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  Tinvel

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  “And you’re sure it’s going to work this time?” Chona asked, leaning over his back as he peered into the engine. He couldn’t see her, but he knew she was there by the palm happily shoving half her body weight directly into his aching spine.

  “When are we ever sure something will work?” Tinvel grunted, twisting his wrench until it cnged against the wall of the cramped engine space. The tool was fresh from the foundries, made of cast steel, and he loved how much abuse it could take. “Are you sure your spells will work if you have to use them up there?”

  “No. How could I be sure? I’ve never cast them while we’re flying.”

  “Exactly. And I’ve never flown with this design before.”

  “I wish you’d be less honest sometimes, Tin.”

  “Stop wishing. I already know you’d find some other excuse to whine.”

  When the st bolt had been tightened until his arms were quivering, Tinvel retreated, untangling his limbs from the twisted position that had been required to cram himself into the engine cowling.

  He wiped his brow of sweat, squinting into the afternoon heat baking down from the setting sun. There had been several deys throughout the day, each tiny little incident piling upon the other until they reached the point they were at now, desperately hurrying to get off the ground before the sun fell. They had taken a circuitous northward route over the st few days, zigzagging across the countryside in brief hops, always avoiding poputed vilges to maintain the vehicle’s secrecy- however much of it was left, after flying it over an army.

  Unfortunately, the pne could barely stay aloft for an hour, and it took hours of regeneration for the crystals to regain their energy after each flight. That process could be sped slightly by Tinvel and Chona feeding their own energy directly into the crystals, but they could only do so much, and most of a day reserved for flying was usually spent on the ground twiddling their thumbs. When you factored in the awkward, vilge-avoiding path they were forced to take? The world’s first aircraft, his marvelous invention, the peak of his months of bor and untold failures, could just barely eke out a lead on a hard-ridden horse.

  Thankfully, the job that they’d flown north for was simple: survey the nd from above, finding suitable locations for the forts whose designs Mr. Brown and Artillery Lieutenant Shale had finally finished arguing over. They’d been instructed to search for rge spaces of ft nd, ideally atop hills, with little in the way of intervening jungle or cover for an approaching enemy. While it would have been simple enough to send surveyors out on foot, Tinvel had convinced Sara it was a good chance to test the practicality of their prototype pne’s endurance, since the task would require them to perform many flights a day.

  As he turned away from the dimming horizon to face his copilot, Chona just barely choked off her shocked ughter, doubling over while using her tail to point at his head.

  “You’ve got a bit of something… uh… everywhere,” she gasped, still trying to hold back.

  Tinvel swore, snagging a rag and rubbing it violently across his face. The white cloth came away bck.

  Up until recently, he’d managed to avoid using lubricating oil in any of the artificeries he’d created. He’d tried to avoid them for a number of reasons. Not only had they not found ‘crude oil’ in Tulian, which was what Sara said was best for machine lube, Vesta had made sure he was acutely aware that every new component he added to a machine increased its cost, time to build, and most critically, its maintenance bill. But complexity had grown hand-in-hand with capability, inexorably leading to greater sections of intersecting metals within his every design. There was only so much steel grinding against steel until Tinvel could suffer before being forced to admit defeat. They’d need machine lube.

  Clearly, Sara had been anticipating it for a while, because the moment he’d inquired after the topic she’d whipped out a variety of lubricants from her bag. Apparently she’d been developing some on her own time, and was perfectly happy to expin the pros and cons of each variety. They were all vegetable-based oils, extracted from different pnts and their seeds, simir to olive oil, which was the only equivalent Tinvel knew of. She told him that none were as good as ‘real’ oil, whatever that meant, but unlike that nonexistent alternative, they could make these various sorts in bulk, something she’d apparently had people working on for weeks.

  He tried not to think about why, when Evie had joined the conversation alongside Chona, Sara had started expining which ones were ‘body safe,’ trading meaningful gnces with her feline partner. Rumors abounded of the Champion’s exploits with her wives, and while many were entertaining to hear about, Tinvel decidedly didn’t want to be forced to visualize them in front of the woman herself.

