The long road that spanned the whole of Spire Annatiki, which Fiona called a "runway," was closed by the time they arrived to hold short for takeoff. In the very center of the upper surface the runway split down the middle and both halves lifted, carried away to either side on huge metal arms. A massive metal platform rose to fill the void, carrying the six-engine behemoth that Kiera had seen inside the city when they first arrived. Ever so slowly, the other airplane drove toward them.

"There is only one reason why Annatiki would pull out that airplane," Fiona observed. "It's almost time for Witch Day. The Sister World is looking pretty angry,"

"What is Witch Day?" Kiera asked.

"The bankers and Heritors call it Ethersleep," Fiona replied.

"Oh right! I remember that happened once when I was a child."

"Up here in the spires we call it Witch Day. Ethermancy stops working everywhere in the world for about a day or so."

"What causes it?"

"It's a natural phenomenon," Fiona said dryly.

"That's a lie!" Kiera accused.

"Of course it's a lie!"

The massive airplane reached the end of the runway directly ahead and the front wheel rotated perpendicular to the body. This had the effect of causing the airplane to slowly begin to rotate around, like the hand of a clock. Sunlight caught the huge T-tail as it jutted over the edge of the spire. The sun had not yet risen high enough to illuminate the runway itself. Even as Kiera watched, the sky was slowly losing its red hue in favor of a color that matched the hat on her lap.

"Fiona, I saw something strange at dawn."

"Yeah?"

"It looked like a black fishnet that surrounded the Sister World. It was only visible for a second or so, and as it vanished the effect spread down the conduit to our own sky for another second. Then it was gone. I have been watching the sky, but I have not seen it since."

"That is not the first time I have heard such a thing," Fiona said. "I have never seen it myself, and in fact no oculomancer has ever reported it. I can only assume that oculomancers cannot see it. However, I do not doubt that it exists. A few bankers and Heritors, who spent at least one night in the spires, have reported seeing the exact thing you describe. I have personally interviewed such people and I can verify that they were telling the truth."

"Do you have any idea what it could be?"

"I once told you that Mother Summer and Father Winter abandoned our world when they discovered what Reyndell could do."

"Sacrilege!"

"I already told you, Reyndell was telling the truth when he told me that story. He personally knew both of them. Reyndell claimed that they were both charlatans looking for a good time. They wanted somebody to remember them and worship them here in our world. Anyway that's not the point. Reyndell was a man, and therefore he was not an oculomancer. He spent his entire life living up in these spires, and he never saw the phenomenon."

Kiera was trying not to scream at the other woman. She had devoted her entire life to the worship of Mother Summer. "So?" she asked. "What does that prove?"

"There are two possibilities," Fiona said. "The most-likely possibility is that the phenomenon appeared after Reyndell died. The less-likely possibility is that Reyndell never noticed it. However, the latter possibility is not impossible. I choose to subscribe to a third possibility, that the phenomenon first appeared very shortly after Reyndell died, not because he died but because of pure coincidence."

"What kind of sick madman Reyndell must have been," Kiera said distractedly. "To say that Mother Summer was a charlatan! What an ass!"

The six engines on the huge airplane began to roar. It lurched forward and began to barrel down the runway, leaving huge clouds of rippling-hot air in its wake. Fiona remained silent until the other airplane was far away, but even then Kiera could still hear the distant rumble.

"Look," Fiona continued, "if you want a god to worship, I'll give you my copy of The Binding of Ashe. As long as you promise to take care of it. Either way, you didn't let me finish. I personally believe that some external entity, perhaps this Vaska character, created a barrier that prevents us from leaving. A long time ago, Renna learned how to fly all the way to the witchstone. She found a single Founder's Tomb there, but she was unable to open it. Ever since Reyndell died, nobody has been able to get anywhere close to the witchstone. I've flown all over the world and all over the Sister World and I've flown up the conduit and up every sub-conduit, and I can personally attest that there is no escape. We are trapped here. I think that you saw the bars of our cage."

The huge six-engine airplane lifted off into the sky, pitched down, and sank below the edge of the spire as it crossed out of the spire sub-conduit. The whole fighter jet jolted when Fiona released the brakes. She drove the craft forward along the taxiway, and even as they were turning onto the runway the power lever lurched forward and the engine began to roar.

This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

Faster and faster they went. The white lines painted on the runway blurred together. If Kiera rotated her head quickly like a ballet dancer, she could just barely make out the small undulations of darkness on the snowfields to either side of the runway. The needles on the gauges were rising.

"I am going to pull up on the stick and you are going to experience five times gravity," Fiona warned. "Focus on your life aspect weave. Get ready."

Suddenly the nose of the craft pitched up sharply, and the ground dropped away. Almost immediately, Kiera's body felt extremely heavy. Her vision narrowed and began to gray out. Instinctively, she began to pour dream-ether into her life aspect weave, pushing the blood up toward her head, counteracting the inexplicable sensation of abnormal gravity. The whole world rotated around them until the nose faced the apex of the heavens. Dazed but awake, Kiera glanced in every direction. The fighter jet was trailing a long plume of white mist, twisting like a helix down toward the shrinking white plate crowning Spire Annatiki.

