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The warm, wet wind splashed her in the face. She thought she was going to fall into the canyon, down, down below where a glinting river ran like a thread of gold. In her twist of vertigo, she pulled back against the rock wall, the cool stone scraping her skin. She was on a stairway cut into the side of a cliff. To her left, the sheer face of the edifice. To her right, the air, and the jagged drop.
“Don’t look down,” said the girl.
So she looked up to a full and sanguinello moon lifting above a jagged horizon.
“Come.”
Her companion turned to her, revealing the visage of a young girl in the blood-orange light. Her hair was long and shimmered darkly crimson, and when she turned, it flowed with her movement, now bounding down the steps.
Jane followed. She moved with incredible ease, her bare feet feeling out the rough rock. Her hips were strong, that limp had gone, and there was a tone of youth in her body.
Ahead, the girl stopped at a boulder that marked a switchback in the staircase. She waited, and when Jane had caught up, she started her climb.
They climbed higher than where they had come through the door, up and up the face of the mountain, turning two more switchbacks until the girl stopped under an outcrop of stone.
“Here.” She grabbed the rock and pulled herself up, vanishing out of sight.
Jane reached up and found the fingerholds. She was astounded at the ease with which her arms lifted her body.
The girl waited atop the crag, standing in the maw of a great cave that fell back into shadow. “See.” She pointed down to where little figures were moving on the stairs.
“Who are they?” Jane asked.
“Orphans. They want to kill us.”
“Should we go?”
“Yes,” said the girl in a breath, but she did not move. She gazed out at the vista. The cliff dropped beyond the stairs. The ribbon of river, a meandering, golden fire at the bottom of the deep gorge. The cliffs rose on the far side, not as high and set with cubic structures of a village built into the rocks, deserted save for an electric light that twinkled in one of the windows. Hung in the sky above these buildings was the rusted circle of the rising moon.
“Why is it red? Is there a fire?” Jane asked.
The girl shook her head pensively. “Blood of the Veil.”
Blood of the Veil. The words lingered. It dawned on her that the girl’s English was imperfect.
“What’s your name?” Jane asked.
The girl looked at her with such intensity, as though she’d asked an impossible riddle. “Ciris,” she said. “My name Ciris.”
“Ciris. That’s beautiful. My name is Jane.”
“Jane… Jane… Jane… That’s beautiful.”
Her intense, vulpine eyes studied Jane’s face. She had Mongolian features, perhaps from the far reaches of Eastern Europe or one of the climate refugees washed upon a shore. A lock of hair shimmered across the sepia of her emergent chest, tickling her taut belly and the puerile angularity of her hip. Her legs flexed sinuously, as if every second she was on the verge of exploding into a run.
A wrathful wail roiled from below and echoed through the tunnel.
“Come.” The girl loped into the shadow of the cave with feline grace, every movement of her body in controlled balance. Faster and faster.
Jane found herself jogging and then sprinting, at times jumping over boulders that materialized out of the dark. She struggled to keep up.
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Ahead, the girl leapt atop a boulder bathed in a dapple of moonglow coming from the cave’s opening. From her perch, she looked back at the way they had already come. In the darkness, her eyes reflected the ambient light with a yellow luminescence.
It was not her eyeshine that caused Jane’s heart to pound but her tail. Long and sensuous as her pubescent body, it was covered with a down of black fur and melded gracefully into the musculature of her coccyx. She turned, the tail flicked, and she was gone.
Jane climbed the boulder, leaping from rock to rock until she could go no farther—the cave ended in a cul-de-sac of stone.
“Up, up,” said Ciris from above. “Hurry. They come.”
She reached up, holding the ledge, and felt a hand atop hers. She pulled, got a leg up, and with a firm push and pull, she was standing next to Ciris, their backs against the bedrock with no place to run.
The moon now fully covered the mouth of the cave, casting its beam on them, revealing all, as if they were actors on a stage bathed in an ochre spotlight.
She lifted a hand to shield her eyes.
Down the tube of the cavern, she saw them silhouetted against the light, a dozen of them leaping from crag to crag, boulder to boulder. A howling symphony rose up, and she felt their hatred and their hunger.
Ciris turned and placed a hand flat on the stone surface. “It’s ready. Go.”
