"Spaghetti?" asked Bitterwood.
"Moving on," said Jandra, turning to Hex. "You've suffered brain damage. It's slowing you down, and I don't have time to fix it. Luckily, I have a sort of whole body crutch you'll find useful."
Hex shook his head. Jandra might be about to put underspace gates on the tips of his teeth, a prospect he found worrisome. "No thank you. I've fought with more severe injuries than this." He hadn't.
"This really isn't a situation where you get to choose to accept my help or not," said Jandra, casting her gaze toward the statues. Suddenly, the gold that coated them began to drip to the ground, exposing naked flesh beneath. Around the garden, men and women fell to their hands and knees gasping as the nanite shells that supported them flowed into a large golden river that snaked toward Hex. Hex flapped his wings and hopped backwards, avoiding the liquid metal.
He landed in an even larger pool of gold. Flecks of the cold metal splashed onto his belly and wings. Instantly, they began to slither and expand, coating his scales. He flicked his wings sharply to fling the metal off, to no avail. The gold crept upward. He craned his neck and held his breath as it reached his jaws. He instinctively closed his eyes as the liquid metal washed over his face. When he opened his eyes, he was completely encased in a flawless sheet of gold.
"Gold seems ill-suited for armor, daughter," said Vendevorex. "It's too soft, and too heavy to allow him to move freely."
"Gold is merely an aesthetic component," said Jandra. "The armor actually incorporates several different elements, including titanium. There aren't many things that are going to be able to cut through it. The added weight is offset by the exoskeleton's power, which will multiply Hex's strength by a factor of ten."
Hex spread his wings. She was telling the truth. He didn't notice any additional weight. He still didn't feel good, but he no longer felt as if he were about to collapse.
He looked around at the score of men and women who lay on the ground, groaning in agony. Some of the statues still stood, unaffected by Jandra's spell.
"Were they prisoners of the shells?" he asked.
"No. The statue act is a kind of art. They stand out here for years at a time. Visitors to the garden try to figure out the real statues from the living ones. They're like very, very, very slow and focused mimes."
"Why are they in pain?"
"Severe nanite withdrawal," said Jandra. "The city knows we're here by the way. Heads up."
Hex looked toward the sky. The stars were blotted out by an army of onrushing angels.
"Keep them out of my hair," said Jandra. "I've got an antenna to build."
Bitterwood knew he was being manipulated into this fight. He pondered Zeeky's counsel that Jandra could be saved. He placed his new arrow against his bowstring. If the shafts were as powerful as Jazz said they were, would they slay even her?
Unfortunately, this wasn't a moment for contemplation. A throng of marble angels swooped toward him. Despite their wings, they were objects explicitly out of place in the sky. They appeared carved from polished marble, too heavy to do anything but plummet.
If these creatures were like Gabriel or Hezekiah, the danger they represented through their sheer numbers made them more of a threat than the goddess for the moment. Yet, the angels weren't bearing any obvious weapons. Their faces were placid, devoid of emotion. They looked as if they were here to investigate, not to fight.
Yet, against foes this powerful, the element of surprise was something Bitterwood couldn't afford to lose. As so often happened in his battles, he would draw first blood… though he doubted they had blood. A rainbow-tipped arrow launched from his bowstring in a glowing streak, punching into the brow of the nearest angel. The winged statue lost control of its flight, its body wracked with spasms as it dropped, crashing onto the granite tiles that surrounded the fountain, sending a shower of gravel and dust skyward.
The other angels instantly halted their descent, their eyes narrowing as they turned their gaze to Bitterwood, assessing the threat. Bitterwood needed no time to think. A second arrow raced skyward, then a third, then a fourth, his bow singing a song of one-note staccato plucks. Three more angels dropped from the sky, silently, with no sign of pain on their faces. They crashed into the ground, shattering.
A strong wind suddenly swept over Bitterwood as Hex beat his wings, launching himself at the angels. They were only a hundred feet overhead, barely two body lengths for the giant dragon. They had no time to focus on him before he grabbed the first angel in his toothy jaws. He whipped his head about, tossing the angel into his nearest brethren. The wings of both shattered from the impact and they plummeted.
It had been almost twenty years since the first time Bitterwood had shot a sky-dragon in flight and watched it fall to earth. Watching the angels fall, he felt the same pulse of adrenaline wash through him. He didn't know if he was on the right side in this battle. He didn't know if Jazz was manipulating him into an act of unspeakable evil here in the city of gods.
Mere moments ago, all he had wanted was to save Jeremiah and take him and Zeeky far away, to a place where war was only a distant whisper, to live in peace as something almost a family. He had wanted to put his life as a killer behind him. Yet, as he watched his opponents fall from the sky, all these desires faded, washed away by the battle lust that surged through his veins. He targeted the next angel with a feeling approaching glee, and let his arrow fly.
Jazz paid no attention to the throng of angels. Her experience with the two warriors at her back left her confident that the next sixty seconds would pass in relative quiet. She clapped her hands and the water falling into the pool trickled to a halt. The golden disk atop the fountain would make an excellent conductor for her transmitter.
She needed to concentrate. She allowed the shell of light that clung to her like her third skin to fade away, revealing her second skin, the silver genie that was affixed to Jandra's pores. It had been an obvious mistake to wear her genie in such a compact form inside her old body. Balling it up like that had left it vulnerable to Gabriel's sword. By spreading it out along the full surface of her new body, she had a greater chance that, should any part of it be damaged, the rest of it would survive. Her personality was still mostly located within the computer memory of the genie. Once all the excitement was over, she'd spend a few days relaxing on the beach, soaking up some sun, and rewiring the synapses of her new brain so that it would be truly her own.
Threads of silver shot from her fingers and wrapped around the glass spire at the center of the fountain, twining upward around it, sinking into the gold at the top, etching elaborate maps across its surface.
An angel crashed into the fountain on the other side and the glass rim shattered. The pool water surged out the new opening, leaving goldfish flopping about beneath her. She didn't mind that she was about to kill or cripple six billion people, but she felt bad that the fish had to suffer.
She was vaguely aware that Vendevorex was standing right beside her. She was a little perplexed as to what she should do with him. He wasn't part of her plan. If she'd killed him back in the barn, it would have made her Jandra act less convincing. On the other hand, Hex, Bitterwood, and all the others were recent acquaintances according to Jandra's memories. They were easy to fool. Vendevorex had known Jandra her whole life. Was he buying her act? She'd called him by his full name earlier, which was a slip up. Jandra had a more affectionate term for him.
"Ven," she said. "The key to talk to your nanites once the pulse is activated is 17351. It's about twenty seconds in coming. Since you're not doing anything in the meantime, could you save the goldfish?"