Chapter 894: Arrival At The Northern Corridor [Bonus - ]

Chapter 894: Arrival At The Northern Corridor [Bonus Chapter]

“I’m not afraid of anything,” Lara said, very stiffly. “I’m centuries old, handsome. I’ve wrestled river leviathans, and I’ve walked through the deep basin at night with no light but my staff.”

The freighter dipped again, and her eyes squeezed shut.

“I simply don’t like being inside a metal box in the sky with nothing underneath me but air. It isn’t natural. Trees are natural, rivers are natural, and this…” She gestured stiffly at the window without opening her eyes, “…is a crime against nature.”

Kara stared at her for a long moment, then burst out laughing so hard she fell back onto the couch, and Lara opened one eye just to glare at her with pure murderous fury.

“I will bite you, handsome,” she warned. “And it won’t be the nice kind of bite…”

“Sorry, sorry,” Kara wheezed, wiping her eye. “It’s just… the protector of the forest, centuries old, strong enough to sit at the Council’s table… and you’re scared of a plane. A plane, Lara…”

“I am not scared of the plane,” Lara said through her teeth. “I disapprove of the plane. There’s a very big difference, and you’d know that if you weren’t so busy laughing…”

Aki crossed the lounge, sat down in the seat beside Lara and gently held out her hand with her palm up, and Lara eyed it as if it might bite her.

“And what’s that for?” she asked suspiciously.

“For holding,” Aki said simply. “When I was little, I hated flying too, and Father would never let anyone hold my hand on the royal jets because it wasn’t dignified. So I used to grip the armrest until my fingers hurt.”

She smiled a little.

“It’s easier with a hand, trust me…”

Lara looked at her for a long strange moment, then slowly let go of the armrest and took Aki’s hand, her long fingers wrapping around Aki’s small ones and holding on tight.

The freighter hit another bump, and Lara squeezed so hard that Aki winced, but Aki held on.

“…You’re not as annoying as I thought, little thing,” Lara muttered, still staring at the floor.

“Thank you, Lara,” Aki said, completely sincere. “I’ll take that as a compliment…”

Kara watched the two of them from the couch, the tiny blue-haired princess and the towering, terrified forest woman in an oversized black shirt holding hands by the window, and a warm feeling settled in her chest.

’Huh,’ she thought. ’Did not see that one coming…’

…

The flight north took two days.

They crossed the endless green of the Amazonian basin, then the high plains and the grey sprawl of the central continent, stopping twice at Amazonian airbases to refuel, and the weather grew colder and the light grew thinner the further north they flew, until by the second morning, the green below them had given way to a stark white world of snow frozen rivers and dark forests of pine that stretched to the horizon.

That same morning, the Borealis fighters arrived.

There were six of them, sleek and white and silver with the twin-headed bear crest of the northern Tsardom painted on their tails, and they slid out of the clouds on either side of the convoy and settled into formation alongside it, close enough to see the pilots’ helmets, flying there in silent watchful formation and matching the convoy’s speed exactly while their weapons stayed cold.

On the command deck, the alarms were going off.

“Six bogeys with Borealis markings, two hundred yards off our port and starboard escorts,” Leona reported calmly from the console. “No weapons lock and no transmissions… They’re just sitting there watching us, Marshal.”

“Volkov,” Da Silva said, standing over the radar screen with her jaw tight. “He wants us to know he’s there… He’s still furious about the tournament, and he wants my engineers looking out the window at his fighters the whole way to the Corridor.”

Her hands tightened on the edge of the console.

“And if one of my escort pilots gets nervous and fires a single shot…”

“Want me to go say hello?” Kara asked, in the casual tone of someone offering to fetch coffee.

Da Silva turned around slowly. Kara was standing by the window, looking out at the nearest Borealis fighter with her head tilted and an expression of mild, lazy curiosity.

“Say hello,” Da Silva repeated slowly, the way someone might repeat a sentence in a language they didn’t trust. “To a squadron of Borealis fighters. At thirty thousand feet…”

“Politely,” Kara assured her, with the most innocent smile Da Silva had ever seen on anyone, let alone on her. “Very politely. I won’t break anything… probably.”

Da Silva looked at her for a long, deeply suspicious moment while every instinct she’d built over twenty years of command screamed at her to say no.

“…Define politely, Lord Vespera.”

Kara only smiled, and then she was gone.

POP!

Inside the cockpit of the lead Borealis fighter, Captain Dmitri Orlov was enjoying himself.

He’d been ordered by the Tsar himself to shadow the Amazonian convoy all the way to the border and make sure every soldier, engineer and fat cargo pilot on board knew exactly whose sky they were flying through, and he’d been doing it for three very satisfying hours with plans to do it for three more then someone knocked on his canopy.

TAP-TAP!

Orlov turned his head and found a woman in a black suit standing on the nose of his fighter at thirty thousand feet and seven hundred miles an hour, in the screaming wind, with her long black cloak snapping behind her like a flag, her left sleeve pinned and empty and her black hair whipping around a face he’d seen on every news screen in the world.

