Nerida Quickwave's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

Nerida held still against the bent bars, watching the beast trace the warnings with a strange tenderness. Then the water behind it shifted. Something else had come through the gate. She heard it before she saw it—a low scrape of stone, a current pulled sideways. Whatever trailed the beast was between her and the open sea now, and it was moving closer. She turned her head slowly. The shape sliding past the ruined gate was not flesh. It was metal—a twisted hull of dark plates and glowing blue panels, half-collapsed, dragging itself across the broken shelf. It moved on jointed limbs that scraped grooves into the stone. The council had not built this. The beast had not made it. But it had followed the beast through, and now it filled the only path back. Nerida pressed lower and scanned the shelf. A squat concrete bunker hunched against the cliff wall, its hatch marked with faded warning symbols. It was small, sealed, and close. She could reach it before the metal thing turned. She tucked the dim spear against her chest and kicked hard along the broken ground, keeping the bent iron bars between herself and the beast. The hatch gave under her shoulder. She slipped inside and pulled it shut behind her. The dark inside the bunker smelled of old salt and rust. Through a narrow slit in the door, Nerida watched the metal thing settle beside the beast. They did not fight. They stood together over the carved warnings, two wrong shapes reading the same message. She was alive, and she was trapped, and whatever her mentor had died chasing was no longer one thing. It was two.