Jie didn’t reply.
At first, Da thought she slept, and he was glad of it. Since the ambush, most of her waking moments had been marred by pain and fatigue. But then he saw how clear the air was in front of her mouth and nose—clear and undisturbed, when it should have been fogged by each exhalation.
Except there were no exhalations.
“Jie!” he shouted, leaping into the back of the cart and fumbling in his pouch for the dried peony petals he’d saved from the Garden of Benevolent Tranquility. “Wake up!” He found the petals and injected a little of his jing into each one, hoping that renewing them would sharpen the scent his sister had once said she loved more than any other.
It didn’t work.
Neither did six rapid compressions of her chest.
“Amadi!” he yelled, gathering Jie in his arms and lifting her out of the cart. “Do it now! He has to do it now!”
In his haste, Da had spoken in Mandarin. But when he ran back to the mine entrance, it only took the Afrii a glance to understand the urgency.
“Come,” he said to Urcon, leading the boy to Da and his limp sister. “Take her hand.”
The boy gripped her left hand and Amadi her right, then joined their free hands together to form a three-race triangle. Their arms pressed against Da as well. He fought the impulse to recoil from the touch of the man who’d pounded down that Metica City causeway like an avenging yaoguai. But Mateo had returned from the overseers’ office with Isaura and Bolin, his arm around the child and his rifle pointed at the mother. They still had the advantage.
Not that any of it mattered if Jie was beyond reach.
She’d been fine a few minutes ago. Weak—weaker than ever. Probably no more than a few days from funeral candles. But stable. Better than she’d been since collapsing after the ambush.
And now, seconds away from salvation, from fulfilling the vision she’d had six months ago in the earthen pyramid’s shadow, she was dying—or dead already.
“Do it quickly!” Da pleaded.
Urcon looked at Amadi, who shrugged and nodded. They both shut their eyes.
Nothing happened.
“Please,” Da whispered. His gaze never left Jie’s face, but he was aware of how many other people watched her too. Isaura, slanted away from Bolin. Haru, newly emerged from the mine. And Chase, his features flushed with anguish.
The Anglo was right to be ashamed. This was his fault. Burning Urcon had delayed everything, costing them precious minutes. “You will be the base for my next dragon,” Da muttered under his breath, trembling with grief and rage and everything in between. “Jie will still need one when she’s healthy—and she will be healthy.”
But what if she wasn’t? What if he’d journeyed all this way, rationalizing heinous act after heinous act, for nothing? What if …
What if he’d hastened this outcome by sporing her?
“Try harder!” Da shouted. If he hadn’t been holding Jie, he would have shaken the Afrii, then the boy, then choked Chase for good measure.
Amadi opened his eyes. “What am I doing wrong?” he asked Urcon.
The boy opened his eyes too, glanced at Jie, and gave her left hand to Amadi. Then Urcon took her right hand. A second later, he traded the hands back and raised his gray-brown eyebrows. But the Afrii just looked puzzled.
Da swallowed a scream. He’d been holding Jie for what felt like hours now, yet she was so light he barely felt the strain. An image came to him of his sister as an upturned hourglass, delicate and running out of sand. Running out of time.
Would sporing the boy help? But the infected were often useless initially, their bodies overwhelmed by the fungi’s surge of dominance. No, too risky. Better to use leverage.
“Isaura,” Da said, “if Jie isn’t better in ten seconds, take Mateo’s knife and cut off your boy’s left foot.”
The words were monstrous. He knew that. But he also knew the sand was running out for Jie.
“Shen Da,” Amadi growled, “if you make Isaura hurt her child, I will feed you your sister’s heart. Now shut up so we can try again.”
The Afrii closed his eyes once more, as did Urcon.
And finally, something began to happen.
A warm, thick energy blanketed Da’s skin, built to an inexorable pressure, and sank inside him. He gasped as the force filled him from top to bottom, pooling in his chest and soothing his ravaged lungs. The sensation was like … being inhabited by the Tao. It didn’t make sense, but there was no other way to describe it.
If this was the secondary effect, what was Jie feeling as the focus? How wonderful must it be to—
Not breathe. Jie still wasn’t breathing.
