THE LONELY YEAR

Day 0

The end of the world comes to her in a series of stolen moments, lit by boiling flashes that erupt through the clouds.

There: A piece of scaffold shines as it comes apart, individual pieces of brass stretching, shrieking, and fragmenting in midair.

She feels her cloak wrench at her shoulders. The gold clasp digs at the hollow of her throat with an animalistic neediness, and then the whole garment whips away from her body and out into the void.

And there: A long, pale face frozen in a moment of horror and dread realization. Corn-white hair flows behind it as if caught in the flow of a river.

She turns end over end in darkness; is struck with vertigo like a hammer-blow; feels a moan gargling deep in her throat; clenches as her stomach contents boil and churn.

And there: A swarm of broken timber careens through the sky. A hail of bolts and nails and washers. Steam pipes, bent and cracked as ancient bamboo, spin downward toward black ripples run through with racing bolts of fire.

She cannot hear her own cries over the maddened shriek of the wind, much less those of the others. Her mind is consumed with a ceaseless, panicked roar. In the cold and spinning dark, she can feel her vocal cords stretch and twang and resonate, yet there is no sound. Throat aching, body howling, she clutches blind and mute for something, anything, to steady herself. Something hot and pliant passes over her palm—skin? someone else? please? take my hand!—and then it's gone, a ghost in the endless freefalling dark.

And there: She sees one of the deckhands—those fine and largely nameless men who work the Blackjack's engines and corridors—tumbling through the air, arms flailing, sweat and tears streaming in a glittering arc behind him. Something massive rushes through the air above her. In the next burst of light she sees a whirling mass of deck plating, scything through the sky like a meteor. Time enough to see the deckhand's eyes widen as the jagged iron missile strikes him mid-torso and then continues, slick and unstoppable. The deckhand's body falls apart in a cloudburst of red, intestines unraveling from each bisected half like pink and gray ribbons.

In the dark again. The vertigo inescapable, implacable. She can't tell which is worse: The intensity of the sensation, or the drawn-out length of it. She has no idea how long she has fallen. Seconds? Minutes? Time is meaningless beyond those singular moments of light, caught like insects in amber.

I need to—if only I can—

Something hard and heavy and redolent of machine oil ricochets off her shoulder. She senses the crack of splintering bone.

For all the chaos that suffuses the world, this time she finally hears her own voice, screaming.

And there: In a coruscating barrage of light, a dozen silhouettes twirl, spin, careen, and dance—falling. They float through an endless howling abyss of churning clouds and glowing paths of red fire. Their limp bodies sail through a rain of jagged metal, splintered timbers, and shimmering glass. Their forms trail blood and sputtering, wisp-thin nebulae of desperate magic. She thinks she sees a flash of emerald—that beautiful, improbable, Esperborn hair—and a pair of arms raised as if in supplication.

Oh, she thinks. Oh, gods. Not like this.

Some updraft or burst of wind catches her, flips her, directs her eyes into the idiot rage of the burning sky. Pain like a colossus drives itself from her fractured shoulder and into her body. Thought ceases. She screams and screams. Some final, dying corner of her mind curses herself for her helplessness.

She senses something part. She feels a wet, gentle push on the small of her back. A static-laden sigh fills her ears. Suddenly, the air about her is thin, cold, and crisp as diamond. The pain grasps her by the head and forces shut her eyes.

She smells the sea.