With one last heave of her left forearm and shoulder, Ysabet shoved the burrow beast’s heavy hindquarters past the limestone tooth into the wide side passage. The animal tumbled forward into the cool gravel run beyond the overhang, its stiff wings scraping noisy sparks off the pebbles as it scrambled toward the outer pools.
“Pip, out!” Ysabet shouted, throwing herself backward into the side passage and rolling onto her bruised left ribs to clear the threshold.
Under the groaning travertine slab, Pip refused the last push of the war treasury.
Instead of letting the newly grown ridge of thick, grey fortress-bone anchor into its spine, Pip starved the outer layer of mineral sap and wrenched its shoulders downward. With a sharp, dry report like breaking pottery, the half-formed stone-hard arch sheared clean off the top of Pip’s translucent shell, leaving a raw, pale scar across its back plates.
Freed of the rigid bone lock, Pip tucked its head and scrambled sideways on all six legs through the narrowing gap just as the twenty-foot slab of travertine came down like a butcher’s cleaver behind its heels.
A blast of gritty dust and warm spray blew both Ysabet and Pip ten feet down the side chute. When the stone settled, the lower nursery shelves were gone, buried beneath a solid rampart of fallen cliff—and every animal that had been in the outer pools was already splashing up the cool western runoff channel beside them.
