Metal watched them go.
"I like when my women run, run run girls as fast you can, I will catch you I'm the boogie man."
For a moment he simply watched, the black wolf form moving through the burning trees with his younger daughter on its back, moving with the speed of something that had been building toward this moment for years.
Then he spread his wings.
The volcanic feathers caught the firelight and the fire caught the trees and he rose through the burning forest with the ease of something that had never needed to hurry because nothing had ever been fast enough to make hurrying necessary.
He was wrong.
Plum held on.
She had her face pressed against Einstera's neck and her arms around the wolf's shoulders and she could feel the muscles working beneath her, the specific rhythm of her sister's stride, faster than anything Plum had experienced, faster than the convoy cars, faster than the animals she'd seen in the books under her bed.
"He's getting closer," Plum said.
And he was.
She could feel the heat behind them. Could hear the wing beats.
"Hang tight," Einstera said.
Something changed in the stride.
Not faster, different, a gear that hadn't been used yet engaging, the rhythm shifting into something that Plum's body registered as beyond the category of fast she had been experiencing previously. The trees stopped being individual trees and became a blur. The ground stopped being something she could see and became a feeling. The heat from behind them reduced not because Metal slowed down but because the distance between them increased faster than he could close it.
Plum felt the wind hit her face at a speed that wanted to take her breath and she held on tighter and let it.
Metal stopped.
He hovered above the burning forest and watched the black wolf form disappear into the darkness ahead with a speed that he, Metal, the so-called strongest of all Hammerians, the man whose volcanic wings could cross a district in minutes, could not match.
He stayed in the air for a moment.
Processing.
"Incredible," he said quietly.
Faster than light itself.
He looked at the path she had taken through the trees, the specific route, the turns, the way she'd navigated the forest without slowing, without hesitation, as if she had run it before. As if she had been running it in her mind for years, practicing it, memorizing every variation of it.
If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
"Shit, So that's what she was training for," he said.
To outrun him.
She had known. About her mother. About why Velmora had left. About what her father was and what he was capable of and what the future looked like if the future arrived without an exit.
She had been preparing the exit since before she had the speed to use it.
She had been waiting until Plum needed it.
Metal looked at the burning forest.
At the darkness his daughters had disappeared into.
He smiled "Very clever Velmora, very clever."
Not warmly. The smile of someone who has been surprised in a direction that produces respect rather than rage, the specific appreciation of a predator for prey that turns out to have been something else entirely.
"Very well," he said. "My daughters. I'll let you go." He folded his wings slowly. "But one day the Brothers will unite. And when they do, you will both be my brides."
He descended back through the burning trees.
The forest continued its burning without him.
The Entrance to Dragon Hive.
They arrived at the entrance both breathing hard.
Einstera and plum they stood by the end of the forest not far from the gate of Dragon Hive Shibuya with the city spread out ahead of them and the burning forest somewhere behind them and the specific feeling of people who have just crossed a distance they weren't sure they could cross.
Plum was still crying. She'd been crying since the room and hadn't stopped and didn't try to stop because there was nobody left to perform composure for.
Einstera stood beside her and breathed.
She didn't ask if Plum was okay.
Not because she didn't care, because she had heard her sister screaming in the forest and had shifted and run and carried her out at the speed of everything she'd been building for years and the question of whether she was okay was one that the running had already answered as much as running could answer it.
Plum looked at her sister.
"You knew," she said. "About why mom left. You knew the whole time."
Einstera looked at Dragon Hive's entrance. The lights of the city visible in the dark.
"Yes," she said.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
Einstera was quiet for a moment.
"Because you still called him father," she said. "And I didn't want to take that from you before I had to."
Plum absorbed this.
"He destroyed mom's abi," she said. "She came out of my scythe and he choked her and she dissolved."
Plum wiped tears from her eyes.
"I know," Einstera said.
"She put herself in my scythe. Before she left." Plum said
Einstera "I know."
"She thought about us," Plum said. "Before she went."
"Yes," Einstera said. "She thought about us."
Plum stood at the entrance to Dragon Hive Shibuya and cried about that for a while, not from sadness exactly, or not only from sadness. From the specific feeling of finding out that someone who disappeared loved you before they went. That the leaving wasn't the whole story. That there was something underneath it that had been there the entire time, waiting in the scythe, for exactly the moment it was needed.
Einstera stood beside her and didn't tell her to stop crying.
Eventually the crying slowed.
They looked at Dragon Hive ahead of them.
"What do we do now," Plum said.
Einstera looked at the city.
"We go in," she said. "We find somewhere. We don't go back."
Plum nodded.
She wiped her face.
She looked back once at the direction they'd come from, at the darkness and the distant orange glow of the burning forest and everything that lived in that direction.
Then she turned and walked into Dragon Hive beside her sister.