A Soft Landing on Solid Basalt

How many safety regulations can a man violate before terminal velocity turns him into grease on a rock?

According to Section Twelve of the Tana-Mega Linesman Handbook, unauthorized descent without an anchored counter-pulley was a Class-A infraction punishable by dock of wages. It said nothing about falling six hundred feet through a screaming monsoon with a half-wild storm shifter clutching your lapels.

Mist tore across my face in blinding sheets. The iron skeleton of Tower 44 was already a vanishing gray needle above us, lost to the cloud wall. My toolbox was gone. My spare crimpers were gone. My stomach was somewhere up around my collarbones.

"Wings!" I roared into the howling gale, spitting out rainwater. "Use the wings, or we're both street pizza!"

"I'm trying!" Sela yelled back.

Her grip on my canvas harness tightened until the heavy cotton strained. Beneath her soaked tunic, two immense arches of glowing indigo feathers burst outward with the sound of snapping canvas. The shockwave threw an arc of cobalt lightning directly into my chest.

My teeth clicked. My tongue went numb with the sharp, coppery tang of ozone. The static surge tore down my arms and straight into my marrow, harmlessly grounding itself into my cellular sponge.

The sudden drag hit us like a runaway steam carriage.

Our plunge snapped into a sickening, shuddering scoop. Sela let out a strangled squawk as the updraft caught her primaries, pitching us into a violent sideways spin. Her feathers weren't smooth; they crackled with erratic, sputtering blue sparks, starving for proper atmospheric current. Every downstroke shuddered through her shoulders. She was running on empty fumes from the wire she had chewed.

"We're dropping too fast!" she shouted, her manic golden eyes wide with panic. "The current is thin down here! I don't have enough lift for two!"

"Stop flailing and bank left!" I yelled.

Below us, the thick cloud soup parted for a fraction of a second. I saw the jagged teeth of the southern plateau rushing up—black basalt pillars sharp enough to fillet a whale, with a narrow shelf of loose shale perched three hundred feet above the gorge.

If we hit the pillars, we were dead. If we overshot the shelf, we'd plunge another two thousand feet into the boiling rapids of the canyon floor.

I didn't think about the handbook. I reached down to my tool belt, found the secondary safety lanyard still hooked to my heavy brass ring, and yanked the spring-loaded carabiner free.

"Hold still, Feathers!"

"Don't call me Feathers, Spark-Plug—what are you doing?"

I wrapped the vulcanized rubber strap around her lower waist, snapped the forged brass clip into my own sternum ring, and pulled the cinch tight with a vicious yank. The canvas bound us belly to belly, locking our centers of gravity into a single rigid mass.

"Hey!" she gasped, her face inches from mine.

"You're fishtailing because our weight is split!" I barked, grabbing the thick tendon at the base of her left wing-joint with my insulated leather glove. "Lock your core! Flare right on three!"

The contact sent another jolt through my ribs. But with our bodies pinned together, her wild, sputtering wings stopped thrashing independently. I pulled her left shoulder down with all my weight, forcing her aerofoil into an aggressive, descending bank.

"One! Two! Flare!"

Sela screamed, a raw, fierce sound that carried more thunder than human breath. She snapped both electric-blue wings wide, catching the canyon's updraft with a deafening boom.

The deceleration tore the air from my lungs.

We skimmed over the needle-sharp tip of the first basalt spire by less than six inches. The tip clipped the heel of my right work boot, tearing away the vulcanized rubber tread in a spray of black crumbs.

Then the shale shelf slammed into us.

We hit the rock at forty miles an hour. Sela's wings folded reflexively around us like a cocoon of glowing down, taking the brunt of the primary impact before she lost her grip. We tumbled across the loose gravel in a tangled knot of limbs, canvas straps, and flying blue sparks.

I rolled four times, skidded across ten feet of wet scree on my back, and came to an abrupt stop with my shoulder wedged against a slab of solid ironstone.

For five long seconds, the only sound was the howling rain and the ragged wheeze of my own crushed lungs.

I didn't move. Moving required muscles, and right now every nerve in my torso felt like it had been dipped in hot pepper oil and scrubbed with steel wool.

"Status check," I croaked. The sound came out as a raspy, rhythmic series of static clicks. Tsk-tsk-chhh.

"You're alive," a voice muttered from three feet away.

I turned my head slowly.

Sela was sprawled on her stomach among the shattered shale. Her wings had retracted into two damp, shimmering streaks along her shoulder blades, leaving only a faint dusting of glowing indigo down clinging to her skin. Her dark hair was plastered to her forehead, and her fingers were digging into the wet moss like she wanted to strangle the earth for not being softer.

She groaned, pushed herself up onto her elbows, and stared at me.

Her eyes were wide, vibrant, and completely unhinged.

"You steered me," she said, her voice breathy with disbelief. "You lashed yourself to my frame and trimmed my rudder."

"It's called basic rigging," I clicked out, working my jaw until my tongue stopped buzzing. "Standard procedure when dealing with an unstable load."

"I am not an unstable load! I am a tempest-born shifter of the Upper Ridge!"

"You're an uncertified aerial hazard who nearly turned us into jam," I said, finally dragging myself up into a sitting position against the boulder. "And you broke sixty years of company bolts on Tower 44. Boss Gali is going to deduct the repair cost from my pension."

Sela let out a sharp, incredulous bark of laughter. She crawled toward me on hands and knees, moving with a fluid, predatory grace that didn't belong to any city girl I'd ever met. She stopped when her knees bumped against my outstretched boots.

She didn't look at my bruises or my torn canvas trousers. She looked at my bare wrists, where the faint blue web of lightning burns was already fading into my pale skin, completely absorbed.

She reached out with one trembling, soot-stained finger and pressed it against the base of my throat.

A tiny, bright spark snapped between her nail and my pulse point.

I didn't flinch. The jolt slid into my bloodstream like a sip of lukewarm ginger broth.

Sela's breath hitched. A slow, terrifyingly bright grin spread across her mouth, showing sharp, gleaming white teeth.

"You really don't burn," she whispered, leaning so close I could smell the ozone and rain radiating off her skin. "You took three thousand volts of my emergency backwash, and your pulse didn't even skip a beat."

"My pulse is currently furious," I corrected dryly. "And my hair feels like a wire brush."

She ignored me, her grin widening until her golden eyes sparkled with reckless delight.

"The cloud canyon is dead because the cartel is vacuuming the sky," she said, tapping my collarbone with possessive familiarity. "My sisters are starving. I was starving. But you... you're a walking, talking lightning rod with legs and hands."

"I am a licensed technician," I said firmly, trying to ignore the prickle of heat traveling down my neck where her skin touched mine. "With eight paid sick days remaining."

"Not anymore, Spark-Plug," Sela purred, grabbing my coat lapels and pulling me half an inch forward. "You belong to the sky now."