He nodded again.

She lowered her head, angled her body, and tried to use the wind resistance to create some slight motion forward, rather than entirely downward. The ground rushed up to meet them.

They passed through the ring of skyrises, plummeting past the roofs, windows, balconies. Given the hour, she doubted anyone saw their descent.

She reached out with the Force, channeled power into a wide column beneath them. She conceptualized the power as somewhat similar to what she would use when augmenting a leap, except that instead of a sudden rush of power to drive her upward, she instead used the power in a gentler, passive fashion. She imagined it as a balloon, soft and yielding at first, but providing ever-increasing resistance as they fell farther into it.

They slowed and Zeerid shifted in her grasp. Perhaps he did not believe it.

Pressure built behind Aryn’s eyes, an ache formed in her head.

The balloon of her power slowed them further. She could see benches in the plaza, a fountain. She could distinguish individual windows in the skyrises around them. They were five hundred meters up and still falling fast.

The pressure in her brain intensified. Her vision blurred. The ache in her head became a knife stab of pain. She screamed but held on, held on.

Four hundred meters. Three hundred.

They slowed still more and Aryn feared she could not bear any more.

Two hundred.

A second stretched into an eternity of pain and pressure. She thought she must burst.

“Hang on, Aryn!” Zeerid said, his voice muffled by the mask. He was rigid in her arms.

Fifty meters.

They were still going too fast.

Twenty, ten.

She dug deep, pulled out what power she could, and expended it in a final shout, an expulsion of power that entirely arrested their descent for a moment. They hung in the air for a fraction of a second, suspended only by the invisible power of the Force and Aryn’s ability to use it.

And then they were falling free.

She released Zeerid and they both hit the duracrete feetfirst, the shock of impact sending jolts of pain up Aryn’s ankles and calves. She rode the momentum of the fall into a roll that knocked the wind from her and tore a divot of skin from her scalp.

But she was alive.

She lifted herself to all fours, every muscle screaming, legs quivering, blood dripping from her scalp. She tore off her mask.

“Zeerid!”

“I’m all right,” he answered, his voice as raw as old leather. “I can’t believe it, but I am all right.”

She sagged back to the duracrete, rolled over onto her back, and stared up at dawn’s light spreading across the sky. The long thin clouds, painted with the light of daybreak, looked like veins of gold. She simply lay there, exhausted.