Liquid Fire (53 page)

She broke off, clenching her fists, savoring some feeling of rage.

“The spell will work. Pele will hatch, and the Noose of Will will tighten around her throat as she rises from the flames. Liquid fire from her egg will nourish our firespinning, and living fire from her maw will cleanse our sacred lands. Together, we will retake Maui, Pele, and her people. Under her, at last, the people of Hawai`i will again be free—”

“You know, Jewel,” I said, mouth quirking into a smile, “I believe you’re monologuing.”

Jewel fell silent, sighed, shook her head. “Only you, Dakota, could make light of this—”

“But wait, there’s more,” I said, grinning. “If you’re the villain, then I’m the hero, and it’s in my contract to say, ‘but wait, you’ve forgotten something.’ ”

Jewel turned to me, head cocked, hands on her hips. “All right, I’ll bite. What have I forgotten, Dakota Frost?”

———

“You’ve forgotten, Jewel Grace,” I said, pulling my hands free, “that I’m the most flexible person you’ve ever met.”

57. Rumble on Pu’u o Maui

I rammed my elbows into the chins of the twin guards on either side with solid
CRACKs
. I wasn’t quite free of the
karada
when I started—my arms were still pulled back behind me—but I had managed to work a few thorns of my vines through the liquid latex, and by the time I completed my motion, the whole array of ropes fell away from me like hemp confetti.

Then I went to the closed universe of the Taido form
untai no hokei
.

My hands shot out to either side, bladed fingertips nailing the twins in their throats before they recovered. As the guard in front of me whirled to act, I kicked up once, twice, first one connecting with his nuts, the second one with his chin as he hunched over. He toppled back.

On instinct, I spun like a top, a move called
sentai
—shielding my face with one hand, then firing off the opposite punch into the breastbone of a chunky guard behind me. I winced as volcanic cinder ground into my knee—but something crunched in his chest, and he fell.

I whirled back with another
sentai
, just as the front guard was recovering, lifting my arm just enough so that my wild punch hit his chin. His teeth clicked shut, a bit of blood splattered, and his head flopped back. As he sagged forward, I caught him with both hands.

My eyes went wide—I’d thrust my hands into the air a hundred times in this part of
untai
, but never actually caught anything but air. The form worked. Holy shit. The
form
had
worked
. Of course, I’d made a complete salsa of it, using its movements in the “wrong” order—the
natural
order for the situation I’d been in—that I was
still
in. Letting my breath out very slowly, I twisted to the side, letting the guard fall to the bloody gravel on my left, my body relaxing into an attack posture as I faced the twin who had held my left arm.

He was staggering up, hand at his throat, recovering. Then his eyes flicked behind me—and I threw both hands to the ground and shot one leg back up in an
ebigeri
“shrimp” kick. My foot slammed into the twin running up behind me, pain spiked my hands as they ground into the gravel—and I felt ribs break beneath my heel with an ugly
CRACK
.

I popped back up to find the other twin in front of me, his fist flying at my face. Without thought, I backflipped away from the punch, just like Paj had drilled us. My feet connected with his chin, I caught myself, turning the failed backflip into an awkward cartwheel—and whacked the recovering twin in the head, who flopped back to earth in a rattle of volcanic cinder.

I landed and whirled to face the remaining twin. He froze, blood streaming from his nose, his hands held up in a sloppy boxing posture. I crouched in the stance my instructors called
chudan
, my legs splayed low and wide, my bleeding hands held forward like blades.

He ran.

“What the hell!” Jewel cried, standing by the cauldron. Molokii was moving toward me, fists raised, but Jewel jumped forward, hit him on the shoulder, and gestured frantically. He jerked and ran off toward a cache of gear. “Are we not fireweavers? Stop her!”

I turned to follow him, but a blast of fire slammed into my back, winding me and nearly knocking me off my feet. I whirled to face this new attack, falling into a low stance called
jodan
, legs coiled like a spring, front fist forward, back hand shot back up behind me.

Zi and Yolanda faced me, poi whirling around them in shimmering arcs, creating magic bubbles of flames around them. On the left, Yolanda brought her poi together, creating a momentary impression of a flower; then the flower jetted forth a stream of flame.

Heat flashed against my face and I flinched back—but the magic-infused latex was as much a barrier to her magic as it was mine. The fire roiled off me, eerily repelled by the coating on my body, dissipating into colorful streamers of magic, like a kaleidoscope to my new eyes.

“Whoops,” I said, as they hesitated. “Hadn’t thought that through, had you?”

Then I moved in on them.

