In which we give Nicole a few distractions and Ghost gets cozy.
Before the Storm
Dear Traveler,
… I'm very tired and my Guardian is about to wreck her first sparrow.
Ghost winced. It wasn't more than a miserable, exhausted twitch that barely moved his shell, and came with yet another warning blip that his reserves neared empty. He dismissed it. Like he'd done all the ones before, too.
Which is fine, he continued in the privacy of his core. They all do that. Wreck their first sparrow.
His Guardian yelped. Threw her weight left. Too far left. Way too far left…
Right?
And that was how, under another dreary sky (because the weather up here was about as decisive as a Hunter in the cape shop), his Guardian got her sparrow to pivot at a sharp angle, her entire weight hanging off on one side. The relatively open and wide stretch of road they'd found to practice on suddenly wasn't anymore. Wasn't. Period. Not wide enough and definitely not clear enough. Spitting out an offended whistle, the engine compensated for the abrupt change in direction best as it could. Ghost begrudgingly admitted that it had a surprisingly tight turning radius, especially for a rusty old bucket like that, but — oh no.
Like a needle on a compass that'd found it's north, the sparrow stopped spinning. Except north, in this case, was a fallen tree sticking out into the road. Fallen, but not dead yet with thick bushels of leaves still stuck on its branches.
"Watch out!" he called. Next to him, Bjarte snapped her hands over her mouth, her eyes open wide.
His Guardian avoided the tree. Well. No. The sparrow did. Narrowly. She got clipped by a bunch of branches — TWACK "OW!" TWACK-TWACK "Ohferfuck'ssake." Until there she went again. Too much throttle. Too little control. She yanked the sparrow away from the tree, its exhaust blowing hot air down its length. Made leaves scatter. Set some on fire.
Oh this was going well, wasn't it?
And then she headed straight for a rusted mound. A bus, Ghost's processing core supplied wearily. The wreck didn't look like it'd been left here ages ago, rather it might as well have grown right out of the ground. All part of the scenery — and no — nope — he really didn't want to watch his Guardian go splat against it.
So he did the only reasonable thing he could think of: He turned around and blanked his eye out.
The screech of metal and the thump of an explosion, both of which he'd expected, didn't come. Instead, he got a delighted squeal from Bjarte as she clapped her hands together sporting a wide, carefree grin. All while his Guardian halfway leaned over the sparrow's steering handles. She'd stopped it an inch away from the nose connecting.
Hooray, he thought. No broken sparrow. No broken bones. Crisis averted. For now. I'll get back to you later. Love, Ghost.
They'd brought one helmet from the camp. One. Nicole had found it stuffed into a pack, where it'd been used as a bowl to hold a herd of unpaired socks together. They'd been kid-sized, naturally. Along with the helmet. Bjarte-sized. So that was the head the helmet went on.
Kneeling in front of her, Nicole carefully clipped the strap closed under Bjarte's chin, gave it a testing wiggle from the top, and then tried on a reassuring smile. Gosh, she hoped it said I won't crash us, promise, even if she didn't much believe it herself. But she had to, right? Believe it. Had to fight to keep the smile in place. Had to fight the scream that'd been building in her chest, wanting out. And fight to get back on her feet, too, because her knee popped and her muscles ached all over from all the walking and running and more walking — and, yeah, that shite night of sleep spent in a scarred landscape of nightmares with nothing but a blanket between her and the hard ground.
At least the fire had been warm.
The dreams? Cold. Full of whispers. With ice tipped claws scratching her insides bloody.
She shivered and tried not to think about it any more. There were other things to worry about now. Like… driving the sparrow from here to there. Wherever there was.
"Right. I'm good to go."
Ghost shimmied in from somewhere behind her left elbow and regarded her with a long look. "That didn't sound convincing," he said, his eye pulsing with an almost dulled glow and his shell twisting in a few short, jerky motions.
"Does it matter? What else am I supposed to say? Can we not?" Her jaw clenched. "Not hasn't got anyone far. Ever."
He bobbed up and down in a brief sort of nod, and so she decided now or never and climbed back onto the sparrow, placing herself in front of Bjarte. The girl didn't waste a second before digging her hands into Nicole's coat, balling one little fist on her left and the other on the right.
