“We’ve got movement.” Horan floated from the top of the split-in-two skyscraper down to the ground, where he landed on the cracked sidewalk among his three companions. “They’re definitely doing something across the river, like we thought.”

“What kind of something?” asked Quet.

A dull rumble on the horizon suddenly erupted into a vitriolic screech of noise and power as two fighter jets streaked overhead, emerging from the impenetrable cloud cover blanketing the sky as they raced each other westward.

“…Yeah, that kind of something.” Horan waved in the direction the jets had flown in. “Spotted a ton of trucks and stuff headed across the river in that direction too. Seems like they’ve found something to zero in on.”

“Think that whatever it is will be enough of a distraction to let us cross?” asked Waia.

“Not even close, no.” Horan pointed up to the clouds, where spotlights could still be seen sweeping across the grey mass from an unseen point on the ground. “They’ve still got plenty of folks manning the other side. They aren’t even giving us a chance.”

Quet sighed and looked at the ground. “…It’s probably the monsters that they’re attacking, isn’t it? Yeah, I bet they found where they’re hiding out.”

“Think we should watch what they do over there?” asked Waia. “It’s not like you have any better leads so far, we might be able to spot something interesting if we watch them at work.”

Quet blanched at went to say something, but was cut off by Mark before anyone could notice her attempt.

“We haven’t heard anything in terms of possible engagement,” said Mark sitting on the remains of a bus stop. “I can’t even hear those jets at all anymore, so whatever they’re going for, it’s going to be too far away for any of us to spot anything.”

Quet sighed with relief. “Alright, so… I guess we circle back around to our last question: Now what? I mean, if we just keep pacing around our chunk of the city like a zoo enclosure, eventu–”

Another distant set of cracks echoed through the city. A moment later, two dark shapes soared overhead in the same direction as the jets, the only thing lending visibility to them being the small green indicator lights that flashed on the sides of the shapes like the lights of the airplanes that once filled the sky instead.

“…Those are new,” said Mark, watching as the indistinct shapes reached the peak of their arc and momentarily vanish into the cloud cover. Wherever it was that they emerged to approach the ground, none of the four could see.

“…I think I might have an idea,” mumbled Quet.

All three of the others turned to look at her.

Quet pointed up to where the shapes had vanished. “The Servants can’t see through those clouds. Nothing can. The monsters here were totally invisible until they dipped beneath to land.”

“You’re joking,” mumbled Mark.

“I can’t lift all three of you,” said Horan, “not even one at a time. I definitely can’t do it for such a far distance, and I definitely can’t do it that high up.”

“Which is why we do what humans have always done,” declared Quet, plucking a jagged shard of rust-bathed metal out of the snow. “We supplement our natural abilities with the possibilities offered by technology.”

She began to draw a rough sketch in the snow in front of her using what had likely once been part of a stop sign. “The term ‘technology’ is applicable in technicality alone, of course. This is all going to be quite rudimentary in design, seeing as the only tertiary education any of us has is in linguistic theory.” She glanced up at Mark. “You don’t have a degree in anything, right?”

“Never went past high school.”

“Okay, yeah.” Quet went back to drawing.

“Man,” mumbled Horan, “We don’t ask about each other enough.”

“We’re pretty boring people, but we can discuss the implications of how little we know about the only people we routinely talk to later.” Quet stepped away from her snow-drawing and gestured for the others to take a look.

A highly-simplified, almost childlike drawing of a hot air balloon lay in the snow. A smiling stick figure stood inside the basket, with an ‘H’ next to its head. Above the figure, an arrow pointed inside the envelope of the balloon, and a second arrow outside the craft pushed the balloon to the right.

“This is going to kill all of us,” said Mark.

“It’s just a spur-of-the-moment draft,” clarified Quet, “which I say because looking at it now makes me feel like an idiot. But the theory still stands, that as long as we can support Horan’s wind powers with means beyond, like, his arms, we stand a much better chance of making it across the Willamette undetected. Plus, while Horan might experience physical ‘complications’, quote-unquote, we could probably make it to Mount Rainier in an hour or two, if Waia’s ‘hundred miles’ reckoning is accurate.”

“I mean, I…” Horan rubbed his chin. “I think there’s something to the idea, but, like, that just means I have to overexert myself way too much in a slightly different way. Magic… Probably can’t juice up my powers without just disintegrating me, right?”

“No, and even if it could, that kind of thing would take me months to make with the tools I could feasibly find out here…” Quet stared at the drawing for a moment. “…But magic can share the load.”

