Chapter 210: The Penguin Found Still Water Inside a Star-Eater’s Wake

The dead stars left no opening wide enough for Skykeel.

Black current ended at their white shells and returned in the cramped spaces between them. Some shells were round. Others had broken into hooked plates with edges facing the oncoming city.

Morrowfin drove them toward the field with one sound wing.

Her wounded wing remained folded against her belly. White fire seeped between the fold and her dark skin, making each hard stroke shiver before it reached the crosswake.

The fold had swallowed Jiang’s lee.

Kesta understood the collision before anyone called it. She crossed the remaining root with her wrapped hand raised, sent residents out of the empty east rooms, and kicked loose the door teeth behind them.

"Strip every roof outside the nursery brace," she shouted. "Leave the east root ready to cut."

Neris put the occupied cradle into Dema’s arms and limped toward the roof lines. Beras followed with his strong shoulder under a coil. Olsa’s hunters spread through the empty rooms, pulling black armor plates from their coats to cover the worst splinters.

Nobody had room to ask whether another sacrifice was fair.

Aylin knelt beside Jiang at the copper lip. His bad leg stuck behind him. When she tried to bend it, the ankle trembled inside her palm and stayed straight.

"You cannot tow anything else," she said.

"I was hoping to tow myself."

"That is also under review."

Jiang looked past her into the water.

The folded wing moved against Morrowfin’s belly with every breath. Six dark slits behind her jaw opened. Water pulled toward them. When they closed, a thin skin of air escaped the wounded fold and slid backward along the animal.

The air did not spin.

It gathered in a dark crease close enough to Morrowfin’s body that the sound wing could not reach it. The pocket vanished when she turned to breathe again, then returned behind the same fold.

Still water existed there.

Jiang wanted it to be large enough for a root. It was barely large enough for him.

He pressed his beak into the intact feathers below his throat. A small chain of trapped air left the plumage. The bubbles raced sideways in the outer current, reached the fold, and stopped in the crease.

Aylin followed them with her eyes.

"If you go there, the wing closes between us."

"Only until she breathes."

"You do not know that."

"I know where my air stopped."

The first hooked star scraped along Skykeel’s empty east roof. Copper curled away with a cry that shook the nursery brace.

Aylin took Jiang’s right-ankle loop off the damaged leg. She moved it above his sound ankle, tested the knot with both hands, and waited.

"Bring me back before I become clever," he said.

"That happened several bad decisions ago."

She lowered him into the black current.

Jiang could not use his bad foot. He rolled onto that side instead, drove with the good foot, and kept both flippers close enough that the crosswake had little surface to seize. Buoyancy lifted his breast toward the folded wing.

Cold reached the bare patch before the rest of him entered the crease.

His skin tightened. The old beak fracture throbbed with every shallow breath. He kept his tail flat, let the trapped air along his back take his weight, and slid behind Morrowfin’s injured fold.

The water stopped moving across him.

Morrowfin’s body still traveled. Jiang traveled with it. Inside that narrow pocket, there was only the scrape from her wounded joint and the slow pull of water through the breathing slits ahead.

He opened one flipper.

The feathers did not bend.

Jiang lifted his white breast toward Skykeel and tucked again. Aylin saw the change through the dark water. She raised both arms.

Kesta answered from the root.

The city began making itself thinner.

Residents closed the empty east mouths. Others opened the central chambers beneath the nursery so Morrowfin’s body-drag could pass through instead of catching every wall. Neris cut three roof lines. Olsa severed a fourth with her burned hand wrapped in a strip of her ruined coat.

The loose roofs entered the outer current and shattered against the first dead stars.

Their breaking made a path no living body had to test.

Ashwake dropped beside Morrowfin’s head. Half its water-facing sail trailed from one mast, and the broken mast had been lashed across the open keel. Irra’s crew brought up one uncracked shell from the lowest rack.

They did not throw it at Morrowfin.

Irra and two deckhands rolled the shell down a silver cloth until it floated ahead of her sound-side eye. Then they released the cloth and let the whole star choose its own current.

Morrowfin saw the offered shell.

She also saw Jiang.

Her eye turned beneath Skykeel and found the black-and-white body traveling beside her wounded fold. Jiang held his flippers against himself. He called nothing. Any sound in that water would have belonged to pain before it belonged to language.

