“It’s Cassius,” she says slowly. “I don’t know for certain. What if he’s not alone? What if Aja is with him?”
The storm falls as we climb along a rocky arm of the mountain. Soon we can see nothing beyond our party. Steel-gray snow gnaws into us. Blotting out the sky, the ice, the mountains inland. We duck our heads, squinting through the sealSkin balaclavas. Boots scrape the ice underfoot. Wind roars loud as a waterfall. I hunch against it, putting one boot after the other, connected with Mustang and Holiday by rope in the Obsidian way so we don’t lose one another in the blizzard. Ragnar scouts ahead. How he finds his way is beyond me.
He returns now, loping over the rocks with ease. He signals for us to follow.
Easier said than done. Our world is small and furious. Mountains lurk in the white. Their hulking shoulders the only shelter from the wind. We scramble over bitter black rock that slices at our gloves while the wind tries to hurl us down gulches and bottomless crevasses. The exertion keeps us alive. Neither Holiday nor Mustang slow, and after more than an hour of dreadful travel, Ragnar guides us into a mountain pass and the storm breathes. Beneath us, impaled upon a ridgeline, is the ship that shot us from the sky.
I feel a pang of sympathy for her. Sharklike lines and flared starburst tail indicate she was once a long, sleek racing vessel of the famed Ganymede shipyards. Painted proud and bold in crimson and silver by loving hands. Now she’s a cracked, blackened corpse impaled upside down on a stark ridgeline. Cassius, or whoever was inside, had a nasty time of it. The rear third of the ship sheaved off half a kilometer downhill from the main body. Both parts look deserted. Holiday scans the wreck with her rifle’s scope. No sign of life or movement outside.
“Something seems off,” Mustang says, crouched beside me. Her father’s visage watches me from the razor on her arm.
“The wind is against us,” Ragnar says. “I smell nothing.” His black eyes scan the peaks of the mountains around us, going rock to rock, looking for danger.
“We can’t risk getting pinned down by rifles,” I say, feeling the wind pick up again behind us. “We need to close the distance fastlike. Holiday, you lay cover.” Holiday digs a small trench in the snow and covers herself with the thermal blanket. We cover that with snow so only her rifle’s peeking out. Then Ragnar slips down the slope to investigate the rear half of the ship as Mustang and I press for the main wreck.
Mustang and I slink low over rocks, covered by the renewed vigor of the storm, unable to see the ship till we’re within fifteen meters. We close the rest of the distance on our bellies and find a jagged hole in the aft where the back half of the fuselage was shredded by Ragnar’s missile. Part of me expected a camp of warColors and Golds preparing to hunt us down. Instead, the ship’s an epileptic corpse, power flickering on and off. Ins
ide, the ship is hollow and cavernous and almost too dark to see when the lights crackle off. Something drips in the darkness as we work our way toward the middle of the craft. I smell the blood before I see it. In the passenger compartment, nearly a dozen Grays lie dead, smashed into the floor above us by the rocks that speared the ship as it landed. Mustang kneels next to the body of a mangled Gray to examine his clothing.
“Darrow.” She pulls back his collar and points to a tattoo. The digital ink still moves even though the flesh is dead. Legio XIII. So it is Cassius’s escort. I manipulate the toggle on my razor, moving my thumb in the shape of the new desired design. I press down. The razor slithers in my hand, abandoning its slingBlade look for a shorter, broader blade so I can stab more easily in the cramped environs.
There’s no sign of any life as we move forward, let alone Cassius. Just the wind moaning through the bones of the vessel. A strange feeling of vertigo walking along the ceiling and looking up at the floor. Seats and belt buckles hanging down like intestines. The ship convulses back to life, illuminating a sea of broken datapads and dishes and gum packages underfoot. Sewage leaks from a crack in the metal wall. The ship dies again. Mustang taps my arm and points out a shattered bulkhead window to what looks like drag marks in the snow. Smeared blood black in the dim light. She signs to me. Bear? I nod. A razorback must have found the wreckage and begun feasting on the corpses of the diplomatic mission. I shudder, thinking of noble Cassius suffering that fate.
