Caelum couldn't see her properly. Just the eyes and a suggestion of something behind them, mass against deeper black, and the slow heavy push of air whenever she shifted her weight up there. Big. Bigger than the bats by a wide margin and that was as much as he could process before she made the sound again.
It came down through the shaft like a hand pressing on his face. The same vibration he'd felt in the rock, but this time aimed, and his teeth went hot inside his skull. Kifah dropped to one knee with a whimper. Éloise braced herself against the wall and her face went the colour of paper.
The bats above them didn't quite wake. Restless. Shifting. One more pulse like that and they would.
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.
"She's calling them," Yara hissed. "The colony. We've got seconds."
"Kifah—"
"On it." Kifah's voice was thin but she was already moving, pushing herself up off her knee with one hand on the wall, the other coming forward with her palm flat. The Blank field snapped into existence above them, narrow, focused upward, not the wide bubble she'd thrown in the bat tunnel but a tight column of suppression aimed straight at the matriarch's position.
The matriarch tried to make the sound again. Caelum heard it start—the deep building hum—and then collapse, choked off in the middle, like a voice cut at the throat. There was a beat of silence. Then she shrieked. Sharp, angry, and very loud, and Caelum's stomach dropped because that wasn't suppressed at all, that was pure animal noise and the bats above them were going to hear it.
Kifah's nose started bleeding but she kept the field up.
Behind Caelum, Yara had dropped to her knees at the lip of the ledge and pressed both palms flat against the stone. He didn't see what she did because he wasn't looking at her—his eyes were locked on the matriarch's eyes up in the dark and his hands were trying to remember what they were supposed to be doing—but he felt the ledge move. Not crumbling. Moving. The stone under his boots shifted outward and there was suddenly more platform than there had been a second ago, and a low ridge of rock pushed up along the outer edge between them and the open shaft.
What the hell.
He couldn't process it. He filed it under things to deal with later if there was a later.
The matriarch came down.
She dropped out of the dark in a rush of leathery wings, four of them, the span twice what the smaller bats had, and Caelum got a single half-second look at her shape before she was on top of them. Long body, narrow, jaw and ridge for a head, the throat sac under her chin already pulsing for the next pulse. Dawson met her. He came up over the new rock ridge with his sword out and swung—no plasma, no flare, just steel into the joint of one wing—and the strike landed but it landed shallow because Dawson's footing was wrong on the unfamiliar stone and his weight wasn't behind it.
He cursed and pulled back. Dark blood, but not enough.
The matriarch wrenched sideways and her wing caught Dawson across the chest and threw him into the wall. He hit hard. Slid down. Got his sword up before Caelum could even think about helping.
"Éloise!" Yara was shouting now. "Wing! The same wing!"
Éloise had her rapier out and her free hand raised and Caelum saw her concentrate—saw the water gathering at her palm, focused, trying to form whatever it was she was about to throw—and then the matriarch shrieked again and Éloise flinched and the water shot went wild. It hit the wall above the matriarch's head and burst into spray that drenched the cover ridge and the front half of the team. Cold. Useless.
"Fuck," Éloise said quietly. Caelum had never heard her swear before.
She raised her hand again and tried to pull the water back together and the matriarch was already lunging at her, claws first, and Dawson hauled himself off the wall and intercepted with the sword across his body, taking the hit on the flat of the blade. The impact knocked him sideways but he held the line. Just barely.
Caelum's hands were shaking. He didn't know why for a second—then he realised it was because he was supposed to be doing something and he'd been standing there frozen, watching, and everyone else was already in the fight.
Move. Move you idiot.
He brought the spear up. The matriarch was three, maybe four metres away. Outside reach. Outside anything he'd ever managed to do with his electricity except maybe—
He thought about the manual. Don't store. Don't compress. Flow, don't hold.
Pulled the current up out of his chest. Clamped down on it. The pressure spiked under his sternum almost at once and he felt his nerves start to scream. Wrong. All of it wrong.
He didn't have a better idea.
Behind him Kifah made a sound like she was choking. The Blank field flickered. The matriarch was building another pulse and Kifah was barely holding it back and her nose was bleeding properly now, dark down her chin onto her uniform, but she hadn't dropped the field.
Brought both hands up. Palms forward. The current in his chest had become a solid weight he wouldn't be able to hold for long, and his mouth had already gone copper.
Then Blanchard stepped past him.
Blanchard. Bad arm hanging dead at his side, gauntlet sparking weakly, his face grey with exhaustion. He moved up to the cover ridge Yara had raised and braced his good shoulder against the inside of it, gauntlet up, just as the matriarch managed to push another pulse through Kifah's failing field. Caelum saw the air bend around the front of Blanchard's gauntlet—amber light, the bulwark resonance flaring along his good arm and into the stone of the cover wall itself—and the pulse hit and broke against him.
Blanchard grunted. His knees buckled and he caught himself on the wall.
"Hit her, Caelum." His voice was tight. "Now."
Caelum hit her.
He pushed the current out. Ugly burst. Not aimed so much as flung, and it crossed the gap in a jagged blue-white line that didn't look anything like the clean arcs from the salamander fight. It hit her chest above the throat sac. The electricity webbed across her body in branching forks and lit the whole shaft up for a single brilliant instant.
The matriarch went rigid.
Then the feedback hit him.
The current had used his own nerves as the launch channel. Every muscle from his shoulders to his fingertips locked at once. Vision went white at the edges. Copper so thick in his mouth he gagged on it. His arms wouldn't move. His legs went and he hit the stone hard, couldn't get his hands up to break the fall, and his right hand had stopped existing as far as his brain was concerned.
The matriarch was twisting in the air above him, wings spasming, dropping out of sight below the ledge. He heard her hit the opposite wall somewhere down the shaft. The wet scrape of claws catching stone.
Stunned. Not killed. Not even close.
The clicking around them was building. Caelum could hear it through the ringing in his ears. The colony, waking in patches. Smaller bats unfolding their wings. Hundreds of bodies coming alive at once. Kifah's field was gone. Her forehead was on the stone and her hands shook and Caelum couldn't tell if she was conscious.
"Up! Now!" Yara was already moving. "She'll come back inside a minute, and the colony's going with her—everybody up, climb, climb, climb—"
Hands grabbed Caelum under the arms. Blanchard. One-armed and shaking but on his feet, dragging Caelum upright toward the spiral.
"Walk," Blanchard said. His voice was very close to Caelum's ear. "Or I'm going to drag you. Pick one."
"Walking." Caelum's mouth wasn't working right. Slurred. Right hand was gone. Left numb to the elbow.
"Good."
Above them, somewhere in the dark, the matriarch shrieked again. Closer than before. She'd caught herself on the wall. The smaller bats were dropping from their roosts in twos and threes. Some of them in the air already.
Blanchard half-pushed half-carried Caelum onto the first step of the spiral. Éloise was ahead of them, hauling Kifah by the arm, Kifah's feet barely under her. Dawson was somewhere up the line shouting something Caelum couldn't quite make out. Yara had one of the Unit 4 fighters by the harness and was dragging Malik upward between them.
Caelum tried to move his legs. His left worked. His right was slow.
The clicking turned into rustling. The rustling turned into wings.
They climbed.