Gearspark Aviatrix's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Gearspark Aviatrix bolted the salvaged core engine to a new frame on the rooftop, teal light bleeding through the seams of her armor. Yesterday the rest of the machine hit the harbor floor. The engine survived, and she had rebuilt around it in one night. She meant to fly it into the storm-wall by dawn: the churning gray band that circled the sea and had swallowed every pilot who tried to reach the lost continent behind it. She wanted her name on that crossing. She wanted it enough to launch on guesses. She had no data on what the wall did inside itself, only the wrecks that came back in pieces, and her wing spar was thin enough that a wrong gust would fold the craft in half. A boot scraped the gravel behind her. Storm Grit climbed off the fire escape with bandaged hands and yellow eyes that did not blink enough. Gearspark did not know her. Storm Grit spoke first. "I know about storms." She said her curse pulled her under whenever one came within a day's reach. She could feel pressure the way other people felt hunger. She named the wall's inner pattern in four flat sentences: a calm shell, a shear layer at two hundred feet, an updraft column at the center, a second shear on exit. She said it the way someone reads a receipt. Gearspark grabbed a grease pencil and wrote it on the wing itself. Then she asked why. Storm Grit shrugged. "Velvet sent me. Says you owe her now." Below them, on a lounge balcony one roof over, a woman in black watched with her arms folded. Velvet Mirage raised two fingers in a small wave, patient, unhurried, already counting what the favor would cost. Gearspark lit the engine. The frame shook and held. She climbed to two hundred feet, cut hard through the first shear the way Storm Grit had described, and rode the updraft column until her goggles fogged from the pressure change. The second shear kicked the tail. The craft held. She punched through the far side of the storm-wall into clean, cold air and saw, for one full minute, a dark shoreline no chart had ever shown. Then a strut cracked and she turned back, threading the same seam home. She landed on the rooftop with half a wing and a working chart of the crossing in her head. Storm Grit was already gone. Velvet Mirage was not. She lifted a glass across the gap and mouthed one word Gearspark could read even from here: soon.