Bubbles of magic surged around me, like pulsing jellyfish made of flames, as Zi and Yolanda danced around me, trying to gain the advantage. Unfettered by spinning, I darted back and forth between them, aiming lancing kicks, forcing them back, moving them apart.

Then a third fireweaver attacked me from behind, a hoopspinner. Her waist ground in an undulation that would have done Jewel proud, and six fire sticks jutted out of her gyrating hula, creating expanding rings of flame that rippled out over me in buffeting waves.

But the latex barrier that still contained my magic also repelled theirs. The flames washed over me harmlessly, held back inches by an eerie repulsion. Now, here and there, I was getting stings and burns as movement wore the latex off, but I was protected enough to move in.

I jammed my body between two of her firesticks, stopping the spin, shoving my shoulder against her magic barrier. Darkening waves of mana churned before me as the shield weakened. The fireweaver tried to move back, but I lanced in and punched her jaw.

She bounced back off the inside of her field and fell into a triple punch—then just fell. I caught the hoop, let her collapse out of it, then turned back toward Zi and Yolanda, who were weaving back and forth, carefully getting into position, prepping a new attack.

Why hadn’t they attacked me from behind while hula-girl had me distracted? Then I realized that while fireweaver magic was powerful, it wouldn’t be easy to get two giant jellyfish of fire to fight together. The magic would interfere with each other—aha!
That’s it!

I tensed, squinted, analyzing their magic—then saw my opening.

“Catch!” I said, tossing the hoop high so it landed atop Yolanda’s bubble of magic, rattling back and forth, the flames sparking off the field. The firespinner tried to maintain her shield, but the hoop sank into the magic, the poi intersected, and the field blew apart.

I cartwheeled in as Zi fell back, slipping one ankle into a hole in his shield. A fiery ball on a chain whipped around my ankle and jerked the poi handle out of his hands. I kicked the poi off desperately, looking up to see Zi stare at me in shock as his shield disintegrated.

His remaining poi hit him in the head, discharging all its mana at once, and Zi went down. I should have felt relief, but unexpectedly, I was gasping for breath. I firmed my stance and looked around, fearing another attack. Most of the fireweavers were down or running, but Jewel still stood guard over the cauldron, now with lit poi in her hands.

And one fireweaver had stayed, placing himself between her and me.

Molokii faced off with me, monkey’s fist poi spinning. Briefly, he transferred them to one hand, not even missing a beat in the complex pattern he was spinning; made a quick gesture, then took the poi back in two hands. To an outsider, it looked like he was calling me out.

———

To someone who spoke sign language, it read,
time for the main event.

58. Take the Rib

In that brief moment, I took stock. Underneath the layer of goop on my skin, my new Dragon squirmed, singeing me with trapped power. Outside the circle of power, my original Dragon curved, trailing lazily across the sky like a distant comet, unnoticed except by me.

Before me within the circle, Molokii weaved within a
double
bubble of magic, whirling the biggest pair of knotted “monkey’s fist” poi I’d ever seen, the blocky knotted wicks blazing with a full load of faux fire, burning white and, to my new eyes, just s
treaming
magic.

My eyes tightened. Molokii’s shimmering barrier wasn’t bubbles. His shield was two nested baskets woven from flames, swirling around each other constantly, like one of Cinnamon’s mathematical diagrams brought to life in colored streamers of fire.

I shifted my shoulders, feeling the latex peeling away from my body in places. The fire and fight and volcanic cinder had left me a mess of bruises and burns and scrapes and blood, and my Dragon was moving, but not enough skin was exposed to let me reactivate my magic.

Or maybe it was the henna. When I tried krumping—flexing my stomach rhythmically to build up magic within my body, that trick that had served me so well—I instead felt electric shocks rippling over my body, followed by a hot cable burning across my belly.

Molokii smiled viciously, then began flicking his poi left, then right, fluidly, building up some new attack without ever losing his cross-weaving shield. But the patterns I could now see in his shield gave me an idea, and before he could deliver his blow, I ran.

Molokii laughed, a rough bark, but the laugh died when I retrieved the hoop and poi of the firespinners, guttering now but still afire. I threw the hoop down, then began whirling the two monkey-fist poi around me, focusing on the simplest spin possible—two parallel planes.

Molokii snorted, resuming his complicated weave, eyes on me as I moved to a weave of my own, wrists crossing over each other, poi arcing around me in a three-beat pattern—then I added another twist, making it a five-beat weave, the simplest possible beat that could sustain a magical pattern—the fireweaver’s equivalent of the Dance of Five and Two. It was complex, far too complex for me to keep up for more than a minute before clocking myself in the head, but at the same time it was simple, far too simple to do any projective magic. Yet it had the right math to serve as the basis for a crude shield—as long as the right intent was behind it.

