"Or it might add to Jazz's already formidable powers," said Hex.
"Just how much more powerful can she get?" asked Shay.
"You wouldn't ask that if you'd fought the goddess the first time. However, your idea is worthy. We'll go to the Free City."
"The Free City? Why?"
"That's where I buried Jandra's genie. The Free City has been abandoned in the aftermath of the atrocities that took place there. No human or dragon would want to call that cursed place home. I'd planned to keep the genie there until I could locate some force powerful enough to destroy it."
"After we get the genie, how can we find Jandra?" Shay asked.
Hex sat down. His legs were still weak. The dancing lights before his eyes were fading, at least. "We should find Bitterwood. He killed Jazz last time. She may seek revenge. More importantly, Bitterwood is now the guardian of Zeeky, a girl who possessed a power that the goddess greatly desired."
"What power?"
"I'll tell you what I understand, though when Jandra explained it to me I failed to grasp much of it. You witnessed the rainbow Jazz escaped through?"
"Yes. I've never seen anything like it."
"Beneath our own reality, there's a larger reality known as underspace. The rainbow gates let you slip through underspace to travel instantly to any other part of our own world. Apparently it's possible to become trapped in underspace. If you linger outside our reality, you gain the ability to see all points of space and time. You become omniscient."
"What does that have to do with Zeeky? She's smart for her age, but hardly omniscient."
"Jazz trapped Zeeky's family inside underspace, sealed inside a crystal ball. The goddess can't communicate with them, but, somehow, Zeeky can. From what Jandra told me, Jazz wanted to study Zeeky to discover what quirk of her brain gave her this ability."
Shay stood up. He walked over and picked up the flaming sword. "It sounds as if we have a plan. Recover the genie. Find Bitterwood. Guard Zeeky and hope the goddess still wants her."
He held up the sword, looking mournfully at the dancing flames. "This blade cut her. If I'd been a better fighter, she might not have escaped."
"Let me carry the sword. I trained extensively in my youth. When we find Bitterwood, we'll let him carry the blade."
Shay frowned. "How do I know you won't just fly off and bury this?"
Hex sighed. "I've done nothing to earn your trust. Keep the blade. Let us hope your mistrust doesn't doom Jandra."
"Let's hope your mistrust of Jandra, which led you to take her genie, doesn't doom us all," said Shay.
"We can argue later. We should leave. We have a long journey from this place back to the surface."
"Maybe not," said Shay. "We found a map at the barracks. It showed a shorter route out of here. We should stop and get it. There were other supplies that also would be useful."
"Lead on," said Hex.
Shay walked toward the fallen earth-dragon. The coat Jandra had discarded lay nearby. He knelt and wrapped the small body within it.
"I… I didn't like Lizard," he said. He shook his head slowly. "I thought Jandra was taking a risk in adopting him." He cradled the bundle to his chest as he stood. "When we make it back to the surface, I hope you don't mind if I pause for a while to bury him. He deserves better than to rot away down here in this sunless kingdom. I'd like to find a tranquil valley, or a sun-drenched mountain top. Some place… some place that…"
"Of course," said Hex. He wanted to ask more about Jandra's adoption of a dragon, but held his tongue. In truth, he wasn't surprised. Jandra had befriended Hex almost from the moment they'd met. She'd been, perhaps, the most trusting, open-minded individual he'd ever known. The burden of betraying her still weighed heavily on his soul.
Could all of this have been avoided if he'd extended her the same faith and trust she'd shown him?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR:
STRUGGLE AGAINST MONSTERS
Jazz fell from nowhere, face-down onto the white sands of a sun-washed beach. She rolled to her side, squinting as she looked around; the beach sparkled like powdered diamonds. She closed her eyes, letting the bright sunlight sink into her silver shell. The tiny machines that coated her hummed with pleasure as they ate up the free energy. All around her, the air buzzed with nanites not guided by her genie. She exhaled a thin swarm of machines, commanding them to acts of piracy. Given time, she could manufacture more nanites; right now, here in Atlantis, it was simply more expedient to steal them.
The ghost of Jandra's personality shouted somewhere in the back of her mind, but as the power levels of her genie increased, the faint remnant grew quieter. Jazz sat up, wincing from her wounds. The dragon had given her quite the workout. She ran her silvery fingers along the three-inch gash he'd torn in her belly, knitting the wound shut. She turned her attention to her shoulder. The heat of the sword had carbonized much of the tissue. It wasn't going to be as easy a fix. She set her nanites to work on it, then flowed the silver shell of her genie back over the wound to prevent contamination.
Satisfied that her new body was no longer in peril, she paused to look around. She was on the western shore of Atlantis. The sun hung over the waves. In another hour or two it would be night. The ocean lapping the shore was breathtaking, a bright shade of blue that would have looked perfect on the wings of a tropical butterfly. When all this was over, she'd have to whip up a batch of butterflies. She'd design them as flesh eaters the size of small eagles, but they'd still be beautiful. The required DNA chains uncoiled in her mind's eye.
Jazz stood up, wiping the sand from her silvery butt. She craned her neck to see as much of her new body as she could. She looked good in chrome, better than she would have imagined. Despite her high-tech talents, Jazz had always possessed simple, down-to-earth tastes in fashion-blue jeans, cotton blouses, hemp sandals. Her vegetarianism had extended to eschewing leather, but she had to admit that Jandra's calf-high black boots looked good against the mirror-smoothness of her legs. The fact that they were scuffed and worn provided a pleasing contrast to the machined perfection of the rest of her. The rationale for her longstanding vegetarian ethics rested on shaky ground, anyway. She was honest enough to admit she'd long ago lost the moral high ground when it came to killing the creatures who shared the planet with her. Jandra had eaten meat her whole life. Her brain brimmed with cells programmed to enjoy the taste of fish. Perhaps it was time to try sushi.
Jazz looked up and down the beach. Not a sushi vendor in sight. In fact, the beach was empty. Six billion people lived in Atlantis, and not one could be bothered to come down to the beach on this perfect day. Of course, this beach was perfect every day. That had always been the fatal flaw of the city. After a thousand years of paradise, even the most innocent souls grew bored.
She looked up at the towers behind her. The tallest spires stretched into the blue sky, vanishing in haze, their peaks somewhere beyond the edges of the atmosphere. She saw a shadow of movement race along the shell-pink surface of one of the towers, miles up. She had the nanites in her retinas reprocess the photons striking them and the image sharpened. It was a man, falling, flapping his arms like they were wings. He looked as if he was laughing. Quickly, Jazz spotted another man, then a woman, all falling on parallel paths. Now that she was aware of them, she quickly spotted a hundred more. Some were laughing like the first man she spotted, but others were weeping, and still others looked as if they were screaming in terror. One by one the bodies vanished behind the screen of the lower towers surrounding the spires. If anyone was walking below, Jazz hoped they were carrying heavy-duty umbrellas.
"If your friends jumped off a building, would you?" she asked out loud, remembering the question her father had put to her over ten centuries earlier. She shook her head in disgust. It was time to get to work. She said, "Find Cassie."