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Taylor looked down at the lashing, screaming, losing-it Drake and said to Astrid, “Peter. He sent me. To save you.”
“Thanks,” Astrid gasped, and picked bits of Drake’s nose out of her teeth.
“He’s very weak. I think he only has minutes—”
“Little Pete? I asked him to take me,” Astrid said.
Taylor shook her head, a too-slow, reptilian move. She seemed to be enjoying the way her hair flowed across her neck and forehead. “Not you. He is scared of you. Peter is scared of you. But he likes you.”
“I get that sometimes,” Astrid said. “Tell him thanks.”
Taylor disappeared from the room. Astrid turned to flee, hesitated, picked up a chair, and slammed it down on Drake’s head as hard as she could, breaking one of the heavy legs in the process.
Then she fled.
Somewhere close by, guns were firing.
The plan, such as it was, had worked.
Gaia was in the church. The idea had been that she would be drawn to the only debris she could use as weapons. The hope would be that she’d go all the way in.
And now Dekka sprang her trap.
Gaia stood, bleeding, visible now as she relinquished Bug’s power of invisibility. She stood gasping from the pain, seething in rage, frustrated again, and surrounded, literally surrounded, by all the heavy, hard, sharp-edged debris of the semi-collapsed church.
Dekka was at the altar.
“You murdered someone I love,” Dekka said, and raised her hands high. Thousands of pounds of wood and steel, plaster
and glass, pews, roof tiles, and accumulated filth rose in a rush, a pillar of swirling junk.
Up and up, and Gaia rose with it.
Forty feet up and Gaia had recovered her wits well enough to take aim at Dekka, and then, just as Gaia began to fire, Dekka dropped it all.
WHOOOOMPF!
It fell and bounced and crashed and splintered with a noise like the end of the world.
Dekka jumped back to avoid being hit, but she still took a dozen small impacts from flying debris. She couldn’t see Gaia, but she wasn’t taking chances. She raised high the debris and dropped it again.
And raised it and dropped it again. Hammer blows.
On the fourth attempt Dekka saw Gaia floating above it all, bloodied, bruised, her clothing torn, her hair filthy, but not dead, very much not dead.
Gaia looked down at her, aimed, held Dekka directly in her line of fire, and laughed. “Very clever,” Gaia said. “It almost worked. But I won’t kill you. Not yet.”
Gaia floated calmly down as the mess settled around her, slowly, under her control now.
Dekka drew a pistol. Gaia flicked it easily from her grip and sent it flying away.
“Anything else?” Gaia asked.
“You’re getting weaker,” Dekka blustered.
“Mmmm. So are all of you.”
“You can’t afford to kill me.”
