The Traitor, Part 2

Fort Bloodland, Missouria, Northern Union.
September 4th, 1765.
Eighteen months and thirteen days after the Seattle landings.

They lined up for inspection while Sergeant First Class Kamau prowled past the platoon. Despite the sudden change of uniform, fatigues were fatigues the world over, and the rest of the platoon had helped make sure they knew how to lace their boots. By Vaya’s count, there were exactly two men (well, people with masculine-pattern SIBs, not “men” per se) in the platoon of thirty-something soldiers. Everyone else had changed. The gender brigade, she chuckled to herself. Given the size of the company and the fact that none of them had been there more than a month, Vaya figured the PDT must have captured at least a few thousand conscripts in the last push.

“Private! Do you find something humorous in this inspection?”

Uh oh. “No Sergeant.” Vaya tried to stand up a little straighter.

She walked— no, stalked closer. Vaya wasn’t quite sure how she managed to move like she was a two-ton quadrupedal predator in a human body, but she managed. The sergeant looked her up and down.

“Well, how about we—” She cut off, noticing something. “Private, why do you have a bruise?” She motioned towards a spot on Vaya’s neck. “What did I say about bruises on my soldiers?”

Vaya tried to keep a straight face. She knew how that one had gotten there, and it hadn’t been hazing. Quite the opposite, in fact. “Um. That’s from, uh…”

She grinned. “You have fun, soldier?”

“Wha—”

She dropped to a more casual tone. “Next time, use a different body for formation. You have three for a reason.”

“Yes, sergeant.”

“Good! By the grins I’m seeing on some of you, I assume you’ve all introduced yourselves to your new coworkers. We’ve got one main order of business today: CQCP. We’ve been allocated a bunch of chamber time, so the gloves are coming off. Let’s go!”

Sergeant Kamau shifted and took off, with the rest of the platoon following suit. Vaya hadn’t even flown yet— she’d barely even worn her scales for more than half an hour since she’d gotten them yesterday.

Arya had already shifted next to her. “Just switch to the Sprinter, jump, and flap. You’ve got muscle memory, you’ll be fine,” they thrummed, their voice pulsing directly into her bones. Dragonspeech was still new to her— well, all of them really. Nobody outside of the NCOs had been here for more than a month or two.

Vaya took a breath, then brushed the little lump of herself that was wings and speed, feeling reality twist as she melted into a sleek, aerospace-gray dragon. She stepped forward to clear some space, spread her wings, then jumped and pushed and—

And she was flying. She could feel the massive muscles in her chest pulling with each wingbeat, wing membranes gripping the air like bubblegum on asphalt. Vaya looked down as she gained altitude, and for the first time in her life, didn’t feel her stomach drop out from under her.

It was freedom, she realized. She could go anywhere, survive anywhere.

Well, that wasn’t quite right. She couldn’t go anywhere. A third of the planet would summarily execute her for what she was, and if the transhumans lost the war, it’d be a lot more than just a third of the planet. So she had one place to go, and that was with her newfound allies.

“Uh, what did she mean when she said the gloves were coming off?” Sona asked, breaking Vaya out of her reverie.

The sparring rings were simple pits of sand positioned not too far from the building where she’d become… well, not transhuman. That had happened unceremoniously in a field hospital somewhere. But a few hundred meters away was where she had become herself. It wasn’t an impressive building; barely two stories tall if you included the big concrete structure for the resonator attached to the side, and there were probably dozens or hundreds just like it scattered around the world. But it was still special, all the same.

She landed with ease, gliding down, pivoting her wing-shoulders at the last moment to flap forward— reverse thrust, just like an airliner —and lightly touched down. Flight had come naturally to her, just like it was supposed to. It felt strangely disappointing, to know that she wouldn’t have to struggle to learn how to be something so different.

“Alright, are we missing anyone?” Sergeant Kamau asked. She had shifted back to human, even as the rest of the platoon milled around in their scales. “Okay, I guess not. Most of you have done this before, but the new kids haven’t, so listen up. This is CQCP, Close Quarters Combat Program. If you did combatives training in basic, this is similar but a lot bloodier. Bodies are cheap, so we’re going to mess ours up. Private Fan, you’ve earned the first round. Step into the ring with me, please.”

The woman— or dragoness? Vaya wasn’t quite sure of the language to use when someone wasn’t human —shouldered through the crowd and stepped into the ring.

