AT FIRST, MARCELLUS SAW NOTHING except endless gray clouds. But the sound was getting louder. It rattled the air around them. It shook the ground beneath their feet. It plunged his heart into a frenzied panic.
Combatteurs.
They had found him. His grandfather had tracked the ship, tracked the escape pod, and now he was going to end it all in a rain of fiery, scorching explosifs from the sky.
And they were an easy target. Sitting in wide-open terrain with their blue parachute flapping in the wind like a homing beacon.
Marcellus turned to Alouette and then to Cerise. The fear in both their eyes told him they’d heard it too. They all looked to the sky with puzzled and terrified expressions. But still, there was nothing. Where was that sound coming from? No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t pinpoint its origins. But there was one thing for certain: It was getting closer.
“What is it?” Alouette asked.
Marcellus shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Should we move?” Cerise asked, her eyes darting anxiously to Gabriel. Marcellus knew what she was thinking. How would they possibly move him without injuring him more?
“Where would we go?” Marcellus asked. “If it’s a craft, it’ll move faster than we could ever travel by foot. And if it’s already spotted us, then there’s no hope.”
“But if it’s a craft,” Alouette said, craning her neck, “why can’t we see it? Is it concealed by the clouds?”
“I don’t know,” Marcellus said again, this time with a shudder.
A second later, the air around them started to whip and thrash, battering against Marcellus’s ears until he couldn’t decipher the sound from the mysterious rumble of what he knew to be engines. Their chute flapped violently, locked in place only by the tethers that were still secured to the abandoned pod.
It’s landing, Marcellus thought, desperately scanning the horizon.
And then he saw it. The faintest shadow on the ground. Something blocking the afternoon light from the three Sols hidden behind the clouds.
“How is it … ,” Alouette began to ask, but her question drifted into the wind when suddenly, as if carved right into the air, a door emerged and hissed open.
Cerise gasped. Alouette sucked in a sharp breath. Gabriel let out another groan. And Marcellus could only stare. Speechlessly. Incredulously. Breathlessly.
A figure stepped out of the invisible ship, dressed in strange clothing flecked with white and gray that was almost camouflage against the backdrop of the Terrain Perdu.
Without warning, Marcellus’s heart swelled to the size of a Sol. His skin prickled. His legs felt like they might surrender beneath him and bring him thudding helplessly to the ground.
And strangely, his eyes were the last to recognize her.
He let out a breath so shocked and sudden, he wondered for a moment if it might be his last.
Then, somehow, through the battering wind and the roaring engine and the kilomètres and kilomètres of lost land that surrounded them, Marcellus managed to find his voice.
“Chatine?”