Clarissa’s voice penetrated my jumbled senses, cutting through the discordant shrieks, groans, and clangs of tortured metal. The deck was jumping and convulsing beneath my back. I opened my eyes and saw branches and foliage dragging past the jagged sides of the roof. The ship was still crashing through the canopy of the forest.
There was a girder across my body, pinning me down, excruciatingly heavy against my chest, but as far as I could ascertain, I hadn’t sustained any grievous injury—miraculously!—though I was so battered that even raising my wrist to my mouth sent spikes of pain through me.
“Aiden! Please! Please!”
“Clarissa,” I gasped.
It made no sense. Why wasn’t the vessel slowing? Its propellers couldn’t be rotating—the impact would have torn them apart—yet the aero-ship was grinding through the treetops, the boles so massive and densely packed that it couldn’t fall through them.
“Oh, thank Heaven! Get out of there, Aiden! Quickly!”
I reached down, took hold of the girder, and pushed. It shifted, but not enough.
“I’m trapped!”
My ears were assaulted by cacophonous thunder and the crashes and squeals of the disintegrating flying machine. The deck bucked and shrieked. It banged against the back of my head. A gust of wind whistled through the ripped metal, bringing with it the scent of lemons.
“I can’t get to you in time, Aiden! You’re being pulled into the rupture.”
“Don’t try!” I responded. I heaved at the girder and managed to push myself a little way out from under it. “Report!”
“What?”
“Report! What has happened?”
I shoved the beam again, my lacerated fingers sending a spike of pain through me, and gained a few more inches of freedom. Then the deck suddenly angled upward, the girder came loose, and I heaved myself out from beneath it. I grabbed a fold of twisted metal to secure myself. The frenzied whistle of escaping steam sounded from the rear of the machine, drowning Clarissa’s reply. I pressed my wrist to the side of my head and shouted, “Repeat! I can barely hear you!”
“The war machines are disabled! Colonel Spearjab and Artellokas are drawing the defeated Divergent to the forest below me. They’re taking to the trees and pupating. The rest are being hunted. We’ve won, Aiden! But you have to get off that ship! It’s almost at the mouth!”
To my left, a jumble of debris flew into the air and clattered upward out of the cabin. The storm was raging outside and everything was being drawn into it as if magnetised.
A buckled panel clanged aside and Yissil Froon burst into view. His body was dented and bloody, the shell ruined, his limbs broken. Still, he had strength enough to throw himself onto me with an inarticulate cry of rage, slicing his left hand down, its serrated digits gashing my chest. Then he was suddenly twirling into the air as the aero-ship jolted upward, and I saw him catapulted out of it and yanked into the sky.
I felt myself grabbed by a powerful force, as if gravity itself had reversed direction. The twisted deck plate was wrenched from my grasp and I was sucked out of the wreck.
The world pirouetted around me—trees, a band of purple, the moons, a streak of orange, Yissil Froon, the sea, the ship, lightning.
“Aiden! No!”
Clarissa’s scream followed me into a vertical tube of iridescent energy. I was enveloped by numbing cold and felt a sensation of immeasurable speed.
The last thing I saw, as my senses fled, was the aero-ship, below me, flowering into a ball of flame as some part of its engine—probably the boiler—detonated.
°
My eyes were brimming with pale blue sky—a memory returned but oddly detached, as if belonging to someone else—and a syrupy scent clogged my nostrils. I felt dewy grass between my fingers. A bee flew lazily past my face.
Earth.
And I knew exactly where on Earth, too. The intoxicating perfume was unmistakable. It belonged to a small blossom-filled glade on one of Koluwai’s hills, a clearing strewn with the corpses of Zull.
Dawn had just broken, the quality of the light told me that much, and the trees should’ve been alive with squawking birds and chattering monkeys. They weren’t.
I slowly turned my head, cautious of pain. The foliage around me was littered with fragments of metal and ragged strips of material—pieces of the aero-ship and its two dirigibles. The destroyed machine had been coughed through the rupture.
A shadow slid over me. I tried to push myself upright but a heavy weight thudded down onto my chest, knocking me back, pinning me to the