Chapter 29

  Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.

  - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

  Chunks of meat sizzled atop Nemesis. Akkama allowed them only a moment of searing before she devoured them right off the blade, nearly raw. She sliced a few more slabs from the carcass of the wildebeest, brushed the sand off, and slapped them onto the blade of her sword where it lay on the rocks. She reheated it with a considerable effort, for her arda had not fully regrown, and watched hungrily as it fried.

  “Sure you don’t want some?” she asked Acarnus, who sat leaning against a palm tree, the bright morning sunlight reflecting off of his new goggles.

  “Thank you for the offer,” he said, “but I am aware of where that sword has been.” He sniffed the air despite his words; that keen nose of his would not let him forget the cooking meat.

  Akkama chuckled. “It’s sterile. I promise.” She liked to drop that word—promise—whenever she could in conversation with Acarnus. Just a reminder.

  He did not reply, occupied by something going on in those goggles that she could not see. She shrugged and turned back to the meat. It had cooked enough. She took one piece of meat for herself, then seized the sword by the hilt and flung the rest up into the air and to the side, away from Acarnus and toward the eyeless black serpent. Her angel caught the rest before any of it hit the sand.

  Mystrikt: tropical white-sanded beaches peppered with derelict oil derricks like the skeletons of a flock of ancient monsters. Warm green waters full of sea monsters, vast sandbars full of burrowing beasts, and islands full of buried treasure. She was here with Acarnus and her angel in search of a very specific treasure: the Shrikesteel Sword.

  “It is possible,” said Acarnus suddenly from his spot at the palm tree, “that the drilling operations disturbed the tombs.” He paused, his mouth open slightly, scanning pages and charts and maps as they flashed through his vision. Searching, analyzing, drawing conclusions. “They utilized subterranean displacement charges to granulate bedrock. The boreholes have collapsed, but there is evidence that they intersected natural tunnels at several points.”

  Akkama examined the nearest derrick, which towered like a strange dead bird inspecting the ground. They were almost in its shadow against the rising run. “So we should try the mines,” she said.

  “It would be most logical to begin there. Odds of success are low, however, as this approach would rely mainly on luck.”

  Hmm. There had to be a better way. An easier way.

  She stood, stretched, burned the grease off of Nemesis and slid it back into its sheath. “Well, for now,” she said, “let’s fight.” The best part of having Acarnus pledged in loyalty to her was that she could make him fight her whenever she wanted.

  Fighting Acarnus was not terribly satisfying. He either threw those stars while she deflected them, a losing game for her since he could steer them in mid-flight, or else she moved in for martial combat at close range. At close range, she could either slice him to pieces with Nemesis or ditch the sword and immediately lose—neither option very fulfilling. Still, a fight was a fight. Her skill at unarmed combat was improving, theoretically, as she became familiar with an ever-expanding list of ways that a highly skilled opponent could incapacitate her. At least by this point she knew how to kill him. She might have to do it soon.

  She called off the sparring after only a short time. She had barely even begun to sweat when she stuck Nemesis in the sand and frowned in disapproval at Acarnus. She shook her head. “If only it had been Rasmus,” she muttered.

  “Rasmus?” Acarnus looked at her with a slight tilt of his head. Confusion.

  “You have fought Rasmus,” she crossed her arms.

  He nodded. “Frequently.”

  “You ever win?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Acarnus did not hesitate. “Too strong.”

  That made Akkama flare with heat and annoyance. She knew by now that Acarnus was not to be trifled with. In an arena, in an open space, she could take him. If he was caught by surprise, she could take him. But he was too damn smart. If he knew a fight was coming, and if he had time to prepare, and if he knew his opponent, then he could not lose. He wouldn’t fight fairly, but he wouldn’t lose. Except that he did lose, to Rasmus, repeatedly, despite his vastly superior tactics and intellect.

  And the way he said ‘too strong’—like it was obvious, like she had asked him why he didn’t win a fight against the tide.

  “What the hell do you mean, ‘too strong?’ How strong is he? Give me a number. You’re all about numbers.”

