Dance of Destinies (The Galactic Mage Series Book 5) (41 page)

Pernie looked out the window again. She spoke the words of her teleport spell and broke her promise again. She appeared outside the window. She looked back in time to see the major’s mouth shape the word “no” as she began to fall.

She fell toward the street, faster and faster all the way down. Just before she hit, she cast the teleport again, reappearing on the sidewalk on the opposite side of a police car. She ran around the corner, once more heading for the broken buildings in the distant part of downtown. She couldn’t go back to Sophia Hayworth’s house, that was sure. At least downtown she sort of knew.

She ran in a series of sprints and teleports. She’d already ruined her promise now, anyway. She had to get far away. Quickly. She had to get the chip out of her arm again.

In only a few short minutes, she found a vacant lot, where a smaller building had been demolished and left to the weeds. There were amber streetlights all around. Light glinted off broken glass. Sirens wailed in the distance now.

She snatched up the neck of a brown bottle and went right to work on her arm again. She cut through the “staples” and back to the bone. It hurt a lot more with a piece of glass than it had with Jeremy’s laser knife, but she didn’t care. She cut in with one long, neat slice and stuffed her finger in, searching for the bump that marked the ant-sized chip was there. She found it right away. She slid the jagged point of the bottle up against it, and with a sideways swing of her arm, she struck the mouth of the bottle against a streetlight pole. The chip gave way from the bone.

Tossing the bottle aside, she fished out the chip again. She dropped it and mashed it flat with a chunk of concrete.

The sound of sirens surrounded her, echoing between the buildings from all directions. She couldn’t tell where they were really coming from. Or else they were coming from everywhere.

She picked up the broken bottleneck again. It was a decent knife for now. There was blood all around her feet, running down her forearm and dripping off her elbow. She glanced up and down the street. No time to heal it now. She ran toward the one place remotely familiar to her down here, the big, broken building that looked like a spear. She teleported in fifty-span leaps as she ran, blinking in and out of the pools of amber light cast by the streetlamps, in and out of the darkness. Light and dark. Light and dark.

The siren sounds got fainter as she fled. She paused long enough to sing the daffodil healing song. Her arm closed up by the second time she sang it through. The wound was still angry and red, but it wasn’t bleeding anymore.

By the time she got to the big spear-shaped building, she’d sung even the red away.

Chapter 41

T
he fatigue and frustration bent Orli for a time, but they did not break her. When the sobs had passed a few minutes later, she lifted her head and glared up through the grate of the deck above her. The alien had taken Altin away, it was true. But it was also true that she had found him once despite thinking him lost to her. She would do it again.

She wiped her hands as best she could on her underwear, then examined the damage to them. It wasn’t too bad. They hurt, and they were going to be a mess tomorrow, if she lived that long, but today, she could still make them work.

She set the Higgs prism to zero and jumped once more into the wind. She’d had enough practice that angling herself up to the next level was easy enough. She crawled through the grating, checked for oncoming billowed-alien traffic, then thrust herself into the wind that had taken Altin and his captor away.

Without her spacesuit as a sail, she couldn’t direct her flight as effectively as before, but she made her way along at a good clip and managed not to hit any more goddamn alien machines. One of the billowed creatures flew by to her left, overtaking her and passing her by at a seemingly leisurely pace, but it paid no heed to her. She angled herself just a little higher up, closer to the deck above her, just in case. She didn’t want to be seen, and she certainly didn’t want to be mashed into the pillowy lampshades of their parachute sails if another one or two came by—not too close, though, for this was tricky business. If she skimmed along the bottom of the next level too finely, a wayward wind gust might push her up into a gap, and, well, she thought she might be running out of ribs to break.

The wind carried her over what seemed like endless fields of alien machinery, the patchwork squares of the grating like vast pastureland, the quilted fields of an alien landscape seen from high above as if viewed from a spaceship high in the atmosphere.

Eventually she flew across one of the wide, empty spaces, then over the grate on the far side of it. She had to veer left to dodge a huge steam stack that rose from another bulky machine, and then for a full five minutes she flew over nothing but bulbous brown tanks like those she’d seen nesting in the strange brown piping.

Eventually the stretch of tanks and the platform itself came to an end, and once more she was flying over an abyss. She looked up and saw a violet ring, oval shaped, high above, but on the same line as her flight path. She knew immediately it had to represent another upward column of air. She shifted the direction of her flight so that she would fly by it rather than into it, not wanting to be driven back up to the uppermost reaches of the ship.

As she neared the next stack of levels, she saw the telltale orange lights in the distance, marking where the dead-air column must be. Either she was back where she had been before, or more likely, the aliens definitely lined those lights up with consistency. Predictability was one thing Orli desperately needed in this place.

But there was still no sign of Altin.

She flew over the next level, another long platform, an endless-seeming grate stretching for mile after mile. It was astonishing how massive the ship was. As she neared the end of this one, she found herself flying between what looked like a forest of steam stacks on either side. There were hundreds of them, all climbing through the grate from down below, and through the one below that as far as she could see. They rose up through the grate above her, and above that one as well. Beyond that they were lost in the dark. The puffs of steam that she flew through grew more frequent.

Shortly after encountering the dense assemblage of steam stacks, she shot out over another wide black abyss. Again she found the violet ring above her, though not in a line with her course, and shortly after, the orange lights, one above the next, marking the edge of yet another level.

She flew over platform after platform, in what seemed an endless stretch, the vastness of the ship becoming increasingly staggering, experienced in slow, desperate reality. Each was in some ways different from the previous, but all were essentially the same to her untrained eye. The only thing she recognized for certain was that there was no sign of Altin anywhere.

