A Perverted Path to Victory

Chona

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The Sunrise rolled even further to the right, engines kicking up to combat speed. The clatter of spell against steel grew overwhelming as Tinvel pointed their nose towards Affe’s plane, ignoring the griffon which had nearly crashed straight through their wing.

Affe was under assault from another griffon, but it hadn’t overshot its target half as bad as the one which had attacked the Sunrise. Chona caught sight of its dark, tawny feathers just as it finished sweeping past Affe’s flank, its outstretched claws missing canvas by a matter of feet. The creature immediately tucked its legs in and twisted its wings, turning the momentum of its dive into a rocketing ascent. Just when it reached the apex of its arc, hanging in place, the animal twisted inverted, aligning its beak with Affe’s path of flight, and began another dive.

As it turned, Chona caught a flash of metal-studded leather on its back. The creature was harnessed, two riders sat astride the hump of the animal’s spine

“Imperials!”

“What?!”

Chona pointed, screaming so loud it hurt.

“They’re Imperials!”

Tinvel leaned forward to follow her gesture just as the Griffon’s twisting exposed a flash of iron and wood. Not only were two people riding the griffon, one of them was holding an oversized crossbow.

“Shit!” Tinvel yelled yet again. It was becoming something of a mantra for the day. He reached into the engine space and sent the engine surging into emergency speed, popping the control stick to the right for a few seconds, then hard left, trying to sweep around the griffon’s side in a way that would give Chona a clear shot.

She’d never more wished for a speaking crystal in the planes than she had in this moment. Affe was heading almost directly away from them, all his focus on the griffon angling for yet another dive. If he would only turn around, they’d reach one another in seconds. Instead he was consumed by jinking left and right, turning it into a stern chase.

At some unseen signal, the griffon began another stooping dive. Its wings practically disappeared with how tightly they tucked to its side, legs folding into the fluff of its feathers until it was nothing more than a blurred line.

The few moments it took for gravity to assert itself over the griffon’s flight were more than enough for Affe to realize what was happening. He kicked his rudder right, feinting a turn, then rolled hard left, going inverted, clawing his way through a wing-bending vertical loop.

One that, Chona realized, was going to end with his plane pointed right at the Sunrise.

She unbuckled her harness without thought, leaving herself secured only by the belt around her waist as she leant hard out of the plane’s right side, forearm braced against the buffeting wind.

“Left! Left! Angle left!”

She didn’t know if Tinvel could hear her or if he had the same idea as her, but it didn’t matter, because he did as she wanted. Affe pulled out of his dive and shot past them with a roar, his right wingtip slicing a bare dozen feet off the Sunrise’s, the griffon following close behind.

“BURN!”

A curtain of fire shot out of Chona’s palm, curved into a scythe’s blade by the speed of their passing. She bared her teeth in a fierce grin even as an icy pickaxe dug its way into her skull, leaving shimmering spots of pain in her vision. The griffon was heading straight towards the flames-

The animal’s wings snapped open, flaring wide. She caught a brief glimpse of its muscles shuddering with effort, near to tearing as it fought to arrest its own speed.

Then it dropped like a stone.

Her torrent of spellcraft was wasted as she and the Sunrise dragged a curtain of fire through empty air.

Chona couldn’t even swear before the sound of popping electricity distracted her, pulling her torso around to look behind herself. Her entire body was going numb, and her pounding headache seemed to have spread to her eyes. Each painful pulse distorted the world around her, the red and green of the Sunrise’s wings swirling together like watery paint.

She’d been in fights before, learned to fight dirty, but the pace of this fight was insane. So much was happening that it was impossible for her to process any single event, her mind leaping from elation to rage to panic and back every few seconds.

She caught sight of Affe’s plane as it was weaving its way through a series of tight, looping spirals, a griffon matching it beat-for-beat. It was the second griffon, the brown-feathered one that had ambushed the Sunrise. The animal and its riders had managed to regain their altitude in the time she and Tinvel had been focusing on helping Affe, but, rather than spend it diving after a target already heading away, elected to eagerly pounce on Affe as their two planes switched positions.

This wasn’t an ambush anymore. Affe, obsessed as he was with getting the Governess’s permission to see combat, had chosen Cebrav as his backseater for a reason.

No other mage was as obsessed with Professor Brown’s lessons on electricity as Cebrav.

