by Elise Kova
She looked over the dusty plains of Ter.4, a steam engine rolling across the ocean of tall grasses in the distance. Master Oliver had taken her under his wing when she was still so young. They had traveled the world together, just the two of them. And then the Dragons had come to ruin it all. To confine guilds to their territories and initiates to textbooks rather than true learning.
Still, when she watched the sky lighten over the plains, the quiet dawn on a mostly barren land, it looked as it had then—smelled as it had then. Arianna stepped forward, putting Wraiths and Dragons and boons and misplaced Ravens behind her. For a brief hour, she navigated the world as nothing more than a Fenthri woman.
Three hare and a bag full of edible plants later, she returned to the world below. Escapes were wonderful, but impermanent and shallow. She was made of stronger mettle than those that fled into the warm bosom of nostalgia.
The fingers of her left hand trailed through the grease line, following it down and through the winding passages. Silence flooded her, and it wasn’t until Arianna was nearly to their resting place that she realized the source of her unease.
It was too quiet. She heard no breathing, no discussion, no clanking of the cart over the rails as its occupants shifted in their sleep. Her pace quickened and Arianna sped to meet the last corner, already knowing what would greet her.
Nothing.
Her line ended where it had begun in a spot she knew she could not be confusing for any other. Panic swelled to a crescendo and Ari forced it down with a hand on her dagger, as though she could ward off her emotions with golden blades and lock them away behind spools of wire. She stretched her hearing, but stillness greeted her in all directions.
Wherever they had gone, it was far and fast—enough that even her Dragon ears couldn’t pick up the faintest squeal of wheels on rails. Her breathing quickened as the options unfurled before her, and Arianna picked up a faint scent.
It was one she’d come to know on their travels—the crisp, fresh smell of burning wood. Cvareh. Her eyes drifted over to the wall, led by her nose, and Arianna ran her fingers along the fresh scratches in the rock. He had bled here.
Balling her hand into a fist, Arianna screamed, punching the rock so hard blood exploded and her bones snapped. Her anguish echoed through the caves uselessly, the ears she wanted to hear were too far away. But there were more things to hear her than a Dragon and a few misplaced Ravens in the Underground.
She drew her daggers, her bones already knitting, the pain sharpening her mind. A primal hiss echoed up to her, followed by the clicking of pincers. Ari placed the tip of her dagger in the wall, slowly walking backward.
“That’s it…” The sound of metal on stone grated through the tunnel like an alarm for any in the vicinity. “Follow me.”
Helen’s words were still fresh in her mind: no hope of finding each other once separated. Arianna watched as the darkness melted around the shape of a Wretched, lean ropes of muscle suspended over bones and wrapped in the thinnest of pale gray skin. Useless eyes—white and beady—were placed behind the gaping orifice that was once a Fenthri mouth. Acidic saliva glowed faintly, oozing between pincers that clicked in excitement, tracking her movements.
A second emerged in her field of vision, followed by a third. Arianna slowly pulled her dagger away from the wall. At the least she’d draw them off Flor, or try.
“Right, then.” She flipped her grip on her dagger, clipping in the second. “Who’s first?”
The beasts hissed the moment she started to speak. Their long claws scraped against the stone, charging for her with gurgling madness. Arianna let out an animalistic roar in reply.
Wretched and Chimera lunged for the kill.
27. FLORENCE
The Wretches chased them on all fours down the tunnel. They hissed and clicked, moving unnaturally fast through the darkness, dotting a trail of glowing saliva that steamed pock marks into the stones behind them.
Florence’s shoulder ached and burned as she struggled to keep her balance in the jostling cart. Will strained against the levers in the back. Helen was rigid at the wheel, trying to keep them on a course she could track in her mind.
“Ari. What about Ari?” She grabbed for Cvareh. He was the only person she could distract with her panic, the only one of the three she could lose her head around. Helen and Will had their hands full enough trying to keep them from dying in a swift and terrible crash.
