6 Rising Withering, 1886 CE

"Hey there, loverboy." Senrii slapped the side of Tvorh's drop-pod. The sound of the impact rang in his ears, making him drop the pack of provisions on the floor of the pod. "Ready to chase down your crazy ladyfriend?"

Tvorh backed out of the cramped pod. "She's not my ladyfriend," he said, fighting to keep his voice level. He was disgusted at himself. How had he ever fallen for Thiyyatt's tricks?

Other than because she looked unbelievably good naked, that was.

"Yeah, no kidding." Senrii looked around the chamber and put her hands on her hips. "Not much of either a lady or a friend." Her eyes fell on Piotr. He was sixty degrees around the catwalk surrounding the Thunderhammer cannon, wrestling his own effects into his pod. Grunting noises emanated from his direction. Tvorh had never heard Piotr make those noises before.

Was Senrii looking at Piotr's butt?

The Thunderhammer cannon loomed like a slanting tower above them. The loading zone for its ammunition was a circular room, with catwalks granting access to the launching chambers. Apparently the Last Era rendering fluid that the cannon could spit flowed up from the Libraratory through a central barrel, but it could also launch solid munitions from the chambers.

It was an unbelievably powerful weapon. Dorsin occasionally talked about the deterrent effect of a weapon that was able to bombard cities from halfway across the continent.

For now, they were just using it to place transport pods in the air. The same flaming fuel in those pods that drove them across the sky once they'd reached altitude could also make them dangerous exploding weapons. Tvorh preferred not to think about that, not when he was about to ride one.

"Jitters, kid?" Senrii asked.

There was plenty to be jittery about, starting with Tvorh's fear that Dorsin would hold his mistake with Thiyyatt against his sisters. Plus, Aoife was coming with them, and Tvorh was pretty sure she still hated him. "Nah," he replied.

"You're a terrible liar. Look." Senrii stepped in front of him and stared him in the eyes. "It's not your fault what happened."

"But--"

"I'm sure if I was a guy, I'd've been thinking with the wrong head, too. Thiyyatt's got those pheromones." Senrii shivered. "Even I felt them. I don't like that bile--you can ask Rosabella. But even for me, even while she was shanking me, Blue Bitch's mind control had the...the usual effects, I guess. So stop beating yourself up." She slapped him on the shoulder. "All right?"

Easy enough for Senrii to say. She didn't need to worry about getting kicked out of her family. Still, Tvorh nodded mutely.

"Good. Hey, Eztli," Senrii shouted as the Nxtlu Maga came striding down the catwalk from the control room. Eztli had a pack slung over her shoulder, and her eyes roved steadily from side to side, taking in the chamber. "Got everything?"

Eztli nodded. "I'm ready to depart." She glanced back at the control room. Tvorh couldn't hear past the glass windows, but he knew the Nethress engineers bustled about back there, preparing for launch. "And your family is ready to see me gone."

"They're good to go?" Senrii shrugged with studied nonchalance, and Tvorh realized that she, too, was worried about something. But why?

"Yes. I passed by the Sodality novice on the way." Eztli's face turned to Tvorh. "She brought what Magus Tvorh forgot to take care of."

Tvorh gulped. What had he missed? He had his weapons, his provisions, his high-density calorie pills...

The door to the control room opened, and Aoife came through, a little girl's hand in each of her own.

Hrega and Bilr. Tvorh had spent so much time worried about them, he'd forgotten to tell them goodbye, or even that he was leaving.

"Tvorh!" Bilr shouted, breaking free from Aoife. Her feet crunched on the forgebone catwalk as she ran to him, limping ever so slightly. Hrega was a mere step behind her.

Senrii and Eztli cleared out to the side, and Tvorh went to his knees. He caught Bilr with one arm and Hrega with the other, and they crammed themselves against him. "Be careful you don't burrow under my skin! This's a nice surprise," Tvorh said, trying to keep his voice light. "What did I do to deserve such amazing hugs?"

"Probably nothing," Aoife said, her voice flat. She stood over him, looking down at him. She seemed...unhappy. Disappointed?

Hrega pushed back and scowled at him. "You're leaving," she said.

