Life Seed, page 32
“In your opinion,” the director continued, “would you advocate an evacuation of Portree if Sizzra attacks? Would she spare, for example, the women and children? Could we build a bunker somewhere, safe and unknown?”
“Sizzra sees everything on this continent,” Elias said reluctantly. “And I don’t think she would spare anyone if she came. To her we’re all the same: dangerous creatures that should be eliminated. There’s nowhere we could go that she couldn’t find us.”
“On this continent, though,” MacLeod observed. “Or so you said. What if we moved to the other continent on New Skye? What if we rebuilt Portree on Raasay?”
The other continent. Raasay. Elias looked up at the golden map above his head. Unerringly, his eyes sought out the largest volcano on the Western shores: the enemy’s nest.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” Elias answered glumly. “Maybe Sizzra wouldn’t follow, but then we—”
But at that moment, the entire hall shook.
“Earthquake?” the director asked, activating her link.
“Talk to me,” Commander Rodriguez said at the same time, talking into her headset.
Elias also checked his own link. No seismic activity. Which meant….
Another tremor shook the structure.
“We’re under attack,” Commander Rodriguez announced.
Director O’Rourke looked as if she didn’t want to ask her next question, but she did anyway. “By whom?”
The commander’s face was glum as she took out her shock spear and activated it. The sharp hiss of electric static filled the room as her officers imitated her.
“Wurl.”
Chapter 31—The Storm
“EVERYONE STAY calm!” Director O’Rourke said.
“Is it Sizzra?” another council member asked.
“It’s her!” MacLeod shouted, his eyes glued to his link. “Treetop sensors are going dark—something tall is coming. It has to be her!”
Tenuous order held for another split second. Then chaos broke loose.
Almost everyone made for the doors. Elias watched council members move as fast as they could, typing on their links as they went. Calls were made. Warnings were shouted. The Colony Patrol officers converged around Commander Rodriguez and drew their shock spears.
Another tremor shook the building. Nobody was looking at him at the moment, so Elias decided to get out.
Someone shouted after him, but Elias ignored whoever it was. He ran across one of the narrow hallways, jumping over obstacles without stopping. He was suddenly at the back doors. He pushed them open and stumbled out onto the landing of a spiral staircase leading up to ground level.
A sudden thought occurred to him. The Main Hall was easily the safest building in the entire colony. If he stayed underground, unseen, he would escape the worst of the attack.
No way. He rushed up the staircase two steps at a time. Not while my family is out there.
He sprinted the rest of the way up until he burst into the large room where the Midwinter Feast had been held an age ago. Looking around wildly, he spotted the door and ran for it. He passed Councilman MacLeod on the way out, and Elias realized that the councilman was sitting at a computer terminal, furiously typing away. In response to one of his keystrokes, heavy shutters of reinforced metal dropped on every window in the hall. Two other members of the council stood at the entrance, holding the doors wide open.
They weren’t escaping or giving way to panic. They were executing their emergency plan. Elias dashed out of the building before they could stop him, and his guess was confirmed when he saw every single citizen in Portree already on the move, walking toward the Main Hall in an orderly line while outside the rain was quickly becoming a buffeting storm.
“Mom! Dad! Oscar!”
They weren’t around. Elias ran out onto the main square and then took the turn that would take him straight to his home.
A wurl was in his way.
Some people screamed. Everybody scattered, taking alternative routes, but Elias stood his ground. This was the quickest way to his house, he knew it, and the juvenile wurl would have to move.
“Out of my way,” Elias said, loud enough to be heard above the rumbling thunder in the sky. Rain was falling harder now, soaking his clothes, plastering his hair to his forehead. Elias blinked droplets away and stared down the obsidian-scaled juvenile.
The wurl reacted at the sound of his voice. He turned his head slightly to the side, as if trying to look at Elias better.
“Out of my way,” Elias repeated. He focused his entire attention on the wurl, sending out his thought with as much clarity as he could.