  “To the best of my knowledge, there is no upper limit to his strength,” said Acarnus. “I believe this is a result of the godshatter. A fragment of the Thunder God is alive within Rasmus.”

  Akkama ground her teeth. She shook with desire. She had to fight him. She had to.

  Acarnus went on. “This is evidenced by the fact that he defeated the forvalaca, one of the ten beasts.”

  Akkama drummed her fingers on the pommel of her sword. “Not something you could do.”

  “Indeed.” The forvalaca had taken Acarnus’s angel only days before, just as it had Fiora’s, and apparently Derxis’s. It was collecting them, controlled somehow by the Ephathic Remnant. Akkama was trying to wait patiently for her turn.

  Derxis was out there trying to find out where the angels had been taken, what the Remnant was doing with them. Derxis had asked for Acarnus’s help, but Akkama had refused. For now, Acarnus was helping her find the Shrikesteel Sword. A weapon born of one great beast, she would use it to slay another. The thought pleased her.

  “Captain Shard could have done it,” Akkama said.

  “As could Miriam Fivemind,” Acarnus added. Akkama gave him a grin. They had bonded over their shared admiration for heroes of old. Though in her opinion, Acarnus took it a bit too far by even copying the Fivemind’s fashion sense. He wore that long coat even in a gods-damned desert.

  “Ah,” she said, suddenly reminded of a question she kept forgetting to ask. “Why was she called the Fivemind?”

  Acarnus appeared eager to share this information, which was something Akkama could discern only because she had been around him for six months. “Miriam’s brilliance was famous even from her youth. Some of her enemies decided to challenge her. A contest of wits, a game of strategy, with Miriam matched against four of the greatest minds of that time. It is even said that the Chained God was involved in selecting her opponents. She won, of course, and thus it was said, since she defeated four of the greatest minds working in concert, that she was worth five such minds. She gained the name of Fivemind.”

  Akkama frowned. That was it? Well, since it was Acarnus telling the story, it had probably been a lot more exciting than he made it sound. She was about to ask what the nature of the contest had been, exactly, when Acarnus spoke.

  “Someone’s coming,” he said. He sniffed the air and turned in a slow circle, scanning with his goggles. He relaxed almost at once. “Emmius.”

  Nemesis, back in Akkama’s hands, wilted down to the sand. Akkama’s incredulity must have been plain, for Acarnus shrugged back at her. He pointed to the nearby derrick. “Almost here,” he said. “Downwind.”

  “How did he get here? What the hell is he doing here?”

  Acarnus shrugged again.

  Akkama growled. “Let’s see what he wants.”

  They left Akkama’s angel to guard their campsite and gnaw on the wildebeest carcass as they strode into the morning sun. They found Emmius in a broad open space, ringed with stunted palm trees and derelict rusted mounds of ancient machinery. He was struggling to heft a large sandstone rock, and it was not clear where he was going with it or why. He was in his typical rags, dirty guitar on his back, and he had the dragon mask on as usual, except that he had painted it all white. His left arm and hand were a dull, dusty grey, metallic, skeletal.

  They watched him for a minute, both of them curious about what he was doing. They stood in plain view, but of course Emmius had the situational awareness of the rock he carried. Puffs of glittering white smoke intermittently emerged from the eyes and around the edges of the mask. He was smoking the crushed crystals again.

  Emmius placed the rock carefully in what looked like a random spot near the edge of the clearing. He stood to observe it, then crouched and made some minor adjustments to its positioning and orientation. He turned and surveyed the clearing. It was a fair thirty paces across, scattered with several clumps of weathered stone just like the one he’d moved. He turned his gaze from one pile of rocks to the next, and if Akkama didn’t know better, she would have said he was deep in thought. At last, he made for the nearest pile. His gait was unsteady, but the sand beneath his feet corrected for him. He selected another rock, larger than the last, and with a loud grunt heaved it up, turned, and waddled away to the far end of the clearing.

  “The hell is he doing?” Akkama asked in a low voice.

  “Rock garden,” said Acarnus. “Little hard data on how it works. Symmetry, tectonics, lay lines, astronomical patterns. Apparently, a properly constructed rock garden focuses a brown’s power.”

