(TAYLOR HEBERT) CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Taylor hit the ground hard enough to knock the breath out of her, and for several seconds she had no idea which way was up. All she could feel was the impact running through her body as she rolled across something rough and hot, until her hands scraped against the ground and she finally managed to stop herself. For a while, all she could do was lie there with her cheek pressed against the surface, her lungs struggling to remember how breathing was supposed to work.

Then, she coughed, rolled onto her back, and stared at a sky so bright that she had to squint.

There was no water.

That was the first thing she noticed.

The second was the heat.

It pressed down on her from every direction, though mostly from above, carrying none of the coolness that had surrounded her moments earlier. Taylor pushed herself upright, blinking as her vision gradually cleared, and turned in a slow circle.

Sand stretched in every direction.

There were no buildings or rescue teams waiting for her, and certainly no Simurgh hovering somewhere overhead. As far as she could see, the landscape consisted entirely of dunes and stretches of hard-packed earth broken by the occasional dark stone, while the horizon wavered beneath the heat.

Taylor stared for a moment longer before looking down at her wrist.

The watch was still shining red.

She pressed the dial experimentally, although she already knew nothing would happen.

The transformation had timed out, and apparently being dragged through a dimensional portal by an Endbringer wasn’t considered enough of an emergency to make the watch reconsider.

“Great,” Taylor muttered.

Her voice sounded strangely small in the open space.

She looked over her shoulder again, searching the sky for any sign of the Endbringer. There was nothing. No white feathers, no distant movement, and no portal waiting to take her somewhere else.

That should have been a relief, but her thoughts immediately went to Armsmaster. She could still see him, the portal behind him and the Simurgh’s arm passing through his body, followed by the sudden spray of blood.

God, the gore. 

Taylor shut her eyes.

Maybe she had seen it wrong. It had happened too quickly, and the whole scene had been so chaotic that maybe her mind had filled in the worst possible version of what had happened. Armsmaster had survived things that should have killed him before, and his armour was far tougher than anything she had made so far.

He had to be alive.

He had to be.

Taylor opened her eyes again and forced herself to look around.

Whatever had happened to Armsmaster, standing in the middle of a desert wasn’t going to help him. If the Simurgh had dragged her here for some reason, Taylor needed to figure out where here was, and the first step was finding shelter, or at least some shade. Water would be even better.

She picked a direction more or less at random and started walking.

The sand made every step harder than it should have been, and Taylor quickly learned to avoid the softer sections where her shoes sank several inches into the ground. She tried to keep to the firmer patches between the dunes, although there was little consistency to the terrain and no obvious landmark to guide her.

At first, the heat was merely unpleasant, but after several minutes it became difficult to ignore, and sweat gathered along her forehead and beneath her collar. Taylor wiped her face with the back of her hand and kept walking, occasionally looking down at the watch as though sheer irritation might convince it to start working again.

The red glow remained, so she kept going. There had to be something somewhere, a road, a building, a vehicle, anything. Even a tree would have been enough. Instead, the desert stretched around her, with each dune looking much like the one before it. The lack of anything familiar began to get under her skin, and she found herself glancing over her shoulder more often, half-expecting the Simurgh to appear behind her.

Nothing followed.

Her mouth had become dry enough that swallowing hurt, and Taylor immediately regretted trying.

She hadn’t realised how much water she had lost until she started thinking about drinking. She could almost feel the ocean from earlier, cold water surrounding her while she moved through the wreckage, and the memory only made her thirst worse.

She kept walking anyway.

Time passed without giving her anything to measure it against. The sun moved gradually across the sky, although Taylor had no idea how long she had been walking, and the heat seemed to become even more oppressive with every passing minute.

Her legs began to feel heavy, and she slowed despite herself. The sensible part of her mind told her that she should find shade before she collapsed, but there was no shade to be found. Every direction offered the same empty landscape, and the only thing Taylor could do was keep moving and hope that something eventually appeared.

She stumbled over a patch of loose sand and caught herself before falling. 

“Come on,” she muttered, pressing a hand against her forehead when another wave of dizziness followed. It eventually passed, although the relief lasted only a few seconds before the sensation returned, stronger this time.

She looked at the watch again.

Still red.

“Come on.”

Nothing changed.

She took another step.

Then another.

Her thoughts were becoming sluggish, and she found herself thinking about things that had nothing to do with finding shelter. Her dad would be looking for her. The PRT would know she had disappeared. New Wave would know. Maybe the portal had been visible from the battlefield, and someone had seen what happened to her.

There was still a chance Armsmaster had survived.

That thought was enough to make her keep moving.

She had to believe that.

If he was alive, then she had to get back.

Taylor tried to picture his armour as she’d last seen it, intact and standing in front of her, but her mind kept replacing the image with the moment the Simurgh’s arm had all but bisected him.

She stopped thinking about it. There was no point. She needed to stay conscious.

The next dune seemed farther away than it had a moment earlier, and when she finally reached the top, Taylor stopped and stared down the other side. More sand waited below, followed by another rise in the distance.

She laughed once, although there wasn’t much humour in the sound.

“Of course.”

Her knees felt weak.

She took a breath and started down the slope, placing one foot carefully in front of the other while the world seemed to sway around her.

The heat had become all she could feel.

Her lips were dry, her tongue felt thick, and every breath seemed to take more effort than the one before it. Taylor tried to tell herself that she only needed to make it a little farther, although she no longer knew what she was hoping to find at the end of the walk.

Her foot slipped, and although she caught herself and stumbled forward, she couldn’t recover when it happened again. Taylor went down hard, landing on her hands and knees as the sand gave way beneath her. She stayed there for several seconds, breathing heavily while the ground burned through her palms.

She tried to push herself upright.

Her arms shook.

Taylor managed to rise halfway before the world tilted violently around her, and she dropped back into the sand.

She stared at the red watch on her wrist.

It was still timed out.

Still useless.

Her eyes began to close.

She tried to keep them open, reminding herself that she couldn’t sleep out here, that she needed to find water, that she needed to get back to the ocean and find out what had happened to Armsmaster.

The thoughts became harder to hold onto.

The sky blurred above her, and the last thing Taylor felt was the heat of the sand against her cheek as consciousness slipped away.