We ran out across the ice at speeds that would have made old pre-war muscle cars jealous. All around me the winds gathered, filling me, infusing me with their speed, their power, their joy. I ran like I had never dreamed of running before. Where I had been wearing a simple sealskin shirt and trousers, black witch-armor formed around me, changing me from a sprinting cross-country star into a charging juggernaut. But I didn’t feel the weight of the armor. It didn’t feel like I was wearing much at all. I thought about drawing the sword at my waist to complete the image but thought better of it. It wouldn’t do to bring a sword to a heavy cannon fight. Instead, I sent my machine spirits out into the wind and called down the storms. The Great North Wind answered, but he wasn’t the only one. We ran at the heart of a vortex of howling wind and clashing thunder, lit only by strobing lightning. Though my own eyes could not pierce the walls of the storm, my wind spirits painted the landscape ahead of me in my mind.

Nissikul kept pace with me easily, unshaken by the rise of the storm. Of course, she wouldn't be bothered. She might have been the least of the Stormcallers before her unexpected promotion, but that just meant she had been running with the storms for only years rather than decades. Her black, featureless helm reflected the frenetic dance of the lightning back at me in menacing green as she asked, in a conversational tone that I could nonetheless understand perfectly, "Joanna, are you alright?"

I laughed at the absurdity of the question, and a little of the tension went out of my chest. The storm returned my cackle as a blast of thunder that rattled my teeth in my skull. “Am I alright? What kind of question is that?”

Nissikul didn’t share my amusement. “You’re leading my people now, Storm Queen, I need you at your best. That thing- the metal man wearing the face of your dead lover- it shook you up, cracked the mask. I need to be sure you aren’t going to break.”

I sighed, a sound that became a rushing howl of wind as a funnel cloud calved off from the storm and spun itself into nothingness. “Well, I’m going to break some of that thing’s fancy toys, that’s for sure.” Getting no answer from Nissikul, I continued, resigned. “I’m fine. I’ll be fine. I’m going to have no trouble killing that demon when the time comes.”

“What about if we have to capture it?” Nissikul asked. “You heard the Deepseeker’s plan. What if we decide to capture your spirit and bring it back to be a part of that old coot’s ritual?”

I shrugged. “Then I’ll catch it. I doubt Barbas can still be found in there, but if he can, I’ll do my best to save him.” I turned my face back forward into the raging storm, searching through my wind spirit’s perceptions for Barbas’ gun emplacement. Every so often a shot would pass through the storm, warped off its course by the force of the wind, but I saw no sign of the cannon. It came as no surprise to me. A properly installed gauss cannon could kill a target with a nearly direct shot at a distance of over twelve miles.

Nissikul didn't let up. "If you catch it- if you catch your spirit, what will you do about my brother?"

“What?”

Nissikul laughed, and the sound was echoed by the storm around us just as mine had been. “Don’t play dumb, Joanna. He is obviously smitten with you.”

“And…” I prompted, not wanting to give her anything.

Nissikul just stared at me for a full minute, her blank helm conveying nothing. A gauss cannon shot passed us in the storm, thrown a dozen meters wide of either of us.

I groaned. “Fine. I might have feelings for him too, but I don’t know if this-” I gestured all around me, “-is the best time to be thinking about those. We’re fighting a war. If Volistad is in love with me, then maybe after we save your people from certain destruction, he and I can think about what that means.”

“It’s too late for that,” Nissikul commented lightly. “You kissed him. You reciprocated his feelings. You both have to sit down and talk about this, or it will go sour. You might not want to do anything yet, one way or another, and that’s fine. But you have to at least talk to him about it.”

“I have to, huh?”

Nissikul snorted. "Don't play god with me, ‘Storm Queen.' My brother might be a little caught up in your living myth, but I'm not. I've seen you with a hole in your chest where a heart should be." Her voice changed from conversational to a dangerous, poisonous hiss. "And if you hurt my big brother, Joanna, I will tear that shiny new god heart out of you. And no one will be filling that hole back up again. Do you understand me?"

I swallowed hard. Damn. “Yes, Nissi, I understand you.”

“Good,” she said brightly. “Now I think I see something up ahead of us. What do you say we break some of that metal abomination’s toys?”