The tent was overcrowded with decrepit, old Sajaahin who wore beads and bracelets and necklaces made of clipped, scavenged metal. Rusted gears, door handles, pipe shafts, and construct parts clinked and clattered as they made their bobbing bows or prostrated themselves before Poire.

Some grabbed at his hands insistently, cooing and clucking and choking out words which Poire could barely understand. Begging for his blessing.

Poire wasn’t sure if the sour odor was their breath, their clothes, or just them. Either way, they were cloying up the air, and he was worried Eolh would die from suffocation before his wounds took him.

“Please, give us some space!” he shouted over the clinking and bowing. They responded, in unison, with some barking chant that they all seemed to know.

When he gestured at the tent flaps, as if to sweep them out, the hobbled little elders did open the tent. But instead of leaving, they simply invited more Sajaahin to come huddle inside.

The regal avian who was called Ryke spoke above the crowds. “May I be of assistance, Divine One?”

Poire shrugged. “Be my guest.”

She puffed up her chest, rising to her full height so that her head brushed against the ragged cloth ceiling, and loosed a piercing screech. Her majestic wings beat at the air, shoving and knocking over the nearest Sajaahin in a fierce gust, forcing them out of the tent.

And out there? Out there, it was so much worse. Thousands of Sajaahin were gathered, chanting in unison, so that their prayers were like the waves crashing to shore. He could see them only by the candles and torches that lit the huddled masses.

What did they want from him? What did they expect?

Well, whatever it was, it would have to wait. Eolh was still unconscious in the tent, and the nanite was doing what it could to knit new skin over his severed hand. If only they could find a bioprinter . . .

“Divine One,” the regal avian said. “My task is unfinished. You will be safe here for the moment.”

“What task?”

“There was another hunter out there. The one who took his hand. I shot it, but I didn’t have time to confirm the kill. Do not worry, I will return before he wakes up.”

“Thank you for saving him,” Poire said.

“He is the one who saved me, Divine One. I will return.” She bowed so deeply he could see the reddish-brown crest feathers running down the back of her feathered head.

Divine. The word needled at him as he watched her sweep out of the tent. What is she going to say when she realizes I’m not?

A moan came from somewhere in the dark tent. Eolh was lying on a cot, his head rolling back and forth as if he were deseparate for the pain to stop. His forehead burned at the touch. Poire had already injected him with three tubes of nanite and was afraid to give him more. There was a limit to what those microscopic constructs could do and a limit to what a body would accept. Could nanite even work on a corvani? On any of these aliens?

As far as Poire knew, nanite was made to rebind flesh and muscle and bone based on human genetics, not . . . not whatever Eolh was.

The bandages on Eolh’s wrist were soaked through with blood, and Poire was pretty sure they needed to be changed. Where do you find clean rags in a place like this? Everything the Sajaahin owned was covered in filth.

The corvani was staring at him. His eyes were two black glints of light in the shadows of the tent. “Water,” he croaked.

Poire fetched a bowl, but even the Sajaahin’s water was murky and brown. He fished out the larger specks of dirt and tilted the bowl up to the avian’s beak.

The bird gasped with every gulp. Poire couldn’t imagine the pain he was in. And when he was done, he tried to speak.

“Where is she, fledgling?” His voice was ragged and terse. “Where is the Queen?”

“Eolh,” Poire said gently, nodding at his severed hand.

When the corvani saw the stump, he swallowed hard and let his head fall back to the cot. At least the nanite numbed the pain. One of the Sajaahin shamans had tried to put a cold, gray fungal paste on the wound, but Poire had pushed him away.

“Where is she?” Eolh asked, still squeezing his eyes shut. “We need to leave. If the Empire sent spiderachs, then they know we’re here—”

Eolh tried to sit up until a shock of pain made him fall back against the cot.

“Ryke said you two were attacked. She wanted to make sure they were, um, they were dead. Here, drink more water.”

“And what if she’s lying?” Eolh’s breathing was heavy and pained. He took the water but did not drink. “What if she’s bringing the imperials down here right now?”

“Do you think she would do that? She seemed grateful to you.” And she worshipped me, Poire didn’t say.

“No,” Eolh sighed and fell back against the cot. “I don’t know what to think anymore. All these years . . .”

The words died in his throat. Outside, the waves of Sajaahin chants ebbed and flowed. Horns called and instruments made of bone and leather clattered and thumped.

“Can you tell them to shut up?” Eolh said.

“I tried.”

“And?”

“Every time I go outside, they just get more excited.”

“Some god you are,” Eolh muttered. He started to unwind the bandage from his wrist and let out a caw of pain. Poire got up to help, but Eolh shook his head.

“I’m fine. It’s fine,” he grunted in a tone that suggested he was anything but.

