Rattled, Five sneezes and spits, shaking off the Thin Mog’s grasp.
“John—,” Sam starts to say, but then his eyes widen, and he dives back into the cell just ahead of a jagged piece of dark-colored ice.
Phiri Dun-Ra is back on her feet. She reels me towards her using her tentacles. With most of her backup dead, her eyes are suddenly wild and desperate.
“Extraction!” she shrieks into an earpiece. “I need extraction!”
Five rams into her, grabbing her around the throat with two hands. His skin is the speckled white and black of the tile floor. Phiri lets a gout of fire loose in Five’s face, but it only singes his carapace and makes him angrier. His hands tighten around her neck.
It’s a relief when one of Phiri’s tentacles slides out of my back. That feeling doesn’t last long. Phiri lashes the oily appendage around Five’s neck and lifts him off the ground so that his feet are no longer touching the tile floor. His skin loses its hardened coating—now it’s back to normal—and Phiri is able to squeeze his throat closed with her tentacle.
Now’s it’s Five wheezing for breath.
“Let’s see what you have for me, boy,” Phiri says. The sharpened end of her tentacle slaps across Five’s face, seeking out his empty eye socket. She’s going to attach herself to Five like she’s attached herself to me.
That’s when I see Five’s blade lying abandoned on the floor. One of the Mogs he dusted must have been carrying it.
“Five!” I shout, trying to get his attention as he starts to turn blue. I stretch my leg out as far as I can and kick the blade towards him. I hope he can hear it skittering across the floor.
Before Phiri can plug into Five, he uses his telekinesis to yank his blade towards him and strap it to his arm. It’s so smooth, I get the sense that’s not the first time Five’s practiced that move. And what comes next . . . well, I know Five’s got experience in this area.
With maniacal glee, Five stabs at Phiri Dun-Ra. He hacks away at the tentacle around his neck until it’s nothing but pulp and he’s able to drop to the floor. His skin takes on the hardened tile texture again, just in time to absorb a desperate burst of fire from Phiri. Undeterred, Five goes right for the mass of ooze attached to her shoulder, mutilating it until the tentacles attached to me drop loose and wither to ash. Phiri screams in frustration, even as her sick appendage keeps regrowing. Every time it does, Five seems almost glad to get another chance to slash it apart. I’d almost forgotten how sadistic he is.
“Just kill her, Five!” I yell, edging backwards across the floor and grimacing as I notice the size of the blood trail I leave behind.
“Don’t rush me,” he snarls.
The Shadow Mog emerges from the darkness behind Phiri Dun-Ra. This must be the extraction she was screaming for a few seconds ago. He wraps his arms around Phiri’s waist and yanks her backwards, the shadows like liquid around them, swallowing them up.
Except Five doesn’t let go. He buries his blade in Phiri’s shoulder and launches himself through the shadows after them. The teleportation is completely soundless. One second they’re here and the next the hallway is completely still. Wherever the Shadow Mog brought Phiri to, he took Five with them.
“John!”
Sam falls to his knees on the floor next to me. I can tell by the look on his face that I’m a mess. There are puncture wounds on my side and my back, broken bones in my arm and deep gashes around my neck. Everything is sticky with my blood.
“I’m . . . I’m all right,” I tell him.
“Shit, no, you are definitely not,” he replies. “Can you heal?”
“I am healing,” I say.
Sam looks down at me. “No. You’re bleeding.”
“It’s . . . it’s going to happen slow.”
Now that I’m separated from Phiri Dun-Ra, I feel my Legacies gradually returning. With some effort, I lift up my arm and examine the puncture wound underneath it. The black oil is slowly seeping out of me, pushed out by my Legacy as it struggles to knit my body together. Once all that’s cleared from my system, I hope my powers will be fully charged. It’ll just be a matter of me having the strength left to use them.
Sam rips off a piece of his T-shirt and clamps it to my neck.
“This cut isn’t closing even a little,” he says.
“It won’t,” I tell him. I weakly hold up the noose. “They used that Voron noose on me. Like what Pittacus used on Setrákus Ra.”
“Oh man, you’re going to have a scar,” Sam mumbles, shaking his head.