​     A pebble of light rose from the rubble.​

​     It rose directly in front of where Tindriss stood until it reached eye level. 

     Tindriss stared at it for several seconds as it hovered. It shimmered, that pebble. It seemed to mesmerize Tindriss. 

     Tindriss let her mouth open just the slightest bit. 

​     The pebble flew between her teeth, then down the Coal-Maiden's throat...

     where it detonated...

     creating the most powerful explosion that has ever occurred on planet Earth.

     Claudia put all the energy she had, all the nuclear energy she'd contained from Livia's nuclear missiles, all the sonic energy she'd contained, all of that anti-matter by-product, all the energy she personally contained to run the compound and keep the force fields up, all of it crammed into that little pebble of light.  

     Tindriss grew as Claudia's final assault exploded. She swelled until she was twice her normal size, then three times, then five times, and as she swelled her body crackled and cracked and distorted until it hardly even looked like a body anymore. One eye expanded like a balloon while the other one looked more or less unharmed. Her whole body kind of went like that as it swelled to become ten times its normal size, then twenty. 

     And she kept twitching like she was having this wild, epileptic attack. 

     But, damn it, damn it, she didn't come apart. She didn't disintegrate into atoms the way anything else in this or any other universe would have given the size and shape of the explosion. 

​     It took her a full twenty minutes to shrink back to her original size, but at last she did. 

​     Claudia's final, desperate attack stunned Tindriss but did not annihilate her.  

     "Claudia?" Adam whispered into his com. "Claudia?"

​     Nothing.

CONTINUE