All the pain Mithra had to endure in the last few weeks had one upside: her pain tolerance was through the roof. She didn’t even flinch when Leah cut through a tendon in her leg.

  “Slow,” Leah said. Her voice wasn’t strained at all. “You’ve got a reach advantage. Use it. Two minutes break.”

  Mithra grit her teeth. The slit tendon knit itself together in a few seconds. With Leah’s instruction and a lot of experimenting, she managed to figure out a way to focus her healing on specific injuries. The speed increase was downright astronomical, even Leah was moderately impressed. Mithra took a swig from a bottle that was collecting water dripping down in the back of the cave and got into position.

  It was their fifth day stuck in a cave on the bottom of the ocean. Or what once was the ocean. They had to leave the bike when the cube exploded—something about its energy disrupted not only Mithra’s divine energy, but also the delicate mechanisms of its engine. They grabbed as much as they could carry and pushed on. On the second day of travel through the desert they made it to the dried out coast.

  The way down the continental slope was almost entirely vertical. They had to use climbing hooks to get down, with more than one close call. Once, Mithra lost her grip and almost fell to her death—regenerative powers or not—only to catch herself in the last possible moment. The baby Q was flying around them the entire time, screeching, cheering them on.

  During the days in the cave they settled on a name for it: Menace. Mostly because of the way it terrorized the ocean’s floor animal population—flying between pillars of salt with breakneck speeds, picking out stragglers and bringing carcasses back to Mithra like a kitten proud of its first kill. But for Mithra it had a second, much more personal, meaning. Duncan often called her a menace. Enough that every time she called out the animal’s name, it reminded her of him.

  They got stuck in the cave on the third day of their trek through the seabed mountains. When the ground started shaking, Leah ushered them both into it.

  “Cleaners,” she had said. “Giant robots with an army of drones following them. They used to clean the ocean of pollutants, before the war. When the ocean dried, their programming got screwed. They’re a death sentence if you get too close.”

  And so they were staying in the cave until the shaking stopped. It’s been going non-stop for five days. The cave itself was man-made by Enclavers. They had made a whole series of artificial caves to allow safe passage through the ocean, Leah had explained. Mithra didn’t understand how it was supposed to protect them from a steel leviathan, but it seemed to be working so far.

  The cave was cozy as far as a cave could be. There were scribbles on the walls, grooves in the salt counting days people had spent there, with signatures to boot. Mithra had been making her own grooves, signed MLM: Mithra, Leah, Menace. Leah had found it amusing, though she wouldn’t say why.

  For the last few days Leah had been teaching Mithra to fight, incorporating her regenerative mark into the training. They had altered her fighting style to make the best use of it. With the rapid regeneration she was working on she could fight much more aggressively, taking blows that would slow down others too much, leaving herself open and trading wounds. Of course it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. She could still feel pain, and it took a massive amount of concentration to direct her divine energy effectively mid-combat. It was insanely risky, but also highly effective. Against anyone other than Leah, of course.

  The woman wasn’t the best hand to hand fighter, but she was fast and almost untouchable in her armor. Her fighting style was insanely scrappy, taking advantage of everything around her, including the environment. More than once Mithra found herself maneuvered into a corner by Leah’s quick thinking. She obviously wasn’t trained in any official fighting style, but her attacks were vicious and retreats clever. Every opening Mithra presented, Leah pushed mercilessly.

  The sound of steel on steel echoed through the cave. This time, Mithra was set on overwhelming Leah with her attacks. She slashed at her knife hand, intent on keeping the armored woman at bay. If she could keep the reach advantage, there wasn’t much Leah could do. Leah parried the attack, but another was already coming: a flurry of thrusts meant more to push her away than deal any damage. Leah was fighting uncharacteristically slowly, not dashing around with those weirdly shaped legs of hers. Mithra’s barrage of attacks was proving successful—Leah had no space to advance—but she wasn’t about to let her guard down. The steel woman had too many tricks up her non-existent sleeves.

  Leah parried a blow to the side and took a fast step back. Her back was to the porous wall of the cave. She was cornered. Mithra was about to press the advantage and finish the fight, when deafening bangs shook the cave.

  Mithra was familiar with guns—Leah had taught her about them—so when a bullet bit into her thigh, she wasn’t too surprised. It had passed through cleanly and she only missed half a step before the wound was gone. Bullets were an easy obstacle for her to overcome. Her mark didn’t care about the severity of the wound, just the size of it.

  But Leah wasn’t idle. She fired three more times, each shot perfectly placed into her healing leg. Mithra’s knee protested and she missed another half step, her leg buckling slightly under her. She healed it immediately, but it was too late. Leah had used the time the gun bought her to rush Mithra. A steel elbow crashed into her stomach with so much force she was scared it’d rupture something. She tried to wrestle Leah away, but the weight of the woman with her armor was too much and she was pushed back.

  The fight ended with Mithra on the floor, Leah’s steel leg pressing on her larynx.

  “Good fight,” Leah said and let go.

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  Mithra sat up. One bullet hadn’t passed cleanly and in the midst of the fighting she had healed over it. It was scraping on her bone painfully when she moved. She concentrated her energy and pushed it out. It fell to the ground with a clink, her flesh making an awful wet sound as it closed again. The use of her magic made her hungry, as always. Menace was doing all their hunting for them so she had a limitless supply of deliciously salted dinosaur meat, but she didn’t eat just yet.

