It’s still not enough.
A second snake descends on me, and nothing I could muster, whether radiation or unleashed rage, could possibly be enough. All at once, I’m caught in the second serpent’s coils. It wraps its body once, twice, three times around my own, feels like it’s squeezing my bones into liquid as it slithers its head down to lock blind, obscenely black eyes with my own.
“You want … Kori,” I gasp through the increasing constriction. Every drop of air in my lungs feels like a gift that could be revoked by this creature at any moment. “Over … my …corpse.”
That can be arranged, the snake might say, if its tongue were good for anything but sibilant intimidation. Instead it ramps up its strangulation another notch. My eyeballs feel like they might burst from their sockets. I probably have blood vessels failing already.
My will remains steel, though, even while my bones feel like water. A growl rumbles in my chest, rises in my throat. The fathomless, colorless eyes glare sightlessly back into my own watering ones. At the edge of my wavering peripheral vision, Aspect scrambles deeper beneath Kori’s collapsed bed, the first serpent trying and failing to jam its head underneath and take a chunk out of the mech. Distant freezeshot, swearing, and serpentine snarls compete to be heard through the increasing din. As I instructed, Russ dutifully hangs back from my and Aspect’s scramble, but his triple growls have become triple whimpers, begging me not to go out like this.
Nois the only word my mind can form.No, this can’t be how it ends.I open my jaw wide, a pulse of azure energy blasting from my mouth.
The snake’s face is molten, burning; emerald scales scald as black as its eyes, the forked tongue lashing about in its agony. The monsterroars and releases me. I crash, limp and breathless, to the uneven floor, thankfully landing on a still-solid section rather than plummeting several levels down through a crevice.
Sufficiently frustrated, the first snake abandons Aspect, whirls, and dives for me, the edge of one tooth dragging a nasty tear through my left wing. The bite would’ve needed to linger for the paralytic venom to inject, so I’m safe on that front. But blood spritzes from the wound, splattering against the wall and the floor and the side of my face. I taste rust and salt.
Never enough, not even with all my stubborn strength. Not even with the overcharge and the raw, bestial rage the Diakópsei endowed me with. But Kori’s entrapment in that cell is my doing. She’s a stationary target for these serpents—if they don’t burrow through all seven floors of my fortress and bring it down on all of us first.
Anger is a decent fuel in desperate times. But this nameless thing I feel for Kori, despite how many times I tried to smother it, is power of an entirely different kind. I don’t fight like an animal, desperate for the elixir of death on my tongue. Swallowing my blood, tearing serpent needles from my chest with my bare hands, I bare my teeth and fight like someone with something to live for.
I don’t know if I’m going to live long.
Recovered from my blast of burning power, the second snake wheels upon me again, the first snake similarly focused alongside it. They lunge at me together, both serpents’ bodies and tails tangling around me in a dizzying maelstrom. I try to slide between and beneath them. Instead they drag me to the floor, suffocating me in the crushing combined weight of their scaled bodies, until dark spots dance across my vision.
I gasp and flail. The dark splotches widen like spilled ink. Blurry, broken landscape swims across my eyes—blue fire, gray-black stone, flashes of colorful tapestry, my dog’s triple sets of bright baleful eyes, Aspect’s similarly scarlet wide optical processors—and I think,Maybe this is it.
Maybe, when Kori finds me—because I am under no illusions, that girl will come after me even if not a shred of me deserves it—maybe, by my wounds, she’ll know that in the end, I tried to go back to that first glimpse of undeserved sunlight. Tried to tell her with my last burning breath that I hope whatever I find on the other side, I don’t forget her. I don’t want to forget any of it.
Darkness slips over me like a curtain.
Then, all at once, impossibly, it’s rent in two, a new weight careening into my spine and dislodging both serpents from the shock.
Coughing, every bone screaming, I somehow roll to my knees. I break free of the serpents, but they can’t disentangle themselves from each other. They’re a convoluted knot of snake in the center of the warped floor, hissing and spitting.
Blinking hard to clear my spotty vision, I lift my head. I expect to see, perhaps, Aspect astride Russ once again, having somehow found an opening to mount a successful combined assault on the sun serpents. But that isn’t it at all.
Standing before me, panting but unbowed—all five or so skinny, stubborn feet of her—is Kori of the Daylands, a pair of pilfered freezeblades split between her hands.
I want to tell her I’m grateful, even if I can’t even begin to deserve this rescue. I want to tell her she’s beautiful when she refuses to back down. I want to tell her she has enough fight in her for seven nightfolk soldiers, even if she’s nowhere near their stature and training.
“Kori, youidiot,” I say, and then break into a coughing fit again.
“Youridiot, your queenliness,” she says, raising both freezeblades in a defensive X, “so the appropriate response isthank you.”
I spit on the floor. “Thank you.”
“Too late.”
“I hate you.”
“Hate me later,” she says, gesturing to my ruined wing. “Let me help you now.” I know full well that I don’t hateherat all.
The tear in my left wing’s membrane has worsened from continued strain. It’s nearly a hole now. I’m unspeakably lucky it hit only the membrane and not the phalanges that allow me to move it, or I might be in too much pain to keep fighting at all.
The snakes remain hopelessly woven together, one mega-snake with a head on either side. But they aren’t done fighting yet. They’ve sensed Kori’s scent, or heard her voice, or whatever sense triggers a blind reptile to become officially unhinged. The tangled tails rattle; the twin tongues hiss. Their unnatural single body swings for Kori like a garrote. Two of Russ’s heads howl. Aspect shrieks.
As she ducks, Kori swings both freezeblades in twin crescent-moon strikes. One glances off their twin scaly hide; the other embeds itself in serpent one’s vulnerable underbelly. The injured one roars and thrashes, thrashing the second serpent wildly about with it. Kori, having ducked, is somewhere between them, still at risk of being bashed into the floor.
“Damn it all,” I sigh, and force myself aloft again despite my wounded wing.
