they'd be unlikely to reach him. The wind filled her ears with a sound that went far beyond the blustering, buffeting sensation she was used to.
How far down had they come? Head-down, you could fall at well over a hundred miles an hour, if that meant anything in the Second Realm. It felt like they'd been falling for a long time, but the star ahead stayed obstinately four-pointed. Around it, shapes and colours surged and rioted. She tried to squint harder, to make out more detail, but her vision became too obscured.
Finally, a long, thin diamond of red too bright to match the star spun into place and drove into the crook between two of its points. Pevan rammed her arms out straight and screwed her face tight up against the brain-stopping force of her dive. Muscles strained and then sharpened to fiery lines of pain down the front of her shoulders. Across her back, bones ground against one another, for a moment feeling bent so far that they'd surely snap.
The wind of passage abated, dropping back to gentle breeze as she flattened herself out and settled back into level gliding. Chag appeared off her right wing, hair fluttering and streaming around his face, his mouth and eyes wide. She caught his eye, and the look they shared drew out his breathless laughter. Even scrawny, pallid and haggard after months of isolation, he seemed alive beyond life with that laugh dancing in his eyes.
She let his mirth draw the same from her in response, rising up through her in an effervescent tide, spreading inward from her fingers and toes to her chest and then, irresistibly, up her throat and out into the air ahead of them. Escaping her, her chuckles took on the form of dandelion-down, tufts like tiny feathers gusting out against the wind as if it wasn't there.
Savouring the simple fact of survival, they circled the star - which had swelled until each point had to be fifty feet long - for one whole, steady lap before she said, "What now?"
"Down." Chag's answer stabbed out at her, and she had to veer sharply sideways to avoid it. The rush of blood to his head had clearly made him a little careless, but the way his face went rigid with alarm told her he didn't need reprimanding. More carefully, head turned downward, he finished. "We land on the star, then just follow me."
She nodded, dipping her wing to pull away from him and give him space to land. And a little privacy. Birds had had thousands of years of evolution to develop bodies that were well-shaped for making landfall. Even then, some of them looked properly stupid when coming down. For a human, even a goose's belly-down, flapping, splashing crash would be a step in the right direction.
A low swoop brought Pevan down over the body of the star, which now seemed to float on a pond covered in brightly-coloured leaves. She aimed along one of the points, back-winged furiously to bring her head up, and then swung her legs forward as fast as she could. It almost worked, but she'd misjudged how low to swoop and the tops of her toes caught on the star's hard surface.
Momentum dragged her forward, flat onto her face and hands. Her palms slapped into a surface like polished wood, which at least meant no grazes, but the impact stung, badly. She pushed herself up on her elbows, head swimming for a moment. Somewhere behind her, Chag swore, though the tone of his voice sounded more like frustration and chagrin than anything indicating a real, serious problem.
Clambering upright brought a rush of dizziness, but she managed not to stumble. She rubbed her bruised chin and turned to look at Chag, who turned out to be lying on his side, clutching his knee and muttering curses, half-way along one of the far points of the star. He started to get up when he saw her coming, his face turning stoic.
With his wings turned back to arms, he was able to gesture, Everything okay?
She gave him a thumbs-up and a smile. His smile in response was wooden, clearly a clumsy attempt to cover for substantial pain. Well, if he was going to be an idiot, she'd let him deal with the consequences. She gestured for him to lead on.
He nodded stiffly and turned to scan the horizon. The sea of colourful fragments through which the star slowly revolved spread out as far as Pevan could see, its horizon a flat, straight line above which the 'sky' was a muted blur of Second-Realm colours, vaguely nauseating to look at. Whatever landmark Chag was looking for, she couldn't see it, but he set off along the star-point to their right, with no indication that the choice of direction was random. His stride was purposeful, but he couldn't disguise his limp.
Movement out of the corner of Pevan's eye sent a chill down her spine and put her on alert. For a moment she dismissed it as just the random motion of the tiles floating around the star, but the feeling of unease persisted. It took her a moment to realise that the steady rotation of some of the fragments had picked up the rhythm of her steps, slowing slightly each time her foot lifted off the ground and speeding up again towards each footfall.