“It’s wrong!” Da howled.
Amadi laughed and reopened his eyes. “Don’t you feel better?”
“This is no game!”
“No,” the Afrii agreed, dropping Jie’s hand. “It’s not.” His voice had taken on a strange rustling quality.
Da twisted so that his sister’s fingers brushed Amadi’s again, but he ignored them, and Urcon let go of her other hand. “Heal her!”
The Afrii crossed his arms.
So be it. “Isaura, take Mateo’s knife and—”
“She doesn’t have to do what you say,” Amadi interrupted. “None of them do. Not anymore.”
Jie didn’t have time for this. “Isaura!” Da barked as he whirled to get a better look at the Espan, expecting her to be drawing a blade from Mateo’s belt. Instead, the mercenary wore a bemused expression as he let her pull Bolin from his grasp.
The look of rapture on Isaura’s face was all Da needed to confirm Amadi’s claim. “What did you do?”
The Afrii smiled, uncrossed his arms, and punched Da in the face.
He couldn’t dodge it, not without dropping Jie. And he couldn’t let himself fall with her, even though Amadi had probably broken his nose.
The Afrii flexed his fingers, just as he had after slugging Chase. “It’s been a long time since it hurt to hit someone. It feels good.”
Da half-expected blood to dribble down his chin, but none came. Instead, it was Amadi’s mouth that reddened, leaking little crimson teardrops from each corner. And when Da tried to reach for his jing, it was gone, pressed out by the thick energy. “What did you DO?”
The Afrii finished shaking his hand out and rested it on Urcon’s shoulder. “As best I can tell, the boy is a trader. He can’t just acquire a property from something else, though. He has to make an exchange. And he’s an honest trader. The swap has to be for roughly equal value. Like the mine’s colors for his own: he can’t keep both.”
“Heal her!” Da repeated, thrusting Jie’s body at Amadi. How long had it been since she drew breath? Was she too far gone? Why wasn’t he healing her?
“And when he needed my spirit armor,” the Afrii continued, “he had to give me something of comparable worth. So he gave me his ability to trade. That wasn’t the plan, but we made it work.”
Urcon nodded, then knelt so he could touch the ground.
“You were the trader,” Da said dully, Jie’s weight—slight as it was—finally beginning to tell on his arms.
“Not a very good one.” Amadi pivoted to survey the others, and Da followed his gaze. Chase was staring at Jie, tears rippling his ruddy face. Isaura was crying too, twirling with Bolin and singing softly to him as he giggled. Haru had gestured for Mateo and his comrades to leave, and they seemed happy to comply. “I couldn’t trade with myself,” Amadi went on after spitting out a gob of blood. “I guess that’s harder—I couldn’t assume your powers to command; Urcon was supposed to give them to me. But I was able to fumble them to him instead.”
At the sound of his name, the boy looked up from the patch of shockingly green grass he’d just grown. He had jing now? Da’s legs trembled under the weight of his disbelief.
The Afrii wiped his mouth on his sleeve and motioned to Haru. “Will you help me hold this jackal down? I have one more trade to make.”
&nbs
p; The Nippon grinned, showing more teeth than lip. “Gladly.”
Da blinked. His thoughts were as thick as the energy Amadi had injected him with. What was happening? Why was everything going wrong? He’d waited more than a year for this moment, and now it was …
Now it was dust.
Amadi took a step toward him, stumbled, and took another.
Don’t wallow. Think.
Haru closed in from the side.
You can’t command them now. Without your jing, the bond between your spores and theirs’ is gone. Think!
Chase rubbed his eyes and turned away.
You can’t summon vines either, or join these tricksters’ feet to the earth. THINK!
But if Urcon had flipped his trading ability for Amadi’s spirit armor, and Amadi had used that ability to give the boy jing, then that meant …
“I have your spirit armor,” Da said as he set Jie down, looked one last time for the rise and fall of her chest, and balled his fists.
Amadi shrugged, blood streaming from his mouth now. “Not for long.”
