When the water crashed down on his head, shockingly cold and heavy, dragging him into the sea, Knuckles knew he was dead.
He was sucked down and down into darkness until his ears popped from the pressure. Bubbles streamed from his mouth. Invisible currents swirled around him, filled with flashes of yellow, blue, hot pink. Was he seeing real light, or was he seeing things because he was drowning?
Then something hit him. The pressure and the drowning stopped. A wisp! Had a wisp followed him down? His body changed, becoming pure energy, a different shape, glowing like the phosphorescence around him. He was no longer drowning because he didn't seem to have lungs anymore.
For what seemed like a long time he simply drifted, existing, neither awake nor asleep. Power was being drawn through him and he was only a conduit, less important than his connection to greater powers.
Suddenly he snapped awake. His mind engaged. "Am I dead?" He said it, or thought it, or something, because he didn't seem to have a mouth anymore, either. He just was.
"Curse you," Chaos said, both inside his head and outside him, in the water. His voice was the sing-song moan of whale song. "Curse you and your ancestors, echidna. If only they had withered and died before giving rise to you."
"Hey," Knuckles snapped, "that's uncalled for. You accepted me as your sacrifice. Am I dead or what?"
"You are phased with my hyper-go-on," Chaos growled. "You are not of Solaris's line at all! You are one of the Angel Island wizards. Blast you."
"What about Gladiolus?" Knuckles exclaimed. The glowing jellyfish thing that his body had become cycled through panicked yellow to cold blue. "If you've killed her, I'll gut you from the inside."
"She lives." A huge bubble floated through Knuckles's range of vision. Gladiolus lay inside, eyes closed, breathing.
"Why is she like that?" Knuckles said. He found that he could move, so he jetted after the bubble and stayed close beside it. The panic that had clouded his mind was gone. The dread that had saddled him for days was gone. He was relaxed, free, light as water in water. Whatever had happened to him, Chaos hadn't expected it and was unhappy about it.
"She is sleeping while I examine her mind," Chaos said. "She is a descendant of Solaris, but she also bears the taint of the Others. While I would not turn away a sacrifice of a daughter of Solaris, she did it for you. I hate such devotion. It sours her in my mouth."
Knuckles's heart, wherever it was, hurt him at this thought. She cared for him enough to throw herself in Chaos's way.
"I wanted you, Guardian," Chaos muttered. "I could reach the chaos girl through you. But she is fighting back and I can hold only you."
"Good for her!" Knuckles shouted into the sea. "Black his eye for me, Maria!"
"You are a troublesome little beast," Chaos snarled. "Stuck in me like a thorn I cannot dislodge."
"How do you have hyper-go-on?" Knuckles retorted. "What are you, a big, ugly, overgrown wisp that's too fat for the air to support?"
"I am a metawisp," Chaos replied. "And watch your tongue or I'll tear it out."
"I don't have one right now, I don't think," Knuckles said. "So what's a metawisp?"
"I was one of the first," Chaos said. "I was birthed on another planet. But some of us set out to explore the universe. When we found Mobius, we thought we had stumbled upon paradise. As I was the eldest, I cared for the younger wisps, and I grew in proportion with my responsibility."
"Weird," Knuckles said. He studied Gladiolus, floating on her back with the bubble curving over her. Her long, stiff dreadlocks spread beneath her in the water like a mermaid's hair.
"What about her curse?" Knuckles said. "You were going to try to lift the blood curse."
"You are not powerful enough," Chaos said. "The chaos girl would be, but I cannot take ahold of her. The curse lies upon thousands of echidnas, following families from generation to generation. It took tremendous power to lay such a curse, but it would take that power multiplied by a thousand to lift it."
Knuckles gazed sorrowfully at Glad's eyepatch. "She came to you to save me, you rotten monster. Surely that means something."
"It does," Chaos said grudgingly.
"There's got to be something we can do!" Knuckles roared, swimming around and around Glad's bubble in his strange aquatic form.