  Her clothes had been damaged in the fall on the rocky floor: her pants had ripped on the side and her top got a brand new hole in the back, losing structural cohesion. After the accident with the cube she had to patch the clothes up, sacrificing a lot of material. Her pants were turned into awkward shorts, stopping barely under her knee. Her shirt hadn’t survived, and so she fashioned a wrap from the tatters, covering the essentials while leaving her shoulder and midriff bare. Thankfully the cave was more or less at a constant temperature, but it’d be a problem when they had to move again. Getting sunburn during the day and frostbite in the night wasn’t exactly appealing, even if she could heal any damage.

  She got to work with a needle carved from bone and unwrapped her top. Leah turned away immediately. Her reactions never ceased to surprise Mithra. More steel than woman and yet so bashful. Was the sight of bare skin taboo in her culture?

  “How’s your mind mark?” Leah asked, still looking away.

  “Still the same,” Mithra said. The barriers she destroyed were slowly rebuilding itself around it and it started moving again the day before, but it was leaking energy constantly and the inky flow was less like an energetic river, more like a dripping faucet. Despite herself, Mithra was worried. While she wasn’t too keen on using it, without it she wouldn’t be able to resist the Priest’s manipulation.

  “It should repair itself with time, but you have to keep trying to use it,” Leah said. “It’ll speed it up.”

  She was. Everyday when she wasn’t training her body, she was directing energy to the emotion mark. Sometimes, it even responded. Mithra tried again, out of habit, and got the slightest hint of a smell outside the cave. She looked out.

  Menace was there, busy licking a pillar of salt. Its tongue was narrow and snake-like and it flashed out in quick movements from its sharp, toothed beak. It had grown big. Its neck seemed to be growing every time Mithra looked away, and its beak was already the length of her arm. Menace was roughly the size of an adult human now, with a wingspan of over fifteen feet. In the night it was Mithra who snuggled into it now, thankful for its warm and only slightly bloodied feathers as it wrapped its long neck around her and covered her with a wing.

  “How’s the work on the cube going?” Mithra asked. She’d seen Leah fiddle with the thing a few times. It seemed intact after the explosion, not that she dared to try channeling energy into it again.

  “It’s going,” Leah said simply. “I didn’t figure it out yet, I’d need the rest of the cubes for that, but I have some ideas now. Here, look.”

  Leah took out the cube and opened her mask. Her face was slim and pale, in an otherworldly kind of way. She was holding her breath. Mithra hadn’t noticed before, but her eyes were different from each other. One was mechanical, with lenses and a single point of shining blue light. Sleek, with a metallic sheen, combining well with her overall impression of Leah. The other was halfway between a regular eye and a glass ball, bloodshot somehow. It seemed ill-fitting.

  Focused on the eyes, Mithra flinched when the woman took out a knife and cut a small line in her unmasked cheek. Blood welled and she gathered it on the flat of the blade. The mask slid back into place.

  “The cube has more than one use,” Leah continued, like what she’d just done wasn’t irregular in the slightest. “I’m not sure how many functions my parents crammed into it, but it’s a lot.” Her parents had made it? She didn’t mention that before. “The one you activated by accident was some sort of protective measure.”

  Leah smeared the blood from the knife on the cube. The symbol on it took on a rusty color, similar to its mark counterpart. “Channel into it now.”

  “What?” Was she insane? The last explosion almost killed her, who knew what’d happen if it blew up again, this time in an enclosed space. ”I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Just do it,” Leah said. “It’s safe. Should be safe.”

  “Yeah, that’s not reassuring,” Mithra said. “I’m not doing that.”

  “I’ll teach you theory on the mind mark in return.”

  “Wait, you know magic theory?” Mithra asked, but she knew the answer. Of course Leah knew magical theory. She was the one that told her to break down the mark for its reserve energy, something Mithra didn’t even know was possible. “And why now? You could’ve taught me before, Gods know we had the time to.”

  “Knowing theory will help you repair your mark faster and,” she paused, “I didn’t trust you before.”

  “And now you do?”

  “A little more, yes,” Leah said. “Besides, I had other things on my mind, like figuring out the cube. Which I did, so now my time is free.”

  “You just said that you didn’t know what the cube did.”

  “I said I didn’t know everything that it did. I learned what I could with the limited equipment here.”

  “Fine,” Mithra relented. “But how do you know magic, anyway? Is it common knowledge in your Enclave? I thought people outside the Veil didn’t have marks.”

  “They don’t. My parents researched the marks, and I learned it from their notes,” Leah said. “Now channel, before the blood dries completely.”

  Reluctantly, Mithra held out her hand to the cube.

  “Wait, filter it through your hand first.”

  She did, slowly guiding a sliver of energy through her veins, feeling it swirl in her regeneration mark. She had to strain to keep the mark from using it up immediately and to push it out instead.

  The cube glowed, sending a spike of panic down Mithra’s spine. But this time the light was faint, winking out after a moment. Another moment and it glowed again. It was blinking in a repeating pattern.

  “Coordinates,” Leah said, after observing it for a few minutes. “It’s transmitting the locations of the other cubes.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because those are the coordinates for the Enclave. That’s where I left them.”

  “That’s all great and all,” Mithra said. “But why the blood?”

  “It felt right,” Leah said simply.

  “Did you just risk our safety on a hunch?”

  “It was an educated guess based on my familiarity with my parents’ technology,” Leah said, voice cold. “We’ll start your lessons tomorrow.”

  Gods, that woman was going to be the death of her.