The goddess stiffened. “It knows my name.”
I raised the Howler.
“No,” the girl blurted out. “I want to hear what else it has to say.”
“I don’t answer to you.” But I lowered the gun all the same.
Aranth, it croaked, I felt, directly into my brain. Heal the breach at the heart of the world. The Cruel Kingdom hungers. Sacrifice overthrows chaos. Sacrifice heals the Breaking. Help us. Help us. Help us—his voice rose into a near screech, almost painful to hear—Help us help us HELP US HELP US HELP—
I fired. The shot went wide before I remembered the Howler’s precision was down to shit, and I swore.
And then I saw a rapid swirl of dirt-whipped wind behind him, bearing down on us, and the mirage promptly became the least of our worries.
My stomach clenched. The air was always motionless in the dunes, but sandstorms were a different story, sweeping in from the west ever since the world split, fueled by pockets of wild magic that had nowhere else to go. They came without warning, always seemingly out of nowhere, and the sharp, corrosive dust swirling within could cut you from the inside out, if you didn’t suffocate first. There was nowhere to take cover except beside the beached whale—and there was no way in a thousand infernos that the Sun Goddess would allow me near that. Few people could outrun these storms, but I cursed and turned, prepared to try anyway.
A hand closed over my arm; with surprising strength for someone barely half my size, the Sun Goddess dragged me toward the aspidochelone and shoved me against a cushion of blubber, up against the corpse’s massive jaw. I was stunned enough to let her. “Don’t move!” she snapped.
Already the storm was bearing down on us both. I gritted my teeth and curled up as much as I could, trying to fit into as small a space as my body could physically allow for. Arjun, the mirage wailed, a horrifying sound—and then it was gone, swallowed up by the approaching chaos.
When the dust storm hit, it felt like a punch to every exposed part of my body all at once, strong enough for the dead whale to rock on its base. The Sun Goddess shoved her hands into the soil, and the winds parted before her, just wide enough that they flowed swiftly to either side of us. She’d diverted the gale, but it wasn’t enough to prevent wayward slices of sand from nicking us, biting into flesh and leaving bloody cuts in their wake. My armor wasn’t made for sandstorms, but I had better protection than the girl beside me, who was making soft, choked sounds as the wind scraped against her unprotected skin.
I didn’t want to. No way, no hell. I’d no obligation to help her, not even when she . . .
I growled and yanked her into my arms, pressing her face against my chest while I buried my nose against her hair, pinning her between me and the whale. To her credit, she kept up the barrier, her whole form trembling from the exertion.
It took mere minutes for the center of the maelstrom to hit us, several more before we were out of the danger zone. The storm spun away, leaving us gasping for breath and up to our knees in stones and grit.
Everywhere itched. I could feel sand down the back of my neck, pooling around my waist, running down the backs of my legs. I groaned, trying to shift into a more comfortable position. A pair of hands pressed against my shoulders, and I looked down to see the girl staring back at me, wide-eyed.
“You didn’t need to do that.” She sounded exhausted. Up close, her eyes were even prettier; no longer flashing with an incanta gate, they were almost colorless. She was smudged in grime like I was, but her short hair continued to move independently of any gust of wind, running the gamut of colors from yellow to brown to even green. “I thought you wanted to kill me.”
Furious—at myself, mostly—I pushed her away. “Let’s not make any assumptions just ’cause I didn’t, woman.” More sand had gotten into the Howler, making it useless for anything until I’d scrubbed it out and repaired the metal, both of which would take hours of work. I stared at it as my mind worked frantically, trying to figure out what to say—I don’t owe you a goddamn thing despite this, maybe, or I was trying to murder you, so why spare my life? or even just What the fuck is going on?—but in the end, I opted for the simplest choice. “Why did you save me?”
She studied me, some of those wayward locks falling over her eyes. Even at the height of the storm, even when the sand had been at its thickest, her hair had smelled fresh, scented with a fragrance I couldn’t identify. “I don’t kill,” she said again, simply. Her gaze wandered back to the bloated whale-corpse. “The man. Where did he go?”
“I’m guessing when the sandstorm formed, it took the rest of the specter’s energies along with it.”
“He talked of a twin. A sister, and an Aranth. I—” Her voice shook. “But I don’t have a sister. Did he mean Mother? She had a twin before. . . .”
“Before your mother up and killed her, you mean.”
Her face flamed, her anger evident. “No! My mother had to kill her. Her sister broke the world, not us. But why would a mirage know anything about—why would it know my name—unless—” Her fists clenched, unclenched. “Why am I explaining this to you? You won’t believe me, anyway.”
She was right; I didn’t.
A new sound met our ears—this time it was a rumbling, ominous noise, and it sounded like it was coming from somewhere inside the hulking cadaver two feet away.
We moved on instinct, reaching the same conclusion at the same time. We tore across the desert at high speed, trying desperately to put as much distance as we could between us and the whale. The sibilating sounds rose to near-deafening intensity, like steam rattling out of a kettle spout. A very large, two-hundred-ton, hundred-foot-long kettle.
We managed about twenty yards before everything exploded.
I threw myself forward. The goddess did the same, and we lay unmoving in the dirt with our hands over our heads. I smelled more than felt the viscera raining down around us, the splat splat splat of entrails hitting dirt until there was one final goosh that trailed off into silence.
Once the worst was over, I snuck a quick glance back at the aspidochelone—or what was left of it. The blowout took most of its stomach, but the head and parts of its tail remained intact. If it had been quietly decomposing the last couple of days, then the gases inside must have built up to alarming levels. The sandstorm had only hastened the inevitable outcome. If the girl planned on resurrecting the monster still, she was going to have to work doubly hard after this.
The goddess in question was a mess. Blood was caked down one side of her. Giblets and some pieces of innards hung around her neck—hell if I wanted to know what they were. She looked ridiculous. I could only imagine that I looked the same, from the way she was gaping back at me.
And then, irrationally, she began to giggle. The bits of blubber clumped in her hair slid down her face, and for some reason that triggered my own quick burst of laughter—like we hadn’t been trying to kill each other five minutes before. The comedy of it all, knowing we’d come out of both storm and whale intact, was a temporary relief.
It didn’t last long.
An invisible wind knocked me off my feet, sending me sprawling onto my back. I was up on my knees in an instant with the Howler inches from her face. The barrel was hot against my skin, a clear sign it was damaged. What happened after pulling the trigger would be unexplored territory, potentially of the fiery kind. My other hand twitched toward a knife I kept hidden in my boot, slow enough so as not to attract her attention to it.