“We can’t go back that way.” He bared his teeth in a fearsome snarl at the creatures in hot pursuit.
Florence’s hand shrunk away from him on instinct at the terrible look that overcame his face, wild and savage. It was the face of the Dragons Ari had filled her head with over the past two years and one she hadn’t witnessed with her own eyes until that moment.
“Those things are exactly what I’m worried about! Ari’s alone with them!”
Ari, her teacher, her friend, a woman who was a shining and steady light in Florence’s otherwise gray world. She had left someone precious behind in the Underground. Again.
“At this exact second, I think you should be more worried about us being alone with them!” Cvareh shouted.
A Wretch dove from a side tunnel. Cvareh instinctively placed his body between its sharp pincers and Florence. He grunted in pain as he slashed into the creature and acidic blood poured over his hand. With an aggravated roar he threw the body away, and it bounced limply down the cart path.
“Can you not get acid on our only means of transportation?” Will scolded, motioning to where erosion was already weakening the side of the cart, boring holes in the rusted metal. “We’re pretty far from the Holx yard and I don’t think we’ll stumble on another this deep.”
“Why don’t you ask the monsters? I’m sure they’ll be happy to oblige. Or should I just let it into our cart next time?” Cvareh growled in reply, rubbing his knitting flesh.
“Can you all not talk so much? It’s taking a lot of focus to keep us on track!” Helen’s words had both a literal and figurative meaning.
Wretches on their tails, Arianna nowhere to be found, and the only thing separating them from being lost in the Undergound forever was the map that spun madly inside Helen’s head. They were falling apart at the seams, cracking under the pressure. Florence swallowed.
Fight or flight.
The instinct rose up in her, hot and searing under every nerve. She dropped her bag, falling to the floor of the cart with it. Flight after flight, she’d run through life. From avoiding responsibility in the guild, to running out on Will and Helen, to letting them leave Ari now.
“What are you doing?” Cvareh asked as she frantically tried to make sense of the state of their current supplies. It wasn’t much. She couldn’t restock with everything she’d needed in Ter.4.2—there was no substitute for Mercury Town.
“I’m trying to get us out of this mess.” She passed Cvareh her revolver, loading it with three canisters. “Hold this.”
He took the gun skeptically and turned back to the Wretches.
“No, you’re not shooting them. Don’t fire a shot.” Florence dumped one canister over the side of the cart, the precious gunpowder lost to the air whipping around them. It hurt her very soul to see it wasted, but she didn’t have anywhere else for it to go and she needed a blank vessel of some kind.
While she was up, she tried to assess how fast they could be going, but the numbers all blurred in her head. Ari would know what to do, a voice in the back of her mind nagged. But Ari wasn’t here. She was, and someone had to think of a solution, however wild and reckless.
“Helen, when’s the next downhill?”
“Uh…”
“Helen.”
The other woman spun the wheel frantically.
“Helen! Log it aloud, recount later to figure out where we are, and take the next downhill,” Florence demanded.
“Understood.” Helen began muttering to herself, a method Florence knew the girl used to help commit things to memory.
Florence’s hands shook as her brain replayed chemical after powder, reaction after reaction. She shuffled the deck of everything she’d been taught from Ari, from her Revo tutors, from books. She threw out every ounce of conventional wisdom on explosives and bombs; she needed the most unstable reactions. The world was upside down, and the only way it was getting righted was with an explosion that would shake the foundation of the earth itself.
She cradled the canister in her hand, trying to counter the sudden movements of the cart so nothing would be set off prematurely. Helen was finally able to fulfill her request and the cart tipped forward. Will frantically twisted and pulled, trying to temper their fall.
“Let it go, Will!” Florence demanded. “Let it all go.”
“But if we gather that much sp—”
“Just do it!” Her order didn’t vibrate with the same resonance as Ari’s would have, but it carried equal weight.
