Her footsteps receded. Gyre’s legs gave way, and he slid down onto his belly. The energy bottle sat tauntingly on the floor, meters away. For all the strength he had left to him, it might as well have been on the moon. He stretched out an arm, straining, but even that brief effort was too much. The vision from his silver eye winked out, and shortly after the real one followed.
*
Gyre woke with a splitting headache and a need to vomit. He managed to roll over before his stomach had its way, spewing a thin stream of bile onto the rock. Gyre turned away from it, gasping, and lay on his back breathing hard.
He could see. Through both eyes. His hand went to his side and found an energy bottle, warm and humming with power. Strength was already returning to his limbs.
“Good,” said a weak voice. “I hoped that would work.”
Gyre sat up, ignoring the pounding in his head. Maya lay on her side across from him, propped on one elbow. The silver sword was on the ground behind her, trailing a slick of crimson. She’d wound a strip of cloth around her middle, but blood was already soaking through. As he watched, her arm gave way, and he lunged forward to catch her before her head hit the stone. He lowered her to the ground gently, and she smiled up at him.
“What are you so upset about, big brother?” she said. “You were trying to kill me a minute ago.”
Gyre’s throat felt like it had swollen shut. A sob wracked him, doubling him over, and tears ran down his cheeks and dripped off his chin onto Maya’s forehead. She brought one hand up to wipe them away, the other pressed against the wound in her stomach.
“Gyre,” she said. “Gyre, please. Listen to me.” When he swallowed hard and looked down at her again, she opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue at him. He saw the chewed mess of a couple of waxy quickheal tablets. “Emergency supplies. Should be enough to stop the bleeding. Beq has other things. I’m not going to die.” She swallowed, and for a moment her brave smile faltered. “Probably. Maybe.” Maya hesitated. “Unless you kill me.”
“I can’t,” Gyre said. “You know I can’t. You’re …” His throat felt choked again, this time with everything he wanted to say, as though it were all trying to escape at once. “My little sister.”
“You have to stop them.” Maya turned to look at the huge shape of Leviathan. “That woman, and whoever else is up there. You can’t let them use that thing.”
“I …” Gyre paused, looking down at her, and found himself smiling. “That’s not fair.”
“I know you hate us. The Order. The Republic. And we’re … not perfect.” Maya turned back to him. “But the answer can’t be to destroy what little humanity has left. You have to see that. Whatever you believe about us, there has to be a better way.” She swallowed and looked pained. “That kind of power … is best left sleeping.”
“It may be too late,” Gyre muttered.
“Try. Please.” Maya closed her eyes. “I think … I’m going … to pass out now. Beq is … at the bottom of the tunnel. Call to her. She’ll … help us. You …” She let out a shuddering breath. “You know what you need to do.”
“I …” Gyre shook his head. “Maya?”
She didn’t respond. Heart pounding, he bent over to check her breathing and found it shallow but steady.
Painfully, Gyre got to his feet. Leaving Maya where she lay, he walked back to the arched doorway. He felt like he was moving in a dream. At the top of the ramp, among the destroyed constructs, he cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted.
“Beq!” His voice echoed off the stone. “Can you hear me?”
Silence for a moment. Then a voice called back, “Who’s there?”
“Maya’s up here,” Gyre said. “And her friend. They’re alive, but they need help.”
“What?” Beq said. “Who are you—”
There wasn’t time for more. Gyre turned and jogged back along the dock. He scooped up the silver sword, still sticky with his sister’s blood, and returned it to its sheath. The fatigue and cramps were burning away in the stream of fresh power, and he felt light again, though a lingering weariness in his bones warned him there would be a price to pay. And there’s no spare bottle, this time.
The tower with the lifter in it was just ahead, and Kit had left the door open. Gyre stepped into the tiny chamber, and it started upward at once, accelerating smoothly until it reached the bridge over the top of Leviathan. This was a long, curving walkway, and Gyre pounded down it at a run. Beneath his feet, he knew, were the vast plates of the construct’s back.
The bridge ended in a short ramp downward to a broad steel plain. It was impossible not to think of the plating as a deck, as though Leviathan were a ship or a skyfortress instead of a muscular creature animated by dhaka. Spurs protruded from it, huge flanges like the spiked ends of vertebrae, armored in steel, running in two parallel rows. Between them, some distance away, he could see the hulking shape of Naumoriel’s war-construct, with the tiny figure of Kit kneeling in front of it.
Gyre crept down the ramp, taking cover behind one of the lines of spurs. He moved forward, watching through the gaps, until he was close enough to hear. There was a hole in the deck between the ghoul and the human, a deep, square pit, and around the edges something moved. Constructs, Gyre realized, a swarm of the little spiderlike things they’d seen inert in the complex, now animate and in furious motion. They crawled in and out of the pit, carrying bits and pieces both metal and organic—plates, cylinders, bones, and strips of meat. Spare parts?
“And the Order?” Naumoriel was saying, his voice distorted by the construct.
“Dealt with,” Kit said. “Though Gyre was injured. I left him below.”
“Good.” Naumoriel waved a clawed limb. “As you can see, the Core Analytica is in place. Leviathan’s swarm has awoken. We stand above the primary motivators, and once the swarm has repaired them, Leviathan will be ready.” He waved his smaller limb, still carrying the code-key. “And then the world will tremble.”
“It certainly will,” Kit said, grinning. “But that means I don’t need you anymore.”
She raised the tablet, flipping up the grille and pressing her thumb against the crystal switch. Gyre flattened himself against the metal spur, waiting for the blast. A heartbeat, then two. Nothing.
Kit looked up in time to see Naumoriel’s huge claw impale her.
It took her in the stomach, lifting her entirely off the ground, so she hung bleeding from the arm of his war-construct. Her hands scrabbled along the smooth surface of it, and she coughed, blood spraying from her lips. Her dangling legs kicked frantically.
“I imagine you’re looking for this.” One of Naumoriel’s smaller limbs snaked over, holding a familiar clay cylinder, scored on one side where the ghoul had cut into it. “I found it at once, of course. Poor fool. Did you really think this would work?”
He dropped the bomb to the deck. Kit could only cough again in answer, blood drooling down her chin.
“I should have killed you on the spot, of course. But I reasoned you might still be useful to help reach this place, and so it has proved.” The war-construct moved forward, and Naumoriel tossed the code-key aside and ground it under a steel foot. “Not that I would ever trust you with all my secrets, of course. There is no master key to Leviathan. My father was far beyond such crude methods.”