Poire sat on the edge of the cot and watched him work. Poire had seen animals dissected before; he had even seen human bodies, though only in simulations. He didn’t look away when the last strip of cloth fell loose, revealing the ruined stump of Eolh’s wrist. Silver webs of nanite knitted over the gore and bone, becoming a kind of mercurial skin.

Eolh started dabbing at the silver skin.

“Don’t touch it,” Poire said. “You’re going to confuse it if you touch it.”

“This stuff is alive?” Eolh said, inspecting his wound from every angle.

“Sort of,” Poire said.

“Where the hells did you get so much of it?”

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

“I found a train. Or the Sajaahin did. It ran out of power, but that’s how we got the nanite. I had to cut my hand open to get its attention.” Poire opened his palm to show him. “I talked to it, Eolh.”

“Yeah, well, I guess that makes us even, then,” Eolh crowed. “I saved you, you saved me. Wait, what do you mean you talked to a train? Trains don’t talk.”

“Ours do,” Poire said.

“Of course they do.” Eolh’s tone said he didn’t believe Poire in the slightest.

“It said there was another human. Up in the caldera.”

“Poire.”

“His name is Marsim Collette. I remember him. He came to our conclave every few months. He was the director’s nephew or something close—”

“Poire, no.”

“Yes, Eolh. I have to go look. You were right, OK? You were right about my home. My city is gone. You were right about everyone being gone. But I have his signature. I know where he is. I have to get to him. I can’t do anything on my own. I need his help.”

“I don’t care what you think you know. There’s no one left, fledgling. You are the last. Listen, I’m not—” He moved to sit up again and gasped with the pain. Eolh put his hand—the only hand he had left—to his chest to steady his breathing. “I’m not telling you this to hurt you. The Cauldron is my home, and I would know if there was a human being up there.”

“I have his signature.”

“You don’t know what it’s like up there, human. They’re looking for you. And when they find you . . .” Eolh held up his severed hand in warning.

The corvani might know things that Poire didn’t, but he didn’t understand.

My home.

My people.

Everyone.

I have to find them.

Eolh tore a strip of threadbare cloth off the cot and started to wrap it around his stump.

After a long silence, Poire said, “I can hide. If we go up there, I can stay hidden.”

“Can you?” Eolh nodded at the tent flap. “How’s that working out for you?”

Outside, thousands of Sajaahin were beating drums and rattling bones together and swaying with their torches as they bowed in great waves across the cavern floor.

“No,” Eolh said. “You have to stay down here.”

“There’s nothing for me down here.”

“There’s nothing for you up there either.”

Poire wanted to say too many things that he didn’t mean. He clenched his jaw, not trusting himself to speak.

Eolh stopped wrapping his wrist. His clever black eyes stared into Poire’s.

“Human,” he said gently. “Look at me. Until I met you, I didn’t believe your kind really existed. At least, not the way we’re told to believe. A god? I still don’t believe it. But when I first laid my eyes on you . . . I don’t know what I felt. Something. You did things, up there and down here. You made light unlike any light I have ever seen before. I followed that fool android down here because I’m a fool too. I’ve never met anyone like her, and I’m starting to wonder if somehow, her coming here was your doing. I don’t know. Maybe I’m losing my mind. Maybe I’m just so gods-damned desperate to do something about this world. But if there’s a chance—even the slimmest hope—that you have any power in you at all, well, fledgling, then maybe they’re right. Maybe all the believers in all the worlds know something I don’t.”

He closed his beak for a moment, thinking. Or feeling some kind of pain unrelated to the wound on his wrist. Eolh shook his head. “If things can change, maybe it will be because of you.”

Poire’s cheeks were hot with guilt. And with anger.

Change? It was like nothing had changed at all. The words were different, but the meaning was the same. How many cultivars had told him the same thing? You have to keep trying, Poire. You have no idea how important this is.

I didn’t ask for this. I never wanted this.

And now all his cultivars were gone or dead, and he was alone, surrounded by aliens who thought he was some kind of god.

Well, if they’re looking for a human, they couldn’t have found a more useless one.

All his tests, his cultivars, everyone in the Conclave could attest to that. He was a failure. And the harder he tried, the more it hurt.

Poire clenched his hands so tightly his fingernails dug into his palms, reopening the scab that had only begun to dry. I didn’t ask for this. He couldn’t stop staring at Eolh’s wounded wrist.

Eolh tucked the bandage into itself with a grunt of pain. He looked up at Poire. “Fledge, can you be patient? That’s all I’m asking. All you have to do is stay here and wait while we figure this out.”

“For how long? And what if I can’t do anything that you think I can? I don’t have admin privileges; I’ve barely done any training. And nothing works down here. All the systems are dead. Everything is dead, Eolh. Everyone—”

There were the tears again. They choked him and burned his eyes and cheeks. It hurt. It hurt so much. He just wanted the pain to go away.