He flipped a few levers, and the cart became a bullet barreling down the darkness. The sound of the Wretches grew distant and Florence exchanged the pistol for the canister in Cvareh’s hands. The faint glow of the glovis eyes they’d harvested rattled around the bottom of the cart, illuminating his confusion.
“I’m going to shoot three times. On the second, you throw that and wait for the third shot before you push every ounce of magic you have into that gold pin.” She manually placed his thumb over the pin at the end of the canister, the spot where the golden hammer of a gun would strike.
“You got it.”
“Flor…” Helen had stopped muttering.
“Ready?” Florence raised the revolver.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Will shouted.
Florence spared him a brief glance before curling her finger around the trigger. “What Revos do best.”
She fired. The first shot exploded against the ceiling. On the second shot Cvareh threw, and rock began to collapse in place. On the third shot he did exactly as she had instructed, and the three, their cart, and everything in it were sent flying forward by the shock wave.
The earth groaned and Florence groaned with it. She instantly panicked, thinking she’d gone blind somehow, only to remember that she was working with nearly no light. The tunnels rumbled with shock waves. Large chunks of rock began to fall and Florence heard the first satisfying hiss of a Wretch crushed beneath one.
Another set of spider web fractures cracked across the ceiling above them. Florence pushed herself to her feet, running on pure adrenaline as the world spun. “We have to move.”
She wrapped her arms around Will, hoisting him to his feet with all the strength she possessed. Her left arm couldn’t get a good grip on him, and just as she nearly lost her ability to support his weight, he found his balance.
“Helen?” Florence called further up the tunnel, scattered glovis eyes gave them barely enough light to see by.
“I have her,” Cvareh called. Helen was cradled in his arms; Florence suppressed her panic at the sight. If their navigator died, they would be stuck forever. “Hurry!”
They sprinted forward through the dark tunnels. Florence and Will led with a glovis eye each. It wasn’t until the last echo of the cave-in that they all collapsed at once, chests heaving, exhaustion crushing their shoulders.
Florence and Will crumpled to the floor. Cvareh gingerly laid a moaning Helen next to them. He squinted into the blackness beyond their tiny fragments of light.
“Hold your breaths, for just a moment.” He motioned, and they obliged. “I don’t hear anything…”
“We either scared them all off, cut them all off, or told them exactly where we were with that.” Will rubbed his ears. “Next time you feel like going explosive crazy, warn us?”
“I did. You just—” she interrupted herself with a hiss of pain as she shifted.
Florence looked down at her arm. Will’s clumsy stitches had been ripped wide open. Blood poured from the wound, merging with blood from a secondary location where the bone in her forearm protruded from her body. She felt faint almost instantly.
“Flor, Florence.” Cvareh was at her side, propping her up, supporting her as Ari would. “Hang in there.”
Hang in there for what? she thought grimly. They had no food, were down to two canisters and one pistol, their medical supplies were depleted, and they’d lost their transportation. No one was coming for them. Even if Arianna tried—and Florence found herself hoping her teacher wouldn’t do something so foolish—she’d never find them. Even if she somehow knew the right path, she’d never make it to them now with the cave-in.
Florence tilted her head back and rested it on the rock, panting softly, unsure how much of the darkness at the corners of her vision was due to blood loss and how much was just lack of light.
“It’s like then,” Helen whispered.
“We’d pushed the cart too fast, we’d made too much noise.” Will’s eyes glossed over, looking at the past they were all reliving.
“Drew them right to us.” Helen turned her head, staring at Cvareh. “I thought with a Dragon, we were nearly invincible.”
The expression that briefly overtook his eyes was heartbreaking. He felt guilty for their situation, despite having no real obligation to. They had thought him near invincible, a god among them, as if by virtue of his blood alone he could be their savior.
And that was the thought that sparked an explosion of possibility in Florence’s mind
“Helen, how long to Ter.4.3?”
