Danyk’s voice startled the scarred gaijin. He looked over his shoulder, made a questioning sound. The round-eye leader barked an order, beckoned with one broad hand.
Piotr helped Yukiko to her feet, the world slipping away underneath her, Ilyitch’s kicking still ringing like a thousand iron bells in her skull. He guided her over to the others, standing in a pool of watery blood around Buruu, speaking in a babble of gruff voices. The smell from Skraai’s corpse was nauseating; a rancid mix of blood and guts and excrement, bile and copper on her tongue. She looked at these men with hatred swelling in her chest, a bitter loathing threatening to steal the very breath from her lungs. Eight of them.
How many of them can I kill before they take me?
She looked down at her friend’s body on the stone, groped for him in the darkness.
Buruu, please wake up. Please.
The gaijin seemed to be debating about Buruu’s wings. Two of the younger ones were prodding the crumpled machinery running down his spine, the torn harness affixing the contraption to his pinions. Danyk spoke to Piotr in his rumbling baritone, waving at the arashitora. Lightning arced across black skies, the downpour growing heavy again; so thick it was almost blinding. The sound of the rain upon the ocean was a constant, rolling hiss.
“Danyk ask what wrong with this one.” Piotr’s voice was harsh, but there was pity in that single blue eye. “Is cripple?” He pointed to his leg, the metal brace around it. “Cripple?”
“What if he is?” she said.
“Will not wear for the cripple body.” The gaijin shook his head. “No strength. No prize.”
Her heart skipped a beat. A glimmer of hope. She nodded to Danyk.
“He’s a cripple.”
Danyk gritted his teeth, spat what sounded like a vicious curse. He waved the younger gaijin aside, commanded a pale black-haired fellow to step forward. The man was broad, jaw like a brick house dusted with black stubble, eyes of blue glass. He drew a long, double-bladed axe from his belt.
“What are you doing?”
Yukiko’s eyes were wide with disbelief. Piotr dragging her away.
“No, why would you kill him? Stop! Stop it!”
BURUU, WAKE UP!
“Kak zal,” Danyk said, watching the soldier raise the blade above his head.
“NO! NO!”
Yukiko reached toward Piotr, slammed into his mind with everything she was. The round-eye released his grip on her arms, fell to the ground, senseless and mute, nose and ears gushing. Turning on the axeman, she seized hold of his mind and squeezed as hard as she could, two bloody handfuls, tearing side to side like a wolf worrying a piece of meat. The gaijin made an odd, strangled sound and staggered as if she’d struck him, dropping the axe and clutching his temples. She screamed, lips peeling back from her teeth as she felt it rise up inside her, the heat of a collapsing star, the roar of a thousand hurricanes. And with blood pouring from his ears, nose and eyes, the gaijin crumpled to the stone.
She whirled on a third, smashing into his skull with everything inside her own, his head flopping about as if she’d broken his neck. And with a roar, Danyk seized her by a handful of sodden hair, pulled her back as she screamed and cursed and kicked and spat, nails and teeth and fists, mouth agape, eyes rolling in her head. Madness had taken her, a rage so deep it was suffocating, stealing away everything she was and leaving a shell behind; a burning, shrieking thing wearing her skin. She bucked in his hands, tore lose from his grip, a handful of hair clutched in his fist as she reached out to crush his mind like eggshells.
He punched her; a hook to her jaw that rocked her sideways, lit a fire at the base of her skull. And then, with almost casual brutality, he hauled back and buried his fist deep in her belly.
Pain.
Awful. Wet and tearing.
PAIN.
A scream, somewhere in the back of her mind, a voice that sounded like her own. A burst of light in her head, flaring bright as the world fell perfectly still.
She could feel it. All of it. The men gathered around her, each a tangled thread, a thousand knots thick—so intricate it hurt just to look at them. Buruu at her feet, a shape she knew as well as her own, a distant pulse still struggling toward consciousness, flickering with the taste of stolen lightning. Skraai’s shell, just a shadow of lingering heat in his bones as all he was escaped into the ether. The dragons in the snarling ocean around them, swaying with the current, cold as the lightless depths of the sea. High above, the female, circling in the blood-scent, the knowledge she should protect her kin burning bright in her mind, overshadowed with a rage born of heart-deep grief; a severing so terrible it hurt her to even begin remembering.
What she had lost.
What he had taken from her.
And in Yukiko’s belly, where the knuckles had been buried in her flesh, nothing but pain.
She slumped to her knees, gasping, screams growing louder in her ears, feeling the pulse of the world and knowing something was terribly, terribly wrong.