“Chase her up,” I shout. Perhaps it is a whisper in my voice that shouts, because in this instant, I no longer have a voice of my own.
Magiano pushes against the balira’s back. The creature lets out a haunting cry that shudders through our bodies. Then it dives. It dives so sharply that I have to steady myself against the saddle so that I don’t slide off completely. Almost immediately, Magiano pulls it back up, and the balira jerks its head up toward where Gemma flies.
She senses us. Suddenly our balira shudders off course—she is trying to manipulate our ride’s mind. Magiano grits his teeth. He pushes back. Our balira steadies. Magiano pulls it until its head is turned back up, and then he whispers something to it.
Gemma sees what we’re about to do, because she pulls hers up too. We charge forward, hurtling higher, leaving the warring bay below us. Rain flies in my face and I feel that old panic again, the fear of not being able to see, and I hastily wipe the water away. Gemma’s balira swings its tail in an arc. Its needle-like endpoint swipes at us, threatening to cut us—Magiano pulls us away at the last second. He forces us to move slower, out of the tail’s reach.
I grit my teeth and reach out with my energy. The threads shoot toward her, wrap around her like a cocoon, and then, as I concentrate, tighten. I feel her shrink away, her terror jump. From her point of view, it seems as if the world had suddenly rushed up to her, the sky become the sea, and she is upside-down, hurtling into the ocean and submerged in water. She can’t breathe. From where we are, I see her hunch over in her saddle in panic. Her balira veers sharply off course as she tries to turn them around in their illusion of an ocean.
I grit my teeth and tie my strings tighter and tighter around her. Gemma twitches violently again as she feels like her lungs are filling with water. She’s drowning, and she claws at the air, trying to swim.
“Adelina.” Magiano’s voice cuts through my concentration like a knife. My illusion wavers, and for a moment, Gemma can see. “We have to pull back!” he shouts. “We’re too close to the storm!”
I hadn’t even noticed. The black clouds loom far too close, an endless blanket of black that stretches in every direction—and we are about to plunge right into it. I blink, breaking out of my anger. Above us, Gemma shakes her head and realizes the same thing. But her concentration has been thrown off, and her balira struggles against her, refusing to listen. Magiano pulls our own balira so that its nose points down again. The black clouds leave our view, and I find myself staring once more at the bay dotted with fire and warships. We start to dive back down.
I look, once, over my shoulder, to see Gemma still struggling with her balira. It lets out a shriek of protest.
Then the dark world lights up, and we all go blind.
A bolt of lightning—a crack of thunder that splits the sky. The sound explodes all around us. Heat sears us from above. Magiano and I both throw ourselves against our balira’s back as it continues to plummet down. I can’t see anything but light. Something burns. My eye tears up. Magiano somehow manages to pull our balira up as we near the bay—I feel my weight drop down against the creature’s back. I’m trembling uncontrollably. All I can do is turn my face to one side, and through the blur, a streak of light shoots past us.
It is Gemma, burning, falling to the ocean. Her balira’s enormous, lifeless body hurtles beside her. Struck by lightning.
I watch her. She falls forever, the shooting-star thief, her light fading from a streak into a dot, then into nothing, then, finally, into the sea with her balira. From the ocean’s surface, I know the impact must look like a tidal wave, pushing all the ships around it outward in a ring. But from up here, it looks like an insignificant splash, like she was here and then she was gone.
And the world continues as if she had never existed.
My heart twists, but we have no time to dwell on it. Even as we sit, stunned and suspended in midair, Magiano turns his head toward where a cluster of ships have gathered around a single one. Baliras dotted with white-cloaked figures head toward it. Immediately, I know this must be Queen Maeve’s Beldish ship. Magiano shouts something at me. I nod in a daze. Below us, an anguished scream comes from a voice I recognize all too well as Lucent’s. She is screaming Gemma’s name.
Magiano turns our balira away, even though all I want to do is stare at the spot where Gemma had hit the water, where ripples have covered her flaming light.
Mankind has been fascinated with baliras for thousands of years. Countless stories have been written about them, and yet we are still no closer to understanding the secrets of their flight, kin, and life in the deep.
—A Study of Baliras and Their Closest Cousins, by Baron Faucher
Adelina Amouteru