They shook hands.
“You’re building a machine to help the victims? To remove the needles?” Asha asked.
“Yes, and we’re making excellent progress.” Taziri nodded at Jiro and pointed to the golden rod on the table. “It’s fairly straightforward. We just need to bolt a highly charged wire coil around this rod of aetherium, and rig some sort of switch connecting it to the battery I brought, and we’ll be in business. Should be done in the next hour, I think.”
Asha nodded and went to sit by Bastet in the corner. “So, it’s truly that simple? In an hour, we’ll have a tool that can restore all of Lilith’s victims with the press of a switch?”
“Probably.” Bastet bobbed her head. “You should have seen the thing that Taziri built the last time she was here. A flame so hot it melted clean through a seireiken in half a heart beat!”
“Impressive.” Asha leaned back against the wall and looked blankly at the floor, chewing her lip.
The sooner this business is finished, the better. Then I can leave and go someplace far away from everyone. Someplace where the dragon can’t hurt anyone else.
Where I can’t hurt anyone else.
Over the next half hour, she sat and watched the device take form. It looked like a thin golden arm wearing a loose copper sleeve, and at the back end there was an untidy mess of wires and a small black bucket with its lid welded shut. Taziri and Jiro worked quietly, occasionally making some small commotion when the soldering iron went astray or a tool rolled off the table.
“We’re almost done,” Taziri said over her shoulder.
Asha nodded absently.
Maybe we can finish this business today. Maybe I can leave this city tonight.
The two engineers slid the sun-steel rod out of the device and set it aside as they flipped the copper coil over to fiddle with its base. And then the ceiling collapsed.
There was no groan, no crackle of breaking stone or keening of bending beams. The ceiling simply collapsed in one massive avalanche of bricks and dust that began in the center of the room and quickly expanded out toward the walls.
Asha woke the dragon and shielded her head with armored arms while Bastet vanished in a swirl of white aether and the two engineers dove under their work table, Taziri cradling her wire coil to her chest. In a moment the cascade of stone and mortar was over and Asha stood up, knocked the chips from her hair and arms, and pulled her feet free of the blocks around her legs. She scrambled over the debris to the far side of the room, sank her ruby claws into the fallen bricks, and hauled them away from the work table, where she found Taziri and Jiro huddled in a dusty, dark hole under the table, unharmed. Asha reached down to help them out when she heard a strange cry from overhead and she looked up at the midday sky.
A wall of white feathers crashed down into the ruined house, flapping and beating on the cracked stones and raising a storm of gray dust. Asha covered her mouth and nose with one arm while clawing her way to the side of the room with the other. The huge wings smacked her in the back and arms several times, but never hard enough to knock her off her feet, and she huddled against the wall, squinting through the swirling clouds of dust. But the wings kept beating the broken room with powerful strokes, and the dust didn’t settle and the feathers kept their owner hidden from view.
“Nethys!” Asha shouted over the swooping, swooshing noises of the wings and the flying dust. “Nethys, stop!”
But she didn’t stop. Nethys screamed a single word that sounded like “No!” and she raised her winged arms above her head in a great v-shaped salute. For a moment, the dust drifted apart, revealing the body of the immortal woman draped in a filthy, stained dress. Her face was thin with a small nose and thin lips and narrow eyes, making everything about her expression seem angry and cruel.
Asha pushed off the wall and straightened up, curling her ruby claws into a fist. “Nethys! Go back! Leave now! I don’t wish to hurt you!”
The Aegyptian woman looked at her for a moment, and then swept her feathered arms down in one great stroke, hurling herself into the air and across the room toward the work table beside Asha. Nethys landed with a crash, sweeping her massive wings once for balance and showering Asha with dust and tiny pebbles that clattered against her armored skin and the wall behind her like a hail storm.
Asha raised both arms to shield her face and through the narrow crack between her golden hands she saw Nethys hook her bare feet around the bar of sun-steel on the table, and leap into the air.
“No!” Asha dashed across the table and leapt after her. With the power of the golden dragon in her legs, she shot upwards and grabbed Nethys by the ankles as the immortal winged her way above the roofs. Asha grabbed the bar of sun-steel in one clawed hand and strained against the winged woman’s legs, but she couldn’t break Nethys’s hold on the bar.
The immortal Aegyptian beat the air with powerful strokes, and Asha had to cling with both hands to keep from being blown free as they both rose higher and higher above the houses, above the harbor, and soon above the bright sparkling waves of the Middle Sea. Each time Asha reached out for the bar of sun-steel, Nethys would twist and flap and shake, threatening to drop the golden woman into the water far below.
Asha glanced down once at the distant waves and felt a faint vertigo. She had been in many high places in her life. Fortress towers, royal pagodas, and even tiny shrines high in the mountains. But always with her feet flat on the ground. Now she hung in empty space, staring down past her useless, swinging legs, and felt the yawning void between herself and the world below. The emptiness of that space, the alien sensation of having nothing at all below her, sent a cold shudder down her spine.
In that moment, all traces of her self-righteous or vengeful anger evaporated and her dragon skin vanished, leaving her soft and brown and weak. Her calloused fingers slipped off Nethys’s ankles and Asha fell. At first, there was nothing, no sense of movement, and she almost thought she was floating on the breeze. Then the wind began to tear at her thin yellow sari and her long black hair, whipping upward and beating her face as she tumbled end over end toward the sea.
The air roared in her ears as her clothes and hair buffeted her skin. She caught one brief glimpse of Nethys high above her, already so high that she almost looked like a bird gliding among the clouds, and then she was gone, lost in the glare of the sun.
Asha saw the earth and the water tumbling upward to meet her, flashing blue and green and blue, over and over again. The sunlight shone on the waves, and the city appeared as a white blur of stone walls and dusty roads. Only the massive lighthouse had any real shape to her, and even it was distorted by the wind and her dizzying fall.
I’m going to die. The moment I hit the water, I will die. Like a turtle dropped by an eagle, I will crack open and be no more. In just a moment now.
She clawed at the air, trying to stop the spinning and tumbling, trying to focus on either the earth or the sky, but they went on flying round and round her.
The tiny specks became tiny boats, and they became larger still, crewed by ants, and then by men. The wrinkled sheet of the ocean resolved into waves and foam.
Here it is.
Now.
Asha closed her eyes.
Death.
The dragon in her breast roared.
Asha arched her back in midair as a horrible burning sensation lashed across her skin from head to toe and she caught a brief glimpse of her skin shining with gold before her body struck the water. She crashed into the sea as immovable and as unfeeling as a stone, smashing through the surface with arms and legs outstretched, feeling almost nothing of the transition from air to water. Instantly the world was dark and cold, but muted and muffled as though she were locked inside a prison with thick stone walls, far from the light and heat of the sun, trapped in frigid shadows.