He opened his mouth to tell her off but shut it quickly and crossed the street to a narrow alley. He glanced at her smirking face and knew she was pleased he would simply obey. He threw a telepathic shield around her, and she didn’t seem to sense it, probably not sensitive to power at all. When he felt nothing from the Sun-Moon and heard no warnings in his head, he used his micro powers for a little punch to her brain, knocking her out. As her face went slack and she fell, he felt a jot of guilt but also one of satisfaction. Too late for regrets. He only hoped Cordelia would be all right on her own for a few hours.
He kept his shields tight as he ran for the other hole in the wall, and it was easy enough to send the guards telepathic signals to look the other way and allow him to slip through into the field.
He sent a quick signal to Mamet, and they met up with each other. He told them what he’d done, but now he was out here, he wasn’t quite sure what to do. “It just…feels good to do something I’m not supposed to.”
Nettle wrinkled her nose. “Ahya, Pool has taught us this, but I will not leave Sa. Perhaps if the Sun-Moon are still distracted, we may sneak Sa outside and be done with this place.”
Horace bit his lip. “Well…”
Mamet sighed. “I know you want to help your friend Natalya and this possessed girl, Horace, but can’t you see now how hopeless it is?”
Nettle held up a hand, stopping them from arguing. “I hear the queen!” She froze. “She is coming. I hear her faintly, but the thoughts she sends me…” She frowned hard before smiling widely. “The queen has Sa’s spirit!”
“Is this more…” Mamet tapped the side of her head.
“Shh,” Horace said. “What else?”
Nettle beamed again. “The queen has shawness Simon!”
Horace’s heart lifted, and he saw an end to all their troubles, though he dreaded bringing Simon into the middle of this. At least he was used to dealing with these people. “That’s so—”
“He is gravely wounded,” Nettle said softly. “He needs your aid.”
And now his chest did a different sort of lurch. “Shit! Wounded where? How?”
“I only feel her concern. She wants you to come, shawness. Go and heal him.”
“Right, but Cordelia—”
“I will fetch her and take her somewhere secret. Take young Mamet to guard you.”
“If the Sun-Moon realize I’m gone, they’ll come after you.”
Nettle grinned. “They cannot attack my mind, and with Sa’s spirit gone, they will not sense her, either.”
“They can still light you on fire or tear you apart!”
“Then I will keep in motion, and they will not find me. I will work to get outside the city and come meet you. Now go! I will tell the queen you are coming.”
He and Mamet ran in the direction Nettle pointed them in. She warned them not to stray and Pool would find them. Horace could only hope they wouldn’t be too late.
*
Fajir climbed to her feet, her head throbbing. “Lords?” she asked. “Was it as you suspected?”
“He was waiting for his chance to flee,” the Lords said in her mind.
Fajir nodded, wondering why they’d let the rogue healer knock her out if they’d known what he would do, but she knew they had their reasons. “Shall I go and fetch him?”
“No. The aliens were communicating with one another, and we couldn’t read their thoughts, but Horace’s came through loud and clear. He left to heal the other healer, and then they’re all coming this way.”
Fajir felt their relief. This battle had taken a toll on them, but like their people, they’d persevered, and now it seemed they’d get everything they wanted. Fajir moved back toward where Nico and her troops waited. After this battle was done, and the Lords had the healers, her life could return to normal, but the idea only made her anxious. She loved the Lords, accepted their will in all things, but Cordelia’s words hadn’t given her a moment’s peace since all this had started. Strange. Cordelia had said nothing that Fajir didn’t already know. She knew she could run from her duties and find Halaan’s killer. She knew Nico would offer to come with her, but something about having those words spoken by an outsider clung to her like smoke.
She heard Cordelia’s promise in her mind again: she would aid Fajir in hunting down Halaan’s killer. Nico would be spared the shame of abandoning his duty, and Halaan’s spirit would finally rest, and Fajir could die as she should have died so long ago.
