Gravity is not a suggestion; it is a law. And the Rusty Pelican was breaking it in the worst way possible.
The airship plummeted through the cloud layer, a burning comet of canvas and brass. On the flight deck, the world was a blur of screaming wind and flashing alarms.
"She's breaking apart!" Skid screamed, fighting the dead wheel. "The frame can't take the G-force!"
Julian stood in the center of the deck, his legs spread wide for balance. He gripped the main mast with his crystal hand. He wasn't trying to fly the ship; he was trying to hold it together.
Hold, he screamed into the metal. Don't let go.
He poured his resonance into the ship's skeleton. He felt the rivets popping, the iron beams bending. He visualized them welding back together, forcing the atoms to cling to each other for just a few seconds longer.
"Brace!" Lyra yelled, grabbing Julian's belt and hooking him to the railing.
Through the smoke, the clouds parted.
Below them, the ground rushed up to meet them. It wasn't the flat glass of the wasteland. It was a jaw of jagged, snow-capped mountains. The Razor Peaks.
"Aim for the trees!" Julian roared.
Skid yanked the emergency flaps. The ship jerked, banking hard away from a granite cliff face.
They hit the treeline.
CRACK-SNAP-CRUNCH.
The sound was deafening. Giant pine trees shattered like toothpicks against the hull. The balloon was ripped to shreds, the canvas flailing wildly.
The ship slammed into the side of the mountain.
The impact threw Julian forward. The connection to the metal broke. The world spun—sky, snow, fire, darkness.
Then, the ship screamed one last time as the hull sheared in two. The tail section broke off, spinning down into a ravine. The nose section, where the flight deck was, plowed a trench through the snow and rock before finally coming to a grinding, shuddering halt against a massive boulder.
Silence returned. But it was the ringing silence of a concussion.
Julian woke up to the taste of copper.
He was hanging upside down. The flight deck was inverted. He was dangling by his belt, which was hooked to the twisted railing.
"Lyra?" he croaked.
His voice sounded small in the wreckage.
He unhooked his belt and dropped to the snow-covered ceiling—which was now the floor. He groaned, checking his limbs. Bruised, battered, but no broken bones. The Black-Iron ring was still on his finger, thank the gears.
He looked around. The flight deck was a ruin. Snow was drifting in through the shattered windows, mixing with the smoke from the control console.
"Help..." a weak voice whimpered from under a pile of debris.
Julian scrambled over. He saw a flash of green hair.
"Skid!"
He grabbed a heavy wooden beam and heaved it aside. Skid was curled up in a ball, clutching her arm. Her goggles were cracked, and she was shivering violently.
"My arm," she gasped. "I think it's broken."
Julian quickly checked. It was a clean break. "I can't fix it," he said gently. "Not without resonance, and I can't risk taking the ring off right now. But I can splint it."
He tore a strip from his coat and used a piece of wreckage to bind her arm. Skid bit her lip to keep from screaming.
"Where are the others?" Skid asked, looking around with wild eyes. "Where's Lyra?"
Julian stood up and looked through the hole where the door used to be.
The back half of the ship was gone.
"The tail section broke off," Julian said, a cold pit forming in his stomach. "Lyra... she was near the aft gunnery station when we hit."
He climbed out of the wreckage into the freezing mountain air.
They had crashed on a steep slope. About a mile down into the valley, smoke was rising from a second crash site.
"She's down there," Julian whispered. "She has to be."
"We can't go down there," Skid said, crawling out behind him. She pointed at the sky. "Look."
High above the mountains, three black dots were circling. Imperial Vultures. Long-range reconnaissance drones.
"They're scanning for the wreckage," Skid said. "If they see heat signatures, they'll bomb the site."
Julian looked at the distant smoke of the tail section. He looked at the drones.
"We need to move," Julian said. "But we can't go straight to the tail. We'd be sitting ducks on the open snow."
He scanned the terrain. To their left, a dense forest of ancient pines offered cover. It led down the mountain, flanking the ravine.
"We go through the trees," Julian decided. "We circle around to the tail section. We find Lyra. And then we vanish."
"And if she's dead?" Skid asked, her voice trembling.
Julian turned to her. His eyes were hard, the blue flecks in his irises glowing faintly even in the daylight.
"She's not dead," Julian said. "I would feel it."
He didn't know if that was true. The ring blocked his sensing. But he had to believe it.
"Come on," Julian helped Skid up. "Can you walk?"
"I can limp," the mechanic grumbled. "But if I see Blitz again, I'm going to beat him to death with his own wooden leg."
"Get in line," Julian muttered.
They began to trudge through the deep snow, moving into the shadows of the treeline.
As they walked, Julian noticed something disturbing.
The trees here were wrong.
They weren't just pine. Their bark was metallic, shimmering like iron pyrite. The needles were sharp, rigid wires.
This wasn't just a mountain range. It was the edge of the Ferrous Forest.
And in the silence of the trees, something was watching. Not a drone. Not a Silence unit.
Something that chattered.
Click-click-click.
Julian stopped. He looked into the dense, metallic undergrowth.
"Skid," he whispered. "Do you have a weapon?"
"A wrench," she pulled it from her belt with her good hand.
"Keep it ready."
From the shadows, a pair of glowing yellow eyes appeared. Then another. Then a dozen.
They looked like wolves, but their fur was matted with wires, and their jaws were hinged with rusted springs. Scrap-Wolves.
They stepped out of the trees, encircling the two survivors. They were starving. And they smelled fresh meat.
Julian clenched his fist. The ring burned cold on his finger.
"I really hate this planet," Julian sighed.