Page 69 of Daughter of No Worlds

All at once, an idea hit me.

I whirled to Max. “Can you send fire in without looking?” I asked, straining to raise my voice over the chaos.

He looked at me like I was insane. “Too dangerous. I can’t go in blind.”

“I can see,” I said, pressing my finger to my temple. When he just stared at me, I said again, more urgently, “I can see.Let me in here.” I brought my hand to his forehead. “And I can tell you where to go. We can push them out.”

Max’s face went hard as stone. “No. Absolutely fucking not.”

At that moment, the ground rumbled again, this time accompanied by a bone-rattling cracking sound.

We were running out of time.

“We have no other ideas,” I pushed, desperately, and Max winced — as if the truth of the statement physically struck him.

But again, he shook his head. “I can’t,” he said, more quietly. “I can’t.”

But I heard what was really hiding in the razor’s edge of his voice, in the hard tension of his features. Before I gave myself time to think, I took his bloodied hand in mine, ignoring the startled jump of his fingers.

His fear was so intense that I felt it vibrating from his skin.

“Trust me,” I murmured. A plea, a request, a command — I wasn’t sure which, or perhaps all three. Max looked like he didn’t know, either.

He paused, grimacing, fire still springing from his other hand. He looked at the battlefield, then me, then his eyes lifted to the Syrizen at the base of the building.

And then his gaze fell back to mine, and even before he opened his mouth, I knew the exact moment that he made his choice.

“Sammerin—” he started.

Sammerin nodded. Somehow, the man still managed to appear perpetually unshaken. “I can cover.”

He slipped his blades into his belt and lifted his hands.

And what I saw next had me transfixed, horrified.

The dead bodies piled around us began to move. Not in a lifelike way, but in grotesque, skin-crawling lurches, their limbs dragging at awkward, sickening angles, heads lolling, clawing over each other to the base of the bridge that led to the tower. They were creating a wall of human flesh, slithering over each other into a twitching morass.

There are more useful ways to utilize someone with Sammerin’s mastery of flesh and bone,Max had told me. Gods, he had been right.

“Tisaanah,” Max barked, yanking my attention back. He opened his palms. A spiral of fire lengthened and broadened between them, creating a ball, then a tower, then something larger, more organic: a serpent, like the one he had produced out of mist that day in the water, but carved from searing flame.

It circled our bodies, so close to my skin that it could have scalded the hair of my arms. Still, it grew, until it was larger than either of us. The fire dyed the mist red, silhouettes through the fog looking like they were swimming through blood. Sammerin’s growing wall of human bodies were reduced to broken, crimson shadow puppets.

“You need to tell me where to go.” Max’s arms were trembling, as if controlling this serpent took every ounce of his strength. “I’ve opened the door for you. Don’t you dare poke around in there.”

His mind, he meant. I nodded as if I knew exactly what I was doing, even though that couldn’t be farther from the truth. And I allowed myself to drop my shield, squeezing my eyes shut.

The world lit up in a map of souls and flames. A pair of blue serpent’s eyes opened in the darkness. I stepped into them, surrounding myself with Max’s presence, slipping into a crevice of his mind that he had carved out for me.

I’m blind.I heard his voice echo.Be very careful. For both of us.And for everyone inside.

The muted terror on his exposed nerves twined with mine. I tried to send him shaky reassurance.

The civilians were beneath the tower, huddled in one giant mass beneath the earth. But a smaller group lingered near the top. This, I thought, had to be Pathyr Savoi and his commanders, who must have been overseeing the battle from the highest vantage point.

And if we cut them off… we’d be forcing their surrender.

Go,I whispered.

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