She stood gasping from the pain, seething in rage, frustrated again, and surrounded, literally surrounded, by all the heavy, hard, sharp-edged debris of the semi-collapsed church.

Dekka was at the altar.

“You murdered someone I love,” Dekka said, and raised her hands high. Thousands of pounds of wood and steel, plaster and glass, pews, roof tiles, and accumulated filth rose in a rush, a pillar of swirling junk.

Up and up, and Gaia rose with it.

Forty feet up and Gaia had recovered her wits well enough to take aim at Dekka, and then, just as Gaia began to fire, Dekka dropped it all.

WHOOOOMPF!

It fell and bounced and crashed and splintered with a noise like the end of the world.

Dekka jumped back to avoid being hit, but she still took a dozen small impacts from flying debris. She couldn’t see Gaia, but she wasn’t taking chances. She raised high the debris and dropped it again.

And raised it and dropped it again. Hammer blows.

On the fourth attempt Dekka saw Gaia floating above it all, bloodied, bruised, her clothing torn, her hair filthy, but not dead, very much not dead.

Gaia looked down at her, aimed, held Dekka directly in her line of fire, and laughed. “Very clever,” Gaia said. “It almost worked. But I won’t kill you. Not yet.”

Gaia floated calmly down as the mess settled around her, slowly, under her control now.

Light, Chapter 29