Page 5

THREE

K el’s knotted stomach eased once she and Savita entered the aviary on their farm.

Here, amid the sprawling greenery and refracted light, it was easier to pretend everything was as it had been this morning.

There was only Savita’s full wingspan, the smell of moist earth and the scorching overhead lamps.

Kel had changed into a set of protective riding leathers and still the aviary’s heat prickled her skin.

She usually hired a transport unit to move Savita between locations, not wanting to tire her out any more than necessary, but today she’d flown Sav back home as Oska’s fall played on a loop in Kel’s mind.

Savita lumbered through the aviary’s metal gates and pressed her beak against Kel’s side.

Kel waved a gloved hand and jostled Savita’s heavy saddle against her hip.

Twice the size and thickness of a horse’s, the saddle was a monstrous burden to carry—even with Kel’s seventeen years of muscle helping her maneuver it. “Yeah, yeah—hold on a sec.”

Savita bristled and ducked her head. Kel reached for Savita’s collar, glowing like tarnished starlight.

She felt the warm, yellow feathers beneath Sav’s neck brush against her face as she leaned in, making her eyes water.

Alongside other gadgets, a small temperature gauge was embedded in the collar.

The tech was from Cristo Industries, like most equipment used for phoenix racing.

The collar was as much for Savita’s protection as it was for Kel’s. There were plenty of absurd superstitions about the brutality of phoenixes, but it was simple fact that a phoenix without a collar would burn down half of Cendor.

It might be a crude form of control, but there were no better options.

The last time a phoenix had broken free of its collar had been ten years ago, when a new technician had mishandled a phoenix after a race.

The phoenix, already agitated, took flight and burned down the racetrack.

Eight CAPR members had died, as well as five spectators, and another fifty were injured.

“Your vitals are completely normal. You had me worrying all night over nothing.”

Savita’s temperature had fluctuated like a fever the previous night. A temperature spike wasn’t uncommon before a race, as if Sav anticipated the track’s ferocity, but Kel had still spent much of the night chewing on hangnails.

Savita threw Kel what seemed like a filthy look and snorted. Steam escaped her beak.

Kel retorted, “You throw earsplitting tantrums and tear up a dozen shrubs before every race, as if you don’t love getting out on the tracks. But I should know better than to worry, right? You’d probably wake the other isles if you so much as got a splinter.”

Savita snorted again and turned away. The aviary’s dome seemed to curve around the phoenix, welcoming her home as she spread her wings and rose in a whirlwind of dust.

“Thanks, Sav,” Kel coughed.

Kel shook her head and closed the metal gates behind them.

The steel frame held together the aviary’s tempered glass panels and rose high enough to house hundreds of native plants.

Though panels and heat lamps had been replaced over the years—not nearly as often as they should have been—the looming trees and sprawling shrubs all bore her grandfather’s touch.

Kel’s grandfather had bought Sav as a true newborn: fresh from the egg, not her own ashes.

Harrin Varra must have paid a fortune for the young phoenix—though whatever money had allowed him to buy her was long gone.

Kel had been told she’d inherited her ash-brown hair and gray eyes from him, though she’d never met the man. He’d died of Armond’s Blight—AB—before she was born. Before the disease was as common as a cold. Before it made you a statistic instead of a soul.

Kel often dreamed about her grandfather when she slept in the small office attached to the aviary. She wondered if he’d laid his head on the same thin mattress. If he’d watched Savita swerve and glide through the air and heard each of her cries as a ballad.

She never dreamed about her father.

She hoped she wouldn’t dream about Oska, either.

Kel flinched from the thought. Oska hadn’t been the kind of Howler that she’d envisioned welcoming aboard, coming from Ascira’s glamorous isle, dressed in impractical ruffles and fighting most of Dira’s instructions. But she’d had a fire to match any Cendorian’s.

At some point, without even realizing, Kel had let herself forget the fate that befell most riders.

Shaking the thought loose, Kel dropped the saddle and shuffled over to the chest freezer at the far side of the aviary. Savita shrieked, trailing behind Kel as she lifted the freezer lid. A metallic odor filled her nose. Savita lurched toward the freezer and tried to poke her head inside.

“Flames—wait— two more seconds ,” Kel wheezed, shoving away Savita’s insistent beak and grabbing a thick cut of meat from the freezer.

