For the first three hundred feet, Pei Jing fell straight down. The wind hammered his chest and tore at the weave of his robe. Through breaks in the cloud he saw red lines on the land far below. Then they disappeared again.
He drew his arms close and held the tablet’s weight close to his spine with his core. The fall stopped turning him sideways. He waited until he could feel the stronger wind that blew toward the west.
Pei Jing spread his arms. The cords at his wrists went tight. The gliding cloak opened behind his shoulders with a crack like a sail catching wind. Its eighteen bamboo ribs bent until he thought one might go, then held.
The pull drove through his shoulders. He passed it down into the core and felt the strain spread along his back. The heavy fall eased into a glide. He let a little more of his weight rest against his gravity field. The linen stopped straining at its edges, and the wing carried him west.
Behind him, the Cloud-Piercer fired into the links of Chain Seventy-Two. Blue flashes came through the cloud. By the time the ship’s searchlights swept down, Pei Jing was two miles away and below the brightest part of the beams.
