by Ken Rivers
She said something that made Lana jerk her head back then scurry around and help her onto her elbow. Yare took her sister’s head in her hand, kissed her forehead and smushed her nose and cheek into Yari’s placid face. She began to whimper, then yell. Her timid voice rose louder and louder until the sound of it rivaled the Kaiju’s scream. We all moved back from the force of it.
Where Lana and Yare had used orange healing magic with their hands, this time Yare’s entire body was set ablaze. Parts of her flecked off and disintegrated in the wet air. The fire that enveloped her was bright as the suns that lived behind the clouds that shrouded us in one misery after another.
The shrieking died, and then there was silence. All of us hovered over the two. Even Lana didn’t know for sure what to do next. Yari’s eyes opened fully, and her chest heaved upward, sucking in life that just moments earlier was fading away.
She turned and pushed her forehead against Yare’s. “I knew it was true…”
“She wanted nothing more than to see you, Yari,” I said.
She smiled, sobbing and barely putting the words together, “She came to me. In the dark, she told me she was sorry for never being there. Sorry for what was done to both of us. She was my light.”
Yare lay against the stone floor of the Spire bonding hall, skin grey but painted with a smile, finally at peace.
Yari sat up and the beast below filled the air with its blood rage and hate. “Mark, are you ready?”
“Baby girl, I was born ready.”
“Then get on the altar and take your pants off.”
28
The Bonding ceremony was a link between Yari and me and the Spire itself. A link to the entire history of every Mother and Father. A tradition that never once involved the use of the Rau-Kan, a half human-Levani, or a human, but the obsidian altar was getting all three in the same day. Set high off the ground, it was made for the long legs of the purest chosen of their ranks.
Pusi held Yare in her arms, covered in Lana’s heavy black robes.
Yari stared at Midori and Aoi, huddled under Yare’s shadow. They were peeking at her from behind folds in the long cloth, each not sure of the others.
Yari slowly tilted her head. “Are you sure they’re Kaiju?”
“Your sister seemed to think so. As do I,” Lana said.
I brought rain water from a trough off to the side of the room and washed the blood off the altar as Yari had instructed me. I knew what we had to do. Bond on the Altar of Bonding. That meant fucking in front of everyone, which wasn’t a problem, but the timing was on a short list of times not to have sex. No matter what I did, no matter what mental hoops I jumped through to get away from Yare’s sacrifice, I was pulled straight back to the light she disappeared into as I wiped the last splashes of red from grey.
“Mark, you know what else Yare said to me?”
“No.”
“She mentioned you. She made me promise that you and I make Tawa pay for it all. She said she may not be here in body, but she’ll be watching.”
“That’s both sweet and in need of processing time.”
“I don’t think you understand what I’m saying. That sword took part of my soul and my blood. In order to save me, Yare replaced both with part of hers. She’s inside of me, right now.”
“She would be here with us in her own body right now if I had been stronger.”
She turned, grabbed me by the shoulder and sat me down on the slab. “I need you to calm down and focus for me. This is not how I imagined my first time would be. It’s not how I imagined us.”
“Me, too. I thought I could in any situation, but, she’s right there,” I pointed to Pusi.
Yari cupped my face in her hands and pushed her nose into my cheek and whispered, “Two things. One, if we don’t, we’ll be dead by midday. Two, I’m not only Yari anymore. Which makes this almost a threesome.”
She jammed her tongue hard into my mouth, paused with it flattened against mine, then slid her dry lips against mine, flexing and relaxing until they were moist. She kissed me so soft and slow and deep that I nearly lost my shit right there.
“I’ve been waiting for this since you first grabbed my trembling hand and ran with me from the temple. I believe in you. But, if this is the last time we ever do this, I’ll never forgive you.” Both hands holding my face eye-to-eye with hers, she melted every bit of reticence and doubt in my mind with a simple smile. “I’m yours.” She touched her forehead to mine. “Always.”