Rather than an easily-dodged blast of flame, the griffon was met by Cebrav’s forking spellcraft, a net of white lightning crackling across the sky. The griffon was caught within the spider’s web of electric energy in an instant, smoke bursting from its feathers as involuntary spasms threw it violently off-course.

Tinvel yelled something Chona couldn’t hear, forcing her to turn around yet again. She tried to ask him to repeat himself, unable to comprehend a thing through the blistering wind and her molten skull, but didn’t get a single syllable out before the Sunrise tipped violently forward, nearly throwing her from her seat.

Through the thin slot of forward vision afforded her by the gap between Tinvel’s head and the upper wing, she caught a flicker of the griffon which had been forced to dodge her earlier spellflame.

Unlike its brethren, it hadn’t tried to regain altitude. It had committed to the dive, angling itself away from the dogfight. Chona didn’t know why. They were nowhere near the airstrip, and there weren’t any targets of interest. Her eyes tracked the griffon’s path, confused…

It was heading towards the wreckage of Hunes’s plane.

Tinvel’s dive turned vertical.

The roaring wind became a high-pitched whistle as air ripped across the Sunrise’s wing spars, a dangerous tone Chona had heard only a few times before. Tinvel kept both hands on the control stick, keeping the plane in emergency speed even as he drove them directly downward, chewing through their altitude at an insane rate. His shoulders were hunched inward, his hands wrapped so tightly around the controls that they were trembling. If she could’ve seen his face, Chona felt certain it would have been twisted in a terrified, furious grimace.

Knowing there was no way for him to hear her, Chona lunged over the seat, grabbing for the control stick.

They briefly wrestled for control, both of Chona’s arms and her tail struggling against Tinvel. It was only when the whistling wind began to truly shriek that Tinvel gathered his wits. He pulled back, and together they threw both their bodies into the effort of levering the Sunrise’s elevators against the weight of wind. As soon as the banshee wailing fell away, Tinvel released one hand from the controls and leaned forward, cutting the engine off emergency speed.

Below them, the griffon reached Hunes’s crash site. It shot past the crumpled plane with its massive hind claws outstretched and, with a horrible screech of shearing metal and snapping wood, tore the entire upper wing off the plane. What was left of Hunes’s Halfeye was jerked into a flailing roll, fragile body spraying debris across the hillside.

The griffon began to flap, using all four legs to adjust the wing until it was clutched tightly to its chest, folded out of the way of its flight. Its wings began to beat even harder as it turned south.

“It’s trying to get away!” Tinvel yelled.

Why? Chona wanted to ask, but before she could, Tinvel jerked the plane out of its dive, trading their speed for a steep ascent.

“What are you doing?!” Chona yelled. “They’re getting away!”

“Where’s the third?!”

“What?”

“The third!”

It took a while for Tinvel’s reasoning to slip through the thin gap left between her pounding headache and pulsing adrenaline. She’d only ever seen two griffons at once, but he was right. There had to be three. Hunes had been taken down just before the Sunrise had been attacked, and she’d heard Affe or Cebrav casting spells at almost the same moment. Three planes, three simultaneous attacks.

Chona sat back in her seat, re-buckling her harness. Like most vanara, she had better eyesight than humans. She started scanning the sky, searching for whoever had attacked— and probably killed— Hunes.

She found them circling far, far above. The course of the dogfight had been a tangled weave that dragged everyone closer to the ground, leaving the final griffon well above them all.

Altitude is speed. Speed is life.

Professor Brown hadn’t been a pilot in his old world, but he’d read as much as he could about them. Despite the precious little time he could squeeze from his schedule to lecture the flight students directly, that one phrase— altitude is speed, speed is life— was something they all must have heard a thousand times. The faster you were compared to your opponent, the less time they had to react when you made your move, and the more easily you could disengage if it went wrong.

And there was no better way to gain speed than dropping out of the sky with your engine roaring. Trade altitude for speed, speed for altitude, and as long as you didn’t run out of either, you’d win the day. Right now, that griffon had the pick of the litter.

Its head was cocked to one side, staring down from gods-knew how high. It was so far above that she could only just make out the creature’s coloration. It had mostly the same brown feathers of its brethren, but its head was a vivid, stark white. To Chona’s grim satisfaction, a rivulet of blood was dripping off one of its hind legs.

Sinking your claws into wood and steel isn’t as easy as feathers and flesh, huh, prick?

