Page 35 of Ignite the Infernos

Needing no more encouragement than that, Karis adjusts his form for speed and targets the invisible shield. He rushes in like a meteor, only slowing slightly when he extends his claw-tipped hands like he’s about to dive through the barrier. Suspense stalls my breaths, and tension tightens my wings and spine.

He hits, and the impact sounds like a bomb going off. I feel a pulse of pressure pass through me from the hit, and the others rumble their shock when it looks as though Karis just crashed into an invisible wall. He’s suspended midair, his arms and legs pressed against something that looks like nothing. A tremor moves through his wings and scales as he shakes off the force of the brutal impact.

“Fuck, that hurt,” Karis grunts, and his affinity must be healing something, because he doesn’t immediately spring back into the air to regroup.

Tove watches him intently, weaving herself back and forth above him. Chatter fills my mind, but something strange catches my eye, and I home in on it. It’s hard to trace, but a ripple moves through the air, heading right for Karis, like an underwater predator that’s just found its next meal.

Alarm detonates through me. “Get off!” I roar, both mentally and physically, but it’s too late.

The ripple reaches Karis, and bolts of magic explode out from the barrier’s surface and begin zapping the massive Thrasher relentlessly. Karis tries to take off, but the attacking current refuses to let him go. Karis’s roar of pain cleaves me in two, and I take off in a flash of rage to get to him, begging the Source with each flap of my wings that I won’t be too late.

Chapter 16

Ever

THE CRACKLING OF A WELDING machine and the sharp sound of a grinder fill the garage. The steady clicking from my ratchet is like the rhythm section to a song I’ve heard a thousand times before, and yet I still can’t decide if I love it or hate it.

“There . . . got it,” I grunt to myself and then wiggle out from under my cycle.

I check my right stabilizer from this angle and nod. Hopefully, that adjustment will keep it from trying to dump me in the sand like it was doing before. I give the sandcycle a final once-over and grab my helmet off the floor just in case I’m wrong about the stabilizer fixing the issue. With a tired huff, I lower the sandcycle from where it’s being held in the air. The steady thrum of the lift cuts off when the flier is once again resting on sand, and I unhook the clamps from around my ride and fold them out of the way.

“Here goes nothing,” I murmur, pulling on my helmet and climbing onto the machine I half fabricated and most definitely enhanced over the last day or so.

The sandcycle rumbles to life beneath me, and I flip the switch and toe the pedal that levitates it into the air. I lean forward and slowly steer out of the bay I’ve been working in. My helmet visor automatically darkens to adjust to the bright day, and stats begin to tick across the screen in front of me as the tech registers my surroundings. I clear the garage and pick up speed, maneuvering around camp and pushing the limits of the sandcycle as best I can in the confines of the wards.

It’s no longer pulling to the right like it was before, and the ride is much smoother now that I’ve tweaked the intake valves. I smile to myself and set the sandcycle down next to the others near the training facility. A familiar sense of pride and comfort cascades through me as I climb off and pluck my helmet from my head.

In Four Tiers, I had no choice but to fumble through a world I didn’t know. I was out of my element in every possible way, juggling the overwhelming and the unfamiliar, all from my back foot. But this—I give the flier a proud little pat—I know this.

I can take apart, repair, and reassemble with nothing more than scraps, a few tools, and some ingenuity. Here, I can trust the mechanics of something. If the correct parts are put together in the proper order and given the right fuel, a machine will do what it’s supposed to do at least eighty percent of the time. There’s no betrayal or manipulation. It’s not going to ask you to be its mate and then accuse you of treachery. And it sure as shit isn’t scheming behind your back or interested in stealing your blood. Spilling it is another matter altogether, but seven times out of ten, that’s operator error.

“Is she still bucking like a bronco?” Enslee calls from the back of Craith’s flier as he sets it down across from mine.

“No. I’ve got her sorted now,” I shout back.

I duck my face into the neck of my shirt to prevent the sand from blasting me, and keep it that way until I hear Craith kill his engine. He and Iker returned late last night and confirmed the other Syphons made it onto the boat just fine and left without any further complications. They should be a quarter of the way to their destination by now, and not a minute too soon either. The loam hounds were out first thing this morning, and it took them and the dragons less time than I anticipated to discover our tunnel, map it, breach it, and then block it off.

Enslee climbs off the sandcycle and wipes sweat from her brow with the sleeve of her shirt. She looks up at the sky, in search of dragons, but I haven’t spotted any in the air since they drove a tornado into our wards just over an hour ago. They know something is here, but they haven’t made any other attempts to figure out what yet.

I have a feeling it’s because they’re waiting on orders. Most of Aeson’s Wing is here now, but Ogdan, Sondar, and the commander himself haven’t been spotted. He’s either off doing something somewhere else or he’s hiding in one of his oversized tents while Sondar and Ogdan fan him with palm fronds and feed him chilled grapes.

I sigh and shake out my hands. My nerves are shot at this point, not that they were in the best shape to begin with. The presence of all these dragons has my fight or flight really fucking confused. Nothing is happening, which is good and a bad, but it’s the waiting that fucks with you. By the time anything pops off, you’re already half-crazed just from the anticipation of it.

“Six fliers ready to go,” Craith announces as he climbs off the last one that needed attention. “The gear is ready too. Mayur just needs to adjust the respirators on a couple of helmets, and we’re all set.”

“Everyone has their chutes?” Enslee asks.

“Sure do,” Craith confirms.

“Wyverns are set?” I chime in, and he lobs a smile and then a nod my way.

“We’re as ready as we’ll ever be,” he assures confidently, but it does little to assuage my persistent worry, and going off the welling concern in my sister’s gaze, it missed the mark with her too.

I lean back against my cycle and study the others sporadically parked around the clearing between the training area and the stack. The sandcycles are a strange amalgamation of an old-world superbike and a jet that’s been patched together with the latest magi-tech that sorcai blood can buy on the black market.

The front is bulky but aerodynamic. There’s an open cockpit of sorts with a windscreen that protects varying instruments and controls. The fliers are designed to be ridden forward leaning, which leaves the operator straddling a volatile engine that’s only happy when achieving speeds that are either breakneck or supersonic. Either way, you’re probably not surviving any kind of crash, but at least you had fun flying the death mobile before meeting a fiery end.

A whirring fills my ears, and my head snaps up to find Gable flying down the zip line.