“Miss Silver,” Bragginton called after me.
I stopped and turned to him.
“I must implore you,” he said sternly. “Do not activate your transponder until you are at least a league from here.”
I nodded. It was a simple request. “Roger. Wilco.”
I headed for the door again, only to hear his voice call out once more. “We’ll meet again soon, Miss Silver.”
His cryptic message put a stutter in my step, but I shook it off and bolted from the bridge with Darby right behind me. She offered no more protest, of which I was glad. I didn’t care if she went ahead and won the race, I had to get to Rigel. His ship was probably damaged, and he needed help. Yes, that’s all it was. Just some damage.
It turned out that I needed no help to get back to the hangar. It was probably because I had just come up from it, but I was able to find my way back with no trouble. Even Darby’s muttered instructions of, “Left…down…straight…” were unnecessary as I ran. In just a moment, I was practically tumbling down a set of stairs into the hangar. Darby was right on my heels. I assumed she’d be hopping into the Foxfire to go with me, but instead she followed me right to my hatch. When I opened it, I turned around to face her.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “Come on! I need to go for Rigel, but you can finish this thing!”
She just shook her head, forcing a smile and handing me the flask of water. “No, you should go. I’m going to stay here. Take this.”
I took the water that she handed me despite the frenzy in my heart and mind, but I faltered in the middle of boarding my ship. “You’re not coming?”
She shook her head again, her face full of sorrow. It hurt me deeply to suddenly see her in pain. “I don’t want to compete against you, Elana,” she said, her voice quiet and frail. “And I lost my best friend yesterday. I don’t feel much like racing anymore.”
I blinked, searching for the right words. “Well…you have to finish…for Killian.”
She gave a watery chuckle. “It never meant that much to him. We were only doing it for fun, you see.” Her eyes moistened. “And now he’s gone.”
I ducked back out of my hatch and wrapped my arm around her, pulling her into a tight hug. She returned it, leaning her head against my shoulder. “Thank you for everything, Darby. You saved my life. And whenever I hear a beautiful song, I will always think of Killian.”
She gave another small laugh as she pulled back. “So will I. Thank you.”
I gave her one last encouraging smile as I stepped back into the Cloud Kicker. “I’m gonna come back and visit you. I’ll bring Rigel.”
She grinned and wiped a tear from her cheek. “Good luck!”
We exchanged a final wave and I closed the hatch, wasting no time in powering up the engines. At once, I noticed that the overhead lamps were functioning again, which was a relief to see. I flipped on my main power and cranked the engine, making sure all my instruments were good, and then checked my rear view mirror. It was mostly out of habit, but I happened to see that there was another person in the back of my ship.
Startled, I spun around in my chair to make sure I was seeing clearly. It was the same wild-haired, apron wearing, sooty-faced man that I had spotted running through the hanger when I had first landed, the same one that had been working on my ship the day before. He was bent over my Leap engine, and had the covering opened up while he tinkered inside it.
“Hey!” I shouted, jarring him violently. “Who are you?”
He looked in my direction, his eyes gigantic. “I…like old things. I was - I was only curious. Watts…my name…um…is Watts.”
“Well, please get away from that, Watts” I said, trying to reign in my panic and anger. “I’ve almost got that thing working.”
He nodded, wringing his filthy hands together as me made his way to the hatch. “Working, working. Working jet. I know. I know what it is.”
I could only stare at him incredulously as he opened my hatch and left. He was polite enough to shut it behind him, but I still stared at the handle for a moment, wondering if he had really been there or if I had just imagined it.
In an instant, I remembered what I was doing, and turned back to the windscreen. I reached up for my radio cord, but remembered that I now had a second radio, tuned in to a frequency of three hundred gigahertz, which I had never used before. I retrieved the microphone corded to it and brought it to my lips.
“This is the Cloud Kicker. I’m ready for departure.” My voice was oddly high-pitched and squeaky.
At once, the platforms began rotating, spinning and lifting me into the prime takeoff position as the large hatch descended. The immediate burst of daylight was blindingly bright, but it didn’t take my eyes long to adjust. I flipped on my turbines and lifted off before the traffic control voice came back.