The griffon turned away, angling itself to overfly its desperately flapping companion far below. The wing the brown griffon had stolen wasn’t heavy, not when compared to the creature’s elephantine proportions, but it was literally designed to catch the wind. The animal was struggling to keep its stolen bounty in check, wingbeats stumbling every time it was forced to readjust in response to every stiff breeze.

Affe was already in pursuit, though she doubted he had any better of an idea of why the animal and its riders had wanted to steal a wing of all things. Unfortunately for him, the griffon already had a sizable lead. They’d both traded every last ounce of altitude they had, leaving them a bare hundred feet over the ground. The Halfeye was proving faster than a griffon in level flight, but not by much. It would take Affe precious minutes to close the distance.

Meanwhile, high above, the white-headed griffon barely had to flap its wings in order to follow the low-altitude chase. Its wings were spread for easy gliding as it bounced from current to current, shadowing its retreating comrade without sacrificing an inch of altitude. Chona stared after it, fiending for the Governess’s spell that casted her voice across vast distances. She’d have spat no end of profanity after the fleeing Imperials, trying to goad them back into the fight.

Even more than that, she would have warned Affe about the griffon high above his tail. He and Cebrav were both humans, and she didn’t know if they had good enough eyes to see it coming. Could humans see something that size from so far away? She knew her eyes were better, but by how much?

Chona tapped Tinvel on the shoulder, directing him to the speaking tube.

“The last griffon’s above and behind Affe, about a mile up. Can we climb in time to catch it?”

“A mile?” Tinvel didn’t bother to search for himself, taking Chona at her word. “We can get that high, but we’ll lose too much speed to do it. If they fight, everything will be done by the time we’re halfway there.”

“Do we have any way to signal Affe about it? Do you think he’s noticed?”

“No we don’t, and I don’t know.”

Chona swore. If Affe had noticed his overhead pursuer, the smart thing to do would have been to abandon the chase, letting the brown griffon waltz away with its useless prize.

Just give it up, she mentally urged Affe. They’re not going to learn anything from that piece of scrap!

Her request was answered in perhaps the worst way possible. Affe’s Halfeye suddenly shuddered, jerking to the right briefly, then reasserted itself.

“Oh, no,” she whispered, leaning forward.

His plane jerked again, shuddering harder.

“Hey!” Tinvel yelled. “Is he running out of-”

“Yeah!” Chona slammed her fist against Tinvel’s headrest in a fit of frustration. “Yeah, he is!”

“How?!” Tinvel reached into the engine cowling, tapping the crystals within. “We’ve still got… another half-hour of flight, at least!”

“He’s probably kept his plane in emergency speed this whole time!”

“Dumbass!”

Chona would personally have chosen several other, far harsher words to describe Affe, but she didn’t bother correcting Tinvel.

The Halfeye gave one last final sputter, the entire frame vibrating terribly as the spell-driven pistons fell out of sync, then fell terribly, dangerously silent.

What had begun as a panicky, incomprehensible melee had become something far worse. The Sunrise’s speed of a hundred miles an hour, once so fast it was unfathomable to her, suddenly felt like she was crawling forward on hands and knees. They were trapped in the sky, miles away, and though they were traveling faster than nearly any person ever had, it would take far too long for them to get close enough to do anything useful.

Affe’s Halfeye began dropping out of the sky, the drag of thick, low-altitude air tugging at its every exposed surface. Professor Brown had said that the planes of his old world had something called a glide ratio; for every foot of altitude, they could travel a certain multiple of that number forward. The best planes, those designed just for gliding, could travel seventy feet forward for every one foot of altitude they lost. That meant if they were a thousand feet off the ground when they lost power, they could travel seventy thousand feet forward.

Affe’s engine died at a hundred feet of altitude.

The Halfeyes’ glide ratio was about eight to one.

He had five seconds to impact.

Chona and Tinvel were left as helpless spectators to the crippled plane doing its best to swerve towards the flattest nearby piece of ground, using its rudder more than any rolling of its wings in a desperate bid to save every inch of altitude. Chona had just long enough to start a prayer, and then Affe hit.

The plane struck the front side of a hill, Affe’s final attempt to flare not nearly enough to get him level with the oncoming terrain.

He hit hard, bounced once, one landing gear bent at a dangerous angle, both tires popping with a loud crack, and then hit again.

The Halfeye’s rubberless wheels dug hard into the dirt, frame trembling violently as it plowed a path through the dirt, nearly flipping head over heels before it came to a harsh stop, immobilized.

“We’ve gotta cover them!” Chona yelled.

“Are they even alive?”