Her hand guided me inside and she winced, and stopped. She was already clutching down on the head. Her chest rose and fell, and she continued until there was no more left for me to give. Her warm breath poured life and love into my soul while she rose and dropped her ass onto my thighs.
Each wet moment at the top and bottom of her movements could’ve been the best of my life. Before I could think about what to do, where to touch, how she would respond, the air left my chest and my eyes shut the world away. Instead of a kiss afterward or even cuddling or hugs, I felt a fullness of soul and richness of purpose I never thought possible. I had emptied everything I was inside of her, and she was becoming me and I, her.
I didn’t have to open my eyes to see the expression on her face, or fish for words of affection. They were as much from me as from her. The ruins of the eye above the altar shone bright gold, lighting a ring around us. Some of the runes touched our skin, the others floated in the air. Midori and Aoi perched on the altar slab to either side of us, tiny tongues licking their noses and waiting for a scratch behind the ear.
“That was better than I thought.” Her voice was breathy as she rested her head on my shoulder. “Better than anything. EVER.” She threw her hair over to the right and smiled. “I guess I’m the Kaiju Queen, now?”
I kissed her forehead. “Answer me one thing.”
“What?” she said, pecking my neck with slow, sticky kisses.
I opened my mouth, but her finger stopped my lips from moving, “If it’s anything like, Who’s your daddy, I’ll punch you in the dick.”
“Never mind.” She saw it coming. Lying would be difficult from now on.
I helped her up slowly, my hand in the small of her curved back as we separated. We had barely enough time to dress, show some much-needed affection to our new family members, and blush with everyone who had watched it all.
Sirens had been screaming during the whole approach of Tawa’s Kaiju, but they went silent and were replaced with a high-pitched alarm that clicked on and off repeatedly.
B was up and over at the window. “That’s the ‘all evacuation’ sign. Everyone is heading to the bunkers.”
“Where bunkers?” Pusi asked, hoping for somewhere to lay Yare someplace safe as soon as possible.
Then a radiating burst of energy flew through the sky. It covered every square foot of CONTROL and its sprawl from the Spire. When it hit us, the energy seemed to bounce off the open windows.
B stood looking at her Clear-Tech, hand shaking and battle-wand hanging limp from her other hand. The screen was red.
“What is it, B?”
“Enforcers get updates on any deaths in Occupation territory. But, this can’t be right.” She walked over to me, shoved it into my hands, and backed away. “It’s broken, right? There’s something…fucked with the software or something, right?”
Before I could stop myself, I read what I saw out loud, “Two thousand, eight hundred fifty-eight deaths. Evacuation protocol suspended. Salvage en route.”
“Marrrk, how many live here?”
“Two thousand, eight hundred and fifty-eight human names are on the register…”
The stone shifted violently under our feet, and a fissure opened up from one side of the room to the other that crawled uncomfortably up both walls and ended halfway across the ceiling.
“All of you, down the lift, now!” I yelled. “Yari, get—”
“Way ahead of you, babe.” She grabbed the tiny Kaiju and ran to one of the open archways fac
ing the red glow of death below.
The ding of the lift sounded from below and I turned to face Yari. All I could see was a sea of blood and her tanned silhouette in the inky darkness.
“He’s speaking to me,” she said.
“What long-winded bullshit story is it now?”
“He says we will know that it was Enkiru who broke the chains of blah blah blah. He named his Kaiju, Enkiru. The rest is just more of the same.”
A white membrane slid across Enkiru’s eye from right to left. Pulling back from view, the air whistled and boomed from far off to the right. Sound streamed toward us like some locomotive beast out of control. The room jerked, tilted hard left, and kept tilting.
“Grab my hand!” she yelled, holding onto Midori and Aoi. I ran and slid to her as the top of the building listed. In freefall, totally out of control, we grabbed hands and our purpose was one.
Our bodies vanished. We swirled through a vortex of light and color and finally came to a stop in two places at once. One green cave and one blue, with a hole that we could see out of. Yari and I were inside Midori and Aoi at the same time, tiny bodies tumbling through the air.
