THE RISING SUN BREATHED the sky to life. It sloughed through a gamut of clammy blues before warming to pink, its skin scarred with strips of cloud. Astride Phoenix, Mokoya smelled water on the air, a metallic tang cleaner than blood and not quite as sharp.
The caverns chosen by the naga had a single mouth, a wide slash in the rock that could swallow Phoenix twenty times over. A hundred yields to its left lay the scrub-ringed clearing where the crew waited with hungry nets.
Mokoya was the bait.
She sent her soundball, a softly glowing, plum-sized sphere laden with the cries of naga prey, floating toward the cave mouth. Tensing through metal-nature woke the device and triggered a piercing blast: the trumpeting call of a tuapeh. A temptingly juicy meal for a naga.
Silence followed. Stillness. The cave mouth remained undisturbed.
Mokoya counted to six, then tensed again. Another sound.
Phoenix shuffled, nervous.
She couldn’t be wrong. The prickle rippling through her lizard arm meant the naga was close by.
A shadow passed across the ground: wings, still distant, still indistinct. Startled, Mokoya looked up. The new sun greeted her, smearing green afterimage into her vision. She squinted.
High overhead the naga circled, gliding, wings held straight.
Surprise hissed between Mokoya’s teeth. The naga had left the cave during the sundown period. But naga had poor night vision. They hunted in daylight.
The beast dipped downward, not vertically as for a landing, but sideways, like a flyby. Still out of their reach, but close enough that Mokoya could pick out the massive tendons in its wings, stretching out from the muscles of the arm, and—
A series of brown strips crisscrossed the naga’s pale chest. There was a harness. She had missed it in the panic of her previous encounter.
A harness. That meant—
“There’s a rider,” Mokoya whispered. A human rider.
The naga beat its wings once. Phoenix braced against the displacement as it sailed to altitude.
It wasn’t going to come down. A human rider would know a trap when they saw one.
Mokoya blew air between her lips, and allowed herself one small, soft “cheebye.”
Then she tapped her wrist, where a brand-new and unflattened voice transmitter bravely waited. “Adi. There’s a problem.”
“Wah lao. What now?”
“I have to bring it down.”
“What? Mokoya—”
“Stand by.” She shut the transmitter off.
The naga was still circling overhead. Mokoya kicked twice into Phoenix’s side in warning. Then she raised her right hand over her head and tensed.
Earth-nature responded. Gravity warped in the pull of the Slack. Everything in Mokoya’s radius instantly grew tenfold heavier.
Iron-weight, the naga crashed to land. The ground shuddered, and a crown of dust rushed outward at them.
Metal-nature sang through Mokoya’s cudgel, and electricity struck the downed naga, paralyzing one wing.
Mokoya released her hold on earth-nature. The dust cloud jumped in height. She punched through it with water-nature, exposing the naga sprawled on the ground, wings spread, bellowing.
Freed from the weight, Phoenix sprinted toward the beast. Behind her was Adi’s crew, making the best of the disarray.
On the naga’s back, the rider was a thin figure cocooned in gray. Mokoya had to get to them.
She braced into a crouch as Phoenix ran up to the naga’s paralyzed shoulder. It was ten times her size, easy, radiating exhausted heat. Mokoya leapt up—
—the Slack punched into her—
—and the world tilted. The Grand Monastery. The raptor pens. This dread architecture, with all the bronze gates still intact. The chirrups of young raptors waiting to be fed. Eien’s laughter, the way her robes bounced as she skipped forward holding the bucket. The loud clicking from the heater in the center, which Mokoya knew now was the warning sign that one of its pipes, corroded by acid, was about to give way.
She wanted to scream as Eien darted away from her, tracing the path history had already mapped out for her;
the path where Mokoya watched her baby girl run toward the raptors, past the clicking heater, oblivious;
the path where Mokoya smiled indulgently, instead of scooping her up and dragging her to safety, condensing a lead-thick wall of air between them and the heater that was about to—
—vaporize in a ball of angry orange, engulfing her daughter a microsecond before the hot air and gases seared into Mokoya, screaming agony dissolving flesh and bone—
Something jerked Mokoya forward so hard her shoulders popped. Her feet found purchase, planting into something warm and shifting and hard, like muscle, like skin.
She stared into a face. Human. Swathed in gray, long-boned and milk-white. Dark eyes with an intensity that stopped the heart.
The rider. The naga’s rider had caught her.
Beneath them the naga bellowed, a wall-shaking sound that traveled up its rib cage. Then it reared. Mokoya’s feet slipped. The naga’s back rippled as it beat its wings. Air whipped fiercely up, hurricane strength: the paralysis was gone.
The familiar cyclical whine of lightcraft cascaded over the chaos, accompanied by the rhythmic syllables of battle chants. Mokoya knew that sound. She had learned it as a child; she had sung it as an adult. Thennjay. The pugilists had arrived early.
The rider’s arms shook, narrow fingers latched to Mokoya’s wrists, biting into bone. Even in the chaos, Mokoya could hear the air whistling through their lungs. Those eyes had the pull of a sun. Acting on instinct, Mokoya squeezed hers shut and tensed magnitude back into gravity, forcing the naga toward the ground.
A strange sensation enveloped her, as though a dozen fingers were tracing patterns across her soul. Mokoya swallowed air, and her eyes snapped open. The rider—a woman?—was still staring at her.
Their pale lips moved. “Forgive me.” Forgive me. A sound heard in the heart, not in the mind. The language sounded archaic and she didn’t know why.
Then, like a fishhook through the chest, her connection to the Slack was torn from her. Not destroyed, but pulled out of reach. Mokoya gasped as she detached from the world.
Great power accumulated and released. Something massive moved, like a city falling off a cliff.
“Mokoya. Mokoya!”
She was flat on her back, head throbbing, throat and tongue cottony. Sunlight poured into her eyes. Her wrists felt like they were broken.
Adi leaned farther into her field of vision. “You better not be dead. How am I supposed to explain to your brother?”
Mokoya found the shape of her mouth. “What . . .”
“You asking me?”
Mokoya sat up, and her hips groaned. Everything lay flattened in a twenty-yield radius around her. Adi’s crew was in disarray, fighting with the upset raptors. And there, with the grace of drifting petals, were the pugilists descending on the lotus-shaped plates that were the Grand Monastery’s signature lightcraft.
The naga, and its rider, were gone. Strangeness upon strangeness. Only now, in the post-adrenaline pulse of the aftermath, did Mokoya realize that they’d used the old genderless pronoun for adults, from before the language changed. A radical? That unplaceable accent.
“There was a rider,” Mokoya said. “Did you see?”