"I am going to level off and then flip over," Fiona announced.

Maddeningly, the world began to rotate around them until they were perfectly inverted. The sky above was white and cloudy, the ground below was a deep blue. At an abstract level, Kiera knew that the blue sky was above them, however gravity was pointing in that direction, and her body told her that the sky was down. When the nose of the craft reached the horizon, the whole affair suddenly tipped over like a falling cat and then they were upright. The altimeter and airspeed gauges went haywire as they passed through the edge of the sub-conduit, but the momentum of the fighter jet kept them going perfectly straight.

"Now I am going to bank and turn to the left," Fiona said. "Expect seven times gravity."

Kiera poured all the power she could muster into her life aspect weave, and it certainly helped. The craft flipped on knife's edge, then the nose of the craft sharply pulled up and the whole world rotated around them. The sensation of being in the center of a snow globe returned, but this time it was much stronger. They were not flying, they were staying in the same place while they commanded the whole world to move around them.

Spire Erika loomed overhead, and Spire Lyn to the south was a tiny fence post of stone, too close and moving too fast. Kiera realized with horror that they would fly right over Spire Lyn, a distance that would take six weeks by steamboat, after just a few minutes.

"How fast are we going?" Kiera asked, horrified.

"The air is thin up here," Fiona replied. "We don't measure our speed in knots like we do on the surface. Up here we report our speed relative to the speed of sound. Our current speed is zero-point-eight. We never fly faster than sound because we don't want to create sonic booms that can be heard on the ground. However, in an emergency, this craft can fly at two times the speed of sound, at least."

"I don't know what that means!" Kiera admitted.

"A male witch was reported in northern Zairo," Fiona said.

"Zairo!" Kiera exclaimed. "That's so far away!"

"We will be there in a few minutes," Fiona continued. "As I said, a male witch. Our job is to kill him."

"Our job?"

"Your job," Fiona corrected. "You will pull the trigger."

"I don't want to kill anyone!"

"You promised Annatiki you would help subjugate the etherborn," Fiona said. "Sometimes the witchstone randomly creates new male witches. It takes about two weeks for their powers to fully develop, in which time we have a window to kill them without retaliation. One of my duties is to fly above the fog and lob missiles down at the bastards."

"That's horrible!" Kiera complained.

"The alternative is worse," Fiona said.

She really likes that phrase, Kiera thought.

"The missile is locked on the target, you need to grasp the stick and pull the trigger."

"I don't want to kill anyone!" Kiera repeated.

"You will help Annatiki subjugate the etherborne. She is an oculomancer, and the next time she asks you, you will truthfully tell her that you killed this male witch."

"I've changed my mind!"

"Do you know what male witches can do?" Fiona screamed. "The first thing they do is they make themselves smarter. They use the life aspect to vastly increase their own intelligence. This is something that female witches cannot do. Second, they use heaven aspect to slow down their own perception of time, also something that female witches cannot do. Third, they use their advanced intelligence and slowed time to plot world domination, complete subjugation of all females, genocide, a genetic reshaping of our world. We have seen it over and over and over again."

Hands trembling, Kiera reached for the stick and pulled the trigger. There was a click, and one of the funny white tubes rocketed off the wings toward the horizon, leaving a white trail through the sky.

Then she saw, and felt, something truly horrible. A heinous, revolting red aura of some sort started burning around the tube as it fell. Even from the vast distance between her and the tube, Kiera knew that something was very wrong with that thing.

"What is that?!" Kiera said.

"A burning spirit-ether entropic field," Fiona said. "It disables etherborne powers. That missile is designed specifically for killing witches."

The missile vanished into the fog. The profane sensation continued for a few more seconds, before ending in a crescendo of wrongness. It rapidly faded away, and then Kiera felt nothing abnormal, not from the fighter jet and not from the world outside.

"No trace of etherborne powers anymore," Fiona said. "Mission success, Kiera. I'll tell Annatiki that you have helped subjugate the etherborne. She will be very pleased with your progress."

"Who, who did I just kill?" She asked.

"His powers were about to manifest. I would say he was about twenty-two years old. Lived alone in the woods across the river from a village. A hunter. That missile should not have hit anyone else. As I said before, we have a short window of a few weeks where we can see his powers before they actually manifest. Timing for this sort of thing is very important. A strike mission like this is ideal for witches that manifest in rural areas."

"Do you know his name?"

"No, the oculomancers in the spy aircraft can see things like relative age and sex but we don't ever get close enough to them to really know who they are. Not unless they live in a major city in which case we can't exactly blow them up with a missile."

"You only do this to male witches, right?"

"Mostly," Fiona said. "Female witches are given the opportunity to serve. If they do not conform to our personality profiles, we cut them up and put them in our missiles. Otherwise, they end up in the spires, serving Annatiki."

Kiera shivered. "And that won't happen to me, right?"

"You? Turned into a missile?" Fiona laughed. "No, no. You are far too powerful. Annatiki would need to rip your throat out, and coat the wound with spirit-ether entropy gel."

And my final moments, Kiera realized, would be lost in that profane wrongness.

She swore a silent oath that she would never hesitate to kill a male witch ever again.