Chapter 3: The Valkyrie's Song

The rhythmic thump-thump-thump of rotor blades cut through the jungle air like a mechanical heartbeat, growing louder with each passing second. David pressed himself against the rough bark of a cecropia tree, his missionary clothes soaked with sweat and torn by thorns. Beside him, Cassara had gone perfectly still, her paranoid energy focused into something resembling a predator's patience.

"Military?" David whispered, though he already knew the answer from the way Cassara's scarred hands had begun to glow with that impossible inner heat.

"Worse," she replied, her voice barely audible over the approaching aircraft. "Much worse."

The helicopter burst into view above the clearing where St. Jude's clinic had stood—or rather, where it had been reduced to smoldering rubble. The aircraft itself defied David's understanding of aviation. It moved with an unnatural grace, too smooth, too precise, as if gravity was merely a suggestion it chose to follow. The hull gleamed with a metallic finish that seemed to shift and flow like liquid mercury in the afternoon sun.

"Attention, deserter." The voice that boomed from the helicopter's speakers was amplified far beyond what any normal PA system should manage, resonating through David's chest cavity and making his teeth ache. "Your Empress calls you home."

Cassara's bitter laugh cut through the mechanical thunder. "My Empress can burn in whatever hell spawned her."

The helicopter's descent was wrong—too fast, too controlled, settling into the clearing with the delicate precision of a butterfly despite its massive size. The rotors should have kicked up a hurricane of debris, but instead, the air around the aircraft seemed to bend inward, creating a pocket of unnatural calm.

The side door slid open with a pneumatic hiss.

What emerged was not what David expected. The figure that dropped to the ground was small—barely five feet tall—but moved with a fluid grace that spoke of inhuman reflexes. She wore what looked like military fatigues, but the fabric had an oily, organic sheen that made David's eyes water when he tried to focus on it. Her face was young, almost childlike, framed by short blonde hair that seemed to move independently of any wind.

But her eyes. Christ, her eyes were wrong. They were too large, too bright, and when she smiled, David could see that her teeth were all slightly too sharp.

"Sister Cassara," the small woman called out, her voice carrying impossibly well across the distance. "How long has it been? Fifty cycles? A hundred?"

"Not long enough, Tanya," Cassara replied, stepping out from the tree line. David wanted to grab her, to pull her back into cover, but something about the way she moved told him that hiding was no longer an option.

Major Tanya—for that was clearly her rank, judging by the insignia that seemed to shift and writhe on her uniform—tilted her head with predatory interest. "You've been feeding, haven't you? I can smell the thermal residue from here. Our Empress will be so pleased to know you haven't forgotten your nature."

"My nature?" Cassara's voice dripped with contempt. "You mean the curse she branded into my flesh?"

"Curse?" Tanya's laughter was musical and wrong, like wind chimes made of bone. "Oh, sister, you still don't understand, do you? What she gave us wasn't punishment—it was ascension. Evolution beyond the constraints of base matter."

David watched from his hiding place as Tanya began to pace in a slow circle, her movements too fluid, too controlled. She was lecturing now, her voice taking on the cadence of a zealot sharing gospel.

"The Grand Design encompasses all things," she continued, gesturing to the smoldering ruins around them. "Stars and void, matter and energy, the living and the yet-to-be-consumed. Our Empress saw the truth—that existence itself is just organized entropy waiting for purpose. She became that purpose."

"She became madness," Cassara spat. "She turned Penthesil into a feeding ground and her subjects into living weapons."

"Living weapons, yes!" Tanya's eyes blazed with fanatical fervor. "Instruments of perfection! We carry her gifts in our flesh, her will in our actions. Through us, she reaches across the void to bring order to chaos."

David felt bile rise in his throat as understanding crept over him. These weren't human soldiers—they were something else, something transformed. The way they moved, the wrongness of their proportions, the casual impossibility of their technology—it all pointed to an origin that had nothing to do with Earth.

"And what about him?" Tanya suddenly turned toward David's hiding place, her too-large eyes fixing on his position with unerring accuracy. "The local who witnessed your feeding? The Empress has specific protocols for contaminated witnesses."

Cassara moved before David could blink. One moment she was twenty feet away, the next she was between him and Tanya, her scarred arms beginning to glow with increasing intensity.

"He's not part of this," she said, and David could hear the heat building in her voice, literally—the air around her was beginning to shimmer like summer asphalt.

"Everything is part of this," Tanya replied, her hand moving to what looked like a weapon at her hip. "The Grand Design permits no loose threads."

