Unu’s eyes slanted toward me. “Like he warned Butcher?”
“Yeah, where were you at then, Death brat?” Smoky said. “Waiting for the rest of us to get taken out so you could fill up your Spirit sea?”
The jackal sounded like he hadn’t gotten the fight out of his system trapped under there, Spirit gathered around him, but I couldn’t tell whether he was preparing another shield or an attack. With the last of the adrenaline still charging through my veins, I tensed up and triggered Dead Reckoning and my Ki-enhancements.
“More like saving your stinkin’ carcasses.” Warcry shoved off the tree, letting flames roll down his shoulders to cover his fists. “Come at me lad and you come at me, ya tossers.”
Smoky’s lip curled up in a snarl, but he let the Spirit attack go.
I relaxed and dropped the enhancements, glad Warcry had my back with these guys.
“The Burning Hatred cultivator’s right,” another voice chimed in. “They’re gone.”
Dirt and leaves rustled behind Warcry, and a section of ground lifted up.
Immediately, everybody’s switch flipped from Safety to Attack—Smoky’s barricade started stacking itself back together, Unu swung his tommy gun that direction, and Warcry dropped into a fighting stance.
I grabbed the bright green life point with Dead Man’s Hand, but a muddy Spirit-hand grabbed it back.
“Same side, everybody, same side!” Valthorpe yelled, climbing up out of the hole with his hands raised.
Relief washed over me, sapping all the strength from my legs. I dropped Dead Man’s Hand, then sank to the dirt on my butt. Tremors started running up and down my limbs like a standing wave. I swallowed hard, then lay back and shut my eyes, listening to my pulse hammer slower and slower in my ears.
I heard Valthorpe let out a ragged breath. Red flickered on the backs of my eyelids as he relit the miraculously unbroken lantern.
“I was just going to say—” Valthorpe’s voice wavered. He cleared his throat and went on with a little more strength. “—having the Death cultivator around is already paying off.”
I sat up and looked at Butcher. The dirt was muddy with the shark’s blood, his lower jaw was smashed in at a sharp angle, and his chest was crushed where he’d been trampled.
“Tell that to your shark friend,” I muttered.
“Don’t listen to Smoky,” Valthorpe said. “Three Technol attacks ago, there were eighteen of us on the artifact team. Our survival rate’s already gone up since you joined the crew.”
Wrathblade
TWO GUESSES WHO GOT to loot the dead guys.
“You already have the stink of death all over you,” Smoky said while we unloaded the dead mewler so we could roll it off his legs.
Unu grunted in agreement. “No sense in everybody getting covered with it.”
I left them digging Smoky out and got to work on the corpses. I tried to keep meaningless nothing-thoughts circling in my brain while I dug through the dead guys’ pockets and unstrapped their HUDs, but that targeting app on the Technol sunglasses kept coming back to me. Their fingers tightening on the triggers. The muzzle flash, the bark of gunshots. High-def video of what could’ve happened if I’d hesitated. Me, Warcry, the whole artifact team full of lead, left to rot on the jungle floor.
But I didn’t, I told myself. We’re alive. The enemies are dead. They’re not coming back.
I knew it was true, but it didn’t make me feel better knowing I’d wiped out half these guys without thinking twice. It had been us or them, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I was a better person, it would’ve been me.
Death cultivator should be glad for the practice, Hungry Ghost whispered. Advancement creeps closer with each life taken.
Smoky and Unu had been right about one thing: after that bloodbath, I had plenty of Miasma to spare. It was crammed into my Spirit sea until the pressure was painful, so dense that what usually felt like smoke or fog almost seemed solid. I wondered whether cultivating more just then would make my Spirit sea explode and blow my chest cavity all over the jungle. Probably not. It would probably do something a little less crazy, like condensing the way gas did in a pressurized container.
The Technols’ bodies were packed with gadgets. Guns, weird Swiss-army knife things with everything from lasers to can openers, weighted electroshock gloves, fingertip caps that turned into long metal claws, illusion-casting Spirit apparatuses... Three of the dead guys even had those black coin-shaped silencers like Kest.
“First lucky turn in this whole disaster of an assignment,” Smoky said when he saw them. He held onto a thick vine and worked his legs to get the blood flowing again. “Technols won’t be able to track their locations back to us.”
“They’ll find a way.” Valthorpe looked up from the pile of looted HUDs he was going through. “If the tech to keep people out is widely available, then somewhere a Technol has better tech to get in. Either way, we shouldn’t take these back to camp.” He sighed and shook his head at the HUDs. “There’s nothing in these to indicate how they knew to lie in wait for us here.”
“Galston, wasn’t it?” Unu said. He was busy picking broken liquor bottles out of a crate. “Wasn’t that the point of the saloon fight?”
Valthorpe shrugged. “I’d hoped for some type of confirmation. A message from Galston or his contact information...”
“Maybe the message was set to delete after a certain amount of time,” I said, thinking back to Biggerstaff’s note not to be surprised if the next time I saw him he was Shogun of Van Diemann’s Eight-Legged Dragons. “I don’t know how it works, but when the time’s up, it deletes the message from everywhere, even the trash.”
“If