Da felt the thick energy pulsing in him, arming him, buffering him. “You can’t hurt me,” he snarled, his vision narrowing to the tall Afrii and nothing else. “But you still have my arrow in you, and I can hurt you—I can finally hurt you.”
Then he charged.
Pain pierced his left leg before he’d taken two steps—Haru had hamstrung him with her bone-naginata. But only temporarily: the thick energy surged to repair the damage, and his stride barely wavered. An arrow of water from Isaura struck him next, punching through his chest. Yet he hadn’t finished gasping before the hole closed, and he was nearly on Amadi now, the man who’d let his sister die. Another step and—
Fire coated him like a second skin. The spirit armor withstood the heat, but the force of Chase’s fireball knocked Da back long enough for Haru to whip her bone-naginata’s shaft over his head and yank him down by his throat.
“Hold him!” Amadi wheezed as the flames vanished and he lurched forward. “We can finish him after I take back the spirit armor.”
“No!” a voice screamed from behind. “You leave my brother ALONE!”
The words were in Mandarin.
The voice was Jie’s.
So was the explosion of power that followed.
“Sister!” Da yelled as streaks of fire and water lanced past him and sent everyone else scrambling.
“Stay down!” she ordered.
But he popped up as soon as Haru’s bone-naginata lifted from his throat. And when he spun around, he witnessed his sister in the full glory of her magic.
At Chase, Jie hurled darts of ice. Nothing truly dangerous; she seemed content to keep him on the defensive, and he to be on it.
At Haru, Jie cast nets of jagged vines, pressing her only up to a certain point, even though the Nippon clearly had more aggressive intentions.
But at Isaura, Jie spun lines of fire, precisely targeted blasts that hammered at the Espan while staying clear of Bolin, who was sheltering behind her legs.
And at Amadi, Jie launched a swarm of missiles, hailing death at the man who’d taken her by the throat twice in the past four months.
Even more impressively, she was doing all this at superhuman speed, fighting four wu at once by mirroring their powers faster than all of them put together. That must be where Haru’s swiftness came in—Jie was tapping it to accelerate her wielding of Chase’s fire, Isaura’s water, and Urcon’s stolen jing.
Most importantly, Jie was standing. On her own, without the braces they’d left in the cart. She was standing, because she was finally mirroring the spirit armor.
“Yes,” Da breathed as he watched his sister dodge and duck and dance like she hadn’t in years. “Let it raise you up.”
His use of the spirit armor must have been the trigger, the spark she’d needed to reflect its curative abilities and bring herself back from the brink. But was the magic truly healing her? Or just sustaining the strain of directing so much energy, an orchestration she’d only managed once before, when the Red Wraith unleashed his titanic shamanry on the earthen pyramid? She’d passed out then. Best not to leave this time to chance. The more active the spirit armor was, the more likely she was to mirror it in full.
So Da threw himself into one of Isaura’s counter-streams.
The jet of water, pressurized to a fine edge, sliced him beneath his ribs, opening a slot big enough to put his hand through. It closed within seconds, disappearing in time for him to lurch into Chase’s flail of fire. The heat seared him like a slab of meat, but the spirit armor buffered him again, refreshing what should have been his crackling, blackened flesh. The protection held a moment later when a singing Haru flicked her bone-naginata in and out of his gut as she dashed past.
It felt godly.
Jie seemed to agree. Or maybe it was anger at seeing him injured so many times in rapid succession. She was advancing now, forcing the others back with a swelling assault that no longer spared Chase and Haru its intensity. They were still mostly unscathed, but Isaura’s hair and clothing smoked in several places, and Amadi’s left arm hung uselessly by his side as he tried to shield Urcon.
Seeing his enemies flounder filled Da with a jagged joy, yet it paled in comparison to what he felt watching Jie. She was winning this fight—by herself. And she looked healthy.
His baby sister was finally healthy.
“Thank you,” Da whispered as a vine caught Haru and wrenched her knee back at a debilitating angle.
“Thank you,” he said as a geyser erupted beneath Chase, rocketed him off his feet, and sent him crunching against the side of the mine.
