CHAPTER 7 KORI #3
Has a two-thousand-foot fall ever been survived by any Pagonian?
Let alone their illegally modified robot companion?
I curl my head to my chest, arms around my knees, and aim to land on them rather than risk snapping my spine.
Fully expecting the breath to be knocked from my lungs, I inhale as much as I can.
Then impact.
My armor takes the brunt of it, but the fall’s height and momentum send me careening across the rocky ground on my side, jostling on the uneven stone, one arm viciously pinned between my torso and the ground, my skin splitting and stinging and blood no doubt spilling behind my protective gear.
I taste rust and salt in my mouth, too, and only then do I realize I’ve bitten my tongue between my gritted teeth.
At last my sliding comes to a stop. I roll onto my back, chest heaving for air, every limb thoroughly hating me. My vision swims, swirls. I can’t tell if the darkness all around me is the Shadowlands or unconsciousness threatening to steal me away.
“Kori.”
A warm metal hand tests the pulse at my wrist. I groan, confused, expecting Aspect’s chilly touch, but by comparison to the frozen wastes about us, their hand is practically heated.
“You’re”—I cough, hard—“okay?”
Okay is a stretch. Aspect’s head lolls at a corpse-like angle, locked into looking at me askance. Both their feet are smoking, the metal blackened, where their propulsion rockets fought so desperately to slow their fall. When they move to kneel beside me, they practically collapse to their knees.
I finally manage a full breath; it shudders through my entire frame. “I’m okay,” I say, mostly to myself. “I’m okay.”
Aspect tries to shake their head, but the servos just sort of scream. It’s stuck in that terrible hanged-man twist. “Kori’s arm—is not—okay.”
“What?” I say, not understanding. My voice shakes like the surface of a water glass. Or is it my whole body that’s shaking, harder and harder, even though every shake brings with it a jolt of stabbing, vicious pain in my—
Oh, stars above, my left arm.
Aspect’s head is cosmetic compared to this.
I look like a discarded marionette. A shoulder should never, ever twist at that angle, almost inverted on itself from instinctually attempting to break my fall.
I want to scream and scream, but all that comes out is a child’s terrified whimper. “No, no, no, it hurts, it hurts …”
“Aspect will find—help.”
“Aspect will stay right here until I can stand up.”
“Aspect—is not sure”—they move to rise, pushing up with their hands, but their feet are wobbly, ringed with smoke—“that Kori—or Aspect—should stand. But Aspect would rather—it were Aspect.”
A second heartbeat throbs in my shoulder.
Only continuing to quicken, my breaths rattle my whole body, intensifying the anguish.
Logically, an arm injury shouldn’t prevent standing on my own two feet, but even shifting my weight on the ground makes the shoulder pain surge so severely that I see stars, and not the twinkling ones above us.
I stare, woozy, into the vast dark landscape.
I’m still alive, but it feels like the shroud has come for me already.
“We have to find Alpha. They’re the only one who can help us.”
“Others must—live here?”
“Others,” I echo, my throat constricting. “Not like us.”
And here we are, guarded only by the mountains spearing into the darkness behind us.
On every other side, we’re completely exposed.
Worse predators than the Passage’s sand serpents likely live here, and I don’t even know what to watch for.
If random nightfolk stumble upon us, they could do anything they want to me, torture us both for sport instead of simply letting me die.
I feel through my pockets with a shivering hand; miraculously, my Morpheus sphere for trade remains intact, but my ruined comms tablet meets my flesh as pricks of broken glass. Likewise, I can feel two unevenly broken halves of the “business card” given to me by the Morpheus Market gremlin.
There’s no way to signal for help. Nobody who knows we’re here.
Even if I reset Aspect’s installed tracker to be accurate—presuming it even survived our crash landing—I strongly doubt it can transmit across the entire planet.
It was never meant to mark travel further than the Passage’s midpoint.
For all her desperate attempts to control and micromanage my movements, Chloe has really, truly lost track of us, and at possibly the only time when I don’t want that.
Even my mother, incandescent with rage at what I’ve done, would bring grateful tears to my eyes right now.
The truest dark I’ve ever known watches and says nothing.
Aspect moves their hands to my good arm, just under the armpit, poised to lift. “Aspect—helps—Kori stand?”
“That won’t be necessary,” I start, but the mech is already heaving me to my feet with all the force I’ve managed to install into their spindly, squeaky frame.
It hurts, oh, how it hurts, and I’m shrieking just to prevent biting clean through my own lower lip, but I find my footing.
“Kori stands!” Aspect proclaims, hands brought together in celebration, even as their own footing on their smoking feet remains uncertain. “Now—where?”
I look up to where Charon—or what’s left of it—remains wedged in the mountains.
Absent the covering dome, the cockpit caved in on itself.
One side of the wings seems gone entirely, the other bent at assorted strange angles, a proud bird brought low and humbled, reduced to a smoking, burning husk.
Tears sting my eyes. But as my gaze wanders farther up, hope bursts anew.
Like a primitive Earthside spear, Charon impaled itself in the second of five consecutive stone spires.
Meet me at the Second Spire. We’ve reached the agreed-upon meeting place after all.
And Alpha is nearby, bearing the memory that may finally awaken Aspect’s potential—and hopefully a method of exiting the Shadowlands before the other nightfolk realize we’re trespassing (or Chloe realizes I’m gone).
Despite everything, a smile overtakes me. “I think we’re exactly where we need to be.”