“
I’d passed the point where regrets meant a damn.
“
Like fear, and desire, and ambition, and unsolved mysteries, they were just a waste of my time now.
“
All I had left now was the way I faced the little time I had left.
So I opened my eyes and faced the clouds and saw them, still floating like cotton so far below, still roiling with angry thunder, still waiting for me to join them. I’d keep my eyes open for as long as I could, despite the building wind that was already inflating my cheeks and making a grimace out of my lips. Only the irritation of the air pressure against my eyelids made the tears roll back along my temples: nothing else. Not
“
I almost thought it was Lastogne again. But no, the shout came from my immediate left, from a burned and battered object falling alongside me. Turning my head to see it almost required more strength than I had. Believing what I saw required considerably more effort than that: it was a skimmer, diving straight down in an attempt to match my velocity. The passenger cab paralleled me, with the two standing occupants, Oscin and Skye, both oriented like horizontal protrusions from a sheer vertical surface.
Less than an arm’s length separated me from Oscin’s outstretched hand. It was enough distance to exclude me from the skimmer’s local grav. The skimmer, not built for speed, was having a hell of a hard time pacing me. Only my blunt position against the wind was slowing me enough to permit even this brief approach.
I didn’t even want to know how much fancy maneuvering they’d needed to pull off just to get this close.
They yelled at me again, the words whipped away from the wind.
I waggled my arms. That did something terrible to my aerodynamics and I veered away from the skimmer. For one queasy instant I overcompensated, and found myself diving a direct vertical that left it far behind. Then I flattened myself against the wind again, slowed, felt a nauseating shock wave against my legs as the skimmer almost slammed into my back, and felt that familiar shape swallow up the sky again, this time to my right.
This time, when I looked, Skye was sitting on Oscin’s shoulders, reaching for me with everything she had. Her face was desperate and her chin smeared with blood. Her wrists and hands just barely cleared the ionic shields, grasping for me. I almost corrected the wrong way a second time, remembered the way the same action had affected my fall only a few seconds ago, and this time converged on the two familiar faces, at a speed which immediately made me think of head-on collisions with brick walls.
Too late, I realized that I was not the only person in danger here. One miscalculation, and the weight of my own falling body could yank them both free of the skimmer’s local grav. I couldn’t be responsible for that. I wouldn’t. Given another second to think of it, I would have veered away and gone to my death, rather than allow them to sacrifice themselves for me.
A gust of wind blinded me just as Skye’s hands converged on my wrist.
Have you ever passed through one zone of local grav into another, without either warning or a decent period of transition? Everything changes in less time than it takes your neurons to fire. In this case, the skimmer at my side was suddenly and without any argument the skimmer beneath me. I slammed against the seats, doubling over, and almost rolled over the side as the local grav flickered off, rendering the cloudscape down again.
Both Oscin and Skye were clutching at available handholds with their free hands, while using the other two to grab on to me. It took me a second to realize what they’d done: switched off the local grav at the instant I was pulled inside it, to avoid snapping my neck and rupturing every organ in my body as I was forced into a sudden and unexpected perpendicular jerk.
My legs flailed behind me. I screamed. I pulled myself closer to my Porrinyards and, the instant I had the chance, threw both my arms around one of the seat backs, once again certain I was going to die.
I don’t remember any of the next thirty seconds at all.
Then the grav came on again. My knees settled against the deck. My head bounced lightly against the back of the seat, with a force not much worse than a painful thud. I felt my empty stomach slosh, looking for something to expel.
I realized, with dull amazement, that we’d stopped.
The Porrinyards hadn’t managed anything approaching their usual grace. Oscin lay sprawled against the control panel, his forehead bleeding from a nasty diagonal gash. Skye, curled on her side beside him, looked worse: the blood I’d seen on her chin a few seconds ago had been joined by a swelling bruise on her cheek. For the first time I also saw the nasty flash-burn that had turned her right hand a bright shade of red.
They managed to sit up just as I did, their faces tilting at complementary angles.
Then they smiled, in the manner of people sharing a naughty personal joke. “Why, Andrea. You look good enough to eat.”
I didn’t quite get the punchline until I tried to lift my hand off the deck and needed extra strength just to overcome the glue. Then I understood. I was still coated, head to toe, with a thick layer of manna juice. I was good enough to eat. Hell, I was downright delectable.
And though I might not have said it, under other circumstances…sometimes the straight line is just too perfect.
We didn’t have to swap information just yet.
There were other urgencies.
“You better come here and taste some.”
They scurried over, on hands and knees.
We took the skimmer away from the clouds, sharing our experiences of the last few minutes. Mine elicited winces of sympathy, and at one point a fervent, “Juje, we’ll make you a high-altitude specialist yet!”
Theirs was a little more dizzying. They hadn’t gotten away from the Heckler until they hit upon the radical tactic of using one of the dragons for cover. Flying alongside it, straining the skimmer to its absolute limits in order to keep up with the giant creature’s flight speed, they’d taken advantage of the Heckler’s obvious reluctance to fire weapons in its vicinity, remaining safe in its shadow until the Heckler gave up and flew off.
They said, “I’m surprised he didn’t come after you next.”
I sucked some manna juice off my fingertips. “He?”
“He. She. Whatever. I’m just using the pronoun for convenience. Either way, I have trouble understanding why you weren’t the next target.”
My ragged fingernails were still glistening from the juice of the Uppergrowth. “I wasn’t expecting to survive the trouble I was already in. Whoa. Damn.”
“What?”
“One of this place’s smaller mysteries just solved itself for me.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Not a particularly important one, but one that adds to the big picture. Believe me, I’ll be addressing it before long. You were saying?”
“I was wondering why your friend didn’t come after you when we proved too hard to get. And I know you were under attack yourself, but as long as he’d given up on us, why didn’t he just zip on up and make sure? Why behave like a cheap neurec villain and trust in a cliffhanger to take care of you?”
I bit my thumbnail. The clicking sound repelled me, and I felt no urge to do it again. “I don’t know. There could have been a deadline. Maybe he had to get back to the hangar so he wouldn’t be missed. Or maybe he had something else to—” At which point I froze. “Oh, shit.”
The Porrinyards saw the look in my eyes. “What?”
“Gibb.”
For a little while, everything had seemed better.
And then we returned to the site of what had been Hammocktown.
Some of the support structures remained, but everything else had been twisted out of recognition, or ripped free of its moorings to plunge into the clouds below. Thickets of loose cables dangled from the Uppergrowth, twisting in the winds, some trailing strips of tattered canvas like banners scarred in battle.
