She frowned, but Zoa spoke up quietly. “You could try shooting the drones. Your gift is light.”
“You want me to shoot them?”
Elder Tan glanced at Zoa and Ren, then back at Isavel. “Could you?”
Isavel shrugged. “I have no idea. I suppose I can shoot weakly enough that it shouldn’t damage it, at least. Let’s see.”
She raised a palm and hit the drone with the most feeble shot she could manage. The drone immediately responded, bouncing into the air with a hum, light flaring beneath those disks. It didn’t go very far, though, hovering a few feet above her head.
“What happened?” Aren sounded surprised; the drone must have reported being attacked.
“I tried giving it some power.” Obviously that wouldn’t work. She reached into her pocket and pulled out rations wrapped in a leaf, stuffing everything into her mouth and chewing as fast as she could. As she chewed, she noticed something on the bottom of the drone - two grooves running in parallel along its belly.
“Aren, can you get the drone to flip over?” She tried to speak, anyway, but through the food in her mouth it came out sounding more like “Aahn, ga-oo ge ve vona viboba?”
Ren grinned nervously. “I don’t think he heard that.”
She swallowed, speaking clearer now. “Flip the drone over.”
“Can I do that?”
“Can you try?” The harshness in her own voice only hit her a second later. “Er, I’m sorry, Aren. I mean… can you ask it to flip over, please?”
“Okay.”
After a moment, the drone flipped, the disks bending unexpectedly around to face downwards even as the rest of the body was upside down. It landed on its back, belly exposed to the world, and Isavel climbed on top of it.
There were two long, silver plates, slightly inset relative to the rest of the drone’s underside. She had no idea what they were, but they looked like a better place to start than anything else.
“Is there any code on this you can understand?” She looked to Elder Tan and the two younger coders. The old man approached, his wrinkled touch illuminating tiny etchings of code all over the drone’s body. His reaction was almost immediate.
“I have never seen anything like this. This sigil must give life the drone itself. It is incredibly complex.” He paused, considered, and smiled at Ren and Zoa. “I wonder if the Mayor would allow us to take a drone back to the Institute, to learn its sigil.”
Isavel shook her head. Wise in the ways of code though Tan may be, it was clear that he wasn’t going to be a lot of use here. She turned to the machine itself. “Aren, when the drones aren’t flying, what are they doing?”
“They rest in the drone room.”
“What do they rest on?”
“Hm.” The boy’s musing hum crackled through the drone’s voice. “It kind of looks like a square with two bumps on it.”
She nodded, eyeing the two silver insets. “Okay, I’m going to guess this is how it gets its energy. Sound reasonable?”
The coders exchanged glances amongst one another and shrugged. Fine, they had no idea. She spoke to the drone instead. “Aren - do you know how much energy this drone has right now?”
“Yeah, theres a… a bar. It’s orange. It’s green when they’re full.”
“Good enough.” She spread her fingers, aiming one had at each of the inset silver plates. “Stand back everyone.”
Electricity. Lightning. She was familiar with thunderous spears of energy from the sky, bolts that could crack wood and cloud and flesh alike given half the opportunity. Could she user her hunter’s gift to create such a thing?
She started feeling around in her mind at the things she knew how to do - fire and explosions, energy and light, distance and power. Lightning was such a different beast, though.
Isavel watched tiny hexagons of light percolate on her forearms and fingers, collecting in her palm, and she looked at them very closely. There was light connecting them to her skin, as though they were being guided by something in her blood. By her gift, of course. Perhaps it wasn’t lightning the drone needed at all, but rather some of that powerful light. She let the hexagons melt back into her skin; she didn’t want to damage the drone accidentally.
She started by shining light onto the plates; light was a trick she had learned many weeks ago, on the battlefield. She intensified it as much as she could, melding the pathfinder and hunter gifts to pour bright light from the palm of her hands. The plates glowed in reflection, but the drone didn’t seem to react.