“Thank you!” he shouted as Amadi took two ice darts in his chest, just above his reopened arrow wounds.
Yet Da wasn’t as grateful when a feint of fire distracted Isaura long enough for Jie to scoop Bolin up with a hand of water and deposit the boy in his arms. Holding the mewling child meant avoiding danger, and avoiding danger meant sidelining Amadi’s spirit armor. Would Jie continue mirroring the thick energy if it wasn’t in use?
“Get Bolin to safety,” Jie ordered. “I’ll deal with these traitors and kidnappers.”
“Puta!” Isaura roared. “Give me back my son!”
Da doubted Jie understood the Espan. His sister had been too frail to learn the language on the way here. But Chase’s calm reply was in Mandarin: “She’s right, Jie. The boy isn’t yours.”
“You lie!” Jie spat, ratcheting up her four-pronged assault to a degree none of her targets could survive much longer.
The Anglo warded off a fire-tinged ice javelin and struggled to stand. “The purple haze is gone. Think back to how we got the boy.” Four more javelins sailed towards him, and he nearly tripped deflecting them with bucklers of flame. “The Tao didn’t gift him to you. We stole him in the night. We are the kidnappers.”
Jie sailed another brace of steaming javelins at Chase. “Bolin is mine!”
He blocked this flurry too, but its force knocked him over, and he looked poorly positioned to withstand another volley. Yet his tone remained resigned, sympathetic—loving. “His name is Shoteka. He was Isaura’s before he was yours. If you don’t remember that, you’re choosing not to. Again.”
“No!” Jie screamed, her voice cracking.
Even so, she might have finished him—and Haru, Isaura, and Amadi, each of whom seemed at least as overmatched—if Bolin hadn’t cried out. But something about the boy’s plaintive voice and its notes of real fear cut through Jie’s fury, and she hesitated.
“Keep fighting!” Da urged. Keep mirroring the spirit armor! Don’t stop until you’re fully healed!
Yet when she looked at him, he knew it was over. Her eyes were filled with too much memory for it to be otherwise, too much guilt. “What did you make me do?” she whispered.
“Jie …”
“Coward,” she hissed. “Liar. Monster.”
He gestured frantically at the other wu. “If you stop fig
hting, you’ll die!”
“Then let me!” Her lines of ice and fire shifted, redirecting so that they pointed at Da, some hovering only inches above his head. “I am NOT one of your experiments! I am NOT a plaything to be grafted on and manipulated!”
Da braced himself for the coming blows, welcoming them if they meant his sister would continue channeling the spirit armor. “Everything I did was to help you.”
“You made me steal a child.” Jie took a sharp step toward him. “Worse, you made me want to.”
“Watch your back.” Free of the vines now, Haru was on the move again, albeit limping badly. Isaura was advancing too.
Jie ignored his warning. “Coward,” she said, taking another step, this one far less steady than the first. “Liar,” she added, her magic flickering. “Monster,” she closed, swaying alarmingly—she’d stopped mirroring too soon. “But not a brother.”
Then his sister collapsed.
And, hurt in a way the spirit armor couldn’t repair, Da fled into the Mine of Death, dimly aware that Bolin was still in his arms and wailing louder with each step.
Chapter Thirty-Three
The Mine of Death
“Shen Da!” Isaura yelled. “LET HIM GO!”
She raced after the Han, ignoring the way her body wanted to list to the left. Her head injuries weren’t going to slow her down. Not now. Not while her baby cried for her.
Haru tried to keep pace, but her knee injury negated her speed.
“Help Amadi,” Isaura panted. “And don’t let Chase or that puta do anything stupid.”
The Nippon hesitated, then fell back as Amadi sank to his knees and Isaura entered the mine. With her aim so unsteady, she hadn’t trusted herself to bring water near Shoteka. But as the dark closed around her, she regretted not taking a shot at Shen Da while he’d been visible.
She could still hear Shoteka, though, still feel his terror at being kidnapped yet again, yanked back and forth like a damn trophy. And right after she’d held him. He was so much bigger, but as ever, he’d fit against her as if tailored for it.
The Black Resurrection Page 27