She drew a circle around the balloon, then drew more upwards-facing arrows beneath the circle. “Anti-gravity is something that is both doable and relatively practical for me in particular to set up, given my language’s proclivity towards spatial manipulation in general. If I can create a few anti-gravity matrices using material durable enough to last the whole trip without disintegrating, you can focus on horizontal movement, since at that point, maintaining elevation is a non-issue! Bada bing, bada boom!”

“Yeah, and…” Mark pointed at the circle. “And actually, Horan, you might be able to do that sort of bubble of calm air you do sometimes, like last week or whenever. That would probably get rid of wind resistance, which would be a huge problem for something shaped like that. Plus, it would help if anyone fell off, so…”

“Yeah-yeah-yeah, you’re right.” Horan squatted down next to the image in the snow, wincing slightly as the shins of his pants were slowly soaked through. “That might still be a lot for me, but I can keep us in that bubble, and I can probably just push us forward at the start, and since there isn’t gravity or air to stop us, we can probably just keep going forward forever from that one initial push.” He looked up at Quet. “Is that how momentum works? Is my science bad?”

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

“Do I look like a person who has any amount of extensive knowledge about actually useful subjects?” asked Quet.

“Point made.” Horan drew three extra stick figures in the balloon’s basket. “Might be a lot if I do both one big push at the start and hold up a hot air balloon-sized bubble for an hour, but it won’t kill me or anything.”

“Unless,” said Mark, looking over Horan’s shoulder, I sit next to you and just think about you, like, really hard. It’ll help a little, right?”

“How romantic.” Horan stood up and shook the snow off his boots. “I guess that just leaves open the logistical side of things: How’re we gonna make a giant hot air balloon out of scavenged material?”

“Well,” said Mark, “Quet’s anti-gravity simplifies a lot of factors. Namely falling. Sorry if I sound hung-up about that.”

Horan cleared his throat and pointed a fist at Quet, who promptly met it with her own.

“Weight and density isn’t really a problem anymore,” continued Mark, “all that really matters after that is just that… We get things that do what they’re supposed to. We could probably just use a tarp as a sail or something so that Horan can get us going, and that’s pretty much that. That just leaves getting Quet’s spells read–”

“Matrices, please,” said Quet. “I’m not an Assyrian-using braggart. No offense, Horan.”

“None… taken?” Horan glanced at Mark in confusion.

Mark shrugged. “My point still stands.”

“Well…” Quet looked up and down the street that the four were standing in. “…Lead plaques are quite notoriously suitable for safely containing incendiary writing. Those aren’t exactly commonplace in Portland, Oregon, though…”

Horan noticed that Waia was quietly sitting down in a circle of snow-free tarmac, staring between her legs. He tried waving to get her attention. “Hey, uh, Waia, you good back there? Got any ideas on how we can make this work?”

Waia looked up at Horan and shrugged. “Dunno, looks like you’ve got this covered. I’m good out here.”

“I mean… You sure? Like, there’s– Hang on.” Horan lifted himself out of the snow and floated over to Waia while Mark and Quet discussed common fixtures of major American metropolitan centers. “There’s probably something you can do to help us plan things out. Doesn’t have to be some science thing or whatever, it’s not like any of us know anything more about that than anyone else.”

“Uh, I…” Waia looked between Horan and the other two standing further back. “Wait, what’re we talking about? Sorry, I–I’ve just been spacing out a little for the past couple of minutes.”

Horan rubbed his arm. “…Okay. That’s…”

“No, no, it’s, um…” Waia sighed. “Look, it’s just hard to focus too hard on everything you guys are doing at one moment, because it’s already hard for me to do that, and we’re just cycling through things every few hours, so… Ugh!” She leaned forward and buried her face in the tarmac road, which melted around her head and gave way like mud.

“Hey, uh, maybe you could…” Horan shrugged in defeat. “I mean, it’s not like either of us don’t know what the problem is…”

Waia lifted her head out of the pavement. “It’s just that–” She looked down at the perfect mould of her face in the dent in the tarmac– “Whoa, that’s pretty cool. Yeah, it’s just that things were so much simpler last time we went through this whole rigmarole. Everything went wrong, I know, but it just feels like we’re de-escalating our response to everyone trying to kill us and stop us, when we should be doing the opposite. It’s just, like, it’s hard for me to get into that headspace of ‘we’re on a roll, let’s keep this up’ when I’ve been nonstop running around and blowing things up for months before now, you know?”