“Is this working?”
“Is what working?”
“Okay, I guess not. Hm.”
She stopped shining light on the drone. It occurred to her that perhaps it was a very slow process, but she didn’t have time for slow. It was also possible that the light that powered code might not be ordinary light. But if so, how could she replicate it?
She looked at her hunter’s hands. She might not have to.
“Okay, trying something different.”
She knelt down on the drone, placed her palms on the inset plates, and called up her gift as weakly as possible. The tiny hexagons percolated down her forearms like sweat, and… disappeared into the drone, sucked in as though by an invisible current.
The drone beeped.
“There’s a light on the front, Isavel!” Zoa sounded excited, and was pointing at something. “It’s orange.”
“Aren?”
“I don’t see anything...”
She pushed harder, pouring more and more energy into her gift. She couldn’t feel the shot, even though she was feeding it with as much power as she could muster - it seemed the energy was leeching right out of her hands. She reached for fire, and light, and power above all, and she broke out a sweat.
“The light is yellow.”
Aren’s voice crackled through. “Isavel, it’s working!”
“Good to hear. Let’s get this thing off the ground!”
Weapons zipped through the trees, some landing close but none hitting anything vital. She doubted the ghosts had any idea what she was doing. She kept focusing, kept pouring energy into the drone.
“Green.”
“It’s not done yet.”
Isavel was building up a sweat. She had thought she might be able to do this for all the drones, but she was starting to reconsider. One would have to be enough to get her up to the mountain. One would be enough. She knew it, she felt it; a forest filled with ghosts wasn’t going to stand in her way. She was on another plane.
“It’s done! Isavel, how did you do that?”
She took her hands off the drone’s charging pads and ran her fingers through her hair, dragging a thin sheen of sweat with them. She wolfed down the rest of her rations. “I stuck my hands on it. Okay, Aren, can you get the drone to carry me?”
“It’s not a carrying drone.”
Of course the one drone she charged up wasn’t a carrying drone. Shit. She hopped off the drone as it flipped up to right itself, remaining hovering around shoulder height. It was still huge, though, and looked more than capable. She crouched down on the skid and jumped up, clambering onto the drone with ease despite the slight feeling of tiredness the charging had left her with.
“Okay then - can just you send this one to the mountain?”
“Um, okay.”
She gripped the drone’s shell. “Be careful - I’m on top of it.”
“I can only tell it where to go. The drone decides how to get there. Be careful.”
Isavel swallowed her fear and mistrust of the machine. She could only hope it had some kind of self-preservation instinct. If not that, surely the gods would protect her, as they always did. That was enough for her. It would have to be.
“Isavel!”
She turned to see Hail, looking up at her from the ground. The guardswoman looked frustrated, thwarted in her duty yet again. There was something more familiar to her bearing now, though. Isavel looked at that pale face; was she felt comfortable risking s
omeone else’s life in this? She looked at the woods, peppered with the flashes of fire and light, and hung her head. The gods would guide her towards her destiny, but Hail? Anyone else? She wasn’t convinced the gods took much interest in anyone Isavel knew, except perhaps Venshi. And the ever-elusive Ada Liu, of course.
“I don’t want you following me, Hail. Stay here, stay safe. The gods will do your work while I’m away.”
Hail bit her lip and nodded. “Isavel, I will -”
Whatever Hail had wanted to say was lost in a sudden rush of air past Isavel’s ears. The drone was ascending, bearing straight towards the great white-capped mountain. She should have expected as much, but now Isavel found herself powerless, almost completely surrendered to the drone’s machinations. It thrummed towards the mountain, a solid weight underneath her, guided by a purpose only loosely connected to her own.
The fact that she was suddenly hundreds of meters in the air wasn’t comforting either.
