battue
-the beating of woods and bushes to flush game
also : a hunt in which this procedure is used
The battue is a technique practiced by hunters in order to give them a clean shot at their targets. The hunters' assistants (or sometimes the hunters themselves) rap sticks against trees and bushes in order to scare animals out of the woods and into open space. It derives from the feminine past participle of the French verb battre, meaning "to beat."
The buildings are falling towers of a lost past. They crumble under the impact, the soaring hard waves of elements ripping their foundation apart. They quiver and tremble under the force of weaponry build by human hands.
Rubble and dust whirl around us in waves, getting carried by the sheer force of tumbling structures. It kisses my brow and leaves heavy flakes on my lashes.
I'm protected by the confidence that no sharp-edged piece of metal or a projectile will ever graze my skin. Tip of the legion. Reinforcement for both my cousins. And strangely enough, I would never have it any other way. My fear and all the hateful words for war machinery blur into a blurb of nervous energy in my stomach.
Not suited. Not accessible. Too rigid and too unstable.
I'm on the right flank almost right behind Evangeline now. Our bodies whip between rotting excess falling, exploding and burning, stones, steel, iron and the smell of war that seeps into my pores. Black armors and dark uniforms, we bleed into the very truest definition of dark tidings.
I waltz through the ruins with six pairs of eyes. Skinwalking in the air, below our feet and running along the frontlines, my senses try to pick up signals and decipher them all the while I am still present behind the magnetrons.
When I slip into the dog, the chase blares through my body, and I surrender willingly to it. The adrenaline pumps through my veins excited, and I feel invincible a moment. Hours ago I was almost dead, buried in a swamp of mud below an arena. Now I pledge myself to hunt the perpetrators. I can smell fear radiating from the very definition of the red row of meat shields. Fear and anger, the silver swarm is not scared of anything. The dog inhales the perfume of this twisted calvacade.
The hawk glides over the tipping top of a tower, a sharp turn to the right, feathers adjusting in the aerial fight to steer clear. It lets loose a long drawn scream, but no one except me can hear it in the marching, the explosions and all the other noise of war.
Below the tower trembling, Evangeline's hand swipes away a shower of daggerlike splinters falling, out of my face, away from my scars, holding it back.
For a moment my eyes are just mine alone, and I look at her face. A small line of something angry runs along her brow like a crack running through the skeletal forms of the monstrous steel buildings. I give her a nod. Her arm swings again and with force, the metal flings and crashes into the ground, impaling the earth.
We don't talk. There is no time to say a word.
The words that get yelled throughout the devouring hunt are only commands. I don't need to command my people. Hector did the job before, and now they simply follow. Even Loren continues to follow me meekly and concentrated.
My hands around the rifle shake slightly. For a moment it feels too heavy, but I muster myself and stand straight.
You had a promising career, Maven flattered me. A prodigy. Flawless fighter.
He was right.
I am too old to falter. I won't ever. I will prove to my family and to anyone watching I am not crazy and I am capable.
The silver swarm is deadly. Creatures just as lithe as any big predator and as poisonous as all my snakes and arachnids. The force of the whole army crushing the city is below what little manpower and stolen and acquired weaponry red rebels can muster.
It is a sweep. They flooded the tunnels, they bombed the buildings, they follow through now to flush the prey out.
The few unfortunate souls that are in the way get crushed until we finally find the mark. The real trophy.
My senses, be they from any creature still on and around me or my ears themselves, pick up the signal of a shout and two words stand out. 'Lightning girl.'
The hawk rushes along the edge of the biggest tower still crumbling and dancing in the tremors as if it was a simple grass of blade in the wind. In the eyes of a hawk and a woman, prey is prey.
As the eyes slide down and sharply, keenly, take in the running figures, I focus harshly. My bird soars over the clouds and shoots in a circle below. In the falling winds it slows again, swinging around.
Full and good view. As the static shiver from the radio promised, and the shouting, my eyes prove it right.
There you are.
They look small from above. But I recognize the battered forms.
One girl I have lingered and lurked around on court for a while, being told off and held back like a rabid dog, plans changed to a degree that makes me ally with mind readers and boy kings.
False silver, something else. Abominable? Maybe. Impactful? Yes.
The command to open fire has not yet been given. Not yet.
I stop in the rubble beside the falling embers of once glory. A city we were made to fear with lies. No radiation. No sickness and devastation. Just a lie. And now smoked out buildings and flooded tunnels.
The group pushes on a bit. I clutch the rifle. I stand above my family. Literally.
I recognize the other face besides the miserable ragged form of the Lighning Girl. Because I had a good look at it in the heat of a fight. When I almost shot the blonde one with the red sash and the pistol at the bowl of bones, he was the one that simply threw me over the edge before disappearing. Disappearing into thin air from my grip. A trick, an ability, a jump.
The dog howls below my feet.
"Don't let him jump away!" I yell. "He'll take them all and disappear!"
The impact of my voice cracking over the alley sinks in an instant and I can see a hand sink. For the open command to fire.
He's younger than me, I realize, but older than the girl.
Age doesn't matter though. He threw me off into the abyss. I owe him a bullet.
My hands adjust around the gun.
Wait for the right moment to use it, my father told me. Oh, didn't I wait? I'll be waiting patiently through another painful shower of suffocating mud and stone breaking my bones if it means I can shoot either him or the girl.
I slip into the hawk again.
Feel the wind.
