told him. “Then we cut through again and get down inside.”
John nodded.
Behind them were the bobbing heads of their pursuers, rapidly climbing up out of the valley of the first sail. She and John moved diagonally, traversing the sail as they climbed. But even so, the canvas quickly became so steep that they slid backward with each step.
“Knives!” John yelled, panting as he pulled two from his waist.
Quin drew her own knives, and they used them like pitons, digging into the canvas and dragging themselves higher.
The wind was stronger with every inch they moved upward. She glanced down beneath her right arm—to avoid looking directly over her shoulder, where she might catch a terrifying view of the drop to the harbor—and saw a shape fly over the lip of the sail. It was Nott, with a rope trailing from his chest, soaring spread-eagle through the air. He hit the canvas and was brought up short when the rope jerked tight around him. The boy gasped for breath, and the sounds of choking were carried on the wind.
“You can jump!” Nott yelled when he was able to speak. “She’s right here!”
It was so steep now that Quin was nearly hanging off her knives.
“There’s a girder,” she called to John.
John called back, against the wind, “I feel it.”
“Let’s cut here!” Quin leaned into her left arm and with her right pulled her whipsword from its spot at her waist. She cracked it out and twisted her wrist, sending the oily black substance flowing around itself. The whipsword transformed into a long, wide knife. She put her wrist through another complicated series of motions, and sharp teeth bloomed along each side of the blade. “Make your sword short and jagged,” she told John.
He was already copying her with his own whipsword. Then they attacked the canvas, sawing with abandon.
Don’t look down, Quin thought, keeping her body tight against the surface of the sail. If she lost her balance, it would be a quick slide to the bottom, and the boys would be on her with their disruptors in a matter of seconds. They were already on the new sail, climbing toward her and John. In twenty or thirty more yards, they would be within range to fire at them.
She and John sawed until they’d created a man-sized flap, but their cutting job had been uneven, and the canvas was still sticking in a few places.
“We can tear the rest!” John said, his voice at a yell in the wind.
Quin nodded, stowed her sword; then together they ripped the last threads of canvas away from the girder. A large flap snapped up from the sail, and a gust of warm air hit Quin from under the canopy. She slid beneath the canvas flap, John at her back.
It took her eyes a moment to adjust, but when they did, she saw a network of crisscrossed trusses stretching up and away from the girder on which they were perched. Somewhere below was the top level of the Bridge, but the trusses in front of her here were so densely packed, there was no way to climb through them.
She and John were trapped.
Outside the flap of canvas, she could hear the disruptors. With rising distress, Quin peeked out to find the boys only twenty yards below them. She was looking directly into the barrel of a disruptor, and sparks were launching from its hundreds of holes.
“Move back!” she yelled, shoving John.
She pressed herself sideways beneath the canvas, into the tiny void between the steel truss work and the canopy.
Light burst all around the flap’s edges, hissing and crackling. A dozen sparks found their way through the jagged cut and ricocheted violently between the trusses, just inches from her face, before dissipating in rainbow-colored explosions of light.
Quin didn’t wait to see if she’d been disrupted. She gripped the blade of her knife, lifted the flap. All five attackers were spread out below. Without hesitating she chose her target and threw. Her knife planted itself in the arm of the one with the focal and the disruptor. He cried out but didn’t fall. These boys were hard to stop.
Next to her, John threw two knives in quick succession. One grazed a boy’s shoulder, and the second one would have taken out an eye, but the boy ducked at the last moment.
Nott swung himself toward Quin, a blade flashing in his hand.
“Give me my helm, you stupid, thieving girl!” he yelled.
She gripped the trusses behind her, pulled her legs up,