It wasn’t that way for the rest of them. Not for Saint. It was perhaps because he never trusted it. Or because he had learned to program at the same time he had learned to read, and his mind handled these things in a different way.

He handled everything in a different way. He felt more at home with joysticks in each hand, pedals under each foot, and barely a foot between his face and the screen in front of him as he cut through reality and air, zig-zagging through access tunnels and the gaps between sections of the great white edifice. He could feel the systems and the ill-health of his craft in the same way a person who had driven the same car every day of his life might understand a specific shudder of their vehicle.

Not that he’d piloted this angel for long. It simply came naturally, easily, like stepping into a new house and finding it fit you exactly. Everything where it should be. There was no second-guessing, no reaching for a switch and missing.

The static and distortions were because there were so many powers at use in the area. Mischa flipped switches and swiped a gloved finger across a screen to change to another display, tracking the stress levels that Teacher had told them to keep an eye on. Ninety-one percent.

A small number in the corner of the screen showed a ‘98.854%’ in bold red numbers. That was alarming, even looking at it hours later. That was how close they’d come. When they’d been that close, alarms had gone off, orders given out, and entire squadrons of soldiers on the front line stood down, letting themselves be shot, swept up by powers, defeated.

That was the ‘high score’, so to speak. A reminder of how high the stress had ever been. 1.146% higher, and there would be no coming back from it. That had been scary, and Mischa did not scare so easy.

Another wary eye watched another number in the display, right beside the red one. White, innocuous. ‘64.2%’. Scary in another way. A scary that went hand in hand with Dragon, the City, the Machine Army, Sleeper, the Simurgh, or the Titan. If the Simurgh and the Titan could even be counted as distinct forces. It was the fear that came from knowing there was something indomitable and too big or sprawling to defeat, dangerous, malevolent, and soulless.

He was aware that Saint had not replied to him. He looked ahead through the display screen, because there was no window in this sarcophagus he had been buried in, only cameras and screens, ventilated air that still had an acrid flavor to it from the gas, earlier. Saint struggled with turbulence as he flew through an aperture. Not paying attention.

Mischa flipped more switches, diverting power, eyeing the battery load, and imagining that he was playing one small part in that 91% becoming a 91.2% as he relied more on the strange technology.