As Lilijoy crouched next to Anda’s still form, she continued to replay the satisfying moment in her head, mostly to distract herself from the blood pooling the bottom of the hovercraft. The woman’s arms and legs flailing to find purchase. The realization in her face that no matter how fast or acrobatic you are, empty air and gravity will have their way.

The words of the woman as she receded still haunted her a bit.

“I’ll come for you, little mouse and take the other one! And your eyes and skin and mmppph.”

At that point, a large bubble erupted underneath her, and the woman’s body vanished into the muck. The last Lilijoy had seen was the woman’s hand protruding from the mud, still holding Lilijoy’s forearm and hand, desperately trying to paddle back to the surface with it.

Lilijoy felt some regret that she didn’t get in any parting words. She could have said, “Sorry, didn’t mean to ‘arm you,” or “Now I’m as ‘armless as I look.”

While it was nice to distract herself with bad puns, Anda’s injuries were not going away. There was a clear depression where the bullets had fractured the bone under his skin.

“Holy crap, Anda, what is your skin made of anyway?” she said aloud. He was still unresponsive to her messages, and her sensing skills indicated a large mass of fluid forming over his brain at the site of the injury. She contemplated making a hole to release the pressure, something her medical intuition told her was possible, but she wasn’t sure she had any tools that could penetrate Anda’s skin.

“Jiannu, this is an emergency. Can I cultivate the med bugs early?” she asked.

“Yes. It will throw off your cultivation for a day or so, and the med bugs will be unimproved. The biggest problem is time. Cultivating a large number of med bugs at your current rate will not be quick. I estimate one hour for twenty million, due to the heat bottleneck, and a clinical dose would be a minimum of five hundred million. Around a billion would be best.”

Lilijoy digested the information. Her intuition told her that Anda needed help immediately. The pressure on his brain and the injuries from bone fragments were only getting worse. He had a few hours at the most.

“How would I get the med bugs into him?” She feared the answer to this one a bit, remembering her own introduction to suppositories.

“The med bugs will migrate to any part of your body. Skin to skin contact is all that is needed, though thinner skin such as the eyes or lips will be faster and cause less attrition to the bugs. I can’t predict how Anda’s skin will behave to med bug penetration, so I suggest the eyes.”

Answering Lilijoy’s next question in advance, she went on to say, “As long as you maintain proximity of a foot or so, we should be able to control their activity. With a traumatic brain injury, it would be best if we guide them, or they might not prioritize correctly, which could have a poor outcome.”

“Okay. We can’t wait until I have a billion. I’m going to start now and send them as they are made. I just need to set up a few things.”

Lilijoy jumped over to the assault craft, which she had tethered to their own. An imposing bank of physical controls and handles met her sight.

“Crap,” she muttered. “Guess the Sinaloa like to use their hands. Jiannu, is there any way to control the Sinaloa craft remotely?”

“There are no open protocols I can find. Perhaps there is an air-gap switch of some kind?”

Lilijoy scanned the panels and levers. Too many gauges and screens to handle in her current haste. Then she found a red handle on the side of the main console that looked like it would cause some contacts to extend into a waiting alcove.

“Hope it doesn’t blow me up,” she said as she leaned into it with all her might. The handle resisted at first, then capitulated suddenly and the ports on the side connected. The panel instruments went dark.

“I can see it now,” said Jiannu.

“Good,” said Lilijoy. “Now here’s what I want you to do.”

***

Two Sinaloa assault craft scorched the twilight air over the Amazon’s dead marsh, blowing great swirls of glowing swamp gas in their wake. They had been ordered to abandon pursuit of Mo’s hovercraft just as they were engaging, but that was nothing compared to the threat they were under if they failed to accomplish their task.

Just before the commander’s signal was cut off by several feet of water and mud, she ordered them to bring her a certain number of heads. They had a choice as to exactly which number. One head, if it belonged to a certain girl gob. Six if they chose to substitute their own. If those weren’t available, then the heads could easily be obtained from their families. The capture order was rescinded on the commander's authority, but the intact head was crucial. This much had been made painfully clear before signal loss.

The crafts blew past the scene of the initial conflict, ignoring the two disabled vehicles. They flew over their commander’s mud bath without even knowing. She could be rescued later, as her blood bugs would keep her alive for a couple hours.

“Anything on radar?” asked one.

“Nothing but flat out here,” came the answer. “We’ve got visibility to twenty miles, some clutter from swamp gasses.”

“Any shadows?”

“Rolling terrain here and there. Shouldn’t be enough to hide movement.”

