Emily was the smaller of the two, but the gap between her own size and Canard was not quite as wide as she initially thought. Whatever the exact circumstances were, she was never fully told, but  she recognized him without knowing him. She saw him, in her own face, in the face of every other person that had been with her on Puckworld, following the invasion. The hallowing of the eyes, the dulling of all color, the awkward stiffness. He was taller, and there was a suggestion of who he was supposed to be, but he did not fit the outline.

And yet, he had a strength that suggested he was perfectly fine. She struggled against his grip and kicked and bit and did every thing she could think of, and he did not seem to care, giving no reaction whatsoever. He crushed her fingers in a lone hand until she dropped her blaster, and then kicked it far out of her reach. He twisted her arm until she fell to the ground, and then further, to the point her shoulder began to threaten to pop out of its socket.

There was noise all around them. The vortex of light, the monster, the wizard, the drakes she was supposed to be helping. There were flashes and explosions she could not turn to check on. Canard said nothing, responded to no plea to be let go, merely kept her in that vice so she could not move.

Somewhere, between her ribs and her stomach, she felt a faint flutter, like a cough bubbling in the lungs. The deep was still there, and was growing concerned as she became more panicked. It didn’t understand what was happening, but the adrenaline or the pain had jostled it, and it was making the  uneasy movements of a creature questioning if it needed to flee, never mind that it had no where to flee to.

Emily stopped her struggling, feeling overcome with humiliation. She had finally been given a chance to prove herself, and the reward for her hard work was she was incapacitated on her first actual mission. Everyone was going to die and it was going to be her fault because she couldn’t handle basic self defense.

The deep fluttered again. She reached for it, in the same inexplicable manner one reached for a well-worn memory. It responded, with a combination of both excitement and trepidation that could have just been her own reflected back to her.

The noise around them became distant, changing from a cacophony of sound into the low rumbles of a tall waterfall. The pain in her shoulder did not subside, but it did become inconsequential, as if it belonged to someone else entirely. The deep pushed forward in her awareness, and alongside it every thought that it had. It disliked the air here, something in it tasted to her like burning oil. She became hyper aware of her clothing, the breastplate in particular clocking in as something that smelled rancid and chemical that clawed at the lining of the throat. Canard’s fist wrapped around her wrist gave the impression of something chalky and smoky, like burned ash of an old fire.

Emily had used her free hand to break her fall as he had wrenched her shoulder, and was now in full contact with the ground. The concrete under her fingers was warm, its surface felt like the slight buzzing of electricity, and the sensation of sand between teeth.

The deep sent her all these things, a deluge of information given as sensation, pushed back everything it could not immediately touch as unimportant, and waited for her answer.

The ground, she thought. Nosedive had said Canard was off limits, but no one would care if she ruined the ground, it was already being torn apart by larger forces than her.

The taste of sour and grit doubled, and her hand felt as though it was being submerged in boiling water as she pushed her palm into the concrete. Her fingers passed through the aggregate and dust and she could taste all of it. They reached further than they should have been able to, and then further still. She was in the cement, the gravel, everything under her hand was her hand. The sensation of fire traveled up her arm. She was aware of a new sound, distant and higher pitched than the rumbling and roaring around her, and it was with that same detached awareness she realized it was herself, screaming.

Like the dream, she told the deep, like the dream. She pushed into the concrete floor and as it became her hand, she was aware of a person standing on her fingers, on her far too many, far too long fingers. She shifted the very floor underneath Canard, and shoved him off his feet. He let go of her wrist as he fell to her side, and she slammed the newly freed palm into the floor too, pushing awareness even further. The sensation of being boiled spread up through her shoulders to the space under her collarbone.

Emily grasped at him with her new hands, and as he tried to scrabble away the floor continued to move under him, refusing to let him back on his feet. She finally caught him in a fist of too many stony fingers, encircling his torso and pinning him firmly to the ground. She held him there, letting him struggle, before deciding that he was firmly stuck, and pulling her hands—her real hands—out of the floor.

The strange awareness was clipped as soon as the contact left, and the sensation of being boiled ended. The deep stepped back, and she let herself breathe. Her hands and arms, that had been searing with pain, appeared fine.

Beside her, Canard continued to wriggle in the strange fist made of solid concrete. Beyond, she could see both the other drakes were still fighting their assigned problems, and, with this one  neutralized until someone more important could decide what to do about it, she should help.

“Take five,” Emily suggested to him, getting uneasily to her feet. She rolled the shoulder that had been wrenched, and it did not seem worse for wear. She searched around her, trying to find where he had kicked the blaster.

“Listen to me,” Canard said. She turned, confused. It was the first thing he had said since he had first ambushed them. He was staring up at her, with a lucidity that suggested it may even have been him talking to her. He had ceased struggling, his cheek pressed to the ground as he twisted to look at her.

“He’s not your friend,” he said, haltingly, as if it were painful for him to talk. “He’s going to kill us all. He’s done it before. You have to stop him.”

She almost said something assuring, that they were working on it. But it caught half-formed in her throat. The phrasing was wrong. The word friend should not have been in the plea at all. Canard was not asking for help with some dumb wizard.

“Who?” Emily asked. “Who’s going to kill us all?” 

His eyes had glazed over again, and his struggling with his restraints began anew. More troubling, it appeared that the concrete was beginning to flake and crack in some places. It would not come free at once, but it either wasn’t as strong as it was supposed to be after being moved by her hands, or he had found an unexpected wellspring of strength.

She gave up on the blaster and ran to help the boys, in the hopes they would be able to help her in turn when Canard broke free.