The jade eyelid didn’t snap open. It parted with the slow, earth-shaking majesty of a land-wide rift unsealing after a winter that had lasted a hundred million years.
Arthur Vance stood upright on the skull crown of the Archaic World-Serpent World-serpent, his boots planted firmly between two rows of silver-steel staples. The emerald lymph on his rubberized razor-sharp gloves was already drying into a semi-clear, jade-tinted varnish under the surrounding heat of the hollow core. Beside him, Grimm leaned his massive flank heavily against Arthur’s right leg, his ears pinned back in cautious scrutiny. He watched the fifty-meter membrane of reptilian skin slide back into its sky-high groove.
Beneath the membrane lay an orb of pure, liquid emerald crystal.
It was larger than the cathedral plazas of Mega-City 07. Deep within the pupil—an upright slit of dense, starlight-refracting jade—there was no trace of the oily purple rot that had driven the guard into a frenzy of blind destruction. The bloodshot void filaments that had choked the optic nerves had dissolved into inert gray ash, sloughing off the serpent’s scales and drifting into the zero-gravity updrafts like burnt paper.
The serpent looked at Arthur.
There was no sound of human speech, no dramatic mental proclamation echoing through the cave. What passed between the ancient guard and the human trauma surgeon was an exchange of pure living awareness. The serpent felt the forty-two silver-steel staples binding its skull plates. It felt the cool, sterile foam of the Osteo-Regenerative Balm soothing the inflamed…