“They won’t be if one of those griffons comes for them!”

“What about Hunes and Docks? Their crash was worse!”

Which means they’re probably dead, Chona thought. She stopped herself from saying it. Tinvel hadn’t seen anyone die, she reminded herself. Not since the Sporaton Knights, at least, and that had ended up with him spilling his guts across the cobblestones.

“There’s not two griffons near them! Affe needs the cover more!”

Tinvel didn’t seem any happier than her to leave Hunes in favor of Affe, but he could at least acknowledge the logic of it. He tilted the plane forward once more, trading what height he’d managed to garner for speed. There was no way they could reach the crash site before either griffon, not if they decided to attack, but at least they’d be able to see reinforcements were coming. Maybe it would be enough to dissuade them from treating the second crashed plane like they had the first.

To Chona’s surprise, they didn’t even try. The brown griffon began to drag itself higher and higher, still clutching its worthless prize, while the white-headed animal didn’t so much as twitch a wing to turn towards the crash. Whatever their objective had been, whether it was to stop their burning, destroy some planes, or steal a chunk of an aircraft, it had clearly been accomplished. By the time the Sunrise was circling around the face-planted Halfeye, the griffons were little more than a speck against the sky, heading south as fast as they were able.

Chona felt a wash of emotion at the sight that greeted her below. Two figures were beside the plane, one sprawled in the grass in a posture of clear exhaustion, the other shading their eyes as they watched the Sunrise circle. The standing figure— Chona guessed it was Affe, since Cebrav was probably as wrung out by casting his spells as she was— began to make a series of gestures, pointing in the vague direction of the first crash site. It was hard to make out exactly what signs they were making, on account of the constantly-orbiting nature of their flight.

“I think they’re telling us to go check on Hunes and Docks first!”

“Those griffons could still come back, though!”

“If they want to steal another chunk of wood, let ‘em! What if someone’s still alive over there?”

Tinvel didn’t like that, Chona could tell. More than anything else, Tulian’s planes were his crowning achievement. It didn’t matter that the Imperials stealing a wing told them nothing useful; they’d taken something that was his. He didn’t want to let that happen again.

“Affe barely cast any spells!” Chona argued. “Even if Cebrav’s wiped out, Affe can fend the griffons off if they circle back! We have to see if anyone survived!” She reached under her seat, checking the supply pack she kept there. The simple motion of bending forward felt like a shotgun had been pressed to her spine and the trigger pulled. She grit her teeth, digging around to confirm she had what she was looking for. “I’ve got a couple basic potions! If they’re still alive…”

Tinvel growled incoherently, but jerked the Sunrise onto a new path, gaining altitude once more. Chona watched the figure on the ground wave them off, looking relieved, then turned her attention forward, searching for the fallen plane.

As they went on their winding path through the sky, attempting to retrace the sprawling midair battle to find the fallen Halfeye, Chona’s mind turned to the sheer contrast she’d been subjected to. When the enemy had closed with them, the battle had been fought between blinks- every second an hour, every decision her last. Feathers had torn past fast enough to buffet her with their wind, her spells spitting and spewing like geysers, her entire body lifted and slammed across the cockpit by unnatural, foreign forces.

Then, the moment they broke apart… Nothing. The long wait had begun. The slow dance of maneuvers, altitude adjustments, and constant, constant vigilance. Compared to what Professer Brown had told them of his old world’s wars, this hadn’t even been a skirmish, but she felt like her exhaustion was drowning her. It had taken minutes to set up an exchange that was decided in a split second, and there had been no time to reflect after each lightning-fast exchange. Just more decisions, more strategy, screaming, and attempts to predict what the enemy would do.

Chona blinked hard, resisting the urge to lift her goggles and rub her eyes. Her spellsickness was turning the static scenery below into a rolling, boiling sea, colors mixing together in the bubbling stew of her throbbing head. Spellsickness manifested differently in nearly everyone, and for her, it was always like this. A steadily-worsening disconnect from reality, her own senses betraying her. Garen said her mind was at war with itself. She’d overstepped the boundaries of her soul, drawing energy not just from herself, but from the living world around her. She’d taken in so much of it that it was a struggle to tell who, or what, she exactly was. Everything she’d connected to in the moment, the strength she’d taken from them? They wanted their due. The birds, the insects, even the grass and trees, they each had a piece of her mind. They didn’t want to let go.

Her mind would reject them in time. But until it did, she was forced to see things through the senses of creatures her soul hadn’t been created to comprehend.