Yari’s voice swept through my mind. “I am connecting you to both Midori and Aoi. You are both of them with me. You will feel what they feel, but if they die, I will, too.”
“What about me?”
“I think you know the answer to that. Fate wouldn’t give us this power if it meant we could be together in death. You will lose me forever. So, don’t.”
I began strategizing the least dangerous course of action for our pint-sized Kaiju. It amounted to a plan of sticking the big boy with as many sleepy Aoi needles in its foot as I could and flying around its eyeballs scratching at them with Midori.
Yari had been following along with me. “That’s a cute plan,” she said, “but remember when I stopped you from dying?”
“Hard to forget, babe.”
“Well, I felt the rot inside of you and forced my energy against it, pushing it back and holding it in place long enough for you to not die. I learned the expansion of my energies.”
“Right, but I’m good, now.”
“Sometimes, a tool is good for more than one job. Watch this.”
The debris falling with us went white with heat, stalled in midair, then blasted out in all directions. The two tiny Kaiju burned bright white in the air. The light expanded rapidly as everything around was consumed by brilliance.
When the light faded, the vantage points from the two cave-like apertures I looked out from had completely changed. One set of eyes was even with the halfway point of the tower, the other with the clouds streaking past.
Then I felt the size, weight, and strength of both the formerly tiny Kaiju. I was swept away in their new form and I watched as they moved through the ravaged landscape. Revenge was heavy on their breath.
Aoi’s legs had become massive jackhammer pistons that deformed the ground underneath him. He was half a million tons of ripped muscle and unbreakable bone but if he jumped, he might never come down. His small quills had transformed into a forest of razor-sharp swords glistening in blue venom.
The Spire was ruined. A jagged and shabby ceremonial shiv left thrusting toward the heavens.
Through the clouds and mist, what looked like God’s arrow shot up from the planet and broke into the warm rays of the Levani suns. Hanging still in the air with wings spread wide enough to span the Spire from ground to tip, Midori brought them together and cleared the oceans of grey off the Occupation territory below with a howl of hurricane force winds. Her soft, furry face had become a hardened, weaponized beak of death, and her talons were one-fifth of her entire body size.
Midori saw it below.
Lidless slits, soulless and engorged with rage, looked back at her. It must’ve had to bend over to look into the tower like it had. Twice the height of the unbroken Spire, even above the clouds, it could’ve easily plucked her out of the sky. Midori circled, then pulled up to distance herself from the terror.
It was some kind of humanoid-reptile mix, cloaked in black almond shaped discs of armor for skin and a wiry chain of bone for a tail that sent parts of the settlement flying into the air as it whipped and lashed the landscape. Standing upon two mountains of twitching slick power that sunk into the earth, cracks in the floating island spider-webbed out around it.
“Doesn’t look very mobile,” I said.
“Don’t be too sure—”
The behemoth looked up, bent its mighty legs, blurred, and then it was gone. The green cave I watched from went dark. It appeared in front of Midori at chest level, pulling its land mass of an arm back hard. Midori pitched down but was too late. The arm blurred and then reappeared as it slammed into her. One second, she was shrieking in pain, the next she was a sliver of green flashing in the sky before exploding into the earth below.
She struggled to get up. Her body lifted, but her head dropped and her wings slipped inside the crater walls. She tried again and found her footing but listed to the right. She shook it off and swung her mighty wings to take off. The debris around the pit she’d created choked the air around her.
Earth buckling under its weight, Enkiru landed on the crater rim with both hands, gnarled impossibly thick, clasped over its head. Again, the shimmering before the attack, but the hands appeared only halfway through the arc of death as Aoi’s legs loaded up and exploded, spinning him through the air and slamming him into the super-Kaiju’s knotted fields of chest bulk. He had lodged himself and nearly half his spines into his target.
With a hurricane-inducing exhale and scream, the same massive hands avalanched down on Aoi’s body. Enkiru wrenched the blue beast from its chest, raised its arms, blurred, and put him into the foundations of the island that CONTROL was built upon.