  Maybe body safe doesn’t mean what I think it does, Tinvel thought, grimacing as he failed to shake the grease off his hands. I’d be screwed if this crap was actually poisonous.

  The slick oil clung to his fingers and stuck in his hair, darkened by the grime accumuted within the steel and crystalline machinery. The new engine cowling they had installed was hopefully going to do wonders for reducing drag, but it was a hell of a pain to stuff yourself inside, which he’d had to do to inspect the newly-installed ‘clutch.’

  The paired disks were Sara’s solution to the runaway engine power issue, allowing Tinvel to detach the thumping crystals from the propellers whenever he wanted. That had required moving the props farther back and the crystals farther forward, as well as building a new assembly for the shaft to catch the constantly-fshing crystals. Those changes, in turn, had lengthened the entire engine considerably, which meant Mr. Brown had insisted on covering the space in wood. Even though the prototype bipne was anything but aerodynamic, the Champion’s father insisted every little bit of smoothing would help.

  When Tinvel had started this project, the artificery which drove the pne’s engine had been almost blissfully simple. Per Garen’s advice, he’d started with the most basic spell in the world, a jutting pilr of force which had been embedded in eight separate crystals. As the four propeller bdes swung around, each crystal would detect their proximity and activate in turn, throwing a thin block of green energy into the metal-wrapped wood. That meant each crystal activated a dozen or more times a second, each in a paired set that took turns knocking the next propeller bde forward. It was insultingly primitive next to what Tinvel knew was possible, the artificer equivalent of spinning a windmill by swinging cudgels at the gearing, but it did the job. Sara and Mr. Brown both thought the artificery engine was a disaster waiting to happen, and Tinvel agreed with them.

  The problem was, it worked. He could think of a dozen different better ways to do the same job, and he was working on them, but they’d all take time to develop.

  Time that he would have to spend not flying.

  “You ready to go?” Tinvel finally asked, having finished his inspection of the pne.

  “Depends. Is the pne?”

  “As much as it can be,” he said, picking up his leather jacket. “The clutch worked well enough in the tests, so even if we have another runaway power event, we should be able to disengage the props.”

  “I don’t trust it,” Chona said, even as she began donning her own flight gear. Her jet-bck vanara fur did a better job than bare skin at keeping her warm, but being bsted by blinding winds could chill anyone. “The whole engine’s power is being sent through one lever and two ptes. If they slip…”

  “We’ve tested it,” Tinvel repeated. “Do you get nervous every time you cast a new spell?”

  “No. But I get nervous when someone else does.”

  Tinvel rolled his eyes. Chona was not a paragon of optimism at the best of times, but their flight tests were where her negativity got the most grating.

  Not overly so, though. He knew it was mostly for show. If she’d really been concerned about the engine failing, she wouldn’t be getting in the pne. No matter how much she tried to hide it, Chona loved being up in the air, maybe as much as he did. He only needed proof of that in the way that she finished dressing even quicker than he did, hopping into the front seat of the bipne, aviator goggles already strapped on.

  “Well?” She called as Tinvel bent over to re-ce his boots. “What are you waiting for? We’ve got a pne to crash.”

  Tinvel grumbled out his response, but he did speed up. She was right to be impatient; they’d spent so long preparing that there was only enough daylight for one flight, if even that. He ced up his other boot, tying it off in a tight knot, then hopped up into the cockpit, accepting Chona’s wiry arm to help pull him up and over.

  The bipne’s engine hadn’t been the only thing that had changed. Their first few test flights had produced a undry list of alterations, most of which were invisible to the inexperienced eye. Springs were added to the control surfaces, so that they would return to a neutral position if control was lost, rather than tossing them like a rag doll through the skies. The wall between Chona and Tinvel (which would have flight instruments someday, once they invented them) now had a hole cut in the middle, so that the vanara’s tail could, if necessary, reach back to wrap around the control stick. They’d tried a few tests on the ground and decided that her tail had the necessary dexterity to keep the pne straight and level, though any kind of maneuver beyond a slow banking turn was certain to end in disaster. It was a st resort, something that might be helpful if Tinvel had to make mid-flight repairs to the engine, or if he’d been knocked unconscious.