“
Spirit of flame,
” I murmured, “
shield my path.
”

A weak, guttering sphere shimmered into existence around me, a soap bubble compared to Molokii’s huge web of flame. Molokii nodded, then idly flicked a wrist left, then right, one poi seeming to stop midair, the other looping around it, creating a focused blast of fire.

My shield wavered, nearly popped, at this slightest bit of Molokii’s magic. He flipped his poi in and out, creating a whirlwind around him, the shimmering basket weave never losing its grip as the spinning vortex blasted volcanic cinder on me from all directions.

Then I threw my poi away—straight at the join of his baskets of fire.

The guttering balls of fire bounced off the weaving shield, getting drawn up into the sky by the churning of the weave, their chains flicking up and getting tangled not in Molokii’s poi, but in the patterns they made. Molokii cursed, refocused, tried to reinforce his shield.

Then I shoved the hoop into the thicket of magic.

The hoop was sucked in and churned up in an eyeblink, its ring twisted into a pretzel, its firesticks spinning around crazily, their arcing creating just the right twist of mana to disrupt Molokii’s shield. By itself, that wouldn’t have been enough to destroy the pattern, but after throwing two whole fireweaver’s sets of gear as impromptu monkey wrenches into Molokii’s magic gearworks . . . the whole outer shell of the basket blew apart.

And then I ran in with a flying side kick.

This wasn’t Taido, the martial art that I practiced now; this was
taekwondo
, the martial art I’d started with. Old reflexes kicked in when I ran forward, triggering a flash of memory of my college karate instructor, hearing his words, guiding my body into a devastating side kick.

I bounced off Molokii’s still-solid inner shield and fell to the volcanic cinder.

Molokii stumbled back a step, but recovered, reinforcing his shield. He laughed as he saw me fall to the rough volcanic cinder, thinking I’d failed. But a Taido student is as comfortable on the ground as they are in the air, and I lanced back with a back-leg shrimp kick, buffeting him.

I’d known I wouldn’t be able to break his inner shield with one kick—but now I was too close for him to build up another wicker fire barrier or volcanic blast, and I planned to stay there, using the latex they’d coated my body with to protect me until I found an opening.

At first, Molokii struggled to get his bearings as I danced around him using Taido’s distinctive lancing, acrobatic footwork,
unsoku
. He had plenty of tricks in his playbook, but so did I—his waves of fire, I dodged under, and his whips of flame, I cartwheeled over.

But Molokii had the strength and speed to gather himself. He flicked one poi behind his head in a lazy figure eight, maintaining an umbrella-like shield while he drew the other poi’s chain in, whirling fast around his fist, building up an ersatz boxing glove made of flame.

Then he began pummeling me with his blazing fist of fire.

Molokii was strong, and with his magic behind it, the blows threatened to knock me off my feet. My protective latex coating was disintegrating, my tattoos were still shut down, and the burning pain began to wear at my will, making me stumble. Molokii grinned—and punched.

The flaming fist screamed at me, and faster than thought, I threw myself to the ground. No; I didn’t
throw
myself; I did
foo-koo-tekky
, Taido’s gymnastic defense, dodging with my body, rather than blocking with my fists. I arced to the side, body coiling like a spring, catching myself on two hands and one foot, the other leg cocked back as I faced Molokii’s side, recalling Paj’s words, echoes of advice Molokii never heard:
His form is sloppy. Never pass on free.

I was beneath the edge of his shield. I saw the opening—and took his rib.

My leg popped out in a perfect
shaa-jo
side kick, slamming into his torso. I felt the bone snap, heard the crack, saw a silent cry pass his lips. But I was already moving, retracting the foot, shooting it under me and whip-coiling back upright just as he was canting over.

He staggered back, trying to recover his spinning rhythm, wincing as the movement required him to bend his side; and, in the open space between his flailing poi, I surged in, slamming both hands into his chest and hooking my forward foot behind his heel.

Molokii flew back, head cracking against a rock, his poi falling to the earth.

I stood upright and drew in a ragged breath; I was even more winded than before. Was it the altitude? Then I stepped up to Molokii’s splayed form and kicked gravelly sand over his poi. The surging blue flames of Molokii’s faux liquid fire fought against the volcanic cinder, sputtering, but in moments, the squarish burning wicks hissed and went out.