Soon after, we were off.
To watch River do it, flying Seremina seemed an unexpectedly elegant process; she danced effortlessly between myriad levers and pulleys and switches and other things I couldn’t name, tweaking our course as we sailed above the treeline. She seemed easily as comfortable in the air as on the ground.
On the other hand, I wasn’t sure I could get used to it. We were standing together inside, but still, the distance I could feel below my feet was unsettling when there were nothing but canvas and momentum holding us aloft. The foundations of the ship’s structure quivered and grumbled, bombarded by the wind as we easily cut our way through it. The earliest rays of sunlight swept across the room in bursts, briefly illuminating us in shafts of golden light before fading back into the shade.
Presumably, she was navigating by the ley lines twisted through the atmosphere – it was usually second-nature to me, even when I was barely paying attention – but everything outside was so chaotic it was hard to pick them out. We were easily, casually moving faster than I figured I had ever moved before.
Needless to say, I was a little nervous, but what else was new.
Far below us, the countryside rushed past, dense patches of woodland streaked by winding streams or broken by long, rolling hills, stretching out to the placid horizon. I couldn’t make out the city anymore, let alone the shoreline; just a dark range of impossibly tall mountains, way off in the distance to one side, breaking up the low, soft cover of clouds.
From so high in the air, it looked a lot like the ocean on an unremarkable, windless day. Except more coarse and rugged than not, and in shades of verdant greens instead of blues, and without the ever-present twinkling of sunlight and sky reflected in its surface. So, in most ways, probably not actually very much like the ocean whatsoever. But it was pretty.
On the other hand, I hadn’t realized how reliant I’d become on the lives of other living things in the short time I’d been here; not until we were so high above, and my connection so faint. It felt… empty. It was only me and River and the heat and noise of the engines.
I kneeled down next to where she stood and leaned against the wall, my dress folding around my legs, below the long, narrow window dominating the room – the bridge, she’d called it. She smiled, without looking away from her work. “Everything comfy so far?”
“We’re higher up than I’m used to,” I intimated. She just chuckled.
“We’re not gonna reach our destination for a while, y’know,” she said. “And since I’m probably gonna have to stop to refuel at some point… any thoughts about places to visit along the way?”
“I don’t know what you expect me to say.”
“Well, I could give you my suggestions. Like, we could drop my some nice, quaint village, somewhere in the foothills. I know a few more… hospitable places along our route. Or we could find some nice, quiet valley to lay low in? Clear water, fish, birds, rainfall on the colder nights…”
“Why would we spend the night?” I asked, suddenly second-guessing. “Shouldn’t we be heading to meet your contact and those people? As soon as we can?”
“Yeah, I know, don’t worry,” she said. “Just daydreamin’, I guess, right?”
Right. Of course. “That, I understand,” I said. Fears somewhat assuaged, at least for now, I leaned back, closing my eyes to listen as she continued to talk, hanging my focus on her voice. As much as she was able to put me at ease, it was still a lot easier than speaking. She certainly didn’t mind.
“Indulge in this potential future for a sec, though: we wind up in the capital, get caught up with Em ‘n all. But then I can be your tour guide, I guess. Show you around, see all this cool new stuff you might wanna check out, the gourmet, the artistique, the works. Like, there’s this big theatre right in the heart of the city? Biggest on the continent. They’re doin’ new productions there all the time, it’ll be a riot.”
“You should know I barely understood half the words you just said.”
“Oh, excellent! I’ll get to pass my tastes on to you even easier than I thought. Some might call them tacky, but those folks I’d call pretentious jerks.”
I hummed to myself, mentally still picking through the threads of her spiel. “It sounds interesting, at least,” I said. “Even sort of nice. I... think.”
“Yeah,” she sighed. “...Let’s be real, though, cards on the table, we’ve got probably another half a day nonstop ‘til we reach the delta, and until then we’re gonna be doing more easy flying than any of that good stuff. So, y’know, in the meantime, if…”
I glanced up at her as she trailed off, but she’d stopped moving– she was staring out the bridge window, straight ahead. I was about to ask her what was wrong, my anxiety building every moment she didn’t speak, when I realized what she was doing. What had caught her attention.
