“One spark,” Prima said, understanding the image. Then in a louder voice, she told her fleet, “We aren’t the spark today, people.”
King began to like this brave, fierce female human.
Then the officer beside him said, “There he is. I see the target again.”
Diamond was running back the way that he came before, emerging from the smoke and swirling ashes.
Breezes bent the smoke, causing it to gracefully follow after the boy.
Every day before this day, imagining war, King dressed armies in majestic colors and marched them forwards with great purpose. In his mind, the papio and humans were two combatants standing beside contested ground, and they would trade blows and insults and bleed each other before inflicting even worse wounds, and one species would win and the other would retreat, and there was order to what he envisioned, and the imagined drama sometimes left him joyful.
But now, experiencing the thinnest example of real war, he found nothing honorable or orderly. This was mayhem. This was waste on a fabulous scale. Real war was more like a storm than any fair contest between warriors. Storms rose to sweep through the world, and they had no souls, and they were idiots—mindless, changeless impulses to be endured, or they would crush everything in their path. War was very different from one brave soul standing on his important floor, guarding the lens and his telescope for no reason except that this was the most interesting place to stand.
“What am I seeing?” the operator asked.
“A female papio,” said a third operator. “But no, she’s huge . . . isn’t she . . . ?”
King’s telescope was the last to see the apparition running over the barren, uptilted coral. But he noticed Merit before the others, and he had enough time to bring the focus to the old slayer as he fell and then recovered. A crisp shout of directions pulled the other telescopes to the scene, and every little telescope and pair of binoculars were raised, people claiming to see nothing or everything.
Father and their leader moved to the pilot’s window.
“What is that?” asked Prima.
The giant papio had stopped beside the old slayer.
“List,” she said. “What is that thing?”
The officer beside King said, “Oh. She’s trying to help Merit.”
Then the slayer was dead, and after the shared hollering, shock fell into anger and the bridge turned quiet enough that only one voice was audible.
Prima said, “You know. I think you do know. Is that the papio’s child?”
Father said, “Yes.”
“Tell me about it,” said Prima.
Everyone wanted to hear the answer. King wanted to hear. For all of his insights and honest chatter, List had never mentioned this creature, at least not in earshot of his son.
“It’s physically huge,” Father said.
“Gigantic,” Prima said.
“Female in appearance.”
“What else?”
“The creature’s inhabited by different minds, different personalities.”
“What does that mean?” Prima asked
“She’s stranger than ours,” said Father. “Your child, and mine.”
King kept the one eye fixed on the papio, watching it climb farther up the ridge. Diamond was standing on higher ground, and the whiffbirds descended, and the giant easily dropped one of war machines.
King stepped back from the lens.
What was apparent needed to be words, and he spoke them. To his father, he asked, “Could the attack from two days ago . . . could that belong to this creature?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, Father, what do you guess?”
List didn’t like the subject, the tone. Something caused him to straighten his back, and King knew that more secrets were being hidden from him.
Five leaps and then King lifted his father overhead, pressing him near the ceiling. Just short of screaming, he asked the squirming man, “What else do you know?”
“Nothing,” Father insisted. “We have an agent, he’ll report again soon.”
Then the indignity was too much. With a stiff voice, the Archon of Archons said, “You will put me down.”
King dropped him and then caught him just before he struck the floor.
More leaps and he was standing back at the telescope, watching his tiny brother do nothing while that bizarre sibling climbed closer.
Diamond was facing his father’s killer.
And that was the moment when Prima pulled her shadow across the bridge, finding an empty piece of floor where she could talk and the lieutenant could listen. Everyone else was watching the scene below play out. King watched, and he breathed in great gulps, trying to make sense of what glass and his eyes showed him.
But all that while, he listened with every ear.
Prima said, “If we discover that this is . . . ”
“Yes, madam,” Sondaw said.
“The criminal.”
“Yes.”
“We need options,” she said.
“Of course, madam.”
“I need someone outside the normal lines of command.”
The lieutenant breathed, saying nothing.
“You. I need you. But only if you’re ready to carry out my orders.”
“Madam, of course,” said Sondaw.
And after a moment’s reflection, with the slowest, most careful voice in the room, the young man asked, “What do you want my hands to do?”
The smoke and black ash stood tall, ignoring the wind and the wash of propellers. Twisting currents made the smoke swirl, and from deep inside came a rumbling, low and purposeful and almost too soft to notice. The boy stood on the dead coral. Divers charged up the rugged raw slope, and the soldiers tried to block her route. The papio didn’t want Diamond injured. Bountiful’s gutted belly was scattered across the landscape below, flames dying, survivors moving slowly. Save for a few fingers of stubborn reef, there was nothing beyond the wreckage but air. The morning was staggeringly brilliant. Graceful airships flew under the shaggy green and happy wilderness, and most of the forest was nothing but healthy. Slice away the violence and pain, the stark emotions and dangerous trajectories, and what remained was a lovely picture that a mind could swallow and then cherish for the rest of its days.
Divers threw a massive lump of coral, and one whiffbird dropped and died.
The smoke swirled within itself, and it shrank, growing denser, the rumbling turning into a familiar voice.
“I’m here,” said Quest.
Diamond glanced over his shoulder.
There was no smoke behind him. Particles of coral dust and ash were suspended on a framework of narrow airborne fibers. Quest had eaten bodies and consumed a fat portion of the ship’s stores, and while the fire raged, she discovered that heated corona skins had an appealing flavor, bits of them incorporated into her huge new body. She was vast, she had never larger, and she was still trying to gauge what she could make from these far flung ingredients, and how quickly she could work, and which shape would do the most good.
Divers chopped up two papio with a makeshift sword.
“I’ll help you,” Quest said.
Diamond shifted his weight, saying nothing.
Divers threw a third soldier into the rotor, and she sprinted toward their brother, one hand grabbing at the rising coral while the other brandished that bloodied piece of sharpened bone.
“What are you doing?” their enemy asked.
“Standing like soldier,” said Diamond.
“You should have run,” she said.
“You should run,” Diamond said.
“Your people aren’t close enough to help,” Divers said.
The boy wiped his eyes and dropped his hand again. Divers paused, coming no closer while her eyes lost their focus. Then as their sister reached up with her empty hand, climbing again, Quest yanked every last thread to her center. She gave herself the shape and effortless grace of a jazzing—a black predator with black eyes and a forest of long milky teeth. Except she was far larger than the living jazzings, and louder, and for as long as she screamed, there was no louder voice in the Creation.