Act I, The RecordChapter 5
Chapter 5: Cover Me
A gold giant through the dome, a reckless jump, and one shot that has to land.
The girl had walked out of the crowd. Fanny saw her from the air: a red dress, a pink rabbit, alone in the avenue with her face turned up.
The giant lowered its head through the broken dome. Its shadow covered her. The light in its chest grew brighter.
Fanny dropped and scooped the girl onto her left hip, the Shield’s way. The rabbit fell.
“I’m flying!” said the girl.
“Flying feels great.” It was out before the Shield part of Fanny could stop it.
Behind them the giant fired. A beam of gold light came out of its chest and burned a line down the avenue, through the place where the girl had stood.
In three leaps Fanny reached a side street and set the girl down behind a van. “Stay here.” Then she went back, flat out.
“Cover me!”
At the dome’s edge Layla had three Enders down and a fourth coming.
“Oh, you can’t handle this on your own?”
“No!” said Fanny.
The cannon whined, and the fourth Ender folded. No argument came.
“Right,” said Layla, flat and quick, the voice she used on scoreboards. “Joe’s rule. Its chest opens when it fires. The glow doubles every four seconds, so it fires again in fourteen. I need three seconds of full charge.”
“Keep it busy and take the right edge. Stay right of the center line, because I’ll be using it.”
Fanny remembered the test match, and a shot a hand’s width from her shoulder. She trusted the aim anyway.
She went out through the broken dome. All her life she had wanted to see what lay past it. It was sand.
Enders stood between her and the giant. Gold light burst in the sand around her. She cut her way through, low and fast, on blades and thrusters.
“Eleven,” said the channel. “Ten.”
The heat cracked her lips. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six.
The count stopped.
Fanny counted on, the way artillery crews do. Five. “Layla? Count!” Four.
“Shh. I’m lining up my aim. Don’t get in my way!”
“I’m the one in the way!”
“Then stay on the right!”
Three. The giant’s chest swung away from her, toward the dome. Toward the side street and the van.
Not there.
Fanny went straight up the center line and jumped in front of its chest, blades out, shouting at it. Two. One.
The chest opened, and the giant fired at her.
Something hit Fanny from the left and shoved her right, out of the line. It was Layla, on her suit’s thrusters, the cannon on her shoulder and every cell lit.
Layla fired the full charge into the beam. The shot went past Fanny’s left side so close her hair stood up: a blue-white line, lightning spreading off it like wings. It split the gold light and went on into the open chest.
Fanny was on the right edge now, where Layla had wanted her. She drove in both blades. White light poured out over her arms, and she held.
Then everything the giant had gathered went off inside it.
The blast threw them both. Fanny slid on her shoulder across the sand until her blades dug in. The giant lay in burning pieces.
Layla was on one knee a few meters off, looking at the cells on her cannon instead of the wreck. Then she turned the dial all the way down.
“That was a good shot,” said Fanny.
“Of course it was.” It came late. “Don’t say it like it’s a surprise.”
“I didn’t.”
“You jumped on my line.”
“It was aiming at the side street.”
Layla did not answer that.
A swarm came over the dunes, black things with too many limbs. Behind them walked a gray Ender taller than a tower. Out here there was no narrow place to hold.
Fanny put her back to Layla’s. “Left is yours.”
“I know,” said Layla.
They fought back to back in the open. Some time after the second wave, Fanny realized she had stopped counting. Nobody was counting kills now.
As the sun sank behind the dome, the swarm drew back, the tall one with it. Most of it was still out there. It had only gone quiet.
They went back in where the giant had broken the dome, through a gap wide enough for a truck. On the Academy’s tallest tower, rings turned around a white-cyan beam that leaned across the sky. That was the Energy System, and it fed the dome. Its light ran into the dark hexagons one by one, and each came back pale.
Ash lay over the avenue. Coats covered some of the shapes along the wall. From the side street came a thin sound that did not stop. Fanny decided not to hear it.
One pink ear stuck out of the ash in the avenue. Fanny pulled the rabbit free and beat the ash off it against her thigh. She set it on the broken wall at the side street’s mouth, facing the avenue, where a mother coming back would see it.