“Artillery, incoming!”
The whistle sound grows to a deafening volume. Close behind us, a fireball blossoms from a three-layer ziggurat. Stones spin away, smash into other buildings. Rubble rains down on the streets.
The artillery we couldn’t find has found us.
Big Pig picks up speed. The driver pushes the truck hard and fast.
Artillery shells rain down around us, turning our city into a foggy cloud of explosions, fire and smoke, sprays of deadly shrapnel. Buildings shatter. Streets erupt. Flames rise. Ziggurats crumble in upon themselves.
Uchmal has suffered two aerial bombardments so far, but neither compares to this assault. The city that has stood tall for two centuries is finally falling.
A Wasp fighter roars past overhead. A stream of red fire snakes out from the Observatory. The fighter angles up and races off, trailing flame.
If the Wasps only knew how little ammo we had left, they would have swarmed us with their fighters.
Three blocks from the plaza, we pull ahead of the artillery explosions. The Grub…the Wasps somehow know to not target the area above the Grub.
Big Pig screeches to a halt at the plaza’s edge, next to the special cart used to move the Goff Spear rounds. I see the hexagonal rounds mounted under the shuttle’s wings. It doesn’t look like much is holding them on—I can only hope Zubiri and Gaston know what they’re doing.
Bawden stops our spider next to the truck. The trebuchet Springers leap out of Big Pig and hop to us. They help Lahfah lower Barkah down from the spider, help her carry him to the Wasp troopships.
Dozens of people rush to Big Pig to unload the wounded. Bishop and Bawden jump out to help. I see Borjigin placed on a stretcher, Okereke carrying Maria in his arms. Kenzie Smith shouts instructions as everyone scrambles up Ximbal’s ramp.
A shimmering haze of heat makes the Ximbal’s engines look like they’re masked by falling water. The engines of the two Wasp troopships glow red with the promise of power.
All around the plaza, artillery shells hammer down. Buildings that stood for centuries are gone in an instant. A wayward shot strikes the Observatory itself, fifteen layers up, breaking off huge blocks that tumble down the slope in an avalanche of stone.
Over the cries of our dying city, I hear people screaming my name. I look to the shuttle, see Spingate on the metal-grate deck, calling to me, more people around her doing the same.
I’m still standing in the spider’s bloody cockpit—I’m the last one left.
I scramble down and sprint for the shuttle. One troop transport is already climbing into the air, slowly driven upward by a column of fire. The second is just starting to lift off.
And then, beneath my feet, the ground shakes. Not the hard-hitting thrum of a detonating artillery round…this is something more powerful, something much bigger.
To my right, a thick slab of plaza stone cracks, tilts upward. It sags back down for a moment, then angles high again. More stone shatters, pushed up from beneath, a miniature mountain growing right before my eyes. From the jagged tip of this new peak, something massive slithers out.
Something copper.
The Grub is rising.
My feet hit the Ximbal’s ramp—I’m halfway up when the Grub bursts from the plaza. The ground trembles so hard the shuttle slides. Metal screeches, twists, warps. The ramp slides beneath me, snaps free and drops away. I manage a desperate leap for the deck. I reach and reach…I’m not going to make it—
—Spingate catches my wrist. My hand wraps around hers.
Ximbal slowly elevates, cones of flame pushing it straight up.
I hang in the air, my life in Spingate’s hand. She lies on her side on the rattling metal deck, her left arm the only thing keeping me from falling to my death.
Ximbal’s exterior door is still open. The deck twists and warps beneath Spingate—it’s not supposed to be extended while Ximbal is flying. Her red hair tosses madly. Her arm is so straight, pulled tight by my weight.
“Spin! Please don’t drop me!”
Her eyes are closed, her face split by a desperate grimace. Through clenched teeth, she growls out one word.
“Never!”
The shuttle continues to climb.
Dangling like a bug on a vine, I don’t want to look down—but I can’t help myself.