The wurl made a small, confused sound. Elias walked one step closer, his fancy dress shoes squelching in the mud. The male was very young, physiologically at least. He was less than half the size of Narev and nowhere near as imposing. His spines were long and slender, but to Elias they looked brittle.
Elias wasn’t afraid of the juvenile. He stepped forward again, Sizzra’s spine held high in his right hand.
The wurl roared suddenly, crouched low to the ground, and fired three spines faster than any adult ever could.
Elias barely had time to react. He froze, stunned at the sudden attack. The spines whizzed through the air, missing his head by the merest fraction.
Thunk.
Elias whirled around. He looked up, blinded momentarily by the pouring rain, and a sudden flash of lightning disoriented him completely.
His eyes were watering, but still he saw something drop out of the sky.
There was a moaning roar above him, and then a slender shape crashed to the ground in a burst of spray and a strange smoldering smell.
The juvenile wurl rushed forward to the attack. He pounced on the fallen creature, eyes blazing, and proceeded to tear it apart.
Elias was too shocked to move out of the way. The wurl hadn’t attacked him. It had attacked that thing: a creature with cobalt scales, an incredibly long tail… and two sprawling, twitching wings.
Elias crouched by instinct at a burst of wind overhead, and something swooped from the sky fast enough that the wind from its passage threw Elias to the ground. He rolled in the mud and water, then jumped to his feet just in time to see death come from above.
Another slender cobalt shape crashed against the obsidian wurl like an arrow, punching through his armor. The juvenile wurl howled in pain, but the Flyer was already on the move, taking off in a buffeting gust of his massive wings. He rose into the air, turned once, and swept down as thunder exploded with a deafening burst all around them.
“Look out!” Elias shouted, but it was already too late.
The Flyer came down faster than the rain, wings tucked on either side of his body, and at the last moment he brought out two wicked taloned feet. There was a crash, a sound like metal crumpling.
The juvenile Spine wurl collapsed on the ground and twitched once. The glow in his eyes died completely even as the Flyer rose again, perhaps looking for more challenging prey.
Elias blinked away stinging raindrops as he saw the horrific wounds the Flyer had inflicted. Two bloody slices on the juvenile’s body, perfectly parallel, marked the raking damage the Flyer’s talons had made. The edges of the slices were glowing softly, almost red-hot, and the flesh around them smoked and sizzled as rain fell upon them.
All of a sudden, Elias felt terribly exposed, vulnerable. He looked up and all around, but with the rain and the wind and the intermittent lightning, it was impossible to know whether there were more Flyer wurl in the sky.
My family.
Elias turned away and ran the last few hundred meters until he came to a stop at his house, breathless. The lights were still on inside. He pushed the door open and stumbled in, not knowing whether to feel relief or dismay when he heard his father call out for him.
“Elias!” he shouted. “Upstairs!”
Elias rushed up, glanced left and right, and saw his father was in the master bedroom. He ran inside. Oscar was cowering in a corner, and Elias’s mother appeared to have fainted.
“Help me with Oscar,” his father urged. “Your mother had an episode. We need to get to the Main Hall! Come on!”
“Oscar, come here,” Elias said.
Oscar shook his head.
“Oscar!” Elias insisted.
“He’s terrified,” his father said. “I couldn’t get him to move, and I can’t carry both him and your mother. Pick him up, Elias. Let’s go, quick. Before Sizzra comes.”
It’s not Sizzra, Elias thought hopelessly. But instead he said, “Oscar, I’m going to carry you, okay?”
Elias made his way to the corner of the room and slung his brother across his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. He was heavy, but the weight was manageable. Elias clearly felt him trembling.
“I’m scared, Eli,” Oscar whispered.
“I got you. You’re safe. Just don’t let go of me,” Elias said.
“Ready?” his father asked. He was carrying his wife’s limp body across his arms. Elias had never seen such a look in his father’s eyes, ever. He looked about to panic.