"I can do nothing," Chaos said. "But you are the Guardian, descended from the line of wizards. As much as I curse their names, they respected me, and I them."
"So, tell me," Knuckles said. "What can I do?"
"What is a blood curse?" Chaos countered.
Knuckles considered. "It's a curse on a guy and his kids and their kids, right?"
"A hereditary curse," Chaos replied. "Passed from one family to another through the male line. However, this Gladiolus is female."
Knuckles tried to figure out where this was going. "So ... what, females are different under the curse?"
"It can be broken if she enters another family," Chaos said. "Had I not added that condition, all echidnas would have shared the curse within a few generations. I was angry, not stupid."
"Enters another family," Knuckles said, thinking of the Speaker and the island crew. "What, like through adoption?"
"You will have to marry her, fool," Chaos snarled.
"Marry her!" Knuckles flinched away from the bubble. "I barely know her!"
"That's how the curse may be broken in the case of a female," Chaos growled. "Were she male, you could not lift it at all."
Knuckles floated, reeling from this information, looking at Glad in her bubble because he couldn't see Chaos. Marry her!Wasn't he too young for marriage or something? What was being married even like? He tried to remember his own parents, but they had died when he was five, and his memories of them were blurry. Did the girl just come live in your house? That was how it looked on TV. How could he take care of her when he didn't technically have a job?
As these concerns bounced through his mind, Chaos said, "I have taken you both as sacrifices, and I find that I don't want either of you. Justice is done, and it is bitter to me."
"I can't say I'm too fond of it, either," Knuckles replied.
The water around the echidnas shifted, swirling, growing lighter. Sunlight filtered down from the surface in long golden rays.
"I will release you both," Chaos said, his voice a guttural rumble. "The Others are coming to steal what I could not. Once you have defeated them, throw their bodies in the sea and I will manage them."
Before Knuckles could reply, he was thrust upward by a powerful current, as if a monstrous fin had swirled at him from below. He shot toward the surface, his jellyfish-body hardening back into his echidna body as he went.
Knuckles burst from the water like a dolphin, crashed down on the bank he had left, and lay there, gasping for breath. By the dryness of the earth and the angle of the sun, they must have been down there for hours.
Another splash drenched him, and Gladiolus landed beside him, coughing and wiping water out of her eyes. "What happened?"
Knuckles found that he didn't want to tell her what Chaos said. He was violently embarrassed to even breathe a word of how the curse might be broken. So he said, "Chaos was willing to negotiate after all."
They sat there for a moment, just breathing and staring at the rippling sea. Knuckles's whole body ached, as if he had swam a marathon.
"Why didn't he kill us?" Gladiolus said softly. "When he grabbed me, I felt him tear open my mind. I sort of ... went to sleep. Then I woke up and here we are." She pressed a hand to her temple and closed her good eye.
"He really only wanted Maria," Knuckles said. "He tried to use me to get to her. And since you were trying to save me, he didn't like your sacrifice, either."
Gladiolus sat up straight, her eyes widening. "Did he hurt Maria?"
"No, he said she was fighting back and he couldn't reach her."
Glad gave him a fierce grin. "Good."
They sat there a little longer. Knuckles chewed on the solution to her curse and marveled that she was sitting there at all.
"You tried to save me," he said.
Gladiolus nodded without looking at him.
"Why?"
She hunched her shoulders a little, as if trying to hide. "Oh, well, you know. You're not the one who's going to die soon. It seemed like such a waste for you to throw your life away."
Knuckles nodded and gazed at the tranquil sea as it sparkled in the sun. He was almost-not quite-disappointed at this answer. It was a perfectly valid reason, of course. But if he was going to have to marry her to save her, it might help if she cared about him. Even if he married her to save her life, he couldn't look forward to a future stuck with someone who merely tolerated his existence. They could divorce, he supposed, but what was the point of getting married in the first place? And if he left her, wouldn't that place her back under the curse?
