Page 20

It's one fuck-ton of dirt.

But then I'm able to feel Airos's power there too, and mine joins with his, combining to work together to move our target. The synchronization is instantaneous and powerful, and the only thing I can compare it to is the way it felt when working with my squad to clear a room. Normally, that kind of cohesion comes through months of practice, drilling again and again, working to build trust and shared understanding. What I'm feeling right now is all intuition, all feel, like a dance that we've known forever. How? Andwhy?

The cloud of sand has formed behind us like a massive flag, waving and glimmering in the sunlight. The swarm takes the bait, dispersing and reforming in a dark line coming straight for us.

Airos veers sharply and heads straight for a group of rock spires. Soon, I can't see the others anymore. They're behind us now, obscured by the thick sand cloud. We fly low and fast, but the insects have already pierced the cloud and are gaining on us. Goddamn, they're relentless.

It's getting harder and harder to keep a hold of the sand. My powers just aren't strong enough, and my stamina is burning out faster than a candle in a wind tunnel. Airos is weakening too.

"I hope you have a plan!" I shout. "Because I've got about five seconds of this left!"

"Save it! Let go!" he says. "I'm going to need your help to move those rocks!"

"Oh shit..."

This motherfucker wants to bring down one of those spires?

The sand cloud begins to disperse and drop away as I let go, but before Airos fully releases, he surges his power and squeezes the cloud between two invisible palms. In the blink of an eye, it crushes into a ball that splatters half the pursuing swarm into a black and purple mist.

"Nice one!" I yell, tugging his feathers.

Airos doesn't reply, and I can immediately feel how costly pulling that move was to his energy. He's barely keeping us aloft. We're only gonna get one shot to make this work—it's either success or we're gonna be cooked.

We enter the spire field. Airos weaves through the pillars of rock with such speed and agility it seems like a head-on collision is inevitable.

"Don't close your eyes," he says. "I need you ready."

"Oh, my eyes are wide fuckin' open, Airos," I reply.

I'm not missing a damn thing on this ride. Not even if it's us getting splattered against a rock wall.

The bugs tail his maneuvers with exacting precision, latched on to the trail of phoenix energy he's exhausting to keep them interested. He makes a hard turn, swooping close to a spiky outcropping from one of the spires, and it clips a few of the bugs, sending them into a death spiral. He tries the move again, but this time fails. The bugs are too fast, or they've caught on to his tactics. Or maybe he's slowing down.

"Here we go," he says.

We shoot up, swirling around the tallest spire until we break past its peak into the open air, then corkscrew around, cutting past the bugs to pull into a sharp dive. I cling to Airos's back with my entire body. The muscles in my hands and forearms burn as I fight to maintain my grip on the roots of his feathers, which are rough and abrade my palms. I push my hips forward, squeezing as tightly as I can with my thighs in a desperate battle to keep myself from being plucked off by the g-forces.

"Now!" Airos commands, and I feel another surge of power. I immediately know what he's trying to do. I can see it in my head, and I join with him and grasp the top of the spire andpullwith every bit of ability that I can summon.

I feel the rock shatter under our control. I feel it fall in an avalanche of massive boulders raining down above us. And then I feel something inside of me snap, like I've just laid my hands on a live power line. Airos pulls up hard just a few feet from hitting the ground, and the last thing I see as my strength gives out is the mountain of falling rock crushing the last of the swarm beneath it.

My grip weakens, and the warmth of his feathered body disappears as I fall away.

6

AIROS

Beneath the stars, seeing this vast expanse of sand and rock feels like looking out at the sea from what used to be my favorite perch on the tip of the helm of the thunder god's great statue at Tassos. The dunes rise and fall like waves frozen in time and bring me back to the island that had once been my home. It doesn't matter how far away I go, whether in time or steps taken—even after almost twenty years since I fled its soil, that place continues to keep me as a prisoner.

I expect I'll never make peace with what happened there. And perhaps I don't deserve to.

I've made camp not far from where we went down, where the warm breeze occasionally carries the scent of the phoenix hunter insects crushed into a paste beneath their rocky tomb. What little energy I maintained after the battle I'm using to care for Jackson. He lies on his cloak, which I've spread out across the ground like a blanket, his head cushioned by my travel satchel. His breath is steady and even. Apart from a few new scrapes andthe nasty bruises left by his captors, he's not badly injured, just depleted of energy. He should return soon.

But what had happened up there with him? I'd asked Jackson to lend me his assistance in defeating the insects and had received something beyond expectation. For that brief moment it was as though we were submerged together in a shared spring of being, where our phoenix powers merged together and revealed something I'm struggling to comprehend. I saw possibilities of knowledge impossible to put into words. I felt memories of things I'd never done, and seen places I'd never been—a different realm, a different life and more. It was a glimpse of Jackson's core, and the raw determination and the deep-seated fears driving him forward. A conflict over something I wasn't able to clearly see or understand.

Jackson groans softly, and his head slowly shakes back and forth like he's trying to escape from something in his unconsciousness. I dab the sweat from his knotted brow with a scrap of cloth. Suddenly, his eyes snap open and he catches my wrist with his hand. He looks at me with wide, confused eyes. Slowly, they focus. He's back.

"Airos?" he murmurs weakly. "What are you doing?"