I paused. “And you’re very frank.”
She nodded at the barrel strapped to my limb. “I try to be. How long were you tracking me?”
“I wasn’t. I was following the water.” The Salt Sea was a deceptive name—it was a toxic dump posing as seawater, more gray than blue, three parts corrosion to one part brine. It took four hours for any of the Mudforgers to squeeze drinkable water from it, and the portions grew smaller with every passing week. It’d been six weeks since we’d found any fish safe to eat, and two years since we’d found anything bigger than a mackerel. It was a miracle anything of this size had survived this long. “You can’t bring it back from the dead. No one can.”
“I can. I just need time. But you won’t give me that either, will you?”
She hadn’t planned things through. Even if she could summon the beast back to life, unless she could whip up an ocean of water to go along with it, it’d suffocate in the air and die all over again. I’d rather harvest it for parts—blubber for candles and wax, whalebone for weapons and utilities, everything else that wasn’t rotting for meat—and also probably get around to shooting her before I started.
“No,” I admitted quietly. “I won’t.”
I watched those magnificent eyes change color, the silver of her irises switching to green terra-gates as Earth sparked about her, replacing the patterns of Light. “Do you still plan on killing me?”
Sky and land, ripped in two. The heart of a goddess’s twin, eaten. A lifetime of wasteland.
“Sorry,” I said, and raised the Howler. My own patterns of Fire blazed into being around me, and I funneled them through the barrel, hearing them multiplying and ricocheting off each other inside the steel chamber until I’d worked them up into an explosive, furious heat. I pulled the trigger, and my fire-gates flared.
She threw herself to one side, and the shot screamed past, missing her completely. Her fingers dug into the whale’s rubbery hide, and I lost my footing as the ground rocked underneath me. I was a Firesmoker down to my bones, and as a Firesmoker I’d die. But Sun Goddesses could change their incanta, could shift from Mistshaper to Shardwielder to Earthshaker as easily as the rest of us changed clothes. Whichever way you looked at it, it was cheating.
But the small, short-lived earthquake was meant to knock me off-balance, not kill. She wasn’t taking me seriously.
I ripped off another shot before the ground broke my fall, and she leaped. The blast brushed against the dead whale’s side and missed her by a few inches. It was at least a fifteen-foot plunge, but she hit the ground rolling with an ease that suggested practice, and scrambled to her feet just as I did. I lifted my gun again, and the fire-gates in her own eyes flared. Hissing streams of Water spewed forth from her fingers—aimed not at me, but at my Howler. I felt the faint sizzle of acid striking the barrel, and with a grunt I jerked it back out of her reach.
My eyes flicked to the dead whale, saw her hand still braced against its side. An Acidsmith incanta—she’d drawn out patterns of Water through her fire-gate instead of the usual Fire, and the result was poison instead of flames. There was nothing in the dry, heated air for her to pull fluid out from, but the liquid pollutants still swimming around inside the decomposing aspidochelone were a creative alternative, albeit a disgusting one. I was wrong—she was smart. She was resourceful with her incanta. It was a good enough reason to want her dead.
“I don’t die easily,” she snapped, panting. The toxin had melted the Howler’s tip and part of its iron sights, which meant anything I fired out of it now would be sans accuracy. She could have just as easily flung the acid in my face; I’d be dead at the worst, and incapacitated at the least. She glared at me, reading the unspoken question in my eyes. “I don’t kill easily, either,” she bit out.
“You’ve already killed us.”
She shook her head. “You don’t understand.”
“There’s nothing to understand. We’re chasing a dying sea under an endless sun that kills us with a thousand little cuts every day. There’ll be nothing left soon. Nothing but sand and bone.” I jerked my stump, white and mottled from old burns and worse, toward the whale. “Your kind killed us the day your mother decided her revenge meant more than our lives, and you’ll both kill more of us before you’re done.”
She brought her hand down on the beast’s hide again, the angry slap echoing across the sand. “You don’t understand! If something as enormous as an aspidochelone could live this long, then what’s to say there aren’t more of them? That maybe there’s more of everything else? That studying how could mean a chance for the rest of us, too? I know we can’t bring things back to the way they were before the Breaking, but what if there was some other way to save the world?”
“And how do you propose to save Aeon? Create more water? Purify the toxins in the Salt Sea? Not even your mother could do that. Bring every creature back to life?” I looked up at the hulking carcass and sneered. “Yeah, I can tell you’ve done a fine job there, woman.”
She stared at me, at a loss for words. I gripped my damaged Howler and took a step forward. A few more, and I’d be close enough to touch her if I wanted to, wouldn’t have to worry about missing the shot. Of course, she could have cracked the barrel badly enough that the gun could potentially explode in my hand—not like I had a hand there to worry about. . . .
A new sound tore my attention away from her—a low, harsh moan. We turned to look out at the desert, where a figure dressed in black was staggering toward us.
He wore no armor, nothing heavier than a warm cloak and breeches, sewn in a style unfamiliar to me. He wore a cowl too thick for the weather, blue vertical strips lining either side of it. The closest thing to identification that I could see was a silver brooch—a star, from the looks of it—pinned to his chest. He carried no supplies and stumbled as he walked. Out here alone, he should already have been dead. I’d seen enough remains of kinsmen who hadn’t survived solar burns to know he could not have traveled any great length through the barren lands and still be walking. He was either an extremely lucky man, or . . .
The Sun Goddess took a step forward, no doubt intending to help.
“He’s not human,” I rasped.
She looked puzzled for a moment, before her eyes widened. “A mirage?”
“Looks like it.” Mirages were more than illusions. Mother Salla believed they were souls unable to pass over, doomed to wander until the world was either healed or utterly destroyed. They were dangerous more often than not; they attracted patterns in the same way steel attracted lightning, and they left natural disasters in their wake.
The being was pale, its arms outstretched. As it drew closer, I saw that I was right. Mirages had no eyes; empty sockets stared back at us, and the goddess cried out in horror.
Its jaw worked, the skin so thin that I could see the flesh tearing while it spoke, the voice loud in the stillness. A twin, it croaked, and I had the strangest sensation that although its mouth was moving, the words were coming from somewhere else. Already I could see Earth patterns dancing around it, working themselves into a frenzy. A twin. Many-haired twin. Haidee.
Crap. Mother Salla never said mirages could talk.