Two yards short of the limestone buttress, the wet travertine sloped sharply down into the sheltered pool.
The young burrow beast smelled the deep, still water before it saw the surface. All at once it kicked out with both mud-plated hind legs, trying to lunge off the canvas sling before its joints could lock again. Its heavy belly slewed sideways across the slick algae, and its rigid right wing-strut caught hard against a jagged horn of stone at the pool’s lip.
If the three-hundred-pound body tumbled into the water while that brittle mineral wing was wedged behind the rock, the bone would snap at the shoulder socket.
“Hold its chest!” Chaska hissed, digging both heels into the slime as the canvas rope burned through her palms.
Pip did not have hands to grab the rope. It lunged forward on all six legs, wedged its own low shoulder beneath the burrow beast’s mud-caked breastbone, and shoved upward with everything in its back and hindquarters to lift the wing-joint clear of the stone horn.
The sudden, straining effort pulled hard on Pip’s mineral reserves. Beneath the green-clay patch along its translucent shell, the faint interior lights it had grown in the quartz caves flared up in an involuntary surge—bright, watery green fire running along its ribs and lighting the wet steam around them like a lantern under green glass.
