The labyrinth ended and the wasteland began and there was nothing gradual about it.
One moment the crimson coral walls were on either side of them, narrow and close, offering the specific comfort of things that might kill you but at least gave you something to hide behind. The next moment the walls were gone and the ground was ash-grey sand stretching in every direction without interruption, the horizon flat and featureless and entirely uninterested in providing cover. The endless tangled paths of the labyrinth had at least given them something — even danger, when it came with walls, had the decency to be directional. Out here there were no directions. Just open ground and whatever was on it.
Sunny looked at the wasteland and felt the exposure settle onto him like a second skin he hadn't asked for.
They kept moving.
He was riding the Echo with Cassie when he felt it — not saw, not heard, felt, the shadow he kept spread thin across the sand picking up a vibration that had no business being friendly. Something very large, moving in a direction that was going to intersect with theirs. He was off the Echo before he had finished deciding to be, landing beside Quinn and Nephis with the word already forming.
"Hide."
He dismissed the Echo. Cassie dropped and he caught her, and the four of them moved to a dune — low, barely enough, the kind of cover that works only because the alternative is none at all — and pressed flat against the far side of it.
The centurion crossed the wasteland at the pace of something with nowhere urgent to be. Eight legs, each step deliberate, the bone scythes on its arms moving with the slow rhythm of a creature simply walking from one place to another. On one of the scythes, caught in the joint where the blade met the arm, a soul shard caught what little light existed and held it. The creature passed thirty meters from where they lay and didn't look at them and continued toward the ashen barrow rising from the sand in the middle distance.
They waited until the sound of it faded.
"It's carrying a soul shard," Sunny said.
They all looked in the direction the centurion had gone.
"We follow it," Nephis said.
Nobody argued.
They followed it across the wasteland in short bursts — dune to dune, moving when the creature's back was to them, going still when it wasn't. It didn't check behind itself. It had no reason to.
The barrow was a low hill of compacted ash and dark stone, and the centurion descended from it as they approached, moving toward the base where something else was already waiting.
The something else was not the centurion.
It was the size of a house. Eight segmented legs like pillars, each step pressing deep gouges into the ash, each one landing with a weight that Sunny felt in his chest before he heard it. The body had the same general architecture as the creatures they had been killing — carapace, humanoid torso, the familiar grotesque arrangement of limbs — but nothing else about it was familiar. Where the others were chitin and shell, this creature was metal. Not armor over a body. A body that was armor, the shell polished and lustrous as though the whole thing had been submerged in a crucible of molten steel and pulled free when it set. Long jagged spikes protruded from every surface. The torso had four arms — two ending in pincers, two in scythes — and a head that sat on the shoulders with the proportions of something almost human and the reality of something that had decided almost was close enough. Several horns rose from the crown of it. Its face was metal and nearly recognizable and deeply, specifically wrong in a way that Sunny's eyes kept sliding away from.
Just looking at it made his skin crawl.
They followed anyway. Moving low, using the terrain, staying behind the centurion's bulk when they could. The metal creature led them — or they led themselves, following it — to an obsidian tree. The trunk rose from the grey sand like something that had decided to become a monument and committed fully to the decision, enormous and black and absolute, its broad roots spreading outward across the ground in every direction, creating a landscape of dark ridges and shallow channels in the ash around it.
The metal creature stopped at the base of the tree.
It set the soul shard down in the sand carefully, the gesture almost deliberate, and then reached up into the dark branches with one of its scythe-arms and pulled a fruit free. The fruit was dark and heavy-looking, and the creature ate it with the unhurried focus of something that had come here specifically for this and intended to enjoy it.
The sound of metal working against whatever was inside the fruit carried across the still air.
Sunny did not think about it in detail.
The four of them found cover in a dense cluster of the obsidian tree's roots, wide enough to crouch behind, close enough to watch. They assembled into their familiar huddle — the small, quiet configuration that had become the default for conversations that couldn't afford to be heard — and looked at each other.
Sunny looked at Nephis.
She was looking at the creature. At the soul shard sitting in the sand at its feet. At the way the metal caught the grey light and held it.
He already knew what she was thinking. He had known since the moment the creature set the shard down.
"Let me guess," he said. "You want to kill it."