Firewalker (Worldwalker 2)

She milked herself for venom, Lily.

I saw, Tristan. Everyone, listen—don’t let the Sisters catch you with the ends of their whips! Cut them off if you can!

As Lily sent out her warning to all her braves the Sister spun her whip over her head and cracked it at Tristan. He dove to the side, narrowly escaping the stinging cat-o’-nine-tails she wielded. She reversed the direction of the whip and sent it back at him, but he wove his way inside the arc of her lash and stuck his blade between the plates of her exoskeleton.

The Sister twitched as she died. Three more Sisters dropped from the sky and a swarm of Workers zeroed in to attack Tristan in concert. Lily heard no spoken commands from the Sisters or the Workers, but they fought as one.

They are all connected. The Hive has one mind and it fights as an organism.

Lily didn’t know if the thought was hers, one of the Tristans’, Una’s, or everyone’s, but she sent it out to all her braves. If the Hive fought as one, so must they. She pulled her single consciousness out of her Tristan and instead imagined herself as plural, like a tapestry of many threads. Lily let go of her sense of I, of being one person, and became They.

They moved into a circle and focused first on becoming fire. They allowed the fire to engulf them, but fire would not kill them—it could only fuel them. The Workers died in droves, falling off their skin as husks of blackened carbon, and the Sisters cringed for a moment before diving back into the flames with Lily’s They.

They cut through the Sisters—charred bodies falling around them and piling up, but more came. Always more. They lost one, two, then three threads. They howled and wept with every loss of Themselves. The whips cracked and the Workers flew into the fire to die without hesitation. Wave after wave. Sting after sting. The wildfire moved on, but They were pinned down by the bodies of Workers and Warrior Sisters everywhere—thousands of bodies.

They lost one more thread—an absence unlike any other—and Lily pulled herself out of the tapestry.

Tristan!

No answer.

“Tristan!” Lily screamed, but only a thin wail came out of her.

She heard a whip crack and felt the lash across her back. Hot and numb, the venom seeped into her blood. Lily could see Sisters swooping down to pick up her loved ones and fly off with them. She saw Juliet, Breakfast, Una, Caleb, and the other Tristan getting hauled up into the air.

Her Tristan, her best friend, was not among them.

She felt nothing—not hands holding her nor the temperature changing nor the wind rushing past—but she saw the ground get smaller and farther away as she was lifted off her stomach and flown upward. The black battlefield below still smoked. Everything went dark.

* * *

Carrick saw the smoke from miles away. Then he felt the thunder in the ground. A prairie fire was stampeding the buffalo.

Carrick didn’t feel fear often, but he felt it now. There was no high ground to climb, no river to put between him and the tide of hooves and horns, and he’d lost his connection with Lillian when he followed Rowan over the mountains. Strength from his witch would not avail him, anyway. Neither would cleverness or high ground or any river but one of the great ones, for that matter. Surviving a stampede came down to luck. Either the buffalo came your way or they didn’t.

Carrick could guess who had set the fire. Lily and her tribe must have needed to fight something. Something huge.

Rowan was ahead of him—out of direct sight—but not so far away that Carrick couldn’t clearly distinguish his brother’s track lying directly over Lily’s. After maintaining a nearly inhuman pace, Rowan had caught up with her. He’d pushed himself over the mountains and across the plains with wha

t seemed to Carrick to be a suicidal single-mindedness and now Rowan was only a few hours behind Lily and her tribe. Carrick was only a few hours behind Rowan and his endurance was at its limits.

Carrick stood in his stirrups, trying to see what enemy could be dire enough that Lily’s tribe would risk a prairie fire to stop it. All he could see was smoke rimming the horizon, and the air rippling like water over the grass.

He saw a figure detach itself from the heat-haze. It wasn’t the front line of the stampeding herd yet, although that was sure to be coming soon. It was Rowan, riding like hell, and heading straight for him. Carrick pulled up on the reins and wheeled his horse around. The horse was smart enough to not need any whipping, and reached a flat-out run in a matter of seconds.

Glancing over his shoulder wouldn’t help, Carrick knew that, but he couldn’t stop himself. Rowan was gaining him, but the stampede was gaining on Rowan. The ground shook as if to break. The pounding filled the air like a solid wall of noise—something felt as much as heard. Carrick’s insides rattled against his bones, and his teeth clacked in his head as the horse under him galloped in panic. The pounding in the ground was joined by a strange buzzing in the air. Carrick glanced back again and nearly lost his seat. He eased back on the reins and tried to control his frenzied mount.

There were things in the air above Rowan. Flying things that Carrick had never seen before, but he could guess what they were from the stories his father had told him.

The Hive.

Rowan slashed at the air with one arm and clung to his horse’s reins with the other, trying to fight off the Warrior Sisters who harried him from above. Carrick turned to face forward in his saddle and let the reins go with a terror that bordered on blindness.

First he felt the buzzing of the Workers’ wings on the back of his neck, and then two pairs of impossibly strong hands grabbed his arms and tore him from his horse’s back. Carrick didn’t know if he screamed or not as the Sisters hauled him up into the air. The ground shrank away from him, his neck wrenching painfully as he was jerked into the sky. He tried to right himself, but the force of the Sisters’ ascent was too much to fight.

Staring down as the ground rushed away from him, Carrick saw the green grass beneath him turn into a sea of ruddy brown bodies as the herd of buffalo swept across the plain. Dust rose up in great plumes bearing the smell of churned earth, blood, and musky hide. Smoke from the fire joined the dust to blot out the sun. The Sisters flew him west through the murky air. The thunder of the stampede was drowned out by the buzzing of the Hive all around him as they flew.

Out of the corner of Carrick’s eye he saw Rowan’s body dangling between two Sisters. Rowan’s eyes were shut and his body was limp. Carrick couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead.