Page 63 of Fly to Fury
“And clearly a lot you haven’t told me yet,” Mak grumbled as they neared the hangar stretching before them. But he sighed and held her gaze. “How can I help?”
There wasn’t time to send him all the way to the storage caves up in the mountains for extra magical power cells.
“Get your hands on whatever magical power cells you can without risking not having enough spares for the aeroplanes.” Pip ducked inside the large hangar door. “If the enemy gets past our defenses and bombs my shield, adding the magic stored within the power cell will reinforce it.”
Mak nodded, patted her back, then peeled away from her to head toward Bay 3. Perhaps he was going to liberate a magical power cell from the airships’ section of storage.
Pip hurried out the opposite hangar door. It had been less than fifteen minutes since she’d run out that door in search of Fieran’s dacha. Mere minutes since she’d raced with Colonel Loiatir toward Merrik’s crashing aeroplane.
And yet it felt like hours. Her world had shifted. No, more than shifted. Crashed and burned. Exploded into thousands of pieces.
In the sky above the frontlines, aeroplanes still swarmed and fought. Burning aeroplanes spiraled out of the sky, crashing to the earth among the bunkers and dugouts of the frontline infantry. Farther out, the great behemoths of the airships pounded each other into submission, wreathed in smoke and fire until little could be seen except the faint outlines of their bulk against the sky.
And yet it was the horizon that drew the eye. Beyond the Wall, flashes of blue magic flared in brilliant bursts of power. The great warrior Laesornysh had gone to war once again.
Pip planted herself against the metal wall of the hangar, her magic humming in her veins. Digging deep within herself, she cast a shield of her magic, extending it behind her to cover the hangar and before her to extend over the shelters and beyond to the headquarters perched on the bluff.
At that distance, she stretched her magic thin, but right now, she didn’t care.
Fieran had crashed. Merrik had crashed. Some of the other flyboys she cared about might be crashing even now.
She would stand for them. No matter what it cost.
Chapter
Twenty-One
He drifted within an ocean of darkness, waves of agony crashing over him, threatening to take him down, down, down until he never woke.
He might have opened his eyes. He thought he might have seen a burning aeroplane taking on three others. But he couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t be sure of anything for what seemed like ages untold.
When Fieran finally peeled his eyes open, it was to a smoke-filled sky above and the rays of a still rising sun. He couldn’t see any aeroplanes directly above him, but he couldn’t work up the strength to turn his head to look around.
Pain filled him, so all-encompassing that the exact points didn’t register. When he sucked in a breath, his chest flared with it. His exhale rattled and gurgled. He tasted blood.
He was partially sunken into the mud, the damp shivering through him in a counterpoint to the burning pain.
He should move, shouldn’t he? But he couldn’t seem to find the will, much less the strength.
Fog still clung to the ground. Or perhaps that was thegray of death closing around him. Distant gunfire cracked while deeper booms echoed from the sky and reverberated through the mud beneath him.
He was going to die here. Alone. Half-buried in the mud of a foreign land.
Squishing sounds squashed closer before a man wearing the gray-blue uniform of a Mongavarian soldier appeared out of the fog and halted beside Fieran, peering down at him.
Fieran blinked up at him.
The Mongavarian turned and waved at someone Fieran couldn’t see. “Found him! I thought this was where he fell.”
More squishing came closer before other Mongavarian soldiers clustered around Fieran, standing over him.
All Fieran could do was stare up at them. He wasn’t sure he could even get his mouth to work enough to speak.
“He’s still alive.” One of them poked Fieran’s arm with a toe of his boot.
Fieran squeezed his eyes shut at the rush of pain, unable to fully quash the moan that bubbled within his chest.
“Not for long, it looks like.” One of the others grimaced and gestured at Fieran. “I doubt he’d survive if we tried to get him back to the general.”