He had a little time to win her affection. Maybe he would try, if she would let him.
Gladiolus shielded her eyes from the glare of the sun on the water. "It must be past noon. Wasn't that bad ship supposed to arrive today?"
The words triggered an avalanche of renewed worries in Knuckles's head. "Yeah. Oh crap." He ran up the path to the crest of the little hill and looked east, across Angel Island.
The Fellstorm hung in the sky just off the island's coast. It was a long, whale-shaped airship with six sets of wings. The jets on the wings had been rotated downward, allowing the ship to hover. Smokestacks lined its back like spikes on the whale's spine, pumping out clouds of dirty black smoke.
As he watched, there was an orange flash from a cannon array in the whale's nose. A few seconds later, the muted crack-boom of the cannon reached his ears.
His headset was gone, and Glad's was waterlogged. He had no way to know what NME was targeting with guns that size, but they might be punching holes in the palace for all he knew.
"Glad," he said, "we need to get under cover, like, right now."
When Chaos took Knuckles, his friends didn't know what to do. Amy burst into tears. Sticks patted her on the back with a strange expression, almost smiling.
Sonic and Tails grabbed lightning wisps and blasted up the stairs and out of the palace, down to the shore where water still trickled off the rocks. But there was nothing there. The ocean lapped at the shore, glittering and blue under the clear sky.
Sonic halted and the wisp released him, floating over his shoulder. "Knux," he whispered, "why did you do it?"
Tails appeared beside him with his own wisp. "I don't know what to do, Sonic. Could we try to swim?"
"I can't swim," Sonic said, voice cracking. He covered his eyes with one hand. "He's gone, Tails. He's gone."
Tails bowed his head. They stood there like that, and if tears were shed, neither of them would ever mention it.
After a while, Sonic said hoarsely, "What're we gonna do with no Guardian?"
"I don't know," Tails whispered. "He had all the memories of this place. The traps and doors and stuff."
"NME is almost here," Sonic said. He gave a short, ironic laugh. "Knux told me he was going to deal with Chaos. I didn't know he was going to-going to feed himself to him!" Suddenly enraged, Sonic picked up rocks and threw them at the water. "Blast you, Chaos! Come back and fight me! I'll teach you to bully people! Come on!"
Nothing happened. The ocean remained calm and blue. No monsters stirred the water or shaped it into dragon heads.
Sonic slumped onto the muddy bank and covered his face, spines drooping. Tails merely stood there, wiping his eyes over and over.
In their headsets, Ramussan said quietly, "Only the greatest Guardians lay down their lives for their crew."
"Shut up!" Sonic choked. "You should have warned us what he was going to do!"
"I knew that Chaos wanted him," Ramussan said, sounding as grieved as Sonic. "He didn't tell me his plan. He didn't tell anyone."
Tails said, thickly, "Sonic, don't try to one-up him when NME arrives."
Sonic laughed, a painful half-sob. "I'm not suicidal, Tails. I'm not the Guardian who does stupid things like think he has to protect everybody." He pointed at the fox. "And don't you try it, either."
Tails nodded. Then he sniffed and wiped his nose. "Don't make me promise, Sonic. If you were in trouble ..."
Sonic dug his fingers into the damp earth. "Dammit. If you were in trouble ..." He beat his fist against the ground. "I did this. I told him we were screwed because we couldn't fight NME and Chaos at the same time. This is my fault. He must have thought this was the only way to save us." The blue hedgehog tilted his face to the sky, eyes closed, mouth twisted. "It's my fault."
"The NME ship is nearly here," Ramussan said apologetically. "I have battle strategies planned, but they require the presence of certain wisps."
Sonic nodded and climbed to his feet. The laser burn across his chest hadn't hurt as bad as his heart did right now. Yet he had to carry on, to finish the fight without his friend. "Come on, Tails. Let's end this."
