*Why on the planet are they sniffing after ME?*
Kyrus’s wings beat frantically as he darted into a thicket of trees covered in
thorns, hoping to throw off the tracking monsters. The sniffers were too big to come into the
trees, in between, but their mournful croaking and honking didn’t go away.
*I have no idea.*
*Dark. Dark. En-fakken-darkened!*
The thorn trees had fruit on them dangling from
long, thin strands and as Kyrus watched an insect blundered into one and it
exploded. It simply vanished and
splattered the surrounding tree trunks with pulp. *Careful of...*
*... no fakkin’ kidding.*
The honking behind them checked suddenly and out of
the ground, hundreds of tiny sniffers erupted.
Their little pink-fringed bell-like noses swung accurately toward Kyrus
the moment they emerged from the dirt.
Instead of basso honking their tinny little squeaks were like the hisses
of larval bush dragons, pretentions of threat to come.
*Fak. Fak.* He soared higher as the swarm of baby
sniffers clambered up the thorny trunks, completely undeterred by the spines.
It should have been blood thundering in her ears,
she thought almost resentfully. But in
the owner’s country it was all detached and distant. She could hear Werfas calling in the distance
but his voice was muffled and she couldn’t make out what he was shouting...
even here. The sniffers were up to the tips of the thorn exploding trees, their
long, long legs waving up over their honkers.
Kyrus’s toes just cleared the reaching claws of the
last and they soared out over a lake that was turquoise, then shifted to red,
then yellow, before settling on dark blue.
*That should...*
*We can’t look for our fathers if we’re running from
monsters...*
*Ownershit... I’m running out of energy. Why me?
Why aren’t they chasing after you at all?*
*I don’t know.*
She zipped across his trail in the air a half a dozen times but it didn’t
deter the sniffers, labouring along on the ground, trying to round the lake or
plunging in and drowning in a flurry of honking bubbles popping to the surface.
*Hara... I’m ... I don’t know what’s going on...*
Kyrus’s sending was thinning, weakening. She could see a faint mist around him, as if
code were coalescing around him as he flew, weighing him down. *I don’t know if I have the energy to get
out.*
*NO. You are
stronger than that.* If she could have
slapped him, she would have, but she had to settle for a shout, risking more
attention from Perrin’s... oh... enlightened owner crap...
On the horizon, a whole line of dragons was arrowing
toward them. *Kyrus! Hide! Hide! Hide! They’re after you... they’re sucking your
energy! I’ll get Werfas in and we’ll get
everybody out.*
*But that’s stupid...* Even his thoughts sounded
sluggish. The glass fog of bugs all
around, trailing him like a comet of stupid, was doubled from a moment ago.
*HIDE!*
She cut through the glass bugs and grabbed his
hand. Together they tumbled toward the
ground, her interference cutting the security’s focus on him and he realized,
just before they hit the ground. He
smiled... she saw that as he transformed into a plant... a myrtle tree,
plunging roots into the ground, stretching branches to the sky.
She sat in the tree he’d become and watched the
dragons tear the sky, looking for their lost trace.
*Look for the bee tree. I’ll bet da and papa are a beetree and a hive
of bees.*
She flinched and crouched down as a dragon roared by
just scorching the tips of Kyrus’s new branches. *I just have to wait a bit longer. Till they settle down. Werfas?*
She couldn’t hear him. She could feel the line she’d left trailing
behind her, but there was no sign of Werfas and Kyrus was being a tree. Trees didn’t speak very quickly. She huddled into a hollow and waited for the
dragons to stop scorching the sky.
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