp as Rasia swung upside down and caught Neema before she fell to the sharp beak. Neema openly sobbed as she reached up to get a solid grip on Rasia’s arms.
“I’ve got her!” Suri shouted.
Suri raced forward, and Rasia swung Neema in her direction. Suri managed to catch Neema, not with her arms as she intended, but a little with her face and chest, and they both crashed to the sand. Neema wept and clamped her legs together to hide the dampness of her pants.
The tentacle where Rasia still hung upside down careened through the air, and she couldn’t get herself upright in time. She was helpless to do anything as the limb slammed her to the ground. The sound hit like a gut punch.
Rasia didn’t get back up.
No. Rasia was too stubborn to die. Nico rushed over and never felt more relieved to hear blood pumping through Rasia’s chest like drumbeats.
The gonda loomed and hissed above them.
Rasia was out of the fight. Neema was a mess, and she might have landed wrong on Suri’s shoulder. Azan was still stuck under the windship. Their weapons were scattered. They needed to regroup. Nico had to make a decision.
One gonda wasn’t worth dying for.
Nico breathed magic out of her veins. It moved with the power of a torrential downpour, drizzled through her bones, and dripped down the core of her. Storm clouds formed.
Gonda didn’t like rain, it confused their ability to sense prey. At the first drizzle of water, the gonda hissed, and the siphon swelled. Nico shouted to the others in warning and pulled her shroud over her nose. She crouched to cover Rasia’s unconscious face.
A thick, noxious cloud covered the gonda’s retreat. Nico’s eyes burned, and tears fought against the sting. The gaseous form wasn’t often fatal, but those pregnant sometimes lost babies to it. Nico thickened the rain to disperse the poison.
Underfoot, every vibration came weaker than before. The gonda fled farther and farther away.
The magic taxed what little energy Nico had left. Her legs turned numb and stiff. Shivering, Nico dropped to her butt and took a vibration to catch her breath. She couldn’t help but to replay all her mistakes in vivid detail. She knew she would be churning over them for days to come.
Maybe Nico should have given Rasia the glaive. Maybe Nico should have continued the fight instead of forcing the gonda to retreat. Maybe they would have won. Maybe Nico wasn’t as ready for this as she had hoped.
Maybe when Rasia woke up, she wouldn’t be too angry.
Nico winced. Maybe.