Burning Bright (s-1) by Tom Dowd

Author:Tom Dowd [Dowd, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf

17

But there wasn't anything that could be done.

Hours later, Kyle sat against one of the basement walls drinking tepid soykaf from a plastic cup. The cheery fast-food logo seemed to jeer at him from the side of the container. He watched as Woodhouse, another Eagle Security magician, a young woman who'd arrived with the reinforcements, and some paramedics tried to save a girl, barely out of her teens, from the terrible death that overcame most of the cocooned once they were removed. Physical death came quickly, but the mental anguish seemed to echo long past the body's final spasm.

Some, by strict medical definition, survived. One by one, mindless and still the way Mitch Truman had been, they were carried away in ambulances for extended treatment elsewhere, but no one held any hope for them.

The girl, swathed in some almost embryonic blue-white gauze shrieked and pushed against the gentle hands that tried to help her. Mucus flowed from her mouth in a great rush, down her neck and shoulders and across her exposed body. As they had done with all the others, the magicians tried to heal her, to stave off whatever biological reaction was forcing the body into collapse.

As Kyle watched, she gave one last gasp, then went limp, her body releasing whatever other fluids it contained. He could see that her body would not live. He'd become an expert at telling such things. She became quiet, and the four eased her back inside the cocoon.

Woodhouse stepped away, the muscles in his arms quivering from the exertion to which he was subjecting his body. He looked at Kyle, eyes helpless.

"There's nothing we can do," Kyle said.

Woodhouse nodded, but the other mage turned on them. "That's right. We can't do anything for them here. Let's move mem. Let's take them somewhere we can-"

"It won't work," Kyle said wearily.

The mage was angry. "We're just not set up here to help them. We need to-"

Kyle interrupted her again, this time by standing. "It's not us. It's them. They're dying even without our interfering." He pointed to a pile of cocoons in the farthest corner. Those are dead already. And we haven't touched them."

While Woodhouse was spelling Kyle in their attempts to resuscitate the insect spirit victims, Kyle sat watching as the auras of all the cocoons slowly but inevitably began to dim. They were simply dying.

The mage had turned and Kyle could tell she was using her astral senses to examine the piles he'd pointed out. "Maybe if we moved them all closer together," she said. "And left them alone. It might be our presence that's killing them."

This time it was Woodhouse who spoke up. "I think it's that we killed the females."

Kyle nodded. "That's what I think too. The two biggest ones.”

“Yes.”

"The younger mage seemed perplexed. Kyle walked toward her between the piles. "All the cocoons started showing signs of agitation once the big ones began to get hurt," he said. "I think a couple of the bodies in them died even as the mothers were being killed.

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