Their coming sacrifice had meaning. Maybe not for them, but maybe for their children. And maybe, just maybe, for some other, alternate version of themselves.
Billy stared up at the Incursion. “Fuck you, you bubbly baboon’s ass of malice.” He gripped Poke’s hilt to draw it out the moment Daisy gave the order. He’d pulled off enough duct tape to allow him to wiggle the sword.
He continued to stare at bright balloon colors in the sky. “Commander William Bower,” he said. “He’s in Medical Isolation Bay Two.” He looked directly at Daisy. “He’s doing a lot of the talking right now.”
She looked away.
“They have three Burners onboard. One’s a cook.” Billy pinched his lips together and closed his eyes.
“Billy…” Rysa reached for him, but he pushed away her hand.
“He might be quiet, but he’s still an asshole, luv.”
Terry snickered.
“They’ve been testing since I got the glass.” Billy stood as perfectly still as Terry. “But the testing’s done. They’re gearing up for their big event. They’re…” He pinched his lips again.
“They’re what?” The more information they had, the better.
He shook his head. “No more distractions for you two. We get this done.”
Daisy looked up. She nodded.
They were right. The Incursion hung with its open maw into another space directly over them. They were in a good physical placement and had as close to a straight shot as they were going to get.
Daisy built the cannon’s cage with the blades, and when the time came, Rysa would use her seers and the data in the optimizers to “aim” the Burners.
She hadn’t talked to Billy about the intermediate step.
There’d been too much death as it was, and even though everyone assumed both the Burners would die, no one had asked how.
They were technically grenades about to be lobbed at the enemy, or suicide bombers, like the Burners Trajan sent into all those warehouses. The ones he used to set up his “Fates and Shifters are here to help you!” narrative before the world ended.
The brilliant narrative that, Rysa hated to admit, had probably saved a lot of people by positioning Praesagio Industries as the good guys.
But Burners died. And the best of them was about to die, too.
“Mr. Schmidt,” Rysa said. “When Billy pulls Poke, he is going to step out of the triangle, then set the blade. Do you understand?”
The four people Billy wanted to survive were going to be five if she had anything to do with it.
Terry grinned a death’s head grin. “Whatever you say, Leibling.”
Billy tore his gaze from the Incursion to stare at Rysa. He didn’t comment, though his eyes said it all: Do not trust him.
Billy, like Daisy, expected to die.
Rysa flipped the optimizers back over her eyes and looked out at the horizon, the approaching plane, and Ladon and Dragon.
The fuselage exploded. Ladon and Dragon turned back toward the group, but not in a calm way. They ran.
Oh no, she thought. “They’re coming back.”
She looked behind them, toward the fields they left. The path was contracting, which meant they were running out of time.
Then she looked straight up, at the Incursion. Straight up into its not-here center. Straight down the belly of the beast as it flickered from the secondary colors to the primaries. The rings pulsed. And the wound in the sky roared with the blood pumping in her ears.
The wind howled through the field’s rows and whistled around Billy’s sword. The rising sun spread what should have been clean, clear warmth onto the world but the Incursion was set to suck it away.
The Incursion writhed above the Earth like one of those giant clown mouths at the entrances to carnival rides that vomit pain onto the world.
Yet Rysa could not look away.
Several more glimmering ships dropped out of the Incursion. She pointed. “We need to do this now.”
Daisy nodded and continued to roll the shard around in her hands. “I need to connect to Mom. If I can do so without causing myself pain, I’ll be able to control the cage better.” Her lip curled. “I have no idea what I’m doing here. I need a guide—got it.”
The shard lifted off Daisy’s hand. “Why should I stick it in my gut when all I have to do is ask it nicely to open a channel?”
The energy lines twisting around the shard coiled upward and ghosted out at the top of each loop as if it carried half a magnetic field in real-space, and half in new-.
Daisy knelt and patted Stab, and it… ghosted, as if Rysa looked at an old television with the doubling images.
