I float on my back, watching it get smaller and smaller, a sinking feeling overtaking my stomach. That bird carries people who saw me alive. Saw me throw myself from the Minnow. Saw me turn the Otachi on the copters.

Saw me summon a beast from the depths to crush the people trying to bring me home.

I flash the Otachi at Bao, and the Reckoner’s head snaps toward me. His vast, reptilian eyes narrow to slits, his blowholes flaring as he lets a slice of the copter’s hull slip from his mouth. I can see the gears in his brain working. He’s flushed with rage, filled with the need to savage, but the lights that blaze from my wrist are calling him in a way he can’t ignore. I silently plead with him not to reconcile the two impulses on me. If I can attract him, if I can just pull him away from the wreckage, there might be survivors.

I might be able to spare a few of the people I just tried to slaughter.

I never meant for it to go this far. My stomach twists and surges, and before I can swallow it back, I’m emptying my guts in the ocean. I struggle to keep the Otachi level as I retch, but Bao’s losing interest in the beams. He lowers his beak back into the water, prowling closer to the quadcopter’s ragged hull.

“Get over here, you little shit,” I choke, and slash the lights over his eyes.

Bao roars, rearing up again. With two quick strokes of his back legs, he drifts toward me, and as he draws close, I can smell the acrid smoke and gasoline fumes that roll off him. His beak snaps shut impatiently, and I shut off the Otachi.

For a moment we regard each other, one monster to another. The one who took down the quadcopters and the one who made him do it.

Then I twist a knob on my wrist, and the dive signal flashes out into the depths, the noise of it ringing in my ears. Bao hauls in a deep breath through his blowholes, then slips silently under the surface, sinking fast, but not fast enough to avoid brushing me with his singed keratin plates as his shoulders rush beneath my feet. I flinch when my toes skim over a scorching-hot bullet hole.

It doesn’t seem worth it to go back to the Minnow. For a moment, I fantasize about crawling into the wreckage of the quadcopters, about trying to pull out whoever’s left alive in there, as if I can undo some of the damage that Bao’s—that I’ve—done.

But that doesn’t seem worth it either. If there are people living and breathing in those twisted remains bobbing on the waves, my face is probably the last thing they want to see.