“I'm. Driving.”
“Do you remember the way?” I scooted backward, feeling stupid relief curl. I touched the control cuff. The long drive would require a constant touch of magic through the recycler.
“Every crater, Charybdis effect, sand wyrm, and siren-weed of it,” he said darkly, long leg lifting over the front.
After threatening the Ophidians with a bomb and instant death, his trip on a similar bike had been less than kind.
As the single passenger with Frost Viper, the best driver in the territories and the Ophidian leader for a reason, I'd had it easy. The ride had been amazing.
My mind shifted, looking out at the broken landscape.
There was something wistfully sad about fixing the entire layer. The outlaw vibe, killer animals who spun shifts, and jagged skies of death...
The sky crackled with green lightning outside the dead space, as if in answer.
“What if what I did makes the sand wyrms go extinct?” I murmured.
Constantine stopped checking the gauges, and Axer paused his task of fitting the rest of our supplies in the trunk compartment in the back.
Their heads slowly turned to me and both boys stared for an extended moment.
“What?” I asked.
Constantine narrowed his eyes at me. “Are you trying to cheer me up?”
“I got rid of the wyrms' homes—”
Axer's face changed, understanding softening the hard lines of it. “And they were all returned. Your book—”
I laughed without humor. “Exactly. I promised the people here that I would fix the Third Layer.” I touched my pocket. “And I...what am I doing? What do I know about fixing the world?”
“Quite a bit,” Constantine said darkly. “I'm pretty certain I saw my nightstand from the manor fly by in four separate pieces disconnected by threads of reversion magic.”
“That's...that's not helpful.”
“I never liked that nightstand.”
Axer motioned and Guard Rock ran up the side of the vehicle and flipped into the small recessed space between the trunk and seat that Axer had created.
I saw Constantine look back at them and his fingers twitch.
“Don't you dare,” I said.
“I'd never leave your rock,” he said blandly.
Guard Rock allowed himself to be strapped down, gaze already stretched to the distance—our small lookout to the rear.
I felt Constantine shift, and I pinched his side. “Don't you dare,” I hissed.
“With a few additional words, that sentence could be perfect.”
The bike shifted as Axer settled in behind me. Trapped between the two, I became instantly aware of the precariousness of my position and where to put my limbs.
“And, by the way, darling,” Constantine said, looking at me over his shoulder with a bland expression. “Just to be clear… If you push me to another location while you remain at a battle site again, I will tie you up and drop you into a dark hole,” he said, starting the engine. “Then I'll fish you out, make certain the bindings are still secure, then drop you in again.”
“Not handcuffed in the tower?”
“The oubliette,” he said darkly.
I let my forehead fall against his back, securing my arms around his midsection, Axer's thighs hugging mine.
School trips, science class, death, destruction, antipodean portals... I tried to think of a popular song that had always been playing on the radio—the one Christian used to hum then try to deny what he was singing.
A small bit of comfort crawled under my skin from Axer and from Constantine in response to whatever emotion I was exhibiting. I closed my eyes.
Chapter Thirteen: Erstwhile Companions
I slipped from the seat and flopped onto the grass six hours later.
We'd found a single patch of green in the middle of the endless wasteland—one with a giant tree—and Constantine had headed for it at speed. Only two sand dragons, a lizardgator, and a rabid Stygian phoenix had interrupted that side trip.
Our plan would have been toast without someone along who could fight without using magic.
Axer was possibly the only one having fun, using the weapons the Ophidians had stocked—a new one each time—challenging whatever monster or pitfall presented itself, as if performing a training exercise.
“Adrenaline junkie,” I muttered.
He could fight a sand chimera with a spoon, but even he was starting to tighten up without using his magic.
The whole trip might have been a grand adventure under different circumstances. Under normal circumstances, we'd have been sharing magic between us in a continuous circuit and not worrying about using any of it for such stringent concealment. But it was too dangerous to freely give in to that desire while there were so many mages tracking us. And while wearing the cuff, I was a sharing liability.
Without it, though...
I’d spent the last two hours trying to swallow down paint after Axer made me remove the metal band. Only a concentrated effort had made it possible.
The bike allowed for a thin sheen of recycling between the riders and the machine, but like everything in the layer, it was thin. Each of us had been working overtime on keeping the paint that had started creeping up my throat contained. Throwing up a portal to the Fifth Layer would immediately end our anonymity.
Each of us had to use the containers strapped to the bike that the Ophidians used on such trips. But where the Ophidians were used to such constrained circumstances, none of us were. The three of us were privileged Second Layer mages—even worse, Excelsine mages—where abundance was taken for granted.
It was like having words flashed and being told not to read them. Reining it in was exhausting. Without the cuff, an explosion was imminent. And with the cuff, the magic buildup was just getting worse.
Axer was literally vibrating with constrained magic as he dismounted. Constantine had jumped off the bike and was crouched some fifty feet in the distance, doing who knew what. But I could feel his own unspent, forcibly capped magic coiling in bigger whorls.
“I’m driving next,” I said. Sandwiched so tightly between them I had barely been able to move, let alone defend us.
“This isn’t a dream, darling,” Constantine called.
“No,” I said quietly. It was sort of the opposite.
I had felt the last of the dragons activate three hours ago, scattering his papered seeds within a hurricane wind and destroying a large section of barren wasteland; prompting an intense global debate over the possibility of our deaths. Axer and Constantine had relished in a dark sort of pleasure in repeating some of the commentary from the communications they were still receiving.
We were listed officially as dead in twelve countries. But that left hundreds of countries that were still searching for us.
We were existing on borrowed time. Eventually one of us would use magic, and a chase worse than the last would begin.
I rotated my shoulders against the earth to ease the clogs and tightness in my neck and back, feeling my aches. This must be what fifty felt like. Mom had been sniping about it for the past year.