“They’re dead,” he said. “Dead bodies, somehow animated …”

The maggots squirmed toward his shoes. He hastily backed away. Something about those maggots didn’t look quite right, and he wasn’t sure they were maggots at all.

“Interesting that they had no plan to deal with your abilities,” he said to Layanna. “Almost as if they couldn’t imagine you refusing them.”

Fanatics, she spoke into his mind, and he was forced to agree. Still, he thought there might be more to it than that—some inhuman, mindless need that would brook no refusal or alternative. And, now that the priests knew that there was an alternative—that Layanna had a will of her own and the means to implement it? What would they do now?

Turning to the others, he saw Coleel staring in fascination and horror up at Layanna, whose attention was on Avery and the bodies. She was still encased in her other-self. Beside Coleel, Virine moved. Holding one hand over his bloody nose, his other hand groped for the pistol he’d made Coleel drop. Avery dashed forward and kicked the gun aside, then collected it.

Look, Layanna said, speaking, again, directly into Avery’s mind.

She watched something to the south. He looked. There the combined aerial fleet of the local Octunggen, the two zeppelins and dozen dirigibles, angled toward them.

Chapter 5

“He felt me,” Layanna said. “The Octunggen have a military psychic with them, I touched his mind. When I changed, he felt me.”

The air started to shimmer around her in preparation to her releasing her other-self.

“Wait,” Avery said. “Can you last much longer?”

“Not for long.”

“Then grab us up and run. If we can veer around the outer edge of the battle, it will either draw the airships into the fight or make them go wide around. In either case, they won’t be able to continue the chase.”

“If I can last long enough to get us away.”

She didn’t waste any time. She grabbed up Avery, Coleel and Virine—both of whom screamed and cursed and tried to resist, to no avail; she removed their guns, just in case—then bounded over the edge of the roof and alit on the next roof, her movements fluid and graceful. Her great size didn’t seem to have any bearing on her weight in this world, and she moved as buoyantly as any of the airships following them, perhaps more so.

Maybe I should deposit Mr. Virine somewhere, she spoke into Avery’s mind, something he would never get used to. We don’t want him summoning his glabren after us. Or maybe I should just kill him. The world would be better off without him.

“No. He commands an army of glabren, and he’s at our mercy. He could come in handy later. Keep him, but put him out, if you can. He can’t know where the rebels are hiding.”

She apparently passed a non-lethal poison into Virine, or a small dose of a lethal one, as he screamed and went limp. Gripped in a transparent, whitish tendril, Coleel watched all this with wide eyes. When he could speak, he shouted—having to pitch his voice over the sound of the wind, the nearby gunfire as the battle escalated, and the rasp of Layanna’s tentacles on the gravel of the rooftops—“What is she?” His face glowed not only with his own lights now (which were becoming visible as the dried mud flaked off) but with Layanna’s lights, too.

Avery thought of lying to the man, or even telling the truth, but in the end he just shook his head. Coleel asked no more questions, but he couldn’t take his eyes off Layanna as she bounded from rooftop to rooftop, circling around the battle just as Avery had suggested. Behind them, the zeppelins hesitated, then veered to the west, taking the long way around the fighting. With any luck, it would take them an hour or more to circumnavigate it, and by then the group should be well away and Layanna back to her normal self and hopefully less visible to the psychic.

As she went, she grabbed fruits and entire infected trees—and some infected animals, too—from the rooftops and shoved them through her sac wall, eating to keep up her otherdimensional strength. Eventually, though, she had to release her other-self, and the three continued on foot. If anyone had seen them leaping from roof to roof through the city, they must have ascribed it to some phenomenon of the Crothegra, since no cries rose up and no sirens wailed in their direction. Avery tore a strip off of his shirt and bound it across Virine’s eyes as the gangster started to rouse, and Coleel ripped a strip off of his shirt and tied the man’s hands behind his back. They half-supported the criminal as they went. They’d left their tree behind and had to descend a fire escape to the road. They were close to the temple of the Sisters of Jucina now and most people in the area were squatters or rebels; the group received some strange looks but no one tried to stop them. Though clearly fascinated by her, Coleel did his best to put as much distance between himself and Layanna as he could.