In the street, Fajir spotted Nettle sneaking into one of the houses and taking out Cordelia’s body. She knew she should stop the alien, should hold Cordelia’s body hostage, but the Lords might command Cordelia’s death. Then the promise would go unfulfilled forever.
Fajir turned and continued up the street.
*
Samira hovered between awake and asleep. She leaned forward, head resting against the pod that held Simon’s body, but she didn’t care enough to either sit up or lie down. She could hear Reach shuffling around, tending to the other pods. Samira’s brain kept trying to make words into a dream, some exhausting cacophony of images that robbed her of where she was and why, then something slight would wake her again.
She rubbed her forehead and found it slick with the fluid that coated the pod. If that fact would have disgusted her before, she could only blink at it now.
Reach touched the back of her head. “You have been leaning on the pod too long. Your hair is a fright.”
Samira sighed something like a laugh. “Where are we?”
“Drawing closer to this city of the Sun-Moon. Shawness Horace comes, or so the queen has told me.”
Samira sighed again, but some of her tension left her. Simon was still floating in his pod, still alive, and now Horace would save him. She leaned back and began to slip into sleep when the sound of a dull crack seeped into her consciousness just before Reach cried out.
She sat up, blinking. “What’s happening?”
“The tree has been shot again. The Storm Lord or his paladins must have found us.”
The tree lurched. Pool was no doubt moving in an erratic pattern, trying to make herself harder to hit. Reach cried out again, and Samira struggled to her feet.
“You must go, Usta,” Reach said. “The queen has need of your power.”
Samira nodded, trying to clear the fog from her brain. She slicked her hair back and left the basket of branches. They were so close to healing Simon now, to making sure everyone was back together. She damn sure wasn’t going to let the fucking Storm Lord spoil everything again.
Drushka were pouring from the branches onto the plains. Pool’s roots lashed several armored paladins, tossing them around the field. Samira spotted Liam donning armor and one of the stolen batteries.
Several drushka gathered around Samira, and one said, “As before, Usta? We rob them of power?”
She nodded, and the root lowered them to the ground. Her power flowed sluggishly, but she directed it toward as many paladins as she could. Pool’s roots wrapped around one paladin and slammed him into the ground. Her branches struck others and flung them away, but they never seemed to tire. Samira knocked one over and shoved him over a hill, and pain began to build in her forehead. She hadn’t gotten enough rest!
One of the drushka tossed a battery in her direction, and she knocked it up to Pool, not waiting to see if it was caught. The pain spread through her temples, blinding her, and she staggered.
The drushka rushed to cover her, but she could barely see them, couldn’t hear them. She reached for her power again, but it refused. A drushka carried her to the ground as a shot rang out, and she couldn’t do anything to catch herself. As her head bounced against the ground, sleep caught her at last, and there was no denying it.
*
Across the plains, the tree was easy to spot, the tallest thing for miles outside of Celeste. Horace grinned when he saw it, before the shots broke the stillness of the early morning.
“Run!” he said to Mamet, char
ging for the tree. It had to be the Storm Lord. Who else on Calamity had guns? Mamet kept up, but her eyes said it all. What were they supposed to do against a bunch of paladins?
But all he had to do was get close enough to heal Simon. Even amongst so many minds, he’d always be able to pick Simon out of a crowd. They kept running, though it was still a long way, the tiny figures fighting in the distance.
“We should sneak,” Mamet said.
“No time!” And he didn’t want to sneak. He wanted to run in and finish something for once, something he hadn’t been able to do on this whole adventure. Mamet kept up with him, her expression calling him crazy, but she wouldn’t abandon him. She seemed to take great stock in her word.
“I’ll try to reach him from here,” Horace said. “You’ll have to guide me.” He slowed a little, searching for Simon. He wouldn’t be on the ground but in the tree, and there were more alien minds than human ones.
