Chapter 183: The Flightless Beast Took the Drowning Road

When the Bellmother rolled, every rider flew upward into the sea.

Her scar pulled the nursery chain first. The marked district rose beneath Kaul’s shear perch, struck the lower skin of the ceiling ocean, and punched a tower-sized fold of water through the roofs.

Wing-sails opened by reflex.

That saved riders in air. Underwater, the cloth trapped great silver bellies of air and dragged them away from the streets below.

Beras vanished into the fold with both dark wings spread. The green-sailed rider followed, one arm around the hatchling she had pulled from the broken cradle. Three Hook Choir hunters struck the water beside them. None came back through the surface.

Kesta hit the grate with her brass hook. "They cannot close their sails against that pull."

Jiang was already swimming.

He left Aylin’s rope secured to the root and drove up the chain channel. His bad leg trailed after every second kick, catching currents instead of making them. Warm water became cold where the Bellmother’s turn mixed the layers.

The flooded pocket had swallowed a bridge, two rooflines, and everyone between them.

Jiang entered beneath a snapped weather vane.

He saw bubbles, roots, and wing cloth whipping hard enough to hide bodies. A boot passed above him, toes kicking at a direction where no air remained. Then the whole pocket clouded with white dust shaken from the Bellmother’s scar.

Sight became a guess.

Jiang caught a chain root and pressed his belly into its fork. His feet hooked opposite sides. Water beat against his back until his own wake thinned enough to vanish among the larger movements.

Then `Pressure Wake` opened.

The Bellmother filled everything.

Her turn came through the water as a slow bend that swallowed smaller wakes and returned them from the wrong side. Chain links hammered separate rhythms into it. Wing cloth snapped, baskets tumbled, hatchlings clawed at wood, and people fought currents that carried every struggle into the next.

Jiang could not count them. He could not tell Beras from a loose spar or a dying rider from someone cutting free.

Pain pushed behind both eyes. The break in his beak throbbed with every overlapping wake.

He held still long enough to notice what did not move with the rest.

Behind a curtain of braided roots, several fresh wakes struck the same patch of water and folded back. Something enclosed them. Small bubbles escaped through the roots, rose toward the Bellmother, and stopped under stretched cloth.

Bodies might be there.

Air was there. That much was certain.

Jiang released the ability and trusted the part he could confirm.

He swam through the root curtain. A wing-sail had wrapped around three riders like a net, its trapped air pinning them against the ceiling growth. One hunter hacked at the cloth with a hook while the blade bounced too close to another man’s throat. Beras held the green-sailed rider beneath him, keeping the hatchling between their bodies and out of the swinging metal.

Nobody could open the sail because their weight no longer pulled in the familiar direction.

Jiang found its lower spar.

Kesta had shown him what paired flight did to a loaded wing. Air had to leave from the edge the rider could not reach.

He planted both feet against the spar and shoved his beak under a wooden toggle. The injured tip slipped. Jiang turned his head, caught the toggle near the hinge, and twisted instead of pulling.

With one turn, it opened.

Trapped air struck him in the chest.

The sail collapsed around the riders. Without its silver belly, they began sinking toward the city air below. Beras tore one arm free and passed the hatchling to the hunter with the knife. The hunter dropped his blade to take it.

Jiang could not carry any of them.

He swam downward through the folded cloth and made them choose whether to follow.

Beras came first. He dragged the green-sailed rider by her shoulder strap until she kicked for herself. The others formed a line through the roots, hands gripping ankles, frames, and torn sail ribs. Their descent was clumsy, frightened, and alive.

A second bubble mass shivered beyond the drowned roofline.

Jiang turned toward it.

Beras caught his good flipper. Through the water, his face made the shape of a refusal.

Jiang looked at the bubbles and bit the silver stitching on Beras’s shoulder.

The wingman let go before Jiang tore it.

This pocket held only one rider, facedown beneath an intact sail. Jiang opened the trailing toggle and slapped the man’s cheek with his flipper. Nothing changed. He struck again, harder, until the rider coughed water inside a scatter of bubbles and found Jiang’s neck with both hands.

The grip almost drove Jiang’s beak into the roof.

He could not explain panic underwater. He twisted free, put the rider’s hand around a root, and swam toward the visible surface below.

The man followed one root at a time.

Bellmother water tore away from the district without warning.

Roofs dropped. Winged bodies fell into air, where their sails snapped open and became useful again.

Jiang fell with them.

No connected descent remained around him, only broken sheets of water and open sky beneath a ceiling that had retreated. `Stormdive` offered nothing. His bad leg spun him sideways while the city opened below.

Beras dove past the rescued rider.

Kesta swung out from a chain on her brass hook. Beras caught Jiang across one dark sail and let his weight drive the frame down. Kesta met the sagging cloth from beneath, hooked its spar, and turned a crushing fall into a brutal swing.

The green-sailed rider caught Kesta’s waist as they passed the bridge.

Jiang rolled from Beras’s wing into a basket of nursery moss. Pain climbed from hip to shoulder. For several breaths, all he could do was lie in someone else’s bedding and hate the sky.

Kesta leaned over him. "Flightless beast."

Jiang snapped his beak at her hook.

Skykeel had been sideways long enough that her laugh startled him.

The sound ended when Aylin’s rope jerked against its root.

Water around the line had narrowed to a fist-sized throat. On the Red Aeries side, Valea chipped the stone lip along a natural seam while Hest held his iron bar across the opening. Neither forced the living edge. They only kept rock from closing over the space the juvenile made.

Kesta put her hook into one root. Beras took the other. ℯℯ𝑙.

"One bridge," he warned her.

"One woman," Kesta answered. "Then you may try the hook again."

They pulled apart in the old paired rhythm. Valea struck when the roots yielded. Hest shifted his bar when water rose. The plain rope carried every change between them as tremors Jiang could feel through his breast.

The smallest juvenile hurried back and forth beside Aylin, chasing Mottle’s changing taps. Each pass pushed more living water through the wound.

At last, the opening held wide enough for shoulders.

Aylin removed her outer coat. She set the rope behind her ribs, tightened the off-center hitch, and waited through one full pass of the juvenile before placing both hands into the current.

Jiang moved toward her.

She stopped him with one pull on the line.

That single pull meant wait.

Aylin drew a breath on the Red Aeries ledge and entered under her own strength.

Her head disappeared into the water. Her shoulders followed. Valea fed rope; Hest guarded the stone; Kesta and Beras held the roots apart without gaining another hand between them.

Halfway through, the Bellmother rolled again.

The current turned sideways with Aylin inside it.