“Ready.”
“Then let’s go. They’re closing the safety doors to the hall in three minutes.”
He led the way down, and Elias followed. It was surreal to step out of his home and into the fury of a storm that had grown even more in the few minutes he had been inside.
Why now? Elias asked silently. Why are the Flyers attacking now?
A long winged shape was briefly outlined against the dark storm clouds overhead amid flickering lightning. Then it was gone, as if hidden by the storm itself.
Elias ran after his father through the mud-covered streets, and he realized he already knew the answer to his question. Generations of memories warned him of underhanded, treacherous attacks by Flyers whenever they could get away with it. The weather helped them, shielded them. Land-bound creatures had no hope against attackers from the sky, not in conditions like this.
Ahead of them, the main square opened up. A single phalanx of spear-armed patrol officers stood at the doors leading into the Main Hall. They were already retreating, spears facing everywhere, back into the safety of the building. Most people were inside by now. Elias’s father shouted at them and the patrol stopped. They shouted something back, but it was lost in the whipping gale blowing through the open space.
They were almost there. But then a wurl came rolling in from the south, cutting Elias and his family off from the safety of the Main Hall.
“Stay back, Elias!” his father shouted above the din of the rain.
“He’s not here to hurt us!” Elias shouted back, but the wurl roared at that moment and drowned out his words.
He was an adult, and he looked ferocious. But he was wounded. The entire left side of his body had been raked by Flyer talons, leaving behind the same glowing slash marks Elias had already seen. Elias froze, backing away from the frenzied creature instinctively. One of his eyes had been put out, but the other two looked around with a terrifying rage-fueled glow, searching the skies.
At a trailing howl in the wind, the adult wurl’s head snapped to the right. He fired two spines in quick succession, but Elias could tell they hit nothing but air.
The patrol chose that moment to shoot the wurl.
There was a sudden whoosh and then a hard impact. A miniature explosion engulfed the wurl in flame and threw Elias back. He lost hold of Oscar.
“No!” Elias screamed, but the patrol shot again. This time, the adult fired a spine at the incoming projectile and the explosion bloomed halfway, close enough to the officers that they, too, were forced back.
The wurl roared in defiance at the unexpected violence. His brief distraction cost him his life.
Elias cried out in helpless horror as he saw yet another cobalt shape swoop down from the sky. The attack was swift and brutal. This time the Flyer’s talons struck the Spine wurl on the side of the head. As the murderer flew away, back into the storm, the wurl collapsed lifeless in the rain.
From behind Elias, Oscar screamed.
“Oscar!” Elias shouted, jumping upright.
“Elias!” his father called after him.
Oscar was running away from the Main Hall, panicked, screaming at the top of his lungs.
“Oscar!”
Elias dashed after him. From behind, he heard a heavy thud, another roar, and more shots. He did not look back.
Oscar was fast, but Elias was faster. After a couple of blocks he overtook his hysterical little brother, tackled him to the ground, and held him tight.
“Got you,” Elias whispered. “It’s me, Oscar! Stop that!”
But Oscar was acting as if possessed, struggling against Elias’s grip, his eyes searching the sky for something.
“We have to go back to the—ow!” Elias cried out. Oscar had kicked him in the side. “Oscar, snap out of it!”
Oscar screamed. Then he suddenly went very still.
Elias followed the direction Oscar was looking in time to see one of the houses demolished by a Flyer wurl crashing against it. At first Elias thought that it was on purpose, but then he realized the Flyer had been thrown.
There was a large, blinding gust of wind and rain. When it died out, Elias grabbed Oscar and ran.
He took the quickest way to the Main Hall again, but he was forced to back away when a slender Flyer landed on the street to block his passage. The creature was too fast to really tell, but Elias thought there was something on his back.