“There!” Tinvel called out, pointing.

Chona screwed up her eyes, trying to figure what he was pointing at. All she could see were messes of colors and shapes, each less coherent than the last.

“Then land already!”

Tinvel shot a concerned glance back at her. Had she slurred her words? She hoped not. She was going to be fine. But it would be real damn annoying convincing Tinvel of that fact if her spellsickness was showing.

He turned around without comment, focusing on finding a flat track of land to land.

With its wheeled pontoons, the Sunrise was far more difficult to land on rough terrain than the Type N Halfeyes. It took some time for them to find a stretch that wouldn’t end up with them adding to the day’s losses, and when they did, it was about a half mile away from the fallen plane. Thankfully, the latest upgrade to the Halfeyes had included a rudimentary wheel-braking system, one that let them drag themselves to a stop in under a hundred feet.

Tinvel cut the engine, then tore his harness off, leaping out of the plane.

Chona reached for the buckles of her chest harness. Missed. Tried again. Felt her fingernails clack against the metal. She spread her palm, feeling the cool iron, then managed to find the release button. She moved to her seat belt and fumbled with the latch until she felt a click, then slowly stood, bracing both hands on the sides of the cockpit.

Tinvel was watching her with a certain kind of sympathetic expression on his face that she really, really didn’t appreciate. She shot him a deep scowl even as she swung one leg out of the plane, then the other, sitting on the edge of the wooden cockpit. Taking a deep breath, she dropped to the ground.

She bit back a whimper as she hit the dirt. Her head swam, glass grinding in her ankles and knees. She kept her eyes closed, breathing hard.

A warm body pressed itself to her side, lifting one of her arms. Her eyes shot open as Tinvel put himself under her shoulder, helping support her.

“Fuck off,” Chona gasped.

“Told you that you should’ve held back.”

They began walking in the direction of the crash, half of Chona’s weight leaned against Tinvel.

In a few minutes, Tinvel was panting almost as hard as she was. Spending hours hunched over an artificer’s bench wasn’t the best for building up muscle.

It took them the better part of a half hour to reach the crash site. As much as she wished they could have gone faster, their pace was something of a mixed blessing. She needed all the time to recover that she could get.

They found pieces of the Halfeye before they found the actual plane. The griffon’s attack had torn chunks from the plane in mid-air, forcing Hunes into a flat spin. She’d been trapped in a belly-down spin, her plane unable to muster up the forward speed to reattain level flight. The Halfeye had fallen to the ground like a drifting leaf, but with far less grace. It had been shedding pieces all the way down.

Chona and Tinvel walked around a piece of wing. Its edge had a jagged tear, evidence of the claws which had ripped through the canvas. Chona did notice that the rip stopped in the middle of the wing— right where a thin steel support beam had been. The griffon’s claws had bounced off the metal. Maybe that’s what had caused the cut in its leg. She allowed herself a small amount of satisfaction in that.

They reached the crash proper a short time later. Hunes’s plane had initially hit the ground belly-first, snapping its landing gear like twigs and collapsing the lower wings. Chona could see the tracks in the mud where the plane had been dragged as the griffon tore its upper wing off, shattering what little had been left of its internal structure.

“Hunes!” Tinvel called. “Docks! Are you there?”

Chona didn’t say anything. Tinvel had come to look for survivors. She’d just come to salvage the engine. She knew there was no way anyone had survived the crash.

“I’m feeling better,” Chona lied, shrugging herself off Tinvel’s shoulder. “Go ahead and look. I’ll keep an eye out for any other griffons.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.” She forced a tired smile to crawl up her face. “I’ll be good as new in a few minutes. Promise.”

Tinvel reluctantly left her, jogging forward. Chona followed behind at her own, far slower pace, mentally bracing herself.

The Halfeye was borderline unrecognizable. The crash had shattered its wooden frame and twisted what precious little steel it had. She could see snapped control cables poking through the canvas like torn sinew, bent into shapes so abstract they were almost artistic. The lower wings had been scattered by the roll, the upper wing torn away entirely. All that was left was a long cylinder broken into two pieces. It was laying on its side, belly towards her, cockpit out of sight.

Tinvel jogged around the plane, still calling out for Hunes and Docks.

As he reached the far side of the plane, Chona stopped by a chunk of the tail, resting against it as she waited.

Tinvel stumbled, his words dying in his throat. She could see him staring down, looking at the cockpit. He stood completely frozen, eyes wide.

