Total Eclipse

Walk, I told myself sternly. You have to do this. Now. Because deep down inside, I knew that I wasnt going to have the strength to wait and do it in a more orderly fashion.

I didnt make it very far, but then I didnt have tothis whole area was hot and live with the kind of thing I needed. This was a storage area, deep underground, and the doors were massive affairs on hydraulics. There were six doors. I fell at the first one, flailed around on the floor for a while, and left a hell of a bloody mess trying to get up. The control pad was way the hell up there. That seemed wrong. Why didnt they build them closer to the floor, for convenience?

Oh, the hell with subtlety.

I blew the door off its hinges in a massive burst of superheated air. It flew over my head, slammed into the far wall with an impact hard enough to be felt in Switzerland, and embedded itself in the concrete to a depth of at least a foot.

Inside that storage locker, about the size of a medium-sized residential home, were stacked row upon row of containers marked with vivid red radiation warning stickers. All very neat and orderly. The aetheric here seethed black, and my own distress didnt help much.

One more thing to do.

I triggered a reaction.

It wasnt really all that hard; destruction never is. All I had to do was put some chemical chains together, add heat, pour in energy, stir to a rolling boil.

I didnt have enough left in me to set up any kind of protective shieldingnot that I thought it would have worked in any case. I hoped that the evacuation had worked. I hoped that Dr. Reid and his people were safely outside the facility.

Right now, though, that was a very moot point.

I rolled over on my back, staring up, and my last conscious thought was of David. How much I wished I could die in his arms, if I couldnt live in them.

I heard his scream echoing through the hallways a second before the brilliant flash of light, and then it took all the power I had left to hold the explosion in, point it down, driving it like a spike deep into the skin of the Mother.

Then there was just . . . light.

And dark.

I didnt expect to ever open my eyes againwho would, really? After exploding a stockpile of nuclear material? Who the hell survives that?

Me. Im just lucky like that.

I opened my eyes and found myself floating in a sheer bubble surrounded by flames and destruction. I was still bleeding. There was a pretty significant amount of red pooled at the bottom of the bubble, and my clothes were soaked. My heart was struggling to keep on pumping what little remained.

So, I wasnt going to go out in a blaze of glory. Id just bleed to death, lying here inside of this protective cocoon that I swore I hadnt constructed, and wasnt maintaining. I couldnt have, because there was almost nothing left inside me to use.

Someone had saved me. Sort of. And I hated them for it.

Something moved, out there in the fire, in the rubble, in the chaos of smoke. I breathed slowly, steadily, listening to my laboring heart, and watched the figure come clear.

It was the Dji

Her eyes blazed milk-white.

I kept you alive, she said. Dont you want to thank me?

Not really, I said, and coughed. That hurt, as if I was tearing pieces of myself loose with every movement. I ended up sobbing, and tried to stop. Let me go.

No, Ve

This was the part that Lewis and I hadnt discussed, because it was a terrible thing to even think about. Hed hoped, as I had, that Id be dead, obliterated in the destruction.

Survival was one hell of a lot worse as an outcome. I wished I could will myself to death, but there are some things I just couldnt manage, and my heart refused to do anything but keep beating, beating, beating.

Ve

No, she said. It was a flat, inhuman sound, and there wasnt even any anger behind it. There was nothing. You stay alive.

I should have been dead already, I realized; from the amount of blood Id lost, and the fact that the flow had slowed to a leak from the wounds, Id already bled out. Whatever my heart was pumping, with such great effort, through my veins was not my blood.

I was an animated corpse, living at Ve

I remembered Davids screams, and I wondered if he knew. I wondered if he could see, from that distant, cold vantage point of Jonathans picture window, helpless to stop this, helpless to do anything but grieve. If he left, if he tried to rescue me, hed be lost himself. Dont do anything crazy, I begged him silently, through the cord that still, even now, was holding us together. Let me go. Let them do whatever they want, so long as they come here and leave the Wardens alone. Ill hold out as long as I can.

It sounded brave. I didnt feel brave, not at all. I felt sick, weak, and dying, and more than anything, I didnt want to hurt anymore.

Ve

So many Dji

I floated in my blood-soaked bubble, waiting for the end.

Ve

Ve

Every last bloody second of it.

I coughed and clawed my way out of the rubble. I got to my feet and stood there, trembling but erect. I lifted my chin and said, Thats all youve got? You hit like a girl, Ve

She bared her teeth and became a feral animal, rushing at me with clawed fingers and snapping teeth, and I knew this wasnt going to go well, not at all.

But Id signed up for the whole ride, hadnt I? Id known what I was getting into, and in that split second before Ve

Something hit Ve

There was another Dji