Chapter 4
Ember
The world comes back in pieces. Heat against my face. Wrong, too close, scorching the air in my lungs. Metal groaning somewhere overhead. A smell that makes my stomach lurch: fuel and burned insulation and something that stings my throat.
My eyes won’t focus. Everything tips sideways. Wrong angle. The helicopter cabin stretches above me instead of around me, seat straps cutting into my shoulder in a position that doesn’t make sense.
We’re not flying anymore.
Memory crashes through the fog. Luke’s hands on the controls. The shriek of failing rotors. Mara’s scream cutting through the wind. Trees rushing up to meet us, then—
We crashed.
Oh God. Oh God!
My breath comes in short, sharp gasps that leave my lips tingling.
Calm down, Ember. You need to stay calm.
I try to move. My body doesn’t respond the way it should. Everything feels distant, wrapped in cotton. My hand finds the buckle release by instinct, and the straps let go with a metallic snap. I fall three feet and land hard on what used to be the cabin wall.
The shock of it clears my head.
Not cotton. Shock. I’m in shock.
I force myself to my hands and knees. Glass crunches beneath my palms, piercing skin, though I’m barely aware of the pain.
The cabin lists at a sick angle, nose down, tail section twisted away from the cockpit.
Through the shattered windshield, I can see dirt and broken branches pressed against the glass. Beyond that, empty air.
We’re on the edge of something. A drop-off. Maybe a chasm of some sort.
Shit. This is bad. This is really bad.
“Mara?” My voice comes out hoarse. “Luke?”
Movement draws my attention to the front of the cabin. Mara hangs half through a shattered emergency hatch, her body wedged in the opening at a cruel angle. Metal—jagged, torn—pins her at the waist.
She’s not moving.
Panic floods my veins, burning away the last of the fog.
Luke kneels beside her, one hand braced against the buckled frame.
Blood runs down the side of his face from a gash near his temple, but his hands stay steady as he reaches for the wreckage pinning her.
His fingers close around the twisted metal, and for a second, scales emerge across his knuckles, gleaming slate, dragon-bright.
Then they fade.
He tries again. The scales flicker back, but weaker this time. Translucent, then fading. His whole body goes rigid with effort, muscles straining, but the metal doesn’t budge.
Something’s wrong. I can feel it in the air: a flatness, like the moment before an earthquake when all the birds go silent. Magic should be crackling around us. Luke should be able to tear that wreckage apart with dragon strength.
But he can’t.
“Is she—?” I start.
“Trapped.” His voice cuts through my question. Low. Controlled. But I hear the edge underneath. “Don’t move.”
I freeze halfway to standing. The helicopter shifts slightly, and my stomach drops as I feel the ground beneath us give a fraction of an inch.
We’re not just on the edge. We’re balanced on it.
Luke doesn’t look at me. All his attention stays fixed on Mara, on the way her chest barely rises. He positions himself, plants his feet, tries again to shift the metal.
Nothing happens.
I watch the frustration ripple through him—controlled, but there—as he tries to access power that isn’t responding the way it should.
“When I tell you,” he says without looking at me, “grab the support strut behind you. Don’t let go.”
I twist to look. The strut runs along what used to be the roof, now the wall beside me. My hand finds it without thinking, and the metal feels solid under my grip despite the destruction around us.
“Got it,” I manage.
He nods once. Then his hands move to Mara’s vest straps, trying to free her from it. If he can’t move the metal, maybe he can slide her out—
The helicopter lurches.
I scream.
Not a subtle shift this time. A full drop, maybe six inches, before something catches and holds. The groan of stressed metal fills the cabin, high and terrible. Through the broken windshield, I watch dirt and small rocks slide away into nothing.
The edge is crumbling beneath us.
Luke’s head snaps up, and for the first time since I regained consciousness, his eyes find mine.
There’s blood on his face, a smear across his cheek, but it’s his eyes that make my breath catch.
They’re not quite human anymore; amber bleeding through the brown, dragon rising to the surface in response to a threat.
I can practically see his mind working. He’s running scenarios. Probabilities. Making the kind of cold assessments that come from too many years in situations exactly like this.
But under the calculation, I see something else. Something raw.
His dragon can’t save her. And he knows it.
“Ember,” he says. My name in his voice sounds different from how it has before. Not commander to subordinate. Something urgent. Something almost—
The rest of his sentence disappears into a sound like the world tearing open.