Tvorh didn't know whether to laugh or cry at the injury evident in her tone. "Yeah," he admitted. "There are some bad people I need to find."

"Are you coming back?" Bilr asked, still pressing her face against the side of his neck.

"Of course, love," Tvorh said, stroking her hair. A tiny mouse-mouth nibbled gently at his fingertip as his fingers slid through his sister's silky tresses. "I'm coming back as soon as I can."

"I miss you," Hrega said.

Tvorh chuckled despite himself. "I'm not even gone yet."

"But...but I miss you."

Tvorh knew he'd been staying too busy. He'd been doing it to protect his sisters, and he'd do it again in a heartbeat, but they needed him and he'd been MIA for months. "I'm so sorry, sweetie." Tvorh pushed Hrega back and looked her in the eye. "But I promise you, I'll be back as soon as I can."

"Okay," Hrega said, sounding not okay.

"I'm so sorry I haven't been around much, and I'm so sorry I'm going away. But I'll be back, and when I come back, I'll be better. Sometimes we make mistakes," Tvorh said. "Sometimes we can't fix those mistakes. All I can do is promise to do better in the future."

"Okay," Hrega repeated.

Aoife's weight shifted from one leg to the other, and she glanced away. Tvorh wasn't trying to guilt her, though! He just wanted to be...

Better.

Better, for the sisters he loved. Better, for his friends.

"Okay, loves," he said, rubbing Bilr's back. "I have to go now." He felt damp spots on his neck as Bilr pulled away. "Take care of Adenine for me, will you?"

At the sound of her name, the rattus rattus delphinus that accompanied Bilr everywhere poked its head out from Bilr's hair as if surfacing from a river. Bilr nodded and sniffled. "I will."

"And you." Tvorh turned to Hrega. "No pulling Jorn's hair, now."

Hrega tried to stifle a giggle. "I don't pull Jorn's hair. Jorn's silly."

"Norman, then. Be nice to the Princeps's kids." Tvorh rose and turned his face toward each of his sisters in turn. "Be good."

"We will," they chorused.

"I'll pray for you," Bilr added.

If Tvorh had had eyes, they would have snapped to Aoife. The novice shrugged. "If you had problems with me teaching them about Adon and Yesh, you should have told me."

"I didn't know," he said quietly.

Aoife raised an eyebrow. "Maybe you would've if you'd been around more," she murmured back. "Okay, girls. We've got to load up."

"Wait!" said Bilr. She held up a smooth pebble about the size of a fingernail.

"That's pretty, Bilr," Tvorh said.

"Tvorh, can you make it smell nice?"

Tvorh took the rock from Bilr with a smile and rolled it between his palms, coating it with a vanilla scent. It would keep for a few weeks.

Bilr blushed as she took the rock back from Tvorh. "I'm going to put it on my pillow for when I go to sleep."

"Do that," Aoife said. "And Tvorh will have a dozen more stinky rocks for you when we get back. Now go. We'll see you soon." She patted Tvorh's sisters on the backs, and they groaned but ambled down the catwalk back toward the control room, where a Wolfman waited to escort them back to the palace.

"You have to load up." Tvorh replied to Aoife. He didn't want to be petty, but he didn't appreciate being called out in front of everybody. He'd had enough of that in the past twenty-four hours.

Aoife's facade cracked at the coldness in Tvorh's words. Tit for tat, right?

Aoife pressed past him and found an empty pod.

"So, this is the Xipe Totec," Eztli said, turning to take in the whole structure. "I've not been inside the loading bay before."

"Yeah. Better get yourself situated, Maga," Senrii said. "We've got a long flight."

Eztli smiled wanly. "I've ridden longer."

"I'm sure you have, but not in cramped quarters like this." Senrii clapped her hands. "Move, people. We've got a psycho bitch to run to ground."

Tvorh slipped a leg into his pod, then paused. His echolocation didn't rely on the direction he was facing, but he still turned to "look" out the pod door.

Hrega and Bilr stood at the end of the walkway alongside their Wolfman guardian, watching Tvorh as he took his leave.

They were the reason he was here. They were his reason to come home. Tvorh just hated that he had to leave them in order for his time with them to have meaning.