  “Huh,” said Akkama. “Or he’s just carrying rocks around ‘cause he’s high on crush.”

  “Possibly.”

  They watched him struggle the rock into position. Acarnus sat down. Akkama joined him.

  “I don’t think he knows we’re here,” said Akkama.

  “I agree.”

  “So, what, he was just wandering around, found himself in Mystrikt somehow, and decided to stop and set up a rock garden within a klick of us?”

  “It is Emmius.”

  “Right. The whole ‘luck’ thing. Didn’t help much with his arm, did it?”

  Acarnus glanced at her in a way that made her tense and wary. The events at Prax were still all foggy in his mind, and he did not like that. He suspected. Soon.

  Still, she wanted to try Emmius’s luck. How far did it go?

  “Hey, Acarnus.”

  “What?”

  “Try to hit Emmius.”

  He turned his head until he was staring at her with the creepy dead-eyed gaze of the goggles. “Clarify.”

  She gestured vaguely at Emmius. That idiot was still oblivious, cheerfully humming something to himself as he heaved stones into place. His brown arda thrummed now and again with hints of placid song. “Throw one of your stars. See if you can hit him.”

  “Of course I can hit him.”

  “Then prove it.”

  “I have no desire to prove such a thing.”

  “Do it. That’s an order.”

  He stared at her for a moment longer, then turned to Emmius and flung out a star in a single fluid motion. He threw from a sitting position; she hadn’t told him how hard to throw it, after all.

  He missed. Emmius stooped to inspect something in the sand at the last moment, and the star flashed above him before striking the sand. The motion and the glint of sunlight got Emmius’s attention. He looked in surprise at the star, then up at the sky in bewilderment as though expecting more to fall. Akkama snorted a laugh.

  “Were you really trying to hit him?”

  “…yes.”

  “Keep trying.”

  A few more stars; every one narrowly missed. Every one also added to Emmius’s confusion. He searched around, but apparently he couldn’t see much through the eyeholes of the mask because he still somehow missed Akkama and Acarnus just sitting there watching.

  “The probability distortion field manifests in different ways,” explained Acarnus, “at different times.” He appeared unembarrassed at having missed half a dozen easy shots.

  “Hmm…” Lucky. Earth powers. “He could help us find the tomb,” she said.

  At last, Emmius chanced to look directly at them. He froze in shock, then bestumbled toward them in evident excitement. His movements were comically at-odds with the ferocious expression of the white dragon mask.

  “Woah, like hey guys,” he said as he approached. Acarnus nodded in response.

  “Emmius!” Akkama stood and swaggered to meet him. “Friend. How you doing?”

  “Uh like okay I guess.” He hesitated, confused.

  “Great! Good. Listen, you’re not still mad about that stuff at Prax, right?”

  Emmius had a remarkable ability to look like a bemused idiot even while wearing a scowling dragon mask. He looked from her to Acarnus as a cloud of sparkling white smoke filtered out from behind his mask. Akkama could smell it now, burnt gemstones. A strange, dizzying smell. “I mean like I was never mad you know?” said Emmius. “Just kind of like bummed I guess about the arm and also about Anthea.”

  Not mad? Maybe he lacked the mental capacity to really understand what she had done. Whatever. “Aw, don’t take it so seriously,” she gave him a fanged smile. “It was just a joke, you know? Just a silly game. Don’t worry about it.”

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  Emmius looked down at their feet. “Well like I hear you okay but when we talked over at Guertile afterward you seemed pretty upse—”

  Akkama hissed and punched him in the stomach to shut him up. His sentence ended in a wheeze and he doubled over. She grabbed Emmius’s arm and dragged him away from Acarnus. She leaned in close when they were out of earshot and whispered fiercely. “I told you not to talk about that.”

  “Yeah but like sorry I just forget.” By the gods, he sounded like he was about to cry. She rolled her eyes.

  “Well then forget about it, okay?” Sometimes she really wished she still had the mind stone.