Back indoors, Amy met them at the foot of the stairs. She caught Sonic's hand and searched his face. "He's gone?"
Sonic nodded grimly. "He's gone."
Her face contorted, as if holding back tears. Then she pointed to the center of the main hall. "Look at them. Something's happening."
Maria and Shadow sat on the floor, hands clasped, foreheads touching, eyes closed. Chaos power flickered around them like red fireflies, and Shadow's stripes glowed like neon.
Sonic's heart hurt too bad to worry about things like personal space. He walked straight up to them and laid a hand on one of Shadow and Maria's hands.
The world spun and darkened. Sonic stood on the horizon of a vast world he didn't understand, full of bright lights and deep shadows. Maria and Shadow burned like a pyre, red and gold. Arranged against them was a huge, ferocious blue thing that dragged and clawed at them, ripping away fragments of their power. Deep in its heart burned two bright sparks-a green one and an orange one.
Then Sonic hit the floor, smashing his nose on the marble, and let go of Shadow and Maria. The world snapped back to normal. Maria didn't acknowledge Sonic's presence, but Shadow said without stirring, "Do that again and I'll kill you myself."
Tails helped Sonic up. Sonic pinched his nose and looked around wildly, trying to determine where the blue monster was. "I think Knux is alive. Maria and Shadow are fighting Chaos for him."
Tails looked at the motionless pair doubtfully. "They are?"
"Yeah, and we can't let NME distract them." It was a slim, fragile hope, but Sonic was going to hang on to it with every ounce of strength he possessed. Maniac energy flooded him. "Tails! Get the ARK cannon ready! Amy, Sticks, go get the robot dragons. Metal Sonic! Guard these two! We've got a crapton of robots to fight!"
Everyone scattered except Metal Sonic. The blue robot walked up to stand beside Maria. He gave Sonic a nod. In his headset, the robot's text-to-speech voice said, "Nothing shall harm them."
"Good." Sonic sprinted for the crowd of wisps. "Ramussan, which ones?"
"Red, yellow, orange, and pink. And a white one, if there's any."
Sonic repeated this. The wisps in question floated up to hover around his head and shoulders, making happy trilling sounds. "I'm keeping the lightning one, too," Sonic said.
"Good," Ramussan replied. "There is a cave in a hillside where I want you to hide as they approach. I've been scanning the Fellstorm, and this will be a desperate fight."
Sonic ran for the stairs. "You want me to hide? I've got wisps! I can probably tear right through that ship!"
"You have to lure it in," Ramussan retorted. "It's going to try to shell from a distance, and I can't let our Warrior get blown to bits in the first five minutes."
This was a sobering thought. As Sonic bounded out into the hot, green jungle, he said, "You're telling Amy and Sticks to hide, too, right?"
"They're your rearguard," Ramussan replied. "Fith! I don't know how we can do this with only three of you. I need Shadow and Metal Sonic to help fight, too."
"But they have to protect Maria! The bat's still in there!" Sonic was running through the trees now, his voice uneven.
Ramussan muttered, as if to himself, "Oh Guardian, why must you abandon us now?" Louder, he said, "You're approaching the hill with the cave. Bear left."
Sonic couldn't see through the dense trees, but he felt the ground sloping upward. He tore through brush and vines and climbed to where the vegetation was thinner. The wisps floated in his wake, strung out in a line, looking as if moving this quickly was taxing their floating power.
As Sonic emerged, he stopped to stare for a moment. The Fellstorm was closer now, filling the sky with its shadow. It was bigger than he had thought. It was like a flying skyscraper. He had trouble understanding its scale because of the distance and its size. His brain simply couldn't grasp it.
"Ram," Sonic said faintly, "exactly how big is that ship?"
"I estimate that it is thirteen hundred feet long," Ramussan replied. "About a quarter of a mile in length."
Sonic whistled. "How does it fly?"
"Once you destroy it, I'm certain the Mechanic will explain it. Now take cover before they mark you."
