Focus, idiot, I told myself. Don’t do something stupid like miss.
I locked my eyes on her lips. The corners of her mouth turned up in a tiny smile just before I stopped being able to see it and started being able to feel it. She tasted like Coffee Drank and metal and something else. Something incredible.
My broken nose was pressed against her cheekbone, but who cared? Jags of pain shot through the bridge, and I couldn’t really breathe, but I ignored it. I was not stopping this for anything—not for a nose, not for breathing, not if a feral staggered up behind me and jammed an ulna through my brain stem. Kest was going to have to decide when this kiss was over, because I would suffocate before I stopped.
Then something else started to happen. Molten Metal flooded my Spirit rivers, scorching the banks as it traveled back along the paths to my Spirit sea. The hot slag poured into the raging storm of Miasma, disrupting its natural cycle.
Pain shot through my core like a spear. My Spirit sea couldn’t hold that much. The icy Miasma pulsed and stuttered as it fought to capture the burning foreign Spirit, trap it, and drive it out. For a second, the edges of the Metal cooled, hardened, but then it heated up again from the inside out, melting and swirling and encroaching. It wasn’t going away. It couldn’t be stopped. Metal was the unrelenting element. It got what it wanted.
But so did Death. It couldn’t be avoided. It could be delayed, but not forever. It was waiting patiently at the end of every path, the silent victor, the old friend, the admiring lover.
Somewhere at the edge of my brain, I heard Kest gasp as the frozen Miasma latched onto the molten Metal. This time, they sank into each other. The stuttering and pulsing stopped, and a low hum started up. I could feel it vibrating through every inch of my body and Kest’s, like she was part of me, like my lungs and bones and skin. I felt her dual hearts pumping and her stomach flipping and her Spirit sea forging my Death Spirit. For a second, I could even feel what she felt about me, this explosion of giddiness and heat and nervous excitement.
Our Spirit seas both opened up at once, and a tsunami of Miasma and Metal Spirit roared in. More than I’d ever borrowed from Hungry Ghost. More than Kest had ever cultivated in one shot. The seas didn’t feel like they were going to burst at the seams anymore, though. They felt perfect. Exactly right.
When the real world came back, Kest’s eyes were almost completely black, and intricate lacy patterns rolled across her skin in waves. She was visibly shaking. So was I, I realized. Not to mention I was wheezing like an asthmatic who’d just survived a cage fight with Bruce Lee.
“What was that?” I gasped.
“I think...maybe...resonant cultivation,” Kest said in a breathy voice. “Check your Spirit reserve stat and see. If it was, you should have exponentially more—”
“Yeah, later. When did you say you have to leave?”
“Night sun high.” She glanced at the darkening clouds.
I didn’t want to sound too eager, but I asked anyway. “Should we do that again?”
Kest grinned and pulled my face down to hers.
That was the best day of my afterlife.
Staying Hungry
KEST DIDN’T WANT ANYBODY around when the Technols’ transport came to pick her up, so when the night sun was getting close to its apex, I did a last sweep for ferals, then headed inside, almost forgetting to let Sushi in behind me. Honestly, I was so wound up, I forgot a lot of stuff, including that Hungry Ghost owed me a crap-ton of explanation.
Maybe the exhaustion had something to do with it, too, because I don’t remember shutting the door to my room behind me or getting into bed, just waking up from this weird dream about my dad dreaming about me, except Sushi was there, too, eating parts of the picture.
The little fish was there when I woke up, sleeping on my chest like those creepy old stories about cats sucking the air out of babies’ lungs. As I reached up to move Sushi off me, pain shot through my side. I flipped back the covers to find an ugly yellow-brown-purple bruise all down my ribs and into my hip, along with bunched-up knots of swelling around the knife scars from the Ylef’s soaking room attack.
Right, Warcry had said I needed to find a healer to fix the damage more permanently. Wasn’t killing the nerves there supposed to stop the pain, though? Maybe I hadn’t done it right.
For a minute, I considered just dropping a bunch of credits on the highest-tier healing elixir I could afford. But even that seven-hundred-credit one the distiller had given me obviously hadn’t put everything back the way it was supposed to be. Healing elixirs must have some limitations on what they could do. Kest or Rali could probably explain the how and why, but I didn’t want to bother Kest when she’d just left for her spy mission. And Rali...
I got dressed, planning to head straight down to the market court and find the healer that Biggerstaff had mentioned during our tour. But while I was stuffing the pockets in my jeans back into place, my fingers bumped Hungry Ghost.
I pulled him out. Ready to talk yet?
A gas gauge appeared in my brain with the needle on E.
That’s such bullcrap. You were sucking down Miasma all last night while I was killing ferals.
He sent me a feeling like someone trying to start a car, but the engine not turning over. The needle on the gas gauge jumped, then plunged back to the left of the E.
You’re doing an awful lot of communicating for a guy who’s running on Empty.
The connection cut off like a dropped call.
I really wanted to tell Hungry Ghost to enjoy sitting in the room doing nothing
