One moment, Taylor had Leviathan pinned beneath her, one hand forcing its jaws apart while torrents of fire poured into its mouth, the ocean around them boiling so violently that it had ceased to resemble water at all. The next, something enormous struck her across the side.
There was no warning or even a chance to react. The impact landed with enough force to tear her away from Leviathan altogether, her grip breaking as she spun end over end through a cloud of steam. Worse, she barely had time to register what had happened before another impact followed from a completely different direction.
Concrete shattered across her shoulders.
Then another.
Steel groaned and glass burst as something the size of a bus bounced off her chest before disappearing into the water below.
Taylor’s thoughts devolved into instinct. She curled inward as another object clipped her side, then another slammed into her back hard enough to send her tumbling again. The world became little more than flashes of green-grey ocean, broken buildings, and twisted metal, each collision sending her farther from the place she’d left Leviathan only seconds earlier.
It wasn’t random.
That thought came almost immediately, and was validated as one impact drove her downward, another changed her direction, and a third met her where she was about to be instead of where she’d been.
Someone was throwing them, or at least, controlling them.
She hit the seabed hard enough to vanish beneath the surface in an explosion of bubbles. Darkness swallowed everything, and for a brief instant, she simply lay there.
Then another building followed her.
Taylor twisted, catching the ruined structure across both forearms before it could pin her against the seabed. The impact barely registered beyond the weight itself. The Pyronite’s body held firm, flames dancing stubbornly beneath the crushing pressure of the ocean while molten cracks running beneath her rocky skin glowed brighter instead of dimmer.
She shoved.
The building drifted away, rolling lazily into the darkness. Only then did she stop long enough to breathe.
Which still felt strange as every instinct insisted she shouldn’t be able to. She was made of fire, and fire and water weren’t exactly famous for getting along. Yet each breath came as naturally as it had on land. Water flowed through her without choking her, without totally extinguishing the flames licking constantly from her shoulders and head.
She chalked it up to her alien biology, and stopped trying to make sense of it. Especially since another shadow descended from above.
Taylor swam sideways.
A crane crashed into the seabed where she’d been floating moments before, throwing up a dense cloud of sand and debris.
She shook her head and readied herself.
Her fiery eyes cut through the darkness with surprising ease, the ocean floor laid out before her in shades of orange and gold instead of black. Broken concrete, twisted girders, shattered pavement… pieces of an entire city were raining into the sea around her.
That was when she noticed something on the nearest slab of concrete.
A floor. No. Several floors.
It was the side of an apartment block, with the windows still intact along one section, furniture, curtains, and even a dining table bolted to what had once been someone’s kitchen floor.
Taylor frowned.
Another chunk drifted past.
This one was unmistakably a section of an office building, still with the cubicles, chairs, and computer monitors placed where people had left them.
She looked upward.
More shapes were falling through the water. Some slowly, others impossibly fast.
Her stomach tightened.
No.
Her eyes darted from one ruined structure to the next, and suddenly she stopped seeing just concrete. She saw homes, workplaces, and people.
The last was enough to make everything else disappear.
Taylor shot toward the nearest building.
One side had collapsed inward, leaving a jagged opening large enough for her to squeeze through. The flames surrounding her body hissed violently as she entered, turning the water around her into clouds of bubbles that rolled across the ceiling.
The corridor inside was almost completely flooded. Chairs drifted weightlessly, papers floated in every direction, and emergency lights shone weakly beneath the water. But then she noticed movement.
Taylor turned.
A man.
He was pressed against what had once been the ceiling, which had become the floor after the building overturned. His mouth opened and closed desperately, eyes impossibly wide as he clawed at his throat. Behind him was a woman, a little boy clinging to her arm. Another man pounded uselessly against a broken emergency exit.
Despite her appearance, all of them looked at her, and hope arrived so quickly across their faces that it almost hurt to witness.
Taylor was quick to move, driving both hands into the wall separating them, molten cracks flaring brighter as concrete softened and split beneath the heat. Steel reinforcement bars bent apart with a shrill groan, and she tore the opening wide enough for them to pass through.
“It’s okay,” she said, though the words came out muffled beneath the water. “I’ve got you. Just hold on.”
Whether they heard her or not, she couldn’t tell.
The little boy reached for her first, and Taylor gathered him against one arm while wrapping the other around his mother and the man closest to her. A fourth civilian kicked desperately from the emergency exit, and she caught him too, dragging all four free of the overturned corridor before driving herself upward through the water.
She swam as fast as she could, the pressure hardly registering as her alien body cut through the ocean with powerful strokes, flames hissing violently as they met the surrounding water. Above them, somewhere impossibly far away, sunlight filtered through endless shades of blue.
They were deeper than she’d realised.
“Just a little farther,” Taylor muttered, pulling them closer. “You’re going to be okay.”
Then, movement caught her eye.
Another building tumbled through the water, windows still intact, desks and filing cabinets drifting inside as it slowly rolled onto its side. Then another. A section of a parking garage and another apartment block.
Taylor twisted her head.
Through shattered windows she saw faces. Some pounded desperately against the glass, others clung to floating furniture. One man pressed both hands against the window as the building drifted past her, his mouth moving in frantic pleas she couldn’t hear. Beyond him, another shape descended through the darkness. And another.
Her stomach twisted.
There weren’t dozens. There were hundreds. Maybe thousands.
Every few seconds, another piece of a city plunged beneath the waves, each one carrying more people than she could possibly save. And she realised that every moment she spent bringing these four toward the surface was another moment someone else sank beyond her reach.
She couldn’t get to them all.
No.
She refused to let herself think like that, and tightened her hold instead.
“I’ve got you,” she said again, forcing more speed into each stroke. “Just… hold on.”
The surface remained agonisingly distant.
Then Taylor looked down, realising that the little boy had stopped struggling.
She shifted him higher against her shoulder, but he didn't respond. His small body floated limply in her grasp.
“No.”
She swam harder.
The woman was no longer trying to kick. The man she’d pulled from the emergency exit drifted slack against her arm, bubbles no longer escaping his mouth.
“No, no, no…”
She broke the surface in an explosion of steam and seawater, hauling all four civilians into the open air.
For one desperate second she waited for coughing. For screaming. For anything. But nothing came. The boy’s head lolled against her arm, his mother wrapped around him even in death, her fingers still clutching his sleeve.
Taylor stared.
She had reached them, carried them, and done everything she could. And she had still been too late.
Another building struck the water several hundred metres away, disappearing beneath the waves in an eruption of foam. Then another. And another.
They kept falling.
She swallowed hard, gently lowering the four bodies onto the largest piece of floating debris she could find. Her hands lingered for the briefest moment before she forced herself to let go.
There would be time to mourn later. Right now, there were still people alive.
Reddish-yellow fire erupted around her once more as she turned and shot back beneath the waves.