“Mom sets the swords on the new-side,” Daisy said.
Ladon skidded between two rows of corn stalks. “One soldier and about twenty hellhounds.” He paused. “Dragon says three are at least his size.”
Terry sneered. “Ah, the mean ones.”
Rysa ignored him. “We’re ready.” She reached for his hand.
Ladon squeezed her fingers. “Do not allow your focus to stray.” He looked out over the field. “No matter what your seers tell you. No matter what happens to us.”
No matter if they died first. She had a job to do.
Under Daisy’s hand, the first of the daggers ghosted, then the second. “Now, Mr. Barston!”
Billy ripped Poke from its Burner stone. He swayed for a second, and blinked once. He gulped but did not fall, or stagger.
Poke ghosted in his hand. He looked at it for a microsecond as if he felt the new-version of the sword—a new-space re-formation of Janus’s talisman—as much as he felt his own, and squatted down to place Poke and close the triangle.
Terry continued to stand. He continued to sneer at Rysa.
Until a new-killing projectile vaporized his head.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
“On the ground!” Ladon yelled. “All of you!”
Rysa slapped her hand on the back of Daisy’s neck and held her down just as another alien bullet buzzed by her ear.
“Assume the soldier has a targeting system!” Rysa said. “Work from down here and work fast.”
Daisy pushed Rysa off and dropped her hands to the ghosting swords.
The Burner blood on Poke whined.
Terry’s corpse crinkled in on itself like a deflating vinyl balloon. His chaos ceased moving, ceased functioning, and crystalized around his body. Then it, too, collapsed inward toward his implosion.
Another bullet whizzed directly over Billy’s head.
“Daisy, Terry’s dead,” Rysa said. “He’s gone. He’s imploding right now.”
Daisy set the shard over one of the corners of the triangle. It floated in the air about an inch off the metal and continued to shine like a beacon. Rysa moved between glowing shard and the shooting soldier-dragon in hopes of decreasing their visual obviousness.
She had no sense of Dragon, and only a slight, out-of-the-corner-of-her-eye awareness of Ladon.
A bright, jarring flash like a strobe going off popped about thirty feet away, and she looked up.
Ladon pulled a knife out of the neck of a now-dead hellhound.
Rysa swallowed. “Billy? Can you get out? Can—”
“Princess!”
She looked back at the building cage. The swords had begun to morph. They spread out, stretching and flattening. All the hilts had thinned out. The hand guards retracted.
The midnight blades transformed into black-as-night ribbons—black as the center of space inside the Incursion, shadowed like the land of new. The triangle became a circle, which became the beginnings of a whirlwind rising from the snow.
And trapped in the center sat the Burner with more soul than most normals. A good man. Her friend.
Billy plucked Terry’s implosion from the air. He gripped it between his thumb and finger, and he placed it on his tongue. “I can hold him,” he said. “I can do this.” He dropped cross-legged onto the ground and leaned forward as if the implosion had b
egun to suck in his guts.
“Billy…”
He moaned. “It’s okay. I did this once already. Remember? You helped me, then. You gave me what I need to hold it this time, too.”
She’d let him take a bite out of her arm. “Do you need more?” She started to unzip her jacket.
The blade ribbons spun and crisscrossed as they rose higher. Any second, and they would obscure his face.
He held up his hand. “You can’t come in here.”
“But the vessel was supposed to live.” The past version had lived to become the dark version of herself.
He groaned and looked up at the Incursion. “And you will.”
A bullet hit the cage. A ribbon lunged at it, snatched it from the air, and made its kinetic energy its own.
The whirlwind of ribbons became a cyclone.
“Heh,” Daisy said. She pushed Rysa to the other side of the cage. “Keep it between you and the line of fire.”
Something slinked nearby. Patterns visible in the optimizers’ lenses moved and wiggled. Rysa flung herself to the other side of the cage just as one of those patterns lunged—and fried on the cage like a hellhound bug on a bug zapper.
Daisy ducked behind the cage with Rysa.