The helicopter drops.
Not falling—not yet—but sliding. The ground beneath the nose section gives way completely, and suddenly, we’re tilting forward at an angle that defies physics. My grip on the strut is the only thing keeping me from tumbling toward the windshield.
Toward the drop.
Luke’s hand shoots out and catches Mara’s vest, holding her even as the wreckage shifts and the opening widens. His other hand finds purchase on the frame, both hands occupied, body locked in position between two impossible choices.
Then the floor beneath my feet buckles.
The strut I’m holding tears free from its moorings with a shriek of metal. I slide forward, hands scrambling for purchase on smooth surfaces, nothing to grab, nothing to stop me from—
Luke’s eyes cut to me.
I see the calculation happen in real-time. Mara: unconscious, pinned in wreckage that won’t move. Me: conscious, sliding toward certain death, seconds from going over.
Another lurch.
His hand releases Mara’s vest.
Then he lunges.
Not toward her. Toward me.
Time stretches. I see his arm extend, scales rippling up from his wrist; stronger now, brighter, like his dragon is overriding every other priority. His hand closes around my wrist as my feet leave solid ground.
Heat. Dragon-hot, burning through my sleeve. The grip doesn’t hurt; it anchors. For a half-second suspended over nothing, I’m not falling. I’m caught.
His strength pulls me up and back as the ground fractures completely beneath the helicopter’s nose.
My body slams into his, and his other arm comes around me, solid and unbreakable.
For one absurd moment, I feel safe. Protected.
Like the world could end, and this would still be the safest place to be.
And then reality crashes back in.
“No!” The scream tears out of my throat as I twist to see Mara. “We have to—”
“We can’t.” His voice cuts through my panic. Flat. Final. But his arm tightens around me like he can hold me together through sheer force. “We can’t reach her.”
The helicopter tilts further. Metal shrieks as the frame tears itself apart, cockpit separating from cargo bay. Through the widening gap, I catch a glimpse of Mara’s face—unconscious, pale—before the whole front section pitches forward.
She disappears into darkness.
“Mara!” I’m screaming her name even as Luke drags me toward the rear section, away from the collapsing edge. My hands claw at him, trying to break free, trying to get back to where she was. “No, we have to go back!”
“She’s gone.” His arm is an iron band across my ribs, holding me against his chest as he moves us both toward safety. “We have to get out. The structure’s failing. We have seconds.”
What’s left of the cabin comes apart around us. He releases me only long enough to wrench the emergency door open. The handle tears free under dragon strength that finally, finally responds the way it should. Cold air rushes in, carrying the smell of disturbed earth and something chemical.
Hydraulic fluid. Fuel.
“Move!” He launches me through the door with such force that for a moment, I’m airborne.
I stumble out onto solid ground—real ground, not the crumbling edge—and my legs give out. I hit the dirt hard, palms scraping against rock.
Behind me, Luke spins around and, for one insane second, I think he’s going to dive back in again.
But there’s another groan of metal. He jumps clear just as the front half of the helicopter gives up its fight with gravity.
The cockpit section slides forward one final time, then pitches over the edge.
The sound it makes hitting bottom comes four seconds later. Metal screaming against rock. The crunch of breaking glass. Then a boom that I feel through the ground beneath my hands.
Fuel igniting.
Fire blooms up from the chasm, orange and black and vicious. Wrong colors, I think distantly. Fire shouldn’t burn those shades of purple at the edges. The heat of it reaches us even fifty feet away, a wave that makes me flinch back.
Luke is already moving. His hand closes around my arm—not gentle, but not rough either—and he hauls me to my feet.
“We need distance. Now.”
“But Mara—” My voice breaks on her name.
“Forget about Mara.” He doesn’t soften it. Doesn’t try to cushion the blow. His eyes are still more gold than brown, dragon riding close to the surface. “If she survived the fall, she didn’t survive the fire. There’s nothing we can do for her. But if there’s fuel left in the rear section—”
He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t have to.
I let him pull me away from the wreckage, away from the heat, away from the hole in the ground that swallowed my new friend. We make it maybe thirty yards before my legs refuse to work anymore.
I sink to the ground. My hands shake. My whole body shakes.
Mara’s dead.
The words don’t feel real. They sit in my mind like foreign objects, wrong angles that won’t fit into any understanding of the world that makes sense.