hand from his sleeve. As he was drawn toward the human head amid the monstrous plant, Jak thrust the knife forward, stabbing the man’s face right across the jaw. A gout of flesh and sap went sailing into the air, and the man made a kind of ticking noise from somewhere deep in his throat.
“Let. Go. Me,” Jak snarled, forcing out the words as the pressure of the vines increased on his ribs and lungs.
Still inside the room, Krysty heard Jak’s strained words and looked up. She was fencing with another of those tendrillike vines, this one thick as a person’s leg. The tendril kept trying to cinch around Krysty’s feet and she kept dancing out of its way, using the butt of her blaster to rain hammer blows against it rather than waste precious bullets.
At Jak’s call, Krysty leaped over the swinging tendril as it made another pass for her, grabbing an overhanging branch and pulling herself up from the floor. As she clambered up the branch, she called to Doc, who had drawn his sword from its sheath and was hacking at the writhing tendrils of the plant.
“Doc! Jak needs our help!”
Surrounded by a cloud of debris he had hacked from the living plant, Doc looked up, his pale blue eyes sweeping past Krysty’s hurrying figure and up to where Jak was being drawn toward the human face that waited at the plant’s core.
Krysty began to chant quietly, calling on the goddess of the Earth, Gaia, who had gifted the women of Krysty’s family with an incredible power. Krysty felt a surge of strength rush through her, like a jolt of electricity firing through her muscles, igniting every artery, every vein. With the surge of strength came speed and stamina, turning the titian-haired woman superhuman for just a brief period.
With the power channeling through her, Krysty skipped over a grasping tendril as a wave of thorns launched from its surface. The thorns punctured her jeans and she was spattered with sap, but she felt no pain from the impact, merely kept moving through the vegetation toward the squirming thing that loomed above. Her hair seemed to jut around her in lightning bolts now, great slashes of red encircling her face like blood held frozen in the air.
Behind Krysty, Doc raised his LeMat and rested his finger against the secondary trigger, the one that would unleash a blast from the shotgun barrel.
The mutie plant jabbed at Krysty with its tendrils, but she batted them aside, yanking one so hard that it snapped in a shower of gooey yellow sap. Jak was above her now, his feet dangling inches above Krysty’s head.
Without slowing, Krysty leaped, grabbing the thick vine that had wrapped around her pale-skinned partner and pulling herself up. The vine struggled with the weight of two bodies, and as Krysty rocked it the vine sagged toward the floor, depositing Jak there with a thump. The tendril was still wrapped around the albino, thorns digging into his clothes and the flesh beneath. Krysty took a secure hold of the tendril midway between where it held Jak and where it emerged from the stalk. And then she pulled, yanking both sides apart, twisting and ripping until they split, vomiting a splurge of yellow gunk as they tore.
From across the room, Doc’s voice carried with eminent clarity. “Krysty—get down!”
Krysty dropped, her red hair trailing behind her like a flame. Then Doc squeezed the trigger of the LeMat, sending a burst of buckshot at the heart of the predatory plant. The sound of the blaster was like the crack of thunder in the enclosed space. In the center of the plant, the man’s face and neck exploded as the buckshot struck, chunks of flesh, leaf and branch sailing in all directions.
The plant wavered for a moment, unleashing the last of its projectile thorns in a cruel flinch that peppered the room with debris, rattling against the armaglass of the mat-trans chamber with a sound like rain on a tin roof. Then, finally, it was still.
Doc let out a breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding, his blaster still pointing at the center of the sagging plant. “Is...is everyone all right?” he asked.
Jak lay on the floor gasping, like a man who had been drowning tasting air thought lost. The tendril was still cinched around him, but the pressure had eased. Krysty crouched beside him, using the last vestiges of her enhanced strength to untangle Jak from his attacker. The Gaia power’s fury could be measured in heartbeats, long enough to save a companion’s life but not enough to change the world. In its aftermath, Krysty began to weaken, feeling utterly drained. As she loosened the tangle from Jak, he pulled his right hand free and helped her, producing another of his knives from a hidden sheath and using that to hack at the last of the sickly green limb.
Across the room, Ryan lay in agony, spines from the plant embedded across his face and chest. Mildred had recovered and, though woozy, she made her way past overgrown comp consoles to assist Ryan. He clawed at his face, plucking the thorns away before they could sink any deeper. They were nasty things, barbed down their sides with little spiny hairs that felt like needles pulling at the skin when Ryan removed them. A big thorn had embedded in the leather patch that masked his missing left eye, and Mildred pulled the whole patch away. Ryan hissed as the thorn’s point scratch at his flesh.
“You’re okay now,” Mildred soothed. “It’s okay.” Though she said that, she saw that Ryan’s face was dotted with black spines.
J.B. emerged from the deep vegetation close to the door of the room, wiping blood from his split lip and brushing himself down. He was scratched all over and he walked heavily, as if he had hurt one of his legs, but he seemed mobile at least.
“People,” he said, getting the attention of the others. “Our troubles aren’t over yet.”
“What do you mean, J.B.?” Ricky asked. He was still disentangling himself from a wreath of spiny briars, pulling them carefully away from the bare skin of his hands and arms.
“The mat-trans took a hit,” J.B. said, nodding toward the armaglass walls of the chamber, which were now almost entirely hidden behind the creeping vines of the mutie plant. The little that could be seen of the tinted glass was pocked with hundreds of thorns, their dark spiny protrusions trailing across the surface. The walls creaked ominously.
“¡Salir!” Ricky cried. “How will we use—?”
“I’m thinking it might be now or never, kid,” J.B. interrupted as he strode hurriedly toward the mat-trans. “These walls are supposed to be tough, but I have a feeling that they won’t last more than a few minutes under that pressure.”
“Can we remove the creepers?” Krysty asked weakly.
In reply J.B. merely shrugged before turning his attention to Jak.
“What did you see up there? Anything worth sticking around for?”
Sitting on the floor, plucking thorns from his jacket, Jak shook his head. “Leaves everywhere. Sun hidin’, rain pissin’.”
J.B. was the unofficial second-in-command of the group, and he accepted the leadership role when the situation demanded it. With Ryan wounded and the clock ticking, J.B. figured now was the right time to take charge.
“Any more of these muties?” the Armorer pressed, indicating the dying plant. It had taken all seven of them to take out just one of the strange hybrid plants—J.B. didn’t relish taking on another, especially given the injuries they were now suffering as a result.
Jak looked thoughtful, shaking his head slowly. “Not sure. Not see.”
With his mind racing, the Armorer looked around the overgrown control room, picking out the struggling forms of Ryan,
