The victory dinner.
I swallowed the urge to throw up.
Sushi appeared in a shimmer of purple and white scales, looking down at the burnt food with me. Her round face was smudged with dirt, and cobwebs clung to her back fins.
“Unu tells Sushi to hide,” she said in a small voice. “Sushi doesn’t help them fight.”
“It’s okay.” I scooped her up and used my last cleaning script on her. “He didn’t want you to get hurt. You did the right thing, so he didn’t have to worry about you while he was fighting.”
It sucked that we didn’t have more time to bury Smoky and Unu, but I got them laid out and told them they could go now. It wouldn’t make up for the betrayal, but it was the best I could do. Warcry hung around while I did it, but didn’t comment until I headed to the temple to do the same for Valthorpe and the Technol death squad.
“Val’s one thing, but those bleeders are the enemy, grav. Don’t waste our time.”
“Sanya’s the one who screwed us over,” I said. “These guys were probably just following orders.”
He blew out a long breath. “Just hurry it up.”
The temple was a Miasma pit, swirling with both fresh and ancient Death Spirit. While I worked, I sucked as much of it down as I could handle, replacing the spirals I’d used up.
“Ready?” Warcry asked when the bodies were taken care of.
I nodded. “Let’s go.”
We took off, cutting a line west through the jungle. While we ran, my brain kept going back to the dancer’s shack.
“It’s better this way,” she had insisted when I tried to get her to go to the spaceport. “She’s better off without me. Somewhere far away, where the Jianjiao can’t touch her.”
“You could find a way to go with her if you tried,” I had growled. Even though I knew the anger I was feeling was coming from resentment for my parents, I couldn’t push it down. “Just stop all this and take care of your freaking kid.”
The dancer had shaken her head. “You’re so young. You don’t know anything. Get out of this business, nice boy. Get out before they’ve got you forever.”
Even thinking back while we ran, I was getting mad again. She was the one who didn’t understand. She had no idea what this was going to do to her kid. I did.
She wanted me to get out? She was part of the reason I had to stay in—people like her who wouldn’t do anything to stop this kind of evil, or worse yet, worked with the Jianjiao to keep it happening.
The memory of the tears and looks of horror on those little kids’ faces punched me in the solar plexus, but I shook it off. I could deal with that if it meant they were safe now. If this universe needed a monster meting out justice, I could be that monster. Like the Emperor had said, I could handle it. I’d been hated and rejected before; at least this way it would be happening for a good reason.
Warcry and I ran through the night, ramping up our internal alchemy to flush the waste chemicals from our systems so our muscles wouldn’t crap out on us. We stopped once to scarf some jerky and dried fruit and chug our canteens dry, but that was it.
Sushi swam alongside us, resting in my pocket when she got tired. A few streams and bigger rivers came up, but only one of them was too deep and violent to just swim across. We had to detour about a mile downstream until we found a pair of ropes somebody must’ve been using as a crossing, one to hold onto, one to walk on. Thankfully, the ropes weren’t old or rotted. They sagged in the middle, but not far enough that the water could drag us down into the current.
Every now and then, we saw stone ruins. Some were falling in, but most looked like they were holding up well in spite of the trees and vines growing out of them. Whoever the lost ancient civilization had been, they had built to last.
When we were within a mile of our destination, the location marker on my HUD started flashing. We slowed to a jog. Neither one of us wanted to miss our stop, or worse, run into the middle of hostile territory unprepared.
As we got closer, an endless rolling thunder filled the air. It sounded like the rushing river we’d crossed earlier, but with a deeper undertone, something you could almost feel reverberating in your bones.
The trees pulled back, and we were staring up at a huge cliff face. Fifty yards downwind, what looked like miles of waterfalls stretched off into the darkness.
I checked the location marker on my HUD again. We were right on the dot.
Warcry swiped sweat off his forehead with his forearm.
“It’s at the top,” he said.
I craned my neck to stare up at the sheer rock face. There were no trees at the top, and a faint white-yellow glow lined the edge of the cliff. Too dark to be a city, too bright to be a single cook fire.
“One of Kest’s chain ladders would be pretty useful right about now.”
“Or that rolling silver anchoring trick,” Warcry said.
He unhooked the canteens from the backpack and took them to the edge of the waterfall pool to refill. I was about to keel over from the hunger tearing up my insides, so I dug out a couple MealBagz and got to work rehydrating them. Sushi skipped across the surface of the water, then plunged under, obviously having a good time splashing around. She thought it was the funniest thing ever when Warcry dunked his head into the pool and came up blowing water off his mouth and nose.
The MealBagz were almost to the edible point when a shuttle passed overhead. It hovered above the cliff, flashing its lights at whatever sort of camp or town
