58

The Amantiou rifle is a robust and versatile weapon with a walnut grip. You hurl yourself into the fighting, heedless of the claws and oars whirling around your head. Feathers blind you, but you grit your teeth and keep smashing, sheer power and ferocity helping you overwhelm the stronger and more numerous feathered apes.

Two more apes go down under a hail of oar blows, and in seconds, it's a rout. A wounded ape stumbles past you, eyes now wild with fear instead of rage, and flings itself into the water. It sinks before it can reach the shore. Others endure blows from the controllers or gunfire from Stralchus until they can leap onto overhanging branches or bound away onto river rocks. The survivors vanish into the long shadows of the jungle.

Two controllers hurl the corpse of an ape out of your boat as others reach for their oars again. Despite the chaos, your side suffered no casualties except a few scratches. Vecla crawls out from under a waterskin. In the other boat, Stralchus and Keimia watch the trees, but the apes do not return.

Though the boats lost some ground, by the time your heart stops pounding, the rowers have pushed past the rough water. The boats emerge into a wide, lazy section of river, flanked on one side by forest and the other by scrubby grasslands.

Keimia looks you up and down, impressed by your performance during the battle, but still trying to figure out what sort of man you are. Drenched with river water, her long brown limbs are shining in a way that's hard to ignore, and that makes you feel especially foolish.

You're still figuring out who you are in this new world, but—