She flew over another large cluster of machines, where six aliens were at work on something. She hoped it might be Altin at the same time she feared it would be. They clustered around one another in a huddle, looking to her like a ring of mucous gray dumbbells, their long bodies and uneven bulbs bent toward each other as they blinked down at something unseen between them. Orli stared down through the wisps of steam, into the shadowy place between them, hoping that the flashes of color one or another of them emitted would illuminate her missing husband there.

Just as she was nearly too far to see, she saw a flash of something long and metallic. Not Altin, at least. At least she hoped it wasn’t him, stuffed into some new kind of alien thing. But she was already flying out over the edge of the grate again.

This could go on forever, damn it.

Three more sections of platform came and went, and then, finally, there was something different and new, something very loud ahead. There were no lights beyond the abyss over which she flew, and what little ambient light there was, coming from behind, kept lighting up puffs of steam around her rather than revealing anything.

As she began to curse the steam for its puffy obstruction, a blast of it hit her full force. In the blinking and sputtering that followed, something smashed her left hand so hard that she felt the bones breaking. The sound changed in that same instant, growing louder, and whatever hit her had her spinning around. She struck something hard with her back and then her head. She bounced and slid along, tumbling down some kind of tunnel. A giant duct, like the one she’d discovered within the violet ring. Except this time she’d blown right through the vent into the ductwork itself.

She skidded and bounced along the rough surface, collecting abrasions like mad. The wind was lessened some as the turn of the duct slowed both it and her. She tried to brace herself between the edges as she might have trying to climb a chimney, but the duct was too wide to reach across—not to mention her hand was throbbing worse than her leg and about as bad as her ribs.

She reached for the Higgs prism as she was drawn deeper into the shaft, bouncing along the upward curve, carried by the wind. Dim light now came from above her, along with a frightening increase in the volume of the machinery sounds. Whatever it was, it was getting closer. Much closer.

“Shit,” she muttered just as she blew up and around what was essentially a long horseshoe curve. She fumbled for the Higgs prism frantically. She tried at first with both hands, and the pain in her left nearly blinded her. With her right, she dialed up gravity hard and slammed herself to a stop, pinning herself to the bottom with a full four Gs.

She lay panting, her whole body aching everywhere. She stared up at the rough ceiling of the duct and waited for her heart to slow. She was fit, and it did so right away. She let go a steadying breath, then turned down the Higgs prism to one and a half. She lifted her left hand and examined it in the dim light. It looked terrible. Three fingers broken for sure, and at least a few carpals opposite her thumb. Mangled, basically. Blood ran freely into her left eye from a cut on her head. Her elbows and knees were waterfalls, the blood and sweat mixed to rivers. She laid her head back down and sighed. “Don’t I look lovely for my honeymoon?” She almost laughed.

A painkiller or ten would have been nice, but she had none, so there wasn’t much to be done about it but grit her teeth and go on. Even after resting for a time, breathing still made her ribs ache. And she really did need to find Altin.

Looking in the direction of the airflow, she saw that, forty feet from where she was, the duct came to another vent, which opened out into the ship proper again. Between her and the dim lights of the distant stack of decks beyond was a series of valves, enormous and long, opening and closing sequentially, each slamming in turn with thunderous regularity. There were at least six of them, giant things that squeezed laterally like a digestive act, forcing air through them and out into the ship.

Somehow she had to get out of there and back to looking for Altin.

With an effort that was so fraught with agony from what felt like literally every source possible in her body, she rolled over onto her hands and knees. Her left hand, braced on the heel of her palm, shook as if with palsy. It throbbed. She had to wait for dizziness to pass. She stood and leaned into the air flowing by. There wasn’t any way she was going to try navigating her way through the mashing brutality of those valves, so she had to go back out the way she’d come in.

She bent into the wind and marched back through the duct, having to jump down into the horseshoe curve with some added gravity to overcome the wind. That did little for her battered body, but soon enough, she was around the bend and back on a level surface. Shortly after, she was back at the intake vent she’d blown through, and upon which she’d mangled her hand. She peered at it and shook her head. She was damn lucky it was just her hand.

After being in total blackness coming round the bend in the duct, the ambient light coming through the vent seemed brighter than it had been. It reflected wetly off the slickness of the steam that coated everything, though she thought perhaps a bit of that sheen was her blood.

She climbed through the vent, bracing herself against the wind, and looked out over the abyss toward the layers of grates far beyond. Glancing up, she gauged it had to be nearly a mile to the upper hull. The bottom was so far away she couldn’t see it at all. Seven or eight miles at least. Maybe more. She shook her head. He could be anywhere.

Something scuffed and scuttled to her left. It startled her, and she ducked back through the vent. It passed along the edge of the vent and then moved down below, its course marked by the huffing sound it made, like something trying to intentionally hyperventilate. She risked looking out after it.

It was one of the little aliens, the ones with the three-tentacled faces and the hooks on their behinds, like the one that spat the ecstasy-inducing bubble that nearly got her killed. She shuddered.

It crawled along the bulkhead, oblivious to her. She wondered where it was going. More huffing sounds had her glancing up again. Two more were coming down.

She ducked back inside. What if they caught her? What if she was lunch? The big ones had ignored her, but these little freaks might not. They could blast her with their orgasmic sauce, and she’d be done for. Not one damn thing she could do.

They didn’t. They moved along just as the first one had. She looked out once they were beneath her and watched them go.

She thought about following them. Maybe they were going somewhere useful. But doing so would be as random an action as not following them.