The spiral was worse going up fast than it had been going up slow. Going up fast meant skipping steps, grabbing at slick stone, jamming fingers into cracks for balance. Caelum's right hand wasn't working. His left was slow. He was climbing on his legs and his left forearm and whatever stubbornness he could dredge up out of the feedback fog still sitting behind his eyes, and it wasn't enough.
Blanchard was behind him. Half a step back.
"Left foot. Move it."
"I can't feel—"
"Move!"
The first bat hit the spiral two turns above them.
It came down fast and clipped one of Unit 4's fighters across the shoulder before anyone saw it coming, and the fighter yelped and nearly went off the edge, and Dawson spun on the step above him and took the bat out of the air with a short hard cut that didn't have any plasma. Dead meat dropped past them into the dark below. Dawson didn't watch it fall. He was already facing up the shaft.
"Keep moving!" Yara's voice came down from further up. "Don't stop, don't stop!"
They didn't stop.
Éloise had Kifah by the arm. Kifah's feet were under her but only just, and every couple of steps Éloise had to pull her up bodily onto the next stone. Kifah's face was a mess of blood from her nose and her eyes had that distant look people got when they were operating on pure reflex. The Blank field was gone. Whatever she had left was going into staying upright.
Two more bats came down. Éloise let go of Kifah for a half second to bring her rapier up and a thin lance of water crossed her blade and killed one of them in the air, water and steel both. The other landed on the step in front of Dawson and he kicked it off the spiral without breaking stride.
"Ward, faster!" Dawson called down without turning.
"I'm trying!"
"Try harder!"
Fuck you, Dawson. Caelum almost laughed. His legs were working on a delay now, the left one fine, the right a half second behind, and every step was a decision about where to put his boot and whether his right arm would catch him if he overbalanced. It wouldn't. It was still hanging at his side.
Blanchard stayed on him. One hand under his elbow, the other one—the dead one—occasionally bumping against Caelum's back when Blanchard stumbled on a bad step. He was breathing through his teeth. The sound of it was worse than the clicking above them.
Behind Blanchard, at the very back of the line, the two able Unit 4 fighters were dragging Malik and the half-conscious one up the spiral between them. Malik was barely moving his legs. The other one wasn't moving at all anymore, just dead weight across his teammate's shoulders, and the teammate was going grey in the face from the effort of hauling him.
They're not going to make it, Caelum thought. He didn't know what to do with the thought.
Above them the clicking turned into something else. A rushing sound. Wings opening, hundreds of them, the whole colony coming down the shaft in a loose cascade. Caelum couldn't see them yet but he could hear the air moving differently, pressure pulses from above that weren't the matriarch's calls, just the sheer displacement of mass taking flight.
"Incoming!" Yara shouted.
The first wave hit them.
It wasn't the matriarch. Smaller ones. They came down the spiral in twos and threes, dropping from the dark and snapping at anything that moved, and Dawson was up at the front of the line cutting them apart faster than Caelum could track. Plasma was back on his blade now—short angry bursts, not the wide discharges that had nearly killed them in the bat tunnel but controlled bursts that popped bats out of the air one at a time. Dark blood spattered across the spiral stone. Éloise was beside him with her rapier moving faster than a rapier should move, her water coming off the blade in sharp slashes that cut wings off at the joint.
Caelum tried to raise his spear. The haft went into his left hand and his right just sat there useless at his side. He could jab. That was about it.
A bat came at him from the right side. Caelum saw it late—his reaction was on the left-hand delay now, everything slow—and he started to turn and knew he wasn't going to make it.
Blanchard's good arm came across his body. The gauntlet caught the bat mid-flight and crushed it against the wall, amber light flaring along Blanchard's knuckles as the bulwark resonance kicked in for just long enough. The bat dropped.
The clicking above got louder and then Caelum felt it in the rock, the low deliberate vibration coming back into the shaft walls, building, resonating, and he knew before he heard her that the matriarch was back.
She came down through the colony like something thrown. Furious. The smaller bats scrambled out of her path with a panic Caelum could hear in the rush of their wings, and the matriarch didn't care about any of them — she clipped two of her own on the way down and sent them cartwheeling into the dark without slowing. Caelum caught a half-second look at her from below. Four wings spread wide, the wounded one trailing dark fluid in ribbons, the other three beating too hard, the ridged head thrown forward and jaws already parted. Her eyes were locked on everything at once. A fury-drunk descent, all teeth and torn membrane.
She was aiming for the back of the line.