“You’re cleared, Cloud Kicker. Good luck.”
I didn’t respond. I was too busy blasting out of the hangar and into open air. Using my compass, I put myself on the correct heading and punched the throttle. I wasn’t going to waste any time. I had a bit of flight time before I reached the spot where Rigel’s transponder signal had vanished, and I didn’t know how I was going to spend it. In reality, there was nothing I could do except worry.
And that’s exactly what I did.
For an eternity, I stared into the blue expanse in front of me, willing my ship to go faster, hoping beyond hope that the Alpha Red was somehow salvageable. Even if I didn’t find him, I would just hope that he had gone on, that whatever damage he might have sustained had just shorted out his transponder, and that he was actually okay.
Those were the longest minutes of my life.
As I began to near the right location, I had no idea what to expect. I leaned forward and peered out my windscreen, trying to spot the moon before I checked my compass. I was almost there. I was almost to the place where Rigel’s ship had vanished, but I still didn’t know exactly what I was looking for. Was I hoping he’d just be flying there, making laps and waiting for me to join him? The idea was insane, of course. In the back of my mind, I knew it was nearly pointless to be coming after him. It had been nearly two hours. If he had been shot down, that meant his ship had fallen beneath the Veil and was irretrievable.
I couldn’t accept that, though. I couldn’t accept the fact that I was helpless, powerless, that I was useless and I couldn’t save him. I had left him in the storm and now he’d been shot down because of me. As I neared his exact coordinates, my hysteria was escalating, bringing itchy tears to my eyes. The sky was empty. There was no ship, there was no sign of him. There were only clouds.
I let out an obnoxiously loud sob, fidgeting my feet against their pedals. My muscles were tensed to the point of tremors. I couldn’t feel my fingers. They were white and cold, numb from my iron grip on the yoke. Even my stomach felt like it had been rolled up and tied in a knot. This couldn’t be happening. I couldn’t have really lost Rigel…could I? As I powered through a thick wisp of cloud, something in the distance caught my eye, a tiny speck of dark color amidst the bright blue.
Immediately, my breath caught in my throat, removing the lump that was forming there. I leaned forward for a better look out the windscreen, but I was still too far away to see clearly. I cleared my teary vision with the back of my wrist and settled into my seat, watching the speck grow larger as I drew nearer. I still had to fight the trembling of my extremities, but I knew it must be Rigel. It had to be. Sure enough, as I came close enough, I was able to see the pontoon backpack that had been the award for the challenge. Dangling from it was the shape of a boy that I could never mistake.
“Rigel!” I screamed, practically leaping out of my seat.
Oddly, my hysteria was even worse now than it was when I’d feared him dead. I was bouncing in my chair, shrieking nonsense and crying so hard that I could barely see. I passed beneath him, forcing myself to contain my excitement. As I cruised by him, I noticed that he was unconscious. His arms, legs, a
nd head were all hanging limp as he drifted slowly among the clouds.
Still fighting the madness of my own adrenaline, I brought the Kicker around for another pass, cutting my throttle and approaching him slowly. Once I was practically upon him, I hit my VTOL turbines and cut my engine. With no forward thrust, my ship slowed to a stop, and I was simply hovering in place, just as Rigel was.
Acting quickly, I spun my seat around and leaped into the cargo area, wasting zero time in climbing the ladder to my roof hatch. I spun the lever so fast that I barely had time to duck my head as the hatch swung inward. Instantly, the cool air rushed in at me, dancing crisply across my cheeks. I retrieved my helmet, fastened it under my chin and pulled my goggles down over my eyes, climbing the last few rungs of the ladder.
“Rigel!” I called out. My voice was miniscule compared to the roar of my turbines as they worked to keep my ship aloft. Poking my head out, I turned to the starboard and saw nothing. No Rigel. When I turned my head to port, I had only a fraction of a second to react, catching his foot in my hand before it could crack me in the skull.
With a grunt, I held fast to his heavy boot, grabbing a fistful of his pant leg to make sure he didn’t float any further away. “I got you!” I cried. “I got you, Rigel!”
