Chapter 221: Someone on Red Aeries Pulled Jiang’s Line Back

Aylin found Jiang by the feathers Cairnspire had scraped off him.

They lay in a black-and-white trail over the scorched shelf, vanished beneath an outer shell plate, and appeared again where the cracked breath cap lifted with each of his breaths.

His ankle line entered through the same crack.

"I am directly beneath you," Jiang called.

Aylin put her ear to the shell. "I know."

"Then stop walking on my roof."

She stepped back quickly enough to make Vessa laugh.

The laugh ended when the cap shifted. A gray fracture ran from its hinge to the buried lower edge. Pulling against that edge would break more shell into the dry seam and might drop it onto Jiang’s spine.

Vessa slid a thin root sling through the upper crack. Irra carried the other end to Ashwake’s bent steering rail and wrapped it around the thickest surviving post. The ship had no mast and no sail, but its deck fittings could still hold a sideways pull.

"Move past the cap," Aylin called.

"There is a wall past the cap."

"Move as far as your body allows."

"That sounds less reassuring when you have seen my body."

Dust coughed through the crack. Jiang dragged himself back on the cloth until his tail struck the sealed wall. He folded the sound foot beneath him, kept the straight leg along one side, and covered his injured shoulder with the broad edge of his flipper.

Aylin gave the root sling one test pull.

Jiang answered through the ankle line. Ready.

Irra leaned into the steering rail. Vessa pried beneath the cap with a short shell bar while Aylin kept the broken edge from falling inward.

The old hinge tore before the plate did.

Dry shell rose into open air. Jiang’s head appeared beneath it in a cloud of pale dust, followed by a breast so ragged that Aylin could see dark pin feathers among bare skin.

The lifted cap did not become a repair. Its hinge had torn out of the service spine, and the exposed throat would flood the next time lower water climbed the scorched shelf. Cairnspire had traded Jiang’s dry prison for a hole it could no longer shelter.

Vessa looked into the opened seam. "He does not go back in there."

"I had reached that conclusion," Jiang said.

"There is less penguin on you than before," she said.

"Your hands are bleeding through the wrap."

"I crossed a flooded road inside a feeding bowl. Do not change the subject."

Jiang set his beak on the clean cloth she pushed under him. "I was trying to improve it."

Together, Aylin and Vessa drew the cloth onto the shelf without pulling his bad leg or pressing the shoulder. Jiang emerged dry. That was the success. Nothing about it made him whole.

Open air found every gap in his coat.

His body began shaking before Aylin finished wrapping the warm outer layer around him. She tucked her cut palms inside the cloth rather than rubbing his new pins with rough bandages.

Vessa brought an intact silver fish from Ashwake’s clean hold.

Jiang smelled it and discovered that pain had not killed hunger yet.

He pinned the fish beneath his sound foot, tore with the stronger edge of his beak, and swallowed three uneven pieces. The burned tongue objected. His stomach cramped around the first food, accepted the second, and demanded the third with enough force to make him hate being watched.

Aylin watched and kept the next fish ready.

"Another while your body still wants it," she said.

"That was not a small fish."

"Another before your molt decides food is an insult."

The next fish took longer. Jiang finished it because Aylin was right and because the female emperor’s call still came through the broken star below them, leaving a place in its second note that hunger could not fill. By the final bite, his sound foot shook hard enough to release the tail twice.

When he stopped shaking, Vessa laid a coil of narrow root cord beside him.

"This is all that fits the side slit," she said.

Aylin lifted the cord. "If we feed one end through, the current owns it."

Jiang looked at the two loose ends and the bend at the coil’s middle.

"Send the bend. Keep both ends here."

Vessa understood first. She tied a smooth shell bead inside the doubled bend so it would sink without catching. Aylin bound one of Jiang’s shed feathers behind it. The feather added no magic; it only kept the cord from twisting into itself.