Caelum understood it in the instant before it happened. The back of the line was where the slowest people were. The back of the line was where Malik and his half-dead teammate and the Unit 4 fighter dragging them were bunched up on the spiral, moving at half speed, with no one in front to shield them. The matriarch had seen the weakness and come for it.
"Back of the line!" Caelum tried to shout and his voice came out thin. "She's going for the back—Blanchard, BACK—"
Blanchard was already turning.
He pushed past Caelum on the narrow step, his bad arm clipping the wall, and he was moving down the spiral toward the Unit 4 fighters before Caelum fully understood what he was doing. Blanchard. Bad shoulder. One arm. Going back.
"BLANCHARD!"
Kifah was between him and the back of the line. She'd lost her footing somewhere in the last few seconds and Éloise had let go of her to deal with another bat, and Kifah was on her knees on the spiral step with her hands flat on the stone, trying to get up.
The matriarch dropped out of the dark right above her.
Caelum saw it happen and he couldn't move fast enough. His right side wouldn't catch him if he lunged, and his left was holding him upright and by the time his brain sent the signal to his legs Blanchard was already there, between Kifah and the matriarch, his good shoulder squared and his gauntlet up and his whole body planted on the step with that same stubborn bulwark stance he'd used on the cyclops.
Amber light flared along his arm.
The matriarch hit him.
It wasn't a clean strike. Blanchard's resonance caught the brunt of it, caught the claws, caught the weight of her, and for half a second Caelum actually thought he was going to hold her. The amber light held. The stance held. Blanchard's body shook with the impact. His teeth were bared. He held.
Then her jaws came down past his gauntlet.
It was fast. Caelum almost didn't see it — a whip of motion, the narrow ridged head dropping forward. Blanchard jerked backward. His good arm was still up. The amber light was gone. Blood was coming out of him in a dark wet sheet down the front of his uniform, too much of it, too fast, and Caelum couldn't see where the wound was under all of it.
Blanchard's knees didn't just buckle. They just stopped working. He went down the shaft sideways against the wall. His eyes were still open. His mouth was moving. No sound was coming out.
The matriarch pulled back. She'd taken what she wanted. She banked hard and dropped away down the shaft below them, wounded wing or not, trailing her own blood and Blanchard's, leaving the colony to finish what she'd started.
Kifah was screaming. Caelum registered it distantly. It was a thin high sound and it wasn't stopping.
"KIFAH, MOVE!" Yara was shouting from somewhere. "EVERYONE UP, NOW—"
Caelum wasn't moving. He was standing on his step with his left hand gripping the wall and his right arm hanging dead and looking down at Blanchard, who was slumped against the stone two steps below him with his mouth still moving and his eyes starting to go unfocused.
Their eyes met for a second. Maybe less.
Blanchard's mouth formed a word Caelum couldn't hear. It might have been "go." It might have been nothing.
Then the matriarch came back.
She dropped out of the dark above them in a second descent, and this one wasn't blind fury anymore — this one was purposeful. She hit the spiral where Blanchard had fallen and her claws closed around him, around his chest and his bad arm and the side of his neck, and she pulled. Blanchard's body lifted off the stone like he weighed nothing. His good arm trailed. His head fell back.
She dragged him into the dark below the ledge.
Caelum heard the wet scrape of her wings against the shaft wall as she went. Heard something that might have been Blanchard's boot hitting stone on the way down. Then nothing. She was gone, and Blanchard was gone with her, and the dark below the spiral had swallowed both of them whole.
Kifah was still screaming.
Then light.
Caelum's head snapped up. Somewhere above them on the spiral, white-blue light was tearing open against the stone — raw, jagged, wrong-looking, a rift gate forced into existence by something that hadn't been ready to open. It pulsed. Steadied. Held.
Dawson. Caelum registered it in the same second — Dawson standing on a step three turns above them with his RS stone held out in front of him and his face white, an expression on it Caelum had never seen there before and wouldn't have believed he was capable of. Panic. Raw panic. His hand was shaking around the stone.
The stone worked. Finally. Whatever Dawson had pushed into it in that half-second of animal terror had been enough.
"MOVE!" Éloise had Kifah under one arm and was already hauling her up the spiral toward the gate. "Caelum, GO, GO—"
Caelum climbed. Left hand on the wall, right arm dead at his side, legs going on whatever was left. Above him the gate held steady and Dawson stood in front of it with his teeth clenched and the stone still raised, keeping it open by whatever strained act of will he had left.
Blanchard was in the dark below.
And Caelum didn't look back.