Sergeant Kamau continued her explanation, addressing the platoon. “There are four rules, as always. These rules are to keep you alive. You will follow them or I will make you regret it. If anyone breaks one of these rules, your match and the rest of your afternoon is forfeit. Any questions there?” Some shaking of heads answered her.

“Good. Rule number one. You will not attack the head, period. It doesn’t matter how lightly, you will not touch each others skulls. Questions?” Vaya shook her head. Bodies were replaceable. Minds weren’t. That had been drilled into her over the last twelve or so hours that she’d been fully transhuman.

“Rule number two. No tail strikes above the shoulders, human or dragon. Too easy to have your aim wander. Other attacks to the neck are encouraged. Rule number three. No fire. We all know you can punch a slug through each others’ chests. And rule number four. Putting on a Sprinter means stop fighting. You need something left to go through the reset working. Fan, you ready?”

The dragoness nodded. “Ready.”

One of the others— Singh, her uniform read —nudged Vaya. “You know what Fan did?”

Vaya craned her neck up to get a better look of the ring. “What?”

“Got into a fight at some bar. Something with some reg’s girlfriend.”

“And this is the punishment?”

“Punishment? No, she won. This is a reward.”

The two of them took to opposite sides of the ring, each shifting into their Bladewyrms. The smooth grey of Fan’s Sprinter twisted and shimmered into mottled green scales, the barest iridescence visible through the camouflage coloring in the morning sunlight. The sergeant followed her lead, shifting into physically identical form, but with gray coloration. Urban camouflage, Vaya realized.

Immediately, she sensed the violence in the air. They were not moving like she had been yesterday, cautiously exploring her new body. The pair moved like coiled springs, their thin tails lashing back and forth as they circled each other. Then, suddenly—

They moved, almost faster than Vaya’s eye could follow. Their tails whipped as they lunged towards each other, each of their bladed tips trying to find an angle to slide under the others’ armored scales. Fan got the first “hit” in, a raking strike with her front claws… and Kamau just tanked it, crashing into the other dragon even as Fan’s claws tore her scales off. Fan wasted no time with the hole in her opponent’s armor, her bladed tail instantly flicking to plunge into the gap, each strike and withdrawal splattering bright red blood across the sand as the two wrestled on the ground.

Suddenly, the sergeant had Fan’s neck in her jaws. There was no hesitation, no demand for the other to yield— the second she had an angle, she bit down. Vaya gasped as she heard the vertebrae crunch and saw Fan go limp, her exhalation lost in the cheer that went up from the gathered crowd.

“Holy shit did she just—”

Fan shifted, returning to human form, and slapped the sand with her palm like she was in a wrestling match and hadn’t just been gruesomely almost-murdered. Sergeant Kamau backed off, giving Fan space as she rolled to her feet.

“Again?”

Sergeant Kamau’s response was to shift, a ripple of scales replacing her wounded form with a fresh one. Fan shifted and lunged again, diving at the sergeant’s throat with her claws. This time, the two scrabbled and clawed and disengaged, only to do it again and again, picking each other to death rather than going for a fatal blow. It wasn’t the casual sparring she’d seen in basic, or even the intensity of a street fight. The two of them were fighting full-bore, with almost nothing held back. Well, almost nothing. Even within the rules she’d laid out, the sergeant was clearly letting Fan take the initiative.

“Is she trying to tire Fan out?”

“No, that would take an hour or two. She’s going easy on her.”

“This counts as easy?!”

“If they were trying to kill each other, one of them would already be dead. This is just for fun, and they both know it.”

“Fun? They’re bleeding!”

Singh shrugged, “It doesn’t hurt much, combat forms have pain dampening.”

There was a snap sound, and Vaya turned her attention back to the ring. The two were bleeding, each missing patches of scales, and Fan’s tail-blade had been cracked by an unfortunately-angled strike.

“Oof,” Singh added, “that does actually hurt.”

The sergeant backed up a bit, as if she expected Fan to yield, but she was already in motion, a blur of scales lunging towards Kamau’s neck with an outstretched claw. The sergeant reacted instantly, jumping up and flicking her tail around.

But it was a feint. Fan was rotating mid-air even as the sergeant’s tail-blade sunk into her side, probably ruining something important. Vaya saw what she was trying to do a split second before it happened. The angle lined up just perfectly, and Fan lashed out with her hind leg just as she landed awkwardly on her back, bioceramic claws tearing Kamau’s throat out in a shower of crimson blood.

