Chapter 254: Jiang Met the Thief Inside the Bellmother’s Lung

Hooked steel slid from the season seed and turned toward Jiang.

Blood unfurled between them. Some came from the bare hand. More leaked where the rain-keel had grown into the severed leg, turning the water around the white socket pink.

Jiang’s blood joined it from his beak.

Neither body had enough left for a fair fight.

Red light climbed the keel.

Across the keel, the diver saw it first and locked the grafted leg straight. Jiang felt the command pulse a heartbeat later against his breast, clean and hard beneath the Bellmother’s uneven contraction.

He flattened before it struck.

Water slammed along the white spine. The diver bent around the fixed socket without losing hold of the knife. Jiang’s sound foot slipped from its foothold, and only his belly kept him from being thrown between the amber ribs.

Something opened behind him.

Behind him, the withdrawal flap he had freed was folding shut again.

Its red edge shuddered above the empty animal chamber. One more forced pulse would press the cut graft back across the opening and turn the next living breath toward the brood river.

Across the keel, the diver’s throat lay bare where the remaining armor had peeled from the collar.

Jiang could reach it.

One hard kick, one bite held through the next contraction, and the forest chase could end inside the thing both of them had wounded.

His opponent knew it too. The hooked knife moved away from the seed and waited at the angle Jiang would need to cross.

They had met at last with no one left to lie for either of them.

Jiang turned his back. Anger came with the motion, hot enough to feel absurd inside cold water. The diver had carried his feather through the forest, used frightened parents as cover, and opened the Bellmother for this theft. Mercy was not what stopped him. The living flap behind him simply had less power to choose.

He shoved his sound wing beneath the withdrawal flap before it sealed.

The diver watched just long enough to understand. Then the knife returned to the green organ.

Of course it did.

White graft pressed down on Jiang’s wing. His sound foot braced on the keel while the failed wing stayed folded tight. The flap wanted to follow the red draw. Living tissue around it wanted to open.

Both forces crossed through his bones.

He could not hold them by strength. He changed his angle instead, rolling until the wide curve of his back carried the graft while the sound wing guided the living lip past it.

Around him, the Bellmother took another breath.

Warm water found the gap.

Far above, his own paired call returned through amber tissue, smaller now and broken by branches. A second rhythm struck after it: wood against root, twice, then once.

Aylin was still moving.

Above the lung, she had reached a place where the high breathing root narrowed around the emperor family’s moss passage.

Hest lay across the old red yoke with both boots dug under a branch. Valea had wrapped one white barb around the root behind him and driven the other through a dead graft plate that rose and fell with each command pulse.

Aylin held the joining line.

Her smallest two fingers had closed around it when she first took the strain. They had not told her they were slipping. Nothing hurt in them now, and that frightened her more than the punctures had. Pain at least reported where the body ended.

Rope burned through her palm and jumped free.

Valea caught it against her wrist before it vanished into the black water below.

"Your hand is finished," Valea said.

"It remains inconveniently attached."

"That was not praise."

"I heard the tone."

Another pulse bent the root beneath them. Hest grunted as the yoke drove into his ribs, but he kept its red arms from closing on the family route.

Inside the moss passage, the female emperor answered her chick. Bellwyrm’s lower call followed from farther back. Neither sound came closer to the humans.

They were leaving under their own power. Aylin only had to keep a road long enough for that choice to matter.

She wrapped the line around her forearm instead of trusting her fingers again.

"If the hand tears, you lose the line," Hest said.

"Then catch the line."

"With what? My excellent personality?"

Valea leaned harder against the barb. "It is the only part of you not already occupied."

Hest made a sound that might have been a laugh if the yoke had not crushed the air from it.

Aylin pulled on the next living beat rather than the red one. Her damaged fingers contributed nothing. Shoulder, back, and the line around her forearm took the weight.

Under the strain, the yoke shifted across the root.

Below, the change reached Jiang as a brief slackening in the forced draw.

He let the withdrawal flap open another beak-width, then looked across the rain-keel.

Across the rain-keel, the diver had cut through most of the red-veined sheath.