Below me, the undulating Grub squishes its way out, stone and concrete and dirt spilling off its glistening hide. It rears up, a writhing, twisting, wriggling thing still half in the ground—a copper eel, a metallic slug, a nightmare blob, a horrid demon billowing up from hell itself.
The head—if that’s what it is—rises high. I see its horror of a mouth gape open: two long, thin jaws, one above the other, like the narrow beak of some nightmare insect.
It roars, a sound so concussive it injures the air.
We’re far above the shattered plaza, high enough to see much of the city. From the west, Wasps pour down the streets, tanks and ticks and thousands of foot soldiers, a wave that would have instantly overwhelmed us.
To the north, Borjigin’s fire sends up a thick column of dense black smoke.
To the south, just past the plaza, a pair of troopships set down on the street. Landing ramps lower. Hundreds of Wasp soldiers spill out, armor flashing with the colors of a dying city.
And all across Uchmal, flames rise high, engulfing buildings and ziggurats alike. I thought there was nothing left in the city that could catch fire—I was wrong.
Spingate’s grip slips, ever so slightly.
I look up. She’s in severe pain, her cheek mashed against the deck’s metal grate.
She can’t hold me.
The entire deck lurches, bends and suddenly tilts down.
Her grip loosens. I slide. Our fingers lock—it hurts, so bad, I’m sure my bones are breaking my muscles are tearing but if I let go I die I fall I die I must hold on.
My friend screams in agony, but she fights, she will not let me go.
Two pairs of muscular arms reach out of the open shuttle door, grab at Spingate’s belt, at the back of her coveralls—it’s Farrar and Bishop. They pull her up, and me along with her.
Wind whipping at my face and hair, I look down one last time.
Beneath us, the Grub crawls free from its huge hole. It wanted us to be worms? It is a worm itself, a thick, fat maggot with stubby legs that are nothing more than cones of wobbling flesh. Muscles ripple through the body, send waves across skin that is already hardening, turning a darker shade of copper.
Wasp soldiers swarm around the leviathan. They are tiny next to it, barely more than specks, but even from this far up I can see that they’re dancing.
They’re worshiping it.
Strong hands lock on my wrist; I’m pulled up like I weigh nothing at all.
Bishop hauls me into the shuttle.
Wind howls around us.
Farrar holds on to the door with both hands as his big boot hammers down on the deck, once, twice, then with a third powerful kick and a squeal of metal the deck tumbles away.
Ximbal’s exterior door slides shut.
The wind finally dies out.
Bishop holds me tight.
“Next time,” he says, “try and move faster, all right?”
Kenzie is already with us, tending to Spingate—I think her shoulder is dislocated.
Gaston’s voice booms throughout the shuttle, telling everyone things are going to get rough, to get into coffins as fast as possible.
I grab Bishop’s face, kiss him so hard I hurt my mouth.
“Make sure everyone gets in and holds on tight,” I say to him, then I scramble to my feet and rush into the pilothouse.
Gaston stands in the center, bathed in light. Peura is with him. The young gear must be handling the copilot duties that usually fall to Spingate.
The walls are transparent. I can see the city beneath us. The Springer troop transports are close by, the first slightly above and to our left, the second slightly below and beh
ind us. I can see down into the cockpit of the lower one—Cathcart, the pilot, who suddenly looks far older than his thirteen years.
An alert sound screeches, high-pitched and insistent.
I feel the shuttle’s rear thrusters kick in. We move forward, fast, the troopships move with us.
No…we’re going away from Uchmal.
“Don’t leave until you nuke that godsdamned Grub,” I say to Gaston. “Do it now!”
He glances at me. “Em, get out of here and get in a coffin!”
“No way I miss you killing that thing. So kill it!”
He shakes his head.
“No can do. We’re not high enough yet, and there’s a pair of bogeys coming in fast. We have to take them on or we’re dead. Peura, take the helm. Ximbal, give me targeting and pilothouse crew inertia support.”
Around Gaston’s head, a complex arrangement of floating icons flares to life.