With a deep breath, she leaned forward — and with the same breath held in, coaxed the sparrow into motion. It lurched once. Then twice. Bjarte squished herself against her back, the helmet poking painfully against her spine.
But that was fine. She had this.
Totally. Had. This.
With her bottom lip between her teeth and every ounce of control she could muster, Nicole focused on the odd weightlessness of hanging above the ground. There weren't any wheels grounding her. No crunch of rubber over earth. Nothing but thin air between her and the ground — and sure it wasn't far enough up to be really worth the mention, but it was still flying.
She was flying.
Flying.
But where was she flying to again?
Nicole looked left. Then right. And then slowed the sparrow to a crawl before turning it to the side, pointing its nose at the edge of the overgrown road and bringing it to a stop. An odd little tug against her ribcage told her exactly where to look to find the dirty white blob that was Ghost coming after them. The red electrical tape she'd used last night helped, too. Made him easier to spot.
Also made it easier to see the dips and sways in his flight line, like someone pretending they could go straight but really should have called an Uber or something.
Her brow furrowed.
He'd been flying around all night, she knew that. Mostly because whenever she'd woken from the Deep? He'd been there. Somewhere. Up in the ceiling. Out by the window. Or closer, just a stone throw away from the fire's light, his clicks and whirrs folded into the pops of the wood burning away.
"Are you going to be able to keep pace with this thing?" she asked once he'd caught up. "I'll be honest, you look a bit knackered."
"Knackered," he parroted as he floated by her head to point himself down the road. "Yeah, that's me. Thoroughly knackered. But I'll be fine, I'll just—"
With a sigh stuck in her throat, Nicole reached up and tapped a finger against one of his… ends. Tips. Points. Fins. Protruding shell bits. Trianglebobs. Anyway, she tapped one of those whatchamacallits enough to spin him around, earning herself a ruffle of nonexistent feathers and a squint. A sleepy squint, if she was to use her imagination.
"Hey," he complained.
"Hey," she echoed, her head cocked. Behind her, Bjarte leaned around to look at them, her weight hanging off Nicole's left as she clung to her coat. "There's still plenty of room on here for you. Not like you take up a lot of space. In fact, you take up very little."
He blinked at her, but the retort she expected did not come.
Wow. He had to be really tired.
Eventually (like he'd been thinking it over), he flicked his eye off to the side in a sweeping gesture, light springing from it to come together in a mono-coloured 3D projection. A map. It showed roads and hills and plains and even the tip of a lake nearby. Towns, too. She recognised it all and it made her stomach feel funny — until the map zoomed in quickly, almost turning said stomach. A green blip appeared, connected to an orange line following along mostly flat ground (roads) and eventually hooking up with a red dot at the other end.
"This is where we're headed," he said. The red dot pulsed once. "I can't keep the map open for you while I rest, but if you think you can follow the path for the most part then… then this would work, I suppose. And don't worry about going off course, I'll notice."
"You'll… notice."
"Mhm. And wake up."
"Huh," she mused and looked from the map to him and then down the road, into the direction the map pointed them. It wasn't where the persistent call tugging at her heart wanted her to go, which, yeah, was still there. Getting worse by the hour and awfully hard to ignore. "You're versatile, I'll admit that."
"Talented," he corrected.
"Alright." Nicole jabbed a thumb over her shoulder at Bjarte. "Can't have you rolling off, so maybe she can—" hang on to you while we go.
A miserable, electronic whine clipped the next word in her throat. Ghost, his shell drooping noticeably, looked between her and Bjarte until finally turning his eye up at her from an angle that read Pleeeaase.
"I'm driving," she said, flatly. "I can't carry you while I drive, I need both my hands."
He sunk lower. Didn't say a word. Didn't ask. Just dipped an inch like a dog ducking its head.
"You're a wee bastard, you know that?"
Sighing, Nicole shook her coat open and glanced at the generous inside pocket she could have easily fit three Switches into if she'd wanted. A pang of misery tickled at her heart. Oh what she'd give to be belly down in her bed playing a game, rather than… here. She winced. Here, with a shirt on that was stiff in places from dried blood. A shirt that had holes in it. And that was how she went from missing handheld gaming to realising she'd slept in her own blood in no more than a second flat. Great.
Nevermind that though.
