‘I’ve come to help!’ I yelled above the howl of the wind.
She seemed dumbfounded. The jet shot past in the night sky, rounding for another attack.
‘Go back!’ she said, waving with an armored hand.
‘I’m an Oculator,’ I said, pointing to my Lenses. ‘I can stop the Frostbringer’s ray.’
It was true. An Oculator can use his Oculator’s Lenses to counter an enemy’s attack. I’d seen my grandfather do it when dueling Blackburn. I’d never tried it myself, but, I figured it couldn’t be that hard.
I was completely wrong, of course. It happens to the best of us at times.
Draulin cursed, running across the dragon’s back to block another blast. The ship rolled, nearly making me sick, and I was suddenly struck by just how high up I was. I crouched down, holding my stomach, waiting for the world to orient itself again. When it did, Draulin was standing beside me.
‘Go back down!’ she yelled. ‘You can be of no help here!’
‘I—’
‘Idiot!’ she yelled. ‘You’re going to get us killed!’
I fell silent, the wind tussling my hair. I felt shocked to be treated so, but it was probably no more than I deserved. I turned away, clomping back toward the hatch, embarrassed.
To the side, the jet fired a missile. The glass on its cockpit fired another Frostbringer’s ray.
And the Dragonaut didn’t dodge.
I spun toward the cockpit and could just barely see Australia slumped over her control panel, dazed. Bastille was trying to slap her awake – she’s particularly good at anything that requires slapping – and Kaz was furiously trying to make the ship respond.
We lurched, but the wrong way. Draulin cried out, barely slicing her sword through the icy beam as she stumbled. She vaporized it, but the missile continued on, directly toward us.
Directly toward me.
I’ve talked about the uneasy truce my Talent and I have. Neither of us is really ever in control. I can usually break things if I really want to, but rarely in exactly the way I want. And, my Talent often breaks things when I don’t want it to.
What I lack in control, I make up for in power. I watched that missile coming, saw its glass length reflect the starlight, and saw the trail of smoke leading back to the fighter behind.
I stared at my reflection in oncoming death. Then I raised my hand and released my Talent.
The missile shattered, shards of glass spraying from it, twinkling and spinning into the midnight air. Then, those shards exploded, vaporizing to powdered dust, which sprayed around me, missing me by several inches on each side.
The smoke from the missile’s engine was still blowing forward, and it licked my fingers. Immediately, the line of smoke quivered. I screamed and a wave of power shot from my chest, pulsing up the line of smoke like water in a tube, moving toward the fighter, which was screaming along in the same path its missile had taken.
The wave of power hit the jet. All was silent for a moment.
Then, the fighter just . . . fell apart. It didn’t explode, like one might see in an action movie. Its separate pieces simply departed one from another. Screws fell out, panels of metal were thrown free, pieces of glass separated from wing and cockpit. In seconds, the entire machine looked like a box of spare parts that had been carelessly tossed into the air.
The mess shot over the top of the Dragonaut, then fell toward the clouds below. As the pieces disbursed, I caught a glimpse of an angry face in the midst of the metal. It was the pilot, twisting among the discarded parts. In an oddly surreal moment, his eyes met mine, and I saw cold hatred in them.
The face was not all human. Half looked normal, the other half was an amalgamation of screws, springs, nuts, and bolts – not unlike the pieces of the jet falling around it. One of his eyes was of the deepest, blackest glass.
He disappeared into the darkness.
I gasped suddenly, feeling incredibly weak. Bastille’s mother crouched, one hand steadying herself against the roof, watching me with an expression I couldn’t see through her knightly faceplate.
Only then did I notice the cracks in the top of the Dragonaut. They spread out from me in a spiral pattern, as if my feet had been the source of some great impact. Looking desperately, I saw that most of the giant flying dragon now bore flaws or cracks of some kind.
My Talent – unpredictable as always – had shattered the glass beneath me as I’d used it to destroy the jet. Slowly, terribly, the massive dragon began to droop. Another of the wings fell free, the glass cracking and breaking. The Dragonaut lurched.
I’d saved the ship . . . but I’d also destroyed it.
We began to plummet downward.
5
Now, there are several things you should consider doing if you were plummeting to your death atop a glass dragon in the middle of the ocean.
Those things do not, mind you, include getting into an extended discussion of classical philosophy.
Leave that to professionals like me.
I want you to think about a ship. No, not a flying dragon ship like the one that was falling apart beneath me as I fell to my death. Focus. I obviously survived the crash, since this book is written in the first person.
I want you to think of a regular ship. The wooden kind, meant for sailing on the ocean. A ship owned by a man named Theseus, a Greek king immortalized by the writer Plutarch.
Plutarch was a silly little Greek historian best known for being born about three centuries too late, for having a great fascination with dead people, and for being way too long-winded. (He produced well over 800,000 words’ worth of writing. The Honorable Council of Fantasy Writers Whose Books Are Way Too Long – good old THCoFWWBAWTL – is considering making him an honorary member.)
