King stepped back from the lens.

What was apparent needed to be words, and he spoke them. To his father, he asked, “Could the attack from two days ago . . . could that belong to this creature?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, Father, what do you guess?”

List didn’t like the subject, the tone. Something caused him to straighten his back, and King knew that more secrets were being hidden from him.

Five leaps and then King lifted his father overhead, pressing him near the ceiling. Just short of screaming, he asked the squirming man, “What else do you know?”

“Nothing,” Father insisted. “We have an agent, he’ll report again soon.”

Then the indignity was too much. With a stiff voice, the Archon of Archons said, “You will put me down.”

King dropped him and then caught him just before he struck the floor.

More leaps and he was standing back at the telescope, watching his tiny brother do nothing while that bizarre sibling climbed closer.

Diamond was facing his father’s killer.

And that was the moment when Prima pulled her shadow across the bridge, finding an empty piece of floor where she could talk and the lieutenant could listen. Everyone else was watching the scene below play out. King watched, and he breathed in great gulps, trying to make sense of what glass and his eyes showed him.

But all that while, he listened with every ear.

Prima said, “If we discover that this is . . . ”

“Yes, madam,” Sondaw said.

“The criminal.”

“Yes.”

“We need options,” she said.

“Of course, madam.”

“I need someone outside the normal lines of command.”

The lieutenant breathed, saying nothing.

“You. I need you. But only if you’re ready to carry out my orders.”

“Madam, of course,” said Sondaw.

And after a moment’s reflection, with the slowest, most careful voice in the room, the young man asked, “What do you want my hands to do?”

The smoke and black ash stood tall, ignoring the wind and the wash of propellers. Twisting currents made the smoke swirl, and from deep inside came a rumbling, low and purposeful and almost too soft to notice. The boy stood on the dead coral. Divers charged up the rugged raw slope, and the soldiers tried to block her route. The papio didn’t want Diamond injured. Bountiful’s gutted belly was scattered across the landscape below, flames dying, survivors moving slowly. Save for a few fingers of stubborn reef, there was nothing beyond the wreckage but air. The morning was staggeringly brilliant. Graceful airships flew under the shaggy green and happy wilderness, and most of the forest was nothing but healthy. Slice away the violence and pain, the stark emotions and dangerous trajectories, and what remained was a lovely picture that a mind could swallow and then cherish for the rest of its days.

Divers threw a massive lump of coral, and one whiffbird dropped and died.

The smoke swirled within itself, and it shrank, growing denser, the rumbling turning into a familiar voice.

“I’m here,” said Quest.

Diamond glanced over his shoulder.

There was no smoke behind him. Particles of coral dust and ash were suspended on a framework of narrow airborne fibers. Quest had eaten bodies and consumed a fat portion of the ship’s stores, and while the fire raged, she discovered that heated corona skins had an appealing flavor, bits of them incorporated into her huge new body. She was vast, she had never larger, and she was still trying to gauge what she could make from these far flung ingredients, and how quickly she could work, and which shape would do the most good.

Divers chopped up two papio with a makeshift sword.

“I’ll help you,” Quest said.

Diamond shifted his weight, saying nothing.

Divers threw a third soldier into the rotor, and she sprinted toward their brother, one hand grabbing at the rising coral while the other brandished that bloodied piece of sharpened bone.

“What are you doing?” their enemy asked.

“Standing like soldier,” said Diamond.

“You should have run,” she said.

“You should run,” Diamond said.

“Your people aren’t close enough to help,” Divers said.

The boy wiped his eyes and dropped his hand again. Divers paused, coming no closer while her eyes lost their focus. Then as their sister reached up with her empty hand, climbing again, Quest yanked every last thread to her center. She gave herself the shape and effortless grace of a jazzing—a black predator with black eyes and a forest of long milky teeth. Except she was far larger than the living jazzings, and louder, and for as long as she screamed, there was no louder voice in the Creation.

Half a day of careful labor and she could produce a beautiful body, larger than Divers and far more powerful.

But she had only moments to work, nothing but rough ingredients to weave into some kind of order.

Divers climbed close enough to swing the broken rotor.

She aimed for Diamond’s narrow neck.

Quest shoved the boy down and absorbed the blow, the sharp edge burrowing into a damp matrix of muck and extra water.

She felt nothing but the nagging pressure.

Divers retrieved her sword with a hard yank, and Quest leaped at her, nothing on those feet but the illusion of claws. She used her mass, and she used surprise, the impact driving their sister off her feet and the rotor from her hand as they tumbled across the jagged ground.

Red blood mixed with sooty water. Divers was extraordinarily strong—far beyond what a mortal jazzing could match. But she struck nothing of importance, and she bit what didn’t matter, and then both of them lay sprawled together in a broad bowl where clay lay beneath trapped rainwater. Divers squirmed until she was on top, one hand holding down what looked like a face while the other hand struck and struck and struck all of the body, searching for any weak point.

A cannon on the nearest fletch fired, the shell impacting beside them.

But before the debris stopped falling, whiffbirds and wings began pummeling that fletch, corona scales scattering like shiny leaves while one of its engines dragged smoke in its wake..

Short of breath, Divers quit striking her enemy.

An idea offered itself, and from a human-style mouth deep inside, Quest shouted to her brother, “Run now. Fast as you can.”

But Diamond had already vanished.

Divers invested a moment laughing at this unexpected puzzle.

“You’re the ghost,” she said.

“My name is,” Quest said.

Divers dipped her head, genuinely intrigued. “Yes?”

And Quest turned back into smoke again. She was huge and dense, and then an instant later she was everywhere and vaporous. The world went black, and Divers was swallowed up by the amorphous twisting flesh. Shock became panic. Divers breathed in reflex, ingesting fibers and charred twists of corona skin, and then her lungs rebelled, a string of brutal coughs striking her like body blows.

And once again, Quest shrank.

Her plan, the inspiration, was to shrivel and compress, smothering her enemy in a dense black blanket. Without breath, Divers would collapse, and by then there would be more soldiers crawling about, probably from both species, and Quest could slip away in the midst of that chaos.

She was proud of her plan, even after it failed.

Compressing and smothering was work, and it took too much time. Divers swung into the pressure and kicked hard and reached out, using memory in place of eyes . . . and getting hold of the rotor, she pivoted and lashed out once more, hard and then harder.

The smoky body began to tear and collapse.

The giant papio body stepped out, filthy red with her own blood, and she swung at a likely point in the blackness, doing nothing. But then she pulled the rotor free, slicing at another angle, and Quest lost track of her half-born body.