The platoon went wild. Sergeant Kamau returned to her Sprinter, signalling her surrender. Fan returned to human— even victorious, it sounded like that last hit had punctured a lung. She pumped her fist in victory as the sergeant addressed the crowd.

“Congrats to Private Fan for being the first of you lot to take a round off me. It better happen again, and it better be someone different next time!”

They had been broken out into smaller groups, spread across the dozen or so fighting rings. For their squad, the goal was simple: get comfortable with not pulling their punches, and get comfortable with life-threatening injury. Sergeant Kamau had come to coach them after a run through a reset ritual, starting them off with basic strikes on wooden blocks before turning them on each other.

Which was why Vaya was standing across the ring from Aaliya, who didn’t look nearly as comfortable in her scales as she did.

“Um. Sorry. It’s just—”

“Yeah. Come on, I’ll be fine, I already died once.” Or twice? Vaya really wasn’t sure. Some of the others considered their past selves actually dead, but they’d spent months or years knowing they were in the wrong body. She’d figured out she was in the wrong one less than six hours before fixing it. Her suffering was abstract, dulled by a memory of not knowing it was suffering; she hadn’t known but been forced to wait.

Aaliya took a step and swung her tail, a little uncertainly. Vaya couldn’t blame her, a Bladewyrm’s tail was a strange feeling. Getting used to six limbs hadn’t been too hard, since wings worked pretty much the same as human arms with stretched proportions, but the tail didn’t have an analogy in human anatomy.

Vaya sidestepped the slow-moving strike. Aaliya huffed, blowing smoke out of her nostrils. It looked cute on her, which was a strange thing to think about an engineered killing machine, but true nonetheless.

“Don’t make it harder!”

“It’s not supposed to be ea—” Vaya gasped as she dodged out of the way of the next swing. That had been a lot closer, and a lot faster.

“Oh, I think I get it now.” Aaliya didn’t swing her tail this time. She flicked it, just like how Fan and Kamau had done during their fight. Vaya lost sight of the blade on the tip a fraction of a second into Aaliya’s strike, only catching a glimpse of it when it sunk into her guts and protruded out her back.

Vaya wasted the remaining air in her lungs with a shocked exhalation. The surprising bit wasn’t really that she had five kilos of razor-sharp silicon carbide buried in her, it was that it didn’t really hurt any more than a papercut did. Well, that was the surprising bit right up until Aaliya pulled her tail back, and the jutting edge on her tail-blade ripped Vaya’s entrails out. She felt her blood pressure drop instantly, and knew that if she’d been baseline, she would have passed out in seconds. But instead of letting her black out, her body slammed shut engineered valves in her brain, giving her plenty of time to shift.

She vanished in a pulse of inside-out space, coalescing into herself, again. She felt a brief feeling of pride that she didn’t panic. No gasping for breath or patting herself down like Aisha or Citra had, just a brief glance to make sure that yes, this set of guts was still inside of her body.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, it wasn't that bad.” She could still feel the gaping hole, but it was more of an awareness that some part of her was injured rather than any actual pain. Vaya grimaced at the gore that covered the sand, and Sergeant Kamau handed her the rake.

While Vaya combed her own entrails out of the sand pit, Aaliya melted into a flicker of iridescence, reforming into her human body in a fraction of a second. Shifting apparently looked a little different for everyone, for reasons science hadn’t been able to answer yet. Aaliya’s was pretty, and Vaya was feeling a little jealous about it.

“My turn,” she said, tossing the rake off to the side. Vaya nudged the little bit of her soul that was fifteen hundred kilos of scales and sharp edges, feeling reality twist as her body melted into a weapon. She imagined flicking a safety lever off. “Ready?”

Aaliya nodded. Vaya angled herself the same way that Fan had, slightly to the side, giving her tail a little more reach. Her tail was nearly twice as long as her body, a prehensile limb built for the sole purpose of accelerating the blade on its tip to a lethal blur. She twisted her hips and flicked it towards Aaliya, aiming for center of mass.

Aaliya stepped to the side, just in time to evade a strike that would have gone straight through her sternum. “Oh, not so easy now, is it?”

“Are you actually taunting me?”

“What are you gonna do about it, stab me?”

Vaya responded with another strike, putting her heart into it this time. The series of powerful muscles along the side of her tail contracted, accelerating the blade to the point where she couldn’t see it so much as feel it. Sixty centimeters of carbide slid into Aaliya’s ribcage and out the back of her shoulder with a wet thunk.

