Bram Möller's Arc

Chapter 15 of 63

Parisa lifted the case lid on the pad. Inside lay a dented brass pocket compass, its lid weathered, its face still bright. "It belonged to one of the missing pilots," she said. "His wife paid me to bring it out. She thinks he is still up there." Bram closed the case. Two pilots had vanished in Hollowpass at the start of the week. He had flown past their silence for days. Now their names sat in his hand. Vex came off the mooring line with a wrench in her fist. Her red hair was crusted with frost. She had cleared his mast for launch once, taken his coin twice, and warned him every time. "Don't," she said. She had read his face. "You have one glide left in that bag. Not two." Omondi stood behind her, lab coat buttoned wrong against the cold. He held the hawk on his wrist. "The crown seam will not climb," he said. "You know this." "I am not climbing," Bram said. "I am gliding down." A thin sound came through the wind then. Three short pulses, then three long. A distress whistle from a pilot's kit, carried on the updraft from the slope below the waystation. It cut across the line he had planned for his last delivery. "That is on my glide path," Bram said. Vex swore. "That is a mile off your glide path. You turn for that whistle, you land on rock." Bram looked at the compass. He looked at the patched envelope shifting on its lines. He thought of the courier who had never survived this route, and how legends were only ever the pilots who came back. "Give me the hawk," he said. "Keep the owl here. Parisa stays with you." Parisa did not argue. She set the compass on the rail beside him. "Bring him back if he is there." Bram cut loose alone. He kept the vent almost closed and let the prototype fall down the valley. The hawk faced the whistle. Its near wing lifted, pointing him off his line, out over the scree. He followed the wing. The whistle grew. He saw a torn envelope hooked on a spur, and one man beside it, waving a lantern. Only one. Not two. Bram could not climb back to the waystation with a passenger aboard. The crown seam would split. He knew this before he chose it. He brought the prototype down hard on the scree in a long skid, tore the belly fabric, and stopped ten yards from the man. The pilot climbed in shaking. "My partner went over the edge on Tuesday," he said. "I have been whistling for four days." Bram tucked him under a blanket. The prototype would not lift again. He was grounded on a mountainside, one pilot saved, one still lost, and his final stop still ahead of him in the dark.