He raised a hand, waved once, then slipped the rest of the way into the pod and slammed the door shut behind him.

It was time to go to work.

#

6 Rising Withering, 1886 CE

Tvorh hit the ground in a field of flattened vegetation next to an oddly regular village-sized sphere sunk nine tenths into the earth. The impact shook and disoriented him, but when he rose and listened, he could hear the call of the birds, the rustling of the leaves of the trees in the winds, the squish of grasses underfoot as the others landed behind him.

Coming down through the haze of protective spores over Vallus had been unpleasant. Luckily, he'd been able to apply the vacuum-sealing STIGMOS first. Otherwise, he'd probably be vomiting out his insides right about now.

Senrii splashed into a stagnant puddle nearby, rolling with the impact to her feet. "That you, kid?" she whispered, though the sound carried without a problem to his excellent ears.

Tvorh nodded and gave a thumbs-up.

Eztli came down between Tvorh and the structure. She stumbled into a landing harsher than Tvorh's had been, then glanced at the sunken structure. "Odd," she said after a moment.

Tvorh strained his ears upwards for the sounds of the last two members of their party. Aoife and Piotr were wearing wingsuits; he heard them overhead, descending gracefully, in Aoife's case, and quickly, in Piotr's.

Too quickly. The bulky Tutela had too much mass, plus he was wearing a massive shortsphere transmitter.

"Pull up, Piotr!" Senrii waved her arms over her head and gestured toward the trees at the edge of the clearing opposite the smooth dome structure. Piotr swooped upward.

Tvorh heard the wobble in his wings.

Piotr sailed toward the trees and disappeared into the canopy. Even without his enhanced hearing, Tvorh would have winced at the sound of the crash.

"Oh, no," Senrii groaned. She took off running for the trees.

Tvorh chased after her for a few steps, then paused. Aoife would probably be irritated if he left her behind.

She landed mere meters away in a dead sprint, grabbed Tvorh's arm, and tugged him with her. "Come on, Tvorh! Don't just stand around!"

Well, then.

Eztli brought up the rear as Tvorh followed Senrii into the trees. The air was muggy and thick. It reminded Tvorh of hacking and coughing as he climbed the wall of the Chasm. And now he was on a mission alongside the sister of the man who'd poisoned him back then.

Senrii stood at the base of a tree whose thick trunk belied its swaying. "Easy, Piotr! Don't hurt yourself!"

Tvorh couldn't hear into the canopy at all; it seemed like a mess of thick vines and fronds as wide as Tvorh was tall. He jogged up to Senrii. "What happened?"

"No matter for concern," Piotr called down, making the leaves tremble. "I landed roughly."

"You didn't land at all," Senrii called up. "You leafed. Left?" She turned to Tvorh. "He hit the canopy pretty hard. Sounds like he's stuck."

"Can you retract your wings?" Tvorh asked.

"That would be... difficult," Piotr said. "My arm is injured, and there seems to be a substance on this tree that is holding me fast."

"Blood, bones, and bile." Senrii rubbed her face. "Chimera traps." Tvorh grabbed hold of the lowest branch and swung himself up as Senrii kept talking. "Look, Piotr, just hold on and--hey, kid, what are you doing?"

"What I always do," Tvorh said. "I'll cut Piotr loose and bring him back down."

"Uh, yeah, okay. Aoife, Eztli, hold security."

As Tvorh shimmied up toward the next set of branches, he heard Aoife heft her rifle. "I'll be better in the field. This isn't much use in close quarters."

"Sure, fine, whatever. Eztli?"

Tvorh's fingers brushed something that was simultaneously slimy and sticky on the next branch. He extruded a minor solvent through the skinsuit to dissolve it from his fingers as he hopped up to the next branch.

Eztli's response was a bit longer coming than Aoife's had been. "Yes, Ductrix."

"Thanks. Ductrix." Senrii sounded chastened.

"There's no need to thank me. This is your expedition."

As Tvorh moved into the leaves--sticky, slimy leaves--he heard Aoife call from the edge of the treeline, "What are you going to be doing, Senrii?"