“This could take a while. Be a shame if we couldn’t get back to the commander in time.”

“That would be a shame, wouldn’t it? I’ll be real thorough.”

“What’s the top speed on their boat?”

“Forty, fifty at the most. We should be on them by now.”

“Maybe they took our bird?”

“Then what happened to theirs?”

“Sank it.”

“You can’t sink those things. They practically float on air, forget about water.”

“Right. Towed it?”

“Not impossible. Hey, do ours sink in a swamp like this?”

“Depends. Eventually if they’re torn up enough, probably never if intact.”

“Huh. Tell Juarez to split off from us, cover more area. We’ll circle back in, say, three hours?”

“That would be just right.”

***

A dark sea flowed around jagged teeth of bone, lit by sparse currents of pale light. The currents swirled and converged around the sharpest edges, eroding and softening. A thin shaft of illumination marked where a channel grew, growing to release the abyssal pressure created by the influx of new fluid around the site of the injury. All around the periphery, a gentle green glow marked the release of soothing anti-inflammatories. The terrain was a cratered battleground, where gentle rolling folds gave way to a rough-edged caldera of fragmented tissue.

“This is bad, Jiannu.”

Lilijoy had been working through the med bugs for over two hours, lying unaware with her lips pressed against Anda’s eye. The bugs were doing what they could, but it was a losing battle. The progression of the injury overwhelmed her ability to cultivate and guide the bugs.

“We’re going to lose him if I don’t do something drastic.” Like I lost Sar Noda.

She withdrew her lips slightly, moving them to the site of the injury. “Can you direct the newest wave to erode his skin?”

“I can do that. We will be increasing the chance of introducing hostile microbes into the injury.”

“The bugs can deal with that later. I need to pull out some of the bone pieces; the bugs are just too slow at their current levels.”

After delivering the bugs to weaken his skin, she pulled away for a moment. The cramped confines were utterly dark, but her augmented senses and ongoing connection to the med bugs illuminated her task all too well.

Wishing she had something, anything smaller, she awkwardly brought the tip of the tactical bowie knife to Anda’s forehead and attempted an incision across the soft concavity. The skin parted, almost dissolved under the knife, revealing a chaotic mess of disrupted tissues. She couldn’t make any sense out of it, even with expanded senses.

“Jiannu, take out everything but the bones.”

Her vision flickered and resolved into a new scene, two tightly overlapped radial patterns of shattered fragments hanging within the cavity, thrust inward like a little mountain ridge.

“Jiannu, dial up my focus and suppress adrenaline. I need my hands steady.”

Magnified in her enhanced vision, the tip of the knife was an enormous wedge of shadow pushing up from underneath the mountain range of bone fragments.

“Crap! I’m just making this worse. How can I pull these things out?”

She racked her brain. No tools other than the knife. Maybe she could use some thread or hair to make tiny lassos? Convince the bugs to tie them to the fragments and…no. What she really needed was something that could just suck the bone out.

Wait...oh god.

This was going to suck. Literally.

***

A formation of drones stalked the night air above the former rainforest, their operators sitting safe and warm back in the city of New Manaus. Acting on a tip about a significant incursion into the dead zone between Sinaloa clan and Lone Star clan territories, the small fleet’s mission was to investigate and punish if necessary. They were currently tracking two Sinaloan amphibious assault craft who had wandered deep into the wastelands, close to Lone Star holdings. Too close.

“Firin’ warnin’ shots,” said a voice with an exaggerated twang.

“You git em?”

“Hell yeah. I warned those Sinny rock boxes right off of livin'.”

“That’s about right! Any more crawlin’ round out there?”

“Looks like we got a couple belly up a ways south. No life signs. Another lonesome guy to the west. He next?”

“Think that’s our tipster. Let’im breathe. Take another spin round the dial, then round em up.”

“Rodger that.”

***

Unaware of the flare-up in clan relations going on around her, Lilijoy had other concerns. Mostly finding water to rinse the nasty texture of blood and bone fragments and god knows what else out of her mouth. She had turned off her taste and smell for the experience, suppressed her gag reflex, and dialed up focus to the point that she wasn’t aware of anything beyond tracking the movements within Anda’s wound as she carefully applied suction. That made it bearable, even clinical.

The aftermath was a different story though. Spitting to the side yet again, she contemplated the injury. The pressure and embedded bone were much improved, and her latest round of med bugs was doing their best to control the side effects of her improvised treatment.