  Beyond that, they’d implemented many of the changes Mr. Brown had suggested. The number of connection spars between the upper and lower wings had been reduced after their tests showed the wings were sturdier than expected, and Tinvel’s seat had been raised slightly, giving him a better view over Chona, at the risk of occasionally smming his head into the wing that was now an inch above his skull. A metal speaking tube had been added, their seats had received considerably more cotton padding, and there was likely a million other minor alterations he’d forgotten alongside. It had been weeks since he’d st bothered to maintain version numbers for the bipne’s ever-shifting design.

  “Ready?” Tinvel asked, buckling himself into his seat. Seat buckles- that was another thing they’d added.

  “Ready,” Chona confirmed.

  Tinvel slipped the preflight checklist from his pocket, pcing it into the gss dispy case that was on the right side of what would become the instrument panel.

  “Control surfaces right,” Tinvel said, moving the flight stick back and forth, pumping the rudder pedals. Within the pne, braided steel wires tugged and jerked. They still didn’t have hydraulics, and with neither Sara nor Mr. Brown knowing what it was made of, they likely wouldn’t for some time. Tinvel could see the pne respond, but waited for Chona’s word.

  “Good response right,” she said.

  “Control surfaces left?”

  “Good response left.”

  “Testing crystal inset,” he said, turning around. Even though he’d literally just finished tightening the bolts which held the crystals in pce, Mr. Brown’s insistence that Sara use her illusions to show Tinvel productions of the television series ‘Air Disasters’ had succeeded in putting the fear of the gods in him about the importance of pre-flight checklists. He pressed his thumb into each emerald’s exposed face, a moment of concentration sending a spark of energy into the crystal, after which he waited for the echo, tasting its timbre. After a moment, he nodded to himself. “Crystals are solid.”

  “Crystals are solid,” Chona repeated, raising a hand. “Ready for wind start?”

  “Ready. Start in three, two, one-”

  Chona’s hand sliced down as she called out a word, the roar of warping wind stealing it from his ears. Tinvel felt the spellborne air rush over his shoulder, smming into the propeller bdes. They whirred up in an instant, none of the machinery yet locked into pce to hold them back, but Tinvel paid no mind to the buzzing bdes less than a foot from his face. He had the tip of eight fingers resting against each crystal, all his mind narrowed on one task.

  Garen had told him that artificers, even though they did little in the way of traditional spellcasting, still benefited from incorporating somatic or verbal components into their work. It was one of many reasons (including the archmage’s general disdain for artificery, Tinvel suspected) that their professor insisted artificers and non-mages still attend csses on spellcasting. Just as a conjurer benefited from ritualistic elements, using runes and incantations to prevent a stray thought sending their spell astray, artificers could use spellcasting components to moderate their own Intent, guiding the enchantments down a consistent, desired ne.

  For the pne’s startup procedure, he couldn’t use a somatic component, as his hands were too occupied to gesture, and there was obviously no need for a material component to be consumed; this wasn’t alchemy. That left him only a verbal component, a specific, dedicated word he assigned his Intent to. Garen had suggested something simplistic for the engine, a word reted to what he wanted to happen. Something easy to define in his mind, like move, or spin, or even perhaps something like start.

  But for once, Tinvel didn’t think Garen really understood something that Tinvel did. Artificery wasn’t a discipline like Mr. Brown’s mathematical engineering, where careful calcution and rigorous testing was necessary to discover the desired result. No matter how much the ‘true’ mages looked down on his tinkering, the fact remained that the Mad God had given his gift to Tinvel. Just like any fire-spitting mage, he could reach into the realm where truth and logic overpped. He could feel where boundaries began to blur, contradictions coexisting, impossible realities coalescing into a greater, more beautiful whole.

  Yes, he could have told the engine to start. He could have told the propeller bdes to spin. Those words would work.

  But that wasn’t why he was here, was it?

  Tinvel took a deep breath.

  “Soar.”

  The engine leapt to life with a series of popping cracks and cngs. Green pilrs battered the spinning gear that was sheltered from Tinvel’s spine by nothing more than a thin wooden panel, producing a buzzing hum that quickly melded with the whir of the propellers. Chona’s burst of spell-powered wind had already spun the propellers fast enough to get them rolling, but it was only when the engine began to roar that they truly picked up speed.