"That's Era Senrii to you," Senrii replied. "Or Ductrix, or Maga. You know. Something to show that you respect me."

"I'm an Amrician Adonist," Aoife said. Tvorh heard her settle down into the grass some distance away. It was a sound in two parts, one for laying out her rifle and one for stretching out her body to look down the scope. "I can respect you up one side of Salem's walls and down the other, but only Adon is my master."

"You're also a Tutela Nethress, remember?" Senrii said. "Bad form not to even pretend you care about my authority."

"All right, all right. Hey, Ductrix Senrii. While Ductrix Eztli and I are watching for murdery Chimeras, what are you going to be doing?"

"Managing," Senrii said. "Hey, kid, how's it going?"

"I think I can hear Piotr's foot," Tvorh called back. He'd covered a lot of ground--well, wood--since starting to climb. He'd spent too long in the Chasm and the Labyrinth of Acerbia to be claustrophobic, but the way that the wide palm fronds slapped his face, spilling water over him as he disturbed them, was still disconcerting.

"You can hear his foot?" Senrii grunted. "Never going to get used to that."

Tvorh was never going to get used to it, either. He wished he had his eyes back.

"I'm here, Tvorh," Piotr said from just overhead. Tvorh reached up and tapped at Piotr's foot. "There," Piotr confirmed.

Tvorh scrambled up a few more branches, coming even with Piotr. If spiders spun branches rather than silk, Tvorh would have said that one of their webs had caught the Tutela.

Maybe this trap had been spun by spider, actually. An enormous half-spider, half-monkey monster.

Piotr wasn't quite upright; he listed to one side, and the arm there was crushed in against his body and twisted at an awkward angle. The sticky branches held it tight. "Thank you for coming for me," he said.

Tvorh almost laughed. "We wouldn't abandon you, you know. Hold still." Tvorh leaned in to rub his palms on the sticky branches. "It might take a few minutes for me to dissolve all of the trap solution."

Piotr nodded, a motion which shook his whole body since he didn't have much freedom to move. "Of course. We are family."

Tvorh paused in his cleaning. Piotr gazed at him with a knowing that even Tvorh's ears could see.

"Family," Tvorh agreed, and got back to work.

"Tvorh." Aoife's voice was a whisper piercing between the trees like a knife. "I hope you can hear me. We've got a problem."

"What is it, Tvorh?" Piotr asked. Tvorh held up a hand to shush him.

"If you can hear me, tell Senrii I've got eyes on Chimeras. Two of them sniffing around the building."

"Hey, Senrii," Tvorh said. He could afford to be louder than Aoife was. Maybe? He was farther away from the Chimeras than Aoife, but Tvorh didn't actually have any idea what mutations they might have. Hearing like his, maybe, or perhaps no hearing at all and they navigated by scent. He dropped his voice into a stage whisper, just in case. "We might have company. Aoife saw some Chimeras just a second ago."

"Bile," Senrii swore. "What do we have?"

"Hold on, she's talking again." Tvorh began to relay as Aoife spoke.

"--ten more following them out of the trees. Adon, I don't like this at all. They seem curious or maybe confused. Eztli said this place was a nest, right? These look like they've never seen it before. They're obviously not the original inhabitants. Oh, Yesh. I think they've smelled me. I'm just going to... burrow down. Uh oh. They're heading across the field."

"She's in trouble," Tvorh said. "It sounds like they've spotted her."

"I'm okay... I'm okay... Okay, I'm not okay!" The crack of a rifle echoed. "Tvorh, I need some help here!"

Tvorh slid down a few branches into the canopy, then paused. Piotr was only half free.

"Go," Piotr said.

"Belay that," Senrii ordered from below. "Get Piotr down here. Eztli, on me."

The rifle cracked again and again. Tvorh set to frantic work, with one hand dissolving the adhesive and the other hand cutting free any branches that the solvent couldn't handle. He listened to Senrii's and Eztli's progress as they moved toward the clearing. Aoife shouted in surprise, and he heard her scramble to her feet, rifle in hand.

Piotr grunted and wriggled his uninjured arm free.

This needed to go faster. Tvorh's STIGMOS providing the solvent was only able to extrude the solvent onto his fingers. That was slow work--

Aoife crashed through the undergrowth.