“Fledgling . . .” Eolh crowed softly.

“You think I’m special, but I’m not. I’ve never been. Always the last. Always the worst.”

“Sit down. Take it easy. Breathe in for me, OK? Breathe.”

There was something about the calm in Eolh’s voice, as if the corvani knew what he was going through, knew everything about him. As if everything was going to be just fine.

It made Poire’s blood boil.

Before he could think, his fist smacked the clay bowl, still full of dirty water, off the cot. It smashed against the pole in the center of the tent. There were voices outside, and when a Sajaahin pushed its hooded head in through the tent flap, it leveled a gnarled finger at Eolh and barked an accusation.

Poire shouted, “Get out!” and the Sajaahin retreated, bowing and groveling.

Poire didn’t think of himself as a child. Sixteen years old, almost seventeen, but he was still the youngest in his cohort. In the whole Conclave even. And when the cultivars were hundreds of years old, and Auster older than that, well, that made him practically an infant. He knew almost nothing about the universe beyond his home. The cultivars wouldn’t let his cohort become distracted from their testing. And Poire had been awful at that too.

So, he could think of only one way to help anyone. “If you want a savior, you need a different human. A better one. There is one I know on the surface, right now, and if we don’t get to him soon, someone else might get to him first.”

Eolh shook his head. One of the corvani’s hands was squeezing up and down his arm, gently massaging the pain around his wrist. The blood was already starting to spot through his fresh bandages.

“Fledge,” Eolh said, his voice weary from the pain and from arguing. “Wanting something to be true doesn’t make it so. There’s no one up there.”

“And what about you?” Poire snarled.

“What?”

“What about your beliefs? Why are you so certain you’re right?”

“I—” Eolh stuttered. Blinked. And opened his beak to speak again.

Before he could speak, someone opened the tent flap, letting in the stench and the sound of chanting.

“I said leave us alone!”

But it wasn’t the Sajaahin. It was the Queen. She was covered in mud, and when she entered the tent, her head whipped back and forth as she scanned the shadows.

“We have to go.” When she spoke, her tone was brusque and commanding. “Right now.”

“Why?” Eolh said.

“There wasn’t a body. I hit it, but there was no body.”

Eolh said, “This place is full of scavengers, Ryke. One of them might’ve taken the body.”

“No,” she hissed far too forcefully. “It’s alive. I know it is.”

“How?”

“It’s one of them. The ones that don’t have names.”

At that, Eolh shut his beak.

“What does that mean?” Poire asked. He could feel the tension in the room, and it made something in his stomach flutter.

“They sent an assassin,” Eolh growled. “Gods damnit, are they trying to kill him?”

“The Magistrate,” Ryke said. “That reckless imbecile. He’ll kill us all.”

Her gaze fell upon Poire, a dark dread worrying at her golden eyes. “I thought I would find you before it did. I’m sorry. We have to go.”

***

Death always had a taste.

Today, the One Who Ate the Others could taste his own death. Full of heat, like fire spreading through the jungle, curling and blackening everything in its wake.

But the taste was also sweet.

It called to memory the first days, when it had no limbs, and it still swam in the spawning pools. A taste it thought it had long forgotten. Always swimming. Never sleeping. Knowing that if it stopped, death would find it.

Now, there was a gaping wound from that Queen’s burning weapon. What remained of his lung stuck to his own flesh, uselessly quivering every time it breathed.

It was exhilarating. There was no other taste like it.

But it was also a red, bitter taste. Today, his prey had escaped, and that had never happened before. This failure soured the scent of blood in the air.

He knew exactly where the smell came from. Down there, at the center of that massive scavenger gathering. The filthy things were worshipping his prey.

The One Who Ate the Others held the imperial beacon in his webbed hand. The One Who Paid had told him, “When you find your prey, activate this beacon. If you fail, the Empire will still gain something from your loss.”

An insult. The One Who Ate the Others did not fail. Not ever.

Even this hunt was not a failure. It was simply unfinished.

The One Who Ate the Others crouched low and lifted the beacon high. It smashed the beacon against the ground, again and again. The wound on its torso split further open, but still the One Who Ate the Others did not stop smashing until blood was oozing down its legs and the device was nothing more than fragments.

It crushed them into the mud with one mechanical foot. And then the One Who Ate the Others pulled another device out of its pouch. A new tech tool that could focus its heat into its iron point.

Its wound might heal with time. The missing part of his lung might even grow back.

But the One Who Ate the Others was not going to wait.

He clicked the iron on, testing the heat with his sticky fingertips. The One Who Ate the Others did not wince, nor croak, nor cry out as it cauterized the gaping wound, permanently hardening the skin on its torso.

As it burned, the One Who Ate the Others inhaled deeply, inhaling the scent of his own charred flesh, sending shivers of intoxicated delight down its spine.

The hunt must go on.