Page 37 of Sixth
Voss swore aboard his own ship, the word sharp and small in the hush. On the Councilor’s shuttle, the older man took one slow step back, his movement visible through the open viewport feeds that displayed the chaos below.
The broken lattice kept humming. Awounded sound. The Predator’s head turned. It listened like a hunter selecting avein.
“It’s not coming for us,” Emmy whispered.
“No.” Apex kept his voice a thread. “It is hunting the sound.”
The creature flowed forward. Council soldiers steadied their weapons and then, one by one, realized that the noise of their own breath and their own hearts might call it. They tried to still themselves, but fear is noisy. And the clearing filled withit.
Apex moved his body in front of Emmy again, not because he believed the Predator had chosen them but because he refused to allow any world to hurt her while he stood. He caught the tremor in her hand where it gripped the back of his shirt. He wanted to turn and press his mouth to her palm. He wanted her to know he was steady because shewas.
“Core,” he said, barely shaping the words, “map the creature’s path.”
The AI responded so softly, they hardly heard her comment.“Predictive model unstable. Variable driver is harmonic amplitude. The Predator will attack the loudest frequency source.”
“The lattice,” Emmy breathed.
“And any man who panics,” Apexsaid.
From the safety of his ship, Voss lifted his voice just enough to be heard more clearly. “Kill it,” he snapped. “All batteries. Fire.”
The first volley tore through the quiet. Bolts chewed trunks and set blossoms ablaze. The Predator collapsed into itself, then unfolded in a ripple and slid sideways with impossible speed. It wasn’t evading so much as arriving somewhere else. It crossed the space between two shots without seeming to travel the distance. The third soldier to fire made the loudest sound. He died first, throat opened by something Apex’s eye couldn’t catch.
The rest broke.
They tried to hold formation. Training warred with a raw survival urge as old as existence. The forest punished them for choosing noise. The canopy shook loose a rain of glowing seeds that stuck to visors with adhesive sweetness. When a man swiped at his faceplate, the sound of his glove on glass drew the Predator like blood in water.
“Remain behind me,” Apex told Emmy. “If it turns, get to the ship belly. Crawl.”
“I won’t leave you.”
“You will if I tell you.”
Her hand tightened, as if she could hold him in place. “Then don’t tell me.”
It would have made him smile if he had remembered how. He didn’t answer. Instead, he watched.
The Predator slid toward the annulment lattice. The broken coils wailed. The Councilor’s operator kicked the device, trying to shut it down, making a new sound that rolled like metal in pain. The Predator struck. Coils snapped. The scream cut off as if a knife had sawn through theair.
For a breath the world softened. The motes rose. Leaves relaxed. The bloom that had closed when the shuttles landed uncurled one cautious finger of light.
Voss ruined it. He raised a different weapon. Not sound. Light. Anarrow beam designed to lace a nervous system with obedience. He had used it on women he called product. He fired atEmmy.
Apex moved without thought. The beam crossed the space where her heart had been, missing them both and hitting the ship. Emmy made a sound he had never heard from her before. It was not fear. It wasfury.
“Enough,” she said.
She stepped out from behind him before he could stop her and pressed her glowing wrist to the ship’s flank. The mark pulsed. The motes woke like a storm of fireflies. They poured over the hull, coating the breach in a veil of living light. Asoft, breathing curtain unfurled from bow to earth. When Voss fired again the beam struck that curtain and bent away, splitting into harmless sparks that floated down like dandelion seeds.
Apex stared at the veil, then at her. “How did you know to do that?”
“I didn’t,” she said, breathing hard. “It just seemed right.”
He should have told her she was brilliant. He should have told her what it did to him to watch her make the world obey. He only said, “Stay close,” because that was all the language had left forhim.
The predator lifted its head. The curtain’s soft murmur interested it. Not dangerous. Just present. It turnedaway.
A Council trooper panicked and ran. His boots slapped light. He screamed when he stumbled. The scream made a shape in the air. The Predator leapt and the shape vanished.