There was something else. Something besides the hum of the ship and our own bodies; it was distant, but still far brighter than the background noise. Louder, too, and not abstractly. I stood up and leaned against the window to scan the dim horizon for whatever could be disturbing the air like that, and it only took me seconds to find it; a tiny speck off to one side, in the direction of Vermiles and the coastline beyond it. Silhouetted against the early morning sky. Growing bigger every moment I watched.
The other ship.
In the same instant I realized what it was I looked to River– she already knew, even better than I did. She was in action before I could even ask what I’d already figured out, frantically flipping switches, her grip tight around the wheel. The floor pitched beneath me and I tumbled to the side before finding my balance, bracing myself against the controls. River flung the wheel sideways, hand over hand, and we tilted again, carving a wide arc through the air above the treetops.
“Shit! They must’ve worked out better sensors than I thought, they–”
“That’s Marcel? They followed us?” I shouted over the noise of the engines as she pushed the throttle, tearing away from our pursuers. My voice was cracking, dry.
“It’s gotta be!” She shouted back. “No reason anybody else would be all the way out here, ‘specially not with something that fast!”
Clutching the windowframe, I saw the dark, jagged trees ahead of us drop away, revealing a long swathe of empty countryside. River started to ease Seremina down, not too sharply, but the grade was enough that I stumbled and nearly fell over again. Something shifted in the engines behind us. Their heat fluxed.
“Don’t worry, don’t worry! No need for panic! I never leave home without schemes in spades!”
However placating her words, her frenetic movement gave me the distinctly nerve-wracking impression that panic remained firmly on the metaphorical table. The table was probably all but shaken to splinters, at this point.
She kept us steady down the open corridor as we dove, until we were practically hovering over the gentle hills, the deck rolled beneath my feet. I couldn’t see where the Court’s ship was from the course we were taking, but we flew forward, barely slowing down, even as River pulled us just out of the way of stray trees and taller hills rising to meet us.
The upright sails gently folded down, some furling themselves against the long, undulating masts, the others shifting at an angle until they almost resembled real wings once again, like I’d seen before. “Step one, success,” she muttered to herself, and punched the air above the wheel. “Boom.”
She cut the engines, and their heat began to fade. The realization startled me for just a moment before I saw that we were still being carried by the currents of the wind below us. River deftly kept us steady, moving faster than I could even process. One sail clipped a tree, and its branches splintered, crashing against the bridge window before falling away behind us.
And then she disappeared.
I looked back to where she was standing right next to me, after a moment of panic, and she was still there as if nothing had changed; and I realized that I could still feel her pull on the energy around us, just barely. She was making an effort to conceal herself. Seeing that, I tried to do the same.
It wasn’t something I’d ever had reason to try, before, and it was hard to conceive exactly how she did it, but… I focused on the heat radiating through my own body, on exactly how it flowed from my heart to my fingertips, and then– something switched in my head, as if my eyes had suddenly refocused and shown me what had been hidden in front of me the whole time. My own skin grew cold as I hid myself like she did.
River glanced at me as I did so, somehow flashing a smile, before turning back to the controls and arcing through a narrower gap in the trees all around.
“Without the noise, they should only be able to detect us by sight, now,” she assured me. “Just keep it on the down-low. As soon as we’ve lost ‘em again I’ll turn us around, and we can get back on course. Might have to take a longer way around, but…”
She didn’t finish the thought. Instead, she tilted her head back, gesturing to the far wall of the room; right next to the door was a metal box with a glass panel on the front, and a thick metal pipe running from its top into the ceiling, attached by what seemed to be swiveling hinges. “Check the scope, see if you can tell where they are.”
