Father Desmond Crane's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Father Desmond Crane knelt beside a mound of sand studded with rusted scrap and dug with his fingers. He was hunting Vael tech again. Five years ago, before the wasteland cracked open, he had preached from a pulpit under a rose window. Then came the vision: wings of colored glass, huge, letting light through. He wrote it down that same night. Now he built those wings piece by piece from alien salvage, and he called every lucky find a nudge from God. His spear lay in the dirt beside him. His hands, brown and grey-haired at the knuckles, moved fast through the sand. His fingers struck something smooth. He brushed the grit away and found a shard of Vael glass, violet, warm, humming under his thumb. His hands began to shake. He had traded three days of food for his first cracked panel and studied it two weeks before he dared touch it. This shard was better. This shard would fit the left wing. He whispered thanks and slipped it into his coat. A shadow moved on the ridge above him. Desmond froze. He looked up slow, one hand closing on the spear. A Vael scout stood against the pale sky, purple-scaled, big black eyes, a curved antenna twitching over its helmet. It had already seen him. It raised a small device to its mouth and clicked something into it. Desmond understood. The scout was not here to fight him. The scout was here to mark him. He threw the spear anyway. The scout stepped aside, calm, and the spear clanged off stone. Then it turned and ran along the ridge, fast, low, gone before Desmond could climb. He stood alone in the sand with the shard warm against his ribs and his spear ten yards downslope. He knew what the click meant. More of them would come, and they would follow the trail he had cut through the wasteland to reach this place. He picked up the spear and started for a wind-hollowed cavern he had passed at dawn, a mouth of layered stone deep enough to hide a man. He would reach it before dark. He had the shard. He had his wings to finish. And now he had the Vael behind him.