The eye remained on him through one breath.

Morrowfin chose her next stroke.

She did not open the wounded wing. She rolled it outward just enough to keep the fold from crushing the small body in its crease. Her sound wing shortened its beat to balance the change.

The black current altered around her.

The still pocket widened from a penguin’s body to the width of Skykeel’s central root.

"Move the city now," Aylin shouted.

Kesta released the inner braces.

Skykeel entered the gap behind Morrowfin’s fold. The central chambers drank the body-drag. Closed east mouths glanced off the current instead of catching it. Olsa’s fin-winged companions chose the sheltered ribs and spread their throat fins there, giving residents something living to follow through the turn.

Morrowfin took Ashwake’s shell.

Pale light traveled beneath her belly. Her shortened stroke held for one more beat, long enough to carry the nursery between two hooked stars.

The empty east root did not fit.

Its outer rooms struck a white plate and collapsed. Kesta’s ready cut line snapped taut across her wounded hands.

"Are those rooms empty?" she called.

Neris looked once through the opened mouths. "Empty."

Kesta cut the loaded line.

The east root peeled from Skykeel with five stripped rooms, two roof frames, and the last of the scorched outer band. It wedged between the dead stars behind them and held the gap open while the inhabited center passed.

Neris’s sleeping room was the third. A blue cup she had tied to its wall spun through the broken mouth. She made a sound that began as a laugh and failed, then accepted the occupied cradle back from Dema.

"I hated that cup," she said.

"You carried it through three cities," Dema answered.

"I had not finished hating it."

The white shells crushed the room and cup together. Kesta used the empty notch it left to drag the nursery line closer to Skykeel’s center.

Olsa braced Jiang’s line with her unburned hand. The rider held Kaul and his pale bell beneath the nearest surviving rib. She kept Kaul’s blade across the living hook, not cutting it, only stopping the hook from striking the root as the city rolled.

Ashwake cleared the field first.

Morrowfin followed its offered shell. Her wounded fold opened enough to release Jiang from the still pocket.

The outer current struck him sideways.

Aylin waited through the roll. She pulled when his white breast faced her, and Olsa took the next length without being asked. Jiang crossed the final gap feet first and landed between them with his sound ankle still tied.

His bare breast had gone beyond numbness. The skin felt distant, while the feathered edges shook hard enough to tap against copper.

"Can you feel pain?" Aylin asked.

"Not enough to trust."

That frightened her more than an answer of yes.

She wrapped him in the driest nursery cloth left and kept her hands away from the damaged skin. There was no warmth to spare for relief.

The last inhabited root cleared the crosswake.

Black water fell away behind Skykeel. Open green-black air took its place, cold enough to burn Jiang’s wet eyes. Only after the severed east root disappeared among the dead stars did the System speak.

`[Synchronization: 100%]`

`[First evolution available.]`

`[Warning: evolution during active insulation failure may cause permanent molt damage.]`

His split beak still hurt. His bad leg remained straight. The bare breast patch did not grow a single feather.

Jiang left the evolution unopened.

Ahead, the dead stars had been built into a city of their own.

White shells climbed around a vertical chasm, joined by narrow bridges and rune masts that rose one above another until cloud hid their tops. Broad haul-out shelves held sleeping shellback seals, bridled sea-wyverns, and two young star-rays beneath wet silver awnings. Winches carried food and riders between levels.

Banners crowded every bridge. Green antlers hung beside a black wave. A gold hook faced a silver wing split through the middle. None flew higher than the others.

People ran to the rails as Morrowfin emerged wounded beneath Ashwake.

Irra seized her horn. "Feeder hurt. Clear the lower water. Skykeel behind us."

Rune masts turned toward the broken city.

Their light passed over Olsa first. It found the seven cut holes in her coat and the blood where white scales had been. Then it crossed Kaul’s exposed shoulder.

The living hook rose into open air.

A watchkeeper on the lowest bridge lifted both hands. "Stripped seven-point coat. Live road-hook. Close every inner span."

Olsa stepped to the edge. "My star is gone."

"That is why we are closing."

Bridges folded upward between the shells. Iron gates dropped across the haul-out shelves. Guild beasts woke beneath half a dozen banners and began calling into the chasm.

Behind Skykeel, the black crosswake opened again.

The red lantern of the armada entered it.