“Quote from woman stabbed.” Even through the impact, Aaliya managed to deliver a smirk in response. Vaya pulled her tail back, feeling Aaliya’s heart and lungs shred as the back edge of her tail-blade tore its way out of her chest again. She shifted as she collapsed, picking herself up off her knees in a reconstituted body.

“You good?”

“Yeah, good as new. This is just…” Aaliya trailed off, trying to find the words.

Vaya laughed, or at least tried to, which came out as a draconic rumble. “It’s fucked.” Just like flight was freedom from the tyranny of the ground, this was freedom from something. Not quite true freedom from death or injury, but it felt like going from a balloon in a world of sharp edges to whatever the opposite of that was.

“Alright ladies, you’ve had your warmup round,” Sergeant Kamau interjected, “time for some actual fighting. Who’s volunteering to go first?”

Aaliya shifted back to a Bladewyrm without hesitation, flicking the blood on her tail-blade onto the sand. “Care to try on even footing this time?”

“Sure.” Vaya replicated the gesture, snapping her tail like a whip to clean the worst of Aaliya’s viscera off of herself. “Winner gets to be on top.”

“Damn girl,” Citra whistled as a blood-soaked Vaya shifted to her second Bladewyrm and stepped out of the ring, “you’re dangerous.”

She replied with a hissing growl. Her blood felt like it was burning, like if someone poured water on her it would hiss. It felt incredible.

And Citra’s statement was true. During her round with Aaliya, something had clicked. Her cautious probing had turned into relentless offense, and it had taken her precisely six seconds to learn that it felt really good to feel her friend’s blood running down her chin.

Sergeant Kamau had sent half of the squad at her, one after the other. She’d “killed” Citra before she could even get her bearings, clawing through her scales and puncturing her oxygen bladder with a stab of her tail-blade, then getting her jaws around her neck. Aisha had lasted longer, keeping her at bay with tail strikes, but since they were forbidden from going after the neck or head with their tails, it hadn’t done much to dissuade her. Kiran was the only one who’d put up a proper fight, shredding her flank and using their tail to introduce her heart and lungs to daylight, but not fast enough to prevent her from tearing out their throat with her last breath.

“Yeah? You okay in there?”

“Oh, I’m so okay.” She wasn’t even panting— her heart was pounding, but she wasn’t tired, just energized. She paced a bit, absentmindedly flicking her whip-like tail back and forth.

Kiran had swapped back to their Sprinter. “What happened? You weren’t this comfortable in scales last night.”

“Just… I think I get it now. Or like, I’m starting to get it.”

“What do you mean?” Citra asked, stepping out of the way as Vaya flicked her tail a little harder than normal, “and watch where you’re swinging that thing, Vaya.”

“Sorry. I mean, like, why Arya and Kiran are always in scales, not skin. I didn’t really get it with the Sprinter, but…”

Kiran bared some fangs in a rough approximation of a grin. “Oh, you get it,” they hummed.

“I get it?”

“Ever get the feeling like you want to bite someone just to feel them go crunch?”

“…so it’s not just me, then.”

“Yeah. Not all of us get it like that, but I had some friends who did. I think it’s more common the longer you've lived as not you.”

“What do you mean? Had?”

“Oh, just online. Haven’t been in contact since I got drafted. Actually, we should probably ask about getting cell phones or something. You know, instead of getting back to the barracks and fucking until we pass out.” They winked. The euphoria they’d all been experiencing had been powerful, to say the least. And also a little confusing, because nobody really seemed to know what they were doing when it came to new genders— or species, for that matter.

Sergeant Kamau approached, interrupting their post-fight chat. Vaya’s brain lurched, trying to figure out how to go to parade rest as a quadruped before realizing that wasn’t something she needed to do. “Vaya and Kiran, right?” She nodded.

“Walk with me.” She turned to the rest of the squad. “I’m stealing these two for a few minutes. The rest of you keep sparring until you run out of dragons, then get in line for resets.”

“Are we in trouble?”

Kamau laughed at her question. “No, not at all. You’re just built a little different. How long did you two know you were transhuman before you turned traitor? Like, emotionally transhuman. Obviously not physically.”

“Years for me,” Kiran responded.

“I didn’t. I got a brain full of shrapnel, it was convert or die. Honestly, I’m not sure if I even am.”

Kamau snorted. “Yeah, you are. You’ve both got the juice.”

“The juice?”