Three spots in the ceiling suddenly bulge out, extend thin black tentacles. Before I can react, one snakes around my waist and expands, holding me firmly from armpits to upper thighs. The other two tentacles do the same to Gaston and Peura.
“That harness is for high-G maneuvering,” Gaston says. “It will keep you from being splattered against the walls. Peura, do you have the damn helm or not?”
“Yessir, I have the helm.” Peura’s voice cracks on every other word. He’s doing his best to stay calm, but he’s clearly terrified.
A second piercing alarm makes me jump.
“Proximity alert,” Peura says. “Incoming bogeys at six o’clock, twenty degrees down.”
Gaston turns in place: the floating icons turn with him.
So much is happening at once. We’re almost away, we can’t get hit now, we can’t.
Behind us, I see two flashes coming in fast—Wasp fighters.
“Just let us go,” I say quietly. “You win, you can have this whole damn planet.”
“Target acquired,” Gaston says. “Launch missiles.”
The shuttle shudders a familiar shudder, one I felt in the Battle of the Crescent-Shaped Clearing. Four smoke trails shoot toward the incoming fighters.
The fighters flare with staccato flashes—they’re firing at us.
“Evasive,” Peura says.
Ximbal banks so hard to the right that my head and arms flail left. The strange tentacle lifts me at the same time, shifts me a little to absorb some of the harsh move, then brings me right back to where I was.
Gaston was right: without this system, I’d have smashed against the pilothouse walls.
I regain my wits in time to see the smoke trails close in; one fighter erupts in a glorious cloud of fire and metal.
The other loses half a wing; it spins, trailing a corkscrew of smoke.
We did it. We won.
And then, fate shatters my moment of elation.
The Wasp fighter spins past us, below us, and slams into the Springer transport, punching into the flat black hull as one piece, ripping out the other side in a dozen. There is no fire, no explosion. The troopship seems to hover in place for a moment—I can see through the cockpit window, see Cathcart’s horrified face—then it plummets straight down.
Just like that, in the time it takes to snap my fingers, a thousand refugees are gone.
“Godsdammit,” Gaston says. “We were out. Godsdamnit.”
The cockpit is quiet for a few moments as we try to come to grips with what just happened.
We escaped the Wasps.
At the same time, we lost many of our own.
We lost Springers.
I don’t know if Barkah and Lahfah were on that ship. We may have lost them as well.
Once again, we are victorious. Once again, the price of victory is far too high.
“They’re gone,” I say. “Now go back and drop our nuke. Kill that thing.”
Gaston reaches out, takes my hand.
“We can’t. I know how bad you want this, Em, but we burned too much fuel in that dogfight. We don’t have enough to do the bomb run and still make it to the Xolotl. Remember when I said we needed a full tank?”
I start to weigh our options, to ask if we can kill the Grub and the Wasps and then set down somewhere else, but Gaston isn’t giving me that option. He knows better than I what is and isn’t possible at this point.
He takes control of the shuttle.
We tilt up, and we head for the stars.
Below me, Uchmal gets smaller and smaller, until all details are gone, until it is nothing more than a brown spot with a river running into it, surrounded by jungle. It gets smaller still. Eventually, I can’t see the river at all; the city itself vanishes into an ocean of yellow.
I see mountains. I see great plains. I see oceans.
It could have all been ours.
We’re in space again.
The Springer troopship is on our right.
I don’t want to think. I’m not sure I can think.
I feel gravity relax, weightlessness setting in although the mechanical arm keeps me fixed firmly to the pilothouse floor.
Eventually, Gaston brings me back to reality.
“Approaching the Xolotl,” he says.
It’s hard to finally turn my eyes away from what was supposed to be our home, the home of our children and grandchildren, the home of my people for all eternity.
I look forward, to our future, to the next battle we face.
I look upon the Xolotl.
Aside from a few variations in color, it looks exactly like the Basilisk.
Exactly like the Goblin.
Exactly like the Dragon.
I wonder at the powers of a being that made so many races abandon their homes. I had no choice in the matter. Nor did my friends. And as much as I hate to admit it, neither did Brewer, Bello, Matilda or any of our progenitors.
