Dante

  We fall back along the tracks, the wind lifting us higher above the ridge while the train recedes in the distance. I twist far enough in Andrea’s grip to face her and wrap my arms around her, as her wings are the only lifeline we have in the air. I shoot a glance back at the tracks.

  Another fiery red lance slices out from the slowing train car before it rumbles out sight around a corner, just behind a hill.

  “They’ll be coming,” Andrea observes.

  Her wings sweep together in front of us in a single wingbeat, impossibly strong and flinging us further back.

  Then her shield folds away into the ‘brass knuckles’ on her left hand and her wings fold up into a fraction of their size and then into nothing.

  Andrea and I cling together as my weight spins us in midair until the now-wingless girl is facing not just me but the rapidly approaching ground.

  With another blinding flash, the wings unfurl again from her back and sweep down in another immense storm of wind. Yet still we fall, though more slowly.

  I clench down on Andrea’s arms in a death grip while she’s now holding me with both of hers, almost as strong. Which is incredible. Even if it doesn’t sound like much, I’ve literally never met anyone definitely stronger than myself since I’ve turned sixteen. Aside from Uncle K. And the people on the train.

  If they are ‘people.’

  I stare at Andrea’s wings. A parasail, I think, that flaps. But…

  “Where are we landing?” I demand. I can see she’s steering us away from the ridge… but down the sharp slope to our right, which falls for hundreds of feet. It looks like we’ll glide down until we hit treetops in the deep valley, and maybe die there.

  Andrea responds with a single, sharp whistle, incredibly loud. “Incoming,” she adds.

  “Incom—?”

  A sleek hoverbike shoots out of the sudden mist, jets and rotor roaring, and matches speeds just below us. The vehicle looks like a motorcycle, except for the pair of enclosed, roaring turbofans jutting out on either side.

  Andrea lands right on the seat as though she’s spent her whole life practicing that move at twilight in a misty forest with people shooting lasers at her. I land behind her and scramble for purchase, as though someone just blew up my train car with me in it, and I’m not going to let my new ticket end up like the last one.

  “What’s going on?” I demand as Andrea grips the handlebars and revs the engine.

  “No idea,” she answers, banking our ride downhill, staying maybe ten feet above the ground as she coasted downslope. “We were asked to lend you a hand, not fight off bots or power-armored troops. Have you gotten someone really powerful really angry?”

  “Not that I’m aware.” I hold her and the bike tight and put the Circle out of my mind. From what Ghost told me, this isn’t their style, and it’s far beyond their means.

  “Well, you’re aware now,” she mutters, flying parallel with the tracks but further down the ridge from them. As if using the ridgeline as cover.

  “Is this normal at the Academy?”

  “Not at all,” Andrea says cooly. “They must want you very badly. Or are truly insane.”

  “Probably both,” another voice says, this one coming from the console of the hoverbike, barely audible above the roar of the engines. I’ve got exceptional hearing, but I’m straining to make out the words.

  “Stormforge,” Andrea says. “Where are you?” She touches her ear briefly, and I notice she has unobtrusive noise-cancelling earbuds, ones even more inconspicuous than my own, and is probably getting the transmission directly. Which has to make hearing all this easier.

  “Closer to the train station, like we planned. We’re heading your way, but we weren’t prepped for a night flight. You’re just lucky Hammersmith let us have the bike. I’ve got nothing faster.”

  “Loop me in,” I say. Wordlessly, Andrea passes me a fresh earbud shrink wrapped in plastic. I strip the plastic with my thumb and swap the earbud for one of my own.

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  “Yer looped,” a new voice says. A guy’s. “And what the heck was that? Attacking a train car? We’re loaded for bear, but not that kind of bear.”

  “I think they’re behind you. And in front of you,” the first voice says. ‘Stormforge’s’, apparently.

  “Confirmed,” Foresight comments from his smartwatch, his voice coming in clearly from Dante’s original, remaining earbud.

  “Net’s closing,” the other guy says. “Archangel, cut your speed and drop low. Weave through the trees. Above brushtop, but not treetop.”

  “What?” says Andrea – or ‘Archangel,’ I suppose. “Are you trying—?”

  “Best odds. Lower rotor speed means Hammersmith’s noise cancellation will actually matter. And you’ll want to stay out of sight, so you’ll be low enough even your reflexes can’t dodge in the dark against every branch and bush. And if you get to The Cleft, Hammer’s maps give you an escape route they can’t block.”

  Andrea nods reluctantly. “You’d better be right, ‘Mathlete.’” She drops further downhill, angling for an approaching footpath and the gap it slices through the thickening foliage.

  “Hey, have I ever steered you wrong?” Mathlete responds smugly.

  An uncomfortable silence follows.

  “Uh… Guys?” Mathlete prompts.

  “Let’s not dwell on those times,” Andrea decides, weaving the hoverbike down the path and in amongst the trees. “It’s still the best plan we’ve got. One sweep of that laser and we’re gone.”

  She cuts through a knot of trees and a colorful flock of birds rise from the branches all around them. No, not birds, but…

  “Drones!” I shout in warning. “They’re all—"

  “Birds!” Andrea snarls the word like a curse, twisting the bike to surge past a flight erupting from the foliage just in front of us.

  The birds fluttering aloft and then flying towards us look perfectly normal… except that instead of normal feathers and flesh they seem to be made of brass and crystal, silver and steel, gold and gemstone. They’re eerily beautiful in the eyeblink it takes to recognize them as unexpected and unnatural. And then tenacious and terrifying.