The cave entrance wasn't easy to find. Sonic hunted up and down the hillside until one of the wisps whistled to him. They had found it, hidden behind waist-high grass. Sonic pushed through it and slipped inside.
The cave looked as if it had once been a building, but the years had reduced the outside to a rubble-covered hill. The ceiling was uneven rock, but the floor was paved with cracked stone tiles under years of leaves and other debris. The wisps explored, chirping to each other. Sonic crouched at the entrance, watching the Fellstorm.
"Now," Ramussan said, "once you begin using the wisps, you will not be able to wear the headset. I'll have to instruct you in advance."
The Fellstorm's nose slid open, revealing a bristling array of cannon barrels. Sonic's ears flattened.
"Destroy the advancing robots using the yellow, red, pink, and blue. When the Fellstorm is over the island, use the orange to board. You must carry the fight to NME themselves. Capture them or destroy them, if you must."
"Yeah, that shouldn't be too hard," Sonic said.
The words were scarcely out of his mouth when the cannons flashed. A concussive BOOM hit him in the chest, and Sonic gasped. Across the island, dust exploded from the mountainside and a small landslide poured down. At the same time, a swarm of flying robots arose from the Fellstorm and descended toward the island's edge.
"What was that?" Ramussan exclaimed.
"They unloaded a ton of big guns at the mountain," Sonic replied. "And they're sending robots."
Ramussan swore in some language that sounded as if it had been designed for it. "If they keep that up, they'll penetrate the palace within a few hours."
"Time to go, then," Sonic said. "I'll come back and get the headset later."
"Good luck, Warrior."
Sonic changed channels to the public one. His friends' voices were nervous. "I'm starting my attack, guys. Are you ready?"
"We've got the dragons, Sonic," Amy said. "I wish we had more than just three."
"It'll have to do," Sonic said. "Use wisps if you need them."
"Be careful, Sonic," Amy said softly.
For some reason, a lump formed in Sonic's throat. Maybe it was because of losing one of his friends-he couldn't bear to think of the others being hurt. "You too," he managed to say.
"Sonic," Sticks said, sounding breathless, "those NME people are crazy and probably using alien technology. Don't go to their ship unless you take Shadow. He's part of their alien organization."
"Uh, thanks, Sticks," Sonic said. "I'm going dark now." He pulled off the headset and hid it behind a rock near the cave entrance. "Shadow's part of their alien organization? What the heck, Sticks?" He motioned to the wisps, who surrounded him. "Stay close, guys. This might get a little rough."
The wisps trilled their agreement.
Sonic touched the blue wisp. It dove into him, disappearing into his chest like a drop of water into sand. Sonic changed into a zigzag of blue lightning. He flashed out of the cave and down the hill, back under the cover of the trees.
The cannons boomed again. The battle had begun.
Amy and Sticks marched into the trees, trailed by wisps and three robot dragons the size of elephants. Each dragon had a short neck, a bulky, powerful body, and serrated jaws like can openers. Their bodies were gleaming bronze, and ancient machinery thrummed inside them, powering their hydraulics and simple intelligence.
"There's so many robots," Amy said, pausing to peer through a break in the trees. Clouds of robots were leaving the Fellstorm in waves, shimmering like grass in a high wind. The ship itself floated in their midst, somehow smug.
Amy felt very small all of a sudden. She reached for Sticks's hand for reassurance. Sticks took her hand and gulped. "That's more than Eggman ever used."
Amy lifted her hammer in her other hand, hefting its reassuring weight. "We'll just fight them as they come. And remember the mantises-don't let them get behind you."
"We need to pick good places to fight where that can't happen," Sticks said. She glanced around at the trees, her brown badger face cunning. "I know. Let's go down by the canyon. If the robots follow it, we can ambush them."
"What canyon?" Amy said.
Sticks took off without a word, trailed by her wisps. Amy sighed and followed. "Ramussan, can you control the dragons?"
