by Amy Braun
“And don’t even get me started on what I’ll do to my brother.”
Davin dropped my head and stormed away. The door slammed with an echoing thud.
I lay alone and in pain on the freezing floor, shaking and holding back my tears. I repeated my mantra over and over in my mind. The painful images that Vesper drew from me came with it. But I kept going, searching through the dark images to find the lighter ones. The ones that made me smile as they broke my heart. The ones I gave up and fought to keep.
Nash’s rumbling laugh. Gemma’s half-hearted eye rolls. Abby’s curious questions. Sawyer’s warm, cedar scent. The whisper of his voice when he told me he loved me.
I pushed myself to my feet and lurched to the window. I wrapped my hand around my stomach and pressed my forehead against the cool glass. I stared down at the wretched wasteland before me.
I imagined the darkness of Hellnore spreading over Westraven. Raiding skiffs circling the skies and dropping down to hunt. Endless screams and gunshots. Blood staining the white bricks.
I imagined my friends and loved ones dead at my feet.
It was my motivation. The future I would never let unfold.
I would build the Vesper the Palisade he wanted.
Then I would use it against him.
Chapter 3
Sawyer
Only one thought crossed my mind as I stared at the map on the worktable:
I have no idea where I’m supposed to go.
The map was a rough sketch I’d made shortly after The Storm. As a child, I spent a lot of my time flying through the clouds over Westraven, staring down at the towers of the tall, white concrete buildings, seeing the open markets and squares, gazing at the impressive manor houses in the drafter district, gawking at the expanse of the military-colonized Barren, and never really remembering where I was.
I was forbidden to so much as look at a map in father’s cabin, but making my own after The Storm gave me the advantage of marking down which areas of the city were safe, which were vacant, and which were the most likely to have supplies or hiding spots.
They didn’t tell me much about the actually skies, however.
“What I don’t get,” Gemma remarked, leaning close to Nash as the three of us scrutinized the map in the middle of the hangar, “is why the clouds blackened like that. It happened so fast…”
From my peripherals, I saw Nash curl his hand around Gemma’s shoulder and squeeze it lightly. She was right. Storms were common in Westraven, especially now, but even with the constant grey clouds smothering the sun, we could always see them coming. The clouds we saw yesterday just formed out of nowhere, up from nothing.
They were unnatural.
“Maybe it was a freak storm,” Nash said, no real conviction behind his voice. “Hail and rain storms like that have been known to happen.”
He wasn’t completely wrong. The late winter months were unpredictable in Westraven, going from days of heavy snow to days of warmer temperatures that melted it. But they could be predicted. Anticipated, even if you were flying in the air.
Yesterday wasn’t like that. We’d never seen it coming. One minute we’d been flying in foggy grey clouds. The next, we were surrounded with black thunderclouds and caught in a whirlwind of battering hail and icy rain. It didn’t make sense.
Unless something was going on beyond those clouds that we couldn’t see.
My fingers curled around the edges of the table.
Could we really have been that close?
“We should check that area again,” I said, placing my index finger over the farming district, which was to the west of the Barren, close to the drafter district. Where Claire used to live.
“Do you think the storm is over?” Nash asked, lifting his eyes to mine. “We can’t go straight through it. Those clouds just got darker and nastier in the center.”
“Maybe it wasn’t a storm at all,” I said. “Maybe it was the Breach.”
Both of my friends fell silent. They didn’t want to confirm or deny anything. I reached to the crate behind me for Deanna Abernathy’s journal and flipped through it aimlessly.
We found the journal with Abby. It had been hidden in Claire’s coat after she left the Capital Meridian with Davin, Riley, and the Vesper. It contained detailed reports of the journey Claire’s mother had taken over a decade ago, when she and her husband were hired as engineers to maintain the exploration vessel.
It should have been a direct link to the Breach, but Deanna and her husband had spent most of their time in the engineering bay working on the Palisade. They hadn’t been mentioned much about the destination. Maybe they hadn’t been told by their superior officers.
Maybe those officers hadn’t really known, either.
Now I knew how they felt.
I skimmed the pages I had read countless times over the past month, and saw nothing that would help me. Nothing that told me about a secret entrance into Hellnore, another way to get through and find Claire.
The Breach was the only way in or out.
