Lightning reached down like a skeletal hand in front of him. He flinched and then weaved right. The balloon dragged slightly, and once his rig was level again, he tapped his wrist monitor to let out more helium.
Once it was released, he swooped two hundred feet lower to avoid other strikes, although there was no way to get below their range. Going lower just lessened the chance of being hit. The synthetic material installed around the aluminum bars would help, too, at least in theory.
At seven hundred feet, he had a great view of the surface. There was no sign of a warship or submarines amid the galaxy of whitecaps. He alternated from night vision to infrared, hoping to pick something up.
The minutes ticked by. By two in the morning, the other divers and Cricket had covered a combined hundred square miles. Michael feared they must expand their search even more if they didn’t find Raven’s Claw soon.
Or maybe they were wasting their time. Maybe his gut was wrong about the warship being close.
His mind wandered as he searched.
At three a.m., he struggled to stay awake. The longer he flew under the storms, the more fatigued he became. Part of that was the darkness. Spending so much time in the sunshine had changed him in some ways, making the real world feel more suffocating than ever before.
He drank through his straw, wishing he could splash water on his face.
Lightning sizzled across the horizon, and his HUD flickered off, on, then off.
The map on his display vanished. Worse, his night-vision optics went dark from the electrical interference.
A pocket of turbulence shook his glider violently. He held it steady, waiting for his systems to come back online.
For what felt like another hour, he flew in almost complete darkness, using the glow of lightning to scan the surface and make sure he didn’t go too low.
By the time his optics came back on ten minutes later, he was a mile off course. But seeing that the other divers were still alive helped him concentrate.
He took another drink, trying to break through the fatigue. There was always the stim pill in his vest, but he decided to save it. He had functioned on far less sleep before.
Better to save the precious pill for when he really needed it.
Leaning forward on the control bar, he spotted something on the surface during a flash of lightning. He blinked again, thinking it was an illusion. When he activated his night-vision optics, he saw the curved shape of an airship resting on the top of an oil rig.
Exhaustion had messed with his memory before, but this was no illusion.
The rig was real, and so was the airship.
Discovery had landed on top of the Cazador prison they called the Shark’s Cage. Dozens of boats were docked outside—ferries that had taken Samson and his small army of workers to repair the airship.
It was a dangerous place to do work, but it was the only rig on the Vanguard Islands that didn’t see sunshine—the one place the skinwalkers would probably not think to look.
Michael decided to check it out before veering back to his search grid.
He swooped down to about five hundred feet. Sparks glowed across the airship’s bow. The workers were busy patching up the exterior, but they still had much to do. A dozen mechanics and engineers stood on scaffolding around the exposed bridge. No one seemed to notice as he ghosted past.
He steered away from the airship and headed back out to hunt for skinwalkers. To pick up speed, he let out most of the remaining helium in his balloon.
That did the trick. The sail caught on a gust of wind to send him streaking beneath the clouds.
Arriving back at his search grid, he added some helium from his booster. The balloon both slowed and lifted his rig.
He went back to scanning the whitecaps for Raven’s Claw. But the longer he searched, the more his eyes started to play tricks on him, making waves look like ships. He drank more water and decided it was finally time to take a stim pill.
Fishing in his vest pocket, he retrieved the last one from his stash back at the islands. He flipped his face shield open, the cold wind buffeting his face as he popped the pill into his mouth and swallowed it.
By the time he closed the shield over his cold skin, he had a blip on his HUD. One of the beacons flickered, then vanished.
Michael’s heart sank when it didn’t come back online. They had lost a diver.
Terrified to look, he finally brought up his wrist computer and saw that it was Alberto, one of the new Cazador divers. Michael didn’t know him well, only that he had served in the military as a boat mechanic and had jumped at the chance to dive through the sky. And now he was dead.
“I’m sorry,” Michael whispered.
He flew for the next few minutes thinking of Alberto and all the other divers they had lost over the years. And as always, he did his best to push the grief aside and concentrate on the mission.
The stim pill was already kicking in, and the exhaustion seemed to wash away as the glider took him deeper into the storm beyond the barrier. With the stimulant working, his mind multitasked, focusing on the hunt but also on his worries, hopes, and dreams of the future.
One thing had become clear to him in the past year: life was even more precious than ever before. It could vanish in a blink, as it just had for Alberto.
Michael had struggled between duty to his people and duty to Layla, but out here, flying through the sky, he realized now what he must do, both for his people and for the only woman he had ever loved.
The gift of life growing inside her womb had to be protected at all costs. The very future of their people depended on children like Bray.
Lightning rickracked across his flight path, and he swooped lower. Rows of waves rolled across the black surface, stirred by the violent wind that drove his glider through the sky.
Another beacon winked on his HUD. But this wasn’t one of the divers—not a human one, anyway.
Cricket’s beacon flickered in and out, which could mean the robot had sustained damage or that the electrical disturbance was affecting the signal again. It appeared to be the latter, Michael realized when he brought up the drone’s location.
For some reason, Cricket had veered away from the search grid, heading farther away from the islands and into the darkness. Michael tapped his wrist computer to give it new orders, but the signal flickered off altogether. He waited a few seconds, hoping it would come back online, but the beacon had stopped transmitting. They had lost contact with the drone.
The loss hit Michael hard. In some ways, Cricket had become his friend. Not quite in the way Miles was to X, but so much more than a mere machine.
The loss of Alberto, and now Cricket, filled him with anger. He felt his prosthetic hand dent the aluminum of the control bar.
For the next hour, he searched the water. The only thing on his mind was finding the demons.
At five thirty in the morning, his HUD beeped again—this time, not for a lost diver. The alarm meant he needed to head back to the islands.
It wouldn’t be long now before the sun rose and all the divers had to be back and grounded to avoid being seen.
The search tonight had failed. And they had lost a diver and Cricket in the bargain. Michael’s jaw clenched in anger.
He let more helium out of the balloon and soared back toward the barrier. By the time he was nearing the border of the islands, all he could think of was Layla. She would be waiting for him in the gardens of the capitol tower.
The journey back took him through several patches of turbulent skies. He didn’t flinch at the lightning strikes, or in the rattle of the thunder. Michael was too focused to be fazed by them. He knew what he had to do now. It was all so clear.