  Tinvel let out a whoop of delight as he jammed his right foot down on the rudder pedal, curving their jostling, bumping path away from the ditch that would surely snap their nding gear like twigs. The hills of Tulian weren’t forgiving when it came to providing a convenient nding strip, which meant he had to wind left and right as they rattled across the grass, avoiding rocks and pitfalls as best he could. All the while the pne gained speed, faster and faster, wings bending with every hard jolt.

  Tinvel began hauling back on the control stick as the tone of the whistling wind shifted to just the right note. The wings began to flex as the air started holding their weight, then fred further as the world tilted, the orange-red sky rising to fill his view. Chona was digging her fingers into the wooden frame of her seat, shoulders hunched like she was certain they were going to roll over and crash at any moment. Yet her face was squarely forward, eyes peeled open behind her goggles, her excitement too great to let her look away.

  The skull-shaking rattle suddenly shifted, first disappearing from the front of the pne, then the rear as the nding gear lost contact with the ground.

  Suddenly, without any warning at all, the entire craft seemed to leap gleefully upward.

  Freed of the earth’s burden, the pne began to truly reach its stride, eagerly accelerating in its chase to meet the drifting clouds. Tinvel reached back and tapped the crystals, shifting them to cruise speed, and this time, nothing went wrong. The timbre of the whirring changed just as it should, and the vibrations settled further, the pne now at its most comfortable.

  Tinvel reached forward, tapping Chona on the shoulder. He pointed to the voice tube, so she brought her ear to the other end while Tinvel spoke into his own.

  “Do you know which river we’re supposed to be looking for?” Tinvel asked, then turned his own ear against the speaking tube so he could hear her response.

  “I looked at the map plenty, but who knows how accurate that is? Not like they could see it from above. I’ll tell you if I find it.”

  Tinvel gave her a thumbs up, then returned his focus to flying the pne. He had no real sense of scale for altitude, not by measurement or experience. He could only roughly guess that they were somewhere around a thousand feet above the ground and climbing.

  He always tried to pay careful attention to altitude. Mr. Brown had warned them not to go too high, or else they’d end up deprived not of air itself, but alchemical element “Oxygen,” without which their bodies would begin to suffer. From the professor’s description, suffering from a ck of Oxygen was an insidious thing. It would be like getting drunk without knowing you were drinking, and they might pass out without ever noticing anything was wrong.

  So far, Tinvel didn’t think he’d ever been anywhere close to the ten thousand feet Mr. Brown said was the risky area, but he very much didn’t want to mistakenly climb into it. Death by experimental aircraft failure was one thing. Death by idiotically crashing an experimental aircraft while drunk on air was another.

  Tinvel tilted the pne to the right, taking them on a winding, easterly course, towards the sea. He could see it on the horizon now that they were at altitude. The wide sheet of blue was scattering dimming sunlight through every wave, a glittering carpet of jewels stitched to the tapestry of green by a thin thread of sandy dunes.

  He turned a bit further, setting them on a more direct course towards the sea.That wasn’t where the river they were supposed to be scouting was, but the sun was already touching the horizon line, and he didn’t think they had half an hour left of useful sunlight. The beach had always been a good pce for them to touch down when they couldn’t find a long enough stretch of ft nd.

  It really is beautiful up in the sky, Tinvel thought, pushing the pne just a touch higher.

  He’d never been one for sightseeing before he’d first flown. Seeing the world from above had changed that. He’d never realized just how limited he was in what could be seen from the ground. When he stood on his own two feet, a hill was nothing more than a lump of dirt that had been grown over by a yer of grass. Thickets of trees were opaque walls, and while he knew what y behind them might be interesting, it was always hidden by tangled vines and thick trunks.

  From above, though? Boring lumps of dirt became the texture of a woven masterpiece, shaped by millenia of carving forces. Mr. Brown’s lessons on pte tectonics, erosion, and weathering had stuck in his mind like an itchy bur.