A grisly sucking sound makes its way to us from farther on in the ship. We press forward, feeling the dread of the scene before we enter the forward passenger cabin. The Institute taught us the sound of teeth on raw meat. But still, this is a horrifying sight, even for me. Golds hang upside down from the ceiling, imprisoned in their crash webbing, legs pinned by bent paneling. Beneath them hunch five nightmares. Their fur is grim and matted, once white but now clumped with dried blood and filth. They gnaw on the bodies of the dead. Their heads are those of massive bears. But the eyes that peer through the eye sockets of those heads are black and cold with intelligence. Standing not on four legs but two, the largest of the pack turns toward us. The ship lights throb back on. Pale muscled arms, slick with seal grease to ward off the cold, dark with blood from skinning the dead Golds, move from under the bear pelts.
The Obsidian is taller than I am. A crooked iron blade sewn into his hand. Human bones strung together with dried tendon as a breastplate. Hot breath billows from under the snout of the ursine skull he wears as a helmet. Slow and measured, the deep ululation of an evil war chant blossoms from between his blackened teeth. They’ve seen our eyes and one screams something unintelligible.
The ship wheezes and the lights go out.
The first cannibal vaults toward us through the cluttered hall, the rest behind him. Shadows in the darkness. My pale razor lashes forward and hews through his iron knife, through his breastplate and clavicle straight into his heart. I twist aside so he doesn’t crash into me. His momentum takes him past me into Mustang, who sidesteps him and cuts his head clean off. His body spills to the ground past her, twitching.
An audible grunt, and a spear with a jagged iron end flies from one of the other cannibals. I duck under it and punch upward with my left hand, deflecting it into the ceiling, just over Mustang’s head. Then the Obsidian behind slams into me as I rise. As large as I am. Stronger. More creature than man. Overwhelming me with the frenzy of a lost mind, he pins me to the wall and snaps at me with blackened, sharp-filed teeth. The lights of the ship flash illuminating the sores around his mouth. My arms are pinned to my sides. He bites at my nose. I turn my face just before he rips it off. Instead, his teeth sink into the meat at the base of my lower jaw. I scream in pain. Blood flows down my neck. He chomps down again, pulling at my face. Eating me alive as the lights go out. His right hand tries to work a knife through the sealSkin to slide it between my ribs and into my heart. The fabric holds.
Then the cannibal goes slack, twitching, and his body falls to the ground, spinal cord severed by Mustang from behind.
A black missile blurs past my face and slams into Mustang. Knocking her off her feet. The fletching of an arrow sticks from her left shoulder. She grunts, scrambling on the ground. I lunge away from her, toward the three remaining Obsidian. One’s nocking another arrow, the second hefts a huge axe, the third holds a huge curved horn, which the cannibal brings through the bearhelm to its mouth.
Then a terrible howl comes from outside the ship.
The lights go out.
The darkness ripples with a fourth shape. Shadowy forms lashing at one another. Metal cutting flesh. And when the lights come back on, Ragnar stands holding the head of one Obsidian as he pulls his razor out of the chest of the second. The third, bow cut in half, pulls a knife, stabbing wildly at Ragnar. He hacks her arm off. Still she rolls away, mad, immune to pain. He stalks after her and rips off her helmet. Beneath is a young woman. Face painted white, nostrils slit open so she looks a snake. Ritual scars forming a series of bars under both eyes. She can’t be more than eighteen. Her mouth slurs out something as she stares at the vastness of Ragnar, large even for her people. Then her wild eyes find the tattoos on his face.
“Vjrnak,” she rasps, not in terror, but fevered joy. “Tnak ruhr. Ljarfor aesir!” She closes her eyes and Ragnar cuts off her head.
“You prime?” I ask Mustang, rushing to her. She’s already on her feet. The arrow sticks out from under her collarbone.
“What did she say?” Mustang asks past me. “Your Nagal is better than mine.”
“I didn’t understand the dialect.” It was too guttural. Ragnar knows it.
“Stained son. Kill me. I will rise Golden.” Ragnar explains. “They eat what they find.” He nods to the Golds. “But to eat the flesh of Gods is to rise immortal. More will come.”
“Even in the storm?” I ask. “Can their griffins fly in this?”
His lips curl in disgust. “The beasts do not ride griffin. But no. They will seek refuge.”
“What about the other wreck?” Mustang asks, pressing on. “Supplies? Men?”