“Are they still after us?” he said at one point.

“The Octunggen?” Avery said. “No, they’re far behind us, and I don’t think that they can track us now that Layanna’s back to her old self. And I don’t think we need to worry about bringing Virine to the rebel hideout now that he’s alone and unable to know where he’s going.”

The temple drew closer, and Avery heard the sound of singing coming from its great open doors with light spilling out of them. As the group approached the grounds, dark figures burst out of the doorway of an abandoned, overgrown house and surrounded them: rebels. They shouted at the group in Kuskian. A gun was thrust in Avery’s face.

“Hold it!” called a familiar voice. “That’s the doc! Leave him alone, damn you!”

Avery grinned, relief washing through him. He turned to see Janx gesturing to Avery and the others and talking to the rebels in their own language. Hildra stood at his side, her gaze on Coleel and her eyebrows arched. The mud had almost completely flaked off him now, and his glow lit up the overgrown ruins all around.

“Janx! Hildra!” Avery said. “I’m so glad to see you again.” He let Coleel take Virine’s weight—the gangster was mostly supporting himself now anyway—and shook Janx’s hand, then was engulfed in a crushing hug. He laughed against Janx’s chest. “I was afraid you hadn’t made it.”

Separating, the whaler said, “Naw, we made it back alright. First thing we did was make sure to get on the sentry crew to make sure you didn’t get shot by accident.” He tipped his head at Layanna. “Blondie.”

“It’s good to see you again,” she said.

Hildra spat. “Looks like you’ve got some new friends.”

“Losg Coleel, meet Hilda and Janx,” Avery said. “Hildra and Janx, Losg Coleel, holder of the monopoly of ghost flower nectar merchandising.”

One of the rebels spoke into a radio, apparently asking for permission to bring the group inside. It was granted, and a detachment of the sentries escorted them into the temple through a side entrance, then to the wing the rebels operated out of. General Vursk was off leading the attack on a bank controlled by Octung—that was the source of the fighting they’d seen; the general was trying to separate Octung from its stolen money and thereby force them out sooner—and the group was obliged to wait for awhile. Avery, Janx, Hildra and Layanna became reacquainted, and Coleel spoke with them, then was given a room to lie down in and food to eat. He seemed weary, and Avery didn’t blame him. He himself was exhausted. Virine was tossed into a windowless room and a guard placed on his cell.

Avery and Layanna ate and rested, and eventually Vursk returned. After he had met with some of his officers, he summoned Avery’s group, including Coleel, into his office, and they all hunched around his desk.

“I’m glad to see you survived,” the general told Avery and Layanna. “Your friends were convinced that you had, but I wasn’t so sure. They tried to get me to send another team out after you. Sadly, I needed all the men for the strike.”

“Did the soldiers you sent with us return?” Avery asked.

Vursk frowned. “Some of them. Lisam and a dozen others made it back, with Janx and Hildra here, but the rest fell during the ambush, including Major Nezine.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It seems that’s how I lost the previous team, as well.”

“Yes,” Layanna said. “We still don’t know why the Octunggen wanted to capture me.”

“If that’s what they were doin’,” added Hildra, never one to allow Layanna any airs.

“They may’ve been tryin’ to find out what we knew about him,” Janx said, hiking a blackened thumb at Coleel.

Attention turned to the merchant, who shifted uncomfortably. “I’m grateful for being allowed sanctuary,” he said to Vursk. Off the general’s nod, he said, “I’ve been living on the run for too long. I’m only sorry my men weren’t able to make it here with me.”

“We’re not done running, I’m afraid,” Vursk said. “We move camp every few days. But for your help in repelling the Starfish—”

“What?”

“—we will give you what asylum we can. The good news is that we won the battle today. We deprived the occupiers of a major source of their ill-gotten funds and now have those funds to spend on ousting them. It’s only a matter of time now.”

“Starfish,” Coleel said. Suddenly he seemed like a man who knew he should have bargained harder.

“What I want to know is, was it worth it?” Janx said. “What about it, Losg—you know where we can get our hands on some of that nectar?”