  It wasn’t just blurry terrain that he and Chona were rushing over. It was a masterful weaving of a story that had begun hundreds of thousands of years ago, and would st for millions of years more. The valleys borne of dried rivers told him of a time when kes and springs had bubbled up in what was now a low ftnd, while his mind’s eye tracked the twisting courses of flowing rivers that even now were cutting their own mark into the world. They would carry dirt away bit by bit, piece by piece, until eventually the walls that guided their course would fail, sending them shooting down a new trail to the ocean. It was art in gcial motion, and he sent a brief prayer to Tavan, thanking the God of Spellcraft for the gift he’d been given.

  The sun finally began to sink below the horizon as Tinvel turned north, straddling the line between nd and sea. Chona had given up searching for the river a long time ago, though she kept craning her head over the side, staring at everything they passed.

  Is she as interested in this as I am? Tinvel wondered. Or is she just bored, looking for something to do?

  Really, Tinvel didn’t know much about the vanara woman who he spent so much time with. They’d spent months at one another’s side, almost always working on the same projects, but it wasn’t like they’d chosen it. Tinvel was the best of Garen’s artificer students, and Chona was, he had to grudgingly admit, second only to Garen in terms of spellcasting ability, at least in Tulian proper. If circumstances hadn’t forced them together, they never would have shared more than a handful of words. When they weren’t working on one project, they were usually arguing over a different one. She’d never once refused to fly with him, but was that because she wanted to, or because Garen had told her to?

  He tapped on her shoulder, an impulse overcoming him. She gnced up from her sightseeing, slightly surprised, then pressed an ear to the voice tube.

  “Remember how you said you didn’t know how your spells would work if you cast them from a pne?” She nodded. “Want to find out?”

  Chona turned around in her seat, eyebrows raised. Thus far, Tinvel had absolutely refused to let her cast a spell from the pne. There was too much at risk and too much that could go wrong.

  Chona knew he thought that, too. She twisted in her seat to stare at him, eyebrows raised in surprise. The sable fur that covered her from head to toe was waving wildly in the wind, save where her oversized goggles had been fit over her widening eyes.

  “You sure?” She asked, speaking into the tube.

  “We have to try it at some point, right? And it’s not like we’re going to find anything today.” Tinvel reached back, feeling out the energy left in the crystals. “I think we’ve got a half hour or so. Let’s give it a shot.”

  “Okay. Let’s do it over the water, so we don’t start a wildfire.”

  Tinvel gave a thumbs up, then, in a fit of inspiration, dragged the clutch lever to its opposite position.

  The sound of the cnking engine didn’t stop, but the propeller behind his head immediately began to wind down, its whir falling away. No matter how fast the shaft was spinning, it did nothing for them without being attached to the propellers.

  Tinvel tucked the pne into a dive, sharper than he ever had before, rocketing towards the white-capped shoreline. Chona immediately seized the sides of the cockpit with a loud burst of profanity, bracing against gravity’s sudden desire to throw her from her seat.

  Without the engine giving thrust, the dive wasn’t producing the same speed it would have. They were hardly accelerating, even as Tinvel tipped the pne yet further, past 45 degrees, past sixty degrees, until eventually he had to take a foot off the rudder pedals just to stop himself from sliding forward in his seat. The pne began to pick up speed once more, even without the engine, and he could hear the wind whistling across the support spars, roaring over the control surfaces, which were becoming harder and harder to control.

  After thirty seconds of plummeting almost vertically out of the sky, Tinvel decided they’d reached the limit. The sea had begun to gain detail, blurry waves repced with sharp shapes and stark shadows.

  He tore back on the controls, expecting the pne to lunge skyward as it had so many times before, only to find he was barely strong enough to overcome the force of the wind. He growled as he wrapped both hands around the controls, throwing his whole back into the motion. The waves continued to grow crisper, closer, ever more threatening.

  Then, with a merciful creak of overstrained wood, the pne’s nose began to lift, slowly, ever so slowly. With a final grunt of effort, Tinvel managed to level out some fifty feet or so before disaster, ripping over the wavetops faster than he’d ever gone before.

  “You fucking maniac!” Chona screeched, looking ready to slug him.

  “Get ready to cast!” Tinvel yelled back, yanking the clutch back into pce. The pne shuddered hard, jerking to the left as the propeller engaged.

