“Don’t worry about it.” I squat next to him. “Can I help?”
“No. I’ll be fine once I patch myself up.”
“A few of your spikes were cut off,” I tell him, tapping his head.
“Maybe I’d be better off bald like you,” he laughs, then makes the hair grow back to its proper length.
When he’s healed himself, he stands, checks for any cuts he might have missed, then warily faces the other black panel. “There could be a similar monster through there. Or worse.”
I say nothing. I want to vounteer to go ahead of him, to test the waters, but I’m afraid. Sheepishly hoping Dervish will take the lead.
Dervish breathes out through his nose, then glances at me. “Ready to save my bacon again?”
“If I have to,” I chuckle, then give the order for the marbles to lead us to Shark. They float through the panel into blackness. We follow.
Space. Freezing emptiness. Not even air. A
moment ofcomplete dizziness and suffocating panic. Then instinctmakes me surround myself with a force field of warmth andair. Dervish has done the same and is floating beside me,staring around with happy wonder. His mouth moves but Ican’t hear what he’s saying. I point to my ears and shake myhead. He tries again, then makes a tube of air grow from hisforce field to mine. When it touches, he speaks, and this timeI hear him. “I always wanted to be a spaceman, like FlashGordon. It was my dream.”
“Me too,” I smile. “Except I wanted to be a real astronaut,like Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin. Walk on the moon.”
“It’s bizarre, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Like when we were on top of the cloud, butstranger.”
Dervish does a slow somersault. It looks graceful at first,but he can’t stop, and keeps tumbling over and over. He yellsfor help but I’m laughing too much at the freewheelingpunk. Finally he finds his balance, rights himself and glaresat me. “Thanks for the help!”
“Do it again,” I coo. “Whirl for me, Dervish, whirl!”
“I’ll whirl my foot up your ass,” he grumbles, then looksfor the marbles. “Let’s go find Shark.”
“OK. But if you want to try your hand at gymnastics again,I’ll be more than happy to —”
“Keep it up,” he growls. “Keep it up!”
Laughing, I give the marbles their freedom and we drift forward again, leaving behind a pair of small white panels, glowing softly in the vacuum of sterile space.
I was wrong about this space being sterile. Though there don’t seem to be any planets, the marbles eventually lead us towards a demon of unbelievable size. It’s one of the vast sky demons. From the ground they looked huge, but up here it goes beyond words like massive and immense. It must be hundreds of miles long, fifty or sixty high, a comet-size,
sluglike demon, drifting through the void of space in search of... what? Demons to kill and devour? Foes to fight? A world to settle on?
Dervish and I pause when the marbles zone in on the demon. We look at each other bleakly. “If that thing spots us . . .” Dervish whispers.
“We’re too small,” I whisper back, even though there’s no need — sound can’t carry in space, so we should be able to speak as loudly as we like. “It won’t bother with a couple of ants like us.”
“Unless it enjoys squashing ants.”
We want to pull back, detour around it, or wait for it to pass. But the marbles keep tugging after the demon, urging us to follow. Since we’ve got no other option, we glide after them as they lead us ever closer to the terrifying behemoth.
We come up underneath the monster’s bulging stomach, which looks more like rock than flesh. The marbles pause next to the stomach wall. I get the sense they want to penetrate the demon’s crusty shell. But then they take a turn and lead us forward, towards the creature’s head.
Half an hour later, we float up from beneath the demon’s gigantic lower jaw. I’m worried that, this close, the monster can’t help but see us. But there’s no evidence of any eyes. Either they’re set much higher up its face, or it’s blind.
But there’s definitely a mouth, running like a ridged valley from one side of the head to the other. Lips parted, teeth the size of large houses set in the rocky gums at irregular intervals. A tongue crawling with scores of smaller, parasitical demons, feeding on the remains of whatever this monster eats.
And amidst those demons, fighting for his life — Shark.
The warrior is in poor shape. These demons are weak compared with some of the others we’ve fought, small in size and power. But there are hundreds of them, and they keep coming at him, fresh scavengers replacing the dead almost as soon as they’ve fallen. They’re like tiny piranha bringing down a mighty ox.