They reached the edge.
The brave people had gone below, while the cautious and cowardly remained above, enjoying a lesser view.
Seldom was happy with the cowards.
But not Elata. Suddenly she was the girl that he remembered from Marduk—the bright fear-nothing girl who would try any whim twice, just to see what would happen.
“Come on,” she said, tugging at his arm.
Seldom shook his head. But the shifting light was definitely stronger. Not like daylight yet, no. But how many people had ever seen the sun killed and then rekindled again? Maybe this was just the way it was, the way nature was put together. Who could know? And because science mattered so much to him, and because a short pretty and very strong girl wanted this to happen, Seldom let his arm get yanked, sending him tumbling down the nets.
They bounced, and he felt the giggle sliding along his backbone again.
And then they were running across the long landing, chasing people and catching up with some of them, not taking the lead but still among the early few to reach the tall railing. They shoved their heads through gaps. A gun turret was directly under their feet, motors swinging it one way and then another, its vents opened to let the gunner breathe. And that was why they could hear the gunner shouting across a call-line, unless of course he was yelling at himself.
“I see them,” he yelled.
See who? The papio? But it was too soon. Wings were fast, but the machines were flying from the ends of the Creation.
“I can’t count them,” the gunner complained.
Seldom was looking down. Elata was looking down. There was nothing to see but a great cloud of shifting lovely and deeply colored light. For one spectacular moment, Seldom could believe that he didn’t know what he was seeing. He was free to convince himself that he was fortunate, that only the rarest of people got to see the birth of a new sun, and that this was going to be a better, much lovelier sun. Colors like he had never imagined were rising up into his spellbound face.
Elata cursed, and then she muttered, “Oh no. It’s the coronas.”
Seldom blinked, surprise taking his voice away.
“I don’t know how many,” the gunner screamed into his headset. “But it looks like every last one of the monsters.”
No place was quieter, more remote or half so peaceful, as the vacated guts of a freshly killed corona.
Karlan didn’t want to be anywhere else.
Maybe the earlier battle left him jangled. Maybe silence and the relative solitude was a tonic. But a lot of questions never interested Karlan, and that included why he was searching the same terrain all over again, and what he was feeling, and why it felt good to start walking from the gash in the monster’s side, following this twisting space all the way down near the shrunken but still enormous anus.
Everybody understood that the corona flesh was different than other flesh, but that didn’t do the stuff justice. There was strangeness woven into the muscles, into the organs. The entire body was stacked in odd ways, but that was just one factor. The pure feel of things was peculiar. Even in death, the stomach lining had a quality that Karlan didn’t try to explain. Even when it was chilled, there was heat inside the flesh—a burning that could be felt in every way except with thermometers and touch. The corona’s strength persisted long past its life. Time itself seemed thick and lazy inside the dead blood. The flesh had to be cut apart and its metals rendered before the weird sense of the alien dissolved, and there were moments when this unyielding stubborn and unreflective man wondered if any of these qualities ever really vanished: he was full of corona iron and calcium and copper. Everybody was. Maybe the alien magic was woven inside his world, and that’s why it felt so special and good to kill one of these beasts. It was the only way to rejuvenate what really mattered.
He walked to the anus, and then slower than ever, he walked back again.
Nothing else had been found. Just that one odd ball was trapped inside ten layers of membranes, and nothing else.
But that didn’t mean there was no point in hunting.
Every corona stomach had its odd twists, one-of-a-kind deadends. There were always folds where a human hand could push inside, feeling death that wasn’t dead and the lingering heat as well as that second heat that refused to be measured. Maybe something tiny was buried inside one of these folds. Who knew? Stopped in no particular place, Karlan invested a long moment investigating several deep grooves that gave him nothing. He wanted nothing, and he certainly expected nothing. But his fingers were ready to find a tiny version of that gray ball. He knew what he would do. Before anyone could search his pockets, he would swallow the prize whole. It didn’t matter what the object looked like. The risks were nothing he could measure, so why worry about them? Down the prize would go, and maybe it would take up residence inside his guts like it did before. Or maybe the little ball, or whatever, would endow Karlan with some grave, grand power that would transform him in staggering ways.
That was a thought worth imagining.
Only later, a long time later, did Karlan bother to wonder why the others were taking so long to relieve him, or at least check on his whereabouts. The outside world didn’t exist. Corona flesh had an amazing capacity to deaden sound. Sirens and amplified voices and fletch engines were nothing. Raging gun battles would probably be heard as muddy little thumps in some gray distance. Still alone, puzzled but not worried, Karlan started walking back to the world, and only near the gouged hole did he begin to hear what sounded like a chorus singing in a distant tree.
Grown men and women were shouting.
Karlan emerged just as the newest panic took hold, the depleted crowd running back into the abattoir’s interior.
He understood only that he must have missed quite a lot. The main doors were closing, which meant that they had been opened in his absence. Only one fletch was left indoors, which happened to be the battered Girl. What little could be seen outside was more puzzling than what was inside. There was far too much darkness, except for a curtain of light that couldn’t decide on the right colors. Maybe Karlan had never been scared in his life, at least in any normal sense. But he was very much aware of being out of balance, and the effect was to make him numb and stupid for a few moments. One foot lifted and dropped again. More than anything, he wished he had found some ancient treasure, because nobody was going to bother searching him now.
The big general and little List were standing pretty much where Karlan last saw them. Each was holding one receiver while talking on a second receiver, and surrounding them was the usual collection of officers and aides who were working hard not to make their pants soggy.
Wanting the truth, Karlan headed for them.
But then he came across the old teacher and the old mother. They would work even better.
Karlan asked for an update.
Haddi couldn’t talk. She didn’t try to speak, standing with her arms crossed and hands wrapping into fists, the blood just about drained from her face.
Nissim told the story.
And Karlan interrupted him twice, laughing at what sounded just too strange. The sun was gone? And the coronas were coming too? The slayer laughed until he was sure that the retired butcher had finished spinning this story, and then he looked around again, waiting for his brain to catch up with everything that he was seeing.
Then the armored god showed up with the gray ball in both hands. And riding on top of King was a giant bug, except she was no bug. Karlan understood that easily enough, and looking up at that peculiar face, he said, “I’ve seen you look prettier than this. How have you been, girl?”
Quest dropped and flattened, and she changed color, half-vanishing into the butcher floor.
King turned the ball in his hands, and shoving the smooth end at Nissim’s face, he asked, “Can you read this?”
“Read what?” the old man asked.
But then Nissim said, “Wait.” The four-fingered hand was shaking, pulling a pair of reading glasses out of shirt pocket. Both hands were shaking. Not for the first time, Karlan decided the old guy was just about cooked, nothing left in his nerves anymore. But the glasses got to the nose, and the nose got close to whatever marks were on that peculiar ball. Karlan wondered if he should have looked the ball over more carefully, using his torch and young eyes. But he couldn’t see anything from here, standing one step away, and what-maybes were about the biggest waste of time in life.