Chapter 267: Only a Penguin Could Swim the Mothglass Throat

The thing beneath the water pulled harder than Aylin did.

Jiang’s coat loop bit into his sound shoulder. His feet left the sloping glass, and the dark throat took him breast-first.

Water entered through the Wake Scar and slid straight under his feathers.

He kicked with both feet.

His bitten straight leg opened late. Its web caught water at the wrong angle and turned him until his cracked beak struck the wall. His jaw rang with pain, bright enough to spend breath on.

Jiang kept his mouth shut.

Living glass had folded across the opening behind him. Aylin was gone. No voice crossed the black curve, and the line at his shoulder carried only the pull below.

His human mind wanted a floor, a handrail, and an unreasonable conversation with whoever had designed the passage.

His body had water.

Jiang flattened his good wing, held the useless one tight to his ribs, and let his heavy belly point where the current wanted to send it. Dense feathers kept a skin of air against most of him. Along the Wake Scar, the water touched bare flesh and stayed.

Another pull came from below.

This time he saw its source.

A green-veined strip of mothglass had hooked over Aylin’s line. White bark carried the strip through the channel like a borrowed claw. No thicker than Jiang’s bad leg, the root drew the tether farther below with every bend.

It was not hauling him on purpose.

That did not make drowning beneath it more polite.

Jiang swept both feet outward and drove his breast against the wall. Still moving, the root tightened high-root across his coat while the rough green shard scraped toward his neck.

He could reach the knot with his beak.

One bite would free him from the root, the line, and Aylin’s promise to bring him back.

Jiang pressed his beak to the cord without closing it.

Beneath him, the white branch entered a narrow groove. Its stolen shard rose as the groove tightened. Jiang twisted his belly sideways and forced the line under one foot.

His unstable leg slipped.

Only the sound foot held.

He pinned the cord against the glass and let the root pull its own hook across the trapped line. Green mothglass grated under his toes. Its point caught, bent, and tore free of the white bark.

Without Aylin’s tether, the root vanished into the groove.

Jiang kicked away from the loose shard.

High-root floated beside him, slack and familiar. He had kept the way back.

He had also let the root get farther ahead.

Past the groove, the channel widened. Dim green light moved below, broken by the branch’s stolen weapon vein. Above it, bubbles struck a ribbed ceiling and slid toward a side pocket.

A flight call rattled behind the ribs.

Its first note was sharp. The second collapsed into a wet cough.

Jiang stopped kicking and let the broken call reach him.

Green light from the root sank through a lower slit. It had reached a passage just wide enough for Jiang’s shoulders. Following it now might put his beak against the branch before it joined anything larger.

Behind Jiang, the broken call came from the opposite wall.

His remaining breath could pay for one bad decision.

Jiang turned toward the call.

Two black ribs held a translucent molt skin across the end of the side pocket. Small bodies struck it from behind. A hooked foot showed through, then a narrow wing with half-grown glass vanes.

White fibers webbed the lower edge of the skin.

They tightened each time the retreating root moved deeper.

Three young flight-beasts had been pulled against the membrane. One was a stormmew with slate down plastered across its eyes. Two glasskites beat clear pinions too soft to cut water. Their panic churned the pocket into mud-dark bubbles.

Jiang pushed his beak under the membrane.

His split beak opened.

He jerked back before instinct made him bite harder. Blood left his beak in a thin red curl and disappeared into the black water.

Blood drew the stormmew’s eye.

Its hooked foot struck through the skin and caught his coat’s scorched hem.

Jiang had rescued creatures with better manners.

Most of them were fish.

He planted both feet beneath the lower rib and drove his sound shoulder into the molt skin. Membrane stretched around his breast while white fibers tightened below it with the smooth draw he had felt through Myrn’s harness.

Both glasskites kicked from the other side.

One foot hit Jiang’s bad shoulder. His failed wing opened in spite of him, scraped the rib, and folded under his weight.

Air burst from his coat.

High-root shifted behind him.

Aylin had taken up the slack.

High-root caught around a glass spur in the main throat. Her pull stopped there and dragged Jiang backward by the coat instead of drawing him toward the bay.

His injured shoulder began to fail.

