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ÉMILE WINGED NORTHEAST at full throttle. He was probably still twelve kilometers from Marthe, and even once he got close, he’d still need to find her in the air column. He didn’t hear anything from Pascal behind him. The radio crackled ominously ahead, synchronized with brilliant flashes smothered behind layers of ocher cloud.

He was already at forty-sixth rang, but picked up airspeed by angling into a long descent. Gravity sped him, moving him to a slower layer of winds. Fat drops pelted him, knocking loudly on the crown of his helmet and shrinking visibility to a few hundred meters. Chaotic gusts became violent and a crack of lightning lit the world bright yellow. Deep, bone-vibrating sound reached him nearly at the same time as the blinding light. He was wrenched a hundred meters higher and then plunged down two hundred meters, as if the storm wanted to shake him to death. His upper-deck wings would have snapped long ago. Even the stubby coureur wings strained. The coureurs avoided storms.

Smart coureurs, anyway. No one had ever called him smart.

“Marthe!” he called. “Marthe!”

The static in his helmet was dialed painfully loud, but he didn’t hear an answer.

An updraft hit him like a fist, stalling his lift, flipping him onto his back and into a tumble. He fell half a kilometer before he could level out in the punishing turbulence. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in a storm like this. He was a bit scared. This really might be it.

Something clenched his heart too. Not his own end. He was thinking about Chloé. She and Mathurin had vanished in a storm. He’d loved his little sister. She’d been romantic, dreamy, a good mother, a forgiving sister, and too young to die. And she’d only died because Venus had been in a mood that day. Venus didn’t care who her victims were. She couldn’t care who they were.

Les colonistes made of Venus a hungry and capricious goddess, because their minds were wired to find intent in the world. They looked for meaning because they had none. Thérèse dug for meaning with all her heart. And what did he do? Did he really sacrifice at Venus’s altar? He hadn’t sacrificed anything that was his own. He’d lost his sister, his mother and in some ways his girlfriend, but those weren’t his sacrifices. He’d helped drop the Causapscal-des-Vents into the clouds, but he’d not yet given anything that was his.

An updraft grabbed him, throwing him upward so fast that breath left him, and the vibration of his wings straining in their mountings went straight into his bones. Venus threw him high, so high that he met another wind going in another direction that plowed him downward. He climbed into a slower-moving pocket of air and turned east again. After the pounding, the moderate rain gentled. This might be it. Really it. He might go not as a willing sacrifice to Venus, but as just another of her murder victims.

“Marthe! Marthe!” he called.

In the distance of static, he heard a voice talking. Baie-Comeau control on the common channel, so swamped that he couldn’t make out the words.

“Marthe!” he called.

His battery level was starting to worry him, but he kept climbing. He was getting close to her last coordinates. From here, the storm could have thrown her in any direction at any speed, with her emergency balloon and cracked helmet.

Every suit had an emergency beacon, and a weaker one on the balloon, but he couldn’t hear hers. If her balloon had endured so far, she’d be somewhere between fifty-third and fifty-eighth rangs. Big range. And if her balloon had burst, or even just been leaking, she’d be below fiftieth rang. Ambient pressure told him he was at forty-eighth rang, but GPS put him at fifty-second.

Up or down?

“Marthe!”

A very faint ping sounded in the static. His suit had heard it, at the edge of detection. Down.

Émile jack-knifed and dove. The wind rushed past, the rain flying upwards, receding above him, nature running in reverse, time flowing backwards. He was descending into Venus, becoming more primitive. In his heart, he offered himself for Marthe. All of them—Pascal, Jean-Eudes, Alexis and Pa—needed her. He did too. And he was willing to bargain with a goddess for Marthe, no different from any hunter burning animal remains to the gods fifty thousand years ago.

The ping became louder, enough that his helmet began to resolve its location. Forty-seventh rang, about five kilometers east. Below the storm, and twenty kilometers below safety. She’d somehow dropped so low that she’d gone beneath him. She was at the limit of the zone where her emergency balloon could function. And to have gotten there at all, the storm must not have treated her well.

Droplets of hot sulfuric acid spattered the glass of his faceplate, beading off in the wind. The heat sweltered, pressing his suit hard against his skin, not burning yet, but uncomfortable. He hadn’t been this deep in a long time. Then he broke into clearer clouds of smoky brown. There was no more rain, but the light was reddened and scattered, shadowless and coming from all directions. The occasional crash of lightning far above painted lumpy textured shadows onto the clouds.

He passed forty-eighth rang before pulling up, circling to home in on her signal.

“Marthe!”

Her signal was stronger. East four hundred meters. Down eight hundred. The clouds finally broke into the trackless uniformity of the sub-cloud haze. This virga zone was the world without definition, the chaos that existed before clouds, before ground, before stars or even storms.

A shape came into blurry view in the distance. A silver-white balloon, half-inflated. Beneath it, on a short cable, hung a body. The nature of the attachment point of the balloon to the wing-pack made it look like someone had been hanged. The silvery sheet hanging over didn’t help.

“Marthe!”

He circled, bleeding off airspeed before climbing into a stall with almost no forward speed, right beside her. He grabbed the balloon string with both hands and wrapped his legs around her body. His weight caused them to plunge. But she didn’t move.

He furled his wings and activated his emergency balloon. It inflated off the top of his wing-pack, jerking sullenly at him until they stopped descending. Then they hung together in the featureless haze at forty-sixth rang.

He pulled another emergency balloon and hooked it onto Marthe’s wing-pack. He twisted in the end of a hose, and attached the other end to his oxygen tank, and then blew it. After moments, they began rising, slowly and calmly. He opened a strap on his suit and attached himself to Marthe’s wing-pack so they couldn’t be separated. Then, hanging there from his own balloon, he pulled up the protective tarp that had been hiding his sister.

Her sweaty forehead was pressed against a bloody spot on the inside of her cracked helmet. Shallow breaths fogged a tiny patch of the glass and her cheeks were pink. He tried patching into her suit to read some of her vitals, but her processor was offline. The radiator on her wing-pack was blistering hot.

If he thought she could go deeper and that they were close enough, he would have brought her to the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs, but he didn’t trust her suit.

“Baie-Comeau, can you read me?” he said.

No response.

Ostie.

With two and a half emergency balloons, they would rise, slowly, over four or five hours. He didn’t trust either of their suits for that, nor their oxygen supply. They’d gone too deep to depend too much on balloons. They were below the storm, and it might be moving past them if it was contained enough. Towering storms could be quick hits. Or they could become monsters.

He unfolded his wings and checked the engine readings. He had a third of a charge left on his battery and his coolant system was still okay. And what he was about to do went against every piece of advice any smart person would ever give.

He clung tightly to Marthe and looped the cable he was dangling from round a tie-loop on her wing-pack. Then he carefully popped the attachment on his own wing-pack and brought the end to her pack and tied it firmly. His emergency balloon was now her third balloon. He had no more safety margin. If for any reason his wing-pack failed, he was going to meet Venus up close.

Then he let go and throttled up his engine. Without his weight, Marthe rose fast. He circled her, following her up. Every so often, he flew beneath her, grabbing a trailing cable, yanking her eastward. He needed to get them east of the storm, and higher.