  Emmius nodded and straightened up again, his breath recovered. Akkama suddenly realized how bad Emmius smelled. She released her grip on his arm and stepped back, wiping her hand on her thigh. Then, belatedly remembering that she’d been trying to secure his aid, she reached out and put the hand companionably on his shoulder. He flinched a little.

  “Emmius,” she said. She tried to say it the way that Anthea would have, in a way that made Emmius feel special and important. “I could use your help. What do you say?”

  He perked up at this. “Help?”

  She nodded. “Help. I think you could help me—help us—find something important. Right here in Mystrikt. In fact, it’s lucky for us that you came along.”

  He became excited. “Oh!” he said. “Yeah. Lucky. Um like sure I’ll help. Can I finish with the rocks first?” He turned to look at the clearing scattered with stones.

  “Nope! Come with me.” She dragged him back to Acarnus.

  Ephathic SADs—Suborbital Assault Dropships—were hard to see coming even with access to surveillance satellites due to their tendency to adjust trajectory in superatmospheric space. Their target location was difficult to read until they dropped, and when they fell they spun down through the atmosphere quick and cold, slicing through terminal velocity with their frictionless airfoils. Ephathic SADs tended to arrive at the same time as the warning of their coming.

  So it was pure luck that Acarnus happened to be glancing up as it began its descent.

  “SAD,” he said. The way he said it made Akkama forget about Emmius. She looked at Acarnus, traced his gaze up to the skies above. She saw nothing.

  “Shit,” she said. She pointed at the nearby derrick, only 100 yards distant. Acarnus nodded and began running. “Come on!” She dragged Emmius, who was mumbling some nonsense question about why Acarnus was sad, toward the shelter of that huge metal construction. He was slow; too slow. He didn’t understand. He wouldn’t make it. But he was also lucky.

  She released him, glanced upward, and saw a white speck high in the clear blue sky, something she might miss if she wasn’t looking for it. She sprinted toward the derrick at full speed, digging her boots into the soft sand. Acarnus was already searching his databases, finding the fastest way underground. They pulled up together at the base of the structure, and after a slight pause he took them to a door around the corner, rusted shut. He glanced at her, looked around. “Where is Emmius?”

  “He’ll be fine.”

  “You left him?” He nearly shouted this. Emotion, from Acarnus? That was rare.

  But it was too late for further discussion, because the SAD had arrived. Remarkably silent for such a massive vessel, its white and grey body slid to a halt roughly overtop of the oil derrick. The bottom third of the vessel spun slowly, narrowed to a point like a giant ridged dart aimed at the earth.

  They were here for Akkama’s angel. They knew the angel could survive just about anything, such as a plasma lance, but that she could not. Their course of action was therefore simple: just annihilate everything, including her, and then track down their target.

  Acarnus could not budge the rusted door. He placed his hands on it, glowed grey, and the rust fell away. It was still stuck, so Akkama kicked it in for him.

  “If Emmius dies…” Acarnus said as they flew down a dusty hall, past a dozing voidbound, and into a stairwell.

  “He’s lucky,” she replied. The stairs spiraled down around the edge of a deep shaft. Both Akkama and Acarnus eschewed the traditional manner of descent in favor of leaping down from railing to railing, one flight at a time.

  “Throwing stars is one thing,” said Acarnus, “but how can he avoid—”

  A rumbling heat, a sickening wave of pressure that Akkama felt deep down in her chest. Up above, a sustained blast of energy boiled the oil derrick away into nothing. A plasma lance, or some similar weapon, melted the white sand into liquid glass and then vaporized the glass, stripping away dozens of feet of topsoil. Explosions shook the stairwell as subterranean tanks of oil exploded, ripping up the earth, immolating everything nearby.

  They dodged through a door and into one of the lower floors of the facility as a wave of fire and debris plummeted down from above.

  They had succeeded in reaching sufficient depth. It was dark and musty in whatever kind of storage shelter they had entered, but the weapons of the SAD could not reach them here. That thought pleased Akkama. It meant that the Ephathites would come in person to try to get her angel. To make sure she was dead.

