The air shimmered next to me, and half the spider disappeared with a meaty crunch.
“The hell was that?” Unu asked, pulling out what looked like a pistol-gripped tommy gun and backing away from me.
Sushi burped and took another bite, but didn’t show herself.
“My Martial Devil.” I grinned and dusted the last of the hairy legs clinging to my shirt off. “It’s invisible. And hungry.”
Valthorpe squinted at the place where Sushi was, then laughed.
“Useful,” he said, swatting around his head. “It can eat these bloodsuckers, too, if it likes.”
Sushi giggled. A second later, the cloud of mosquitos circling his head parted.
Her fins tickled my ear when she swam back to me and perched on my shoulder.
“Sushi’s useful,” she whispered excitedly.
The rest of our caravan was already moving on, so I gave her some scratches and caught up.
“Tell me about it,” I told her in a low voice. “You saved me from that spider, you saved us from that dream on the ship...”
“Grady,” she said, turning serious. “Dream on ship isn’t dream.”
“Well, it wasn’t reality,” I said, thinking back to waking up with Kest in my bed.
“Sushi alters Dream Spirit attack.” She said it like she was trying to get across an important mechanic I was missing. “Sushi catches friends by Grady and Gramps’s Lost Mirror connection, but they aren’t all. All pieces Sushi uses are Lost pieces.”
A huge dragonfly buzzed overhead, its metallic body glinting iridescent green in the lantern light.
“It’s okay, Sush, I understand that I can’t ever get back to Gramps. I’m over it.” I wasn’t, but that wasn’t an excuse to let her worry.
Her weight shifted on my shoulder, back and forth like she was shaking her whole body no.
Suddenly, the mewler reared up and let out a trumpeting bellow. Supplies that weren’t tied down well enough spilled off its back, and the lantern swung crazily, throwing shadows everywhere.
“Easy, Bessie!” Smoky had been leading the pack animal, but the rope had been tugged out of his hand when she reared. He got in front of her, huge paws held high as he blocked her path. “Somebody grab her rope before she bolts into the trees!”
Valthorpe and Butcher were the next closest to them. They spread out to either side of the bucking mewler, making shushing sounds at it and snatching at the rope.
A swarm of sawblades edged in blue-white Metal Spirit screamed out of the jungle behind Butcher. One nailed the shark under his dorsal fin and stuck. Another tore open the side of his throat. He gushed blood and fell to his knees, toothy jaws working as he gurgled. The mewler trampled him in its blind panic.
“Technols!” Valthorpe yelled, lantern swinging crazily in his hand. “It’s an ambush!”
“Hide, Sushi!” I sent out a superpowered blast of Dead Reckoning. Sixteen unfamiliar life points of various colors surrounded us, divided into four groups. Four to either side of the trail, four closing in from the front, and four more coming up behind.
I opened my mouth to relay the information, then caught sight of that dragonfly again. It hovered overhead like the noise and chaos hadn’t scared it at all.
“Watch yerself, grav!”
Warcry tackled me.
The ground where I’d been standing detonated in a bright flare of yellow.
We hit the edge of the trail, Warcry landing on top of me, and skidded on the wet grass. Chunks of dirt pelted us. My ears whined, and afterimages glared across my field of vision. Something hot and wet dripped onto my forehead.
I’d seen so much alien blood lately that, for a second, I was surprised to see red. Warcry’s cauliflower ear was bleeding on me, almost ripped off by the blast. He wasn’t moving.
Dead Reckoning showed his life point still going strong, but the explosion had knocked him out. His script tattoo would fix him up in a few minutes.
If we could survive the ambush.
I rolled the unconscious ginger off me and shoved him into the undergrowth. Hopefully that would hide him from the Technols until he came back around.
Sound faded back in as I crawled to my knees—gunshots and shouting and explosions and the whine of flying sawblades. Valthorpe was MIA. Butcher was dead. The mewler lay across the head of the path, motionless and silent, pinning Smoky’s legs underneath.
Unu ducked behind the mewler’s body next to the jackal, leaning over its back to fire crazily into the trees with his tommy gun. Bits of leaves and small branches rained down around them.
Smoky threw out his hands. Rotten logs, woody vines, and broken branches tumbled onto the path, building a wooden barricade to protect himself and the rock guy from the back.
There was so much going on at once that I didn’t know where to focus. I dropped into Last Light, Last Breath to stave off the urge to panic.
Dead Reckoning still showed eleven of the twelve enemy life points out there. Unu must’ve gotten a lucky shot in.
That dragonfly swooped low over the hooligans’ makeshift bunker.
A yellow Spirit bomb bounced off the pack mewler’s head and detonated. Bits of Bessie went everywhere.
Suddenly, I knew where I’d seen dragonflies like that before—Jade City. The Technols who ran the place used them like spy drones to watch the streets. This one must be sending images back to whoever was throwing the Spirit bombs.
Smoky, still trapped under the biggest remaining chunk of the mewler, was throwing together a new section of shield wall while Unu strafed the jungle.
The dragonfly was making another swoop.
I jumped to my feet and shoved a fistful of Miasma at the mechanical bug.
“Moldering Bones!”
Rust erupted across the dragonfly’s shiny outer shell, the metal crumbling too fast to see without Ki-sight. Exposed wire and components corroded like thousands of years had sandblasted it away in a heartbeat. All that was left was a handful of red dust on the breeze.
Dead Reckoning pinged a warning behind me. A group of life points were about