That's when Cassara unleashed hell.

The wave of heat that erupted from her body was beyond anything David had witnessed in the clinic. This wasn't just fire—it was the fundamental concept of thermal energy given visible form, a distortion in reality itself that turned the air into a lens of pure heat. The grass beneath her feet didn't catch fire; it simply ceased to exist, vaporized in an instant.

The helicopter's systems began screaming alerts as the wave hit the aircraft. Electrical systems fried in cascading failures, the metallic hull glowing cherry-red as impossible temperatures washed over it. The rotor blades, still spinning, began to warp and buckle under thermal stress that should have been physically impossible.

Major Tanya dove aside with inhuman speed, but even she couldn't entirely escape the radius of Cassara's power. David watched in horrified fascination as the small woman's uniform began to smoke, the organic fabric charring at the edges.

"Impressive," Tanya said, rolling to her feet with that unnatural grace. "But you're still thinking like prey instead of predator."

She moved then, not running but flowing across the ground like water given form. Her speed was impossible—David couldn't track her movement, only see where she had been and where she suddenly appeared. When she reached Cassara, her hands had become weapons, fingers extended into claws that gleamed with their own metallic sheen.

The fight that followed was beyond human comprehension. Cassara's power turned the air around them into a furnace, but Tanya moved through the heat as if it were nothing more than a gentle breeze. Her attacks came from impossible angles, her body bending and twisting in ways that defied anatomy.

But Cassara was learning, adapting. Each exchange taught her something new about her opponent's capabilities. When Tanya's claws raked across her arm, leaving deep gouges that immediately began to cauterize themselves, Cassara responded by grabbing the smaller woman's wrist and pouring heat directly into the contact point.

Tanya's scream was not entirely human. The sound had harmonics that made David's inner ear spasm, frequencies that seemed designed to induce panic in primate nervous systems. But beneath the alien notes, he could hear genuine pain.

"The bio-tracker," Cassara said through gritted teeth, maintaining her grip despite Tanya's attempts to break free. "How does it work?"

"You think... torture will make me... betray the Empress?" Tanya gasped, her too-large eyes watering from the heat.

"I think you're going to tell me because you're not the only one with gifts," Cassara replied. She pressed her other hand against Tanya's forehead, and David watched in horror as the Major's eyes began to glow from within. "I can cook your brain from the inside out, one neuron at a time."

"Living tissue... integrated into synthetic matrix..." Tanya's voice became distant, dreamy. "Broadcasts on quantum frequencies... every heartbeat sends location data..."

"How do I remove it?"

"Can't... removal triggers self-destruct... liquefies host from cellular level..."

Cassara released her grip, and Tanya collapsed to the ground, her small body wracked with convulsions. The helicopter behind them was now a twisted wreck of melted metal and fried electronics, but David could see more aircraft on the horizon—distant specks that were growing larger by the moment.

"More coming," he said, finding his voice at last.

Cassara nodded grimly, studying the writhing form of Major Tanya. "They'll keep coming until I'm dead or captured. The tracker ensures that."

"Then we remove it," David said, his medical training overriding his terror.

"You heard her. Removal kills the host."

"Not if we're fast enough. Not if we have the right equipment." David was thinking furiously, his mind cataloging the surgical supplies he'd seen at the marina clinic in Colon. "How much time do we have?"

Cassara looked at the approaching aircraft, then at the disabled helicopter. Her expression was that of someone calculating impossible odds.

"Maybe twelve hours before they coordinate a proper search grid," she said finally. "Maybe less."

"Then we run," David said, surprising himself with his conviction. "We get to that boat, we get to Haiti, and we figure out how to save your life."

Cassara stared at him for a long moment, her paranoid eyes searching his face for deception or hidden agenda. Whatever she saw there seemed to satisfy her, because she nodded once, sharply.

"Your boat," she said. "Your rules. But understand this—I'm not asking for help. I'm taking it. You're going to get me to Haiti because the alternative is watching me die here, and taking you with me when I do."

David looked at the approaching helicopters, at the twisted wreckage around them, at the woman who had just rewritten the laws of physics through sheer force of will. His crisis of faith had become something far more concrete—a crisis of survival that would either redeem him or destroy everything he thought he knew about the universe.

"God help us both," he whispered, and meant it.

As they began their desperate flight toward the coast, David clutched his Bible and wondered if he was saving a woman's life or enabling something that would damn them all.

Behind them, Major Tanya's unconscious form began to glow with the same inner light that marked Cassara's scars, and the sound of approaching rotors grew ever louder.