"Here, acolyte," Eztli called.

"They're behind me," Aoife shrieked. "They're on--oof!"

Tvorh almost shouted himself as he heard Aoife leave the ground. A huge shape of sound tore through the trees, heavy wings flapping.

Senrii's pistol cracked. Aoife fell from the blob, smacking into the soggy ground with a splash of water and detritus.

Tvorh had to make it go faster. But how?

The SOPHIOS curled within him, hissing nonexistent words into his mind.

Could Tvorh gengineer a new STIGMOS? He'd built the vanilla scent for Bilr himself, so constructing organic molecules wasn't totally new to him. He'd spent weeks working with Thiyyatt; he'd picked up a little knowledge then. And he had the solvent STIGMOS.

Yes, the Symbiont seemed to say. More.

Tvorh drew a deep breath, dove beneath the surface of his Symbiont, and sought the genes. They flitted through his mind like the colors he could no longer see.

They made sense.

The aerosol would need to be bacterial rather than viral. Tvorh needed the cells to lyse in the air, to release their payloads. But it would also have to be strong enough to survive the expulsion process from the aerosol-producing organs. Short-decaying cell walls, maybe?

Tvorh furiously recombined nucleic acids, shunted one plasmid into another's nucleus, reset the dispersion organs' DNA to connect them to the solvent-producing organ...

Tvorh exhaled up and down all over Piotr, and the adhesive dissolved.

Unbalanced, Piotr grabbed for a handle with his good hand, but as his weight shifted, he fell. The branches bent beneath Tvorh.

He fell, too.

Branches smacked Tvorh in the face, the arms, the legs, the body as he tumbled, but the impact on the puddle-soaked earth hurt more. Somehow he managed not to stab himself with his own knife on the way down. When he came to, Piotr was standing above him, telescoping halberd held awkwardly in one hand, bulky shortsphere backpack set to the side.

The undergrowth rustled all around them. Tvorh scrambled to a crouch, holding his knife tight in to his chest.

Chimeras burst through the bushes to one side, charging Tvorh and Piotr.

Then Eztli was in front of them. "Stop," she commanded, holding her hand out. She might as well have tried to stop a moving biomobile. These were Chimeras. They would barrel right over her.

Except they didn't. The monsters splashed to a halt. Misshapen and mismatched, they sniffed, gazed, and reached with dozens of arms as if confused and unsure of where they were. Even the large flying thing, which landed just beyond the walking Chimeras, kept its distance.

"How did you do that?" Tvorh asked as Senrii and Aoife came through the bushes after Eztli.

Eztli turned a palm toward Tvorh. There was a dot of blood on it.

Aoife and Senrii had dots, too. On their foreheads.

"Our wayward princess granted me a gift." Eztli reached with her blue-dot palm into her skinsuit and withdrew a blood=filled vial. "Though I doubt she expected us to use it to find her. It calms the Chimeras. I admit, I'm glad it worked again. It gave in after a time the last time I used it."

"Gave in?" Aoife asked. "You mean, stopped working?"

Eztli nodded.

Aoife threw up her hands in a huff. "How long is 'after a time?'"

Eztli shrugged. "Fifteen minutes? We were right over there." She pointed back toward the field and the village-sized ruin sunk into the mud. "Before you ask, that enormous amber disc was the roof of a building last time we were here."

"Great. We have fifteen minutes before we become Chimera bait," Aoife said. "No, we're not even a trap. Chimera food." She shouldered her rifle. "Can we just kill them?"

"I wouldn't like to chance it. That might set them off. I don't truly know." Eztli stroked her chin. "Of course, they did only grow hostile after I interacted with the Tool in the structure and gave it Thiyyatt's blood."

"Don't kill the well-behaved Chimeras," Senrii said, giving a nearby bull-eel-oak monster the side-eye. "Check. Don't talk to strange Tools because they might make Chimeras go crazy, check."

"Hope to our fathers that that's what made them mad last time, and not the blood wearing out, check," Tvorh added. Senrii winked at him, it seemed. "Anybody else think it's weird that the Last Era princess has some kind of Chimera repellent in her blood?"

