to leap aside, dragging O’Malley with me as I hook my fingers around an outstretched tree branch and shift our momentum. I feel the talons slice through the air behind me, just a breath from my back. I kick off the tree, bring us up through a tangle of branches, crack off another shot over my shoulder. I hear beastieboy roar, smell sizzling flesh. O’Malley beside me. Heart hammering. Mouth dry.
I’m back in the flight simulator. The day we graduated into our streams. Fellow cadets gathered around me. Instructors watching dumbfounded as I weave and roll. Cheers growing louder as the kill shot notifications keep flashing, as I keep firing, the weapons an extension of my fist, the ship an extension of my body, as the final miss tally flashes up on the screen and they cheer my new name.
Zero
Zero
Zero
Something big hits us from behind, sends us both pinwheeling into the office wall. I realize it’s a tree, that this thing is smart enough to be able to throw. I guess you don’t get to be the last surviving member of your species by being a dunce. I hit hard, O’Malley crashes into me, cracks her head hard on the glass, leaving a bright smudge of red behind her. I bite my tongue, the breath driven from my lungs in a spray of spit and blood as I lose my grip on my disruptor.
We bounce off the wall, sailing back through the air. We’re spinning out of control. Nothing to hold on to. As I grab at her, I see O’Malley is out cold, eyes rolled up in her skull, tiny globes of blood floating from her split brow. I can see the beastie over her shoulder, tensing for another spring. I hear a disruptor fire, Ty shouting.
But its eyes are locked on me. I’ve pissed it off. You don’t get to be the last surviving member of your species without learning to hold a grudge, either.
I look at O’Malley again. Her eyes are closed, her jaw slack, brow bleeding. I do the math. Figure we both don’t need to die. So I let her go and kick her away.
She sails apart from me.
The ultrasaur springs my way, roaring as it comes.
Tyler fires again, I see a bright flash.
The world is moving in slo-mo, I’m spinning weightless as that engine of teeth and claws flings itself right at me. But I find myself smiling. Because I’m flying.
Here at the end, at least I’m flying.
And then I hit something hard.
There’s nothing there, but still I hit it—some invisible force that arrests my flight. Holds me in place.
The ultrasaur is frozen, too, hanging in midair and defying every law of momentum and gravity I know.
It roars in fury.
The air vibrates around me, the world goes out of focus. I taste salt in my mouth. I see O’Malley from the corner of my eye. She’s floating on air, too, short hair rippling as if the wind were blowing. I can see her right eye is glowing, burning, her arms outstretched, a subsonic hum building like static electricity in the air around me.
“T-t-ttrig-ggerrrrr,” she says.
A wave of force rolls out from her, shivering, translucent, spherical. It flattens the undergrowth, crushes the trees flat, expanding in an ever-widening circle until it hits beastieboy.
And beastieboy just … pops. Like a bug being squashed by some massive, invisible shoe. Its armored skin splits apart and its insides become its outsides and I turn my head and close my eyes so I don’t have to watch the rest.
The enclosure shakes like it’s in the middle of a planetquake. There’s something soft and spongy under my feet. Opening my eyes, I realize my boots are now touching the floor.
Maker’s breath, she’s moved me. …
O’Malley sinks down to the earth, arms still outstretched, blood spilling from her nose and floating in the air. Her eye is still burning with that ghostly white light, almost blinding. But I can feel her looking at me. Feel her seeing me.
“Believe,” she says.
She convulses once, then her eyes close and she passes out again, slowly curling into a fetal position and floating there like a baby in its mother’s womb.
“Cat!”
I turn and see Tyler behind me, shaggy blond hair drifting about his head in the zero gee. He’s clinging to the flattened tree line, spattered in ultrasaur blood. His face is pale, his blue eyes wide. But he’s pointing past me.
“Look,” he says.
I turn, look past the curtain of gore to the office wall.