"And lucky," she added, trying not to want to scratch at her chest which suddenly itched from remembering the blood. "A lucky bastard. This coat is obviously made for men, so it got pockets for days and this one looks about you-sized. Go on. Squeeze in."
And squeeze in he did, turning into a warm weight settled against her side. Sort of. Not that he was holding still. No. Of course not. At first, all he did was squirm around — a small hard-shelled puppy getting comfortable in a new bed. It made the edges of his shell poke against her ribs. Which, uh, tickled. Tickled.
Nicole inhaled sharply through her nose and grabbed the sparrow's steering handles like she was going to choke them.
"Are you done yet?" she asked and the squirming paused long enough to make her side itch in anticipation of another round. "Do you need a tiny pillow, maybe? A snack?"
"Sorry," he said, his voice quiet and muffled by the coat. At first she likened it to a phone going off on silent, which would have made sense all things considered. He was, after all, a voice-box with a bunch of fins attached, right? But that didn't quite fit. If anything, it felt more alike to having your ear pressed to someone's back as they spoke. Except in reverse, some odd upside-down version of it.
Nicole bit down on her bottom lip, wished the world normal, and when that did nothing but make the seconds tick by, sent the sparrow down the road.
Accelerating steadily, it carried her further and further away from what'd been home once, with a kid attached to her back, a sun burning in her chest that wanted her to change course, and a Ghost tucked into her coat.
Honest to God, life was weird.
Life was also perched on a very thin line.
A line between her paying attention and doing anything but. On one end, there was the world zipping by while the sparrow thrummed under her and the wind snatched at her hair — and on the other, there was the intoxicating weightlessness of it all that she couldn't shake. Freedom. A distraction. Call it what you will. But the bottomline was that if she didn't focus, chances were she'd wrap them all around a tree. Sparrow. Her. Bjarte. The sleeping Ghost. And with her mind occupied, she could forget how everything around her had broken a long time ago and come back together different.
Until Bjarte yanked at her coat and cried out. The girl strung together panicked words that Nicole didn't need to know the translation of to catch their meaning. Something was wrong. Very wrong.
Nicole hit the brakes, the sparrow decelerating hard enough to almost push her forward onto its neck, and turned around to check on the girl, half expecting her to be falling off or to have caught fire. "What—what— Are you okay?"
Oh. Bjarte was okay. Still hanging on. Still not on fire. Still had her helmet on, too. But that wasn't the problem, was it? The problem was what she was pointing at frantically: a fat metal bulge cobbled together from yesterday's nightmares cresting the tops of the trees lining the horizon like a whale breaching tall waves.
Except whales didn't fly. Or have pincers hanging off their bellies that looked a little like bent feet. And they certainly didn't have a large red eye at the front which filled her stomach with heavy dread.
She liked whales. Who didn't?
She didn't like this.
"Ghost…?" Nicole's voice scratched up her throat.
She didn't know what to do. Drive? Yeah, sure but where to? Get off the sparrow and hide in the woods instead?
What was she supposed to do?
She glanced down at her coat where Ghost's weight still hung snug against her side. Nothing. Little guy slept like a rock. So she grabbed the coat collar and shook it.
"Ghost!"
And just like that the weight was gone and Ghost appeared by her side, the fragile motes of blue light he materialised out of dancing away into thin nothing.
"Present," he said, wiggling his shell. "Are we already there?"
"Are we… what? No. Ghost, what is that thing?" She pointed at the airship, because what else was she going to call it. It had gotten considerably larger as it'd approached and it'd picked up speed. An alien hum rolled on ahead of it, straddling the line between an aircraft turbine and something she couldn't quite place.
She didn't like that, either.
And, as it turned out, neither did he.
"Son of a bird…" Ghost blurted, only to vanish in another wink of blue and return to her pocket like he'd never even left.
…what…
"That's trouble," he added from in there. "Fallen. Just go. Go!"
He didn't need to ask her twice. Not this time — not like back in the burning village. She kicked the sparrow into gear and didn't even bother asking Go where?
Straight ahead would do.
Taffer Notes:
This chapter was brought to you by my new sponsor, Erin, who thinks this is a good premise but that it is badly written. (I really like anon reviews. Don't you?)
Anyway, my apologies for the pace of this, but this is how they want it right now. They wanted another chapter of relative peace before I turn the temperature up again so that is what they get.