The Esca Volenti, coming in slowly and pitching back, with its wings beating furiously against its descent, almost managed to hover. It was a sharp divide between almost and actually, however, and she had to throw the control stick every which way to stop overshooting the deck and ending up in the sea. The blast of her wings buffeted every loose thing on deck before her, scattering papers and hats and baskets and anything else light over the side. Then the spring-loaded legs she had now deployed were scraping the Ruinous’s wooden deck and she finally stilled the wings, letting the clockwork grind to a halt, as the Esca made its ponderous settling.

Taki unbuckled and hopped over the side of the cockpit, her wings fluttering a moment as she undertook the drop to the deck. A slight little thing, even for a Fly-kinden; her kind always made the best pilots, because of better reflexes and less weight to drag at their machines, though few of them ever wanted to engage in such a dangerous profession.

There was a big Soldier Beetle approaching who must have been master of the ship. ‘You, boy,’ he was shouting, ‘you took your sweet time!’

Boy, is it? Well, in her overalls and still wearing her helmet and goggles, why not? She hinged up the smoked glass, squinting under the sudden glare, and then pushed the goggles themselves up over her forehead.

‘I came as soon as I saw the flare, Sieur. What losses?’

‘Four crew dead,’ he grunted. He was rather old for this line of work, cropped hair just a greying speckle against his sandstone-coloured skin, and she reflected how it was odd that older ship’s captains always drifted into the slave trade. ‘Two others wounded as won’t work their way to Solarno now,’ he added.