Ramussan didn't reply for a moment. Then he said, "Oh. Oh yes, I can." He followed this with his best approximation of an evil laugh.
"I suppose I should be glad you're on our side," Amy said, as the three dragons lifted their heads and began to move with intent, pausing and sweeping the trees with their glowing turquoise eyes.
"Be very glad," Ramussan said. "Especially now that I'm driving these babies."
The girls hiked through the jungle for a couple of miles, jumping every time the cannons fired and struck the mountain to their left. Sometimes a dragon would take the lead and smash through the brush, creating a trail like a bulldozer.
Before they reached Sticks's canyon, they met a squadron of attack robots. These were designed like ants, five feet long, with sharp mandibles and lasers mounted on their abdomens.
Amy attacked with her hammer, venting her feelings about losing Knuckles by beating the ants into scrap. She smashed others with a fury she wouldn't admit to the source of-the deep, appalling fear that Sonic wouldn't come back, either.
The robot dragons pounced and chewed ants in half, seeming to enjoy it far too much. Or maybe it was only Ramussan reveling in destruction.
Either way, by the time they reached the canyon's edge, they had demolished an entire wave of robot ants. Amy stopped to catch her breath, gazing down the canyon. It was more of a ravine, twenty feet deep, with a muddy river in the bottom. Most of it was overhung with trees, making it a convenient way to sneak through the jungle quickly.
A mass of robots were coming up it toward them. Some were long-legged roaches that strode through the water itself. Plenty more were wasps, or quick, nasty flies, or beetles carrying explosives.
Sticks hefted her boomerang. "Fish in a barrel."
Amy gestured to the pink wisp. "They'll never know what hit them."
When Chaos finally released Knuckles and Gladiolus, Maria slowly keeled over sideways on the floor. Shadow barely had the strength to catch her-both of them were exhausted and weak.
Metal Sonic knelt beside them, his glowing red eyes somehow anxious. He laid a hand on each of their arms and tried to heal, but nothing happened.
"We're just tired out," Shadow said, too weary to be nasty about it. "You can't heal that."
Metal Sonic withdrew a few paces, but watched over them warily.
Shadow slid to Maria and bent over her. "You do have limits after all."
"I tend to forget how long I was in suspension," she murmured, eyes closed. "I need to go to the Master Emerald."
Shadow thought of the long staircase down, and the long climb up the altar. He groaned. "I don't think I can." Chaos control was out of the question, too.
Metal Sonic stepped forward, offering a hand.
Maria turned her head a little and looked at the robot. "Mecha will help us."
Despite his small, light build, the robot was strong. Supporting them on either arm, Metal Sonic slowly escorted them downstairs and into the Master Emerald's chamber. They crawled up the altar, and Maria simply flung herself across the great gem's top. She sighed in bliss like a cat that had found a sunbeam.
Shadow placed both hands on the emerald and felt its power swirling into him, refreshing him. It felt so much like Maria, he couldn't tell them apart when his eyes were closed.
Maybe Knuckles couldn't, either. When this was over, maybe Shadow could hash things out with the echidna. At the very least, they could declare a truce.
The floor vibrated as the Fellstorm's bombing hit a little too close to the palace's walls. Metal Sonic, standing on the altar steps, scanned the walls and ceiling.
"Why hasn't that stopped?" Shadow growled. As his energy came back, so did his frustration at the ineptitude of those around him.
Maria, eyes still closed, said, "The Fellstorm is inaccessible at the moment. They are trying to draw it in, but they are outnumbered a thousand to one."
Shadow trembled. NME might actually win this fight. They might kill everyone, capture the island, and take Maria. It was too easy to imagine himself, restrained, screaming her name as they stripped away Maria's power, her soul, her life, until there was nothing left but dust.
"I'll have to help," he said faintly.
Maria opened her blue eyes, which currently glowed green as the emerald. "Yes. But don't let Tasha Hunter catch you."