I stepped over and, not seeing anything else to do with it, placed my face up to the glass, steadying myself against it with the hand-holds on either side. To my surprise, looking through it, I could actually see everything around us outside, magnified; I turned the contraption a bit and the image shifted too, sweeping across the landscape. The scope must’ve been fixed to the top of the ship, reflecting its image back to me inside.
Interesting, but not what was important just then. I swept the view across the horizon, looking for the ship that was following us, and it wasn’t long before I caught sight of it, even as distant as it still was.
The sails were swept back, painted with scarlet stripes, while the dawn’s earliest rays gleamed off of the windows lining its hull. Just like I remembered.
“They’re still out there,” I said, squinting closer. I wasn’t looking at the ship head-on, which suggested they weren’t exactly following us, but it was hard to tell whether they were turning or whether we really had managed to lose them so easily.
“Well, if we’re lucky they’ll lose the scent soon, ‘cause I’m gonna run out of open plain to hide on pretty quickly.”
I was almost afraid to make any noise at all, on top of the focus it took to suppress my energy. It was absurd, obviously; we still had to speak louder than usual to hear each other over the noise outside. Knowing didn’t help.
I didn’t count on luck. I waited, knuckles white.
Marcel’s ship turned to follow us.
“Shit!” River shouted again. A moment later the engines were starting to warm again, and we began to glide up above the treeline once more. She spun the wheel and we turned, too, carving a tight course. Towards the ship. The mountains in the distance swung wildly across the horizon.
“I have really got to keep better tabs on their tech,” she groaned. All attempts at subtlety evidently useless, we let our auras loose again. “No more extended vacations. Whatever. We can make this work! I’ve got another plan!”
I was almost incredulous. “Your last plan didn’t work at all!”
“This is a better one! ‘Mina and I can still outfly Marcie any day of the season. We’re gonna leverage that for every second it’s worth.”
The engines flared fully back into life and we soared above the trees, leveling off to meet Marcel’s ship as the wing-like sails unfolded themselves once more, gaining speed. We shot forward on a needle-straight course, and they did the same. Nobody was backing down.
What was she planning to do, fly through them?
River didn’t elaborate, but she did switch something – apparently to lock our course – and turned away from the controls to shuffle through a stack of canvas and rope piled against one wall, miraculously still intact after all her manoeuvring. She pulled out a long, dull metal rod, holding it in both gloved hands; she looked down at it for a moment before meeting my eyes. “Don’t question it. Break this.”
Not exactly understanding, I stepped over and placed my hands on it, feeling the smooth, frigid surface beneath my fingers. I could sense River’s warmth through it, as well as the energy wound up inside, the connections holding the metal together.
I focused and found the points I needed and drew on my own energy again. It flowed through my fingers and into the rod, and a few seconds later it was steaming, practically red-hot. With just a little effort I squeezed and it warped in my grip, melting and malleable, before snapping in two places and falling to the floor with a loud clatter.
She left the cleaved pieces where they were without another word, rushing back to take the helm as I shook my hands to cool them. I looked out the window and the ship hurtling toward us (and that we were hurtling toward, just the same) was much closer.
Without taking her eyes off it, she spoke rapidly to me over her shoulder: “Okay. I’m gonna need you to be brave rather shortly, Adeline. I need to stay here. But if we can pull this off, it’ll give us the opening we need to get outta this.”
I do not like the sound of that. Not at all, I thought. I choked for a moment before managing, “...What exactly do you mean?”
“Um… let’s see. I’m gonna need you to go out there onto the deck, and when they try to hit us with the harpoons, you’ll need to break the chains before they can start dragging us. We’ll need to be quick, and we’ll need to be precise. I reckon maybe two minutes before they hook us, and then fifteen seconds or so ‘til we run out of slack.”
“Wait, what!?”
“Listen, like I said, it takes a little courage. You’ve never had to do something like this before, I know,” she said. “But you’re gonna be fine. We are gonna be totally fine, alright? I know you can do this. About ninety seconds, and then fifteen more to get us unhooked, and we’ll be home free.”
She locked the wheel again and turned to me, gripping my shoulders, staring into my face. So close I could feel her breath. I just froze.
