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The harpy tore a grenade off its waist bandolier. The grenades were fixed so the safety pin came out at the same time it was removed. It threw with its powerful wing-arm, the lever falling off, and the deadly top shape bounced toward them.
Valentine made a move toward the grenade, bending to scoop it like an infielder dealing with a grounder. She was faster and swept his good leg as she threw herself against him. The grenade bounced past and exploded next to the tree trunk. Splinters and shrapnel-torn bark flew off into the darkness.
More flares exploded up the hillside. The harpy that had just thrown the grenade and was grasping another turned its head and took a short, bounding leap into the air, following its nose aloft toward the flares, flapping hard enough to stir the fallen leaves beneath as it gained speed to rise.
When the ringing in their ears subsided and they could hear each other, Valentine said, “Are you trying to kill yourself?”
Irritating in the face of being saved, as usual. “I could ask you the same. Who runs toward a live grenade?” she rasped, applying a field bandage to the claw cut near her hairline.
“The harpies are gone, anyway,” she said. “Speaking of which, we have a couple of dead ones lying around. Should I cut a haunch for stew?”
Valentine made a face. He’d rather half starve eating jerked beef and chalky ersatz chocolate out of his ration bag than have some nice fresh meat.
“Suit yourself,” she said. She used the razor-edged butterfly knife to slice off a leg from one of the dead bodies. The corpse twitched a little as she worked.
“I wonder if they’re the ones who spotted us?” Valentine asked.
“Nah, some Reaper picked up on the Bears. That’s the way it usually goes. They’re crap on lifesign discipline, just like every other kind of discipline.”
Holding her joint so that it would drain, she followed him on Scour’s trail.
They found the Bear at the litter-strewn harpy camp. The handlers were lying under a tree with blankets over them so nothing but their boot tips showed. Half a dozen dead harpies were much less ceremoniously scattered about, with Scour collecting them into a pile. Duvalier was grateful that Scour hadn’t done anything more artistic with either set of bodies; she’d seen Bears do everything from sticking heads on tree-limb poles to laying them out so they spelled an obscene message.
“There’s a big wasp-nest thing in that tree you should take a look at, Mister Valentine,” Scour said.
She looked up, saw a shape about the size of a laundry bag. “What the hell is that?” she asked, sidestepping for a better view.
Scour shrugged. “They might have been guarding it.”
At first Duvalier thought it was a plastic garbage bag full of laundry stuck in a tree. Then she saw that the material she’d thought was laundry was pale pink projections, like long fingers with five or six joints, gripping the trunk and limbs of the tree.
Perhaps it was two or
ganisms, symbionts, the brain and the hand.
“Looks like that brain’s grown itself a set of fingers.”
“Wells’s two essentials,” Valentine said.
“Wells?”
“Something from War of the Worlds.”
Duvalier knew enough of Valentine’s biography. He’d been raised in the basement library of a priest, the closest thing the remote Northern Minnesota community had to a teacher.
“I think—I think that’s like their version of one of the old cell phone towers,” Duvalier said. “The tissue transmits or boosts or relays whatever link exists between the Kurian and its Reaper.”
“Scour, you want to do the honors?” Valentine asked.
The Bear looked up and down the tree, evaluating it. “Sure, Major.”
“Let’s get that tree down, then.”
“Jeez, Val, what did that tree ever do to you?” Duvalier asked, reaching into her pocket and slipping on her cat claws. “I’ll do it, seeing as how you two are just too grown up to go up a tree.”
She climbed above the mass of flesh, keeping an eye out for harpies. Keeping her legs around the pole and gripping the tree with one set of claws, she drew her sword from the stick and plunged it into the tissue, just where the black, beetlelike shell met the fingers. She thrust up and down, sawing with the blade.
The fingers released and the keg-sized object crashed through the branches below and onto the ground. It waggled to right itself and began to crawl off at a surprising pace, but Valentine and Scour were upon it, Val using the legworm pick he usually carried while in country and Scour wielded a short, iron-headed club like an oversized meat tenderizer. They broke the shell open like a couple of hungry seagulls attacking a dropped crab.