The other woman sighed heavily, looking up at the nothingness that coated the rocks above them. She muttered under her breath, and every second she took doing so oozed another bit of life from Florence’s veins. “We’ll have to loop back toward Holx, maybe not. Depends on how fast we can find another vehicle. Accounting for us going all the way back to the higher levels right beneath Holx…maybe four or five more days?”
Longer than she wanted, shorter than she’d thought. Helen and Will were beaten up, but their wounds looked superficial enough. Food would be an issue, but if they had to go that close to Holx anyway, they may find someone they could trade with or one of them could brave sneaking up. Then again, there were always the glovis… Ralph made it through three of them the last time they were all in the Underground before he died.
So there were options for all of them; they could make it to Ter.4.3 safely underground and keep Cvareh’s magic hidden from the Riders. Florence knew Arianna would head there eventually.
That left the matter of Florence.
She would not make it, and they had no supplies to mend the amount of blood she was losing, even if they somehow managed to set the break. Florence pressed her eyes closed, turning to Cvareh. By the time she opened them, she had made up her mind.
“Cvareh, have you ever made a Chimera before?”
28. CVAREH
If he never went underground again, it would be too soon. The journey underneath Ter.4 had been one harrowing moment after the next that he was sure did nothing for the luster of his skin or wrinkles around his brow. They surfaced from the quagmire bloody, beaten, thinning, and blinking against the faint twilight of sunset in Ter.4.3. But emerge they did, in one miraculous piece, and thanks in no small part to the dark-haired girl at his side.
Cvareh had a whole new appreciation for the girl—no, woman. She was sixteen, barely more than a toddler by the lifespans on Nova. But, for a Fenthri, it made her almost middle aged. This was a woman who was coming into her prime and knew what she wanted.
At least, that’s what he had to believe. Because he’d been feeding her his blood for five days now. The magic had a strange affect on the not-yet-Chimera Fenthri. Without a proper transfusion of blood she couldn’t be made into a full Chimera, so his magic didn’t take hold like a proper imbibing would. It also began to work away at her stomach and mouth, creating bloody sores that would be aggravated with every feeding, heal as a result of the magic, and then be made worse again as the magic faded.
Imbibing li
ke this would eventually kill her. But she maintained both their spirits by reminding him that they were already headed to the home of the Chimera—the Alchemists’ Guild. Once she had been given the blood properly, gold mingled with red to make black, she would rebound stronger than before. Such was the way of Chimeras; Florence should need no more living proof than the woman she had made her teacher.
That particular woman was elusive for two days after they emerged from the Underground. They holed up in squalor, but it was far safer than the depths they had endured and even scraps were better sustenance than what they’d had available previously. Cvareh began to fear that perhaps Arianna had not escaped. That she had gone back and was met with an ill fate of pincers and the Wretches they had left behind.
If she died, would he know? Was there something about the magic of the boon contract that would alert him to its dissolution? He had no idea. She’d been an enigma from the start and the woman was content to remain such even when she wasn’t around to give him a hard time.
For two days, Florence went and sat at the port of Ter.4.3. She had an unending belief that Arianna would somehow know to find her there. Where it stemmed from, Cvareh wasn’t quite certain. But she was resolute enough to kill herself for it.
On the third day, he walked with her, bundled and hidden. It was taking longer and longer for her to traverse the area from their hideout to her waiting spot and, after fearing she wouldn’t return yesterday, Cvareh had made up his mind to go with her from then on. He could do little more than give her blood, but that he would do… even if the idea of piercing his flesh above ground settled restlessly across his consciousness. But if he didn’t, eventually, the girl would die. And he’d promised Arianna he would keep her safe. More than that, he wanted to see her safe for himself.
A pop sounded in his ear, echoing from a great distance away with the closeness of someone clicking their tongue by the side of his face. He looked out over the port, feeling the tether form between him and his sister, tugging at his ear. Cvareh rose slowly, giving Florence a reassuring squeeze.