“I’m trusting your eyes for this Ava! You’ll see them long before I will,” I called back over the roar of the engine. This plane certainly had more kick than the beat up hunk of junk my mom let me fly a few times. I was soon going speeds I wasn’t sure that one could reach.

“I got this!” Ava yelled back.

As we moved around the storm, I again realized just how much it had grown over the last few hours. The little cloud we’d launched the stormbringers into had become a monster that stretched into the sky. The rain pelting the glass of the cabin made it all the more serious as rain was taught about in history. No one had seen it in our time.

I had to let off the throttle even though I knew the plane could handle it. If we went any faster, we might completely pass the enemy. The gauge clocked us going close to three hundred kilometers an hour. Part of me wanted to test just how far this plane could take us.

“I see them! Ten o’clock!” Ava’s voice brought me out of my thoughts and I looked in the direction. A crawler roughly the same as the Fortitude was altering its course to run parallel with the Vortex. Crawlers took a long time to turn and it probably had another ten or fifteen minutes until it finished.

There were three enemy craft in the air around the crawler. Just from their flight patterns I could tell they were tense. Not that I blame them, not only was an enemy somewhere nearby, but the Vortex was bumping more water into the desert than this area might have seen in the last three or for centuries combined.

I banked to stay on the edge of the Vortex hoping the clouds would cover us, but my plan barely lasted thirty seconds. The smallest of the planes, a single engine fighter that looked like it had been to hell and back a few times, broke off and started to head for us. It would only be a few seconds before they reached us.

“Incoming!” I shouted though I knew Ava was able to see that for herself.

“What me to take them out?” Ava asked though her voice told me what she really felt.

Throwing a quick glance back at her, I really didn’t think she should fire the weapon again. She had turned a cooked tan from the few times we had already fired it. I glanced around the consul and found the forward gun control. “I got this one!”

Pulling the joystick back, I arced us into the air. The enemy followed. As we basically skipped off the side of the Vortex, I saw glimpses of the island again but shook my head to force myself to focus. When we reached the top of the cloud wall, I jerked us around. My teeth rattling from the force of the maneuver.

The enemy plane opened fire as we started to fall towards them. I felt the plane shudder from a few of the hits but nothing happened. I squeezed my finger and another beam lanced out and sliced the plane into two jagged pieces. With a blast, the plane exploded and cut through the debris.

The other two planes could no longer play defense and began moving towards us. That was when the unexpected happened. An arc of lightning lanced between us causing me to jerk the plane in panic. Another arc had barely missed the enemy. I quickly corrected my course and aimed for the enemy again.

We were just about in range when another arc of lightning flashed again, this time close enough that my hair stood on end. “I think the Vortex is trying to stop the battle!” Ava shouted up to me.

“Funny. I was just thinking the same thing!”

Banking, I pulled off my course and started moving up showing I didn’t intend to dogfight. The enemy didn’t take the hint though and continued to pursue us. Another arc of lightning lanced through the air a third time. It struck the wing of one of the enemy and ripped a chunk of it off from the force of the impact. The plane began to drop, but it still had enough wing remaining to make it back to their crawler if they didn’t make any extreme maneuvers.

I grabbed the radio and flicked through some of the channels. If our crawler had gotten a burst of energy, theirs should have as well. I finally found a channel that wasn’t pure static. “Enemy crawler! This is the Silverwing in the air above you! Respond!”

“Silverwing?” Ava asked. I could almost hear the raised eyebrow in her tone.

“I thought of it on the fly!” I said with a scoff. “We can change it later.”

“Oh. No. You’re going to have to live with this name for the rest of your life.”

A few seconds passed before someone finally replied over the radio. “This is the Hunter! What do you want?!” a woman demanded. She had a heavy accent that made it hard to understand her.

“We have a bit of situation and would like to cease hostilities for the moment. Water isn’t exactly an issue right now.”

The line was silent, before I got a response. “Fine! Tell your Crawler they are to stay at least two kilometers from us, and that we’re not leaving.”

“You got it. Miss?”

“Madam Ki!”

“Madam Ki then.” I killed the line then banked back toward the Vortex. I hugged the wall as we made our