“Chona!” Tinvel yelled, looking up at her. “Chona! It’s- it’s- get over here!”

She sighed, forcing herself into motion. Tinvel kept staring down at the cockpit, his chest heaving heavy, silent breaths.

Chona winced as she turned the corner. Hunes was still strapped into her seat, her head pointing down, neck distended in a sickening posture. It had snapped on impact, along with what seemed to be her spine. She was shorter than she had been, her spine snapped somewhere in the middle of her back, causing her to fold back and forward, her entire upper body connected by skin alone. She was covered in lacerations, but the area around the open wounds weren’t soaked in blood. They’d happened after she’d died. When the griffon had rolled the plane.

Docks was even worse. His clothing was covered in thick, clotting blood, untold wounds ravaging every inch of his skin. He had survived the initial crash, apparently, because his harness was unbuckled, but he hadn’t left the plane. Leaning closer, Chona saw that his seatbelt, which was made of simple iron, had somehow been bent in the crash. The strap that ran through it was halfway sawed through, his belt knife still clutched in one hand.

The top half of his skull was missing. Chona could see the pink of his brain, or at least parts of it. Only when the wriggling mass of flies buzzed aside. He’d survived until the griffon had come for the upper wing. The plane flipping had crushed his head, killing him on the spot.

Tinvel held his hand out, a half-formed, croaking sentence failing to get through his lips.

“I… they were…”

“I know,” Chona said.

“He was- he was still-”

“I know.”

“If I’d turned around sooner…”

“It was a miracle he survived the crash in the first place. Even if we’d landed right away, we wouldn’t have gotten there in time.” Chona took a step forward, holding her breath as she looked into the cockpit. “Both of his legs are broken. He wasn’t going anywhere. Even if he’d crawled out, the griffon would have gotten him. I guarantee you they’d have grabbed Docks instead of the wing.”

Tinvel’s jaw bobbed back and forth. He bit his lower lip, trying to hold back, but his eyes were already watering.

Chona took a step forward, reaching to reassure him, but before she could, Tinvel fell forward, vomiting profusely onto the grass.

She came up next to him anyway, carefully kneeling at his side. She reached out a hand, moving to pat his back, then stopped.

She… wasn’t sure what to do. She’d discovered she was a mage when she was ten years old. She’d killed someone for the first time when she was eleven. A bandit had come after her family while they were on the road. It had been a single catfolk with a rusty sword, barely a threat, but her parents had been unarmed. With a muttered word and angry gesture, she’d lit his fur on fire as he reached for her mother. She hadn’t been old enough then to really understand what it meant to kill someone. She hadn’t even seen the aftermath; her father had scooped her up in his arms and sprinted away, leaving the bandit to his slow death. She’d heard his screams fade into the distance, and she’d felt proud of it.

By the time she’d been old enough to understand what it really meant to see someone die, she’d killed so many she was already numb to it. Her parents had mourned her childhood, seeing their twelve-year-old daughter putting men and women to the torch, and at the time, she hadn’t understood why they were so sad.

So, unlike Tinvel, she’d learned what corpses looked like. She’d smelled burnt and broken flesh. She’d helped bury the bodies she’d created. She knew from experience that when the burns were bad enough, you couldn’t just haul the victims off. You needed a good set of thick, rough leather gloves. The village blacksmith usually loaned her a pair. Without them, the blackened skin would flake off in her hands, leaving nothing more than slippery, hard-to-handle sinew beneath.

Tinvel…? Tinvel had grown up in the capital. She didn’t think he’d ever so much as seen livestock get slaughtered. The gulf between their lived experiences was too vast. She had no idea how to bridge the distance.

She let her hand fall on his back as he continued to puke, giving him a few pats. When he paused for breath, eyes wild and bloodshot, she started to say something, only to be interrupted by another bout of vomiting.

After a time, there was nothing more than bile dripping from his lips, despite how hard he clenched through every convulsion. Only then did his stomach start settling. Still without anything useful to say, Chona stood, looking around for something to cover up the corpses.

Finding nothing, she took her aviator’s jacket off, moving forward to gently place it over Hunes’s corpse. The girl’s body was bent at such a steep angle that Chona had to use her snapped neck like a coat hanger, but that at least hid the worst of it. She moved to Docks next and, without any other option, tore off a long strip of the plane’s canvas. She wrapped it around his chest, doing her best to hide his bloody form. There was nothing she could do for the pool of crimson beneath him, nor the awful sound of buzzing flies.

