ELENA
Rise, sweet avenger! Rise, Lady Death! Rise, O Mother, and bequeath us your wrath!
—fromHymns of the Goddess of the Yamuna
Elena stumbled across the deck, beating back flames. She moved as if in a stupor. Her nerves were frayed, yet with every inferno she put out, her Agni grew, ebullient, powerful. She could not feel the blood dripping from her nose, nor the pain that echoed down her jaw. There was no time to take stock of bodily damage. She knew only that theRelentlesswas off their starboard stern, giving chase. Bearing closer.
“Slow us down, Maya,” she called. TheRelentlesshad not sent another sparker, only because she knew they meant to recapture their ship. “Draw them in.”
“Elena—”
She held up her slingsword, curled her finger around the trigger.
“Wait, you don’t mean—” Maya began, then stopped as Elena turned to her.
“Do you trust me?”
Maya hesitated. “This is crazy. We should continue running—”
“Do you trust me?”
Maya looked at her companions. Tanmay unsheathed his sword. Ajira nodded, her face resolute. Slowly, finally, Maya raised her own sword. “This is madness.”
Elena gave her a bloody smile. “Madness is just brilliance by another name.”
They slowed. Three thousand yards, two thousand five hundred, two thousand. TheRelentlessgrew in size, its bow glinting in the low light, its pulsers glowing like the maws of frothing beasts come to feed.Closer.It began to turn to draw up along their starboard. Multiple soldiers lined the deck, armed with pulse guns and zeemirs. All of them ready. All of them hungry.
Fear touched her then, a grey, smoky tendril, but Elena swallowed it. They had their anger, their bloodthirst, their weapons. But she had it too.
She had itmore.
“On me,” she whispered as theRelentlessdrew in. “Ready. One, two—”
She and the others fired their slingsword blades, cutting into the hull of the killdom. The lines caught, tightened. There were shouts, cries of alarm from the Jantari, but she pulled the trigger and flew forward.
Elena slammed onto the deck of theRelentlesswith the Sesharians. Crewmen shouted. Pulse fire shredded the air, but she stomped her feet, building her Agni, and thrust her fists. The inferno roared to life. High and bright, with a heat that dried her eyes and singed her hair. Someone screamed. There were howls, panicked orders, but the inferno’s song swallowed them. She heard only its desire, and hers within it.
Snarling, Elena cut her arm through, and the inferno split.
Two flames whipped forward like the tongues of laughing beasts. One caught the leg of a fleeing Jantari. The other razored down an officer’s spine, snapping each vertebra like twigs on a pyre.
Ahead of her, Tanmay whipped his urumi and cut the ankles of a running soldier. Maya knocked another’s zeemir to the ground and rushed him, but he swerved, slamming his armored gauntlet into her face. She staggered back, nose spraying blood like a spigot. Elena saw it only a second before. The flash of steel. The quick shift in footwork. She screamed“Knife! Knife!” as the Jantari raised his arm, dagger streaking red in the firelight like the tail of a burning star, and buried it in Maya’s side.
The Sesharian laughed.
Sheleanedinto the knife, her smile bloody and bright, and rammed her urumi up into the cave of his chest. He let out a wet, confused gurgle. Maya yanked out her blade, and he toppled face-first onto the deck.
“Fucking metalmen,” she spat.
Something silver glinted from beneath her clothes. Before Elena could ask, Ajira let out a cry.
“Watch your left!”
Elena dodged as pulse fire ripped into the deck. She caught sight of a soldier at the helm of a pulser, turning the weapon toward her. A crimson light flared at its mouth. She flung her mind forth and snagged into the heat of the pulse. It tasted coppery, rusted. She imagined it flaring, melting, like iron on a forge. The pulser quivered, heating. The soldier shrieked and jumped off, waving his hands, burns bubbling down his skin. Elena did not hesitate, and neither did her fire.
A flame leapt onto him and swallowed his screams.
Her inferno beat onward, raucous, ravenous. The Sesharians pushed forward, and the Jantari peeled back, their pale eyes wide with fright, their skin singed by her fire. They cried for mercy, for aid. And for a moment, Elena thought theRelentlesswas theirs. But there were justso many.
