Page 49 of Destinies of Diamond
“The Weltons, of course. The alloy they invented helped quite a bit. It’s quite unfortunate that the girl had to go and disappear. Ah, well. I’m sure she’ll turn up. In pieces, if she has to.”
If he was expecting me to show concern for Penelope Welton, I was about to seriously disappoint him. I owed her nothing. Without her, the others would have never shown up in the Apsid Quasar. I couldn’t say for sure if that would’ve been good or bad, since the confrontation with Brendan had reminded me what I really wanted for Selene. But by the same token, if I’d had more time at my disposal, I might have been able to protect Selene better.
King Philip’s confession did draw my attention to something very important. First of all, I’d seen Brendan with a similar tablet while I’d been here as a student. It had a very particular, old-fashioned look, and even when we hadn’t been close, it had been an issue that had drawn my eye. I’d actually had tentative plans to steal it, but I’d never gotten the chance before I’d been forced to leave my post.
Also, based on the king’s words, Paul Welton was supposed to be involved in this. And yet, he was nowhere to be seen. That was suspicious as fuck.
The tablet. The Weltons. Selene and her mother. The chimeras and their tamers. Everything was a piece in a huge puzzle. I just couldn’t figure out the bigger picture yet, and I didn’t have time to dwell on it.
The Harpies were compromised. Based on what we’d heard earlier, so were the Grand Chimeras. Selene was presumably in the infirmary. I had to get there and get her out as soon as possible.
Hoping and praying this would work, I summoned the powers of Helios to me again and allowed them to consume my flesh.
Several of the Harpies tried to stop me, but they moved too slowly—far more than they should have. It only took me a couple of seconds to transform. They were the longest seconds of my life, but it was worth it.
In the blink of an eye, I’d left my regular body behind and flashed past Zephyrus, past the king, out of the hangars. My mind burned with a single thought. The cluster of photons I’d turned into swept through the academy, heading toward the med bay.
When I got there, dread swamped me, as potent as Helios’s gift. The door was ripped open, as if an overwhelming force had blasted through it. Blood and ash littered the floor. More chimeras popped up in my path, even less friendly than Zephyrus and the Harpies.
But in my heart, I could not accept I was too late. Fuck it. Fuck everything. If I had to destroy myself to find Selene, so be it. Nobody would keep me from her, not ever again.
****
Wesley
If there was one thing I’d learned throughout my lifetime, it was that losing a limb hurt. But there were other things that hurt more, and never had I been more aware of this than at that moment, when I had to face the remnants of the Lower Chimera Unit.
Standing there, in front of the Centaur Herd that was like a nightmare from the past, I clutched the bleeding stump where my hand had been and struggled to think. Even knowing how dangerous it was, I shut down the mental processes that registered the pain. The clarity I received in exchange was worth the possible permanent damage.
Selene and Knox had made their escape through the back of the med bay. Pollux had been attacked while trying to help me, but his mother had intervened before he could get injured too badly. Prince Brendan was on his feet again, although I had no idea how he’d recovered so quickly from the original attack.
This was the good news. Unfortunately, the bad news overwhelmed what little advantages we still had. My main concern was Prince Archibald, who was in no condition to fight off a chimera. And the Grand Chimera Unit wasn’t doing much better either. Like Archibald had said, there were consequences to being a chimera tamer and they’d started to show up more and more as of late.
I should have seen it much sooner, when Brendan and Knox had started acting so weirdly. But I hadn’t and now it was too late.
We had to face a swarm of angry Lower Chimeras with deteriorating, out of control skills.
Well, I’d never let low chances of success stop me and I suspected the others felt the same. Now that Selene was gone, I could afford to take some risks.
The Centaur Herd wasn’t open to conversation, but I decided to make an attempt, regardless. As our two groups clashed once again, I came face to face with a female Centaur. She lunged at me with just as much savagery as her male counterparts, and I knew the stories about her were true. “You’re making a mistake. We’re not your enemies.”
“Oh, aren’t you?” the Centaurid—Hylonome—snarled. “I beg to differ. Every human is an obstacle in our path and needs to be squashed.”
To point out what she meant, she tried to trample me under her glowing hooves. I ducked out of the way just in time. As Hylonome made contact with the spot where I’d been before, the metallic floor of the infirmary was carbonized. She wasn’t kidding around, but neither was I.
“And what is your path, exactly? Do you even know, or are you lashing out blindly?”
The latter option was far more likely, since Selene had never done anything to harm them, and yet, she’d been singled out. Hylonome grinned, as if she could tell exactly what I was thinking. “We’re not the ones who are blind, Commander Trevor. This is vengeance, justice, and prevention, all wrapped up into one.”
“You may be right,” Prince Archibald intervened, “but you have to know I won’t allow any harm to come to that girl.”
“Right. Because she embodies your precious son,” another Centaur, this time male, said. “Yes, we know. That’s the whole point. Pegasus was always on their side, not on ours. That hasn’t changed.”
If Brendan and the others were confused by the exchange, they didn’t show it. Instead, they decided to use the conversation as a way to sneak closer to their Centaur opponents. I did the same, except I targeted Hylonome. When the screaming started, I didn’t let it deter me.
The chimeras were much larger than us and their disembodied forms gave them a versatility we didn’t have. But at the core, they were spirits imbued with the power of the gods, a power we’d been taught to manipulate. It was crazy to turn to such methods, but we had no other way.
Reaching for the very center of a Centaur was madness at best and suicidal at worst. It was like touching a Tartarus Diamond core barehanded. I did it anyway, all the while carefully monitoring my systems to make sure nothing shut down. My circuits and my flesh both protested against the strain of the onslaught of power, but I stubbornly persisted and tugged.
