Not the whole cockpit. Just the glass covering it. I frowned, and my friends seemed equally confused.
The jet’s canopy shot forth a beam of glowing white power, directed at us. It hit one of the dragon’s wings, spraying out shards of ice and snow. The wing, caught in the grip of the cold, froze in place. Then, as its mechanisms tried to force it to move, the wing shattered into a thousand pieces.
‘Frostbringer’s Lens!’ Bastille shouted as the Dragonaut rocked.
‘That was no Lens!’ Australia said. ‘That fired from the canopy glass!’
‘Amazing!’ Kaz said, holding on to his seat as the ship rocked.
We’re going to die, I thought.
It wasn’t the first time I’d felt that icy pit of terror, that sense of horrible doom that came from thinking I was going to die. I felt it on the altar when I was about to get sacrificed, I felt it when Blackburn shot me with his Torturer’s Lens, and I felt it as I watched the F-15 turn back toward us for another run.
I never got used to that feeling. It’s kind of like getting punched in the face by your own mortality.
And mortality has a wicked right hook.
‘We need to do something!’ I shouted as the Dragonaut lurched. Australia, however, had her eyes closed – I’d later learn that she was mentally compensating for the lost wing, keeping us in the air. Ahead of us, the fighter’s cockpit began glowing again.
‘We are doing something,’ Bastille said.
‘What?’
‘Stalling!’
‘For what?’
Something thumped up above. I glanced up, apprehensive as I looked through the translucent glass. Bastille’s mother, Draulin, stood up on the roof of the Dragonaut. A majestic cloak fluttered out behind her, and she wore her steel armor. She carried a Sword of Crystallia.
I’d seen one once before, during the Library infiltration. Bastille had pulled it out to fight against Alivened monsters. I’d thought, maybe, that I’d remembered the sword’s ridiculous size wrong – that perhaps it had simply looked big next to Bastille.
I was wrong. The sword was enormous, at least five feet long from tip of blade to hilt. It glittered, made completely of the crystal from which the Crystin, and Crystallia itself, get their name.
(The knights aren’t terribly original with names. Crystin, Crystallia, crystals. One time when I was allowed into Crystallia, I jokingly dubbed my potato a ‘Potatin potato, grown and crafted in the Fields of Potatallia.’ The knights were not amused. Maybe I should have used my carrot instead.)
Draulin stepped across the head of our flying dragon, her armored boots clinking against the glass. Somehow, she managed to retain a sure footing despite the wind and the shaking vehicle.
The jet fired a beam from its Frostbringer’s glass, aiming for another wing. Bastille’s mother jumped, leaping through the air, cloak flapping. She landed on the wing itself, raising her crystalline sword. The beam of frost hit the sword and disappeared in a puff. Bastille’s mother barely even bent beneath the blow. She stood powerfully, her armored visor obscuring her face.
The cockpit fell silent. It seemed impossible to me that Draulin had managed such a feat. Yet, as I waited, the jet fired again, and once again Bastille’s mother managed to get in front of the beam and destroy it.
‘She’s . . . standing on top of the Dragonaut,’ I said as I watched through the glass.
‘Yes,’ Bastille said.
‘We appear to be going several hundred miles an hour.’
‘About that.’
‘She’s blocking laser beams fired by a jet airplane.’
‘Yes.’
‘Using nothing but her sword.’
‘She’s a Knight of Crystallia,’ Bastille said, looking away. ‘That’s the sort of thing they do.’
I fell silent, watching Bastille’s mother run the entire length of the Dragonaut in the space of a couple seconds, then block an ice beam fired at us from behind.