“Yeah, I… I get that.” Horan folded his legs and lowered himself down so that he was hovering just above the snow. “From a purely technical standpoint, I can just go to Mount Rainier and potentially resolve all this whenever I want, since I can just fly straight there like it’s nothing.”

Waia rested her head in her hand. “My past year would’ve been a gazillion times better if I could fly.”

“It’s great, yeah.” Horan smiled to himself. “Point is, this could all be avoided if I just flew the… me... to Mount Rainier, or if you just busted through everything the Servants threw at you and walked there. But from everything I can tell– and I’d say I’m pretty good at telling these kinds of things– that you really weren’t doing so hot before we ran back into each other. And actually, I thi– I don’t know if I ever asked, but did you, like know where we were? I assume you were just doing stuff all across the country without even knowing where we were going, so was it just a coincidence that we were both in the same place at once?”

Waia shrugged. “I was just kind of following my gut on what the best way to go was, so… I guess, yeah, coincidence.”

“Alright then. I dunno, call it destiny or something, because those are some slim odds. I– The point I’ve been getting at is, it can be super easy to overlook how much you end up leaning on other people to get you places, especially when you can, in theory, do things yourself. I’d probably be buried under a pile of sand on the other side of the planet if Mark hadn’t been there to… not make me die, at least. And at this point, with all the stuff everyone’s done for me the past year, and with me not really doing much in return besides standing around and looking pretty–”

“A year on the road and down an eye, but you’ve still got it, man,” said Waia.

Horan shot Waia a pair of finger-guns. “But in all seriousness, I don’t think I’d even be able to stomach ditching them out here. Even if it means one side drags the other down with them, I know where I stand with them. It’s, uh, it’s a minor miracle that Mark hasn’t just ditched me after I screw things up for both of us for the umpteenth time. But hey, our brains are human, and sometimes you just gotta stick with the bad stuff.” Horan turned to look at Mark and Quet and raised his voice. “Hey, how’re things going for you guys?”

Quet looked back at Horan. “How do you feel about peeling off some hubcaps? They’re… basically plaques, and you can stack ‘em pretty easy if you need spares. It’ll take some time, but I can probably carve the appropriate matrices into half a dozen round boys with, like, a nail or something. Aluminium’s pretty soft, and we can’t get tetanus or anything.” She glanced at a small cut on her hand. “Thankfully.”

“Actually…” Waia rose to her feet. “Aluminum’s been phased–”

Quet grinned and pointed at Waia. “American.”

“Shut up. Pretty much everything you see on the road uses, like, plastic or polymer or whatever for their hubcaps, since the 70s.” Waia gestured at the cars left abandoned on the sidewalk or street. “That’s why they’re not rusted or corroded like the rest of the cars.”

Quet kicked aside the snow around the wheel of a nearby car, revealing a pristine silver wheel. “Oh yeah, huh. Didn’t consider that. That probably still works, right? I think polymer works better under heat than aluminium.”

“Sure, but you can’t carve anything into it, at least nowhere near deep enough.” Waia walked over and rapped the hubcap with a gloved knuckle, receiving a firm knocking sound. “It’s not soft like metal. It’ll crack. I assume that won’t work then, right?”

“Not at all, no.” Quet squinted and examined the plastic disc. “…Waia, what kind of precision do you have with your fingers?”

It took a herculean effort for Waia to not laugh. “…Yeah, uh, pret–” She coughed. “Pretty good, why?”

Quet shrugged. “Why don’t you just carve it? Like, with your bare hands and everything?”

Waia blinked. “Does making magic even work that way?”

“Yeah, sure.” Quet knelt down to look at the wheel from Waia’s eye level. “I just need to be within two or three metres while you’re carving it for it to take effect. My personal language isn’t particularly difficult to produce, it’s mapping it out for a valid effect that’s the hard part. From an artistic perspective, it’s just a bunch of squares and right angles. I can sketch out the appropriate layout, hand the sketch to you, and you can probably produce it in half an hour if you work slowly. That’s a production pipeline, baby!”

Waia shrugged. “Worth a shot. I’ll give it a try, I guess.”

“Sounds like we have work to do,” said Quet. She raised her fist towards Waia.

Waia reciprocated the fist bump, imitating the sound of an explosion when the two connected.

Mark looked up at the sky when he heard what sounded like whalesong above him. He watched as one of the Potiranga, half a dozen spotlights trained on its chitinous form, vanished into the clouds above. The beams of the spotlights swiftly retreated from view.

Horan followed Mark’s gaze. “Looks like we’ve got a plan, huh?”

“Looks like it,” echoed Mark.