The Echo came from a fight that almost didn't happen.
They were halfway through the afternoon's hunt, moving through a narrow passage where the coral walls pressed close enough that Sunny could touch both sides with his arms extended. His shadow sense had mapped the route ahead and found it clear, so when the scavenger came barreling around a blind corner from a passage his sense hadn't reached, the surprise was mutual.
Nephis was on point. She sidestepped the creature's initial lunge with a pivot that put her against the wall and gave Sunny the center of the passage. The scavenger committed to the lunge and skidded in the mud, its pincers closing on empty air, and by the time it recovered its footing Sunny was already inside its reach.
He drove the Azure Blade upward through the gap beneath the jaw. The angle was tight and the creature's momentum was still carrying it forward, so the blade went deeper than he'd planned, punching through the softer tissue and into whatever served as a brain. The scavenger dropped instantly, its legs folding in sequence, and the weight of it nearly tore the sword from his grip as it fell.
[You have slain an Awakened beast, Carapace Scavenger.]
[Your shadow grows stronger.]
The hunger flared the moment the creature hit the ground. Sunny pressed his palm to the carapace and fed, letting the Awakened shadow's dense quality flow into him and push the gnawing back to its baseline. The chitin paled beneath his hand, going chalky and brittle where it had been dark and hard.
He pulled away and wiped his palm on his leg.
Then the Spell spoke again.
[You have received an Echo.]
Sunny stared at the runes. He read them twice because the first time didn't produce any response in him that felt proportional to what they said.
Echoes were among the rarest rewards the Spell offered. Most Awakened never received one in their entire careers. In the waking world, a single Echo could be auctioned for enough money to buy a residence in the inner city, and the bidding wars between Clans for combat-capable Echoes were the kind of events that made the news.
Sunny had just received one from a routine scavenger kill in a mud-floored corridor.
Nephis was watching him. She'd seen him go still and was waiting for either an explanation or a threat assessment.
"I got an Echo," he said.
Her expression shifted by a fraction, which from Nephis was roughly equivalent to open astonishment.
"Show me."
Sunny dove into his soul sea. The familiar black sun hung above the dark water, orbited by the spheres of light that represented his Memories. A new sphere floated further out, larger than the others and dimmer, hovering at the edge of his awareness. He willed it to descend.
The sphere touched the water and its radiance faded, revealing the creature contained within. A Carapace Scavenger, hulking and still, its black chitin gleaming in the sourceless light. The creature stood motionless, completely devoid of madness or free will. Just an echo of what the living creature had been, obedient and waiting.
He summoned it.
The scavenger materialized on the passage floor in a cascade of tiny sparks that knitted together into solid chitin. It stood motionless, its pincers lowered, its posture neutral. Nephis studied it with the careful attention she gave to anything that changed their tactical situation.
"It's Awakened," Sunny said. "Stronger than any of us individually."
Nephis walked around it, examining the joints and the thickness of the carapace. Then she looked at him.
"Cassie."
Sunny had already been thinking the same thing. "It can carry her. We move twice as fast, and she's off the ground when the tide comes."
Nephis nodded once.
They retrieved Cassie from the ridge and introduced her to the Echo. The blind girl approached it with her hands extended, found the edge of the carapace, and explored the surface with her fingertips. She spent a long time touching the chitin, mapping its dimensions by feel.
"It's very large," she said.
"It won't hurt you," Sunny told her. "It does what I tell it."
Cassie hesitated, then let them help her climb onto the scavenger's broad back. Nephis used the rope they'd salvaged to fashion a set of makeshift reins that looped around the creature's forward joints, giving Cassie something to grip. The blind girl sat upright, her staff across her lap, and tested the reins with small tugs.
"It's actually comfortable," she said, and the surprise in her voice almost made Sunny smile.
They tested the arrangement on the way back to the ridge. The Echo moved at Sunny's command, keeping pace with their walking speed without jostling Cassie, and the difference was immediate. Cassie no longer needed to be guided step by step through the labyrinth. The Echo carried her over the worst of the mud and navigated obstacles on Sunny's silent direction, which freed both him and Nephis to focus entirely on the route ahead and the threats within it.
By the time they reached the ridge, they'd covered more ground in an hour than they usually managed in three.
The storm arrived that night without warning.
