“I just realized that I don’t need to be inside the ball,” Kip said. “And actually it might be a really bad idea.” But with the bubble closed, the sound was muted. They didn’t hear him.
Kip waved to Cruxer, who took it as readiness.
Cruxer and Ben-hadad heaved the ball toward the stairs.
Kip fell immediately. Orange. Slippery.
He thought he saw Cruxer try to grab the ball to stop him, but Ben-hadad, thinking this was the plan, pushed harder on the Great Green Bouncy Ball o’ Doomed Kip.
And Kip bounced. The ball rolled down the stairs, slowly at first, skipping and bouncing, and then it hit the next landing and sproinged airborne. He rolled along the outside curve of the spiraling staircase—and flew at face level into a group of ten or twelve Lightguards running up the stairs. The ball was six feet wide, and the stairs nine or ten. Kip shouldn’t have blasted into all of them, but he did.
Kip was spun around and right side up for one moment, and he saw the squad following hot behind him, slashing at the scattered, fallen Lightguards, trying not to stumble over the bodies themselves, but trying to keep the men from following them. And then Kip was knocked off his feet again on the next bounce.
He didn’t even see the next group of Lightguards, just felt the shock of collision. And now he had such speed built up that there was no way the squad would be able to keep up. He landed upside down on the next bounce, only the curvature of the ball keeping him from breaking his damn fool neck. Another collision—this one so hard that it rattled Kip’s teeth—sent the ball bouncing back the opposite direction.
Finding himself flat on his back, Kip squinted through the barely translucent ball, wondering how many Lightguards he must have killed with that collision.
None. He’d caught the edge of the recessed doorway at one of the landings. His ball, now having ricocheted back into the stairs above, was rolling slowly back toward the edge of the descending stairs once more.
Through the distortion of the green luxin, Kip saw a young face coming up the stairs from below. A Lightguard, baffled at a boy in a ball. The ugly man had a musket in hand, but he stopped. In a heartbeat, half a dozen more Lightguards joined him. They, too, stopped, bewildered.
Kip waved to them, friendly. It had worked that one time out on the river.
But none of them waved back.
Then something else occurred to him. He hadn’t made any holes in the ball. It was getting hard to breathe. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it didn’t sound friendly.
An officer joined the men. “Shoot it!” he yelled.
Kip heard that.
The men raised their muskets. Kip had stopped musket balls with green luxin, once. But that had been open luxin, with all the power of insane Will behind it. He was still flat on his back, and the luxin of the ball wasn’t thick enough to stop bullets.
Why didn’t I make it thick enough to stop bullets?
Thinking was the wrong thing to do. Thinking took time.
A roar resounded through even the walls of his ball, and Kip saw the briefest flash of Big Leo, running down the stairs faster than you can run down stairs. Big Leo lowered a shoulder and flung his massive mass into the ball.
The Ball o’ Kip shot into the Lightguards’ faces amid musket fire.
Sometime in between that collision and the bouncing and the lack of air, the world went red and black and he lost everything.
Some time later, he regained consciousness with a gasp. Teia was standing over him with a knife in her hand, and he was covered with the dust of broken green luxin. It took him a few heaving, deep breaths to regain his wits. He’d passed out.
Teia had cut the seal of the green luxin. The squad were speaking to him, but he had nothing for them. Couldn’t understand.
They pulled him to his feet.
“Where’s Daelos?” Kip asked. Everyone else appeared to be here. Wherever here was. At the bottom of the slaves’ stairs, maybe? Ben-hadad and Ferkudi were reloading the blunderbusses, preparing to breach a door.
“Broke an ankle jumping over some bodies,” Cruxer said. “We had to leave him.”
“You left him?” Kip demanded.
“We gave him a Lightguard cloak and tunic. The chirurgeons will help him and he can get away. The Blackguards will help him, Kip,” Cruxer said. He was defensive. He hated leaving someone behind, too.
Orholam damn it. We’re children. Even Cruxer.
“It was the right thing,” Teia said. “Now shut up and let’s go.”
“Fire in three!” Ben-hadad announced.
Ferkudi fired before any of them could cover their ears.
“Sorry, I heard fire,” he said.
Ben-hadad fired right behind him, and he winced at the deafening sound. “Deserved that,” he said.