The Atomic Sea: Omnibus of Volumes Six, Seven and Eight by Conner Jack

Author:Conner, Jack [Conner, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-01-12T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter 5

“He felt me,” Layanna said. “The Octunggen have a military psychic with them, I touched his mind. When I changed, he felt me.”

The air started to shimmer around her in preparation to her releasing her other-self.

“Wait,” Avery said. “Can you last much longer?”

“Not for long.”

“Then grab us up and run. If we can veer around the outer edge of the battle, it will either draw the airships into the fight or make them go wide around. In either case, they won’t be able to continue the chase.”

“If I can last long enough to get us away.”

She didn’t waste any time. She grabbed up Avery, Coleel and Virine—both of whom screamed and cursed and tried to resist, to no avail; she removed their guns, just in case—then bounded over the edge of the roof and alit on the next roof, her movements fluid and graceful. Her great size didn’t seem to have any bearing on her weight in this world, and she moved as buoyantly as any of the airships following them, perhaps more so.

Maybe I should deposit Mr. Virine somewhere, she spoke into Avery’s mind, something he would never get used to. We don’t want him summoning his glabren after us. Or maybe I should just kill him. The world would be better off without him.

“No. He commands an army of glabren, and he’s at our mercy. He could come in handy later. Keep him, but put him out, if you can. He can’t know where the rebels are hiding.”

She apparently passed a non-lethal poison into Virine, or a small dose of a lethal one, as he screamed and went limp. Gripped in a transparent, whitish tendril, Coleel watched all this with wide eyes. When he could speak, he shouted—having to pitch his voice over the sound of the wind, the nearby gunfire as the battle escalated, and the rasp of Layanna’s tentacles on the gravel of the rooftops—“What is she?” His face glowed not only with his own lights now (which were becoming visible as the dried mud flaked off) but with Layanna’s lights, too.

Avery thought of lying to the man, or even telling the truth, but in the end he just shook his head. Coleel asked no more questions, but he couldn’t take his eyes off Layanna as she bounded from rooftop to rooftop, circling around the battle just as Avery had suggested. Behind them, the zeppelins hesitated, then veered to the west, taking the long way around the fighting. With any luck, it would take them an hour or more to circumnavigate it, and by then the group should be well away and Layanna back to her normal self and hopefully less visible to the psychic.

As she went, she grabbed fruits and entire infected trees—and some infected animals, too—from the rooftops and shoved them through her sac wall, eating to keep up her otherdimensional strength. Eventually, though, she had to release her other-self, and the three continued on foot. If anyone had seen them leaping from

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