To Horace’s power, Simon shone like a bright light among the branches, and when Horace sensed the bullet in his skull, he stumbled. He hadn’t realized things were so dire! Mamet supported him, steering his steps, and Horace reached out again with his power, latching on to Simon.
Mamet yelled something, and Horace staggered under a surge of vertigo as he fell. He was rolling down a hill, feeling the grass sliding under him, rocks bruising his skin, but he kept the contact. He concentrated on that bullet fragment, but they were still too far.
Push, he told himself. Gently. He grabbed the bullet again. Millimeter by agonizing millimeter, he eased it out. Mamet was pulling him to his feet, but his body had become a dream. The bullet slipped, nearly out, a little more. So close!
Hot pain seared his chest, and he felt another bullet sliding under his own skin. Now they both had bullets! How romantic. He pushed the bizarre thought away along with the pain. His body didn’t matter. The pain faded to a cold wave that passed through him, leaving his focus intact beyond Mamet’s shouts.
Horace let his legs crumple. He didn’t need them anymore. The tiny bullet was the only thing that mattered, and it had such a little way to go. He gave it a final tug, and it slipped free, and he could let go of everything, joyous.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Simon opened his eyes to a world of glowing gold. So warm, so comforting. He wanted to sink back into bliss, but he had a nagging feeling, punctuated by a sharp pain in his head, that people needed him to get up. With a flick of power, he healed a small hole in his skull, and with it gone, clarity followed, and he remembered.
Dillon, Gale, Horace. Everything. But he couldn’t be angry, not in this plant womb. It felt as if his love of botany had physically manifested in order to cradle him. He sent his power out and found the wounds in the tree. Pool and her drushka were fighting for their lives, but that wasn’t all. He used Pool’s senses to search farther and found Samira and Horace, both needing his help.
Rage began to seep through the bliss like the little red ribbons his blood left in the pod’s fluid. Someone was outside, watching him. Reach. He stretched the skin of the pod and let her feel his anger, his desire to come out. Her eyes widened, and he felt her surprise that they should be so connected. Pool was surprised, too, but he couldn’t let either of them distract him.
Reach sent him calming feelings; he couldn’t hear her song, but he could feel it, and it urged the pod to open. As the lips above him folded back, he stood, desperate to stretch. The pod ripped along the top, and he grabbed the branch above him. Reach steadied him, helping him down as he tried to remember how to stand.
And breathe? He bent double, coughing and sputtering, heaving fluid. Reach patted his back, but he used his power to help himself, and she gasped again.
“Shawness, I can feel you like a drushka!”
He sent her a jot of healing power, strengthening her, washing away her fatigue and using her as a conduit to do the same to the rest of the drushka. Something nagged at his senses, not drushkan but connected as he was. He felt it coming closer and had a momentary thought about ghosts as a hazy form glided among the branches, but even without a body, he recognized her.
“Cordelia Ross?”
Reach turned, but if she could feel Cordelia it seemed she couldn’t see her. “Where?”
“I hear you!” Cordelia said, a thought that passed through the drushka.
“I have to go.” He couldn’t stand still. The air felt supercharged, crackling with the energy of the tree, with the drushkan connection. He started through the branches, but Reach grabbed his arm.
“Perhaps some clothes, shawness?”
For a moment, he almost didn’t bother, but even with the rage, with the rebirth, he was still himself. “Fine.” She went to find something, and Cordelia hovered beside him.
“You’re glowing like fire,” Cordelia said. “Nearly drushkan, but more… I don’t know.”
“Looks as if the drushka have changed us both. I’m sensing you with my power, but neither of us is a telepath, so we shouldn’t be able to talk.”
“Through the drushka? They need your help, Simon. There’s a fight—”
“I know.”
Reach hurried back with some clothing, and he dressed quickly as she muttered about two humans communicating as drushka. Simon felt another bullet punch into the tree, and he sent another wave of healing energy through his feet, into the branches.
Reach shivered and laughed. “Perhaps not such a bad thing.”
