Chapter 10 - The Spark in the Dark
"Fly, Zephyr!" Her mental shout smashed into his consciousness, laced with agony and absolute desperation. "Leave the nest! Run west!"
Run?
Zephyr looked back at the deep, safe shadows of the caldera. There were caves back there—passages that went miles into the roots of the earth where no machine could ever crawl. He could hide. He could survive. He was small. Nobody was looking for him.
He looked back at the mountain slope.
Ignis was pinned to her knees. A massive, tracked harvester was crawling slowly toward her, extending an enormous, rotating buzz-saw designed to harvest dragon plates from living targets. The frost-salt was freezing her throat shut; her mouth coughed out nothing but brittle, gray slush.
Zephyr looked down at his own bandaged wing. The pain was still there, but beneath the pain, something else was waking up.
It wasn't bravery. It was an ugly, incandescent rage.
The mammoth had swatted him. These iron-clad parasites were butchering his mother. The world kept telling him he was too small, too weak, too fragile to exist.
If I die, he thought, baring his bloody teeth, I’m dying with my teeth in someone’s throat.
He ripped the dragon-gut bindings off his wing with his own jaws, tearing away scabs and dried scales. The agony nearly made him vomit, but he forced his joints open. The wing opened unevenly, crooked and stiff, but it held.
He didn't launch into a soaring glide. He had no lift for that.
Instead, Zephyr dropped into a sheer, vertical free fall down the mountain chute, tucking his limbs tight, aiming himself directly at the open roof hatch of the harvesting rig.
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The wind shrieked in his ears. He wasn't trying to fly.
He was turning himself into a missile.
