The fall through the high-sky cloud ceiling was an assault of pure friction. At end-post speed, the sub-zero gale screamed against Arthur’s flight goggles, freezing the water drops on the sight lenses into delicate, spreading spiderwebs of frost. Beneath him, the grey clouds parted like shredded fleece under a butcher’s knife. It showed the sheer, fiery mass of the Sovereign Splicer Citadel falling upward to meet them.
Arthur kept his limbs tucked in a tight delta stance, checking the HUD readouts reflected on the lower edge of his visor. The altimeter was unwinding with terrifying speed: six thousand meters, fifty-four hundred, forty-eight hundred. His descent harness shook with the violent buffeting of crosswinds that whipped off the jagged dark rock castle walls below. At his throat, the cryo-heat-powered shunt hissed periodically, dumping waste neural heat from his multi-thread connection into the freezing slipstream to keep his skull heat from spiking into fever.
Beside him, Grimm plummeted through the empty air like a black iron metal bar. The hound didn’t scramble or thrash. His heavy muscular frame was locked in a wind-cutting dive. His single ear was pressed flat against his skull. Through the neural link, Arthur could feel the rhythmic, steady pulse of Grimm’s cardiovascular system, fully empty of fear. Grimm’s bone marrow, heavy with a jet-black bone honeycomb lattice, was already drawing surrounding gravity force inward, increasing his body thickness to resist the high-sky rough churning. Grimm turned his amber eyes toward Arthur for a split second, his tail…