“You two figured out how to properly fight a few seconds after you realized that you weren’t going to actually hurt your friends. Most people can’t adapt to a new body that fast. Notice how the others were just replicating the motions they’d learned instead of flowing with it? It takes weeks, even for people who’ve been physically transhuman their whole lives, to get to where you two are. Which means you’ve got the juice.”

“Is that… common?” Vaya asked.

“For folks here? Yeah, about one in ten or twenty, but there’s a lot of self-selection that happens for someone to get here. In the general population it’s something like one in a few hundred. Doesn’t really have an actual name, I don’t think anyone started thinking about it until a year ago or so. I’ve got it too, it’s pretty easy to find. Just look for the new recruits turning their friends into ribbons.”

“So what does it mean for us?” Vaya nodded along with Kiran’s question.

“Well, it probably means you really liked fighting.” They both nodded. “So, you’re going to get assigned frontline melee roles. Still infantry, still in the squads that you are now, but it’ll be your job to be the one getting shot at, since you can take it. If you’re okay with that, anyway. There’s some changes to your form distribution that we’ll want to do for that too.”

“If it means I get to actually… yeah.” Kiran flicked his tail with anticipation.

“What’s the distribution?” Vaya asked.

“Three Bladewyrms, a Shiftscale, and a Loddy. Two SIBs. No room for anything personal, but you probably won’t mind. Could drop a Bladewyrm for one of the newer Shatterscales if you want.”

Vaya nodded. It wasn’t like any one particular body was any more or less her than another, and engineered biology was comforting in a way that nothing else in her life had ever been. She wasn’t even sure if she wanted a civilian body at this point.

“I think I’d like that. Vaya?”

“Yeah. Same.”

Fort Bloodland, Missouria, Northern Union.
September 29th, 1765.
Nineteen months and nine days after the Seattle landings.

Bravo Company had been packed into the auditorium with the rest of the battalion. It was the first time Vaya had met everyone else, but it was difficult to make introductions with all the noise, and she really had no clue who anyone was besides the forty or so people in her own platoon. From what she understood, the whole battalion was fairly new, with the “oldest” recruits having joined a few months ago. Most of their NCOs were from other units in their parent brigade, but their officers were all regulars. It was an awkward compromise. Some of them had taken that (along with their separation from regular units) as proof that they still weren’t fully trusted. But nothing had been held back from them— they had all the gear and biology of a regular Army unit, RG-63s and Bladewyrms included.

The projector came on, and the speaker stepped onto the stage. Vaya didn’t recognize the speaker’s face, but she did recognize their name and rank: LTC Wright, the battalion commander. A month ago, she would have been surprised to see a woman battalion commander, much less a nonbinary one. But here… well, the 499th was different, obviously, but gender seemed to just not matter to Unioners in general. Kiran had said it had something to do with how dragons didn’t have any sexual dimorphism; Aaliya said it was because of Norse shieldmaidens; Citra said gender didn’t matter if you could aim a gun. Regardless, it had required some adjusting to.

“Alright, listen up!” The low roar of a few hundred conversations died down. “We’ve got two points of order today. The first is that we’ve got Bravo back!” There was a cheer. Back? she wondered, what happened to it in the first place? “The second,” they continued, “is that we’re deploying.”

The image changed: a map. South America; uninhabitable contaminated jungle, full of slumbering Mayan monoliths and worse. “Welcome to the jungle, folks. Three weeks ago, the OPIRANT cluster picked up a ping three hundred klicks west of the Central Canal. Two days ago, a couple of ODI marine regiments landed, along with what the intel boys say is a big excavation team. And yesterday, Odie formally notified our bigwigs that they intend to do some land-clearing with nukes. We don’t know what the Hel it is they’re after, but we’re gonna make damn sure they don’t get it.”

“Now, I know that most of you want to know exactly who we’ll be fighting. I know most of you aren’t going to be too happy if we get sent in to kill conscripts. Well, whatever they’re after, they aren’t trusting it to conscript units.“

“As far as what they’re after, the archaeologists have some ideas…”

Atlantic Ocean.
August 4th, 1765.
Nineteen months and two weeks after the Seattle landings.

“Gods. Look at this,” Citra said, holding the tablet out for Vaya. The troopship vibrated as she did, its supercavitating hydrofoil slicing through the choppy Atlantic water.

She looked at the image. A trio of narrow obelisks, two hundred meters tall, one arrangement out of the tens of thousands that dotted the Americas, and one out of dozens that awaited them between the coast and whatever it it was in the ruins. Every schoolchild on the planet learned about the Mayans in history class: a ruthless empire of unparalleled thaumaturges, utterly annihilated in a civil war almost a thousand years ago. But their artifacts and architecture remained.