The wind woke him. One moment the night air was still, and the next a cold gust hit the ridge hard enough to scatter the remains of their fire. Sunny was on his feet and pulling Cassie away from the ridge's edge before the rain hit.
It didn't rain so much as collapse. The water came down in sheets so heavy that visibility dropped to nothing within the first breath, and the wind behind it turned the rain horizontal, driving it across the ridge's flat surface with enough force that they had to fight to stand.
Nephis grabbed the supply pack and flattened herself against the stone. Sunny pressed Cassie between himself and the ridge's one natural windbreak, a low spine of rock that rose half a meter above the surface near the center. The Echo crouched beside them, its carapace angled into the wind, and Sunny realized after a moment that the creature was deliberately positioning itself to shield them.
Lightning split the sky and turned the labyrinth below into a white maze for half a second. In that flash, Sunny saw the dark water surging higher than it ever had, waves crashing against coral walls that normally stood well above the flood line. The storm was pushing the tide beyond its usual reach.
Thunder followed, so loud that Sunny felt it in his ribs.
Cassie was shaking against his side. Not from cold, though the rain was cold enough, but from the disorientation. A blind girl in a storm had no reference points, no way to construct a mental map of what was happening around her, and the noise was obliterating the sound-based navigation she relied on. She gripped his arm and pressed her face against his shoulder and didn't let go.
Sunny held her and watched the water rise.
The ridge's elevation had seemed generous when they'd first made camp. Now, with the waves climbing higher with each surge, that margin was shrinking. He tracked the waterline through his shadow sense and didn't like what he saw. It was still rising.
"We might need to move higher," he said to Nephis, raising his voice above the wind.
She was lying flat against the stone, her hair plastered to her face, water streaming off her armor. She looked at the labyrinth below, then at the ridge around them.
"There is no higher."
She was right. The ridge was the highest ground for kilometers in every direction. If the water reached them here, there was nowhere left to go.
Sunny adjusted his grip on Cassie and pressed his back against the rock spine. The Echo shifted closer, its bulk blocking another gust. Lightning flashed again, and this time Sunny saw the waves breaking against the ridge's base, spraying white foam up the stone slope.
They waited.
The storm raged for hours. Sunny counted them by the intervals between lightning strikes, the way he'd been taught to measure time without instruments, and kept his attention on the waterline. Nephis didn't move from her position. Cassie eventually stopped shaking and settled into a stillness that meant she'd either calmed herself or exhausted her capacity for fear. The Echo remained where it was, a wall of chitin between them and the worst of the wind.
The water peaked less than a meter below the ridge's surface, close enough that the spray from the waves reached them and soaked them further, as though the rain hadn't already accomplished that. Sunny watched the dark surface lap at the stone and thought about what would have happened if the ridge had been two meters lower.
Then, slowly, the water began to fall.
The storm broke before dawn. The wind died first, dropping from violent to strong to steady over the span of half an hour, and the rain eased from horizontal sheets to a heavy downpour and then to ordinary rainfall. By the time the eastern horizon showed its first grey light, the rain had stopped entirely and the sea was retreating with the reluctant urgency it always showed at dawn.
Sunny peeled himself off the stone and stood. Every muscle in his body ached from holding the same position for hours. His clothes were soaked through and the cold had settled into his joints and wouldn't leave without heat he didn't have.
Nephis rose beside him. She looked as though she'd spent the night in the ocean, which was close to the truth. Her face was pale and her lips were faintly blue, but she stood steady and her eyes were already scanning the labyrinth below, assessing the damage.
The labyrinth was transformed. The flood had rearranged the mud, filling some passages and clearing others, depositing debris against the coral walls in patterns that bore no resemblance to the terrain Sunny had spent days mapping. His mental picture of the routes ahead was useless now. They would have to start over.
Cassie sat up on the Echo's back, her hair a matted curtain across her face. She pushed it aside and turned her head toward them.
"Is it over?"
"Yes," Nephis said.
Cassie let out a long breath.
Sunny looked west, toward the castle they couldn't see yet and the path they'd have to find again. The storm had cost them nothing they couldn't rebuild except time, and time was the one resource they'd been short of since the beginning.
The Echo shifted beneath Cassie and turned its eyeless head in Sunny's direction, awaiting a command. Sunny wiped the rain from his face and started mapping the new terrain with his shadow sense.
They had work to do.