"The whispering’s getting louder." My voice was high.
"Then concentrate, Cassandra." Kaoren’s words were clipped, stern, the tone he only uses with me in emergencies.
He continued with the visualisation, and I think I did succeed in making the drone, or at least there was suddenly a loud crunching sound right next to me, as if a solid, squat drone with a vast array of cutting tools was being compacted for recycling.
Then Zee’s voice, loud and abrupt. "Use her suit. Caszandra, we’re going to cut you out."
Nanosuits can be cloth, they can change colours, and they can make an edge sharper than steel. Lots of them, all over. Caszandra Scissorsuit.
It worked too. While Palanty and Kajal teleported down to the malachite marble room with the last of the bombs and a round dozen drones to send skittering off exploring, my uniform grew dozens of blades, effortlessly slicing through the stuff holding me down. My hands came loose first as a technician cleverly manipulated the suit to slice as well as pierce.
But the whispers had me.
As I stopped hearing anything else, my vitals began climbing through the roof, and waves of distortion started rippling out: slow billows of heat which increased with every repetition. Not confined to the room either – they felt them at Pandora. For all I know, they felt them on Tare.
Tsur Selkie ordered Palanty and Kajal out immediately, and recommended that the bombs be triggered as soon as they were clear. All they could do was hope that the malachite marble would be destroyed without much damage to my floor. Palanty and Kajal teleported, but then the next wave of heat and distortion rolled out and that one–
Quite a few people have tried to describe to me what happened next. Maze says he felt thin, Zee that she was made of glass. Everyone on Muina had some variation of this: flattened, washed away, erased, frozen, unable to move, to think, to do. To trigger explosions. Kaoren says he felt painted. And all of them could see another place, a Muina where enormous statues stood above the cities to proclaim the reign of golden gods.
I didn’t feel thin, or made of glass. I felt like I was being cooked alive while my brain was pierced by a half dozen needles. My scissorsuit hadn’t cleared away the covering over my face, but even through it I could see there was a bright, burning light directly above me.
There was just enough of me left outside the brain piercing to be aware that they were going to blow the malachite marbles. I didn’t realise the entire world had fallen into a pit of distortion with no way to dig itself out, and so I was pretty much lying there waiting to die. Which was pathetic of me, but it had just felt so inevitable for so long. I was the Supa Speshul Magick Gurl who had appeared from nowhere and made it possible to win, but who had to die at the end so that the people she cared about could live on.
Which would SUCK.
Especially when I was the one doing the dying, and particularly when it involved being slowly roasted. If I was going to be blown up, I decided, I at least wanted to get away from the mega-sunlamp first.
I wanted to not break my promise to Kaoren. I wanted to not have been wrong to let three children care.
My body didn’t feel quite my own, but I managed to lift a hand and flail clumsily at my face, swiping away the rubbery shroud. But the whispers were getting louder, louder, and I’m not sure if I would have managed any more if not for Lira.
I don’t know how long she’d been there, trying to push me off the altar. She was quite a sight to see, looking like a proper ghost instead of a little girl, with great streamers of light warping off her, being pulled toward this glowing starburst above where I was lying. Every time she reached out, her arms would thin out to light and be caught by the starburst, making it impossible for her to reach me.
But she kept trying, and mouthed words I could barely hear: "You have to move!"
The sight of her galvanised all the parts of me which weren’t caught by whispers. Not to any rational, measured plan of action. No, my response could best be summed up as BAD LIGHT EATING LIRA! The amount of thought space I had left was definitely at Lolcat level. Which is probably why I decided that the important thing was to save the little girl who’d been dead for centuries.
But it got me to move, to roll off the altar, trying to push her backward, looking for the quickest route away from the light. There was no door. That betrayal of expectation actually cleared my head a little, enough to realise that the burning sensation in my chest was at least in part because the air was really, really hot. Still focused on saving Lira, I grabbed her to me, and staggered drunkenly toward the corner of the room, trying to shield her from the light.
As soon as I moved from the altar, the ground began to shake, and heading to the corner increased the amount of earth-shaking to a spectacular degree. And it felt like the needles in my brain were being dragged out, with every treacle-pull step.
Then the floor heaved up, but at least it tossed us toward the corner, whereupon I shoved Lira underneath me and tried to cover her as much as possible, desperately trying to project a shield or wall to keep away the light.
The sky fell.
The earth-shaking was worldwide. The damage at Pandora wasn’t too bad – there’s a crack in one of the science buildings and one of the towers in the old town fell down. More spectacular was the split which appeared in the moon. Instead of a bullet-hole, it now looks like a comma. That happened just before all the painted glass people found themselves real again, and immediately blew the charges.
The destruction of the malachite marbles caused a great surge of power to be released through the platforms. They aren’t working any more, though Isten Notra thinks that’s because their aether supply was exhausted. Moonfall happened at the platform villages where the moon was visible yesterday, anyway. And the Ena is currently a no-go area, all heaving and disturbed, so we’re cut off from Tare and Kolar. They think it will settle down, but not necessarily to the way it was before, and it’s very likely the Pillars are no longer operating.
But all that was later. They blew the charges just after I started causing earthquakes, and a world was thrown from its feet. When the dust settled I was alive but unconscious, my vitals not critical, but not likely to improve with a palace and four levels of subterranean installation collapsed spectacularly on top of me. It took nearly two kasse for them to get me out.
I woke in my home-away-from-home less than a day after my visualisation of Second Squad. Kaoren was asleep in the chair beside me, but came awake with a start which meant he’d had an alarm set to trigger if my state shifted to consciousness. I tried to say hello, but after all that burning hot air, my throat is pretty painful, so I said "I can’t believe I’m not dead," over the interface.
He made a face at me, and then just leaned forward and rested his forehead against my shoulder. I put my hand on the back of his head and we stayed like that without speaking, appreciating that we could, that we got to be alive together, and go on.
My cheek and forehead felt more than odd, so eventually I tried to touch them, but Kaoren caught my hand, then showed me what I currently looked like, with my left eye swollen shut and the skin around it red and angry beneath a coating of salve, the eyebrow gone along with most of my hair, which had been melted and frizzled and then chopped unevenly off by the medics. I also have a broken arm and cracked ribs, but altogether this has been one of my less serious forays into injury-land. I’m planning on it being my last.