  They close in from every direction like a hand clenching into a mailed fist, and I can’t see a single way out.

  Andrea wordlessly slams her palm onto the handlebars’ tiny dash, as if in frustration. And a whirring sound comes from the hoverbike, almost lost beneath the roar of the engines.

  A whirring and… bubbling just behind us. I glance back and see what looks like nothing less than geysers of huge soap bubbles frothing out of the back of our craft, filling our wake as Andrea wrenches us into a new path, trying to dart past the bird drones in front of us.

  She slips through but more birds are coming from every direction and Andrea doesn’t seem to be fleeing. But rather banking incredibly hard into a tight death spiral of a path, engines roaring and bubbles flowing like a river of suds.

  The tilted turbofans blast them back, the bubbles breaking over the brassy birds like surf.

  As each bubble hits a bird, the gossamer film flows over feathers in flight, coating the impossible drones in a shimmering layer of… whatever chemical it’s made of. And the covered birds, in turn, suddenly struggle, joints and pinions sticking and stiffening as the substance catches them in midflight, gumming up their works, or limbs, in a heartbeat. I can see how effective this might be against pursuing drones in normal circumstances, especially as the turbofans scatter the clinging froth in a wide arc behind us.

  Andrea’s swift work and swifter spiral sweeps most of the nearby birds into her snare, and she ducks the bike low and darts beneath a small footbridge as she evades the ones well above them and out of the reach of her sudden cascade of chemicals.

  Most of the metal flock falls behind us in a tinkling rain.

  “That’s… useful,” Dante observes.“It’s limited,” Andrea snaps. “This thing has countermeasures, but it’s built for flight, not war.” She guns the engine as we roar into a glade, accelerating with abandon – briefly. “We’ll be out in moments if they keep catching us.”

  We zoom down the path again where it slips under the trees at the far side of the clearing. We’re going faster again. Perhaps because Andrea’s more confident in her skills, or more desperate in these straits, dire as they are.

  I notice two distant flares briefly above the treeline, like great jets of fire spreading out in burning plumes.

  “I’m down to the sensors in this watch and on your bag, Dante,” Foresight murmurs in my ear. “But something seems to be off about your pursuers.”

  “Off?” I ask. “Other than being metal birds and clockwork knights?” I cling tight to Andrea as she flies further down the pathway and then dodges and weaves through the trees ahead. If this is her driving slowly, I can’t imagine her at full throttle.

  “Yes. For objects so large and anything but aerodynamic, they should not be this fast.” We bank hard through a small gap in a stand of saplings, my stomach falling off the bike as the rest of me clings for dear life. “Yet they are, burning fuel to make up for mass. Or energy to flap wings. Not as much fuel or force as they should need, unless they are far lighter than they seem. Yet even so, they can not maintain this pace for long, and when they drop, they will be stranded.”

  “All of which,” Logos adds, “suggests they have other plans. Or do not care if they are lost, so long as the objective is met.”

  “And the objective is you,” Legios points out, unnecessarily.

  “Stay cool. We’re getting closer, Hot Potato,” Mathlete notes. “But your hostiles will get there first. And we’re starting to see more drones popping up over the horizon. I don’t think you’ll slip the net completely.”

  “Hot—?” I murmur at the girl in front of me. “I thought you were Archangel?”

  “Hot’s you, I think,” Andrea says over her shoulder. I didn’t think she’d heard.

  “You think he’s hot, too?” Mathlete clarifies as Andrea shoots a look at the dash speaker. “I mean, I haven’t even seen him yet, but I’ll take your wor—"

  “We may lose signal in a minute,” Stormforge cuts in. “You good with the Cleft, Arch? Math’s thinking it’s your way out.”

  “Of course,” Andrea replies. She twists the bike in midair and jets down a shallow tree-choked ravine. Leafy branches pass so close I can touch them. And then so close their leaves are touching me.

  “Meet you in the Annex, then.” Stormforge says as we dart under a huge tree laying across the ravine. The call cuts off.

  We plunge through foliage and a puff of falling leaves, and I realize our shallow ravine is no longer shallow.“Got it.” Andrea angles us into the deepening chasm’s depths, unconcerned. But intently focused. I can see a holographic map just above the bike’s handlebars.

  “Annex?” I ask. We drop lower, and I can see a small stream at the bottom of the gap, descending deeper into the shadows. Andrea follows it into the dark.

  “You’ll see, soon enough.” Somewhere ahead, I glimpse what looks like the mouth of a cave.

  Andrea, against all rational thought, accelerates straight towards it.

  I suck in a breath to shout a warning, but before I can do so, we’re inside and still racing forward. The wind of our passage fills the rough cave tunnel we’re in with a muted roar, but apparently all our earbuds are noise cancelling ferociously enough to keep us from being deafened, and I have a gut sense we’re somehow outrunning the worst of it. A faint blue haze glimmers around us like a shell, though I can’t say why.

  Based on it’s shape… “Shaped plasma?” I ask aloud. Andrea says nothing, but Foresight hums on my wrist.

  “Yes,” my smartwatch-hosted AI agrees, “but using a simple but powerful vibrational technique to match frequencies and dampen the noise as well. Pulsing plasma through the envelope in time with incoming vibrations. And I wonder if it has some rudimentary plasma-stealth capabilities, as well. Your acquaintances have some impressive hardware, Dante.”

  I nod grimly. “Full of surprises. Like everything else.” And I don’t even know these people, I reflect, anymore than Ghost. Hopefully they’re as friendly as they seem.

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