  Chona swore again, her expression a mess that Tinvel couldn’t decipher. Still, she obligingly leaned over the side of the pne, one hand outstretched, ft palm pointing down and forward.

  “Need me to get lower?” Tinvel yelled. They were about fifty feet above the ground, which was on the longer end of spell range for mages of Chona’s skill level.

  “Go fuck yourself!” Chona yelled back, squinting one eye. “Torch!”

  A raging ball of fire leapt from her palm. What began as a tiny line of white-hot energy at her skin quickly billowed outward as the wind caught it, spreading into a furious column of reddish fme. Tinvel couldn’t look over the side to watch the spell manifest, but he felt the heat bloom against his skin, enough to make him break into a sweat. A quick gnce behind him showed the way the spell, which was usually a neat, cleansing beam of fire when cast on the ground, had now been spread into a massive curtain of fire, three times as wide as it was long. A cloud hissed from the ocean in its wake, water boiled to steam in an instant.

  Then Chona suddenly sagged, the spell vanishing. Her head rolled loosely on her neck, like an old man who’d stood too quickly and was about to fall over.

  “Chona?” Tinvel yelled. “Chona!”

  Her eyes sharpened. “I’m fine!” She called back. She leaned over to the speaking tube. “I think I put too much energy into charging the crystals earlier. I can probably only cast a couple more spells like that.”

  I don’t think you can cast even one, Tinvel thought, watching as she shook her head. He knew her better than to voice the concern, however.

  “I’ll go lower this time, so you don’t have to put as much energy into it,” Tinvel said. This time, Chona didn’t disagree.

  With the gentlest touch he could manage, Tinvel nudged the pne’s nose downward. They were flying incredibly, wildly low now. If they’d been over nd, he never would have risked it. Maybe thirty feet separated the tips of the waves from the pne’s nding gear, which was more than enough for a sudden rise or gust to send them into the ground.

  Tinvel felt more confident about doing this over the ocean, however. The winds here weren’t stirred by shifting ndscapes, only the constant inbound breeze of the currents. He leveled off, nodding at Chona to cast her spell again.

  The vanara girl took a deep breath, leaning over the side. She was more focused this time, her eyebrows knit together in concentration.

  “Torch!”

  If she’d meant to limit her spell, she’d failed. Another white-hot streak of fmes pierced the dark skies, barreling towards the ground. Tinvel swore as the heat hit him, somehow even more intense, the entire cockpit awash in flickering firelight.

  The beam of fmes impacted the waves with a crash of hissing steam, but with their altitude lower, it began to physically burrow into the water, carving a trench in the bck sea. A veritable fogbank of boiling water fumed into the air behind them, giving their pne a ghostly wake that was stirred into spirals by the whirling air left by their propeller.

  The trench Chona was digging in the water began to deepen, spreading wider as her spell lost concentration, her torrent of fire stuttering out for a second, only to re-emerge an instant ter–

  Directly into the cloud of rising steam, which deflected the fmes upward.

  With a horrifying fsh that left spots in his eyes, the tip of the right wing disappeared behind a wall of fire.

  “No!”

  “Holy shit!” Chona screamed, choking off her spell by clenching her fist. The fmes burned the fur of her arm, but she barely noticed.

  “Shit, shit, shit!” Tinvel yelled, snapping the pne in a series of hard rolls to the left and right, trying to extinguish the fmes.

  “Get us low!”

  “No!” Tinvel yelled. “No! We need to get altitude, try to put it out!”

  “I can cast a spell! If we crash then I can–”

  Tinvel ripped the control stick towards himself, turning all the speed he had into altitude. He had to get the pne higher, as high as he could. He didn’t know what else to do. They didn’t have parachutes yet! All he could think of was getting the pne moving so fast that the fmes were blown out.

  It sounded like a terrible idea, but it was all he could think of. He removed one hand from the controls just long enough to spark the crystals into emergency speed, then returned it, all his focus on flying the pne.

  In the front seat, Chona was swearing profusely, shouting something at him, but Tinvel barely heard her. The fmes crackling to his right seemed to drown out every sound and thought as they ate their way across the wooden wing, canvas shriveling and peeling away from the heat even before the fire arrived.

