Chapter 888: Eggs
Briggs blinked at her, and for a second, the pistol wavered in his grip.
“…It’s Carver,” he said slowly, like a man correcting a waiter who’d gotten his order wrong. “Carver Briggs…”
“Is it?” Kara tilted her head and studied him over the rim of the cup, her purple eyes drifting from his receding hairline down to the coffee stain on his collar. “Hm… No, I don’t think so… You look like a Gary to me. You’ve got that whole Gary energy going on, you know what I mean?”
“My name,” Briggs said through gritted teeth, the pistol rising slowly in his hand. “is Carver Briggs, and I don’t have to explain a damn thing to…”
He was scared… surely this memory would be imprinted into his mind for life.
“That’s a shame,” Kara cut in, taking another unhurried sip. “Gary suits you so much better. Gary’s the kind of man who brews bitter coffee and steals animals for a living, while Carver sounds like someone who makes nice furniture and goes to church on Sundays…”
The pistol came up and leveled at her face, and his finger settled on the trigger.
“I don’t know what game you think you’re playing, Vespera,” Briggs snarled, “but you’re sitting in my command module, alone, with one arm, and I’ve got a gun pointed at your head. So maybe you should think very carefully about what comes out of your mouth next…”
“Mm,” Kara hummed, completely unbothered, swirling the cup like it was expensive wine. “You know, Gary, that’s the third time you’ve told me your name tonight, and I still don’t believe you… Is that a cry for help? Should I be worried about you?”
Briggs pulled the trigger.
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
Three shots went off point blank, straight at her forehead, and Kara stayed lounging in the chair with her boots on the console and simply lifted the coffee cup about two inches.
PLINK!
PLINK!
PLINK!
All three bullets dropped neatly into the coffee, and Kara looked down into the cup, swirled it gently and watched the three flattened slugs sink to the bottom with a little sigh of disappointment.
“Well,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Now it’s even worse, and I didn’t think that was possible… Congratulations, Gary, you’ve ruined your own coffee twice in one night.”
Briggs stared at her with his mouth hanging open and the pistol still smoking in his trembling hand.
“Wh… what the hell are you?” he croaked.
“Disappointed, mostly,” Kara said, setting the cup down on his console with a soft clink. “Your coffee’s bad, your name’s wrong and you steal people for rich old men across the ocean.”
She swung her boots off the console and stood up, and somehow she was much taller and much closer than Briggs remembered her being a second ago.
“Honestly, Gary, I’ve met scarier villains in the cereal aisle at the supermarket…”
“It’s CARVER!” he screamed, and hurled the bag of data drives straight at her face.
Kara caught it without looking, then flicked two fingers, and a twist of wind slammed into Briggs’s chest like a speeding car.
WHAM!
He flew backward through the rear hatch of the module and tore it clean off its hinges, crashed into the mud outside and skidded twenty feet on his back before he came to a stop, staring up at the canopy with every scrap of air knocked out of his lungs.
When his vision finally cleared, there was a pair of bare brown feet standing beside his head, and he looked up, and up, and up some more.
Lara stood over him, tall and naked and terrible, with her staff blazing green and her jade eyes glowing like a jungle cat’s in the dark, while all around her, the roots of the forest were already crawling toward him across the mud.
“So you’re the one…” she said softly, “who’s been stealing my children.”
Carver Briggs, who had poached for twenty years without getting caught a single time, wet himself.
Kara strolled out of the broken hatch behind her, swinging the bag of data drives lazily from one finger.
“Alive, Lara,” she reminded her in a sing-song voice. “Aki said alive, remember? I know he’s annoying, trust me, I know better than anyone, but our princess asked nicely…”
Lara’s jaw tightened as the roots wrapped around Briggs’s arms and legs and squeezed until he screamed, and then they stopped, just short of snapping anything.
“Alive,” Lara agreed coldly. “For now…”
She crouched down beside him until her face hovered inches from his, and the green light of her staff turned his sweating skin a sickly color.
“Your machines hid you from me for two whole months,” she said quietly. “Nothing hides from me in my forest, little thing. Not a beetle, not a frog, not a single drop of rain… unless someone very old and very strong made it so.”
Her jade eyes narrowed to slits. “So tell me who sold them to you.”
Briggs’s mouth worked soundlessly until the roots tightened around his ribs, and then the words came tumbling out of him in a panicked rush.
“I don’t know a name, I swear to the gods I don’t! We never saw a face, nobody did… It all came through the board, through the old man’s people, and all I know is the tech came from someone on the World Council’s Elite! That’s it, that’s all anyone ever told me, please, I’m begging you…”
Lara went very still, and behind her, Kara stopped swinging the bag.
