Thistle in the Sky | #NONC2022 | ✔

Chapter Sixteen

This wasn't an enemy ship with some new kind of ammunition. This was a monster.

Farah had stared at the hole for less than ten ticks when something moved outside of it. The tentacle-tip probed for the entrance it had just made. Unsuccessful, it moved to the left, pressed against the Ariomma's reinforced skin, and punched through it as smoothly as if it were wet paper. In a tick, there was more than a meter and a half of tentacle inside. All of it was pale blue and nearly translucent. The same colour as the sky.

The shadow over the ship wasn't a cloud that had passed across the sun. It wasn't a cloud at all.

Farah stood paralyzed as the tentacle's tip tapped over the spot where she had been sitting only a minute before. Then it slowed. Like it had eyes she could not see, it lifted from the wooden planks and turned to point straight towards Farah.

It lunged.

Farah bolted out the doorway. The wall splintered behind her, but she did not stop to see if the barrier had stopped the assault. The starboard and keel catwalks were open. Farah sprinted for the keel one as shouts indicated she'd been spotted. Mega ran for the side catwalk with a clear intention to intercept her at the rear of the ship. The mechanic was slower, but Farah still wouldn't have time to grab Kaz and get him somewhere safe. She honed in on Mega's mind. If she could lead the woman somewhere else—

A searing pain punched through Farah's chest. It exploded outward like fireworks, stabbing into every part of her ribcage, and she crashed to the catwalk clutching her chest as her vision blacked out momentarily. When she opened her eyes again, she was gasping and unharmed on the catwalk, and Mega's mind was gone. It had gotten her. Skewered her through the chest with a bullet's force, and even now through the thin gasbags, Farah could hear the envelope tearing as the tentacle withdrew with its prize. Mega was gone.

Drenched with sweat and shaking all over, Farah pushed herself to her feet again. She was out of range of Cahya and Baskoro by the time she stumbled onto the landing at the back of the ship to find Dumadi and Vikal's bodies gone, and no sign of Kaz. They must have killed him. Knocked him out and taken him. Her panic was interrupted by his wavering reappearance in the mindspace. Farah locked onto it and dashed into the backup control room, heedless of the sticky sounds her feet made on the floor. She dropped to her knees to find Kaz underneath the desk, just opening his eyes again.

"Fafa?" he said weakly.

Farah lunged forward and hugged him. His yelp prompted her to release him immediately, but there was no time for sympathies; he would have to bear the pain. "Can you walk?"

"What's happening?"

"We're under attack."

Something splintered at the back of the room. Farah shoved Kaz to the back of the desk and dove after him. Kaz bit back a cry as their knees knocked. A tick later, a tentacle shot past. Both of them froze, locked in place by the same survival instinct the outer-city mice that froze in silence when a cat walked by. The tentacle collided with the room's opposite wall and buckled. Rather than collapsing, it coiled like a snake. Its whole length was alive. It withdrew from the wall and began to flail, its tip poking into every nook and corner in a manner too haphazard to be intelligent, but too systematic to spare any hiding prey.

In the semi-darkness, Farah caught Kaz's eye. His were bright with panic and fixed on her. Are we going to die? was the only thought that crossed his mind. She had to do something. As the tentacle-tip plunged towards them, Farah grabbed the desk and heaved it forward. Instruments smashed and scattered across the room. The desk's backboard clocked her and Kaz over the head as its center of balance tipped, and it slammed down over them like a box. The tentacle crashed into its other side. Farah expected it to punch through, but it glanced off instead. She touched the makeshift ceiling above her. Wood.

The racket outside intensified. Farah did not dare press an eye to the narrow gap that the backboard—now a ceiling overhead—left against the wall. Kaz's pain pressed against her temples and made her leg ache. She cut their telepathic connection momentarily to focus on the sounds of the flailing tentacle. Either far more of it had entered the room now, or it was no longer alone. It was impossible to tell which.

A tearing sound began at the end of the room. It intensified, opening the back of the airship, then half the noise in the room disappeared. Two tentacles. Farah and Kaz both winced as the remaining one slammed down on top of their hideout. Kaz squeezed his eyes shut. Another strike splintered the backboard down the middle. It wouldn't survive another blow.

But the gods were on their side today. Farah's skin crawled as a tentacle-tip probed around the base of the desk, then withdrew. The side of the ship ripped again, and the room fell silent aside from Kaz and Farah's too-fast breathing.

"We need to move," whispered Farah.

"Where?"

"The cargo hold."

The hold filled the rear half of the ship's lower deck, and its entrance wasn't far. Farah doubted the monster would be unable to reach it, but it was full of wooden crates as thick on each side as this desk was on top. They would be safer there. Farah pushed the desk back from the wall. Kaz nearly fainted as she helped him up, so she pulled one of his arms over her shoulders and slipped the other around his waist. They escaped the room together.

A tentacle had been and gone on the landing outside. The platform's edge was dented, and two girders stood buckled like snapped twigs. Wind whined through tears in the envelope overhead. Farah's head spun. Escaping hydrogen had filled the air here, and it would take a while to escape. She forged toward the keel catwalk before it overtook her, and pulled up short at its edge. The walkway was only a foot wide, too narrow for her and Kaz to walk together.

"On my back."

He complied weakly. Farah whispered a quick, "Sorry," before catching both his knees. Kaz bit back a cry as his wounded thigh was wrenched. His arms gripped tight across Farah's collarbone, and he dropped his head to her shoulder. Nausea roiled her stomach. Farah cut the telepathic connection for the second time just before she puked. It clenched her whole chest not to stay attuned to her twin, but she wasn't going to make it to the hold unless she could see straight.

They reached it. Farah stumbled down the stairs just as another consciousness moved into range. Cahya was sprinting down the catwalk towards them.

Farah tried not to drop Kaz as she let him down. She snatched her knife from her belt, ready to stab the woman, or ambush her, or throw the weapon—anything to hit her before she fired the gun. Unless it was already empty. Cahya's mind glowed with panic as Farah probed it desperately for any sign of her intentions. The ship juddered sideways. Farah realized what was happening too late to cut their connection; blinding pain whipped around her body, and she crashed to the ground. In the moment before Cahya's mind went blank, Farah felt the woman's agony: a hundred needle-pointed barbs shooting into her skin as the tentacle wrenched her away.

The cold of the cargo hold floor bled through Farah's clothing as she shut her eyes, the mindspace spinning around her. Besides Kaz, only one mind remained. Gemi's consciousness made a bright spot of terror at the edge of Farah's range. She was still alive. She was still locked in the storeroom. As the Ariomma trembled, she pressed into a corner and prayed for safety.