  Where was her angel, anyway? “Hey,” she said. “Angel.” Something coiled itself around her right leg. Although she could not see it in the dark, she knew it was an eyeless serpent, black as ink, ten feet long and as thick as her arm.

  They waited in silence for a few more seconds until the sounds of the weapons above ceased. The temperature rose steadily.

  “Have they deployed?” she asked the darkness.

  Checking his goggles. “They are doing so now.”

  Good. The Ephathic Remnant had some strange rules for an unscrupulous and cruel organization that perpetrated atrocities and war crimes regularly. One rule was that they never fired the big guns on their own troops. They would not use a plasma lance, for instance, if even a single Remnant soldier was in the midst of a horde of enemies. Yet in close quarters, they killed each other all the time. Weirdos.

  She grinned, getting excited. Her partly regrown arda glittered red in the dark, and the curiously sharp edge of Nemesis was a hair-thin fracture in the shadows. “Then let’s go say hi.”

  The surface, when they reached it, was a hellscape of smoke and fumes, hot metal and residual fires, the overwhelming scent of seared steel, burning oil. Tortured heaps of glowing slag were all that remained of the derrick. The air was black and hazy, pleasingly hot, and the SAD overhead was barely visible through the smoke. It was perfect.

  Dozens of Ephathites wandered through the rubble of the derrick, searching. They were cyborgs, augmented by machines, sometimes more hardware than biology. Some were mutants, genetically modified from skyfall or forcibly subjected to horrific genetic restructuring. Some were brainwashed, their thoughts bent into absolute servitude to the Order. Some were monsters, collared and controlled, tortured into submission.

  No mercy for Ephathites, for they offered none.

  Akkama ordered Acarnus to go find Emmius. Then she crept in the smoke, in the shadows and fires. She came up behind one of them, a big burly daimon with artificial legs. This Ephathite was a blue; she wore a complicated white suit with many wires plugged into the base of her skull. She carried a heavy assault weapon. Akkama took her head off with a single swing. She felt barely a tug on Nemesis as it cleaved through metal and bone. Then she snapped her fingers, and in a flash of darkness was elsewhere, out of sight. She had practiced this with her angel.

  The death of the first had sent alarms, but Akkama executed five more before they understood the nature of their assailant. Then the fun began.

  They had come for her angel, but perhaps they had not known the real threat: the greatest blademaster left in the world, one who could disappear in a flash.

  One by one she appeared in front of them—the monsters, the atrocities, the twisted miserable heaps that had once been daimon like herself—and one by one she cut them down. It became difficult, for they were quick to react. They fought back. They swept the area with arc-ray detection and strafed empty space with lasers and concentrated coldrad beams. They clumped into tactical assault groups. Akkama did not care about any of this, not even when it became impossible to pick them off, and still dozens remained.

  She appeared in the midst of a group of five, already swinging. Two of them fell, their shielding cut through like cold syrup by a hot knife. She faced the others, blocked a downward swing from one wielding a laser-edged sword of his own. His laser would have carved through an ordinary metal blade without pausing, but their swords met at a standstill in the air. He was strong, but so was she. She used his moment of surprise to slip inside his reach and carve out a deep gash across his stomach. A concussive pulse weapon rippled through the air. It would have crushed her guts into soup, but she was gone in a blink of shadows. She backstabbed the shooter through its heart. It didn’t seem to care; the upper half of its body spun rapidly and struck a blow to her shoulder, sending her to the ground. It was like getting hit by a battering ram.

  She rolled to her feet and closed on the one with the pulse rifle. She saw her angel on the ground, twenty feet away. Something like a fine net of shivering pink energy pinned it down. She only glanced at it—she could not spare the attention—but it made her wonder. Of course they wouldn’t have come if they didn’t have a means of disabling the angel. The one who had made the net was the last in this group of five, a hulking tech-suited monster the size of Rasmus.

  The one with the pulse rifle turned out to be dangerous. It was a white, and when Akkama feinted left and ducked in for a quick thrust, she was met with a blast of sharpened air that flayed the skin from her left arm and bit deep into her armor. Her enemy swung the pulse rifle like a club; the barrel buzzed with thousands of tiny razor-sharp teeth vibrating in place. That thing could take her arm off in a second. But it was slow. Too slow.

