First principles: water-nature keeps things going in motion. As the shield exploded, the naga fell forward, bellowing and beating its massive wings to keep afloat. The displaced air knocked Mokoya off her feet. A wing and a hind leg caught watchtowers in their path, shattering the fortifications into loose masonry that pummeled the ground.
Lying on her back, Mokoya watched a single figure, clad in black, leap onto the ruins of the city walls. Akeha. Her twin might disguise himself from others, but she would always know him. He raised a hand, something clutched in it. She felt its pull and knew what it was. “Great Slack, don’t—”
Akeha hurled it.
Cheebye.
Akeha called them sunballs, but his contraptions were anything but benign givers of light. When her brother made sunballs, he made superweapons. Enclosed in that shell was a minuscule amount of burning gas, invisible to the eye, tensed into so much heat and pressure that the atoms melted, succumbed to one another, and changed their nature. Akeha was working massive amounts of earth-energy, condensed around that single, infinitesimally small point—
Mokoya shielded her face—
He let go.
The explosion hammered through her bones. Something huge fell into the water, a seismic sound, a deep groaning. Acridity flared into her lungs. Keha, you turtle egg.
Mokoya’s vision cleared in time for Bramble’s wings to interrupt the sky. The smaller naga’s legs were knives scything into the back of the fallen behemoth as it thrashed in the oasis. The larger naga reared its massive head and slammed into Bramble with one sinuous ripple of the neck. She fell with a desperate, wounded-animal sound.
The grand naga surged into the sky. Tsunami-height waves sent the boats on the inlet crashing into each other, the sound of skeletons being shaken. The beat of its wings flattened sand and shrub in its passage. It headed east. Of course. The segment of desert they hadn’t searched yet.
Bramble struggled across the inlet, unable to take to the air. A forlorn figure rested on her back: Rider, slumped in exhaustion. Mokoya’s heart contracted painfully as they slid from the harness and crumpled onto the sand.
Mokoya’s hip and back reported pain with every stride. Still she ran. Her mind conjured visions of Rider dead, blood emptying onto the hot ground, tattoos flaring red as they burned through their skin.
And then they moved, rising slowly to their feet, taking a step toward her, before folding in two again. In relief, Mokoya closed the distance between them and pulled Rider into her embrace. Their heartbeat stuttered in their neck, in their chest. “Mokoya,” they whispered.
“Rest,” Mokoya said. “You’ll be all right. Thank the fortunes.”
“It is as I feared,” they said, barely coherent, barely conscious. “This creature . . . what it means. . . .” Their limbs trembled, and they went limp.
“Rider!” Their weight pulled Mokoya to the fevered, disturbed ground. Rider was pale and clammy, a flickering imprint in the Slack. Mokoya’s graceless tensing through forest-nature told her nothing. The workings of the body, its branches and its energy flows, had always been opaque to her.
A lightcraft approached as Mokoya tracked the precarious contractions of Rider’s heart. One-two, one-two, one-two. Her arms were shaking, her vision eaten by sparks of lightning.
“Nao?” She looked up. Thennjay was warm and solid against the dizzy, swallowing sky. She couldn’t read his face, but she could read the alarm in his voice. “What have we gotten into, Nao?”
Mokoya pressed Rider to her bosom. She had no words for him.
Chapter Eight
LIKE MOSS, LIFE SPILLED outward from Bataanar in the form of a hundred tents and caravans, where brown-toothed merchants and transients and others who couldn’t find space within the tightly regulated city walls made camp and fought for scraps of whatever—food, trade, love—came their way.
It was here that Thennjay and his pugilists had unfurled their tents, choosing to put down their roots among the poor. The caravan city had escaped the brunt of the naga’s attacks, and in one of the tents, Thennjay leaned over Rider’s unconscious form, hands gentle on the pale damp of their forehead, working quietly through forest-nature.
Mokoya watched him while worrying at the bones of her hands, a thousand half-formed sentences swarming in her mind, drowning out all logical thought. Fragments of the past day tumbled loose in vivid flashes: The gray fabric of Rider’s bed. The shadow of basalt outcrops in the desert. The explosion scars on Bataanar’s walls, like black peonies. The sickening smell of burning flesh and oil—
No. That was a set of smells—and thoughts—from another time.
Thennjay stood. Through the ringing in her ears, Mokoya asked, “Well?”
His first answer skated past her in a collection of syllables that did not register as words. She blinked and forced herself to focus on the present. “What?”
With a gentle, patient air, Thennjay repeated, “No internal bleeding, no serious injuries. Just exhaustion. She’ll recover.”
“They.”
“They,” Thennjay acknowledged. He brushed fingers along the scars embroidering her face. “How about you?”
“I’ll be fine.”
He tilted his head. “All right.” He had long years of experience, and he knew when it was futile to argue with Mokoya. He looked over at Rider. “Who are they?”
Mokoya told him what she knew. Her explanation, condensed to six sentences, sounded flimsy and inadequate. “That’s all,” she said at the end of it. “We’ve only just met.”
“You like them,” he said.
“I bedded them. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“You like them,” he repeated, one corner of his lips lifting.
“Stop. I’m not that easy to read.”
“Oh, my love.” Thennjay laughed and caressed her cheek again. “You haven’t changed.”
She smiled back, then looked away. Beyond the cool dim flaps of the tent, a chorus of voices brawled and overlapped, but in here peace reigned. She felt herself settling in the present, her senses behaving better, her mind returning to roost.
The tent flaps rustled, and a stout, frowning entity pushed its way through. Adi. “Ah, you.”
Patches of soot and rusty blood stained Adi’s clothes. A thick, dark clot clung to her brow, but she waved off Thennjay’s attempts to have a look. “Your friend’s naga we tied outside with Phoenix,” she said to Mokoya.
“Good. She’s tame. She’ll give you no trouble.”
“Sure or not. She already tried to bite off Faizal’s head.”
“I don’t blame her; sometimes I feel the same way.”
Adi snorted, but her mirth was shallow. She shook her head. “Mokoya,” she said, “we didn’t sign up for this nonsense.”
“I know. Adi, I won’t blame you if you decide to go. I can’t keep everyone safe.”
“You see outside like that, how to go?” Adi let out a huge huff and planted her fists on her hips. “But you don’t expect me to help with your politics.”
“No. Of course not.” As Adi turned to leave, she said, “Adi—thank you.”
Adi ruched her nose. “You thank me for what.” And then she was gone.