“Where else can we look?” Nash asked, breaking the silence that had fallen heavy over us. “There must have been other ships that were used to take over the cities outside Westraven.”
There probably were. After the attacks started, the Sky Guard took to the skies fast. They went straight for the Behemoth, thinking they could cripple it and send it back to the Breach. The Vesper wasn’t stupid. He would have known our military would put up a fight, and that there were other places besides Westraven that he could strike at for revenge.
Gemma paled slightly. “You think there are other ships like the Behemoth out there?” Her voice was a whisper.
I looked at her grimly. “There would have to be. They would send their meanest ship to us because the expedition started here, but they would have to send more to get to the rest of the country.”
I dropped my gaze to the map, frowning at the empty space beyond the sketched lines of the barricades. After the worst of The Storm, the Hellions set up twenty foot high iron walls crudely designed with sharp metal spears and painted with the blood of the people who failed to climb over the top.
“Besides,” I added, “the Hellions want us to suffer. They can’t do that if we’re all dead. They would need to get their food from somewhere else.”
Neither of my friends said anything to that. I stared at the map, as though it would finally confess where the Breach was if I glared at it hard enough.
I wasn’t surprised when I learned nothing.
“Something’s been nagging me for a while,” Nash remarked. “If the Behemoth was their biggest and baddest, wouldn’t the other airships know it was destroyed? Why wouldn’t another ship take its place?”
A good point. After we brought down the monstrous airship, we expected the Hellions to come back in force. To punish us for daring to fight back. We expected to be wiped into extinction, especially since we learned from “Riley” that the Behemoth was a source of power for the Vesper. Inside, we found a room filled with a hundred captives who were being used as unwilling blood-donors to feed the weakened Vesper. Abby was one of the many children. Bringing down the Behemoth meant erasing a crucial source of food for him and the rest of the Hellions. Even if he did have more ships harvesting outside of the barricades, he would want to make us suffer for the insult of fighting back.
But he hadn’t.
Not directly, at least. Life in Westraven was still hard, but survivors were finding a routine. They were venturing to the surface and regaining what some of the confidence that had been lost to them over the last decade. They were the perfect targets for another strike from the Vesper.
A strike that didn’t seem to be coming. Yet.
“Could be that all of them are in use or being rebuilt,” Gemma pointed out. “It’s not as if the Hellions expect an army to charge onto their turf.”
A wicked grin curved her lips. I managed a small smile of my own. We were marauders. We always did the reckless, dan
gerous, unexpected things.
“Makes sense,” agreed Nash. He didn’t join in the grins. “But with that hailstorm, they probably think they don’t have to.”
“So how are we going to get through it?” asked Gemma. “I can’t imagine the ride through the Breach will be smooth.”
Nash had no response. I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose. I don’t know what to do. My skills aren’t set for this. Claire’s are.
But she’s gone.
I dropped my hand. “We’ll reinforce the sidings. We can go to the Junkers and take some scrap metal. Maybe find something for cannon shot.”
“That didn’t go over so well last time,” Gemma reminded.
I grimaced. No. It certainly had not. Last time, we’d been attacked and tied up. I’d almost had my arms ripped off, but Claire had arrived to save us in the explosive way only she could manage.
I missed my impulsive engineer.
“Biding time isn’t going to help us,” Nash advised cautiously, as if reading my thoughts.
My fingers flicked the journal pages, not really seeing the words. “I’m not seeing any other options right now,” I pointed out. “We can’t do anything with the Palisade until we have Claire back. She’s the only one who has a chance to repair it and use it against the Hellions. Other engineers won’t want to touch anything Deanna Abernathy created or won’t be able to fix it in time. The only people who knew it better than Claire are her parents, and they’re dead.”
Both Gemma and Nash looked away at that. I stared at the map without seeing it. More than once, I wished that I could have met Claire’s parents. If we had even one of them, we might have an actual chance at finding Claire and making this disaster salvageable.
But there was nothing to be done about it. No way to save the dead. The only thing we could do was try to protect the few, fearful living.
“Regardless,” Nash said, eyeing me levelly, “we can’t do this alone.”
I narrowed my eyes. I didn’t like where this was going.
“We need an army of our own.”
“You know some Sky Guards kicking around, Nash? Because I’d like to know if there are people out there who will try to lock us up and leave us to starve for our crimes.”
