The goliath positively crawled with them now, staggering under the weight of hundreds, crusted like limpets all over its body, smashing seams, tearing hatchways. The loading bay doors were torn wide, the Earthcrusher’s belly now overflowing with hellspawn, more flooding through the breach by the second. Towering abominations were locked with the behemoth—twisted giants of skinless flesh, all tentacles and eyes and seething hatred. Kin was swinging the only functional arm with all his strength, sweat slicking his brow.
Freezing wind moaned through the shattered viewing portals. Izanami’s song hung in the air, almost clear enough to make out the words, a pale whispering layered upon itself, an echo of a mother he’d never known. The temperature gauges were trembling in the red, warning lights flashing, a claxon wail deep within the Earthcrusher’s belly driving the demons to frenzy.
He heard the spaulder hatchway give, the clattering and screaming of the oni pouring through, tearing the elevator doors apart. It’d only be seconds until they clambered up the shaft on talons of bone and black glass, smashing their way onto the bridge to find him in his feeble metal shell. Death so close he could taste it, feel its breath upon his neck.
Kin peered through the bloodstained viewports, looking for a distant speck in glowering skies. Some final sight of her, some last moment to share. But he could see only darkness, brief strobes of blinding lightning, smoke and blood and death. His words to Misaki hung in the air, their warmth fading now in the face of finality, their truth slipping up and away into the gloom.
“No one who is loved dies alone.”
A prayer on his lips. A fragile hope in the face of hopelessness.
He slammed the throttles forward, flooding the intakes with burning, boiling chi.
The alarms rose in pitch, one final desperate plea to the madman at the controls, pushing the Guild’s mightiest creation beyond the edge of tolerance.
A spark flared somewhere in the Earthcrusher’s belly.
Vapor rushed toward it with open, hungry arms.
Ignition.
*
Plummeting.
Weightless.
The song of the wind and the stench of death all around, tears of ice crusted in her lashes. A black snowflake, falling, falling, down into the nothing she wished she’d always known. She could feel it below her, shying away from the blood in her veins. The ending she’d bring. But the carrionbirds would tear her to pieces before she reached the dark. She closed her eyes, welcoming the finale that would drown the fear of being finally and truly alone.
The rush of wings, an intake of breath, the tang of ozone. Something hit her out there in the black beyond her eyelids, feathers and fur and warmth, dragging her back up into hateful sky.
Yukiko opened her eyes, fingers digging into jet-black fur, lightning crackling along the edges of his wings. A mournful cry split the air, and she reached into the Kenning, recognizing the shape of the one who’d saved her.
Sukaa …
YES.
Why?
BECAUSE HE ASKED.
… He asked?
BECAUSE I WILL BE KHAN WHEN HE IS GONE.
She looked above, saw Buruu speeding across the clouds, twisting and rolling between the flailing swarms of corpse-hawks. And as he flipped over, dipping his wing to the earth, she saw a figure on his back, a smoking iron-thrower in his hand, fist wrapped in Buruu’s mane. The pair moving together like poetry, cutting the sky to ribbons and the Yomi birds to pieces.
The one who’d knocked her from Buruu’s back.
Leaping from Shai’s shoulders …
Pushing her …
Yoshi …
Sukaa ascended, a slow spiral bringing them up from the rift below. Hana and Kaiah fought on above, the girl screaming into the wind as her brother flew away, Shai blocking their pursuit with flared wings and flashing eyes. The rest of the pack were pressed tight to Buruu’s heels, cutting down all that stood before him, clearing a path toward the deepest blackness, the heart of the wound, the place she’d been prepared to plunge. But Sukaa was flying away from the hellgate, bearing her back to safety beyond the abyssal edge.
What are you doing? Take us back!
SUCH IS NOT YOUR FATE.
Hana raised her chainblade, screaming into Shai’s mind.
Get out of my fucking way! Yukiko, make her move!
Yukiko blinked, slow horror rising inside her breast, crashing down into dark and cold and crushing despair.
No. No, he can’t …
THE BOY CHOSE. KHAN AGREED. BETTER TWO THAN FOUR.
Shai shook her head, sorrow welling in Yukiko’s mind.
*BETTER THEM THAN YOU.*
“No,” she breathed. “No, he can’t…”
She seized fistfuls of Sukaa’s feathers, digging fingers into the flesh beneath, screaming into the minds around her.
You can’t let him! You can’t let him do this!
~ KHAN’S WORD IS LAW. ~
Rage in Shai’s breast, run through with bitter sorrow.
HE DOES THIS FOR YOU, GIRL. THE ONES WITHIN YOU.
“NO!”
Yukiko stepped into the Kenning, reaching out for Buruu’s mind, struggling against the bitter, roiling chill spilling from the rift below. The thought too awful to comprehend. To permit.
It couldn’t be. Couldn’t end like this.
Not after everything they’d been through.