  Akkama sneered as she struck, snake-like. One swipe (off with the barrel of the rifle), two swipes (countering the blast of air with Nemesis), and a final fiery sweep. She closed into its reach, and Nemesis blazed as she pulled through an uppercut so vicious that it took an arm off. The other arm next, because stabbing this thing through the heart had not killed it.

  That left the big one. It had secured her angel and now Akkama narrowly leapt out of the way of a blast of concentrated coldrad. She came into a ready stance, one foot on a blackening corpse, and sized up her opponent. It was huge, more machine than daimon. She had seen these before. There were two daimon in there: one grafted into this mechanical monstrosity, its brain wired directly into the systems; and another, a green, surgically stripped of everything but those organs necessary for life, little more than a brain and some arda. The green was kept in a tank in the back, its blood running through tubes rather than veins, and its only purpose was to heal the other daimon continually in battle. These things sickened her. Akkama hoped to the gods that the green was unconscious.

  Other Ephathites were closing in; she had to be swift.

  She strained her muscles, put fire into it, and left a whirling vortex of flames in the air as she dodged one blast of near-absolute-zero vapors, then corrected her course and darted to the big guy. It met her with a magnetically charged robotic fist that looked like it could crush her in a single blow. She slipped aside, ran her blade along the arm, severed wires and cables.

  She rolled underneath, caught a handhold on the clunky equipment in the back of the techsuit and pulled herself up, riding her enemy around as it turned, trying to face her. Steam hissed as pressure released somewhere inside her enemy. That was her only warning. She leapt up into the air as tens of thousands of volts of electricity coursed over the exterior surface of the techsuit.

  She twisted in the air like a fish out of water, dodging a handful of stray lasers fired at her by approaching reinforcements. Her abomination of an enemy glowed blue and yellow in the smoke. And green; a green glow emanated from the back of the creature. She must have hurt the biology of her enemy; the viridesce was being used.

  She burned as hot as she could on the way down. Nemesis raged in her hand; the smoke and fumes glared red around her. She felt Nemesis’ pleasure, its wrath. She put all her weight and strength into the downward stroke. It carved deep through the back end of the techsuit. But it caught on something, and Akkama’s momentum wrenched the blade from her hand.

  Her enemy grumbled in pain. Gas and sparks cascaded from the rent her blade had created, joined by gouts of coldrad fumes and spurts of emerald blood.

  A constellation of small lights glittered toward her, spiraling outward from her enemy’s suit. Akkama scarcely had time to dive for cover behind the corpse of the white when they detonated. Explosive flares, meant to blind and concuss. They nearly succeeded in doing both. She had not recovered before something very heavy crushed her against the charred metal. The techsuit, its foot pressed against her, pinning her down.

  Her enemy leaned down to look at her. Its black faceplate reflected the glow of her arda. To gloat, maybe, or to decide how best to kill her. A mistake.

  Her left hand was on the white’s pulse rifle. She had severed the barrel earlier, but at this range, that did not matter.

  With her right hand she flung her blood into the face of her enemy. It exploded into a burst of red flame, obscuring its vision. With her left hand she heaved the rifle up and toward the techsuit, and with a pull of the trigger she blew its leg off at the hip. The recoil was great; her shoulder cried out as the butt of the rifle slammed it into the hot metal below. Her arm went numb. But it was only her left arm; her other wrenched Nemesis free from the techsuit and pierced the faceplate of her enemy. This still did not kill it. Automated systems took over. She cut both arms off.

  She spat on its twitching, smoking, bleeding and crackling corpse. “You’re no Rasmus,” she said. Though, she considered, it had been carrying a small green. She did not find this comparison at all amusing. The thought of Rasmus, here, fighting the Ephathites—now that was amusing. She’d pay to see that.

  Her angel was free again. She snapped the fingers of her sword hand with some difficulty, and they vanished to another place the instant before the techsuit self-destructed. The explosion immolated several of the nearest Ephathites who had arrived to aid in the fight.

