The stone floor shook when the quartz beast landed.
It came down on six broad, padded feet, its milky hide rippling like cold tallow, and immediately swung its blind snout toward the hottest thing within reach—Pip’s heated belly pouch and the knot of women directly behind it.
Everyone moved at once.
Lilt gave a sharp, whistling hiss and snapped her left wing half-open to knock Chaska back behind the stone pillar. Osha stumbled backward over the corner of her archive case, dropping her lamp into the gravel where it rolled in a wild yellow circle. Chaska lunged for the straps of her cargo frame to keep the mouse’s box from tipping into the cleft, while Ashaun shoved between Ysabet and the beast’s wet snout, bracing her translucent left stone forearm across her chest like a shield as her right hand went to her belt.
Pip did not move at all.
The hundreds of fine, newly grown sensory filaments along its shell took the brunt of the panic in a single crushing wave. Lilt’s wing-beat on the left, Osha’s falling hip on the right, the rolling heat of the overturned lamp, Ashaun’s rushing boots, and the blinding furnace-glare of the predator’s open feeding slit directly in front—all of it poured through the raw shell-hairs at the same instant.