Plutarch wrote a metaphor about the Ship of Theseus. You see, once the great king Theseus died, the people wanted to remember him. They decided to preserve his ship for future generations.
The ship got old, and its planks – as wood obstinately insists on doing – began to rot. After that, other pieces got old, and they replaced those too.
This continued for years. Eventually, every single part on the ship had been replaced. So, Plutarch relates an argument that many philosophers wonder about. Is the ship still the Ship of Theseus? People call it that. Everyone knows it is. Yet, there’s a problem. Not all the pieces are actually from the ship that Theseus used.
Is it the same ship?
I think it isn’t. That ship is gone, buried, rotted. The copy everyone then called the Ship of Theseus was really just a . . . copy. It might have looked the same, but looks can be deceiving.
Now, what does this have to do with my story? Everything. You see, I’m that ship. Don’t worry. I’ll probably explain it to you eventually.
The Dragonaut fell into the clouds. The puffs of white passed around me in a furious maelstrom. Then, we were out of them, and I could see something very dark and very vast beneath me.
The ocean. I had that same feeling as before – the terrible thought that we were all going to die. And this time, it was my fault.
Stupid mortality.
The Dragonaut lurched, taking my stomach along with it. The mighty wings continued to beat, reflecting diffuse starlight that shone through the clouds. I’d twisted, looking to the cockpit, and saw Kaz concentrating, hand on the panel. Sweat beaded on his brow, but he managed to keep the ship in the air.
Something cracked. I looked down, realizing that I was standing in the very center of the broken portion of glass.
Uh-oh . . .
The glass beneath me shattered, but fortunately the ship twisted at that moment, lurching upward. I was thrown down into the body of the vessel. I hit the glass floor, then had the peace of mind to slam one of my feet against the wall – locking it into place – as the ship writhed.
Kaz was doing an impressive job. The four remaining wings beat furiously, and the ship wasn’t falling as quickly. We’d gone from a plummet of doom into a controlled spiral of doom.
I twisted, standing, the Grappler’s Glass giving me enough stability to walk back to the cockpit. As I walked, I took off my Lenses and tucked them into their pocket, feeling lucky that I hadn’t lost them in the chaos.
Inside, I found Bastille huddled over Australia, who looked very groggy. My cousin was bleeding from a blow to the head – I later learned she’d been thrown sideways into the wall when the ship began to fall.
I knew exactly what that felt like.
Bastille managed to strap poor Australia into a harness of some kind. Kaz was still focused on keeping us in the air. ‘Blasted thing,’ he said through gritted teeth, ‘why do you tall people have to fly up so high?’
I could just barely see land approaching ahead of us, and I felt a thrill of hope. At that moment, the back half of the dragon broke off, taking two more of the wings with it. We staggered in the air again, spinning, and the wall beside me exploded outward from the pressure.
Australia screamed, Kaz swore. I fell down on my back, knees bent, feet still planted on the floor.
And Bastille was sucked out the opening in the wall.
Now, I’ll tell you time and time again that I’m not a hero. However, sometimes I am a bit quick-witted. As I saw Bastille shoot past me, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to grab her in time.
I couldn’t grab her, but I could kick her. So I did.
I slammed my foot into her side as she passed by, as if to shove her out the hole. Fortunately, she stuck to my foot – for, if you will remember, she was wearing a jacket made with glass fibers.
Bastille whipped out of the Dragonaut, her jacket stuck to the Grappler’s Glass on the bottom of my foot. She twisted about, surprised, but grabbed my ankle to steady herself. This, of course, pulled me up and toward her – though fortunately my other foot was still planted on the glass floor.
Bastille held on to one foot, as the other stuck to the ship. It was not a pleasant sensation.
I yelled in pain as Kaz managed to angle the broken machine toward the beach. We crashed into the sand – even more glass breaking –and everything became a jumbled mess of bodies and debris.
*
I blinked awake, regaining consciousness a few minutes after the crash. I found myself lying on my back, staring out the broken hole of the ceiling.
There was an open patch in the clouds, and I could see the stars.
‘Uh . . .,’ a voice said. ‘Is everyone okay?’
I twisted about, brushing bits of glass from my face – fortunately, the cockpit appeared to be made out of something like Free Kingdoms safety glass. Though it had shattered into shards, the pieces were surprisingly dull, and I hadn’t been cut at all.
Australia – the one who had spoken – sat, holding her head where it was still bleeding. She looked about, seeming dazed. The pathetic remains of the Dragonaut lay broken around us, like the long-dead carcass on some mythical beast. The eyes had both shattered, and I sat in the skull. One of the wings jutted up a short distance away, pointing into the air.
Bastille groaned beside me, her jacket now laced with a spiderweb of lines. It had absorbed some of the shock from the landing for her. My legs, unfortunately, didn’t have any such glass, and they ached from being yanked about.
There was a rustling a short distance away, up where the beach turned into trees. Suddenly, Kaz walked out of the forest, looking completely unbruised and unhurt.