“FIRE!”
Jubei heard it again. That awful thunder, turning his gut to water. The Hunger dropped thirty feet as if slapped out of the sky by the hands of angry gods. His legs were jelly-soft, mouth dry as ashes, gripping the rails so hard his gauntlets scored the wood. He longed to rip the helmet from his head, paw the salt burn from his eyes. For one moment of blessed relief.
He thought of his Awakening, the blurred and tumbling visions of his What Will Be, the destiny that could be his if only he had the strength to seize it. The Chamber of Smoke had showed him precious little of his future to make sense of, but he’d seen nothing about burning to death on this ship, being crushed to pulp on teeth of stone a hundred miles from the place he called home. And as the shuriken fire began again, as panic gripped their lookouts and that shape plummeted toward them out of the blinding sun, Jubei felt himself break. Red fear rising up and strangling reason, all the mantras and doctrine fleeing his mind, leaving him with a single truth burning bright before dilating pupils.
He was not meant to die here.
The terrified Lotusman ran to the bow’s edge, ignoring the Scourge’s bellowed order, fumbling with the ignition switches on his wrist. His boots scraped against the railing as he leapt up and over, snatched from gravity’s pull by blue-white flame. The rockets’ vibration shook his flesh, overshadowed by a spear of bright light at his back, the thunderous resonance of the Hunger’s inflatable bursting apart. His comms rig was filled with the screams of dying marines, the conflagration’s roar, the agony of flame on naked flesh. He switched it off, left with the frantic high-frequency data streams from his mechabacus, demands for someone—anyone—to report.
He set his pack to full burn, rocketing away from the Hunger’s death throes, the echoing crash of her ruin on the mountainside behind him. He could see the shape clearly in his mind’s eye, a lithograph etched in sweating fear and sour-tongue adrenaline. Wings twenty-five-feet wide, clad in iridescent metal. Sleek feathers at its head, eyes like molten amber, forelegs of iron-gray. Snow-white fur on its hindquarters, rippling stripes of pitch-black, long tail lashing like a whip behind it. Muscle and beak and claw; a creature from impossible fictions sprung inexplicably to life and spattered red with the blood of his brothers.
He prayed. For the first time he could remember, he prayed. To gods he knew weren’t there, who couldn’t listen. Figments of the imagination, crutches for the skinless and the ignorant, a superstition no Guildsman he knew really believed in. And yet he prayed with a fervor that would shame a priest. That his pack would fly him faster, get him out, away, his pulse rushing so hard he feared his veins would burst. If his heart were an engine, he would have thrashed it to breaking. If his blood were chi, he would have opened his veins and poured every last drop into his fuel tanks to fly just one foot farther.
And still, they caught him.
A rush of wind behind, the thunder of beating drums. He glanced over his shoulder and they hit him in a shower of sparks and flame. He bucked in the thing’s grip, arms pinned, his skin screeching like a wounded corpse-rat. Throat torn raw, spittle-flecked lips, screaming until at last he realized that, though he hung in those talons like a gaijin corpse above the inochi pits, completely at their mercy, the death blow hadn’t fallen.
They hadn’t killed him.
They flew for what seemed like years, south over the sky-clad ranges. A sweeping ocean turning slowly to the color of flame, an undulating carpet of whispering trees and frost-clad teeth that seemed to go on forever. Finally they descended, circling above a flattened spur of rock and snow. A sheer cliff face dropping down on to gray foothills below. The very edge of the Iishi.
Twenty feet from the cliff top, they dropped him. He fell with a crash, sparks and grinding metal, skull cracking against the inside of his helm, biting hard on his tongue. Skin squealing across the plateau, he skidded to a halt two feet shy of the precipice.
And he lay there, too terrified to move.