  Akkama appeared behind something that had once been a large wolf-like creature. She severed its head in an act of mercy.

  And so it went, until Akkama stood bleeding and panting in a hot smoky ruin, surrounded by dead abominations. The remaining Ephathites retreated back to their SAD overhead by A-grav beams. She roared challenges at them as they fled, outraged at being deprived of combat by their cowardice.

  She noticed something strange through a chance clearing in the smoke: a cluster of figures were borne up together from some location off to the side, away from the derrick. This group of Ephathites had a captive. The captive was Emmius, still alive. Remarkable. She wondered if they had killed Acarnus.

  “He’ll be fine,” she said out loud. She wondered whom she meant.

  But something even more surprising happened. Another creature joined the cluster of ascending Ephathites in a flicker of white light. It was a dragon, pure white and life-sized, coiled there in the air beside Emmius and his captors.

  Billowing smoke obscured Akkama’s view of what happened next, but she didn’t need to see it. The Ephathites died—not only those around Emmius but also those others rising from the ruins of the derrick who had not yet reached the SAD. The dragon flickered from place to place and systematically butchered them in the air just as Akkama had on the ground.

  Then the dragon positioned Emmius atop its head and flew away into the distance, but not before turning and gazing down at Akkama. She swore it looked right at her, even though it had no eyes. It was a look of disapproval.

  Then, like that, Emmius and his angel were gone. Akkama stood alone in a wasteland of death and destruction. The SAD began to pull away. Akkama shouted up at it, in case they were listening. “You can come back and try again, anytime!” The SAD did not answer; it turned and spun away back up into the atmosphere, blasting Akkama with air so hot that it singed her flame-resistant hair and made her eyes water.

  She stood alone after that, surveying the battlefield like Captain Shard herself after a glorious victory. Could even Shard have done this—slain dozens of the Ephathic Remnant single-handedly? Well, maybe if she had an angel.

  “Good work,” she told her angel. It coiled happily around her feet, then slithered up onto her shoulders. Its weight and warmth were pleasant.

  She scavenged the fallen for anything of note or value. There was not much; only evidence of cruelties that would make Fiora weep. She did not have to worry about her fallen enemies reanimating as voidbound, for like all spacefarers, the Remnant equipped everyone with bombs in the brain to detonate in case of death. There was voidlight out there in the wilds.

  Acarnus found her as she pried plasma grenades from an integrated grenade launcher affixed to some monster that looked like it had once been a sand skate.

  “Alive?” she said. She glanced at him. “And hardly even a scratch!”

  “The same cannot be said of you,” he replied. She could feel his goggles analyzing her, diagnosing her various injuries.

  “I’ll live.”

  “Yes.”

  “Change of plans, Carny.” She finished prying a third grenade from the device.

  “Do not call me that. And there is an easier, not to mention much safer, method of extracting the ammu—”

  “We’re giving up on the Shrikesteel Sword. For now, anyway. I hate to say it, but without Emmius it could take a while.”

  “Emmius was unharmed by the plasma lance. It seems he was fortuitously positioned at the time behind—”

  “Did I ask about Emmius?” She gave up on the other grenades. Three was plenty. “Listen, we’re going after the Ephathites.” She stood and adjusted her bag of spoils awkwardly. “Gotta find out where those angels are, right? Yours included.”

  “Zayana has said as much. You ignored her.”

  “I’ve had a change of heart.”

  He stared at her for a moment. Then he said, “You just want to kill Ephathites.” He examined the corpse smoldering at their feet. “A noble goal, I admit.”

  She grinned at him.

  “I received a communication from Jeronimy,” Acarnus continued. “He requires assistance with his machine.”

  Akkama thought about forbidding it. She’d need Acarnus’s help to trace the Ephathites, to find out where the angels were being kept. But she would need some time to recover and prepare. “Fine,” she said. “But expect a call from me soon.”

  He bowed. “Of course.”

  The sweeps came as they left the ruins of the derrick and traversed the glass back to their campsite. The sweeps filtered into dark rainbows through the smoke of the burning oil, and they reflected beautifully off of the glittering glassy surface of the melted sands.