The Syrana truth serum had not clawed everything from her. Blake had never intended for Kira to go to Melgrove. And there had been no better way to ensure she wouldn’t go there, than to order her to a place filled with memories of a dead man.
With Tamas’s blood sticky on her skin, Blake rose to her feet and strode after the captain. She had done all she could. Now everything was, quite literally, in Rossiter’s hands.
Eron - 19
Radio comms weren’t out entirely but were severely distorted. Static was muffling conversations into incoherency. Following Bel’s directive, Eron ran around the perimeter of the Tier, headed for the overturned crane that lay on its far side. The bitter scents in the room riled delicate membranes within his sinuses, and the bristling energy still pulsing from the Waters toyed with the layers of his skin. Eron coughed against the discomfort, focusing his attention on not tumbling over the debris scattered in his path.
Within moments he located Gren. The Syranian lay on his back, legs trapped beneath the heavy core of the crane. Eron saw quickly why his brother had not just pulled himself free of the wreckage. A piston from one of the crablike legs that held the crane in place had snapped from its position and speared into his gut. The tubular piece of steel was thick as an arm, piercing the flesh just above Gren’s right hip bone. The force it would have taken to propel it through two layers of ballistics armour was equally impressive and horrifying.
‘Gren, are you –’
‘Eron, just assist me.’ Gren gripped the metal impaling him. ‘It has gone through to the ground. I can’t dislodge it from this angle.’
The Syranians were quick healers, resilient to injuries that would fell other corporeal beings, but they were not immune to pain. Gren would have been in agony. Eron stepped over him, grasped the metal in his hands, and was preparing to attempt to dislodge it when all at once the crane shifted.
‘Quickly,’ Gren snapped. ‘He is rousing.’
For the first time, Eron saw that the gallu was still in the harness at the very end of the crane’s arm. He lay a few metres beyond the toppled structure, his upper body free of the harness but one ankle still cuffed into the wide steel clamp at its base. He recognised the creature as the last of the Four shells that Blake had completed. He was as heavyset as Blake’s bodyguard Rossiter, and of a similar deepened skin tone, but with a fierceness of face that the human lacked. A faint buzz of blonde hair on his round scalp, a neck that barely existed between broad shoulders, and a square, blunt jaw. Nothing of Azrael’s structural fineness remained here. The crane jerked forward, and the movement drew a stifled cry from Gren.
‘Did you Bind?’ Eron sought purchase on the underbelly of the crane, finding a handhold alongside the tractor tyre, trying to keep the machine still. ‘Does the mea hold the gallu?’
‘I’ve done what I can.’ Gren hauled at the piston, veins straining in his neck with the effort. ‘He is strong.’
‘The inhibitors are still not activated?’ Eron held fast, but the gallu’s movements jolted and shuddered through the metal. Each of the Syranians wore a slender white band at their wrist, designed to allow some sedative control over the gallu in the unlikely event that the telekinetic connection created by the mea stones was not enough.
Gren’s deep brown skin was blotched with rivulets of darker dirt, the Waters still glinting on his eyelashes. ‘They aren’t responding. He is not responding. He fights it. Fights the mea.’
The inhibitors had proved their strength time and again when used upon Azrael, felling him as though he’d been hit by a sledgehammer. Cym and Blake had found a way to effectively paralyse the gallu within the carapace, or at the very least slow them down considerably, like a human after a few puffs of marijuana. Eron stared at the creature writhing against his restraints. Clearly, this gallu was not remotely stoned.
First priority, though, must be to free Gren from the tangle.
‘I need to disconnect the harness from the crane,’ Eron said. ‘That will ease your discomfort, give you more strength in the Bind.’
‘He is strong, Eron.’ Gren’s voice was strained. ‘I fear he will slip from me. You must be ready.’
Eron nodded, shamed at the rush of exhilaration that came with Gren’s words. His brother was wounded, yet Eron thrilled with the idea of attempting a Bind. With a nod towards his fallen brother, Eron braced, waiting for a small moment when the gallu did not struggle so fiercely. There was little doubt Gren would suffer in the time it took for Eron to hurdle the machinery and cut the harness free, so he would bide his time, choose the quietest of moments.
Stillness.
Eron leapt over the low heap of the fallen crane. The gallu’s stillness lasted no more than a second. He pushed himself to his new, unfamiliar knees and heaved forward. The crane made a terrible sound against the hard concrete. Eron allowed himself to believe the screech was entirely structural. That it was not mixed with Gren’s scream as it wrenched the piston through his gut and dug the crane into his legs. Pulling a knife from a holster at his thigh, Eron swiped down on the tangle of cable at