’The Council’s Elite,’ Kara thought, and the lazy amusement drained out of her purple eyes. ’Selling cloaking tech to Vanderbilt’s poachers, huh… Now that’s interesting.’
Lara rose slowly to her feet and stood there for a long moment, staring down at him in silence.
“So the pact’s truly been broken…” she murmured at last, so quietly that only Kara heard it.
…
By the time the moon cleared the treetops, it was over.
Every poacher in the camp sat in the mud in neat rows with their hands bound behind their backs, guarded by Amazonian soldiers and a ring of very large, very hungry-looking caimans that had crawled up out of the river to watch.
The shelters were wreckage, the drones were scrap and the combat frames lay scattered across the clearing like discarded toys.
In the center of the camp, Aki stood in front of the stasis cages.
There were nine of them, long and white and humming softly, and inside each one, frozen in a faint blue glow, was a beast… a giant river otter with silver-tipped fur, a huge harpy eagle with feathers like burnished bronze, a pair of glowing-eyed tree frogs the size of dogs, and in the largest cage, curled up with her head on her paws and her belly round and heavy, a jaguar twice the size of any natural cat, with a long dark mane down her spine that glittered with drifting silver stars.
Aki stared at her through the glass with both hands pressed to her mouth.
“She’s beautiful…” she whispered. “Kara, look at her, she’s actually beautiful. I didn’t know anything could look like that…”
Lara stepped up beside her and laid her palm flat against the glass of the Starmane’s cage, and the cold fury on her face melted into something soft and aching.
“She’s the last pregnant female in the basin,” she murmured. “Those cubs inside her might be the last ones born for a hundred years, and these people were going to sell them to a rich man to hang on his wall…”
Kara walked up behind them, rolled her shoulders and lifted her one hand.
“Then let’s not keep her waiting in there any longer,” she said. “Let’s let them out…”
Darkness rippled out from her fingers and slipped into the seams of the cages, then burst them open one after another.
CRACK!
CRACK!
CRACK!
The blue glow flickered and died as the stasis fields collapsed with soft electric sighs, and one by one, the beasts inside began to stir.
The Starmane lifted her head and opened her eyes, huge and gold and glowing, and looked straight at Lara through the broken glass.
She let out a long rumbling purr that shook the ground beneath their feet, then rose unsteadily onto her paws, padded out of the cage and pressed her enormous head into Lara’s stomach like a house cat.
Lara wrapped her arms around the jaguar’s neck and buried her face in the glittering mane, and for a long moment, she stayed there without a word.
Aki looked away and quietly wiped her eyes, and Kara rested her hand on top of Aki’s head and left it there.
Then, somewhere in the distance, an engine roared, and Kara’s head snapped up.
Far off through the trees on the other side of the camp, a single armored hover-truck had torn loose from the treeline.
It must have been hidden under the canopy the whole time, separate from the others, and now it was racing away through the dark with its headlights off and its engines screaming, crashing through the undergrowth on a straight line for the river.
Kara was already gone before the rest could blink.
WHOOSH!
The wind tore up around her boots and flung her into the air so hard that the mud where she’d been standing blasted outward in a ring, and she shot across the camp in a black streak with her cloak cracking behind her like a flag in a storm while the jungle blurred beneath her.
The hover-truck was a dark shape smashing through the undergrowth half a mile ahead, its magnetic engines howling as it flattened saplings and bounced over roots and fallen logs.
Through the trees beyond it, Kara could see the black glitter of open water, and on the far bank, the faint red pinprick of a signal light blinking from a hidden boat.
’Of course,’ Kara thought. ’A separate truck, a separate exit and a boat waiting on the other side… Gary actually planned for this. I’m almost proud of him.’
The truck hit the riverbank and launched itself straight off the edge, its hover-pads screaming as they switched to water mode, then slammed down onto the river in a huge spray of foam and started tearing across toward the blinking light.
Kara dropped out of the sky behind it and hung there a few feet above the water, stretched her hand toward the river and closed her fingers.
The water under the truck swelled upward in a smooth enormous dome and lifted the whole vehicle off the surface as easily as a palm lifting a pebble, and the hover-pads howled uselessly against the empty air as the truck rose ten feet, then twenty, then thirty, held up on a churning pillar of river water with its engines shrieking.
On the far bank, the red signal light went out, and Kara heard the distant roar of a boat engine starting up and fleeing into the dark.
’Run, then,’ she thought. ’You won’t get far, buddy…’
She turned her wrist, and the pillar of water carried the truck gently back across the river and set it down on the bank.
THUMP!
The engines sputtered and died, and Kara landed beside the driver’s door, wrapped her fingers around the handle and pulled.
SCREEEECH!
The door tore off its hinges with a long metallic shriek, and she tossed it over her shoulder into the river, where it sank with a sad little gurgle.
SPLOOSH!
