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skonen_bladesJust a few inches off of the wing of the plane up, up, up on a child’s breath of icy wind. I’m keeping pace with the passenger airliner. My hair and cloak are whipping in the wind. I’m an airborne mirage come to give the Gift to these 812 souls. I can’t breathe up here but I don’t need to. A child wakes up and looks out of the windows and down the wing into the pitch black night time sky. His forehead crinkles. With every flash of the warning lights, he can see me hovering just off the edge of the wingtip, standing where it’s impossible to stand, looking back at him. He looks out the other window to see my sister standing near the far edge of the other wing. He can’t see my brother up by the tail section. He can’t see my other brother standing up on top of the plane near the front above the pilot’s windows like God’s own hood ornament carving into the wind.
The child looks back at me with a smile on his face, trusting round face framed in his little antiseptic pressurized lozenge of brightly lit safety glass. God bless the children. I feel less horror about killing them. They enjoy the hell out of life right up until the end. They don’t waste the last few minutes they have waiting for explanations or wallowing in fear. They just don’t know how. I put my finger to my lips and close one eye and wait for the flash of the plane’s wingtip warning light to give the boy a strobe light wink.
I hear the signal to begin.
I take a deep breath.
It begins.
My brother on the top of the plane turns his hands into metal spikes and punches them down through the roof on the plane and through the skulls of the captain and the co-pilot. The pressure doors come down and the windows shatter in the cockpit, shredding the already dead pilots. There’s not even a tremor. The rest of the plane hears and feels nothing. The cabin crew will notice that they can’t get into the cockpit in about five minutes. They’ll quietly panic but won’t alert the passengers for a while yet. An emergency signal is broadcast out to the airport ahead of them. The plane’s altitude will remain constant for the next eight hours.
Or rather, it would have.
My brother near the back focuses his narrow eyes out into the night. Red beams shine out from his pupils. He jerks his head in three precise arcs and the three fins at the rear of the plane leap off playfully into the jetstream. Now the plane jumps like a startled animal.
The child looks at me quizzically and cocks his head like a dog. All the adults grab their armrests in white-knuckle monkey fear.
I slowly glide forward. I drift up and over until I’m in front of one of the pair of gigantic turbines on my side of the plane. The sound of the engine swallows everything, even the storm around us. I stare into it. At the same time as I turn off my tracking and stop following the plane, I turn into fire and caress the engine as it rotates through me at 900 miles and hour. I angle back in flames and do the same to the other engine on the wing I’ve been assigned.
The plane veers right until my sister on the other side shoots out electricity from her fingertips and shorts the other engines out.
The four of us leap up as the plane dips, nosedives and finally starts to spiral down towards the dark ocean and the waiting mouths.
We hang there in the air.
We avoid each other’s eyes.
We were on planes too. It’s how we ended up in the Tonsil and how we were gifted. But the other passengers on our flights were killed in the trials. The tests don’t have a high survival rate. They need more of us.
We are Bermuda’s children.
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The child looks back at me with a smile on his face, trusting round face framed in his little antiseptic pressurized lozenge of brightly lit safety glass. God bless the children. I feel less horror about killing them. They enjoy the hell out of life right up until the end. They don’t waste the last few minutes they have waiting for explanations or wallowing in fear. They just don’t know how. I put my finger to my lips and close one eye and wait for the flash of the plane’s wingtip warning light to give the boy a strobe light wink.
I hear the signal to begin.
I take a deep breath.
It begins.
My brother on the top of the plane turns his hands into metal spikes and punches them down through the roof on the plane and through the skulls of the captain and the co-pilot. The pressure doors come down and the windows shatter in the cockpit, shredding the already dead pilots. There’s not even a tremor. The rest of the plane hears and feels nothing. The cabin crew will notice that they can’t get into the cockpit in about five minutes. They’ll quietly panic but won’t alert the passengers for a while yet. An emergency signal is broadcast out to the airport ahead of them. The plane’s altitude will remain constant for the next eight hours.
Or rather, it would have.
My brother near the back focuses his narrow eyes out into the night. Red beams shine out from his pupils. He jerks his head in three precise arcs and the three fins at the rear of the plane leap off playfully into the jetstream. Now the plane jumps like a startled animal.
The child looks at me quizzically and cocks his head like a dog. All the adults grab their armrests in white-knuckle monkey fear.
I slowly glide forward. I drift up and over until I’m in front of one of the pair of gigantic turbines on my side of the plane. The sound of the engine swallows everything, even the storm around us. I stare into it. At the same time as I turn off my tracking and stop following the plane, I turn into fire and caress the engine as it rotates through me at 900 miles and hour. I angle back in flames and do the same to the other engine on the wing I’ve been assigned.
The plane veers right until my sister on the other side shoots out electricity from her fingertips and shorts the other engines out.
The four of us leap up as the plane dips, nosedives and finally starts to spiral down towards the dark ocean and the waiting mouths.
We hang there in the air.
We avoid each other’s eyes.
We were on planes too. It’s how we ended up in the Tonsil and how we were gifted. But the other passengers on our flights were killed in the trials. The tests don’t have a high survival rate. They need more of us.
We are Bermuda’s children.
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