Tabitha Chirrick - Overshadowed

“You two are such” -Fehn waved one hand groggily through the air, his eyes fluttering rapidly under his lids—“downers.” He coughed.

The ship sped forward, and Tayel balanced herself against the wall to stand. “You just have to stay with him.” She caught the glint of tears in Jace’s eyes. “Jace, that’s all any of us can do right now.”

With his head feathers puffed, matted, and askew, Jace looked nothing short of exasperated, but he nodded slowly and sidled closer to Fehn. “Okay. I — I got him.”

Tayel squeezed his shoulder once. He was too fragile to have gone through all this. But all this had to be over soon. She pushed past the dozen Varg blocking her path to the cockpit entrance. Balcruf leaned against the left of it, still in the hold but poking his head in toward the pilot’s seat, his ears flattened against his skull.

“Faster! At your pace, we won’t make it before Magis seal the city,” he growled.

“I’m going as fast as I can with five thousand pounds of Varg onboard!” Shy snapped.

Balcruf glared as Tayel slipped past him into the small space behind the pilot’s seat. She took hold of its backrest.

Shy pulled their ride backward away from the mothership’s underside hangar bay. If Tayel hadn’t noticed the tilt in the halls before, she would have noticed it now. The whole structure angled downward toward Cryzoar, and the angle became more pronounced with each passing second. For a Moment, it looked like Shy was flying up to meet it, but she wasn’t. The mothership had started to fall. And it was falling fast.

“Oh xite,” Tayel breathed.

“Tayel?” Shy twisted the yoke and the nose of the ship veered left. “You have something to hold onto back there?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Hold tight.”

She steered the vessel downward. Tayel’s stomach flipped, and claws grating against metal sounded from the hold as Varg fought to stay standing. The gradual dip turned into half a nose dive. Below, Cryzoar awaited its fate. Fires burned throughout the city. Rokkir patrol ships darted above the streets, and people -like little dots — ran about the giant walls encircling the planet’s capitol. From atop those walls, dozens of tiny Varg-shaped blurs fired white beams in an arc from their feet to the sky. Thick white ice formed where the beams touched, and a giant dome started to grow upward around the city.

“Faster!” Balcruf barked.

“I’m trying!” Shy’s elbows extended fully as she thrust the yoke away from her.

The ship dropped into a vertical dive. Tayel clung to the backrest. Her palms sweat as their vessel zipped downward past the edge of the mothership, leaving the view of the monstrosity behind. The aether dome formed higher and higher beneath them, building up around an ever-shrinking hole open to the stars. An ever shrinking hole that if filled, would leave their ship to be crushed between it and the falling Rokkir mega structure above them.

“Shy,” Tayel whimpered.

“Hang on,” Shy said.

“This doesn’t look good!”

“Just hang on!”

The walls rocked with turbulence. A reflection of the mothership crashing through the sky behind them glinted on the aether dome’s shiny surface as it sped to close. Tayel’s breath hitched.

Their opening shrunk.

And shrunk.

Tayel braced herself.

The ship jolted as Shy burst through the hole in the ice. Tayel slammed into the back of the pilot’s chair. A dozen Varg cried out in the hold. The piloting dashboard lit up like an Elshan sunset, but Shy whooped, even as alarms cried dismay. She leveled the vessel to an easier descent as Tayel scrambled to recover.

“What — what happened?” Tayel asked. “We made it?”

“Clipped the wing,” Shy said.

“But we’re safe?”

Shy looked straight up. “I…”

Tayel’s elation died as she followed Shy’s gaze up toward the fully formed protective shield.

Huge, spinning, and out of control, the mothership crumbled downward, the glow from its hull fires illuminating the dome in brilliant orange. It crashed into the aetherial ice. The explosive boom rattled Tayel to her core. Spiderweb cracks reached out like a thousand strikes of lightning through the shield. Dislodged ice rained down, clinking atop the roof as chunks hit. From the city walls, Varg magis fired white beams of aether, sporadically — frantically — rebuilding what they could of the shattering protection.

“Karun guide us to the gates of heaven,” Balcruf murmured.

The mothership tore itself apart. The booming sound hit Tayel like a physical force as white-hot flames blocked out the night sky. Cryzoar turned orange from the glow, and Shy tugged the yoke as their ship veered from the shockwave. The walls shuddered. The floor swayed like it was being ripped apart.

Tayel kept expecting to die, but in seconds the cockpit darkened. The violent orange hue in the city bled away. The floor and walls’ shuddering whined into nothing, and the ship leveled out enough to hover.

Outside, the raging infernos eating away at the outer dome flickered, spreading thin until they started to fade. Skyscraper-sized pieces of charred debris rolled off the ice, kicking up wave-like plumes of snow as they crashed into the earth. Smaller chunks of mothership clicked and clattered down the still-intact shield, rolling off at the curves. As deadly as the Rokkir ship had been, there was nothing threatening left. The Varg’s plan actually worked.

“Yes!” Tayel screamed.

Shy joined her elated cry, and a chorus of cheers rose out of the hold. Overwhelmed with relief, like thirty pounds had been lifted off her chest, Tayel slouched against the wall. The loss of so many Varg, Fehn’s grievous injuries — for one precious Moment none of it seemed to matter. She hadn’t lost her life at the bottom of a fiery wreck.

“That was amazing flying,” Tayel said.

Shy grinned around the edge of her seat. “And you didn’t think I’d make it.”

“Yeah, well, considering the only way for me to have said ‘I told you so’ was for us to die, I’m happy to let you win this one.”

Shy opened her mouth, but her gaze drifted sidelong, and her lips closed into a slight frown. She turned back around, and the engine rattled as the ship glided forward.

“Where now?” Tayel asked.

A Rokkir schematic of Cryzoar appeared over the dashboard. “The shuttle crash.”

Tayel’s ached at the adrenaline spike. All at once, she remembered why she’d come here. “Right,” she breathed.

Her whole journey flashed before her, everything from the siege to the fight with Ruxbane — and that already felt impossibly long ago. It was hard to believe that two months before, she’d been in the kitchen with her Mom and Jace, eating dinner. A week before that, she’d been playing mag with the Undercity Berserkers. Playing cards with friends at lunch. Rummaging through old flexis in Otto’s pawn shop. Lying in bed, dreaming of faraway places.

Shy steered the ship through the city with ease despite the warning for the damaged wing casting red over the dash. They flew over remaining Rokkir troops disappearing through dark portals. Over fires, wreckage, and toppled buildings — buildings that might’ve been homes. Despite the stories of the planet’s crystalline capitol, despite the vids and the history books on Varg civilization, Cryzoar was just empty now . A cold post-apocalyptic nightmare, and little else.

They skirted a skeletonized, charred skyscraper, and Tayel’s heart skipped a beat at the sight of the shuttle crash beyond. The enormous refugee ship rested on a mountain of snow and sleet that used to be part of the now crumbled mile of city wall. The Delta insignia stood out on the side, scorched by a blackened hull breach. Its nose stopped thankfully short of what looked like a residential district, and hundreds of people celebrated in the open space around the crash, jumping, cheering, and pointing up at the dome.