It would be easy. I’d just walk out onto the deck as we flew through the air, who knew how far above the ground and who knew how fast, and it sounded like after that all I had to do was melt through some more metal that would also be flying at me just as fast. In a timeframe shorter than any I’d ever had to adhere to before. Easy. I faintly remembered doing dangerous things like that before, but…
River raised her hands to my face, bringing my focus back to her. She held my cheeks, and I could feel that she was almost shaking, too. The leather was coarse. I fixed my mind on the task at hand. Breathe. Breathe.
There wasn’t really another choice. I nodded, perhaps too forcefully; she returned the gesture, and then pulled the sailing goggles from her own face and strapped them to mine. “For visibility,” she said, and then she pulled the multicoloured scarf from her neck and wrapped that around me, too.
“Now get out there, watch your footing, watch your head. We’ll get through this.”
I rushed outside, descending the short staircase to the windswept deck below the bridge. The ground below us was a blur of green and yellow, the clouds above smeared into soft smudges, cut out by the rising sunlight. River kept our course steady, relatively, but I still staggered to one of the masts to stay upright.
I wasn’t particularly averse to heights, but I tried not to look down anyway.
Marcel’s ship was still ahead. We’d grown so close that I could make out the bright stripes with the naked eye, overlaid by a thin golden circle painted on the side nearest to us. The wind was starting to shift against us, I could tell, but that barely slowed anything down. The gap only grew narrower and narrower every moment.
Thirty seconds, probably, I reminded myself. Or maybe twenty. I just had to stand my ground. River was right; we could do this. I could do this.
The heat and noise of the other ship’s engines intensified until they were almost as strong as Seremina’s. How much time was left? Ten more seconds? Nine–
Not even close. The air itself quivered as the heavy metal darts whistled from Marcel’s ship and collided with the deck, first one, then the other, forming long arcs of glittering metal chain to the side of our attacker. I ducked low and shielded my face from the shower of splinters thrown across the deck by the harpoons dragging through the wood; one punched clean through a sail and pierced the mast while the other hooked against the railing around the deck.
I barely kept my footing as Seremina suddenly, violently listed to the side, before River managed to compensate and steady us out again.
Then we passed each other. The air screamed with energy as bloody stripes tore themselves furiously through the edge of my vision, the hull so close I could almost reach out and touch it, and then as quickly as they’d arrived they were retreating into the distance behind us.
The chains attached to the harpoons were long, but they had already begun to drag us. I remembered. Fifteen seconds before we ran out of slack, and I did not want to find out what happened then. Fifteen seconds that had already started.
I ran to the nearest one– the hook that had torn a gash through the ship and come to rest precariously against the outer railing. Getting too close to that forced me to confront, unfortunately, exactly how fast we were going. I tried to lean away from the edge and to keep from falling in the process.
It was much sturdier than the bar River had tested me with, but I wrapped my hands around the closest link of the chain and got to work. I channeled as much heat as I could manage while bracing myself against what was left of the railing, pulling, somewhat ineffectually. But slowly I could feel it begin to give way nonetheless. Just like before, the metal glowed like it had been set to fire.
The chain snapped, and I stumbled backward as the harpoon fell limp and the remaining links were torn away into the wind faster than I could see. I blinked away the sweat beading around my eyes and wasted no time rushing to the second hook.
It was impossible to say how much time swept by. Too much.
This second one… was going to be more difficult. Part of the sail had been ripped to shreds by the harpoon before it lodged itself deep into the tallest wooden mast, the chain quivering wildly, tangled in the scraps of canvas that still hung loosely around it. I gave myself as much of a running start as I could between the railing and the mast before leaping up towards it, kicking myself off the pillar to reach the chain. I gripped onto it, barely, my feet suspended a short distance from the ground, muscles straining not to let me drop.
Time was running short, I knew. It had to be. I started to melt through the chain just like I’d done before, even as it threatened to buck me off in the turbulence of the flight. Too slowly, it began to weaken and droop in my grasp.