Again she was reminded of turning a kaleidoscope. The shapes out there did merge and split in that same symmetrical, geometric way, matter sometimes coming out of nothing, other times folding away into nothing. She glanced up nervously, half-expecting to see a giant eye peering at them from the sky, but had to look down again when the colours up there became overwhelming. The fluid lapping at the edges of the star looked more like milk than water.
Another rush of dizziness hit her; she found herself veering off the central axis of the star's point, though Chag was still limping along directly ahead of her. Trying to correct her course pushed a feeling of pressure up against her fatigue, as if someone had stuck two fingers through her eyebrow and into her brain. She slid off-course again.
It was getting hard to balance, and her gut clenched as she teetered on the brink of falling into the water - or whatever it was. Chag still seemed to be straight ahead, but when she looked at his feet, he was walking right down the middle of the star's point. She gritted her teeth, forced herself to stop thinking about what his or her feet were landing on, and narrowed her eyes to focus only on his back.
For a moment between footsteps, a cold, hollow sensation replaced her heart as conviction warred with fear, but the ground stayed hard beneath her feet. Her brain writhed and fought, and the star-point unfolded, just like a flake of glass tumbling between mirrors in a kaleidoscope. Pevan found herself stepping across the reflected folds. It felt like stepping through a mirror.
Somehow, Chag kept going in a straight line, trusting his feet to find their path. Trust like that involved an act of will that would have daunted any civilian, and most Gifted. The Second Realm made way for expectation and confidence in a way that the First never could, provided you had more of the latter than most humans could ever manage. And Chag didn't even flinch.
She had to admit, the little man was wasted on his lazy, dull southern hometown. The Separatists had refreshed his training before the winter, but still, she found herself wondering if he'd felt just how undervalued he must have been. Perhaps his frustration with the short-sightedness of his neighbours was understandable after all. How much of a role had that played in his decision to abandon the Treaty of Peace and go with the Separatists?
Concentrating on that question, and the attendant challenge of getting him to rise above his alienation, kept her from worrying about where her feet went. The white ocean with its floes of jewellery whirled around them, the motion accelerating but not growing more violent; the surface stayed flat, without splashes. The silence of the Second Realm took some of the immediacy out of the motion, too, emphasising that it was the world turning around her and not her own spinning. Perhaps for that reason, Pevan found her dizziness subsiding.
There was no sign of the terrain changing, no hint of a shore approaching. Assuming that meant they were still some way away from the white cave - and in the Second Realm, it was by no means certain - Pevan turned her thoughts to rescuing Rel. What would the Separatists do to hold him? Would he be conscious enough to cover them as they got him away? Pevan's and Chag's Gifts were next to useless in combat in the Second Realm; they'd need Rel and Atla if there was going to be fighting.
Just as she was beginning to think it was a good job they w
ere a while from their destination, Chag stopped and knelt down. Pevan faltered, but managed to keep moving until she was close enough to crouch at his side. The moment she stopped walking, the wild gyrations of the crystals around her feet subsided, and she almost collapsed on top of the little man while her balance readjusted.
Tone grim, face pointed intently at the not-water, Chag said, "You might want to hold onto me for this next bit."
She studied the set of his cheeks. With him looking away from her, it was hard to tell, but she couldn't see any sign of mischief or mirth there. He looked like he meant it. Still, she wasn't going to be taken advantage of. She grabbed a handful of his shirt from the middle of his back - given how thin he'd become, there was plenty of slack - and clenched her fist in it. When his only response was a short, sharp nod, she decided it might be best to hunch a bit lower and get properly braced for whatever was coming.
Slowly, hand trembling, he reached towards the edge of the blue diamond on which they knelt. By the time his fingers touched the milky liquid, his eyes were squeezed tightly shut. A shiver went through him at the moment of contact, violent enough that Pevan felt it through her grip on his shirt. Her muscles found