By this time, although Jedao hadn’t realized it earlier, his hearing had started coming back. He’d mistaken the faint roaring for an auditory hallucination, but on second thought, it was the sound of the encroaching fire. And the person he was fighting was wheezing.
“Sorry,” Jedao tried to say, except all that came out was a strangled moan.
This caused the struggles to intensify, not the intended effect. At least the Shuos slumped unconscious shortly afterward. Jedao hoped they weren’t dead, but he needed to keep moving, and it wasn’t like he’d brought any first aid supplies with him.
He’d said once to Mikodez that he wouldn’t kill again. Two years gone and he’d already broken his promise. He couldn’t dwell on that now; he wasn’t so firm in his convictions that he was willing to let the Shuos recapture him.
Jedao moved on to the second target, who went down quickly, and then the third. He didn’t proceed in order of proximity, largely to keep them guessing. No matter what physical advantages he had, he didn’t believe in making things easy for his opponents.
When it came to the third, he ran into a complication. More of his hearing had returned, damn his body and its unpredictable healing. He’d been doing fine without the distractions, and target three was screaming at him, or possibly just screaming.
In response to the irritating shrieks, Jedao reared up, then smashed his forehead against the target’s. His mouth stretched wide open—interesting, he was back to having a mouth, even if he could have sworn his jaw wasn’t supposed to unhinge like this—and then he snapped it shut in horror. He was hungry.
Involuntarily, Jedao gripped the person’s arms to keep them from breaking free, even though he was trembling. Was I seriously going to try to eat them? What in the name of fox and hound is wrong with me?
Once upon a time, the Revenant had warned him that he needed to eat in order to fuel his regeneration. He hadn’t thought through the implications, especially when coupled with the level of physical trauma he’d sustained. In particular, he hadn’t considered what he’d be driven to do when he was caught without even so pitiful a recourse as the ration bars Hemiola had given him, since they hadn’t survived the earlier stunts.
Now that he was aware of the intolerable gnawing in his stomach, he couldn’t ignore it. The target continued to scream. Jedao discovered that his mouth was open again, wider, wider, widest, and that he was trying to taste the target’s face through the faceplate of the armor, which he couldn’t imagine had any appreciable nutritional value.
Jedao stumbled backwards in the initial shock of horror, releasing the person even though he was hurt, he needed to eat, he needed to eat—it was impossible to think past the desire to subdue his prey and suck out the sustenance he required. Fuck, he thought dimly, I should have realized—I can’t regenerate out of nowhere. I need replenishment.
At this point his target made a fatal error. They threw a grenade, which Jedao was too distracted to dodge or catch and fling back. And then they scrambled backwards, out of the blast radius. It wasn’t the blast radius they should have worried about.
The grenade exploded in a scatter of shards of fire and stinging hot gases. Red-hot shrapnel pierced Jedao. The concussive blast damaged his hearing yet again. His entire body was a pincushion of agony.
He didn’t care about any of that. Couldn’t care about any of that. All he knew was that he’d been hurt more even as the regenerative processes that he had no conscious control over demanded more fuel—more food. His self-control shredded.
Jedao lunged again, snake-swift, and tore at his prey’s armor. His fingers were slick with his own blood. He started hammering against the suit, rapid percussive blows erratically boosted by his ability to accelerate himself. The prey screamed. Jedao’s mouth gaped open wider wider widest to swallow the noise—
The bullets slammed into him from behind. Two in the head, one for each knee. Not that he was in any condition to count; it would have required too much cognition. The last thing he thought as darkness engulfed him was that more prey had showed up.
“ARE YOU SURE you want this thing on the moth?” asked the deltaform servitor hovering between Cheris and Jedao. Its name was 1491625, a numerical pattern that it found pleasing, and Cheris had worked with it in the past. At the moment its lights glowed livid red; it wasn’t making any secret of its displeasure.
“Yes,” Cheris said wearily, prepared to argue. It didn’t argue.
Jedao didn’t look human anymore, except in broad outline. Frenzied tentacles of shadow boiled and writhed and reached toward her. His mouth stretched wide and snapped repeatedly in her direction. He was imprisoned in the cargo hold, although neither Cheris nor 1491625 were certain that the restraints would hold him if he regained enough wits to accelerate his way out of them. The cramped quarters made her nervous, because when she’d taken him out, he’d been trying to eat a downed Shuos operative, armor and all.
“You didn’t mention him doing this the last time you fought him,” 1491625 said. Its red lights flared again.
“That’s because he didn’t,” Cheris said. She studied Jedao, frowning. “Don’t you have some piloting to do?”
“I only sit in the pilot’s seat because it gives you more room to move around,” 1491625 said, its red tinting a decidedly snippy orange. “I can control the moth perfectly well from any location, including outside. Not that I’m eager to do extravehicular. And I don’t want the creature, whether or not it’s actually ‘Jedao,’ gobbling you down for a snack.”
Cheris raised her eyebrows and continued to observe Jedao’s compulsive attempts to get closer to her. He was ignoring 1491625 as irrelevant or, more likely, inedible. “Kind of you to care,” she said to 1491625, teasing.
“I’m serious,” it snapped back. “I thought you called because of some kind of emergency. I didn’t realize you were exfiltrating that.”
“It is an emergency,” Cheris said. “Or did you not notice the Shuos running around after us?”
“Kind of hard to miss that when you and your friend set the forest on fire.”
Cheris had a pretty good idea of how Jedao had achieved that, even if she’d been occupied knocking out a Shuos at the time. The question was, how could he do all this stuff? She’d originally assumed that regeneration was the result of some unholy experiment of Kujen’s, not unreasonable given his obsession with immortality. But the ability to fly?
Jedao must have burned off clothing, and whatever equipment he hadn’t told her about. While Cheris had witnessed some strange things on the battlefield, usually in connection with exotic effects, she’d never encountered anything like this. Jedao was composed wholly of a wriggling unhuman darkness, not just ordinary shadow. It seeped out from behind her eyes even when she wasn’t facing him. She’d tried closing her eyes and had felt an unnerving sensation inside her, as though the tentacles were trying to squirm free from within her.