ride long. Because Mookie’s grip is slipping. Nora’s not a big girl, but the weight on his back is too much – and Mookie’s himself far too large and with a busted arm, to boot. He has no stability. The heat here draws out sweat and his hand on the prodigious handle of the cleaver starts… to… slip…
The worm-god’s skin is not smooth like the others – bundles of squirming cilia like the fingers of sea anemones rise up in clusters – and Mookie sees one of Nora’s hands reach out and grab a bundle while the other stays wrapped around his neck.
Stability. Just a little. Maybe enough.
They cling to the side of the creature like ticks on the belly of a bird.
Nora is dead.
She knows it as sure as she knows anything. And yet, she can feel her heartbeat. Can feel the sound of blood in her ears. This isn’t dead like the dead of Daisypusher. This is a different kind of dead. Worse and better in equal measure. It’s not that she’s dead inside but that something inside of her is dead. She just can’t put her finger on what.
Thinking about this helps distract her from the fact that they’re riding some kind of hell-born worm deity to the surface – or to wherever the shimmering gate above their heads is going to take them.
Even as the wind rushes past them, even as she fails to control the fearful whine in the back of her throat, even as she holds one arm around the neck of the man who for so long she hated and wanted dead in that teenage-fantasy way, she thinks about it.
That little skull mushroom gave something back.
But it took something, too.
She just doesn’t know what.
Eventually the police will come.
But for now the dig site is loud and remote and protected by two rings of very robust fencing. Nobody will know anything unless they pass overhead and see all the cock-eyed bodies and bright puddles of red.
They take the elevator – just a cage dangling from a crane – down into the massive quarry-like hole. Sorago and Vithra already wait at the bottom among a new batch of corpses. Some Sandhogs. A few EPA inspectors. A geologist.
Vithra’s limbs twist and crack as they slowly return to human form. Zoladki’s clothes are now in ribbons. Once he returns to the shape of the little old man, he looks like a homeless person, perhaps one cast out of his capitalist tribe when the markets took that nose-dive a few years back.
Sorago and Vithra stalk up to meet Candlefly as he exits the cage.
“The plan may continue,” he says. “Sorago, your… friends are waiting, I assume.”
“Yes. Near the juncture of the three tunnels. They’re blasting in two hours.”
“Good. It is a journey of many miles, so go. And take a walkie-talkie. We’ll need it to speak.”
Vithra cocks Zoladski’s fuzzy caterpillar eyebrows. “I want to kill more. I’ll go too.”
“You won’t. You’ll stay up here in case we encounter any problems.”
The old man’s face tightens. “But I want to go.”
“And I say you’ll stay.”
“My brothers and sisters will be waiting in the nesting temples before night falls–”
“Do not defy me, Vithra.”
“You could come down with us.” A flash of cruel irony in Zoladski’s eyes. “Oh, but you can’t, can you? What happens if you go down into the dark, Candlefly?”
Ernesto doesn’t lose his smile. It’s painful to keep it plastered to his face like that, but he feels it’s necessary. “You’re about to make me lose my good mood, old man. Stand back and let us work to free your brothers and sisters. Unless you care to see that mission complicated?”
Silence.
“Good,” he says. “As I thought. Now, let’s find the detonator. I want to be the one to hit the plunger when the time comes.”
Layers of earth – the mantle of this planet in its many colors and textures, the stratum of the Great Below laid bare – whip past as Mookie holds onto the cleaver embedded in the worm-god’s back. The air is heavy, the smell of soil and minerals bright.
Then there is a static crackle, the sound of stone shearing–
A fresh thunderous boom–
The beast known as Pelsinade launches forth into a massive open chamber like an eel dumped from a bucket. Its belly hits. The ground trembles. Limestone stalactites from above drop like swords into the earth, some sticking into the stone, others shattering.
All around them is a temple. A massive goblin temple. Mookie sees piles of