Jiang slapped the cord against the rib three times with his sound foot.

Pressure stayed against his shoulder.

He struck it three times again.

Slack returned to the line.

Aylin could not see the snag or the creatures. She could feel that her pull hurt him, and she had stopped without knowing why.

Jiang hated how much trust weighed when he was underwater.

He wedged his belly farther beneath the molt skin.

The stormmew’s foot tore a strip from his coat wrap. It did not release the cloth. Jiang shoved anyway, using the bird’s terrified grip as one more hand on the membrane.

Under their combined weight, the left rib bent.

Both glasskites struck together from inside. Their soft vanes spread against the skin instead of cutting it, but the wider force made the old edge peel from its groove.

White fibers snapped across Jiang’s breast.

Molt skin opened around Jiang.

The stormmew came through beak-first and climbed over his face.

Its hooked feet found Jiang’s back, coat, and one painful patch of exposed Wake Scar before it launched into the main current. The two glasskites followed under his belly. One kicked his unstable leg aside without apology.

All three creatures swam upward along the trail of bubbles.

None looked back, and Jiang preferred it that way.

Jiang had no room in his life for three wet dependents who could fly and still chose to stand on him.

Behind them, the torn pocket collapsed. Black water burst through the gap and carried the last white fibers toward the lower slit.

No green glimmer remained.

Jiang had lost the branch.

His lungs tightened around the cost.

Ahead, the young stormmew struck the ceiling and vanished through a vertical crack. Both glasskites folded their soft wings and followed. Bubbles poured from the crack in a silver sheet.

Jiang reached it with one strong kick and one crooked one.

Around his chest, the crack narrowed. His smooth breast entered where a human shoulder would have stopped, but the failed wing caught on a black tooth behind him.

He pulled until the caught wing burned.

A black tooth held his coat.

Below him, the high-root line remained looped around the spur in the main throat.

Jiang could swim back, free the line, and spend the rest of his breath finding this crack again.

His vision had already begun to grain at the edges.

He folded the injured wing as tightly as pain allowed and drove both feet down.

His scorched cloth tore before the wing did.

Jiang shot upward through the crack and broke the surface with half his coat still below.

He opened his beak too wide on the first breath.

Pain burned through the split. He coughed water across a black-glass ledge and sucked in air that smelled of old feathers, damp stone, and something sweetly rotten beneath both.

Above the pocket, all three young beasts climbed a sloped tunnel. Still dragging the strip of Jiang’s coat, the stormmew kept it until a glasskite bit it loose. Then they disappeared through a wing-shaped gap too small for him.

Jiang listened for them.

Claws scraped away from him.

No grateful cry. No waiting flock. Only three living bodies using the opening he had helped make.

For Jiang, that was enough.

He pulled at the high-root line.

It moved one handspan and stopped at the snag below. Aylin could feel some pressure from him, but the bent passage would turn every tug into an answer neither of them had given.

Jiang rested his breast on the ledge and looked around the air pocket.

Old oath marks ringed the chamber.

Names curved through the walls in black glass, each joined to a different wing, claw, or bridge stroke. White root filled many of the cuts. It did not cover them. It wore their shapes.

Something pale floated below Jiang’s feet.

At first he mistook it for a shed wing bone.

Five human fingers opened beneath the surface.

Mothglass had grown over the wrist and along the forearm, preserving skin the color of old paper. A cracked ring remained on one finger. Its arm belonged to a shoulder buried inside the wall.

More shapes waited beyond it.

A row of ribs had become part of the chamber’s lower curve. Dark hair moved in the current beside one half-preserved face. White bark passed through its closed mouth and entered an oath mark above.

Jiang’s desire to breathe became a desire to leave.

He backed toward the water.

A preserved hand closed around Aylin’s line.

High-root snapped tight across his shoulder.

Jiang struck the ledge with his sound foot. Its fingers did not release.

Air moved through the oath marks.

Green light filled one black name. The white root inside it flexed like a throat remembering speech.

A woman’s voice came from the wall.

"Sivra," the dead woman said.

Warm and breathless, the laugh arrived after the name exactly where a living woman might have remembered Myrn biting through her first left rein.

"Lower Myrn’s bridge."