Excerpt

Xander's arm was outstretched toward a winged stranger as he plummeted toward the ground. His own left wing hung limp and burned as red bolts of molten lightning rained on the landscape below like hammers of God.

The arcos were crashing down to ruin, one after another, adding a terrible grinding crash to the chaos of the red afternoon. They ruptured as they collapsed, and hundreds of bodies fell out, people screaming as they plummeted toward the ground.

Xander awoke in a pool of sweat, the sunlight touching his lithe form through the thick plas, warming his face. Everything was quiet and calm, and the arco was still standing.

He glared at the sunlight; it seemed strange. Dimmer? He remembered the trick blathering on the night before. Something about sunspots. Xander hadn't really been listening.

He stood and stumbled over to the wash stall, slipping himself inside the small cubicle with some effort. He tapped his cirq. "Bathe." The warm ionic spray blew over him, covering his shoulders, his chest, his wings. Xander stepped out a moment later and slipped into his riding armor, a black plas-faced jumpsuit that covered his arms, chest, and legs, protecting him from Oberon's harsh daytime glare and the knacks and wereverens who loved to bite the unprotected for a quick blood snack. He slipped fingerless black leather gloves onto each hand.

"Breakfast," he mumbled, and a moment later a tray slipped out from behind a small hatch in his eating nook. The smell of cafflite and eggs filled the room. He downed the meal hungrily, his nerves tingling from the stim he'd taken the night before, a mix of pith and uppers.

Xander wasn't even sure it was pith. That shit was harder to come by than an Oberon City virgin these days.

Shoving the dishes into the recycler, he grabbed the carry sack he'd packed the night before and pressed his palm up against the clear plas of the window, feeling the cold from outside. The storm had largely abated overnight, reduced to tattered clouds with some flooding down in the streets below.

The pattern recognition system matched his palm print, verifying his identity. Twin doors slid aside in the floor, and his hoverbike, a sleek, black machine all darkness and sexy lines, slid up into view. The doors sealed shut below it.

Xander slipped into his riding chaps, pulling his custom-made jacket around his wings and fastening it to keep out the cold, leaving his wings free. There were few enough skythane, or wing men, here in the city, and it was hard to find clothing made for someone like him.

In public, many people threw him dirty looks because of his wings. Wing men were a breed apart from "normal" humans. The skythane—first-wave colonists like him—were often called barbarians by the landers, the second-wave human colonists whose bodies more closely matched the galactic norm. Jealous bastards.

The company had tried to eradicate his people, once upon a time, and even now it wasn't so uncommon for people to spit on him and call him a native bastard. Xander ignored them; he had grown a thick skin in his adolescence, after his adoptive parents had died and he'd been forced to live out on the streets. Before Alix.

He pulled on his black riding gloves. "Ravi, open the doors."

"Acknowledged."

The plas window directly in front of the cycle split apart, a straight hairline crack that spread from the base of the window up to six feet off the floor. Clear doors formed in the plas, and then they opened outward, letting in the chill. The storm had passed.

Xander climbed onto the bike and palmed the power key. The machine roared to life underneath him. He powered up the bike's amalite drive and released the brake, soaring out of the arco into the open air. The wind whistled past him, and he spread his wings to slow his velocity, thrilling in the drag as the cool air flowed past. The breeze buffeted him as the bike descended toward the personal air transportation level a hundred meters above the ground, and he felt free for just a moment.

The whole of Oberon City was spread out before him. The streets far below were still glistening from the rain. Xander breathed in deeply, smelling the scent of the Outland forests, pulling the moisture-laden air deep into his lungs. He loved being outside after the rain. For a few hours, the air was fresh and clean, without the usual nasty, metallic tang of the city.

For all that he'd grown up here, sometimes he still felt like he didn't belong. He loved instead the wide open spaces of the Outland, beyond the city confines.

The ground below sped toward him, a landscape dotted with factories and feeder tubes and causeways thick with traffic. Heavy supply tractors lumbered up to the base of the tower, laden with foodstuffs from the farms at the edge of the city or amalite ores from the Split.

Behind him was the row of two-mile-high arcos, anchored to each other by massive, silvery blue metallic trusses a hundred feet across. The arcos ran in an ordered row along the waterfront.

Beyond them were factories and warehouses where those prized ores of Oberon were refined and prepared for out-system shipment, and past that, the criminal warrens of the Slander began, a never-ending maze of haphazardly constructed warehouses, shantytowns, and Syndicate strongholds like a creeping blight, home to hustlers of all kinds, Dark Market dealers, and anyone who didn't want to be found by the law, such as it was. His home in a previous life.

In the distance, the Governor's residence sat in a massive park-like district off to the east. The upper class of Oberon City had country homes out in the hills beyond the city, including the man who was, in title at least, in charge. Everyone knew OberCorp really ran things here.

Everything below him grew rapidly larger, then skewed out around him as the bike leveled off. Now other structures rose up on either side of his bike, from industrial plants to commercial buildings splashed with the logos of some of Oberon's own companies, as well as several multi-world conglomerates.

Xander was over the Midcity now, following an invisible rail as the grid assigned him a flight path. He folded his wings behind him.

This zone was reserved for individual traffic. Delivery trucks and trains used the crowded streets below, which were finally beginning to dry out from the storm.

Xander's destination was the spaceport on the northern edge of the city, where he'd meet the incoming shuttle from Titan Station. He veered onto a northbound connector, his guidance system selecting the least busy path.

Soon he was merging onto one of the main air causeways, riding out of the central city on a path that would take him out to High Slopes. He pulled his wings in tightly and gunned the engine, determined to move forward.