“Nothing we didn’t know about, though?” The ancient architecture was impressive— and still very lethal —but unremarkable, really. In a thousand years, nobody had pried the secrets of the thaumaturgy from the remaining constructs, and nobody was short enough on livable space to justify the expense needed to render a whole continent safe for habitation.

“No! Just, it’s scary.”

Vaya shrugged, “I don’t think most of them do anything that can kill us instantly. And if it’s not instant…” She trailed off. They’d experienced that first-hand, repeatedly. Vaya might have personally been the most dangerous one in the squad, but a gun was a gun, so they all had to practice shifting when injured. She’d never forget the feeling of a frangible autocannon shell shredding everything between her scaled neck and her rear legs, or looking down at her chest after a heavy machine gun chewed it into mulch, or the ice-cold feeling of Kiran’s carbide tail-blade sinking through her ribcage, or… well. Their deaths had been both traumatic and liberating at the same time, to “die” so many ways and simply walk away from it.

She stopped her thoughts from wandering. “I’d be more worried about Odie. And besides, they’re doing some big barrage to clear our landing zone anyway.”

“Still not a fan of having to deal with magic and gunfire,” Lia chimed in. “Did you see that, uh,” she trailed off, looking for the words. They’d been pumped full of Norse in the last few weeks, their brand-new brains readily absorbing a new language, but more complicated vocabulary didn’t come as quickly. “Bombardment plan, that’s what they called it.” They all spoke Basho, of course, and most of them spoke Hindi, but you didn’t learn a new language by not using it. Norse wasn’t even the PDT’s primary language, but it was the Union’s.

“No, what’s that?”

“I heard some sergeants talk—” she cut off as their sergeant returned from wherever she’d been.

“Didn’t anyone tell you? NCOs get a different SIB with extra hearing,” Sergeant S— no, Astrid, she forced herself to think. She still hadn’t gotten used to the casual attitude. Citra would have jumped a meter straight up if the troopship’s ceiling hadn’t been so low. As it was, her head went thunk against the metal when she tried to stand.

“Hel, at ease, ladies. And theydies,” she said, glancing towards Arya and Kiran. “Sorry for startling you all. I forget you’re probably still jumpy, huh?”

“A bit,” Citra replied, rubbing her head. “Does it ever get better?”

“Yeah,” she replied, “eventually. But you heard right about the bombardment, I just got told about it. Apparently parliament signed off on a hundred megatons for us.”

“A hundred megatons? Of…?”

“Of nukes. Apparently the MPs got reminded that there’s a little over a thousand warheads burning a hole in our back pocket, and they’ve got expiry dates.”

“Fuuuck.” If Vaya had learned any new word in the last month, it was fuck. And a hundred million tons of TNT certainly justified a “fuck”.

“Yeah. Two hundred warheads to clear our landing zone and a path to the ruins. After that it’s all us. Wanna watch?”

“Wait, it’s happening now?!”

“In a few minutes, yeah.”

“How? Aren’t we a thousand klicks out?”

“More like three hundred, and it’s a hundred megatons. Should be able to see it over the horizon. Come on.”

The squad crowded through the narrow stairwell to the deck, which was already getting crowded. The wind whipped at Vaya’s eyes, and she felt her nictating membranes blink to shield them. She’d startled herself badly the first time she’d blinked sideways in front of the mirror, but that was apparently part and parcel of having a dragon’s eyes.

“How long?” Lia had to shout over the wind. They really were moving fast, faster than she could have flown.

“Any minute now!”

A few hundred souls waited with bated breath. Suddenly, there was a flash of light on the horizon— pure white at first, then the bright not-white that she could see in infrared. Then another. And another. It went on for minutes, a constant ripple of titanic detonations just out of sight, only visible by the way their light lit up the clouds. Nobody on Earth, except perhaps Odie himself, hunkering down on the other side of the isthmus, had been this close to this much explosion in all of history. There was a terrible beauty to it, to know that the greatest product society could muster was simply a really, really big explosion.

There was cheering, then a long silence, as if something religious had occurred. Aaliya said something into her ear, lost in the wind.

“What?!”

“I said, do you think we have time for a—” The shockwave hit, wiping out whatever she had been saying with a storm of noise. Vaya knew, though. She was incorrigible.