She gripped onto whatever she could, but the drone’s smooth shell didn’t offer much purchase. It cruised over the firs and tall redwoods that would soon give way to more rugged little pines, bobbing about as ghosts took offense and started shooting at her. Isavel risked a few wild, incendiary shots down into the woods, more to send them running for cover than anything else. So long as she got past them -
Wingbeats. There were wingbeats behind her, masked by the drone’s loud humming. Golden-red flashes of light suddenly bloomed around her, threatening to hem in the drone even as it swerved to avoid the dragonfire.
She tried to turn and see what was going on, but only caught glimpses of the dragons following her, enough to know that she was far from being inside their bubble-like shields. She couldn’t attack them, and standing on the drone to invite them to a melee seemed deeply unwise.
Then all three dragons fired at her at once, and she knew - through some subtle insight of the hunter’s gift, that uncanny ability to know almost exactly how things were moving and where they would collide - that the drone was going to take a hit to the back.
She had a second or two, and her pathfinder’s gift giving her the reflexes she needed. She laced her hands together around one of the drone’s flying arms and slid off the top, dangling from the drone in mid-air. Moments later the dragonfire struck the drone’s back, and she felt the machine lurch and heave, careening sideways towards the trees. In its dying motion the drone managed to dodge the last piece of dragonfire, and then, suddenly, Isavel was clinging to a rapidly falling hunk of metal.
She had no other options. She looked down, saw the rough and spiny treetops not far below, let her hunter’s gift guide her. She let go of the drone at the right moment, even as more dragonfire streamed towards her. Isavel did what she could - she brought her shield to bear and aimed it at the rapidly rising fir tree.
The first impact was catastrophic - the force of the impact burst her shield into nothing, the explosion throwing her back up into the air by a meter or so and knocking the wind out of her at the same time. The second impact was another kind of terrible - most of her speed was gone, but the tree’s needles punctured her flesh, its bark scraped and shredded the skin on her arms and legs, something caught her tunic. Isavel suddenly found herself strangled, hung by her own clothes in a tree, flailing and unable to breath.
Then the tunic gave way, tore, and she fell down again one final time, throwing herself against the tree’s core. The fall was over. She ripped off the shredded remains of her tunic, pathfinder’s brace still intact underneath, and threw it down to the ground. She melded into the tree’s textures and colours so quickly that she almost thought she had lost her arms in the fall.
“Where are you, little thrice-gifted?”
A dragon’s voice. She looked up, wondering if it was the one she had amputated earlier. It was not.
“I promised you I would have your body.”
Isavel was trying very, very hard not to make any sounds. There were fresh pine needles jutting from all over her skin, and she was bleeding from wounds on her shoulders, legs, ribs, and forearms. Everything hurt, she was tired, her plan had failed, and now, if she didn’t think of something extremely quickly, she would be killed, or taken away for her powers to be claimed by the enemy. Duties unfulfilled either way.
“Show yourself, and I will make this easy.”
She looked up to the blue sky, the lacy clouds separating her from that silvery arch that stretched from one horizon to the other. The ring, the seat of the gods. They never made anything easy, did they?
She counted her breaths. The dragons truly couldn’t see her, it seemed - she was alone, briefly, in a strange way. She felt blood dripping down her skin. The gods were not here, her friends - what friends she had thought she had - were not here, Ada was not here. It was just her, and ever-inescapable fate.
The branches swayed around her as she stepped forward.
She let the pathfinder’s gift fall, despite all her instincts, her natural olive skin no longer a match for the tree around her. The dragons saw her, and the largest of them descended.
“This will be over quickly, White Witch.” It spoke that mocking title in an eerily familiar voice. She saw its inhuman features, and the strangely human eyes they framed, as it bore closer and closer. The shell around it rippled gold with a few stray shots as it approached. Isavel offered no resistance, meeting its gaze.
Why the dragons hadn’t learned their lesson yet?