It was still really ugly in there, but she felt that the worst was over. The rest was just continuing to pour med bugs into the injury and waiting to see the impact on Anda’s mind. Her medical intuition told her that he could expect some mental impairment; primarily lack of impulse control and focus. Other possible symptoms were too variable to predict. She hoped his bugs could help with the recovery once the active injury was under control. That gave her an idea.

“Jiannu, can we give the Tao system to Anda?”

“Eventually. Once you have Stage two complete, or nearly so, we will be able to craft satellites that can leave our body. They will be able to enter Anda’s brain and replace his current system. Our stage one flowers could enter his brain and assist, but the risk of complications with his current system added to his injury makes that a poor idea. Stage two involves integration and incorporation of your existing neurons, and we can’t use those in his brain without a host of difficulties. Once we have satellites, a world of possibilities opens up.”

“That’s at least a year away!” she complained. “Isn’t there some way to go faster?”

“Not unless you can improve the way your brain and body handle waste heat,” Jiannu reminded her. “If we can find a Rank Seven bug, we will be able to proceed much faster.”

“Great. I wonder where we can get those.” She sighed. “Oh well, another priority added to the list. I need to get stronger, so I can rescue Attaboy as soon as possible. That means spending time Inside to work on all the skills I need for that. Now I need to finish Stage two, so I can help Anda, so I have to find Rank Seven bugs. I need to keep hiding from the clans in both worlds. I need to find out where Attaboy is being held. And while I’m doing all that, I want to find out why all of this is happening to me, where my people came from, what really happened with the Tao system, and why Guardian didn’t microwave me.”

“You have many tasks Lilijoy. I will always be here to help.”

“Thanks, Jiannu.” Lilijoy sat and recovered for a few minutes. She didn’t dare to turn her smell or taste back on and she realized that she had been lying in a drying pool of blood for several hours. Her skin itched and she had to pee.

She checked the visuals from the assault craft. Only blooping mud and wisps of luminescence disturbed the stillness of the marsh. The other Sinaloa craft, the one that Anda had used the crazy flying wires on, rested on the surface several hundred meters away.

Lilijoy and Anda were parked on top of the first craft he had shot, now sunk under the mud. It had come to rest on its side in the swamp. On top of them was the craft they had stolen, covered in mud with the canopy left open on both sides. Its weight pressed down on their own loyal steed, nearly forcing it beneath the mud. I’m in a hovercraft sandwich.

To an outside observer, The assault craft rested gently on the surface of the mud, concealing the smaller hovercraft. She had watched with glee as the returning Sinaloans had blown right past the wreckage, presumably on their way to catch up with the escaping fugitives. She hoped they had caught Mo first and given him what he deserved.

She had been worried about getting caught before she could get back to the scene of the first battle, but it hadn’t taken long at all to park on top of the half sunken assault craft and then remotely pilot the captured craft on top of them. The only drawback was that she and Anda had almost no space in the hull, and that some of the fetid swamp liquid had spilled over the sides. She didn’t mind enclosed spaces and Anda was in no state to care, so it all worked out. She was rather proud of the whole production.

It was still possible that the remaining Sinaloans could come back to look for survivors and salvage the craft. That had been a secondary concern when stabilizing Anda, but now she needed to plan.

“Jiannu, how far can the sensors of the assault craft see?”

“Sitting on the surface, not great. Maybe six or seven miles unless they are flying higher than normal.”

“Only a couple minutes warning. That’s not good.”

She found a water pouch for a drink and then took care of bodily necessities. One more source of waste won’t change much, she thought. Then she settled in for the night, as she couldn’t come up with a better option. Between rounds of reading and research, she infused Anda with more med bugs, finally allowing herself a few hours of uncomfortable, uneasy sleep before sunrise.

She was awakened by an alert from Jiannu.

“One slow moving vehicle approaching from the west. Estimated arrival in ten to twelve minutes.”

Lilijoy had considered many scenarios, but this threw her for a loop.

“Let’s prepare the ambush we planned. Maybe it’s just someone coming to see what happened.”

She infused Anda once again, and checked his health carefully. He was still stable; the improvised shunt was keeping the fluid from pressing on his brain, the internal bleeding was contained and inflammation was within acceptable levels. He remained in a deep coma.

Normally, Lilijoy didn’t mind being small, but it sure would have been convenient to move Anda to the faster craft and escape the area. She had even contemplated tipping the hovercraft to dump him into the assault craft, but she couldn’t risk exacerbating his injuries, or even killing him.

“I have a visual on the vehicle. Relaying it now.”

There it was, lit by the dim gloom of the rising sun-blob. A small, familiar craft she had last seen with its front in the air waving like a leaf in a stiff breeze.