She was smiling at him, and she lifted her one hand and gave him a small friendly wave.

Orlov screamed into his oxygen mask.

The woman leaned down until her face was right up against the canopy glass, and somehow over the roar of the engines and the wind, her voice came through perfectly clearly sounding quite terrifying.

“Hi there,” Kara said. “Lovely day for flying, isn’t it? Tell Volkov I said hello… and if one of you even twitches toward those weapons, I’ll take this plane apart in the air and carry you home under my arm… In your underwear.”

She patted his canopy twice, the way someone might pat a dog.

PAT-PAT!

…Then she was gone, and ten seconds later, all six Borealis fighters peeled away from the convoy in a sharp panicked turn and vanished into the clouds at full burn.

POP!

Kara reappeared in the observation lounge with snow in her hair and frost on her eyelashes, brushing ice off the shoulders of her coat, and Da Silva, Leona and even Maya, who’d been dozing on the couch, all stared at her.

“They’ve gone home,” Kara said, shaking the snow out of her hair. “Very nice pilots, very polite. I think one of them might need a change of clothes, but other than that…”

Out the window, the last speck of white vanished into the clouds.

Da Silva looked at the empty sky, then back at the one-armed woman casually shaking ice out of her collar, and a hot feeling twisted in her chest all over again.

’She stood on a fighter jet,’ she thought numbly. ’At thirty thousand feet… and scared off half of Volkov’s air patrol by knocking on the glass. Damn it…’

She turned back to the console before anyone could see her face.

’Stop falling for a woman… Fuck!’

…

They reached the Northern Corridor on the second afternoon, and it came up out of the white like the edge of the world.

A vast range of jagged black mountains rose out of the snowfields with their peaks lost in grey clouds, and running through the heart of them was a long, deep valley, a wide pass between the cliffs stretching for miles into the distance.

The valley floor was white with snow, but scattered across it, pushing up through the white in great jagged clusters, were huge crystals of deep shimmering violet void-iron, some as big as houses, glowing faintly from within like embers buried in the snow until the whole valley glittered with them.

Aki pressed her face to the window, her breath fogging the glass.

“It’s beautiful,” she whispered. “I’ve seen the pictures a hundred times, but it’s so much more beautiful in person…”

“And it’s ours, princess,” Kara said, coming up behind her and resting her hand on Aki’s shoulder while Aki looked up at her with shining eyes.

The freighters began to descend one after another out of the grey sky onto a wide flat stretch of snow at the mouth of the valley, their engines kicking up huge billowing clouds of white powder as the cargo ramps dropped.

Amazonian engineers in heavy cold-weather gear spilled out into the snow, shouting and pointing, and the first heavy machines rumbled down the ramps with their treads crunching through the ice.

Kara stepped off the command freighter’s ramp, and her boots sank into the snow with a soft crunch while the air burned her lungs.

Behind her came Aki, bundled in a heavy fur-lined coat Da Silva had given her with her blue hair spilling out from under the hood, then Da Silva in her olive greatcoat and Maya and Leona in cold-weather armor, and finally Lara, who stepped onto the snow barefoot in her oversized black shirt, looked down at the white powder between her toes and frowned.

“It’s cold,” she said, deeply offended, as if the snow had personally insulted her family. “It’s cold and it’s wet and it bites my feet… Who decided this was a place worth fighting a whole tournament over?”

“It’s snow, Lara,” Kara said, amused, watching the centuries-old protector of the forest lift one bare foot out of the powder and glare at it.

“That’s what it does. You’ll warm up once we get moving…”

“I don’t like it,” Lara declared. “I don’t like this place, I don’t like the air and I don’t like how quiet the trees are. Give me back my jungle, handsome…”

’Did I force you to leave your jungle…?’

At the mouth of the valley, beside a row of steel barriers and a small prefabricated guard station flying the white-and-gold banner of the World Council, stood a squad of Enforcers in ivory-white powered armor, and the squad leader stepped forward as they approached with his visor glowing blue.

“Halt,” he said, his voice crackling through his helmet speaker. “This territory is under World Council supervision pending the transfer of title. State your business here…”

Kara held out her hand and let the Inventory open, and the deed appeared in her palm, the thick heavy title with the dark star-iron seal of the World Council glowing faintly on its face.

The Enforcer looked down at it as his visor flickered and scanned the seal, and he went very still before he straightened sharply and stepped aside, with the whole squad stepping aside behind him.

“Title confirmed,” he said. “Blessed Land, with Princess Aki named as co-holder…”

He bowed his head stiffly. “The Northern Corridor is yours, Lord Vespera… Welcome.”

Kara smiled and tucked the deed back into her Inventory, then turned to look out over the long white valley at the jagged black cliffs, the glittering violet crystals and the Amazonian machines already crawling across the snow toward them, and beside her, Aki slipped her small gloved hand into Kara’s.

“We actually did it,” she whispered. “Kara, we really did it…”

“We did, princess,” Kara said, squeezing her hand. “Every bit of it.”

For one perfect quiet moment, they stood there together in the snow at the mouth of the Northern Corridor with the wind whipping their hair and their breath fogging in the cold air

…Then the sky cracked open.

