A Bird Adrift
Birdie’s voice rang out across the aership’s bridge, fast-paced and unsteady. For today’s job, she’d opened with a song about a woman who’d fallen in love with the sea. In return, the sea had swallowed her whole and washed her ashore in the hidden Otherworld of Avalon as a queen.
Outside, the wind howled, and the aership rocked in the gusts. Birdie’s stomach flipped, sour from that second bottle she’d swiped from the hotel lounge last night. She supposed the wine had smelled a bit stale, but she’d just wanted some shut-eye before her last job. Instead, she’d sat up wide awake, singing like an alley cat on her balcony until sunrise.
According to Duncan’s network, the empire had tapped a new source of crystal. A sliver no bigger than her little finger could power a ship this size for a month. If caught, the snap of her neck echoing through the Tower dungeons would be the last sound she’d ever hear. In the empire, Malevolents didn’t get trials.
This one last job would be well-worth the trouble if Birdie could play her part. Her chances though, like her voice, were shaky at best. She focused on the knight slumped over in the captain’s chair. Sir Gawain de Lothe. They’d never met, but everyone in the seven United Kingdoms knew the former Lord Commander of the Crown and Sword.
A serious expression rested heavy on his face, classically handsome with his square jaw and glacial eyes. She tilted her head, thinking he looked far wearier of the world than someone barely twenty-four. He wore the dark crown of his hair swept back behind his ears. The empire’s golden sigil gleamed against the midnight blue of his suit.
“Look!” Gwenn said, her blonde curls swinging as she pointed at his fidgeting fingers. Birdie cringed. If she’d had a vat of tea or a shot of something stronger, maybe, her hold on them would have been unshakable. In one swift motion, she drew her dagger to knock him out. Little good that does, she thought. If the men up here were already twitching, so would the rest scattered throughout the ship. The farther Birdie strayed from her audience, the weaker her song’s enchantment.
A single naval officer’s kill order to any of the dozens of automata rolling around—oblivious to their glyphed tasks—dropped their chances of escape to nil. From the bridge’s overlook, she spotted Colin’s greasy red hair aboard their boss’s smaller, quicker skycutter anchored midair. He squinted right at her.
On the upper decks, crewmen in navy and gray military fatigues hunched over like the undead while Birdie’s voice filtered through the aership’s loudspeakers. Meanwhile, Duncan’s men moved in single file from the cargo bay, ferrying hoverpallettes laden with stacks of freshly mined crystal. Birdie could feel their magic pulsing from here. She could also feel Colin’s temper heating up. A moment later, he growled through Gwenn’s Glass.
“Tell that useless Malevolent piece of shite that she best sing for her supper if she doesn’t want to get left behind. You hear me, cousin?”
Gwenn confirmed and re-adjusted her earplugs, twice, but said nothing. They were both thieves, both stuck in sodding, rotting Camelot for all the wrong reasons. Birdie’s reasons, she felt fine not remembering. The nightmares were more than enough. She closed her eyes, doing her best to ignore one wicked hangover as the minutes crawled by slower than she’d ever thought possible. At least until her voice cut out.
“No,” she rasped.
“Keep trying,” Gwenn said, an octave higher. Birdie could only croak. She whisper-shouted the lyrics to a low warrior’s march, but the officers around the unloading dock below were already shifting on their feet and rolling their shoulders like men waking from a deep sleep. Birdie yanked up a bandit’s mask over her nose and unsheathed her daggers. Gwenn shouted into the microphone, “Bird can’t crow! I repeat, Bird can’t crow! Abandon ship!”
“Come on,” she yelled and raced out the bridge door with a wide leap over the knights waking up on the floor. Birdie charged after her.
“No, wait,” Gawain demanded, his grip iron-tight around her wrist as he stole the tattered mask from her face. His blue eyes, wide like a frozen lake, beckoned her to slip under and drown.
“You?” he asked, breathless.
Birdie went numb, as if she’d jumped into the bay. For the first time in two years, had someone finally recognized the lost girl currently known as ‘Birdie Smith’?