Elias turned around and tried a different path, running through the back alleys of the greenhouse complex while carrying Oscar in his arms. He was getting tired, and he wasn’t sure how he was going to make it back to the Main Hall. Why had that Flyer cut him off like that? And why…?
But then he made it to the fields where crops were grown. He slid to a stop. Oscar gasped when he, too, saw the terrible spectacle in front of them.
Dozens of Spine wurl were dead, their bodies sliced in hideous fashion. There were adults and juveniles, many more than Elias had ever seen around Portree.
“They killed them all,” Elias whispered.
Oscar had been holding him tight, but he suddenly went limp. As if in response, the intensity of the storm decreased until the wind was no longer howling. The rain all but stopped. Churning black clouds still roiled in the sky, and lightning still flickered from moment to moment, followed by the ominous sound of booming thunder.
The eye of the storm. Elias looked up at the place where the circling winds cancelled each other out to generate a brief moment of artificial calm… and then he saw her.
Oscar screamed. Elias knew he should run, but he also knew there was no point. There was no escaping her. They were already dead.
“Dresde,” Elias said, and from above, the Flyer queen acknowledged her name.
Chapter 32—Dresde
THE FLYER queen was a winged serpent armored in breathtakingly beautiful scales of glittering violet. Her membranous wings were so big they spanned the entire eye of the storm from end to end. With every downward flap, a powerful gust of wind threatened to make Elias lose his footing. She was grace and beauty incarnate. And she was also death itself.
Slowly, almost languidly, Dresde descended until she landed on top of the genetics laboratory. The sprawling building was tiny in comparison to her wings. Reinforced metal crumpled under her sizzling talons, those wicked jewels of deep amethyst with faintly glowing edges. Wherever her talons touched the building, the metal heated up, first red, then orange, then white-hot. No rain fell anymore, and the wind was still, but Elias sensed clearly that same smoldering scent he had smelled at the beginning of the storm. Something like molten metal or burning stone. It came from the Flyer queen, spreading like an aura around her.
Her razor attention was not directed at him yet, but Elias still felt its devastating pull. It commanded him to admire the beautiful coils of Dresde’s snakelike body, from her flickering long tail to the tip of her spade-shaped head with its cluster of merciless red eyes. Even though her maw was closed, her front fangs were visible on either side, like unsheathed twin swords with serrated edges. They were longer than Elias was tall. And even though Dresde herself was smaller and probably much lighter than Sizzra, her wingspan and her incredible length made her appear three times as menacing.
Sizzra.
Elias’s strength failed him. He let Oscar go, unable to keep holding him, because Dresde had heard his thought, and her overwhelming mind focused on him all at once, slicing through his defenses like a white-hot knife.
Elias tried to talk but found he couldn’t. He was meaningless, a tiny speck of life in the presence of a goddess. He perceived clearly Dresde’s amusement, her sly intellect, and her suspicious curiosity.
Why does a tiny human male know the name of my sister?
Elias trembled, unable to talk. Dresde spoke in complete sentences, every word exquisitely precise. But why?
He tried to look around for Oscar, but Dresde did not let him. He was forced to look at her, only her. And to answer.
“I… have seen her,” Elias said through gritted teeth. “This… this is why I know her.”
The terrifying queen walked forward on the laboratory roof, towering above Elias. She left glowing metal in her wake, hot enough to melt. Her talons were….
That is when Elias saw something small Dresde carried in the right talon of her back foot. It was clasped tightly by an amethyst claw: a nearly spherical object of pure iridescent white.
No! Elias thought involuntarily. Despair washed over him, black and overwhelming. If she had that egg, that most precious of eggs, then it meant….
Dresde halted.
You know what this is, she said slowly, her mind voice tinged by the ghost of an evil smile. She turned her head to the side in a mockery of attention. The unbearable intelligence behind her eye cluster seized Elias’s mind and would not let it go.
“What did you do to Sizzra?” Elias asked, mustering as much defiance as he could.