“Watch now, princess.” Billy nodded to the optimizers. “Tell me when I need to… let go. Okay?” He rocked back and forth. “I hate German food.”
Rysa snickered. Daisy crouched and held her hands about two inches off the cage.
Rysa looked up. The cyclone of blade ribbons pointed at the Incursion like a wiggly strand meant to thread through the hole in a needle, but the data wasn’t giving her a clear indication of whether “shooting” Billy now would do the job.
She slapped the side of the optimizers.
An upward trajectory path appeared, one that looked very similar to the one they sat on right now, but vertical instead of horizontal.
It didn’t intersect with the center of the Incursion.
“We’re off,” she said. “It needs to move north a hair.”
“Pitch is off,” Daisy mumbled.
Behind them, Ladon hollered. Another dead hellhound bug-zapped against the cage. Dragon roared. Fire filled the area.
Rysa didn’t need her seers to know: The other dragon was close enough that her Dragon and husband took him on hand-to-hand.
Billy peered out at Ladon and Dragon. “They would do anything for you, wouldn’t they?”
She refused to look. She’d lose it if she watched them get hurt. “Yes,” she said.
Billy dug in the front pocket of his pants and pulled out a shimmering sliver. “I got this off the corpse boy. That asshole who hurt you and Daisy. Trajan had me gnaw on him and this was in his hand.” He held it up for her to see.
The missing sliver of dragon talon. Aiden Blake had stolen it and taken it into new-space with him.
“I can’t adjust it, Rysa,” Daisy said. “I don’t know how. I don’t understand what this system is saying. That bullet added something alien….”
Another bullet hit the cage.
The cyclone erupted upward at least ten stories. Maybe more.
The barrel of the gun was forged, but it still wasn’t aimed correctly.
“They’re singing, princess,” Billy said. The muscles in his neck bulged. “The people of the Intrepid. They’re singing the song I wrote for you and Boyfriend.”
Billy gasped. “They’re singing.”
Ladon dropped to his knees between them and the soldier-dragon. He held his side, but he did not cower.
Stop! Dragon scream-pushed. Stop hurting this world! They are Nest! Stop!
Ladon’s new-killing gun fired one round, and one bullet capable of piercing anything split open the head of an invader.
Dragon shrieked. The soldier fell. Rysa gasped but held her focus. She’d do her job right this time, no matter what happened.
Billy looked down at the sliver in his hand. “Let’s see what happens when we add a hint of your talisman to the cage, huh, luv?”
He flicked it into the cyclone.
Rysa’s Ambusti-Prime-infused seers let go of the optimizer’s data. They let go and they chased after that sliver like puppies chasing a ball. They untwisted and they unswirled from their tentacled whipping and they wove themselves into the fabric of the cage.
The ground below her feet writhed. The sky above throbbed. Idunn, the Mother of Shifters, touched her cheek. “Tell Daisy she is the best of my children.”
The Whispering One, Derek’s sister, also touched her cheek. “Make it possible for me to make myself.”
Rysa looked up at the clouds above. At the pulleys and the engines.
This time, the chains and the shackles didn’t hold her. She held them.
“Princess!”
She snapped back into real-space.
Billy leaned toward the wall of the cage. “You need to run.” He panted now, his breaths shallow and ragged. “Take Ms. Daisy and Boyfriend and the good Dragon and…” He gulped. “It’s… I don’t remember much now… I…”
He reached out for her, but his hand dropped to his thigh. “I haven’t had family for…”
“Billy…”
Daisy pulled on her arm. “We need to go.”
Billy’s breathing dropped to fast, shallow wheezes. “I’ll hold it as long as I can, but I might not remember, okay? Tell Ladon I might not remember what to do. Tell him I might need his help.”
“Okay. Okay. I will.” Her seers pushed at the chains holding the cage—the threads controlling its orientation.
“Thank you for naming him after me, Ms. Daisy.” He held up his hand. “Run! Go! Please.”