Behind her, Tinvel finally stopped puking. He leant back, looking at her, then at the covered bodies, and gave her a simple nod of thanks.

“We’re gonna need…” Tinvel stopped to spit several times, trying to clear his mouth. They’d left their canteens in the plane. “We have to get the engine out in case they come back. Hopefully we can salvage all of it, but we should at least the crystals. We can burn the bodies.”

“I’ll work on it.”

Tinvel stood, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “No. You’re still screwed up. I can do it.”

Chona glanced to her right. She wondered if he’d noticed the way that Hunes’s blood had dripped into the engine compartment, half-dried and caking the crystalline engine.

“Okay,” she said, because he was right. She was screwed up. She had all the disorientation of a blind drunk whose hangover had already started. She couldn’t see straight enough to know how bad her hands were shaking, but she knew it was bad.

She could at least do something for him, though. As Tinvel began pulling tools from his patchwork jacket’s pockets, Chona reached underneath the clothing she’d used to cover Hunes and began unbuckling her from her seat, keeping one hand underneath the girl’s shoulder. She let out a pained groan as Hunes’s full weight suddenly settled onto her, but thankfully she didn’t drop her. Carefully, as best she could— ignoring the way she could feel broken bones grinding beneath her fingers— Chona began dragging Hunes out of her seat.

After a few minutes of pained effort, Hunes’s corpse was free. She adjusted the jacket as she laid the corpse out, trying to pose her like she’d seen some people in her old village do for funerals, before they covered the corpse in firewood for the cremation. She didn’t know how much of a difference it would make to Tinvel, but it wasn’t like she could offer him anything else.

That done, she finally let herself sit down. She tried to keep her eyes on the sky, in case any griffons came back, but it was so difficult. The warm breeze running through her fur, which should have been so wonderfully relaxing, instead felt like it was heating her to a fever. She wanted nothing more than to stuff her face into the cool dirt and never see the sun again.

She didn’t let herself give in to the childish impulse. She kept an eye on the sky as Tinvel worked, pulling the Halfeye’s shattered engine apart piece by piece. She heard him gag several times, threatening to vomit at the viscera within, but he held himself together. She wasn’t sure if that was because he was growing more accustomed to the gore, or if he simply had nothing left in his body to throw up.

It was maybe a half hour later that she spotted something in the sky. Actually, she heard it first. A propeller thumping through the air, coming in from the south.

Chona got her feet beneath her on wobbly legs, shading her eyes. It took longer than it should have for her to pick out the green dot against the sky, but she eventually spotted Affe’s plane heading towards them.

“Affe’s on his way,” Chona announced. Probably useless to say. Tinvel had working ears.

“Great.”

Chona winced. She’d have rather heard his more familiar exasperation than that empty, emotionless statement.

Affe circled once around the crash site, searching for a place to land, then began to put down. He disappeared behind a much closer hill than the Sunrise had, his lighter plane coming to a stop much quicker. It was only a few minutes before he and Cebrav came marching over the hill.

She locked eyes with Cebrav. His expression was haggard, and he had an unnatural limp to his step; one that switched sides every few steps, rather than staying on one spot. She wondered what spellsickness felt like for him. Not any better than it did for her, it would seem.

“Hey!” Affe called out, far too chipper. “We finally charged enough to make our way over. How bad was the crash?”

Chona let silence be her answer.

Affe and Cebrav made their way down the hill, picking their way through the debris-strewn grass.

She saw the moment when they recognized what, exactly, lay beneath the lumpy pile of Chona’s discarded flight jacket.

Affe paused mid-step, his eyes widening. He seemed surprised for some reason. As if he thought their crash, a rapid, dizzying flat spin that had slammed them right into a hillside, had been as survivable as his own controlled descent.

Cebrav showed less emotion. His face paled as he looked away, grimacing, but that was it. Chona wondered how much he’d seen before. He was one of the older university students, a few years into his twenties. More than old enough to have seen something awful.

“We… we, uh, stopped at the downed griffon,” Affe said, averting his eyes.

Chona glanced at him. “Downed?”

“Dead. The dead griffon.”

“So you managed to kill it?” she asked Cebrav.

“The ground did most of the work,” he said. “It couldn’t recover in time. Hit like a rock. Feathers everywhere. Looked like a fox got into an entire city’s worth of henhouses.” He held up his jittering hands, showing off how hard they were trembling. “Fucking lucky I got them with that one spell. Electric spells… they’re not as good as I hoped. That one was all I had in me.”