He gave no reply as I stumbled down the ladder, trying to pull him in. The small hydrogen balloon on his back was making it difficult, though. I ended up having to wrap my arms around his waist and jump off of the ladder. Our combined weight was too much for the balloon, and I was able to pull most of his body into the ship before I reached up and hit the buckle release that was fastened around his chest. Grunting again with the effort, I had to jostle Rigel’s unconscious body in order for the backpack’s straps to slide off his shoulders.
Finally, the pull of the balloon helped to jerk the pack off of him, leaving me to bear his full weight, which was enough to bring me to my knees. As the pack floated away, I could only clutch my best friend as we lay in a tangled heap on the floor of the Kicker. I didn’t care how feeble it made me look, I held him close and sobbed into his shirt, which smelled like exhaust and hazelnuts.
“Hey, Ellie,” he said weakly, his voice sounding almost like a whisper due to the turbines.
Quickly pulling back from him, I wiped my face on my sleeve and looked down at him. “I can’t believe it. The pack,” I sputtered. “If you hadn’t had that pack, Rigel, I –”
“It’s okay,” he said, smiling up at me. “I’m all right.”
Without thinking, I leaned down and kissed him, pressing my lips tightly against his, and reaching under his helmet to clutch a fistful of his dirty blonde hair. I can’t say why exactly I did it, but I didn’t care at the moment. I was just so grateful to have him with me, to have him alive and breathing in my arms. In that instant, he was the most wonderful sight I had ever laid eyes on I couldn’t deny how good it was to feel his sun-drenched lips melding into mine. The cold hysteria that had gripped me before was melting away, fought into submission from the constant warmth that radiated from him. That same warmth was now spreading through my entire body, pulsing a wild energy with every thunderous beat of my heart. It threatened to engulf me. I wasn’t sure quite how to handle that, so I opened my eyes and pulled away from him.
“I’m…” What was I going to say?
Rigel could only stare up at me, his eyelids slightly drooping. He looked like he’d just been clubbed in the back of the head. “I’m definitely fine,” he breathed, grinning.
With a small laugh, I sat back and helped pull him to a sitting position. “Hang on, okay? I have to get us moving again.”
Rigel nodded slowly and reached to for the nearest wall, grasping one of the straps that I usually used to secure cargo. “Adams,” he murmured.
My head cocked to the side. “What?”
Refusing to repeat himself, he dug into the pocket of his scorched brown trousers and retrieved a square of parchment. He acted as though it took a great deal of effort to just hold the paper out for me. I took the parchment and looked it over, smoothing it out against my knee. There were words written on it, scrawled in the same fashion and hand writing that all the other clues had been in.
“A clue!” I blurted out. “You got the clue!”
Rigel simply nodded.
I looked down at the paper in my hand and focused on the ornate letters. “To finish, you require great power,” I read aloud. “But, the power, you should not seek. What began as a warning of Tristitia became a nickname from the meek.”
At once, I knew what Rigel meant. As the image of the rusted metal sign above the plant entrance appeared in my memory, the plant that my father had worked in, and my mother after that. I knew the race was taking us back to Adams.
Wiping away fresh tears from my cheeks, I got to my feet and hopped back into my pilot chair, spinning around to face out the windscreen. With the flick of a switch, I fired up the Kicker’s primary engine and killed the turbines, which caused me to begin losing altitude. Thankfully, my engine got up to full power in just a few seconds, and I was easily able to swoop around and pull up before we fell into a dive. Now that we were moving in the right direction again, I punched the throttle and leveled off the nose of the ship, making sure I was flying evenly before turning my chair around once more.
Rigel was still sitting where I had left him. As I approached his right side, I could see that that entire half of his body looked to be bright pink in color. He was badly sunburned, surely from floating around the clouds with no protection from the ultraviolet rays. In addition to this, he had a long, bloody wound down his left shin.
“Is that from a gunshot?” I asked him, grabbing Darby’s flask of water.
Rigel shook his head. “No, I got that from kicking out my own windscreen. I only had a few seconds to punch out of there.”
I handed him the canteen and he tipped it upside down, gulping loudly several times before pausing to take a breath. “Thanks,” he panted. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, resting against the metal wall of the hold.