As the shell enveloped her and the dragon extended its scaly claws to whisk her away, Isavel jumped, meeting its talon with her own gifted daggers. The dragon roared and kicked back, but she was already on it, tearing in as she climbed. Blade in, blood out. Blade in, blood out. Deep regal red gushed onto her ragged arms, and where the dragon blood met her open wounds she could feel every nerve suddenly light on fire.
Her sense of balance was completely gone as the dragon spun around and roared, its twisting body her sole point of reference, and so she dug on as it twisted and beat its wings. Suddenly she was on its back. She was on the verge of throwing up or losing consciousness, or both, when the dragon turned upside-down. She wrapped her arms around its neck, dangling to avoid the fall, grip hardened by a sudden rush of adrenaline.
She called up a great blade on her left arm, holding it against the dragon’s throat. “Drop me and your head comes off!”
“I will live again! In your corpse!” The dragon was snarling, but it did right itself, and with a thump Isavel was suddenly riding the thing’s back. She took no chances as it continued to twist and shake and coil.
Of course death threats wouldn’t work. Nothing worked. Everything was always going wrong, and this dragon thought it could just deny her what she needed? She felt impatience and frustration boiling inside herself, and leaned down to yell into its ears. “I’ll cut off your arms and legs! I will gouge out one eye and rip out your tongue and all your teeth, but your ghostly friends won’t put you down because you’ll still be able to fly and shoot! How about that ?”
The dragon flipped over again, but this time she was prepared, and her arms and legs were both wrapped around its surprisingly narrow, almost human-sized body. Then it righted itself again. It couldn’t actually fly upside-down.
“Stop that!”
Before anything else could happen the amputated dragon was diving towards her, bubbles collided, and she turned with her warrior’s shield, flinging it off without thinking straight into the creature’s gaping maw.
The shield shattered into a cloud of blue-white shards of light, the second dragon’s head cracked into a spray of blood and bone, and everything was flung away from the blast, including the dragon she was on. Coated in dragon’s blood, all her wounds searing at the contact, she swung her fist back with another dagger in place of that shield, digging into her mount’s shoulder and roaring into its ears even as it turned to see what had happened.
“Take me to the mountain’s northeast and I won’t mutilate you!”
&
nbsp; The flying was somehow not so dizzying anymore. She wasn’t disoriented or confused, even as the dragon twisted and turned. It all seemed… natural. She felt the energy of her gifts shimmering underneath her skin, begging to be let out. Something was burning in her veins, and droplets of dragon blood, tangy and spicy, were trickling into her mouth from her face. As the dragon moved towards the mountain - it was actually obeying her - Isavel felt a strange rage building in her chest.
“Fly faster! Fly or I’ll burn your scales off and -”
Something flashed behind her eyes, something painful and infuriating all at once, and then she heard the wingbeats of another dragon in the air. She turned and roared, one hand raised, and all around her field of vision there was light and heat. She could feel her gift awakening, without her calling upon it, and suddenly her shout was a feeble, crackling gold-and-red fireball that splashed against the incoming dragon’s shell. The attack was weak, but the dragon veered around and fled.
What had just happened? She hadn’t used her gift on purpose, and it had not come from her hand.
Why wasn’t she nauseous anymore, as the dragon twisted and turned towards the mountain?
She hugged the dragon’s neck closer.
“Fly faster if you want to live!” She noticed red-gold light glimmering on its scales as she growled at it. She could feel a gift at work in her core, feeble and tenuous, but it was not one she recognized. She kept threatening. “Nobody’s coming for you.”
The creature beat its wings faster and faster, bringing her closer and closer to the mountain peak. As it did she started feeling around inside her mind, trying to pin down this strange and alien sense of gift that she hadn’t ever noticed before. Her arms and legs and body were still coated in blood, both dragons’ and her own. She had not been this bloody since…
Since the day she died. Covered in the blood of her neighbours and family and friends.
Had the gods given her her gift through the blood of others? Was she taking the dragons’ own gift now?
First Angels Page 26