"If someone catches the loop, we can move it past their hands by pulling one end and feeding the other," Aylin said.

"And if the armada catches it?" Irra asked.

Jiang could still smell white fire in the dust around his beak.

"They already found this side of the road," he said. "The difference is that my family may find the other."

Aylin looked down at the wraps covering both palms. She had crossed because he could not. Now he wanted to put another piece of them into the same wound.

"We pull it out at the first white heat," she said.

"If a living body has hold of the bend, we warn before we pull."

"How do we warn them?"

Jiang gave the doubled cord two slow tugs and waited before the third.

Aylin recognized the changed nursery signal. Danger beneath us. Do not drag.

"Fine," she said. "But if the cord burns my hands, I am blaming your entire species."

"The chick has earned some of that."

They carried the doubled bend to the broken star.

Jiang remained on dry cloth above the opening. Aylin lowered the shell bead into the narrow side current while Vessa held both near ends apart. Water took the feather first, then drew the loop under the ruined shutter and through a narrow slit in white scar tissue.

From beyond the broken star, the female emperor called.

Far beyond Cairnspire, the same sound reached a cold ledge pressed against the Bellmother’s scar.

Since the wound had closed, white tissue had grown over the last fibers of Aylin’s plain rope. Valea had cut the loose end before it strangled into living flesh. Hest’s iron bar remained bowed where the closing ridge had tried to swallow it, and neither had heard a voice from the other world until today.

The female stood over her chick with her feet joined beneath it. Loose white ridges surrounded the water slit in front of her. At her outer side, the injured male raised his breast from the stone and failed to hide how much the movement cost him.

Jiang’s ordinary answer trembled through the wound.

The chick rushed toward it.

Its mother caught the small breast with her beak and pulled it back between her feet. The chick objected with a sharp cry, twisted around, and saw the black-and-white feather enter through the slit.

A smooth shell bead followed.

Valea reached it before the chick did.

She caught the doubled loop against the flat of her bent blade. Hest drove his iron bar across the scar mouth so water could not wrench her wrist into the white ridge.

"That feather came from him," Mottle said.

Ilex leaned against her good side, one leg still held away from the stone. "Or from something that ate him."

Mottle struck Ilex once with the sound wing that still worked.

"That still hurts," Ilex said.

"His answer changed," Mottle said.

Valea touched the wet feather. Old shaft. Blood near the root. No new seal.

"He is alive," she said. "He is also doing something stupid with rope again."

Hest tightened both hands on the bar. "Then Aylin is alive too."

Valea drew her knife along the inner curve of the bent blade. The bend made every shaving taper to one side, a flaw Aylin had cursed while helping her sharpen it on the Red Aeries ledge.

She cut a thin crescent of metal, notched its broad end off-center, and tied it inside the messenger loop.

Hest gave the line the old paired pull: weight on the bar, slack for the blade, then weight again.

At Cairnspire, the doubled cord moved in Aylin’s wrapped hands.

Not current. Someone had pulled from the wound.

She began drawing one near end while Vessa fed the other. The messenger loop rolled back through the side slit. Jiang held his call unfinished until the female answered around the missing space.

On Red Aeries, something pale entered behind the retreating loop.

It was thinner than the hooks that had climbed Cairnspire’s bridge. White metal bent with the current like a feeler, following the root cord through the scar.

The chick darted around its mother.

Before either emperor adult reached it, the Bellwyrm lowered its wounded head.

Its bare jaw closed over the white probe.

Metal burned against old mouth tears. The Bellwyrm’s forelimbs slipped on the wet ledge, and its wounded head struck the scar ridge. It could have released the probe. Instead, the animal set its weight behind the bite and pulled the hook away from the chick.

At Cairnspire, Valea’s marked shaving broke the surface inside the returning loop.

Aylin caught it against her wrapped palm.

The off-center notch was still wet when the doubled line snapped tight and white heat began racing toward her from Red Aeries.