Thin Air

Chapter 2

The kitten was gone from her mind the moment she opened her eyes properly.

Seraphina pushed herself up on shaking arms, dark curls falling in a heavy curtain around her face. Grass pressed against her palms and the heels of her hands. The air that filled her lungs was thin and sharp, scented with sun-warmed stone, crushed wild herbs, and something metallic that reminded her of cold coins held too long in the fist. Above her the sky stretched in the wrong colors: a deep, bruised violet streaked with moving gold, clouds drifting too fast, light that did not belong to any evening she had ever known.

She was not in the park.

The thought arrived slowly, like a stone dropped into deep water. She turned her head. Sheer cliffs rose in the middle distance, pale stone streaked with darker veins, their tops lost in drifting bands of mist. Strange trees with silver-edged leaves leaned over a narrow stream that ran clear as glass over smooth black rock. The ground beneath her was uneven. Soft with thick moss in some places, bare and warm with stored heat in others. Everything looked too vivid, too sharply drawn, as if the world had been rendered with a finer pen than the one used for the city she had left behind only minutes ago.

It looked like something out of a novel. The kind she used to hide inside textbooks during long lectures, the ones with painted covers and impossible landscapes where the rules of physics were suggestions rather than laws. Only there was no comfort in the resemblance. Novels ended when you closed the book. This did not feel like it would end.

A shadow passed over her.

Seraphina’s head snapped up so fast her neck protested. High above, dark shapes cut through the strange sky on broad wings. Not birds. The proportions were wrong, too large, too deliberate in the way they banked and corrected. She tracked one as it turned, catching the light along the edge of a wing that looked almost leathery near the body before flaring into true, layered feathers.

Another followed. Then a third. They moved with the easy confidence of creatures that had never doubted the air would hold them. Her heart began to beat in her throat.

She scrambled to her feet. One heel was missing; the other sank into soft earth and nearly turned her ankle. Her pencil skirt restricted her stride. She yanked the fabric higher without thinking and staggered toward the nearest rise of rock, silk blouse sticking to the damp skin between her shoulder blades.

Figures moved in the distance. Upright, humanoid, but wrong in ways her mind refused to organize into anything safe. Some walked along the narrow cliff paths with an easy balance that made no sense on such steep ground. Others stood in small groups, and every few moments one of them would open a pair of wings and rise into the air as easily as a person stepping onto a stair.

Hide. She needed to hide.

Seraphina half-ran, half-limped toward a cluster of large stones near a stream, her breath coming short and sharp. The open-backed clothing she had glimpsed on the distant figures flashed through her mind in broken pieces. Dark fabric cut away to leave spines bare, the constant, casual presence of wings. None of it made sense. None of it could be real. She pressed herself into the narrow space between two boulders, the ivory silk of her blouse catching on rough stone, and tried to force her breathing into something quieter than the panic clawing up her chest.

It didn't matter.

A soft rush of air lifted the curls at the back of her neck. Something landed lightly behind her, the sound almost delicate against the earth.

Seraphina turned.

The creature stood only a few paces away. It was shaped like a man. Tall, lean, dark-haired, but the resemblance ended there. Glossy black wings rose from its back, the feathers so dark they seemed to swallow the strange light. Its eyes were too round, too bright, the pupils sharp and intent. When it tilted its head the motion was quick and avian, assessing her the way a bird might assess something that had fallen from a nest. A short open vest of dark leather left most of its chest bare. The skin there was marked with thin, inked lines that looked almost like the barbs of feathers.

A crow, her mind supplied uselessly. A crow that walked on two legs and wore clothing and looked at her with open, intelligent curiosity.

She had no idea what it was.

The scream tore out of her before she could stop it. High, raw, and entirely human. It startled even her.

The crow hybrid’s wings flared wide in surprise, black feathers snapping against the air. In the same instant answering calls rose from the cliffs and the open sky, sharp and overlapping. More dark shapes dropped from above, landing in a loose, tightening circle around the stones. Wings of black and charcoal folded and opened. Feet that were almost human but not quite found purchase on rock and moss. Voices layered over one another, quick and clipped, speaking a language she almost understood and then, clearly, words she did.

“Human.”

“A human. Here.”

“Alive and still breathing.”

Seraphina’s back hit the boulder hard enough to knock the remaining air from her lungs. Her hands were shaking so badly she curled them into fists against the stone. She tried to speak, to demand an explanation, to tell them this was a mistake, to say anything that might restore the rules of the world she knew and only managed another broken sound.

One of the crow hybrids stepped closer, head tipping, dark eyes fixed on her face with bright, almost delighted curiosity. Another spoke over its shoulder to the growing group, voice low and practical.

“She fell through. Look at the clothes. Look at the scent on her. Fresh.”

“Council will want her.”

“Now. Before the eagles catch the wind of it.”

“Human,” someone repeated, almost wondering. “When was the last time a human breached the barrier?”

“Doesn’t matter. Protocol is protocol.”

Seraphina squeezed her eyes shut. The world had become a press of feathers and strange voices and the dry, dusty scent of birds that were not birds. Hands, too warm, too strong, the fingers slightly longer than they should have been, closed around her upper arms. She twisted once, uselessly. The grip only adjusted, firm but not yet cruel.

Someone made a short, irritated sound at her resistance and then she was lifted as if she weighed nothing at all.

Wind roared past her ears a second later. Her stomach dropped so hard she tasted metal again. She kept her eyes closed so tightly that colors bloomed behind her lids in sick bursts of gold and black, and still she felt the powerful, rhythmic beat of wings on either side of her, the shift of cold air, the sickening knowledge that the ground was falling away beneath her dangling feet.

They were taking her somewhere. The word council echoed in her head, stripped of ordinary meaning and heavy with something colder. She did not open her eyes. She did not want to see the sky that was the wrong color, or the creatures that spoke of her like an object that had broken a rule, or the impossible distance opening under her. She only clung to the dark behind her eyelids and the desperate, private hope that when she opened them again the park would be waiting. The ordinary trees, the ordinary path, the ordinary life she had been so sure of only an hour ago.

The wind kept cutting past her face. The arms that held her did not loosen. And far below, the wild land continued as if a human woman falling out of the sky was only a small, correctable interruption.