At the same time, there was one thing the Covenant of St. George got right, all those years ago. When your choice was kill or die, kill was the only answer worth giving.

Malena climbed higher, moving from side to side to avoid the worst of the thrashing. I leaned close to her ear.

“When we get to the head, I’m going to climb off, and you’re going to run,” I said. “I’ll try to feed it the grenade.”

Malena grunted. Whether it was from exertion or because her face was currently too distorted to allow for human speech, I couldn’t tell.

“I’ll find my own way down,” I assured her. “It’ll be fine.”

This time, I didn’t need a translation for her grunts. Profanity is the universal language.

The snake thrashed and squirmed beneath us, presenting a difficult climb as only a living thing truly could. I held on for dear life, until we had reached the head, and it was time to put my terrible, awful, no-good plan into effect.

Letting go of Malena was harder than I expected. I rolled onto the top of the snake’s skull, and it hissed, irritated by the fact that something was touching its head. It pulled back, nearly knocking me off. I grabbed the ridge over its left eye at the last second, anchoring myself.

If it started shaking, I was going to fly. That couldn’t happen.

“Hey, big guy,” I said, pulling the pin from my borrowed grenade. “How’s it hanging?”

The snake hissed. I let go of the eye, letting gravity pull me down the length of its nose. I was going to get one shot at this. If I missed, well. It wasn’t going to matter much to me, after that. It would matter to my family, and to everyone else the giant snake killed before someone took it down.

I fell.

The natural urge of the falling human is to claw at empty air, looking for purchase, some miraculous rescue from the force of gravity. I’ve been falling recreationally for most of my adult life. I did no such thing. Instead, I pulled my arm back and chucked the grenade into the snake’s open mouth before balling myself up to minimize my area of impact and giving myself over to the inevitable.

Fifteen feet was enough of a drop that I’d break an ankle if I tried for a normal landing. It was still short enough that I might be okay, if I got lucky about where I landed. I clung to that thought. I might be okay.

There was an explosion above me as the grenade went off, and warm wetness splattered over the world, marking the giant snake’s demise. That was a good thing. I had succeeded.

Then I hit the edge of the stage, and stopped thinking about anything but pain, even as the stage shook from the impact of the snake’s body, which fell beside me and mercifully not on top of me.

“Verity!” Dominic’s shout was loud and terrified.

I opened my eyes and pushed myself up on one hand, trying not to look as sick and disoriented as I felt. “Anybody get the number of that freight train?”

“You’re alive!” Dominic dropped to his knees, wrapping his arms around me and setting off a whole new cascade of exciting agony.

“Your ex-partner isn’t,” said Malena. I turned toward the sound of her voice. Her dress was shredded, but she was relatively clean, presumably because she’d been outside the blast radius when the grenade went off. She wrinkled her nose before continuing, “Snake landed on him. Asshole deserved it.”

“Clint!” I pulled away from Dominic, scrambling to my feet. Everything hurt. I had never let that stop me before. “Where is he?”

“Here.”

Alice sounded pleased with herself. As well she should have; she was standing over Clint’s body, tying his hands behind his back. She beamed when she saw me looking her way. “Hi, baby girl. I’m going to take this back to my home base with me, if that’s okay. I have some friends who have strong opinions about pulling endangered super-snakes through the walls of the world.”

I blinked. “Oh. Okay.”

Pax came trotting up. “We have a problem.”

“Of course we have a problem. Is there ever a time when we don’t have a problem?” I looked at him. “What’s the problem?”

His face was a grim mask, streaked with blood and lacerated where he’d been sliced by the snake’s scales. “We’ve been on the air this whole time.”

Slowly, I turned to the nearest camera. The red light was on. The red light had never gone off.

“Oh,” I said.

“We need to get out of here,” said Malena.

“Too late,” I said. Dominic and Alice had both appeared on camera. Even if the Covenant didn’t include any fans, someone would put this on the Internet. Someone would already have put this on the Internet. The Covenant would watch. They would see.