KRA-KA-KOOOOOM!

A bolt of lightning tore down out of the grey clouds so bright and so loud that every engineer in the valley threw themselves flat in the snow, and it slammed into the ground fifty feet in front of them and exploded outward in a blinding white blast that threw snow fifty feet into the air in every direction.

The Enforcers raised their weapons, Maya threw herself in front of Aki, Da Silva’s saber was out of its sheath before the thunder had finished rolling, and Lara’s staff flared green.

The snow came drifting slowly back down, and standing in the center of a smoking black crater, with arcs of lightning still crackling and dancing across her skin, was a woman who stood at least seven feet tall, broad-shouldered and long-legged and built like a goddess carved out of marble by someone with very strong opinions.

Her long golden-blond hair tumbled down her back in thick waves that crackled with static, her bright blue eyes blazed with lightning, and she was gorgeous in a way that made every soldier in the valley forget, for a moment, that they were supposed to be pointing weapons at her.

She looked around at them all, the soldiers and the Enforcers and the engineers lying flat in the snow, and grinned a huge unbothered grin.

“Hello, everyone!” she called cheerfully, her voice booming across the valley like rolling thunder. “Nice place you’ve got here! Very cold, though…”

Nobody answered her, and Kara stared at her in disbelief.

’…Thor?’ she thought. ’What the hell are you doing here?’

Thor’s blazing blue eyes swept across the group and landed on Kara, and her grin widened even further.

“There you are!” she said, as if she’d been looking under every rock on the continent.

She strode across the crater toward them with her boots crunching through the snow and lightning crackling off her shoulders with every step, and the Enforcers scrambled out of her way.

Maya, still standing in front of Aki, raised her fists, then looked up and up at the seven-foot woman bearing down on her and slowly lowered them again.

Thor stopped right in front of Kara, bent down until her blazing blue eyes were level with Kara’s purple ones and dropped her booming voice into what she clearly believed was a whisper.

“I’m borrowing Silas…” she murmured, and winked.

It was barely a breath under the howl of the wind, and Aki and Lara, standing a few paces back, caught nothing but the wink… but Da Silva was standing right at Kara’s shoulder, with ears that had spent thirty years learning to pick out a single snapped twig in a jungle at night and her head turned sharply.

’…Silas?’

“Thor, what are you…” Kara started, her eyes narrowing. “No… Absolutely not. Whatever this is, I’m busy, I’ve got a whole convoy here and a deed to…”

Thor ignored every word of it, reached down, scooped Kara up off her feet and tossed her over one broad shoulder like a sack of flour.

“HEY! Put me down, you overgrown thundercloud!” Kara yelled, hanging upside down with her cloak flopped over her face and her one arm swatting uselessly at Thor’s back. “This is kidnapping! Valeria, She’s kidnapping me in broad daylight, you’re the High Marshal, do something!”

“HEY!” Lara roared, her jade eyes blazing as she lunged forward. “Put that down this instant! That’s mine!”

Thor threw her head back and laughed so loud the snow shook loose from the nearest crystals.

“GWAHAHAHAHA! Sorry, sorry!” she bellowed cheerfully, giving Kara’s leg a friendly pat like a hunter showing off a prize. “It’s an emergency! I’ll bring her back in one piece… mostly!”

“MOSTLY?!” Kara howled from somewhere under her cloak. “What do you mean mostly?! Thor! THOR!”

GWAHAHAHA!

Then Thor bent her knees and jumped.

BOOOM!

She shot straight up into the sky like a lightning bolt in reverse, leaving a smoking crater in the snow where she’d been standing, with Kara still kicking and shouting over her shoulder and her black cloak flapping wildly, and her laughter came booming back down through the clouds long after the two of them had shrunk to a tiny dot against the grey, and then they were gone altogether.

WHOOSH!

The valley was silent as the snow drifted slowly back down over the crater.

The Enforcers stood frozen with their weapons half-raised, Maya stood with her mouth hanging open, Leona stared up at the empty sky and slowly let her hands fall, and Lara stood at the edge of the crater with her staff still blazing and her teeth bared, absolutely furious.

Aki let out a small, defeated sigh and put her face in her gloved hands.

“…Of course,” she mumbled. “Of course she did. We were finally having a nice moment, too…”

Valeria Da Silva stood in the snow with her saber still drawn, staring up at the hole in the clouds where Lord Vespera had vanished, while that whisper kept replaying itself in her head.

’I’m borrowing Silas…’

’Silas,’ she thought slowly. ’That’s a man’s name… and she said it right to Kara’s face, quietly, like a secret only the two of them were supposed to know.’

Valeria thought about the plain black men’s shirt that Lara wore and kept sniffing, the one she said smelled like the real her, and about Lara calling Lord Vespera “handsome” over and over without ever once explaining why.

She thought about the way Lara looked at Kara, as if she could see straight through the suit and the cloak and the long black hair to something else underneath.

Da Silva’s eyes went very wide.

’Is it possible…’ she thought, ’…that Kara is a man in disguise…?’