Get to the sky, run, fly, to the sky, go go go. The sky is safe.
Her mother screamed in her ear, her father pushed her back, her brothers clung to her limbs, her sisters her heart.
The sky was safe. The sky was death.
Swarms erupted through the dark, fire ignited the clouds. Metal screamed, engines roared, wires shrieked along with the people they were attached to.
The sky fell. Building collapsed. Death dampened the air.
She fell from the sky and into the dark.
And into the dark did she wake.
She lay utterly still, hardly daring breath. Hard earth was packed beneath her, cushioned only by grass and thin cloth.
Very slowly she brought air, unpolluted, so clean it burned, into her lungs. She sat up, tucking her legs underneath her before reaching for the flap of the tent and pulling it open. Around her two others stirred, Natsuki and Tsukiko, twins shifting in their sleep thanks to her.
Moonlight fell past the edge of the tent, accompanied by the warmer glow of the camp fire. When she slid out, bare feet breaking stalks of grass that had done their best to grow, only to meet their fate at the careless steps of a bipedal being.
"You can't sleep," Yuzuki observed. The old woman sat by the fire, poking it with a stick to keep it alive. On the other side from her was her ever silent companion, Takashi. The girl nodded, letting the cloth fall shut behind her again. The language was still foreign to her, her accent still terrible.
"What troubles you?" she questioned, motioning for the younger girl to find her side. She did so, sitting on the log and turning for the fire.
"Dreams," she said quietly. "Dreams, again, dreams."
Yuzuki asked, "What do you dream about?"
The girl replied, "The sky burns."
Across the fire Takashi grimaced.
"You have many troubles, Sora," Yuzuki informed her, turning half blind eyes that were far too sharp for reason upon the younger girl. She withheld a grimace. Sora, they called her. The child from the sky. That was not her name, but her was so foreign what else could she do? So she bowed her head and agreed quietly.
"If you continue to lose sleep, it may be best for you to take something before you lay down," she advised. Before the words even left her mouth completely Sora was shaking her head.
"I would rather not." Nightmares and sleep deprivation were nothing new for her. She would be fine, they came in spurts. This one would end eventually, just as all the others had in the past. All there was to do was wait it out.
Fear she had lived with for a long time. For as long as she could remember. She could live with unfounded fear now.
Yuzuki didn't say anything more, instead looking back to the twisting flames. Sora wondered if that was how she had gotten so blind so quickly. She looked up at the sky, the place from which she fell, and couldn't help smiling. She hadn't seen a sky so clear in all her life, never seen so many stars from when she stood upon the ground.
The clearing that the camp was set in was wide, offering a perfect view through the lack of trees. Not there were many to begin with in this land, it seemed to be nothing but flat grasslands, scattered with the flowers.
The fields seemed to be the place where the group, the Umino, made their lives. They travelled across the planes and through the trees, travelling as a caravan that took various goods from the sea across the country. So far Sora hadn't seen any civilization but she had been assured that they would get there some day, probably soon if Natsuki was to be believed.
The family, or tribe, or whatever they were rose and fell with the sun, all except Yuzuki, who seemed more inclined to sleep in the day, and Takashi, who never seemed to sleep period.
Not that Sora was really someone to talk. It had once been that work and exhaustion drove her to sleep the instant the opportunity presented itself. Now she did such light labor she had more energy than she knew what to do with, which didn't help anything with her nightmares.
The Umino were strange. There was something about them, she didn't know what, that just seemed off. Different from what she had experienced before. They reminded her of power chords, though she hadn't the slightest idea why. There was an energy in them that she was unfamiliar with, one that she could no more hear than see but knew somehow that it was there.
Power cords.
The thought was, for some reason, hilarious.
The girl fell back against the grass, her feet still elevated on the log. Her attention all went to the sky and what was beyond it, the glimpses she had been allowed.
"Are you waiting for it to burn?" Yuzuki asked, drawing Sora's eyes back to her crinkled face.
Sora shook her head. "No."
She spoke the truth. She knew the Dorvix. They would not follow someone as insignificant as she was when they had their hands now full taking apart her home. Brick by brick, corpse by corpse, chain link and cuff.
They wouldn't come here for some years. They would, eventually. No matter where she went eventually they would arrive there, before or after she was dead.
Her eyes darted to the tent where her pack lay, stuffed with metal and cloth, uniform and weapon.
If they did arrive early, she wouldn't let them take this world without a fight.
Yuzuki asked, "What burnt the sky."
Sora couldn't think of reply. So she shrugged her shoulders upwards, shifting the strange clothes that she had been lent by the Umino when they had found her in the crater, broken into pieces, singed at the edges, lost from all that there was.
She owed them a lot, she knew. They had given her a place to sleep and food to eat. They had nursed her from shattered soul and broken bone into merely a fractured soul. She would do what she could to repay them.
When a star shot across the sky her heart squeezed and her muscles tensed until it winked out of existence, just a meteor igniting in the atmosphere before it burned away into nothing.
She could remember the first time she had seen the world from that high up. The curve of the earth, the haze of the weather, lightning flashing in a storm a hundred miles away. It had been the most beautiful thing she ever thought she would see. The sky, for her, was freedom.
Now it was a reminder of everything she no longer had.
Maybe she was a sadist because she started to count the starts. One, two, three, four, five, ten, fifteen, twenty five. Ursa Major.
The girl's heart froze in her chest.
Those were the same constellation she had learned from her father. The same stars. But this was not the same world.
It was impossible.