I adjust my aim, how I stand. How I breathe.
My fingers press on the trigger.
I let it loose.
With soaring force the bullet jumps and it craves to find flesh.
The command to open fire is given in the same instance as I fire, and the shot overprints the voice, almost.
In the shower of bullets, I cannot follow the perfect trajectory. I can't say which one is mine. But when one impacts into his arm, I can hope it's mine.
I want to shoot again. I don't get to. I feel robbed.
When I make a step with my rifle and aim better, take more time, another shout rings through.
Holding fire, I look over to Ptolemus, but all I see is a gurn before he shouts and we reform to the position in the new line. Loren and the rest of the Vipers scramble beside me.
Black bodies as harsh as the shard and iron.
Being surrounded is usually the ending of a hunt. It ends in a kill. In victory. It ends in a trophy.
My next shot won't be very glorious. He already bleeds. But it'll be merciful end considering what the mind readers and our prisons cells can do to you. It'll be a swift execution. More than he gave me when I landed on the stone and broke my jaw and spine.
As the whole swarm has assembled in the new line of holding the ground, I can hear the sound of something else. I am not very surprised to look over from my position beside Ptolemus shoulder and see a pale face set below a crown of molten fire.
Of course, you wouldn't want to miss the moment you get to capture her after that blow of escaping the arena, Maven Calore. We all want our trophy.
As convincing as Maven Calore has made the case of his older brother, he doesn't show the same conviction for him in this conversation. Yes, he wants him removed, gone. But not like this. Not like he wants her. My mind tries to rationalize and move through the patterns again, and I think about his hand on her arm again. I huff out a breath, quietly hiding behind Ptolemus, but he notices, his eyebrows move slightly before his dark eyes dart off again.
Is that what this is about? And here I asked him about obsession.
I turn the bird above my head to the right, and the jets have turned away from flying too dangerously close to rotating around the whole area again. The brimming engines and leaking warbling piping sounds are the only constant stirring inside my ears above the clouds.
It is quite irritating, but at least it makes me stop listening to this useless negotiation. Just another roll and attack, a barrel filling with bullets of mockery instead of metal to kill, and this whole charade of Maven Calore in a cape (a cape. And Samson calls my poetic thought processes too much) trying to convince everyone we have won this time.
We have jets. Missiles. An army. If we lose, this won't bode well at all.
My feet are getting impatient for a kill. Or at least a capture. I want my blood. The muscles in my neck tense. The bird sails low beside one alley. Fluttering wings, it lays low.
My hawk screeches and I steer it away, harshly, quickly, desperate. I can't afford to lose an asset or creature now in this crucial situation.
And I can see that there are more rats hiding nearby.
I see the scorched dirty blonde one, and anger boils in my stomach. The hawk rustles above her head above a wall made of chunks and broken bits of stone. I could sink my claws into her, but she had a gun. And I am part of a group big enough to squash her under their heel.
Suddenly, heat surrounds wings.
Utterly, violent, excruciating close heat.
Fire eats through feathers and flesh.
I scream. The hawk screams. I can barely make out the shape that burns me. It seems that I found Tiberias Calore.
The prince that made my dogs tails wag talking about treats has little semblance with the one that stares up at the dying wings of my bird. Everyone is ruined and scarred, now, visibly, and he isn't a difference.
The burning scorching pain flattens me, and I can't move my arms. I bite my lips as hard as possible to stop any more sounds.
Then the connection is broken, the hawk has died. The contact ripped. The impact shakes me back, rolls over me like another earthquake. My scars and fresh healed broken bones tremble and it makes me sick for a second.
I have to convince myself this fire isn't real. That my skin is not harmed.
I almost fall, try to grab onto my cousin for support. Instead, I stumble back ungracefully backward because I am unwilling to let go of my gun. Loren catches my back, arms steady, face pale.
He takes the impact of my sharp elbow hitting him in the gut without a word.
I want to yell again, another warning, but the pain of burning alive sinks into my nerves.
The next thing I know, I can't yell anything, not even speak.
With a cackling of lightning flung from a girl into the sky, a jet dies and falls like a meteor.
Everyone moves fast. With force, I take a leap. This time, neither Evangeline or Ptolemus try to shield me from the shards raining down the side of the alley.
My sight goes black a second. I still feel the impact of the fire. A missile crashes inside the turn of the alley across the plastered ground and fallen tower.
Grey-haired frames on the other side of the alley, maybe fifty paces away. I close up again, seizing control of the black dog wandering forward me.
The smell of war so close.
The corpses piling again.
My Samos cousins are relatively unharmed in the distance. I can't say the same for Hector's son and the other Viper in my entourage.
Hector's son looks ragged and one arm dangles unnaturally from his socket. Loren is bleeding from his gut, blood leaking out.
Another Viper lost, half a face unrecognizable, and more flames and more missiles. Some impact has killed and ripped him apart.
I glare. Forget how my lungs function.
This happens all the time.
I don't have time to close his eyes or speak a farewell. This is war. And just the same as his eyes are glassy and dead, mine are still alive.
I have lost the rifle. But I can simply take one out of the hands of a dead silver soldier next to me.
"Get Loren back. I don't risk any more of you dying," I hiss.
No one objects.
When I scramble back on, the line that has held our side has washed away into the second chase of this day.
The dog and I form a rope of smells again and join in.
Or we would. If there wasn't a wall of flames shooting up.