  Just as the fmes had reached the midpoint of the structure, the entire lower wing beginning to crumple, Tinvel forced the pne into a dive.

  “What the fuck are you doing?!” Chona screeched.

  Tinvel ignored her. The wind from before returned, whistling through the spars, but with a far more ominous tint to it all, because it was joined by the sound of cracking, snapping wood. Chip by chip, spar by spar, the right wing was falling apart. With every second that passed, Tinvel had to shove the controls harder and harder to the left, or else they’d go into an uncontrolble spiral.

  From the corner of his eye, just as he thought the pn might be working, Tinvel saw the worst happen.

  The fire, stirred by the wind, threw a spray of sparks upward, scattering themselves on the underside of the bipne’s top wing. Chips of wood and fming canvas joined them a moment ter, and before he could react, the upper wing was alight.

  Chona, who was still screaming something, suddenly lunged for him. She grabbed the control stick in both hands, trying to peel his hands off.

  It worked, but only because Tinvel reacted in a panic, somehow convinced she was trying to drive them both into the sea. He drew back and punched her straight across the face, screaming mindless insults at her.

  Chona forced the pne to level off and then, for a reason Tinvel couldn’t fathom in the moment, reached down to unbuckle his seat belt. He immediately gave up on any thought of controlling the pne, instead gripping the cockpit walls as hard as he could just so he wouldn’t be thrown free.

  Chona grabbed a fistful of his shirt just as a sudden crack, far louder than the others, echoed in his right ear.

  The world spun into a blur, fshing from fme to bck to fme and back in a dizzying dispy. The wind rushing around Tinvel’s head was ripping across his entire body, which, Tinvel’s panicked mind realized, meant he was out of the pne, falling.

  He screamed wildly as something continued to grab hold of his shirt, drawing him close. The constant spiraling jerked to a sudden stop, the sound of the wind going with it, his vision repced by Chona’s face, surrounded by a wall of white.

  “Wha-?”

  Tinvel’s head smmed into something. Hard. Stars burst behind his eyes as the roar of wind was repced by the rush of water, his entire body rattling worse than he’d ever felt on the pne.

  “Take a deep breath,” Chona instructed him.

  The white disappeared, repced by oppressive, all-consuming darkness. The hand that had been on his chest disappeared as water rushed in around him, cold as ice. His ears popped painfully and his eyes burned when he tried to open them, inundated by salt water.

  He felt himself rising, however. Whatever was left of his scattered thoughts seized on that sensation, chasing after it like– well, like a drowning man.

  The trip to the surface seemed to take forever. He could hear nothing, see nothing, could barely feel anything other than the throbbing ache in his ears and the debilitating cold that soaked his bones. He didn’t count the seconds, he didn’t have the wherewithal for that, but in the moment, he was certain he was desperately kicking his legs for hours upon hours.

  Then, unbelievably, the water started getting warmer. Tinvel’s lungs were burning, his legs were trembling with the effort of constant kicking, and he was half-mad with fear, but he kept moving, kept kicking.

  Bursting up into warm air was maybe the most wonderful sensation Tinvel had ever known. He tried to take a gasp of air, but his lungs rebelled, forcing him into such a stiff coughing fit that threatened to drag him under. He kicked desperately as he bobbed in the bck waves, wheezing in gasps between bouts of violent coughs.

  “Tinvel!” A voice cried.

  He tried to respond, but his lungs weren’t there yet. It only set him off again, pain wracking his chest. A deep, throbbing pounding was entering his head, like a screw drilling into his skull, and every cough made it worse.

  Chona clearly heard his coughs, however, because she yelled out, “Swim for the shore! You can see it, right?”

  “Yeah!” Tinvel croaked out, finding the blurry bck line that denoted the shoreline. He couldn’t tell how far away it was. He began swimming towards it anyway, because if he’d survived the st five minutes, he refused to let himself end up drowning.

  He didn’t see or hear from Chona again as he kicked towards the shore. That was alright. He really wasn’t in a talking mood. When the sheer adrenaline had faded, he was left with a soul-crushing disappointment.

