My voice is a strangled shout. “Get out of there now!” I punch at the demon’s eye with my iron hand.
Pain explodes up my right arm, but it’s enough. Enough of a bridge. Flutter’s a shadowy mass inside my hand, quivering, hiding from the angel craft that’s rooting through the rest of my body.
The salt demon collapses in slow agony, mouth open, the fires in its eyes dying to a sullen glow.
I pull back from it, skim the ground, hover upon the hillside.
And then the salt demon looks at me. Sees me, as if for the first time. Rage and hate concentrate in its eyes, as it recognizes an old adversary.
I use all my remaining strength to rip myself away from the angel wings, leaving tears in my very soul. I fall to the ground, angel wings soaring up on their own, just as a beam of focused darkness from the demon’s mouth hits them.
Light and dark collide, but I’m already pressing my face to the ground, sand and salt on my lips and tongue.
There’s an explosion, but it comes from far away. All I’m aware of is the ache in my own body.
That, and Flutter’s almost-insubstantial hand, resting lightly on my iron one.
The eerie men found us, and brought us back to Malaki crater. There, a few remaining eilendi and captured Highwind medics tended our injuries and kept us alive.
I find all this out when I wake up a day later, covered in bandages and sore in every part of me.
“From Chosen to Angel-touched in one lifetime,” says Mehmet, kneeling next to me, wry amusement in his eyes. “Kato the Blessed, they call you now.”
I grunt. I don’t feel blessed, or even lucky.
“A moment longer in the angel wings,” Mehment goes on, speaking dispassionately, as if discussing some variation in the weather, “and your insides would’ve turned to ash. You would have been beyond help, then.”
Am I within the help of any human even now? I feel empty inside, and frayed on the outside. After being filled and wrapped in such awesome holiness, painful as it had been, the world—the normal world we had saved—looks flat and colorless.
“It doesn’t stop my men from coming in every day and touching the soles of your feet and the hem of your tunic. For the blessing, you know.”
I glance down at my bare feet. They look decidedly profane.
“How’s Flutter?” I ask, sitting up on my elbow. The room—the inside of a prefabricated Highwind army hut—spins. I wince.
Mehmet looks at me, unreadable. Finally, “The eilendi have her. They say—they say—she is one of their own.” He doesn’t sound as if he believes them.
At least he didn’t call her a Highwind demon again.
I struggle to sit up, ignoring my protesting body. “Take me to the Director. I need to speak to him right now.”
He doesn’t want to help us, not at first. He says it’s impossible, it can’t be done.
But Daral had told me to get him to change Flutter back. I trust Daral in this. He had been a careful man in life, careful with thought and word.
What had he been to Flutter? I could ask her, but she’s lying on a mat right now, a grey, grainy tangle of pale face and torn cloak, bleeding out her life in thin streams of atoms. Minute by minute, she fades into the surroundings.
This can’t be the end Taurin has in mind for her.
I press the issue with the Director. His release back to Highwind depends on this.
The Director protests, says it’s too hard. Says he doesn’t have the instruments he needs.
“We’ll get you what you need,” I tell him. “The eilendi will help.”
The eilendi aren’t vocal, but they are clearly reluctant. They’ve taken Flutter into their bosom. She’s their dying sister and they want to make sure they do everything right in Taurin’s eyes for her.
Me, I want her to live.
I don’t question why it’s so important to me that at least one of us go on and live strong, live with joy, but it is.
It just is.
With Mehmet backing me up, I bully the Director, persuade the eilendi, and wring a number of mysterious supplies from desert people and Highwind soldiers alike.
At last they are ready to perform whatever arcane melding of eilendi prayer magic and Highwind science will give Flutter back her life.
I spend the entire afternoon pacing. As the shadows lengthen across the desert and the burnished sky takes on the softer hues of twilight, an eilendi, staggering with exhaustion, leans in the doorway.
I look at him.
“She should sleep,” he tells me. “But you can see her for a few moments.”
I brush past him into a room made by knocking two pre-fab huts together to accommodate the Prayer Circle. Eilendi in white gather in groups or singly, many still chanting in a whisper or clicking their prayer beads. The Director, face pinched with disapproval, is packing equipment into a crate.
I go straight to Flutter, lying on a pallet, a sheet drawn up to her chin.
As I kneel next to her, she opens her eyes. Brown human eyes, not the faceted full-black of the cloak’s.
She looks the same and yet different. Her hair is a softer black, her face a creamier shade of white.
“They say…,” she says, in a drained whisper, “it’ll take… time. I won’t… look the same… as I used to.” Her eyes are already closing. I have to lean forward to hear her.
“But you’re back to what you were. You can be eilendi again. Like you wanted, right?”
She says, fighting the sleep and drugs that are weighing down her eyelids, “Daral…?”
I hesitate, wondering how to word it. But there’s nothing I can do to soften the blow. I’m not blessed with the gift of words. “Dead.” My tone is gentle.
Her eyes close, but with grief and pain. Her mouth moves. I lean closer, and realize that she’s saying prayers for the