Then something changed; the vibrations along the chain shifted, evened, quickened. I felt the chain go taut just a moment before Marcel’s ship started to drag us through the air– there wasn’t anything else it could have been. I was almost shaken from my hold. Animal panic flooded through me.
At the moment the chain started to pull on us, I grit my teeth, put all my weight on the metal links in my hands, and with every bit of strength I could muster I squeezed them in my fists– and as the whole ship shuddered and listed below me I felt the chain burn white-hot and shatter, explosively, melting fragments raining down around me as I fell back to the deck.
I felt a momentary wave of relief, even as I shielded my head from the burning metal and braced myself against the deck while River compensated, keeping us on course. And then I heard a splintering crack echo through the air.
Above me, half-broken by the shock it had just endured, the mast buckled. Something snapped.
The mass of wood and gnarled web of canvas and rigging collapsed around me from everywhere at once, and I was knocked flat, gasping. It shouldn’t have been as chaotic, as loud as it was, I thought, but still I felt my heart racing and my energy welling up as it fell apart around me.
I focused on my own heat, the trees below us and the ship behind us, and River, still somehow keeping us aloft. Suddenly the rumble of the engines flared, intensified; she’d done something to make up for the sail, I had to imagine. By the time I could stand up again, brushing away the ropes that had fallen across me, the mast had fallen off Seremina’s side to the earth below, the remains of the sails flitting and drifting behind in long ribbons.
Staggering over to lean on the splintered railing as the entire ship seemed to roll beneath me – we’d already dropped so far that we were crashing through the treetops, branches and leaves exploding all around – I watched Marcel’s ship turn back to us, still close on our tail.
Seremina was slowing down. River said we could outfly them, but now… the sails were crippled. They gained on us every moment.
I could still sense her buzzing about the bridge, doubtlessly trying to salvage what she could; but in the sunlight’s glare I couldn’t see her through the window overlooking the deck. I called her name, and she didn’t answer.
We weren’t going to get away. We weren’t going to make it.
Our pursuer gained, faster and faster, bearing down from slightly above us. I made out the bright red and gold again, the twinkling windows set into the hull, the twin machines that must have been responsible for launching the harpoons. They were loaded again.
“River?”
She was trying to pull us away, but it wasn’t fast enough. They were almost on top of us; wing-like sails blocked out the sun, the noise rising to an unbearable screeching pitch. And I stood there, watching, helpless.
River couldn’t hear my thoughts. There wasn’t anything else she could do, either, and the realization was almost numbing.
No way out. Again.
The sky around us fell away, fading into static. I could feel Marcel up there too. The other immortal, Valerie, who I’d never seen but whose presence was just as obvious. A few other little points of living light. Mechanisms shifted. A harpoon tilted down to point straight through the second mast, rattling into place, the metal reflecting colours of bright paint.
Maybe I could’ve convinced him, made him listen. But it wasn’t only me they were going to take– they wanted her, too. And I hadn’t known about any of this for long, but in some ways, I decided that she and I must have been the same.
Something stirred. My feet were moving before I realized it.
I stood between the harpoon and the mast as it careened across the space between two ships, not knowing what I was about to do, or how, or why. I held my arms wide and the whole world was set ablaze.
Something stirred, and something snapped.
An explosion rocked the sky between my hands, catching the edge of the metal javelin and sweeping it aside. It skipped off the air like a pebble on water and missed the Seremina’s mast by a fraction of an inch, its chain dragged away in a lazy arc. It should’ve been triumphant, but in the very same instant–
My body was thrown back, skipping across the deck and colliding with the far railing, hard, hard enough to shatter it, and it became immediately, shockingly clear that somehow, I couldn’t breathe, and my head was spinning, my vision white, and everything was on fire–
I heard her, distantly – “Adeline!” – as if I was immersed in an endless sea of fog, the sound fading away, drowned out–
And dizzily I felt myself tip over the railing and fall, limp, off the edge of the deck.
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