“I can’t go,” cried Jane, “There’s nowhere to go.” The fear in her voice surprised her.
“Go,” Ciris said again with more urgency.
A growl came from beneath them, and something heavy thudded against the ledge. Ciris whirled around, faster than Jane’s eye could follow.
“Reeeow,” screeched the large black panther crouched next to her, fanning its claws and swiping at something trying to pull itself onto the rock. The cat looked at her and gave a guttural hiss.
Jane turned to the rock face. A shimmer of blue passed across it. And then she saw it, a membrane stretched over the stone, so thin it was nearly invisible. The blue shimmered again. She could feel the heat coming off it. She pressed her hand flat against it and felt its smooth, fleshy texture. It pulsed on her palm. She pushed in, and the rock deformed. Someone screamed. She stepped forward, letting the skin stretch across her face. There was a certain pain in her chest, the momentary inability to breathe, that heartbeat when it was almost too much, and then she was falling.
The heat and humidity engulfed her. Sweat dripped from her body, from her hair. She had traversed the bedrock of the mountain. She looked back at her impossible passage. Against the stone, a dark and distorted glass gave onto the stage: the blood moon, the figurine of a panther fighting the wolves, all in slow motion. The cat sunk its fangs into the throat of the horrid canine, gave a powerful shake of its neck, and let the creature fall away. A man jumped onto the ledge, and the cat swiped out with its unsheathed claws, ripping open his stomach. Then it turned and jumped at her through the membrane.
The sleek, wet panther shook its head and screeched. Its paws morphed into hands, and its front legs became arms. Ciris, her hair matted to her skin, rose from her hands and knees.
She jumped to the rocks near the cave wall and searched in the shadows. She returned to face the portal. A short, straight bladed sword gripped in her hands. Just as another wolf creature mounted the ledge beyond the screen, she slashed once, twice, severing the membrane with an X. The scene faded. The membrane curled, its remnants dried and shriveled like the skinshed of a serpent, revealing the jagged rocks beneath. The darkness of the cave engulfed them.
Ciris procured a bundle from a crevice in the rocks. She set something on one of the boulders and struck a match, putting flame to a candle.
They perched in the cave’s mouth that yawned out onto a massive city, devoid of electric light. It was built on the side of a hill and followed down into the cup of a shallow valley. Medieval buildings, walls, arches, domes, and cupolas mixed with modern, twisting spires and broad skyscrapers, vacant obelisks to a past that had been and a present that was impossible. The glass on the tips of the tallest towers caught the moonrise behind the mountain. The buildings across the city above the valley’s slope stood out against the shadow like a monochrome relief painted in blood.
“Tbilisi,” Jane said.
“Yes,” said the girl.
It was as she remembered it. She had patrolled those streets with her command. They’d gone from building to building, rooting out the FEEN snipers embedded in towers and rooms a thousand years old, or they had neutralized the IEDs and car bombs and killed the urban combatants that concealed themselves in the catacombs and sewers.
Skyscrapers soared like giant stalagmites toward a heaven speckled with amber stars. In the midst of war, construction had continued, backed by the resources of the conglomerates and drowned countries. Her forces had guarded many of these techno-towers as they had gone up, and the refugees began to flood into the burgeoning Asiatown of the Caucasus. The city had been incorporated into the Earth Treaty, with the dream of preserving a bastion of hope in Eurasia, dry land from the rising oceans, a shield against the onslaught of war.
But it was not to be.
This was Ground Zero. She had been in command and would have been dead had she not left the city the day before to attend a consortium with allied admirals on the Black Sea.
She had seen the drone footage, the satellite images. The city had been transformed into a valley of glass, and all its inhabitants vaporized by the explosion.
“This cannot be,” Jane whispered, a fearsome awe settling in her heart.
From the bundle, Ciris retrieved a scabbard with a leather strap that she fastened between her small breasts. Then she wrapped a loincloth around her waist and tied it at her hip. The shift of fabric, an old piece of leather no larger than a man’s hand, fell between her buttocks and over her crotch.
She retrieved another cloth of a similar fashion and wrapped it around Jane’s waist, securing the leather cord with a precise loop and jerk of her wrists.
“Woman,” she murmured, as she concealed the fuzz of her bush. “Come. You need the Tongue of Fire.”