Half a day of careful labor and she could produce a beautiful body, larger than Divers and far more powerful.
But she had only moments to work, nothing but rough ingredients to weave into some kind of order.
Divers climbed close enough to swing the broken rotor.
She aimed for Diamond’s narrow neck.
Quest shoved the boy down and absorbed the blow, the sharp edge burrowing into a damp matrix of muck and extra water.
She felt nothing but the nagging pressure.
Divers retrieved her sword with a hard yank, and Quest leaped at her, nothing on those feet but the illusion of claws. She used her mass, and she used surprise, the impact driving their sister off her feet and the rotor from her hand as they tumbled across the jagged ground.
Red blood mixed with sooty water. Divers was extraordinarily strong—far beyond what a mortal jazzing could match. But she struck nothing of importance, and she bit what didn’t matter, and then both of them lay sprawled together in a broad bowl where clay lay beneath trapped rainwater. Divers squirmed until she was on top, one hand holding down what looked like a face while the other hand struck and struck and struck all of the body, searching for any weak point.
A cannon on the nearest fletch fired, the shell impacting beside them.
But before the debris stopped falling, whiffbirds and wings began pummeling that fletch, corona scales scattering like shiny leaves while one of its engines dragged smoke in its wake..
Short of breath, Divers quit striking her enemy.
An idea offered itself, and from a human-style mouth deep inside, Quest shouted to her brother, “Run now. Fast as you can.”
But Diamond had already vanished.
Divers invested a moment laughing at this unexpected puzzle.
“You’re the ghost,” she said.
“My name is,” Quest said.
Divers dipped her head, genuinely intrigued. “Yes?”
And Quest turned back into smoke again. She was huge and dense, and then an instant later she was everywhere and vaporous. The world went black, and Divers was swallowed up by the amorphous twisting flesh. Shock became panic. Divers breathed in reflex, ingesting fibers and charred twists of corona skin, and then her lungs rebelled, a string of brutal coughs striking her like body blows.
And once again, Quest shrank.
Her plan, the inspiration, was to shrivel and compress, smothering her enemy in a dense black blanket. Without breath, Divers would collapse, and by then there would be more soldiers crawling about, probably from both species, and Quest could slip away in the midst of that chaos.
She was proud of her plan, even after it failed.
Compressing and smothering was work, and it took too much time. Divers swung into the pressure and kicked hard and reached out, using memory in place of eyes . . . and getting hold of the rotor, she pivoted and lashed out once more, hard and then harder.
The smoky body began to tear and collapse.
The giant papio body stepped out, filthy red with her own blood, and she swung at a likely point in the blackness, doing nothing. But then she pulled the rotor free, slicing at another angle, and Quest lost track of her half-born body.
Like black sap, she flowed into the bowl with the rainwater.
Divers stood on the shoreline of this living pond, and where she saw movement, she swung hard, each blow making Quest miserable and weaker and more scared.
Nothing in the world was bigger than her fear.
And that was when what was essential inside her climbed free from what was dying, and while Divers hacked and chopped at the black goo, the tiniest shred of her soul raced away on invisible feet.
One scared soldier had dropped his big rifle before fleeing.
Diamond was standing in the little gully when he lifted the weapon with both arms and a knee. He couldn’t outrun Divers, and that’s why he needed to fight. But the rifle was heavy, and it was covered with buttons with important, secret jobs. As an experiment, the boy tugged on the trigger, and nothing happened. So he pushed buttons and tried again, startled when a single round emerged with a sharp crack, and a bullet longer than his longest finger dug its way deep inside the old dead coral.
Soon Divers came hunting for the source of the gunfire.
With a deep breath and some luck, Diamond lifted the gun’s barrel and fired eight quick shots, three rounds piercing his sister’s chest.
She watched him.
The gun was too heavy, and it fell back to where it was happiest, left behind and useless.
Divers lifted her sword, and she stepped closer.
She was wounded, but the flesh was already healing.
“They’re coming,” said Diamond, and he pointed upward.
“Not fast enough,” Divers said.
One cannon blast had started a full-scale battle. The fletch was limping away while more fletches arrived. Two whiffbirds collided with each other, and a swift wing was struck by someone’s gunfire, screaming its way past the reef’s edge, twisting down toward the demon floor and whatever lay beyond.
“Where’s Quest?” Diamond asked.
“Is that the ghost’s name?”
The boy nodded.
“I killed her,” said Divers.
“You killed everyone on Marduk too,” said Diamond.
“Hardly,” Divers said. “I said a few words, wishing for your death, and the rest of it happened on its inevitable own.”
She raised the sword higher, aiming with care.
“What are you going to do?” Diamond asked.
“Remove that brain from those little shoulders.”
He stepped back, in reflex.
She stepped closer, laughing at the gesture, or maybe something else. “And then,” she said. “Do you know what I’ll do, brother? I’ll throw that head of yours. Believe me, from this ground, I can toss you into a place where nobody will ever find you again.”
Diamond was ready to drop.
And Divers swung the sword once, aiming high on purpose. There was no time to react, and the blade was past and back over her head before Diamond could think about moving.
He was doomed.
In that doomed head, he made wild little plans for his revenge.
Divers edged closer.
“Stop,” the boy begged.
“When I’m finished,” she said.
Then came a noise at once familiar and strange. The woosh began somewhere close, followed instantly by a solid thunk, wet meat absorbing some terrific momentum.
Divers and Diamond were equally startled.
For no apparent reason, the giant had fallen on her side.
Diamond saw the wound filling with urgent blood and the torn tissues fighting to reassemble themselves, and that long papio face was filled with doubt and a growing horror. Divers was still holding the makeshift sword. She used one end of the blade to dig into her body, widening the hole before it healed and closed.
Diamond backed away, but not far.
Divers began to weep, and she dropped the sword, ripping at the wound with both hands, making a gap wide enough to insert four fingers and then the thumb, and that was the moment when the metronome stopped counting. That was when the harpoon’s explosive charge turned to gas and a white flash of light that left Diamond on his back.
He blinked.
Sore everywhere, he sat up.
Above him, the airships were firing salvos of three white flares at a time—the universal appeal for a truce.
From someplace close, Master Nissin called out Diamond’s name.
And then a figure came out from the rain of coral grit and airborne blood. A huge and fearless and infinitely capable soul strolled into sight. The launcher pulled from Bountiful was cradled in his arms, and the hair was burnt but the blistered face was grinning, and with a rough and very pleased voice, Karlan said, “Shit.”
Staring at the shredded body, he said, “Now that’s what I call a monster.”
THIRTEEN