Inside the cab, a skinny young man in grey armor was gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles and staring at her with enormous terrified eyes, and he couldn’t have been more than twenty.
Kara leaned against the doorframe and gave him a little wave.
“Hi there… Nice night for a drive, huh?”
The young man swallowed so hard his whole throat bobbed, and his voice came out as a squeak.
“P-please don’t put bullets in my coffee…” he whispered.
Kara blinked at him, then burst out laughing.
“Word travels fast in a small camp, huh?” She reached in, grabbed him by the collar and lifted him out of the seat with one hand as easily as picking up a jacket, then set him down on his feet in the mud. “Sit, stay, and don’t even think about running, or the crocodiles get you. They’ve been very patient tonight, and I’d hate to disappoint them…”
The young man looked toward the river, where three pairs of glowing eyes had silently surfaced and were watching him, and he sat down so fast he nearly bruised himself.
Kara walked around to the back of the truck and yanked the cargo doors open.
CLANK!
Then she went very still.
The cargo bay was lined from floor to ceiling with padded steel racks, and in every rack, nestled in soft foam and humming incubator cradles that glowed a faint warm orange, sat dozens of eggs.
There were big speckled ones the size of watermelons, small glossy blue ones no bigger than her fist and pale leathery ones that shifted faintly inside their shells as though something within was dreaming.
One near the top was covered in fine golden scales, and another was as black as obsidian and gave off a warmth she could feel from where she stood.
’So they were taking the next generation too,’ she thought, and something cold and quiet settled in her chest. ’Every nest they could find…’
She thought about the matriarch guarding her nest upstream with her mate gone, and about Lara standing on that riverbank with her staff blazing, and then she quietly began lifting the racks out of the truck one by one and sliding them into her Inventory, as carefully as someone handling glass.
’Well might as well give them to her…’
Back at the ruined camp, the soldiers were loading the last of the bound poachers onto the gunboats when Kara drifted down out of the dark sky with the frightened young driver dangling from her hand by his collar, and she dropped him in front of Da Silva like a cat delivering a mouse.
“One more for your collection, Valeria,” she said. “There was a boat waiting on the far bank to pick him up. It got away, but it won’t get far, they were heading downriver in a real hurry…”
Da Silva’s eyes sharpened, and she turned to the nearest officer without missing a beat.
“Send the third gunboat downriver at full speed, and I want that boat tied to our dock before sunrise…”
“Yes, High Marshal!” the officer barked, already running.
Kara left them to it and walked across the camp toward the center, where Lara was still kneeling beside the Starmane with one hand buried in the jaguar’s glittering mane, and Aki sat cross-legged on the ground beside them, holding very still while a giant silver-tipped otter sniffed curiously at her hair.
Lara looked up as Kara approached, and her jade eyes narrowed.
“You went after the truck,” she said as if she already knew she wasn’t going to like the answer.
“I did,” Kara said, coming to a stop in front of her. “Gary had a backup plan, believe it or not… a separate truck hidden under the trees, and a boat waiting on the other side of the river.”
Lara’s grip tightened in the jaguar’s mane.
“And what was in it?”
Instead of answering, Kara held out her hand, palm up, and let the Inventory open.
One by one, the racks of eggs appeared on the ground between them and settled gently onto the mud in a long glowing row, and the warm orange light of the incubator cradles spilled across Lara’s face and lit up the gold beads in her locs.
Lara stopped breathing.
She rose slowly to her feet and walked to the first rack with her bare feet silent on the ground, and laid her palm against a speckled egg the size of a watermelon.
It shifted faintly under her hand, and she moved on to the next one, and the next, touching each egg gently as though she were counting them, as though she were greeting each one by name.
“Harpy,” she whispered. “River turtle, glass serpent, moon caiman…”
Her voice caught in her throat.
“These were taken from nests all over the basin… I thought they were already gone. I’d stopped looking for them, Kara, I’d stopped…”
She reached the golden-scaled egg at the end of the row and rested both hands on it, and her shoulders trembled once.
“Eighty-three,” she said quietly. “Eighty-three of my children…”
Then she turned around and looked at Kara, and the expression on her face was nothing like the lazy smile Kara had seen all day.
Her jade eyes were wide and shining, her lips were parted and a deep warm flush was rising across her dark cheeks, and for one unguarded moment, the centuries-old protector of the forest looked almost shy.
“You brought them back,” she said softly.
“Well, they’re yours, aren’t they?” Kara said with a small shrug. “It seemed a bit rude to keep them…”
Lara stared at her, and then a slow radiant smile spread across her face, sweet and completely different from any smile Kara had seen on her yet.
“Thank you…” Lara said.
She stepped forward, took Kara’s face gently between both of her long hands and leaned down…
And licked her.