Kalla flew long into the darkening sky. The sun had dropped down on her left, low on the horizon, to finally disappear, and still she flew. She hadn’t expected her very first flight to be quite so long. She now knew why Raj had forced them to glide so long at the end of a tether. To build endurance. He had told them that a pilot knew that too much good weather could be a bad thing. Only glider pilots long in the tooth could fly from dawn till dusk. And no one flew at night.
But still, she flew on because if she did land, she didn’t know if she could ever get launched again.
Her exposed skin was numb, and her hands had long ago turned wooden. When the wind grew calm, she flew with one hand so she could warm the other inside her collar. Since the sun had set, her body had been wracked with a few bouts of shivering that made it difficult to control the glider.
She had the bearing to “Mine Redoubt 8” still in her monocle, but not the range. Raj had taught them the theory of airspeed calculations, but in practice, watching the ground features pass below her crossbar and then counting till a second feature passed while estimating her altitude was imprecise. After a while, she knew her distance could only be estimated. She hadn’t yet caught any sight of the wall of storms and bad air that would indicate the world’s edge, but she knew she had to land soon. The darkening sky was causing her to lose the definition in the ground features, and she wasn’t sure how much longer her body would hold out.
And then the snow hit her.
It wrapped her glider into a field of nothingness. She had never seen snow, but Raj had told them of it. She wasn’t sure if this was the storm wall or just some isolated weather, but it didn’t matter; she couldn’t see in the darkness and the snow. She had to find a place to land now.
She pulled the tiller back, and the rush of wind grew, causing the material at her elbows to snap and ripple. Snow pelted her face hard enough to sting. The ground would be rushing up towards her. She activated the dark assist in the monocle. With a click of the toggle, green illumination jumped to life in her eye. Her enhanced vision streaked with the silver of snowflakes, and beyond it, in shades of lit green, were sheer cliff walls and tumbled rock slabs draped in banks of snow.
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Without realizing it, she had flown into a sheltered canyon. The air would be still here, calmed, and it would rob her airspeed and subtract lift. She could almost hear Raj’s voice saying these things to her. She gripped the tiller bar with numb hands as the wings bounced and shook from slack air. Fear washed through her. She needed more lift, or she would plummet and crash. Raj had taught them the immediate flying drill for calm air, and she did it now. She worked the wings opposite each other. Pry the bar from one side to the other side. She cut a gentle arc to the right and then to the left. Each time, it was a slow circle of a turn that lowered her closer to the canyon floor. She pulled her legs from the sling, and with her waist now hanging across the tiller bar like a gymnast, she let her legs dangle. The ground rushed up to meet her. She slid from the bar, and her running feet touched the snow so softly she barely made footprints. At the same moment, she dropped her weight and pushed hard forward on the tiller bar. The glider stalled perfectly, pointed straight up, and settled its tail down into the snow just as gently as a bird sitting on a nest.
Perfect landing.
She smiled a little to herself. Raj would have liked that. Then she recalled what had happened, and her worry for him rolled back like a big stone.
Snow drifted around her, and the air was incredibly cold. With a body stiff from a long day slung in a glider, she stumbled forward and removed the supporting bar from the wings. The glider lay down on its side like a flying lizard settling in to sleep.
Her breath fogged in the glow of the monocle. She had to find shelter, get the glider out of the wet, and build a fire. She scrambled across fallen rock slabs and through snow above her knees, between looming stone monoliths topped with heads of snow.
She made her way to the closest canyon wall and pushed through the deeper snow that was drifted against its base. Just like drifting sand, the snow would settle on the sheltered side. She would search here out of the wind for a place to get warm.
Get warm and figure out how much farther she had to go in her journey.