A laugh, harsh and brittle, escaped Zadie's lips as she slammed her knife onto the whetstone. "You survive one fucking trial and now your ego is taller than the heaven's, Finch?"
Ira turned from the chart, his expression unchanging. "You claim my ego rivals the heavens. But I beg to differ. My ego has not changed. My pride, and my trust in what I am, is what has grown. If that is so hard for you to grasp, then I fear for your intelligence."
The air in the cabin thickened, charged with the aftershocks of the chapel and this new, chilling arrogance. Through the rain-streaked viewport, a surreal sight glided into view: a flock of pure white birds, moving with a languid, dreamlike grace, utterly oblivious to the seething vortex of the rift storm they drifted toward.
Rust's voice, stripped of all bravado and laced with raw, metallic worry, cut through the stalemate. "Hate to break up your lovers' spat," he said, pointing a trembling finger at the main tactical screen. It flickered to life, showing a 360-degree grainy view. "But I don't think the storm is giving us much of a choice."
The screen painted a picture of madness. It wasn't a single storm, but a splicing of many. To starboard, a blizzard of crystalline hail fell in perfect, silent diagonals. To port, the air shimmered with a dry, oppressive heat-haze. Directly ahead, where the birds flew, a column of viridian lightning struck upward from the sea into a bruise-purple cloud, holding its connection in a continuous, sizzling arc. The ocean was a patchwork quilt of impossible states—a glassy calm beside roiling six-foot swells, a circle of boiling water adjacent to a patch of thin, forming ice.
A Rift Storm. The world's fabric, fraying in the weeks before a Swap.
"We can't go around," Rust said, the captain in him analyzing the data despite the terror. "Energy field's too wide. Can't go over—thermal shear at that altitude would peel the envelope off like an orange skin." He looked at Ira, a challenge and a plea in his bloodshot eyes. "The Greywater's got the maneuverability of a drunk brick in a bath. You still think you see a current in that?"
Ira's gaze hadn't left the screen. The cold commander was gone, replaced by something else—a fierce, total focus. The map on his back wasn't glowing, but he stood straighter, as if its weight was aligning him with the chaos outside.
"I don't think," Ira said, his voice dropping to a murmur meant only for the storm. "I see." He tapped his chest, a gesture that was no longer just reference, but invocation. "It's a probability thread. A seam of consistency in the contradiction."
He turned from the screen, his eyes finding Zadie's, then Rust's. The wall of his certainty was still there, but he was offering them a door through it—a terrible, desperate door.
"Zadie. Engine dampeners. The lift-core will try to oscillate with the rift frequencies. You have to keep it in phase, manually. If it resonates, we shake apart mid-air."
She held his stare, the knife forgotten. This was no longer about trusting the man. It was about betting on the tool, and the terrifying skill of the hand that wielded it.
"And me?" Rust asked, his hands tightening on the helm.
"You know this ship's heart," Ira said, moving to stand behind him, placing a hand on the back of the captain's chair. His voice was calm, unnervingly so. "You take the wheel. I'll call the headings. They won't make sense. They'll feel like suicide. You cannot hesitate."
Rust swallowed, a muscle jumping in his jaw. He gave a single, sharp nod. The ghost of the puppet was shoved down, and the old captain, weathered and afraid but unbroken, surfaced. "Aye."
Zadie stood, sheathing her blade with a definitive click. The personal war was adjourned. A greater enemy was at the gates. "This is suicide," she stated, but it was a confirmation, not a refusal. She was already moving toward the shrieking ladder that led to the engine room.
"It's the only door that's opened," Ira said, his voice almost lost in the rising shriek of wind against the hull.
He leaned forward, his eyes fixed on the viewport, on the serene, impossible birds vanishing into a curtain of falling copper coins. The Greywater's engines groaned in protest as Rust pushed the throttle forward. The ship nosed away from the fragile pocket of calm and plunged toward the roaring, splicing madness.
Ira took a deep breath, let the map's silent, four-dimensional data stream into his perception, and spoke the first impossible command.
"Hard to port. Thirty degrees. Now."
Rust didn't question it. He spun the wheel. The world outside the viewport twisted violently, a kaleidoscope of hail and lightning and boiling sea stitching itself into a new, monstrous pattern.
The flight through the Rift Storm had begun.