Dragon picked her up. He picked up Daisy too, and set them both on their feet. Run, he signed.
Ladon held the human-built, new-killing gun. The one with the bullets that could penetrate anything. He nodded once. “I understand, Billy,” he shouted, and also pushed Rysa and Daisy to run.
Thank you, Billy, she thought, and did as he asked.
She ran. Daisy ran, as did Ladon and Dragon. Rysa ran and she worked her seers, and for the first time in her life, allowed her fractured attention to sort itself into the structure it needed to be in order to push and pitch at the same time. To roll and yaw and slide.
She ran, even though they were still too close. Even with the remaining hellhounds attacking from all sides. Billy no longer had control. They were about to burn.
Dragon paced her and Daisy. Ladon ran to the side. He watched her over his shoulder as much as he did Billy.
“Now,” she said.
Ladon stopped. Ladon aimed.
And Rysa, breathing one last time, threaded the cage into the eye of the Incursion.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
TRANSCRIPT:
Commander William Bower, M.D.: We have some historical evidence, Mr. Barston, suggesting that you heard us via the active glass you carried in your shoulder. My family’s memories were never clear on the subject. I’d like to say something anyway, in case it’s true, because you deserve to know who you saved.
Estimates suggest that if the Incursion had not been closed over North America, we would have lost an additional two point three billion humans and all but a fraction of the Earth’s surface.
Your sacrifice saved a third of the world, sir.
Intrepid Control: All Sentinels synchronized and in position. We are go for Trinzi-Bower field activation.
Commander Bower: We all thank you, sir, for your sacrifice. Without you, most of us would not be alive today. We wouldn’t be here and running our first controlled time travel tests.
Control: Hold for the Captain.
Captain Ruto: This is Captain Dee Ruto of the Mundus Imperium Extra-Solar Science Vessel Intrepid. Do we have proof Mr. Barston heard us? No, we do not. But faith, as we all know, plays a mighty hand in fate. So I say to you, Mr. Barston, and to you, my crew, thank you. The Free Peoples of Earth thank you. The Empire thanks you, as does our Emperor and Godh
ead, Caesar Trajanus Augustus Ulpi.
We unbind the what-was-is-will-be today, a feat unattainable without Mr. Barston’s sacrifice. Let us go forward now. We honor you, sir. We honor the Draki Prime and we honor the Dracae. We honor the Firsts. And we honor all those who carry in their blood the fire of the Burners.
Crew member: Thank you, Mr. Barston.
Other crew member: Thank you.
Commander Bower: [singing] We vanish into the fire, you and I. We vanish into the chaos…
[Crew sings Vanish into the Fire. Official recording available for download here.]
Crew: [cheers]
Control: Earth will never fall. Earth is Ours. Earth is Human. Earth is Empire!
Commander Bower: Containment bottle active.
Control: Attention all personnel. Commencing Trinzi-Bower field activation in t-minus one minute ten seconds….
Sentinel One: Ansible coordinates locked.
Sentinel Two: Locked.
Sentinel Three: We are locked.
Control: Activate all ansibles on my mark.
Sentinel Four: Locked.
Sentinel Five: Ansible locked.
Sentinel Six: Coordinates locked.
Control: All Sentinels locked. Let’s do this, people. Let’s show those bastards who controls new-space.
Commander Bower: Tell them to run, Mr. Barston. Tell them to run now!
Control: Mark.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
One final new-killing bullet. One midnight, human-made projectile that the ribbons of the cage recognized as one of their own. As, Rysa realized, Nest.
The ribbons parted. Billy’s hold on his Progenitor’s implosion released and he vanished like her Dragons. He became, for that second, the antithesis of the Burning World. He became hope.
Billy sucked into a single point of bright, blinding light. He flickered for a moment, like a morning star. Rysa’s seers caressed the implosion, doing what she wished she could have done when he was still alive: Offered one last hug. Gave one last touch. Said one last thank you.
The Burning World (Fate Fire Shifter Dragon Book 7) Page 40