She seemed dumbfounded. The jet shot past in the night sky, rounding for another attack.
‘Go back!’ she said, waving with an armored hand.
‘I’m an Oculator,’ I said, pointing to my Lenses. ‘I can stop the Frostbringer’s ray.’
It was true. An Oculator can use his Oculator’s Lenses to counter an enemy’s attack. I’d seen my grandfather do it when dueling Blackburn. I’d never tried it myself, but, I figured it couldn’t be that hard.
I was completely wrong, of course. It happens to the best of us at times.
Draulin cursed, running across the dragon’s back to block another blast. The ship rolled, nearly making me sick, and I was suddenly struck by just how high up I was. I crouched down, holding my stomach, waiting for the world to orient itself again. When it did, Draulin was standing beside me.
‘Go back down!’ she yelled. ‘You can be of no help here!’
‘I—’
‘Idiot!’ she yelled. ‘You’re going to get us killed!’
I fell silent, the wind tussling my hair. I felt shocked to be treated so, but it was probably no more than I deserved. I turned away, clomping back toward the hatch, embarrassed.
To the side, the jet fired a missile. The glass on its cockpit fired another Frostbringer’s ray.
And the Dragonaut didn’t dodge.
I spun toward the cockpit and could just barely see Australia slumped over her control panel, dazed. Bastille was trying to slap her awake – she’s particularly good at anything that requires slapping – and Kaz was furiously trying to make the ship respond.
We lurched, but the wrong way. Draulin cried out, barely slicing her sword through the icy beam as she stumbled. She vaporized it, but the missile continued on, directly toward us.
Directly toward me.
I’ve talked about the uneasy truce my Talent and I have. Neither of us is really ever in control. I can usually break things if I really want to, but rarely in exactly the way I want. And, my Talent often breaks things when I don’t want it to.
What I lack in control, I make up for in power. I watched that missile coming, saw its glass length reflect the starlight, and saw the trail of smoke leading back to the fighter behind.
I stared at my reflection in oncoming death. Then I raised my hand and released my Talent.
The missile shattered, shards of glass spraying from it, twinkling and spinning into the midnight air. Then, those shards exploded, vaporizing to powdered dust, which sprayed around me, missing me by several inches on each side.
The smoke from the missile’s engine was still blowing forward, and it licked my fingers. Immediately, the line of smoke quivered. I screamed and a wave of power shot from my chest, pulsing up the line of smoke like water in a tube, moving toward the fighter, which was screaming along in the same path its missile had taken.
The wave of power hit the jet. All was silent for a moment.
Then, the fighter just . . . fell apart. It didn’t explode, like one might see in an action movie. Its separate pieces simply departed one from another. Screws fell out, panels of metal were thrown free, pieces of glass separated from wing and cockpit. In seconds, the entire machine looked like a box of spare parts that had been carelessly tossed into the air.
The mess shot over the top of the Dragonaut, then fell toward the clouds below. As the pieces disbursed, I caught a glimpse of an angry face in the midst of the metal. It was the pilot, twisting among the discarded parts. In an oddly surreal moment, his eyes met mine, and I saw cold hatred in them.
The face was not all human. Half looked normal, the other half was an amalgamation of screws, springs, nuts, and bolts – not unlike the pieces of the jet falling around it. One of his eyes was of the deepest, blackest glass.
He disappeared into the darkness.
I gasped suddenly, feeling incredibly weak. Bastille’s mother crouched, one hand steadying herself against the roof, watching me with an expression I couldn’t see through her knightly faceplate.
Only then did I notice the cracks in the top of the Dragonaut. They spread out from me in a spiral pattern, as if my feet had been the source of some great impact. Looking desperately, I saw that most of the giant flying dragon now bore flaws or cracks of some kind.
My Talent – unpredictable as always – had shattered the glass beneath me as I’d used it to destroy the jet. Slowly, terribly, the massive dragon began to droop. Another of the wings fell free, the glass cracking and breaking. The Dragonaut lurched.
I’d saved the ship . . . but I’d also destroyed it.
We began to plummet downward.