Aoife raised her hand excitedly.

"Yeah, we can talk about that when we're not about to be eaten," Senrii said. "What now?"

"I would recommend we check the amber complex and speak with the Tool," Eztli said, "but we would need excavation equipment. I suspect that once the Tool got what it wanted--"

"You mean after you gave it what it wanted," Aoife said. "Thiyyatt's blood."

Eztli nodded. "Afterward, it must have collapsed the site to prevent further interference with its plans, whatever those may be. There's nothing to be found here anymore."

"I always wanted to be trapped in Vallus without a way forward," Aoife said.

Senrii waved a hand to get everyone's attention. "No. Ductrix Eztli, you said a whole division of Chimeras tromped away from here toward the interior last time? If the princess and the Chimeras are both connected to that crazy-making Tool, maybe she's going where they went. Since this is a bust, let's find that trail."

It wasn't hard to track down the path of destruction the Chimeras had left as they'd migrated away. They walked for hours into the jungle. The blood didn't wear out. The Chimeras followed them with curiosity. Some of the monsters wandered away now and then, but others didn't take their places.

Aoife grumbled the whole time that her tracking skills were pointless--"A blind mussel could follow these things! No offense, Tvorh."

"It's okay. I like muscles." He flexed an arm.

Aoife blinked and focused again on the path, which climbed switchbacks up a rocky cliff. "There aren't many animals here, either. I wonder if they ate them all as they went."

"Gotta take a lot of energy to keep an army of Chimeras on the move," Senrii said.

"But there were birds back at the landing site," Tvorh pointed out. "I don't hear any now. If a hundred Chimeras were nesting back there for centuries, and if they hunt ecosystems like this one to extinction, wouldn't they have eaten the animals back there long ago?"

Senrii gave him a worried look. "And everything else."

He knew how she felt. After two millennia, there was still so little they knew about Chimeras. The gaps in their knowledge were terrifying.

Especially with an army of Chimeras on the move.

Senrii called a halt when the hazy sunlight turned to darkness. They built a fire in a cave, ate some calorie packs and mycoprotein, set watches, and bedded down for the night. Tvorh fell asleep almost immediately.

His internal clock awoke him at precisely the right time for him to take his watch.

He heard the figure sitting like a boulder at the mouth of the cave, rifle cradled in its lap. Aoife, finishing her watch.

"Hey," he said, sitting down next to her.

She glanced at him and gave him a nervous smile.

At the same time, Tvorh realized he didn't have the bandanna over his eyes. He probably looked like a monster himself. "Oh, fathers. I need to get the scarf."

Aoife chuckled, and Tvorh retrieved the garment, wrapping it around his head and rejoining her. "I've got this," he said. "You can go to sleep."

Aoife shrugged.

"Are you giving me the silent treatment? I know, last time we kind of had a blowup, but..."

"No, Tvorh. I'm not trying to punish you." Aoife looked down almost bashfully. "I just have a lot on my mind. You know. 'Chimeras are moving through the Wildlands. Is my family safe?'"

"I know that one."

"I know you do. Plus, 'I miss my dad and wish he was still alive.' And 'We're probably going to get eaten out here.' And, yeah, 'I'm so angry at Tvorh for ignoring me these past few weeks.'"

"Aoife, I'm sorry."

She held up a hand, but didn't speak for several seconds. "And 'I'm so jealous of Thiyyatt.'"

"What? She's crazy! Why would you be jealous of her?"

"And... 'I'm glad he's still wearing my scarf.'" She gave Tvorh a quick sideways glance.

Tvorh touched the bandanna. It was true that she'd given him the hairsilk garment. "Of course I am."

Aoife chuckled again and leaned back, propping herself up on her palms. The butt of her rifle in her lap wriggled against Tvorh's knee as she moved. "She's sex on legs," Aoife whispered.

Tvorh blinked. He hadn't been expecting that.

"That's why I'm jealous of her. And... I guess I should get to sleep."

Aoife left Tvorh to his watch. He turned his ears outward, listening for movement in the jungle, but even the animals were gone.

Everything was confusing out here. And that included Aoife.