CHAPTER 29: ONE SHOT

Ward swore, loud and unhelpful. Albert didn’t move.

"Telemetry?" he asked.

Harker’s fingers flew. "Dead. ADS—" he stopped himself; there was no ADS-B here. "Inertial feed’s gone. Engine parameters—zero. I’m trying LOS fallback on the relay dish—"

"Keep it simple," Albert said. "Do we still have the bird?"

Harker stared at the screen that now showed only their own worried faces reflected in slick glass.

"No, sir," he said softly. "We don’t."

The room exhaled in one long, bleak sound. Someone took off his headset and set it down as if it were suddenly very heavy.

The duty officer at the TOC door recovered first. "All stations, this net: Global Hawk loss-of-link. Mark time—ten forty-two. Freeze the recorders. Harker, dump the last thirty seconds to a protected drive."

"Already dumping," Harker replied, voice steadier than his hands. "We have the approach, the close pass... and the cut. No RF spike, no missile plume, no kinetic signature I can call ’Earth-normal.’ One moment we’re flying. Next—" he clenched his jaw. "We got opened."

Albert folded his arms behind his back, a posture that meant think fast, not loud. "Last known position."

Harker brought up the last valid coordinate and stamped it on a local overlay. "Grid on our chart: five-two north by three-oh west, plus or minus two kilometers. Over the fissure field, south-southwest of that black tower, angels six-one at loss."

"Projected impact location," Albert said.

"Computing ballistic," Harker muttered. He tapped in standard atmosphere values, then stopped and corrected for the thinner air up here—as close as they could model it in a world that wasn’t quite theirs. "If the engine flamed out and the wing took a structural cut—glide is gone. Straight fall with drift. Winds aloft at that layer were five to seven knots from the northeast. Impact likely within a ten-kilometer ellipse downrange of the loss point."

Ward dragged a palm down his face. "We just gifted them a hundred-million-dollar reconnaissance package."

"No," Albert said, even and immediate. "This is a fantasy world. I don’t think they’ll find much use on that."

Ward stared at the blank main screen. "She just... sliced it. Like cloth."

"Yeah, so this job won’t be easy after all if there are beings like them," Albert commented.

High above the fissure fields, the demoness hovered a moment longer, wings beating in a cadence the thin air somehow obeyed. The strange bloodless bird had been fast and cold and blind in a way that made no sense, a flying eye that held no life. When she drew her hand across its face and spoke the word that unthreads things, it came apart beautifully—no scream, no soul tearing free, only the smooth surrender of metal to gravity.

Now she watched it fall.

It tumbled end over end, long wings turning into failed arcs, composite peeling away in streams that glittered briefly and became dark confetti against the snow. A vapor trail wrote a wound across the sky and the wind set its own handwriting on it, smudging the letters into streaks.

She folded her wings and dropped after.

Air knifed past. Frost formed and shattered along the filigree of her crown. Her eyes narrowed; the glyphs in them burned a shade brighter, focusing, measuring. The field below rushed up: black rivers of molten rock threading a plain of white, vents coughing red breaths into the open cold, a geography forged by anger and then forgotten.

The falling machine hit hard.

It struck a blue-ice shoulder with a sound like thunder trapped in bone, bounced, and disintegrated across a run of volcanic glass. One wing drove itself into a snowbank and disappeared like a spear into an animal. The fuselage tore, belly-first, skidding until it spun, inverted, and lay still—a split, bleeding thing that did not bleed.

Fragments rained down for long seconds afterward. A sensor blister pinged and rolled and went quiet. A panel fluttered like a dying fish and froze, the wind pinning it against black rock.

The demoness landed in a crouch ten paces from the main wreck and stood, steam running off her shoulders in slow coils. Up close, the air smelled of hot resin and a faint sourness like lightning aftertaste. The thing did not weep spirit. It did not even whisper the tired echo of a life spent. It was an artifact that did not belong to any of the old peoples.

She approached.

The hull skin was warm where the fall had cooked it, cold where the wind had licked it. She laid a fingertip to the gashed edge and felt only matter—dense, layered, clever. No mana tethers. No blessing marks. No curse brands. She drew her finger back; a bright line of frost grew where she had touched and then cracked apart.

Her eyes traced the wreck’s broken organs. Here a honeycombed rib, stiff and light. Here a belly of wires braided like hair without scalp. Here a gimbal, its glass eye broken, staring at nothing. In the torn nose, a pale, round dish with its face split—a blind moon cut in half. She tilted her head and reached in.

The dish resisted. She said a word to it—a soft word that unlatched stubborn things—and it came free with a brittle snap. She turned it in her hands and listened the way hunters listen to bones.

Still nothing alive.

Behind her, a vent coughed and a heat-wind rolled across the snow, smearing her scent away. She set the shattered dish down and walked to the wing that had buried itself. With one hand she gripped what remained of the root and pulled. Ice gave reluctantly, screaming. The wing slid free, a broken blade longer than a ballista shot. She ran a palm across its underside, collecting a smear of soot and shattered composite dust, and held it up to the light. The particles did not spark with the sting of worked mana. They were simply very good stone pretending to be feather.

She knelt beside the fuselage crack and peered inside.

There should have been a heart. Even the dwarves—crude as they were—placed a crystal or a bound ember-core in their clockwork. The elves, in their arrogance, coaxed trees to grow engines of sap and light. Humans stuffed meat and hope into leather and called it courage. Everything that moved in the sky here paid a tithe to something older than itself.

This... paid nothing.

She touched her tongue thoughtfully to one canine, then reached deeper into the fuselage and tugged free a box the size of a small coffin with rounded corners and cooling fins. When it came loose it clanged and sparked and whispered in a voice too quiet for anything living. She set it down at her feet and pressed her palm to it. It hummed faintly like a dead hive remembering.

Her wings shifted. She looked up, searching the sky out of habit, expecting a second eye, a third, some sign of whoever had hurled this lifeless bird into the Demon Realm and watched through it with such cold attention. The blue was clean. Only the thin scar of the fall remained.

"Little watcher," she said to the wreck, voice low. "You are not of dwarf, elf, or human make. No god-sign. No demon-mark. Yet you flew higher than eagles and looked farther than scouts. And you did not breathe."

She crouched again, closer this time, and let the rings in her pupils turn, calling the Eye’s lesser sight to tide in. Threads of residual heat crawled in her vision. She found the seam of the belly tank and pressed lightly. The smell that rose was sharp and dead—not oil, not whale, not alcohol. She breathed it and tasted metal ghosts on the back of her tongue.

Interesting.

She stood.

A decision made, as simply as breath.

The demoness reached down and chose three pieces: the broken dish, the coffin-box that hummed like a forgetting song, and a length of wing with intact spar and skin. She stacked them with casual strength, bound them in bands of shadow that behaved like straps, and slung the bundle across her back.

The remaining wreckage she marked in her mind: here, a nest of wire; there, a burnt heart-thing; there, the blind glass of a smashed eye. She extended a hand over the fuselage and traced a sigil in the air that sank and vanished, a hunter’s rune that meant I found this first in a tongue older than the tower.

Then she looked south—past the fissures, past the plain, toward the invisible line where the sky had spit this metal hawk from—and smiled again, that scientist’s smile.

"Who sends birds without souls?" she murmured to the wind. "And how many more do they have?"

She crouched and sprang. The air took her the way a loyal dog takes a thrown stick—eagerly. Snow billowed where she had been. The bundle did not slow her. She climbed in a dark spiral, banked once over the wreck to memorize the geometry of ruin, and then arrowed toward the black tower, carrying the dead bird’s secrets like trophies.