A woman was sitting near the critical panel, but she was talking into her headset, talking to an important voice.
Three more soldiers were between Diamond and the red knob.
Then there were only two soldiers left, and he was past King too.
Someone yelled, “Hey.”
The boy moved a little slower.
“You,” someone shouted.
And Diamond got up on his bare toes, running harder than he had ever run in his life.
FOURTEEN
Divers found herself awake.
Awake and upright.
Once again and forever, Divers was in charge of everything that mattered, and the rest of the world stood in mute amazement, watching her rapid recovery.
Then the flashes came, each flash brilliant enough to make the coral change its hue, and the light seemed odd and a little lovely. That’s what she was thinking. Then one soldier told everybody to get down. It wasn’t order or an alarm, it was just a request. But the body’s position wouldn’t help anybody. The reef was beneath them, ancient and stubborn, secure as any surface in Creation, and then something faster than any wing, faster and quite a bit larger, dug into the coral, burrowing into the slope beneath them, and at some preset depth the finest explosives anywhere turned into noise and wrenching motions that tore the coral and every other body to shreds.
With that first blast, Divers’ flesh mimicked stone, holding her parts together.
Then she was falling back to the reef again. She was wondering where she would heal next. But a second rocket impacted and erupted, and still airborne, she was sliced by the flying debris, desperate hands clinging to pieces of her own flesh as she tumbled, as she fell, followed by a third blast that took away her eyes before flinging her remains out over the lip of the reef.
The Eight fell blind, together and never so close.
Out of the panic, Tritian spoke to the others. With a steady quick voice, he said, “We’re going somewhere warm.”
He said, “None of you can live there like I can live there.”
He said, “Decide. I am the First and you are the Seven, or the coronas eat us all over again.”
The vote was instantaneous and unanimous.
And the long fall continued while the body hurriedly wove itself into the beginnings of something new.
And in a sad fashion, Divers began to laugh.
“Is this what you wanted?” she asked her brother. “When you were walking me in the dark, in my dreams, Tritian . . . were you trying to step us off the edge of the world . . . ?”
Both species had played games and polished their best weapons, preparing for a moment rather like today, and here was a long day with plenty of opportunities to employ all of those lessons. Assumptions were tested as well as their own character. None of the details had been imagined beforehand; who would have dreamed up impossible children waging some ancient, deeply personal war? Yet the results were remarkably close to what had been planned. The tree-walker fleet deployed itself in battle formation, overlapping guns delivering withering fire. Every wing that attacked would be lost, so the papio shifted their aim, finding success in every other part of the world. The sickly Hanner tree was dropped with the first wave. By the time the Ruler of the Storm returned to the Corona District, the Hole had more than doubled in size, and the surrounding forest was riven with smoky stubborn fires. There was no thought of pausing, much less defending the ruins. Delays were another enemy. The combined fleet continued to push straight ahead, spitting off fletches and bigger ships to protect worthier allies. In every sense of the word, war had begun, and a general selected by List two days ago had become the dictator to every human clinging to the branches.
The boy watched the battles until the sameness and fatigue claimed his will. And then without announcing his attentions, he abandoned his piece of the bridge, walking quickly to the Ruler’s main dock.
Every face stared at him.
And reading every face, he saw hatred and fear and the keen paranoid thoughts of creatures that would never look on him with any shred of real trust.
The dock had always been a vast space, a gigantic room busy with small airships and the Archon’s private fletch. But those lesser craft had been moved elsewhere, or they were burnt and lost. What had replaced them was a single vessel—the Panoply Night. The dock’s largest wall had been peeled back to bring that great clumsy, heavily armored balloon onboard, and dozens of cables kept the Panoply secure, comfortable. Armed guards stood where they looked menacing, and other guards watched from high perches. Until they reached home, the Ruler of the Storm was only the second most important ship in the world.
“Stop,” one guard said.
King continued walking. “Call and ask my father,” he said. “He’ll explain why I’m going up there.”
“Your father doesn’t have buoyancy anymore,” said the next guard.
“Then please shoot me,” said King. “Punch my hearts, and let’s find out what happens next.”
Guns were lowered, and he walked on. But every available call-line was opened, generals hearing news that would ensure a nice fresh panic.
The gangway led up to the public hallways, and King soon arrived at the steel door leading to the prison.
One hard blow with his palm, and the door shook in its frame.
From the other side, a scared man shouted, “I’ll open. Let me unlock.”
“I’ll save you the bother,” said King. “Stand back.”
One moment of focused, harmless violence made him a little happier.
Every guard vanished after that. Three prisoners were sitting in the first cell. No charges had been named, but until the full conspiracies were dissected, they would be kept here for their own safety. Nissim was standing in the room’s center—a sorry man suddenly older than his days. The two children were huddled against the back wall, staring at King without quite focusing on him, each holding the other’s hands. Those creatures used to look frail and small. Not anymore. After today, after watching what the Eight and Quest could achieve against one another, King felt the sudden need to huddle with them, awaiting the next awful storm.
The next cell was empty, while the cell after that held the other boy, Karlan.
Like Nissim, he was standing. But he was far from defeated, and despite blisters and burns and probably no sleep, he looked happy enough. At least the smile was more convincing than some, and the humor came with a sharp, unaffected tone.
“Are we winning the war?” he asked.
With both mouths, King laughed, and he pressed on.
Prima and her lieutenant were locked together in the same cell. King’s father and the generals weren’t sure what blame to strap to each of them. The woman had ordered the reef-hammers armed, and her loyal lieutenant did nothing to stop the disaster. Neither had been interrogated, but Sondaw suffered some cracked bones between his last post and this bleak little space. Then they were thrown together so that careful people could listen to every word, waiting for them to convict each other.
The pair acted as if they hadn’t shared one word all day.
But looking at the intruder, Prima sighed deeply.
“Do you know what I would do?” she asked. “If I could step back fourteen hundred days . . . what would I do without any regrets?”
“Throw us back to the coronas.”
She nodded, dipping her head.
“And knowing what I know,” said King, “do you think I’d crawl out of that stomach? Out into this miserable shit of a world?”
Her lieutenant rose, making ready to defend his lady.
But King pushed on to the end, to the solid door that he didn’t break down once before and didn’t need to touch this time. The door was unlocked and ajar. The prisoner and his monkey had been told to remain where they were, and both seemed happy to comply, sitting together in the farthest corner. Diamond was wearing a mechanic’s jumper, sleeves cut short to suit his arms. The air smelled of toilet wastes. Monkey shit and human shit smelled mostly the same to King. He entered the cell where an old woman once beat up an old man. Boy and monkey stared at the dried blood on the floor. King approached, stopping a long stride short of them, and then he said, “They’re afraid that I told you what to do. Starting the war was my idea.”