“You got ‘em with it. That’s what matters.” Chona nodded at Affe. “What’d you find on the griffon?”

He glanced at Tinvel, whose upper body was still buried in the ruined fuselage of the Halfeye.

“Shouldn’t we…?”

Chona shook her head meaningfully. Tinvel’s back was trembling, rising up and down erratically.

He was crying.

She hoped she was the only one who could tell.

Affe cleared his throat, averting his eyes. “We found some pretty interesting stuff.” He turned out his pockets, tossing to the ground a pair of daggers, bits of scorched leather, a tied-up bundle of downy feathers, flight goggles not unlike her own, a compass, and the shattered head of a crossbow bolt. Then he looked up at her, chagrined.

“That’s it,” he said.

“What do you mean, that’s it?”

“That’s all they had on them. Besides their clothes, that is.”

Chona looked over the pile. There was nothing of use.

“The hells? Not even a map?”

“If they had one, it got blown away. Or maybe only the leader of the flight had a map, and the others just followed.”

Chona scratched her stomach with her tail, thinking. “What about what they were wearing?”

“Civilian clothes. Not anything like the flight equipment griffon riders used in the Governess’s reports.”

“So they didn’t want anyone to know who came after us.”

“And,” Cebrav added, “they came with the assumption that they might lose someone. That getting taken down was possible. But they still only sent three.”

“Think that means they don’t have that many in the area?”

“Maybe,” Affe said, shrugging. “Maybe they’ve got a whole flock, but they’re paranoid. Not like it’s hard to take off without wrapping yourself in an Imperial flag or whatever. They could’ve thought they’d get us all before we even blinked, but still took the right precautions. They’re not stupid.”

Tinvel finally pulled himself out of the Halfeye, holding a fistful of crystals. His eyes were wet and bloodshot, but it was hard to tell if it was from crying or vomiting.

“Who gives a fuck which side they’re on?”

Affe frowned. “It’s important. If this is a case of mistaken identity, if the True Empire was coming after us because they thought we were burning down their territory or whatever-”

“Then we’ll kill them anyway!” Tinvel’s hand flung to the two half-wrapped corpses on the ground. “Look at that! They killed them! Are you- are you all okay with that?”

“It’s a war, Tin,” Chona gently reminded him. “I know it’s hard, but there’s not-”

“Fuck that!” Tears returned to his eyes. “Fuck them! Griffons can’t fly that far. They’re in range of our planes, I guarantee it, and they can’t climb half as fast as we can. If we catch them on the ground, they’re dead! And if we can find the camp they’re from, we can figure out why the hell they did this!”

“That’s a lot of ifs,” Cebrav said. He folded his hands under his armpits to stop his trembling. “And do you really think Garen or Professor Brown is going to let us just wander off on our own?”

Tinvel looked ready to break. Chona wasn’t sure if he was going to burst into tears, a screaming fit, or both, but she didn’t want to see any of them. She stepped forward, reaching out to put a hand on his arm.

He slapped it away, pointing to the two wrapped corpses of their friends.

“Don’t! Don’t you tell me I’m being fucking stupid. You nearly killed yourself today!”

Chona took a step back, raising an eyebrow. She reached up into the sash covering her chest with her tail, slipping the communication crystal out. She balanced it for a moment on the tip of her tail, then flicked it to Tinvel, who barely caught it. Despite the fact that he was half-mad with fury, he spent a brief moment looking rather awkward to be touching something that had just been between her breasts. Chona snorted, but for once, didn’t make fun of him.

“Professor Brown would tell us to get the hells out of here right this very instant. The Governess would be enraged she lost two mages, and she’d start figuring things out on her end, but her first order would be to send us back to the city in an instant.”

“Exactly,” Affe said. “We don’t have a choice, Tinvel. We can’t just go after them.”

Chona held up a hand, silencing the prick. “I said they wouldn’t give the order. But you know who wouldn’t? Someone who’d get royally pissed if we didn’t chase down some dangerous spies flying over Tulian? The one person in power who’d really, really understand how badly you want to go kill these bastards?”

“Oh, shit,” Cebrav muttered. Affe only put his head in his hands, groaning.

Tinvel’s eyes lit up. He put the crystal to his lips, embarrassment forgotten.

“Stewardess Evie?” He asked. “Are you alone?”

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