Page 60 of Voidwalker
Fi would fix this.
She just… didn’t know how.
14
When life brings you an immortal carnivore
Fi idled for a week. She spent every molasses-creeping second working on a plan.
Normally, she could burn a month after a job with nothing but bubble baths and chocolate pastries. Ice fishing with Aisinay. A weekend on the Summer Plane enjoying live music on a humid canal patio, dancing until the world reduced to starlight and the perfect clarinet solo.
Instead, she cocooned on her sofa and guzzled coffee while snow clogged her windows, waiting for automaton birds to flutter up every couple of days. All Boden’s messages read the same:Nothing new. Stay put.
Fi read between the lines. He wanted her out of the way while he fixed her mess.
How could she fix this, short offighting a daeyari? An immortal creature too swift and strong for any mere human to vanquish? Fi might as well throw herself onto a pike and deny Astrid the satisfaction.
Further annoyance came when her gramophone developed a stutter. The internal conduits had to be rewired, but after several static shocks and a trainload of curses, she got her music playing with only occasional static. She put on a record from her last Summer Plane sojourn: a seaside city of colorful porticosand bands on every other street corner, air muggy as soup and the best damn crayfish she’d ever eaten. The bass line beat like a second heart. And there came that horn, nimble as a breeze.
Fi couldn’tfighta daeyari. Could Verne be distracted? Coerced? Tricked to fall into a very deep hole? No, that wouldn’t work, only because daeyari teleportation was bullshit.
Her foot tapped to the music as she spread a pile of empty glass capsules onto her table.
In the oldest stories of the Season-Locked Planes, mortals Shaped using only their internal energy. Then daeyari taught them more demanding forms of Shaping, energy conduits and external tools. Over time, humans developed tougher skin, though flesh could still burn from pulling too strong a current. Their muscles built stronger reserves, but charging energy capsules provided useful external storage. Plus, she could charge them in her downtime while she was well fed and rested, fuel for her furnace or future emergencies.
Not a hole to trap a daeyari. Some other binding, then? Astrid had trapped Antal with that energy cord… only for him to break loose minutes later.
Fi pressed her thumbs to the capsule. The current had to come slow, otherwise the glass would shatter. Astrid had taught her that. They’d holed up in her room one night, Astrid grinning like a wildcat with a bag of empty capsules she’d swiped from her father at the energy plant. They’d had no idea what they were doing, blew Astrid’s bed in half and got grounded for a month.
Fi’s fingers ached as she pinched the copper electrodes, cold shivering down her forearms as she Shaped silver energy out of muscle and into the orb.
Traps were probably a dead end. What if Fi poisoned Verne’s water? Did carnivorous Void immortalsdrinkwater?
A knock pounded her door. Fi swore as energy seared her fingertips, nearly cracking the capsule.
The knock sounded again. Intentionally few people knew where Fi lived. Only one of them would bother hiking all the way up here to harass her.Fucking Bodie.After shaking her hands out, she marched across the room, starved for company but equally set on giving her useless brother a piece of her mind for stringing her along all week.
“About time.” Fi yanked the door open. “Can’t even bother to warn me when…”
It wasn’t Boden who greeted her.
It was a daeyari. One specific daeyari she’d begged the Void to never see again, perched on her porch with a mild frown and tail flicking.
Fi sprang into defense. She shifted onto the balls of fuzzy-socked feet, brandishing a half-charged energy capsule ready to hurl.
“What doyouwant?” she said. “You won’t eat me that easily, fiend!”
Antal—former Lord Daeyari of this territory, immortal spawn of the Void between realities—swept a dry look over her flannel pajamas. The drift of music from inside. Last, and least impressed of all, the energy capsule leveled at his head.
“That seems unnecessary,” he said.
“Does it? Then why in the endless black Void are you—”
Fi grunted as he tossed a bag to her chest.
“These belong to you, I assume?”
Why was he here.Whywas hehere? Naïve, to hope she’d endured the last of him, that her sour-milk luck would allow her to focus on a singular crisis at one time. Fi dug into the bag, keeping the daeyari in one eye as—
