“Aspect.” Their name isn’t enough to snap them out of it, so I seize their shoulders, careful not to pierce their outer shell with my claws. But it seems to accomplish nothing. “Aspect, look at me. You’re okay.” My grip is definitely tight enough to scuff their freshly shined surface now, but their continued functioning is entirely thanks to my engineers, so I think they’ll find it in their metal heart to forgive me. “Aspect. Is. Okay.”
Aspect does look at me—or more accurately, in my general direction. Their eyes—or would it be optical processors, or does it really matter anymore as the lines between creature and creation continue to blur?—seem to go straight through me, into the walls, through them, then deeper into the vast subterranean network of tunnels even I only just discovered upon recovery from the freezeblade. When they speak again, their voice is steady as a nightfolk soldier’s hand on a freezeshot trigger.
“Aspect—thinks—Adria—should duck.”
It’s difficult to tell if it’s the wall or the floor that explodes first. Gravity itself seems to upend one entire side of my peripheral vision. Loose stones, gravel, and dust blast apart like nature’s own shrapnel, embedding themselves in my blue-white flesh. I’m too startled even to scream.
Aspect apparently gained some measure of sentience just in time to warn me of another attack—while I, in my infinite queenly wisdom, dismissed this gift of fate as a software bug. Too late to second-guess now. And my own failure aside, this means I owe the robot as surely as I owe Kori for fighting Azarii’s rebels alongside me.
Reflexively, I throw my battered body into Aspect’s, covering their frail, shuddering form. In a ball of black fur, Russ lunges after both of us, adding a rolling boulder of fur to the confusion. Rocky shrapnel continues to rain down, but the rest is deflected by a tangled combination of my outstretched wings and Russ’s three heads biting at the debris.
The entire front of Kori’s room, including the radiation decontamination chamber at the entrance, has been obliterated, alongside part of the floor. A horrible reptilian shriek sounds from the smoking remains.
“What the—?”
A serpentine head—diamond, hooded, and nearly the size of my entire body—lunges for my legs. I wrap my arms around Aspect and roll the both of us, Aspect releasing panicked beeps as we dodge the attack. Two mouths howling, the third growling, Russ lurches in the opposite direction. The snake gets a mouthful of stone and writhes, its forked tongue flicking pebbles and dust left and right.
I’ve studied the archives more than enough to deduce what this foul creature is.
Sun serpent.
It towers before me now, spitting and shaking, the size of any parapet from this very fortress. If it weren’t coiled in upon itself, looping and knotting countless times over, it would shatter through the ceiling and likely slither simultaneously through even more floors of my home. As it stands, I can’t tell how much more of it there is beyond the new hole in the floor. More and more snake floods this limited space with every passing instant, thrashing, forcing Aspect and me to press our backs to the wall by the bed.
The snake curls all throughout Kori’s room, even through the adjacent bathroom, where I can hear a pipe cave and burst, water distantly spurting and splashing behind the noise of the serpent hissing, Russ panting, Aspect shrieking, and my struggling to breathe at all.
Lost for words, I gasp heavy breaths, slack-jawed and staring, sweat beading on my forehead.
The sun serpent could swallow my entire body in one single, painful, pitiless gulp, then savor me for countless torch cycles, ever-so-slowly digesting every mutated muscle and claw of me like the ultimate superfood. I might be dead before I ever hit the stomach, though—its fangs are each the length of my arm, wickedly curved and sharp enough to pierce through muscle, sinew, maybe even bone in one fell swoop, getting right to my juicy marrow. Then Russ’s body, too. Then … Aspect’s gears and wires, I suppose.
At last I find my voice again, even knowing that language is beyond such a creature. “How are you here?” I shriek.
Sun serpents are native to the Passage; our records have never mentioned one wandering this far from the half-light. Could it have followed Kori’s downed starship? No, she crashed multiple sleep cycles ago. Is it hungry for nightfolk flesh? We’re far from the easiest available prey, when the Passage has plenty of mutated game to offer … plus any dayfolk pilot who flies just a little too low.
Aspect unleashes a high-frequency metallic shriek that makes my ears ring and Russ whimper, but it doesn’t affect the sun serpent. Odd, when such a signal was likely designed to deter predators during mech harvesting runs. Apparently this beast’s single-minded bloodlust overcomes its desire to have functioning eardrums.
The snake hisses.
Aspect can hear them … hissing their snake voices …
“Aspect.” I pant, throwing a quick glance over my shoulder. “You heard something before. Something in words.” I jerk my head toward the animal. “Can you … understand it? Translate it?”
Flat against the wall behind my wings, Aspect says, “When Aspect—last—translated—you told—Aspect—to calm down.”
Pulling Aspect with me, I duck under the serpent’s next lunge, slicing its underbelly with my claws as I weave aside. The snake rears back into a tighter coil, trying to defend itself with its own sheer length.
“How about you try doing the opposite of whatever I say? Seems to work well enough for Kori.”
Aspect makes a strange whirring sound that I realize, uncomfortably, may be their best attempt at a laugh. “Aspect—can do that! Aspect—will—not calm. Aspect will”—they rise on the balls of their flat metal feet, optical processors blinking brightly—“PANIC!”
And panic they do, approaching their hopefully final form of overheating toaster as they run left and right throughout Kori’s room, somehow dodging the serpent while shrieking and flailing.
Well, I suppose it was worth a try.
What was it that Aspect said, in the fragmented moments before the serpent burst forth?Seeking—Kori.The serpent can’t have been tracking Kori into nightfolk territory for this many sleep cycles. But if it is somehow pursuing Kori, that presents two terrifying problems.
First, I just locked Kori securely in a nightfolk prison. Her only available weapon is Neo, and for all his bravado, he remains a tired orphan boy, separated from his equally imprisoned sister, and brimming with more fear than he has any idea what to do with.
Second, if a sun serpent has ventured this far away from its natural habitat, then surely it must have done so under the influence of someone else. I have no clue how one would control a beast like this. Nightfolk know better than to toy with the planet’s fiercest predators, and the sun serpents normally range well outside Shadowlands territory. So that leaves only … dayfolk.