Nash crossed his arms over his broad chest. “I wasn’t talking about the Sky Guard. I was talking about marauders.”
I leaned back. “Oh, you mean the pirates who just want to kill us outright? Yeah, that’s a much better alternative.”
Nash’s fingers tightened on his arms. He probably wished they were digging into my neck.
It was long time before he spoke again. When he did, it wasn’t what I expected.
“Stop thinking you’re your father and brother.”
I blinked. “I didn’t think I had that personality defect, Nash. But thanks for the support.”
Now it was Gemma’s turn to glare. Unlike Nash, I was sure she would hit me if I kept pushing her.
“That’s not how I see it,” continued my quarter master. “You’ve tried to prove for years that you’re not like them. Why stop now?”
“I guess the idea of being stabbed in the back doesn’t appeal to me.”
“Then make them win your respect,” he urged, voice rising. “Sawyer, you helped bring the Behemoth down. Something we all thought was impossible. Hundreds of people saw that. Maybe all of Westraven saw that.”
Nash took a breath and lowered his voice. The intensity remained in his eyes, however.
“Do you really think they cared about your name that day?”
Yes.
It was the automatic answer. The common one, the truthful one. I’d gotten used to it, no matter how much it annoyed me to do so. But thinking back to that day almost six months ago, walking out of the wreckage and into the ruins, seeing the disbelieving faces of the survivors who came to witness the destruction of the ship that had terrorized them for so long…
I’d never felt so proud of anything in my life.
But they didn’t know my name. The marauders found out, most of them old enough to see my brother and father in me. They knew it was because of them that the Hellions went to war. If Davin and my father hadn’t been so intent on trying to raid the Capital Meridian, maybe The Storm would never have happened.
But Davin never passed up the chance for bloodshed, and now here we were. The marauders were grounded, and they would never forgive that. My father and the rest of the Wanderers were dead. Davin was untouchable now that he was a Hellion. I was their only punching bag.
And yet, that day six months ago, I hadn’t seen any marauders. None that I recognized outright. I’d seen ragged survivors, people who would do anything to stay that way. I saw hope in their eyes.
Respect.
I would never gain that from marauders. But everyone else…
“You’re right,” I said.
“You– wait, did you just say I was right?”
I smirked and shrugged one of my shoulders. “Something like that.” My grin faded. “Piloting the Dauntless the way we are isn’t going to work. We need a crew. I know where to get one.”
“Where?” asked Gemma.
This is either going to be one of my best ideas, or my very worst and last one.
“The Behemoth.”
Chapter 4
Claire
I spent the next two days acting like I was being productive.
Oh, I was working, and working hard. Just not on the Palisade.
As promised, the storm-maker was turned over to the Hellions. I had no idea how they were coming along with their project, but the clouds seemed even darker before. Channeling the storm and sending it through the tunnel into Aon’s skies was a tenacious challenge when the storm-maker’s heavy turbines could control the wind. On other days, the turbines ran out of power and the storm sought its freedom, billowing through the already wild terrain of Hellnore.
I glanced out the window from where I sat on the floor of my workstation, setting in power couplings and twisting them into place. As my hands worked on their own, my eyes took in the wildly churning ash and dust from the wind outside.
Against my better judgment, I wondered what it was like out there. Was the air breathable? Where were the skiffs and larger airships docked? Where did the Hellions live? As big as the Dark Spire was, it couldn’t possibly hold all the Hellions residing here.
Even though we’d been chased and hunted by them for ten years, we knew little about the Hellions. Back then, only the basics seemed to matter.
They were monsters. Their exposed skin turned to ash in direct sunlight. They had superior senses, speed, and strength. They sustained themselves on fresh blood. They spoke in a harsh, guttural language. They seemed to be in direct contact with the Vesper, attached to him on a mental level that made it impossible to know if they had any thoughts or emotions of their own. Davin seemed to be the only exception, and only because he was an experiment.
A couple months ago, I’d asked Riley to tell me more about them. He shut down immediately. At the time, I couldn’t blame him. The Hellions were a touchy subject for him. For two years, he suffered relentless and sadistically inventive torture under their claws and fangs. When Sawyer and I found him in the Behemoth, he was about to be thrown in a furnace to fuel the monstrous ship.