“I was so afraid you were dead,” I said softly, feeling my lower lip beginning to quiver.
Rigel smiled lazily. “Yeah, well…it’ll take more than a fiery crash to stop me.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at his stupid joke. The sheer relief of having him there with me was incredibly uplifting. “I can’t believe you were able to hang onto the clue!”
“That wasn’t all of it,” Rigel told, forcing himself to sit up straighter. “There was a small route map that looked like it would have led to a platform.”
“Another clue?” I asked, suddenly losing the excitement I was beginning to feel.
Rigel shook his head. “No way. The route looked like it ran through the stop…instead of diverting from it like the rest of the clue locations.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. “Refuel station?”
He nodded. “Fresh hydro, fresh charges, all that good stuff.”
“Well, I guess we’re in luck!” I told him. “I’ve just been to Ravencog! They charged my batteries and filled my tanks. We don’t have to divert to the station! We can head straight on to Adams!”
Rigel looked surprisingly happy at this news, but his rising smile faltered. “Ravencog? How did you…? Wait…how far behind are we?”
I blinked. “Well, it took me a little over an hour to get to you. Probably seventy-five minutes, give or take.”
Rigel closed his eyes and leaned his head back, running the numbers in his head. Since he was the only one that had seen the location of the refuel platform on the map, only he could determine how far of a head start we’d have on the rest of the competition. After a moment, he opened his eyes and sighed.
“I think we’ll make the same time I would have made if I hadn’t been shot down,” Rigel said with a shrug. “Best guess…we’ll get there about the same time as Audra. Maybe a few minutes after.”
I sat back on my heels and exhaled nervously. “Well, at least
we’re still in it,” I said, trying to remain optimistic.
Rigel nodded, giving me an exhausted grin. He reminded me of a child that was fighting sleep, trying not to let his eyelids close all the way. It made me laugh. Letting out another sigh of relief, I swiped the heavy helmet off his head and smoothed his dark blonde hair.
“You should rest,” I told him.
I was expecting him to argue with me, to keep insisting that he was just fine, and that he should fly while I rested. Instead, he just nodded once again and slowly slumped down to the metal grating of the floor, using his flight helmet to cover his eyes.
With another small laugh, I patted his hand and stood up, slowly making my way up the few steps to the cockpit. I plopped down in my chair, huffing all the air out of my lungs. I was suddenly thinking that I could use a nap. The excitement I’d felt when racing toward Rigel was all leeching out of me, and I was feeling pretty drained. After a moment, though, I remembered that I wasn’t yet in the clear. I still had to step on it if I was going to catch Audra. I didn’t know how many more stops were in the race, but it never lasted more than a couple of days. We had to be getting close to the end.
I made sure my throttle was pegged. I would save my hydro boosters for when I was desperate, but I still wanted to be going as fast as I could. If Rigel was right, we’d be approaching Adams at roughly the same time as Audra, and things were sure to get interesting after that. As tired as I felt, I couldn’t falter. I knew we were pretty far off course, but I still couldn’t count out any of the other racers.
In truth, I didn’t even know who was left to worry about. Darby had dropped out, so that was one less ally I would have on my side, John Deseo was dead, Killian was dead, and Rigel was here on the Cloud Kicker. The only remaining contestants I could even remember were Thorn and Grace Buchannon. I hadn’t seen Thorn since everyone had departed from Shiloh. As for Grace, I still wasn’t sure where she stood.
As I struggled to stay awake, I decided to pull back on the yoke and climb as high as I could. If I could catch a tailwind, I could potentially make fantastic time back to Adams. At the moment, I wanted anything that could give me an edge over Audra Carina. I felt my ears pop as I went up, and the temperature began to drop. I searched around the cockpit for my jacket and draped it over my shoulders as I stared out the front screen to read the sky. There wasn’t much of a tailwind, but I spent quite some time weaving in and out of air streams, trying to find a path of little resistance. According to my gauges, it was working. I had to keep checking my windspeed to be sure, but I was making excellent time.
The Blood Racer (The Blood Racer Trilogy Book 1) Page 30