“Mo.” She grunted his name like a curse. “Prepare the ambush.”

***

Mo was feeling clever. Lucky too. His guy in Lone Star had come through, and the last he had heard, the two craft that had nearly been the death of him were blown to pieces somewhere to the north. Now he had a chance to pick up some goodies, courtesy of Sinaloa. He approached the closest of the two assault craft, its canopy melted and shredded. When he looked in, bodies and pieces of bodies filled the damaged interior. He whistled.

“Shee-it, Anda. If I’d known you were this bad-ass, I would have brought in a few more friends to take the gob back at the platform. Lesson learned, I guess.”

He jumped into the bloody mess and extracted some weapons and personal items from the bodies. He considered taking the vehicle for a moment, but decided the other was probably in better condition. Hopping back into his hovercraft with the loot, he moved over to the next target.

This one was in much better shape. As he approached, it became clear that any damage was cosmetic, and his greed began to rise. He would be set for a long time if he could drive off in this and auction it in Manaus. He maneuvered around, looking through the open sides of the canopy, and noted the surprising lack of bodies or any signs of violence. He tried to put together a scenario for why an intact assault craft would have been abandoned, but the best he could come up with was a mechanical failure.

He opened his canopy and prepared to hop over. Just as his foot was leaving the deck, the assault craft shuddered and lifted several feet, catching him off balance.

Mo had spent years perfecting his heavy-footed, foul-mouthed persona, and those who only knew his public face would have been amazed by his agility as he turned what should have been a muddy plunge into a graceful leap, planting one foot onto the side of the rising craft and propelling himself into a back flip. He landed back in his own vehicle in a crouch and looked up, into the tall rectangular barrel of Anda’s rifle, propped on the back of a seat belonging to a hovercraft that had very much seen better days. His eyes traced the barrel back to a bloody and ferociously grinning Lilijoy, who pressed the trigger.

Even with superhuman reflexes, a bullet can’t be dodged from close range. What can be dodged is an intent, the moment that the wielder finds the target and begins the muscle contractions to initiate the shot. In the split second before Lilijoy fired, Mo read her intention and threw himself out of the line of fire. The rifle was far too large for her even if she had two arms, and she had been forced to prop it on a seat back; she couldn’t follow him with the barrel quickly. After the understated discharge blew four huge holes in the deck, Mo sheltered behind the front row of seats and called out.

“Damn, girl! That’s one hell of a big gun. Any chance we could talk this out?”

Lilijoy, who was busy repositioning said gun to finish off the man who had plagued her so much, felt a strange sensation. She knew she should get rid of him. After all, he had ruined her trip off the factory-mine, ruined her stay at the bomb shelter, and was responsible for leading five Sinaloa assault craft straight to her and Anda. The last week would have been much different without Mo sabotaging her efforts to remain hidden. So why was she hesitating?

“You know I can blow you up through those seats,” she called out. “Stand up and show your hands, and maybe I won’t need to kill you.” She fired a single round from one of the four sub-barrels through the seat just next to him to prove her point.

“Hey, hey take it easy!” he yelled over “I’m standing, I’m standing.” He slowly emerged from his crouch, rising with both hands in the air. “This isn’t about the whole ‘gob’ thing is it?” he asked, with an innocent look on his face. “I’m real sorry about that. I’ve got a certain reputation as a foul-mouthed son of a bitch to uphold, you see.”

She looked back at him with contempt.

“It’s your fault that Anda got shot. It’s your fault that I got attacked by vampires. Twice!” She was shaking with rage now and felt no desire to tamp it down. “You are a bad man and I bet no one would cry if you never came back!” Her trigger fingers twitched. But she still didn’t act.

Mo’s face twitched. “You’re right you know. I can’t even go Inside anymore cause everyone there hates me.”

Lilijoy stared at him coldly. Was his lip trembling? She dialed up her senses and tuned in his heartbeat, which was pounding, and his heat patterns, which were less then helpful due to his recent exertion and surprise. She wanted to shoot him and be done, but that sensation of hesitancy nagged at her. Did she feel pity? No. Guilt? No. Was it because she valued life? No, definitely not.

Lilijoy valued nature, which was altogether different.

Then she realized what was bothering her, why she hesitated. She needed Mo alive to help her.

