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speak with him, he wasn’t going to believe them.
    Missy had been following Lenis’s thoughts, of course, so there was no need to talk things out. They had no choice. They would have to stay with the Hiryû and hope things didn’t go too disastrously wrong. Maybe the captain wouldn’t agree to Assen Chi’s treacherous plan. Missy squeezed Lenis’s hands and he realised he’d been holding onto her all this time. He let his hands drop as Missy stepped forward and hugged him.
    â€˜It’ll be all right, little brother,’ she whispered into his ear. ‘Whatever happens, we’ll still be together.’
    Lenis nodded into her shoulder and then pulled away. ‘I guess we’d better go and get some sleep. Looks like we’re going to have an even bigger day tomorrow than we’d thought.’
    The twins crept to the rear hatch and headed below decks as silently as they could, not wanting to draw the attention of the conspirators on the bridge. At the base of the stairs they parted ways, Lenis moving into the engine room and Missy to the crew quarters. On the flight over she’d been forced to sleep in the galley, but once the Puritan crew had left Missy had claimed one of the smaller cabins, hoping the new crew wouldn’t realise. Lenis had decided to keep his bunk in the engine room. It meant he was closer to his Bestia.
    They were still curled up in their hutch, as though nothingworld-shattering had just happened above decks. Aeris had left Lenis’s bunk and joined them, burrowing amongst the others to share their warmth. Lenis sensed contentment rising off them in calming waves. He wrapped the feeling around himself like a familiar blanket, allowing their gentle, sleepy happiness to dull the edges of his own panic. Things were definitely different here. He was different here. If Lenis had just overheard a Puritan captain plotting the theft of an airship, he would have felt the same thrill Missy was feeling, the same surge of adrenaline that came with pulling a new stunt. But they weren’t in Pure Land anymore. There was no Slavers Council here to mete out the usual, predictable punishments. Anything could happen, and in Lenis’s experience, anything normally turned out to be bad.
    Perhaps it was more than just the unfamiliar surroundings that were affecting Lenis so much. He reluctantly pulled his awareness away from the Bestia and sent it out of the airship, off to the west. The Wastelands that bordered Shinzô throbbed with an indistinct yet palpable menace. Lenis had heard many tales of the Wastelands from airship crews he’d flown with, those who had been across the contaminated seas, but he had never seen them for himself, never been this close. Pure Land was free from the Wasteland taint, but the rest of the world was infected by it. Itsû was built right next to it. In fact, until Puritan airships had opened up sky trade with Shinzô a few decades ago, the entire country had been sealed off by the Wastelands that ran along the country’swestern border and the Demon-ravaged seas along its coast. For three hundred years Shinzô had been isolated, standing alone against the Demon threat.
    Lenis shivered and brought his awareness back into the engine room. He forced his heartbeat to slow before he reached out to the Bestia again, not wanting to disturb their sleep with his tumultuous emotions. On impulse, he bent down and picked Aeris up out of the sleeping pile. She was an avian Bestia, able to control air pressure and currents, and was the main source of power for the Hiryû ’s engines. She had also been with Lenis the longest, ever since he’d found her on the shores of Blue Lake behind the first slave encampment he and his sister had been sent to. If it weren’t for her, the slavers never would have found out that Lenis and Missy were gifted, never would have assigned them to airship work. They would have been stuck in