Green light beat inside the season seed. Each beat arrived with the Bellmother. Between them, the red feeder tightened around the organ and pulled the color toward the white spine.

No frenzy spoiled the thief’s work. The hook entered only where living green met white graft, stripping the Bellmother’s tissue away while preserving the machine-grown cup beneath it.

Jiang hated the care more than he would have hated frenzy.

A knife tip tapped once against the seed as the diver glanced up.

Then they pointed toward the loosening withdrawal flap.

An offer, perhaps. Keep holding that, and I keep this.

Jiang answered by driving his beak under the graft lip.

Pain rang through his cracked beak against the plate. He lifted until warm flow entered above his head, then shoved his narrow skull through the maintenance fold beside the keel.

It had not been made as a passage. Two amber membranes pressed his coat flat while the white machine edge scraped the down from his damaged flank.

A person would have needed to cut it wider.

Jiang had already spent too much of his life being grateful for doors designed for people.

He exhaled one thin stream of bubbles and forced his shoulders through.

Behind the plate, the red command feeder came into view.

It resembled a vein only from outside. Here, its glassy sheath ran in a perfectly straight groove along the keel. No capillaries branched from it. When the Bellmother’s amber membrane paused, the feeder continued to tighten on its own red rhythm.

This was machine, not rib.

Breaking the wrong thing would bleed the Bellmother into her own lung. Breaking this could stop the imposed draw, if his beak survived it.

Jiang pressed his breast against the glassy line.

Direct-current sensitivity gave him pressure, not permission. The feeder struck hard beneath him; a softer living tremor arrived from the membrane at his side.

He waited through both.

Opposite Jiang, the diver pulled the season seed outward.

Green tissue stretched across the cut. A red vein snapped and recoiled into the keel.

Jiang hooked his sound foot behind the feeder’s sheath.

The bitten leg had to brace against living amber. It shook before taking his weight. Pain climbed into the hip, but the membrane beneath it yielded rather than tearing.

He twisted his body along the groove.

His foot did not break the feeder. The motion rolled the glassy sheath just far enough to expose a white joint underneath.

Another command pulse was already coming.

Red light struck his belly.

Jiang bit the joint.

His first bite drove the split farther up his beak. The second forced the white edge between the broken tips. He could taste his own blood more strongly than the bitter graft.

Above him, the diver raised the hooked knife.

It could have entered Jiang’s neck through the maintenance fold.

Instead, the blade severed the last green strand around the season seed.

They had made their choices plain.

Jiang clamped down and turned his head.

A dry split traveled through his jaw instead of his ears.

Half the keel went dark.

For one magnificent instant, the hard draw stopped.

Living water surged into every space it had been denied. The withdrawal flap opened over Jiang’s back. Amber ribs recoiled from the white spine, and the Bellmother’s broad call shook loose from his coat pattern into something deeper and wholly her own.

A heartbeat later, the diver tore the season seed free.

Storm-colored fluid burst from the empty cup. It did not spread with the blood. The rain-keel gathered it around the diver’s grafted leg and pulled the green organ against their chest.

Freed from the dead feeder, the white socket released its foothold.

Without the feeder, the machine should have gone still.

Yet the machine kept moving.

A red command lantern answered beyond the Bellmother’s ribs.

Jiang saw it through the opening left by the recoiling keel: a distant light moving beneath the forest, surrounded by roots bent into a long wake.

Below them, the lower black river turned toward it.

Amber tissue stretched between that river and the brood route. A split appeared where the season seed had been, thin at first, then wide enough to admit Jiang’s sound foot.

Clutching the stolen organ, the diver folded around it as the separating current took them. Their hooked knife spun away. One bare hand caught the keel edge, released it, and reached toward the red lantern without hesitation.

Jiang pulled himself out of the maintenance gill.

To his left, the living withdrawal and the brood river strained against the tear.

To his right, the thief and the Bellmother’s stolen season vanished toward the red lantern.

He had enough breath for only one current, and choosing it would decide which loss Aylin saw when the Bellmother opened again.