Monster Planet(75)

Ayaan wanted to rub her eyes, she wanted to blink back whatever was obscuring her vision. But no, it was true. The burnt woman had revived and then vanished into thin air.

The green phantom stamped into the silo. 'Erasmus!' he shouted. 'Where is she?'

The furry lich could only raise his arms in protest. Ayaan wanted to smile to see the two of them so helpless. She closed her own eyes, and listened.

There. A skittering sound, then a quick rhythm of metallic thumps. There was something wrong with the sound. It was less as if she heard it than she had imagined it, or as if someone else in another place was hearing it, not her. Ayaan opened her eyes. A ladder, directly in front of her, lead up into the upper reaches of the silo.

She looked up and saw a hatch rusted shut in the dome at the top. Sighing, Ayaan wrapped her nerveless hands around a rung of the ladder and hauled herself upward. She felt as if she were slipping, as if she would fall back onto the hard packed earth of the silo floor, but she grabbed at the next rung anyway. One after the other after the other. Occasionally she stopped and hooked her arms through the ladder's rungs and tried to listen again, but she heard nothing more.

'What are you doing?' the green phantom demanded, only his cowled head poking into the silo. Ayaan ignored him and kept climbing. If he didn't trust her yet he never would, and she didn't have the energy left to explain.

At the top of the silo a thin seam of metal ran around the base of the dome, perhaps four inches wide. The hatch she'd seen from the bottom stood immediately at the top of the ladder, mounted on this thin ledge. Ayaan grabbed for the lever that worked the hatch and yanked hard at it, putting all her weight into it. With a horrible groan that sounded like the silo was about to collapse around her the hatch slid open, grinding in its tracks, and bright sunlight blasted inside the metal dome.

The blonde woman appeared there as if she'd come in with the light. She stood braced precariously on the thin seam, her pale skin naked to the sunlight, her hair glowing in an unkempt halo around her face. She had a bite mark on her shoulder, the only sign of violence on her, and a black tattoo of a radiant sun on her belly. Her bright form was doubled, though, echoed by her aura'a howling void of dark energy more vibrant and at once more tenuous than any Ayaan had seen before.

'Are you a good lich or a bad lich?' the apparition asked, and Ayaan could only crouch in the silo's hatch with her mouth open, wondering what was going on. The woman leaned forward, across the dome, and grasped for Ayaan's outstretched hands.

'Who are you?' Ayaan asked, finally.

'Who aren't I?' the blonde woman replied with a sad smile. 'I was called Julie, once, but I remember nothing about her. I call myself Nilla now.' She shrugged. 'I've been called worse.'

Ayaan decided to put that line of questioning aside. 'What happened to you?'

Nilla looked away for a moment, as if trying to remember. 'I was burned to death... but I guess it didn't take.' She shrugged again. Ayaan thought something was wrong with her, something psychological. Though she supposed having her heart eaten by a wizard and then being burned alive gave her an excuse for a little mental baggage.

'I was headed for New York, I wanted to see Mael. We were discussing the big plan. I stopped wherever I could, wherever people would have me, living or dead. I helped them, if I could, if I felt they... deserved it.' Her eyes went very wide. 'I was never a very good judge of character. Lots of people tried to kill me, I was used to that. No one tried to eat me before, though. Do you know what it's like to see your own heart ripped out? Lucky me, being dead, I didn't need a heart. He might as well have taken my appendix.'

At the bottom of the silo Erasmus called up at them. 'Miss, we don't want to hurt you,' he insisted. 'We want to honor you.'

'He thinks that's true,' Nilla told Ayaan. 'I guess we should go down.'

'Wait,' Ayaan said, and grabbed the woman's shoulder. 'I have so many more questions.'

Nilla smiled again, that sad, even heartbreaking smile. 'I've never been good with questions. You need to have some answers first, before you can be good with questions.' She looked down at her hand and then turned it palm up. A little blob of silvery metal sat there. It looked like it could have been a piece of jewelry but the fire had melted it. 'Take this,' Nilla said in a soft whisper. 'It used to be in my nose.'

Ayaan nearly dropped it.

'Not like that,' Nilla chided. She touched the side of her nose and showed Ayaan where it was pierced. 'It was a nose ring. Sarah will want it.'