The Church of Mictlan existed before any of us were born. The church shaped our lives, controlled us, put us on a path that we could not avoid.
But is that what life is like for everyone? Can a person truly make a life of their own, or can they only continue the culture into which they are born?
“Where is the Dragon?” I ask.
“Too far away to stop us,” Gaston says. “It appears to be holding its position, well outside Goff Spear range.”
The Xolotl is a slowly spinning copper cylinder set against an endless black backdrop framed by bright stars. The closer we get, the bigger the ship seems.
Bishop floats into the pilothouse. He pushes off the door, grabs my strange harness and uses it to stand next to me.
“Opkick finished the head count,” he says quietly. “Two hundred twenty-five on board.”
Which means twenty-four of my people died in the fighting. Or were wounded and couldn’t make it back. Or just got lost in the jungle during the battle and had to stand there, helplessly watching Ximbal rise in the sky.
I know there is fuel on the Xolotl. Matilda said so. But any survivors we may have left behind have no way of contacting us—we can’t go back down and search a million square kilometers of jungle for them. The Wasps are waiting there, ready to hit us the instant we go back. The hard truth is that we still have to find a new home, and Ximbal is our only way of landing on new planets. I cannot risk this shuttle.
Reality is what it is whether we like it or not—anyone still on Omeyocan is gone forever.
Bishop puts his arm around my shoulders.
He lived up to his word. He gave his support. Now will he expect me to live up to my end of the bargain? Will he expect me to have a family with him?
Do I even want a family?
Anyone can make promises—keeping them is the hard part.
“The Xolotl is beautiful,” he says.
He’s right; the ship is stunning. Red sunlight plays off the copper hull. Copper, the same color as the Grub’s hardened pincers…I wonder if there’s a connection.
Gaston turns to face me. He’s still covered in light, icons and symbols flo
ating around his head.
“Shall I take us to the landing bay?”
I nod.
In minutes, the Xolotl’s true size becomes apparent. We are but a dot in comparison. As we get closer, we can’t even see the entire ship, just the portion of it that’s directly in front of us.
Gaston flies us silently along the endless, rotating hull. The surface is gouged and scratched. There are large craters, as if parts of the hull melted into liquid before cooling back to a solid.
“All that damage,” Bishop says. “Gaston, do you think that’s from a battle?”
Gaston nods. “Most of it, yes. Probably from when it fought the Springer ship.”
We approach something I saw when I was in the Control Room—a long, deepening groove that ends at massive, flat gray doors.
The landing bay.
Gaston puts the shuttle into a gentle barrel roll, stops the maneuver with the Xolotl now above us instead of below. I feel gravity return, a bit stronger than Omeyocan’s, holding my feet to the pilothouse floor. The massive ship’s rotation appears to slow, then stop. I realize that’s because Gaston has the shuttle flying sideways as well as forward—we’ve matched the Xolotl’s rotation. The landing bay is now stationary in front of and above us. It’s upside down…or is the shuttle upside down? Maybe in space there’s no “up” or “down” at all.
“Ximbal,” Gaston says, “tell the Xolotl to kindly open up for us.”
Bishop whispers in my ear: “I’ll get the circle-stars ready. We have a few rifle rounds left, and our bracelets are recharging.”
I can tell by his tone he doesn’t want a fight, but if one comes he’ll be ready. The last time we were in the landing bay, the Grownups killed El-Saffani, the twins who followed Bishop no matter what he did or said. The twins died because we didn’t have good weapons—now we do. If the Grownups bring violence, we’ll bring more.
I kiss Bishop’s cheek.
“I love you,” I say. “Do what has to be done.”
He smiles, then gently pushes off, floating out of the pilothouse to join the others.
I wait. I stare at the huge gray doors. They don’t open.
“Well, this is rather anticlimactic,” Gaston says. “I assume someone on the Xolotl controls the doors. Hey, I wonder if I’ll see the older me.”