All the lights go out, save for a soft, sparkling gleam emanating from the angel wings.
The Director stabs at me with a syringe. I flinch, grabbing for his wrist. My hold on his collar loosens. He wrenches away and I’m left holding his coat as he scrambles out of the pit and flings himself toward the wall.
I see a shimmer in the air, like a soap-bubble film.
“Not so fast.” I lunge for him, my joints and muscles swift and sleek.
The ground trembles, and the Director stumbles. I grab him by the shoulder as pebbles patter down from the ceiling and water trickles from myriad cracks in the walls. The whole place is falling apart.
The Director twists, looks down. Shock shudders through his body.
Stones hover in the air, at knee height. Water gushes sideways and up from one of the cracks.
The wrongness has spread from the salt.
The angel wings flare brightly. Light splinters off line and curve, breaking into small, sharp rainbows.
Banks of instrumentations are going wild, flashing a series of red and yellow lights, needles in dials spinning, some so fast they’re blurs, others in lazy sweeps.
“N-no,” stammers the Director. “No, it’s not possible.”
“You’re severely lacking in both imagination and vision,” I snarl at him. “Because it is.” The soap-bubble film—a portal to Highwind, I imagine—hanging in the air flickers, then pops.
No escape from there. I let the Director go, watch him rush to his instruments. In the lurid glare, his face is a ghastly color.
I don’t need instruments to confirm what I can see. In one part of this cavern, the wall turns to sludge and collapses. Grains of sand splash through the air in slow motion.
Only the area around the angel wings is normal. A steady light glows in a cylinder around the wings, stretching from floor to ceiling.
I have this unshakeable feeling that the light is the only thing holding this place together.
The Director jabs frantically at the buttons on his panels.
Then I hear the sounds. The rattle of metal, the squeal and squeak of chains. Voices, echoing in the cavern. The elevator crashes to the floor, the door is thrust aside.
Mehmet steps out, closely followed by Leap.
He takes one look at the angel wings, then shields his eyes and falls to his knees in the mud. He mutters something that’s both a curse and a reverence.
“There’s no time for that.” I haul him to his feet. “What’s going on up there?”
Leap answers through a grin showing all his teeth. “Jumped the softskins, didn’t we? White-robes come with the four-legged-dinners, took advantage, didn’t we? Would’ve been quick-quick with wither women, but they didn’t come here.” He looks very pleased with himself.
I’m just glad that Mehmet didn’t catch the reference to his horses as dinner.
“Where are the eilendi?”
“Dead,” Mehmet spits out. “They listened to that Highwind abomination you sent with me and went to the salt. Now the wrongness spreads, collapsing mountains and turning sand to glass. The Highwinders are in confusion; it was child’s play to take them over this time.” The old arrogance is back in his dark eyes and the twist of his thin mouth.
“And Flutter?” Something twists in my gut.
Mehemet gives an eloquent shrug. He doesn’t know and doesn’t care.
I get a hold of myself. Flutter is a cloak. She can take care of herself. Right now, there are bigger things to deal with.
Much bigger things.
“So there’s nothing standing between us and the salt demon,” I say. “Except those.”
Neither of us looks at the angel wings. We don’t need to.
“So that’s what will save the world?” The Director staggers towards us. He gives a short, bitter laugh. “This angel technology? And you’re still afraid of it.”
Mehmet frowns. “Who is this fool” he says, “to speak so lightly of the things of Taurin?”
“I’ll show you!” The Director shouts, no longer polished and urbane. His hair’s a mess and mud coats his trousers up to the knees. He half-climbs, half-pitches into the pit. “I’ll show you!”
I wish I could let the old fool know first-hand the dangers of playing with angel craft. I feel Mehmet thinking the same thing beside me.
But there’s Flutter to think of.
“Stop,” I say. My voice is loud and tired.
Incredibly, the Director does, peering at me over his shoulder. His lips twist thinly. “Oh no. I’ve waited too long.” He stretches out his left hand to the cylinder of light. “I’ve—”
There’s a flash, followed by a thin high-pitched wail.
I stride to the pit and leap down. The Director’s huddled against one side, cradling a hand blackened to the wrist, whimpering.
“Didn’t you hear me? I told you to stop. Lucky for you, that was just a warning slap on the wrist.” I clench my own right hand, smiling blackly at the irony.
Was my loss also a warning?
He always gets you, in the end. You cannot run and you cannot hide.
“Leave this place,” I say, to both Mehmet and the Director. “These wings, this task, is for the Chosen.”
I stand at the edge of the cylinder of light, the heat of it burning through my soul. The wrongness wrought by the salt demon has become a murmur and a memory, banished from this small place of holy stillness.
This place of power.
Dimly I’m aware of Mehmet and Leap taking the Director away. I can trust them to keep their prisoner close and safe. I glance at Daral’s dead body, lying not more than a man’s length away.
What was Flutter to Daral?
I banish the mystery from my mind.
I’m about to do something very stupid. Being Taurin’s Chosen makes it so I won’t die right away, but I have no illusions about myself.
Not anymore.
I mutter prayers, weak and hollow to my own ears. The eilendi teach that faith in Taurin will save a man, but that’s something I’m severely lacking. I stop the formulaic incantations mid-chant.
Taurin, I have no right to