  The pne was gone. The world’s first bipne, the first manmade creation to take to the air, was sitting on the bottom of the ocean. The crystals, the machinery, the instrumentation, it had all gone with it. He had nothing to show for months and months of work. Mr. Brown had told him stories about the Wright brothers. About their famous first flight, and the pne that had done it. A hundred and more years ter, that pne had been hanging from the ceiling of one of the world’s greatest museums, free for all the world to see. Tinvel had always imagined that would be the fate of his pne, too.

  Not anymore.

  He tried not to think about it. He kept swimming, the waves pping over his head as he neared the shore. It took so long that he was startled when his feet brushed the sand, half-expecting a shark coming to tear him in half. After all he’d just done, he doubted he would have fought it.

  Instead he sloughed himself up onto the shoreline, realizing far too te that he’d never taken off his heavy flight gear. He staggered up to the edge of the water and flung his leather jacket into the sand, colpsing on top of it. He y on his back, staring at the emerging stars, breathing hard.

  A few minutes ter, he heard the sound of someone shuffling through the sand. He didn’t look over. Chona dropped down next to him, breathing just as hard.

  “I… sure… fucked up,” she breathed.

  “No,” Tinvel said.

  “...what?”

  “Just… shouldn’t have gone so low…” He forced his salt-crusted eyes to blink, then turned his head to look at the girl. Unlike him, she’d clearly thought to remove her heavy clothing to help her swim, because she was naked from the waist up.

  Tinvel’s head jerked away. Sure, she had fur across her chest, but… no.

  “We didn’t know… the fmes would reflect,” Tinvel said. “We only ever tested your spells on… on nd. Shouldn’t have… tried on water… in flight.”

  “‘s till my fault,” Chona muttered.

  “Both.”

  “Huh?”

  “Both our fault.”

  She chuckled darkly. “Okay. I’ll take that.” He heard her roll onto her side, and knew she was looking at him. “So. Give me your shirt.”

  “What?”

  “I’m a girl. You’re not.”

  “It’s my shirt.”

  “I’ve got boobs, Tin. I’m not wandering around looking for a vilge while I’m half-naked.”

  “Should’ve kept your shirt, then.”

  “I saved your life.”

  “Sure did. Saved your own, too. Good spell, by the way. Sloping the shield spell to break the water? Smart. But you didn’t save your shirt. Dumb.”

  She groaned, colpsing once more.

  “Fine. You have the crystal?”

  Tinvel patted his chest, searching his pockets, only to remember he was ying on his jacket, not wearing it. Then the moment he realized that, he felt the speaking crystal digging into his back. He groaned as he lifted one half of his body, digging it out.

  “Yeah, I got it.”

  “Thank the gods.” Chona’s hand appeared hovering over his face, waving tiredly. “If you give me your shirt, I’ll call in the report that I crashed the fucking pne.”

  “Both of us,” Tinvel repeated.

  “Whatever. Shirt. Crystal. Give.”

  With a borious, perhaps slightly exaggerated groan, Tinvel sat up, dragging his dripping shirt over his head. He tossed it blindly behind himself and was gratified by the sound of it spping Chona in the face, and then he rolled the crystal towards her. When the sounds of Chona dressing stopped, Tinvel finally turned around.

  Huh. That’s…

  Huh.

  Thanks to Sara, Tinvel had made several discoveries in his short artificery career. He was proud of them, and he intended to make many more. But in that moment, the very first second that Tinvel first discovered sopping-wet shirts did very, very little to conceal the modesty of a woman’s chest, he was struck by the harsh reality that he’d reached the zenith of personal discovery. He might explore other avenues that were more important to the world at rge, but he suspected none would quite compare in his own estimation to the sight he found in that moment. Before he even realized it, his brain had observed, cataloged, and made several detailed notes regarding this profound revetion, fully intending to thoroughly review its intricacies at a ter date.

  Tinvel coughed hard, spinning back around in the sand, smming a fist into his own chest. Chona waited impatiently for him to finish hacking up a lung, probably thinking it was the effort of sitting up that had prompted it, then muttered to herself.

  “If someone’s gonna answer, Gods, please not Evie.” She took a deep breath, then activated the crystal. “So. Anyone want to hear how the test test flight went?”

  Tinvel’s head fell back as he groaned.