Divers or not, one of the papio gunners opened fire, gutting the creatures that had helped ignite this endless war.
And once again, the Eight became dead.
Inside the Creation, in this one tiny realm, perhaps nothing had ever moved so swiftly.
Quest fell like a dart.
Massive and narrow, wearing a skin that slipped through any air, she plunged faster than the papio wings, and soon faster than every rocket. Distances that should have felt enormous were crossed in moments, crossed and found empty and barely noticed as a consequence. She spawned eyes that didn’t interrupt the precious airflow. She spat out brilliant flares to throw light across the walls of the world. And what she saw was shown to her passengers: the intricate, lovely reefs that had infested the corona world; the formerly high-realm where the sun ruled and where a great hole now waited; and beneath that hole, an expansive but not spectacularly wide cylinder leading down for another enormous journey, swiftly crossed.
“But do you see Them?” asked Diamond.
“If I do, I will tell you,” Quest said.
“See who?” asked Seldom.
Nobody answered.
Then Seldom looked at Elata, and she mouthed, “The Eight.”
The rounded chamber was intended for two bodies, plus the unfathomable gray ball. Crowded together, everybody touched everybody. The humans occupied one side, King and Diamond the other. The gray ball lay on King’s hands. Karlan’s rifle looked at home in his arms. The ceiling and floor were flat, but beyond each was a bubble that bore a strong resemblance to Quest’s crystalline eyes. They could see what she saw, except for the details that their speed that washed away, and the total exhaustion that stole their focus, and the limited numbers of eyes in their few heads. The reef wasn’t built from coral, it was woven from countless holes, and Diamond worried that the Eight were hiding inside any one of those holes, or they were lost in some other way.
Suddenly the reef was above, left behind.
The man in the dream had told him to bring everyone.
But if Diamond couldn’t . . . ?
What might have been the moorings of the sun passed on all sides—a washed-out gray scaffolding, without weakness and without beauty, looking cobbled together by gigantic but ordinary workman hands.
The cylinder beneath was the same slick gray as the ball.
A steel pipe would have more character than this.
Nobody spoke.
Elata set her purse on top of her own foot, and she reached for the gray ball, for the tubes that had held the trap.
King said, “No.”
She nearly tried anyway.
Diamond said, “No.”
She picked up her purse, and after turning it once in her hands, she threw it aside, in that way people use when they will never pick an object up again.
Then with a quick flat voice, Quest said, “I see Them.”
“The Eight?” asked Seldom.
“And everyone else in the world, too.”
A long study of rockets and momentum had inspired this body. This was the opportunity to learn if the lessons and Quest’s plans were any good. She told her passengers, particularly the human three, to lie flat on their backs and do nothing until they were safe or they were dead. There was no room to spare. One swollen stomach beneath them was full of freshly built perchlorates and metabolic rubber and aluminum, and she set that mess on fire. And nozzle made of corona scales dilated, the largest rocket in existence trying it best to remake the missing sun.
Karlan and the human children briefly lost consciousness.
Every refugee beneath them looked up and then looked down, and every bone, living and dead, shook with the roaring.
In the end, Quest managed to hover above a plain covered with battered aircraft and refugees and a thousand ugly fires. There was enough oxygen for easy breathing, but the world was still draining through some undiscovered vent. Quest hovered and then lifted, edging closer to her target, and as the last of the fuel was burnt, she pulled herself free from the huge body. Wearing nothing but a new carapace and strong little body, she lay across her brothers as the ship ended its descent.
The three of them held hands, just for a moment.
The humans were sick to their stomachs, bruised. Even Karlan let his pain show. But after the fleshy rocket was down, the six of them cut their way free and came out together. Tree-walker blimps and forester blimps and one papio airship were covered with lights, and they were parked around one body that had been repeatedly shot and chopped and then drenched with alcohol that still stank in the air long after the fire went out.
The Eight saw their siblings.
Mournful words came from a broken mouth.
“When it all can’t be worse, it is.”
There was no war here. The papio and tree-walkers had been united in one clear task, delivering endless pain to an entity that couldn’t die. And suddenly three more guilty monsters had stumbled into their midst—a parade of bodies and potential delivered by the best Fates.
One of the foresters was a big man carrying a little papio in his blood. He instantly ran forwards to take away Karlan’s rifle.
In reflex, the warrior aimed at the attacker.
Faster than any human, King grabbed the barrel and wrenched it from the hands, and then he tossed the rifle so far that only his ears could hear it hit and slide away.
But that gesture won only moments without violence. Revenge was left to float, waiting for the next opportunity.
Every sort of human followed after them.
The Eight were burnt and bleeding, several colors brightening skin that refused to look human.
“All of them,” said someone. “Make all of them . . . feel . . . ”
Several papio repeated the verdict, and the world stood together.
Karlan cursed, and Seldom whimpered.
Elata did both. This day began with her wanting to die. Death or something far worse was about to claim all of them, and she hated the idea and despised herself for ever walking so close to darkness. She was standing between King and Diamond. The alien wasn’t as huge as before, but he was still taller than any monkey, standing with his feet apart, holding the dangerous ball with one hand. King was probably deciding which of these little necks to break first. And Diamond was even worse, staring ahead and breathing fast out of nervous energy, probably thinking about what to say or what to do that would defuse the situation. But that too-smart brain was generating a thousand more ideas than the one good answer that she had already offered him.
“Put me on top of you,” she told King.
Her voice wasn’t loud, but of course he heard her. And like his brother, he didn’t immediately understand what was obvious and right.
The brave strong and endlessly impulsive girl grabbed those spines and dragged herself on top of the giant. King didn’t try to stop her. His hands were filled with the precious ball, and he assumed that she would feel safer above. Elata put her feet on the alien shoulders, her balance barely surviving the next moment. But she righted herself and grabbed the spines on his head, and she glanced back at Quest and the battered Eight, and then she stared ahead at what seemed like all of the faces left in the world.
“Do you know what these creatures are?” the girl cried out. “Do you understand their nature?”
Curiosity and fatigue kept every gun from firing.
“I know what they are,” she lied. “They are not leftovers from the Creation, and I promise you, promise you that they are not monsters. No. What they are and have always been is simple simple simple, and you are idiots not to see it, and maybe they are right. What they said. What they said when we were coming here to put the world back together again. They talked about letting all of you ungrateful, unthinking excuses for monkey shit die. Letting you die in the way you were made, which was in the dark and stupid as can be.”
Papio who understood now whispered rough translations to the others.
Then silence took hold, but not for long.
A voice in the back called out. A tree-walker tongue said, “All right then, what are they?”