This could not be her world. The air was to clean, the sunsets to blue. It wasn't possible, even if the Umino did turn out to be human! The skies weren't as bright, the air wasn't as clean, the stars could not be the same.
Confusion and fear twisted deep inside her, nearly knocking the girl into a tail spin of thought in a dizzying array of possibilities and lack of understanding.
It couldn't be.
Could it?
"Are you ready?" Liv asked, twirling the bracelet that matched her name around one finger. Lightning bolts darted around the florescent outside, rolling across the surface like they were actually real, flicking through the night and lighting darkened clouds.
Nellie kicked at the metal floor beneath them, her hands gripping the seat underneath her tightly. She hated not being in control, everyone knew it. Planes, trains, and automobiles she wasn't driving were her worse nightmares.
"Yeah," she replied, "What about you, Echo?"
Eleanor was leaning on the back door of the plane, ignoring the tremors that high speeds shot across the surface and sent shaking inside. Her suit held onto her, fitting her form with armor and weaponry, just in case. The familiar weight of micro cables and hand crafted wings was a comfort, one she had spent year in.
"What about me? Of course I am," she dismissed with a wave and an eye roll. With her other hand she adjusted the strap of her goggles and checked against the clasps of her low mask. She had felt the shift in the plane that meant that they had arrived at the drop point, making her tense with excitement and fear. Adrenaline began its creeping drop into her blood.
This was her thirty fourth drop, a simple scouting run over the Badlands, searching for people, for survivors. There are other planes with them, cloaked in clouds and tech. It's only them, the Storm Riders, the Falcons, that can get close enough to the surface to see catch them. There's no time to land, cables for rescue are too risky. So they are deployed to search, like they always are and always will be.
Over the speakers came their pilot, Lala, Labangalata, best in the Storm. Ciel has the best team, or it did, back where there were a full ten of them. Now only Eleanor, Lala, Leon and Casey were all that was left. Now they had green newbies that were bound to get them killed. Nellie, Liv, Louis, Charlotte, Fred, Todd, and Tom. This was their third real drop, the first one that had even the slightest chance of combat.
Eleanor was never very fond of the higher ups, but this was pushing it.
'Someone has to train them.' She could hear the captain, Andre, telling her again, his teeth flashing in a grimaces smile that made her nervous. Andre was a cold hearted bastard who, while he couldn't beat her in a fight, he could sure as hell clip her wings.
In her spacing she had missed Lala telling them that they were dropping. As such when the door opened she went plummeting unprompted into the cold air. She didn't scream or trash. The second wind hit her and gravity pulled her body took over, twisting her into formation.
She's the leader, she always is. Experience and ability put her in front even if Leon outranks her. Without looking she knows the he and Casey had flanked her. Without explanations she knows the other six have faltered. Leon is supposed to take point, not her. Yet this was their first lesson. You don't always go by the book.
They were going faster than the rookies, at a speed other teams, instructors, sane people, name reckless. Insane.
That fit the Falcons pretty well.
All it takes a shift of weight for her and the other two to slow enough the others, panicking over the coms, can catch up. She doesn't want them dying yet. They're her responsibility.
And really, Raptors are getting scarce these days.
The city is identical to the last one they searched. Skeletal buildings hide corpses. Streets are torn, cars are silent, concrete forms barriers that would never help to protect anyone, not anymore. It's not the end of the world that was predicted by most. It wasn't caused by themselves, Yellowstone had yet to erupt, the dead were still as lifeless as ever.
It came from the sky. An idea, a theory, one very few took seriously.
The Dorvix were strong, ruthless, the galaxies scourge and terror. They had toppled empires, ripped peace out by the roots and torn apart olive branches before eating the dove that carried them.
There was just one thing that they hadn't considered when they'd come to this planet of primitive apes and stone aged technology. It was something the Martians could have told them, something locals would have said if asked. It was simple, really.
Humans are very good at war.
When nuclear weapons proved useless an counterproductive they switched tactics, started inventing, took inspiration from works of fictions that had been proven fact. Training began, soldiers were recruited. In face of an enemy greater than all of them age old rivalries had been set aside, resources had been pooled and for the first time since Eden humanity was truly united.
The Dorvix were pushed back.
That didn't mean they gave up.
It didn't mean millions weren't dead.
It just meant that when they went, humans weren't going without a fight.
When she dropped past the very tips of the tallest sky scrapers she can feel the worry in her new followers. Around them the other teams, Hawks, Owls, and Kites have already spread their wings.
The Falcons darted lower, past where the wind currents can carry them safely.
Only when ten stories are left does she show mercy. It's a fluid front flip, leather straps slide around her wrists. She yanked her arms vertically.
Wind slammed into her with jarring force, pushing her straight through the broken city.
When the sun rose Sora had more sleep, if only a few hours, under the vigilance of Yuzuki and Takashi. She still thought that he should sleep more often.
Tents were packed up, food was stocked into wagons and horses were hitched. Leather and metal were clinched around them in harnesses before being locked onto wagons without covers. The Umino were like chronic tanners, none of them showing any interest in sunscreen. Sora wished she could say the same but if she stays out long enough even her normally tan skin will crack and peel.
Sora did what she could to help them get everything packed into the appropriate boxes and stack those into the needed carts. Most of the cargo was personal; tents, food, water, clothes, and miscellaneous other items for each individual. The rest was various medicines, ointments and what seemed to be vaccines. All of it was very primitive. Not in the sense that they were in the Stone Age, but in the sense that it was all very old and there appeared to be no technology she could locate.
That wouldn't work in her favor later on but there was nothing she could do.
As long as the sun shone and the wind blew she would at least be okay.