Once dressed, he strode away from her. Someone was using micro powers; it had to be Horace. He’d been shot, but he was healing himself slowly. Good. That would save some time. Simon searched for Samira and found she’d been lifted into the branches. He didn’t even need to be near her to heal her with a thought.
“Take me to the field.”
Pool’s branches lowered him to the ground. Cordelia hovered in the air beside him, and Reach rode with him as well. He wanted her close. He might need contact with a drushka or the tree to access his connection to Pool. The thought surprised him. With all the anger he felt, he knew he should have been half a step away from gibbering. He should have been lashing out and swearing and damning Dillon to hell and back, but he felt an eerie calm. He sensed humans and drushka on the battlefield, their bodily rhythms similar but different. Reach called something, but he didn’t listen, paying attention to blood and sap and soil. They were all cogs in a great machine, and he was the monkey wrench. All he needed to do was throw his power over them like a net.
The firing and the yelling stopped; even the drushka fell silent, though he didn’t catch them up as he had the humans. The armored ones stood frozen as if they’d been paused in time, but that was just their armor holding them up. The others had fallen to the ground. The drushka milled around, wondering at each other, seeking information from Pool.
“What have you done?” Reach whispered.
“I’ve interrupted them.” He’d once seen Dué do the same, but he didn’t mention that. “Even their neurons can’t fire without my permission.”
“Will they die?” Cordelia asked.
“Not unless I let them.”
“Wow,” she said, and he supposed that summed it up perfectly.
“I can’t hold them forever,” he said, speaking to Pool through Reach. “If you’re going to disarm them, it has to be in the next few minutes.”
“Where are you going, shawness?” Pool asked in his mind.
“I’m going to kill Dillon.” He nodded, never so certain of something in all his life.
“I’m coming with you,” Cordelia said. “I’m not missing that.”
“I also,” Reach said, “so that we can all speak with one another.”
“Okay, but just you two.” He didn’t want to give Dillon the opportunity to use anyone else against him. He was pretty certain Dillon couldn’t hurt a ghost, or whatever Cordelia was, and he trusted a drushka to stay hidden. With one more cast of his power, he sensed that Horace had healed himself and was coming closer. Simon
wanted to hold him with terrible fierceness, but Horace would want to come with him, and Simon couldn’t have that.
Instead, he cast his senses wider, borrowing from Pool again. Dillon wasn’t on this battlefield. He was somewhere else, closing in on Celeste. Simon pinpointed him and started moving. But Dillon wasn’t the only interesting thing in Sun-Moon territory. Simon sensed many wounded and dead. “What’s been happening?”
Cordelia told him about a great battle with Dué, or Naos, as she was calling herself. When she told him about a connection between a plains girl and the space station, he stopped her. “Can you describe this connection? This blue light?”
“Um, it was images, lots of them. Pain, probably because she sees everything. It would drive anyone crazy. Can you do something about it?”
“I don’t know yet.” It almost made him giddy, almost shook his calm, but he made himself keep to center. Killing Dillon was the most important thing here. He’d deal with Naos when and if he had to.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about your uncle when it happened,” he said, wanting to get anything off his chest that still lingered.
“I’m sorry I hit you.”
He nodded. He’d deserved it. It had been the first pain he’d felt in a long time. “I feel as if I’ve spent years in limbo, and I’m not talking about the tree. You know, I thought one time that I’d always heal Dillon, that I could never let him die, but now I’ve never been surer that I have to kill him. I’ve never killed anyone, not a human being.”
“This one deserves it.”
“Ahya,” Reach said. “We will kill him on behalf of those we loved and lost.”
*
Horace’s arms were up over his head, and the ground slithered underneath him. Someone was dragging him? He opened an eye and watched the sky go by for a few seconds before he noticed that someone had hold of his feet. Mamet. Oh yes, there’d been a fight. He’d fallen? He’d been healing Simon, and then he’d fallen, but that wasn’t what was hurting so much.
Widows of the Sun-Moon Page 30