The Sinaloan assault craft, controlled by Jiannu, withdrew twenty feet and rotated to face Mo. Two under-mounted machine guns swiveled and locked on to him. Lilijoy relaxed and lowered Anda’s rifle to the floor. Even resting on the seat back, the effort to balance the cumbersome thing while keeping her hand around a trigger meant for Anda-sized hands had her muscles burning and her heart pumping. Naturally, it was at this point she remembered she could fire the gun mentally as well as manually.

“Here’s what you are going to do,” she said to Mo. “I need help moving Anda safely. Do a good job and I might let you go.”

Then a logistical nightmare began. Lilijoy refused to be in the same craft as Mo. She wanted Anda brought to the assault craft. It used some kind of fuel that was half gone, but it also had the more efficient standing pressure wave drive that the hovercrafts used as a backup. Once the fuel was gone, they would be slower than ever, but at least they would be armed and clean.

Unfortunately, when Mo brought Anda to the assault craft, she would have to cover him with the rifle again, which was a risky proposition.

“Mo,” she said. “Do you have any smaller guns?”

He looked at her with surprise, then slowly nodded. “Handguns on the floor here.”

That earned him a point. Lilijoy figured that he was starting at about negative two thousand, so he had a ways to go to earn sufficient good will.

“Good,” she said. “Get out on top of your canopy and move to the very front.”

He moved smoothly to do as she directed. When he was in position, she hopped into his craft and closed shut the canopy. The guns were in a little pile, along with some jewelry and other knickknacks. She picked one up.

“Jiannu, technical overlay.”

All the information she needed to understand the weapon was placed appropriately in her vision. The was highlighted in green, which turned red when she flicked the switch. The pistol had a magazine status readout which indicated a full load. There was even a floating white arrow indicating how to point it. Lilijoy wasn’t sure if that was entirely necessary, but she wasn’t complaining.

She raised the weapon with one hand, and immediately felt the urge to brace it with her missing arm.

That’s not going to happen, she thought, and immediately added another item to her long list of vitally important tasks. Better get a new arm soon.

Her system-guided intuition compromised with a straight-armed stance that relied on good footing and an involved core. Her muscle groups weren’t quite acting on their own, but somehow, she knew just how to place her dominant foot, how much shoulder to turn into the direction of fire and other fine adjustments that just felt right as she made them.

She turned to see Mo watching her through the canopy with an eyebrow raised.

“Better watch the recoil on that one,” he called through the barrier. “It’s little, but it packs a kick. Sorry about your arm! Was that my fault too?”

She couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. “Only partly,” she called back. “I’m going to fire this once or twice. Don’t fall off!”

She popped the first door panel and squeezed off a shot into the water. The explosive force was more than she expected, body intuition or not, and it felt like her shoulder was dislocated for several moments. Her ears really hurt; this little pistol was louder than any other gun she had heard and it came as quite a shock. She noticed that Mo was saying something, but she couldn’t make out the words. As she turned to look at him, she could hear his voice strangely overlaid on the ringing in her ears. Startled, she looked away and his voice faded too.

“...recommend firing an un-cancelled weapon inside the….” was all she got.

Well, that's interesting, she thought. It seemed her eyes could figure out what he was saying when her ears couldn’t. Another miracle from the system.

She motioned with the pistol for Mo to hop onto the other hovercraft. He had a look of disgust as he jumped into the blood soaked compartment, nearly stepping on the body of Lilijoy’s first victim from the earlier battle. He was saying something again, but faced away from her, so she only caught snippets.

“...uck happened to him? His...rotten melon...something...kill him!”

She assumed he must be commenting on Anda’s current state. She wished her hearing would come back. She was surprised by how much she had integrated her echolocation into her sensory world, and felt oddly exposed without it. She braced her pistol again and took aim at his torso. She also kept the machine guns trained on him, as she planned to do until the last moment of the maneuver.

“Pick him up!” She yelled, her voice distant in her ears. He looked back at her with a dubious expression, and she could see his lips clearly.

“Don’t blame me if this kills him! I don’t know much, but even I know not to manhandle someone whose head looks like that.”

She wasn’t too worried. Her stabilization had worked so far, and she could help Anda more once they were safe.

“Just do it!” she yelled. He winced at the volume of her voice, and then bent and picked Anda up in his arms. “Move to your left side!”

As soon as he reached the side of the hull, she brought the assault craft over, as close as she could. It was still well above the swamped hovercraft, but Mo was able to lift Anda’s body up an extra foot and slide him over to its deck.

She was prepared to shoot him immediately if necessary but was caught by surprise as he quickly slithered up after Anda as a follow-up to heaving his weight.

Before she could react, Mo and Anda were in the assault craft together, with Mo sheltering behind Anda’s prone form.