A fount of reddish-yellow gushed from Aoi’s mouth, but he was still alive. Midori had managed to get airborne but the super-Kaiju’s dead serpent eyes followed her arc across the sky as it prepared for another jump.
From our green and blue viewpoints, I watched a solitary beam of golden light tear through the air of the destroyed settlement and bury itself in the jaw of the super-Kaiju. I knew it was the girls. Midori’s eyesight was laser perfect. Pusi, B, and Lana manned an array of Old-Tech cannons that had survived Tawa’s nightmare’s final birth into the world.
Aoi was on his feet and ran headlong at the distracted nightmare fuel.
When two more volleys followed and ricocheted off Enkiru’s armor, it vanished again. Midori slowed and braced for an attack, but it never came. In the distance, across the barren ruins of the Occupation’s territory, we heard an explosion.
“Remember what I said about Yare?”
“That she is part of you, now?”
Then a second explosion.
“Yes…”
Pusi and B ran from fire and destruction to either side of the third cannon tower. The shadow cast by the beast stretched over the length of gorge and touched the edge of the Levani territory.
The super-Kaiju’s balance shifted as Aoi appeared in another leap produced by his muscle-coiled legs and slammed into the back of its knee. At the same time, Midori appeared at full speed, talons out and burying into the side of its serpentine scaled neck.
Buildings and CONTROL-sanctioned forest park alike ceased to exist under Enkiru’s meteoric impact. There were no shimmering parts this time. Under great labor of cyclone breath and terraforming limb movement, slowly it began to stand and right itself.
“Midori in a dive is as much a weapon as Aoi’s spines. She might be able to pierce its skin if there’s an opening,” Yari’s voice was a calming force in the chaos in front of us.
“Big if.”
Then Enkiru’s bone tail shuddered and lashed into action, whipping Midori out of the sky on a shrieking path into the gorge mists. Aoi was on the move when it whipped at him next, just missing as he ducked and slid across the broken cityscape. He launched and balled up at the monster again,
spikes spinning into a sawblade of poison and death.
I saw the spines already embedded in the super-Kaiju’s chest. If I hammered them again, I thought maybe there was a chance they could break past the armor into its flesh.
Then it vanished. Aoi hit the dirt and slid to a stop. His spines stood straight on end as he took off. Feet and claws tearing into the rubble, he sped away as far as he could get from the girls.
A moment later, it fell from the sky like an angel of death and drove Aoi into the floating island. Its hands wet with orange blood, it turned downwind to its last prey, the cannon mount that the girls were in.
29
One set of eyes was blurred and half-closed, the other lost in the mists.
Enkiru’s thunderheads of steam hissed and roared from its widening maw. The low thrum shook the ground and grew louder and louder. Winds screamed off the summit of an untraversable and inhospitable mountain range of teeth and pure rage, then silence and all seemed gone from the world.
I thought I saw movement from the girls’ direction. Something small, and black, much faster than anything could run.
Whatever came out of Enkiru next, no tech could’ve produced. It was as if someone had caged a coronal ejection and pointed it toward Pusi, B, and Lana. The world turned white. Light consumed every corner and curve of the broken building, leaving nowhere for shadows to hide. The world was gone.
White turned to grey as the light faded. The nothingness lifted, and I saw what the fire that Saiina talked about was capable of—a trench fifteen stories deep gouged out of the earth, and reaching straight out to the horizon. Every Levani still alive would know all was not right.
Aoi coughed up a ball of coagulated orange the size of my company housing unit then slowly lifted his battered body. He began to crawl out of the hole Enkiru put him in. Keeping one eye on the monster, and one eye forward, he made it out. The haze that had collected around the window I saw out of was beginning to clear, but I felt how close he was to the end. My body was sheathed in the armor of the Father, but even with it on, I was on my knees looking out at the world. Without it, I knew I would’ve been long dead.