She tossed it out onto the ground, toward a cluster of bushes.

Savita launched for the icy slab as if it might flee.

Kel watched Sav toss it into the air, the meat instantly defrosting and dripping from her heat, before she opened her beak wide and swallowed it whole.

Kel huffed, leaning back against the closed freezer.

Frozen cuts satisfied Savita during racing seasons, when she could expel energy on the track.

But during the colder Steeling Season she had to sate Sav with live prey: purchased and transported bulls and boars that put up as much fight as any mortal animal could.

Whether her prey was dead or alive, Sav didn’t take kindly to interruptions.

Kel quickly skirted the aviary’s glass edges, grabbed the saddle and hurried into the small, adjoining office.

She dropped Savita’s grimy saddle onto the ground and pulled off her protective gloves.

New blisters were already forming over old burn scars, running over her palms and down her wrists.

Given how popular CAPR was, burns and scars were common across Cendor.

Still, she’d need to buy new, thicker gloves soon.

Savita seemed to grow hotter with every race.

Her phoenix screeched, and the office’s wooden walls vibrated. Two photo frames fell forward onto the crammed desk. Kel hurried to straighten the first frame—a picture of her, Dira, and their old teammates after the Howlers’ first win.

“What are we going to do, Sav?” she whispered.

The office wall connected to the aviary offered a window, and Kel watched her phoenix soar and swoop in lazy patterns.

Without today’s prize money, Kel had no clue how she’d stave off the tax collectors who were sure to harass her this week.

She’d tried everything to scramble together extra funds; night shifts at Fieror’s scattered pubs and pleading for the council grants they’d showered her charismatic father with.

The only thing she hadn’t tried was letting kids ride Sav for money, which would likely end in an expensive lawsuit.

From the door, a husky voice asked, “Where’s your tablet?”

Limping beneath the weight of several bags, Dira stumbled into the office. Her dark brown skin gleamed with sweat.

Kel folded her arms. “What are you doing here?”

Dira’s eyes landed on Kel’s desk, where her old tablet and keyboard sat. “ Aha —never mind.”

Dira staggered forward, dropping her bags to the ground with a heavy, expensive-sounding thud .

“Please, make yourself at home,” Kel said dryly. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m feeling that we don’t have time to…” Dira’s voice thickened, cutting off her words. She cleared her throat and plucked a data chip loose from her pocket, lifting Kel’s tablet and propping up the screen.

A moment later, Dira coughed. “ Flames , Kelyn—I think a ghost just flew out of your keyboard. Have you even used this since the last time I was here?”

“I use the tablet in the aviary to track Savita’s vitals. I haven’t used that thing in months. You might as well take it.”

“You live way closer to Fieror’s races. It’s easier to keep the data here with our girl.”

Savita squalled and shook the office walls again. Kel let the sound wash over her like sunlight, burying the memory of Oska’s screams.

“We’re going to need to find a new rider,” Dira sighed, leaning back in the desk chair.

Kel’s stomach dropped. She knew, beneath the even words, Oska’s death ate at Dira as much as it did Kel—probably more.

Dira had been the one to discover Oska at their local inn.

She’d been the one to push through Kel’s qualms and insist Oska train as their new rider, only in part because of her infatuation with the beautiful Asciran at the time.

Though Dira’s crushes were as common and rapid as AB, they’d spent plenty of time together outside of training sessions.

But neither Dira nor Kel had the time to grieve that money afforded.

Stiffly, Kel nodded. She began scrubbing at the hardened soot on Savita’s saddle. Though she used a bristle brush, her nails were instantly coated with a thick layer of black.

Dira twisted back toward the tablet, and they both worked in silence. Though Kel was relieved neither of them forced conversation, she wished she had anything to distract her thoughts from Oska.

A numb part of Kel knew Oska would never have survived CAPR for long. Oska hadn’t been built for Cendor. She’d hesitated to approach Savita for too long, too comfortable in Ascira’s refinement. Nothing could have truly prepared her for what CAPR would demand from her.

But Kel should have tried harder to show her.

Kel crouched on her cot, brushing her sketch pad and carving kit off the small bed. Both were gifts from her father. Drawing—and then carving her designs into leather—were perhaps the only things she could lose herself in that didn’t involve Savita.