Heat clouds wafted lazily from the dry desert where a small group had collected, buzzing like a tuned engine under the sun. Two nearly identical junk planes dipped and dived between the the mines littering the sky, swerving around each other and the mines. Their pilots were, of course, having the time of their lives, revelling in the freedom of flight and the distance of the drugs they took to gain their wings.

One Kyotoshi was not that lucky.

"Oi! Craika, child, git down! No, kid! DOWN!" He cringed visibly as the plane he was watching pulled up to vertical, then recovered and again stared at the radio and the sky again. "Kid, yer out! Gi'down!"

"Chill, pops," came the reply from the backwards falling plane. "You know I can handle it." The junk plane straightened out, arching backwards then forwards in an incredible fishhook, leaving it drawing furrows in the loose sand. It kept low, slowing down and landing softly onto the packed sand that served as makeshift runway. Automatically Kyotoshi was sprinting for the plane, jumping up on the hull and opening the cockpit in a fluid feline motion.

"Craika, Jet..." he cursed silently, "yer gonna kill yourself one of these days." The pilot's eyes fluttered, and his breathing grew even, the stimulant drug wearing off and leaving him dead to the world. Kyotoshi reached out a hesitant paw and brushed a stray piece of snowy hair away from the others face, gently brushing against his forehead. "Then what would I do..." He withdrew his hand and unbuckled the single restraint, sweeping both pilot and himself off of the plane with the same grace.

Kammi was waiting for him at the hangar, leaning against the wide door frame. She wiped her hands on her mechanics outfit and accepted some of Jet's weight on her shoulders. "He'll be out for a lil' while still. The downs are getting worse, ya know." Her voice was strung with regret.

"He accepted the stims in the first place."

"But both of us'r responsible."

Kyo murmured something noncommital and swung Jet off of their shoulders and onto a waiting cot. The young hellcat stirred and arched his back against the sagging bed.

"Why Kammi, I didn't know you cared," he said with a wink and a lopsided grin that was supposed to be seductive but instead managed only to make the mechanic smirk. "Is the air still open?"

Kammi glanced out the high, wide window in the mud wall. "Can't see 'em, kid. Mus' be out like ya." She handed the familiar pill to the pilot.

Kyotoshi was once more glued to the radio, holding the oversized headphones over one ear, and plugging the other against the whine of junk engines. Kammi stood at his shoulder, following the whirr of the silver light.

"Heyya boss. See that last pass?" Jet whooped over the radio, a long yowl. "That Ranec newbie didn't see me coming! Pacifist oaf!"

Kyo shook his head slowly. "Kid, yer coming up to downtime. Joining us anytime soon?"

No answer.

His stomach lurched, a foreboding knot growing. "Kid? Jet, talk to me."

Nothing, a crackle of fuzzy static.

"JET! Come on! Answer me! No games this time!" Kyo's voice grew tight, his throat closing in fear.

Kammi wrenched the headphones from Kyo's numbing fingers and spun the tuning dial around twice. Her voice grew hard, urgengy overriding her street accent. "Keintem, this is Kammi. As owner of your junk plane and supplier of your stims, I order you to bring your plane down immediately."

There was no voice, only an eruption of static.

"Kammi...look'it!" Kyo yelled, jumping the low wall and running for the sand. She looked up from the radio. Jet's plane...falling like a dying bird out of the sky. Trailing behind it, a flaming tail of red and orange and ominous, billowing grey. The headphones dropped from her nerveless fingers and clattered to the ground.



Kyo was first on the crash scene. Dust billowed up, clouding the wreck of a plane and keeping him from reaching his goal as he floudered through the sinking sand.

He reached the twisted metal and placed his hands on the cockpit. He roared and pulled back his hands from the charred heap. "Jet! Please kid...you gotta answer me..." he pleaded to the blackened glass. He stepped backwards and lunged into the cockpit.

The cockpit shattered with a deafening crash, and Kyo almost flew into the mangled body strapped against the seat. The knot in his stomach grew in fear for the Hellcat as he lifted Jet's sagging head with a trembling finger. The young Hekshanian once white fur was matted with blood, a dirty, caustic burgundy that dripped steadily from his left eye, slashed vertically from where it had slammed against the stick of the plane. "Craika, kid!" he swore and sat on the twisted rim. "Gotta git yer neck..." He looked around for the aid crew that should have been there, tearing a strip fromt the bottom his beloved overcoat and blotting away some of the blood leaking onto Jet's forehead. "Jus' stay still kid...s'gonna be okay...s'gonna be okay..."

A tiny voice interrupted his mantra.

"S'gonna..be okay...boss."

Kyo blinked once as he opened his eyes and lifted his head. Where was he? Where...his eyes focused as he remembered. He had spent the night, one of many, in Jet's room, poised by his bed in a tired old bucket chair the two of them had somehow swiped together. The pilot had been drifting out of a sleep similar to a coma and short lapses of fevered consiousness, so Kyo had resigned himself to this chair so as not to miss a chance to calm Jet during one of his waking moments of hell. And also resigning himself to little or no dims.

The doctors had said that Jet was lucky. He hadn't crashed into a piece of flying debris, no, that would have been a much, much bigger mess. Or a whole bunch of little dust-sized ones. No, Jet had been about to black out, and hadn't swerved quite enough to fully miss the oncoming trash. As he slipped into downs, the tail of his junk plane had brushed the trash and sent him spinning, clipping the wing of his remaining opponent's plane as it tried to pass the crash, sending both of them spinning away. The other pilot, the Ranec that Jet had been gloating over seconds before, crashed into the desert and never made it out of his plane alive. They said if Jet could make the first week or so, he'd heal fine. Oh, sure, there were a few major bones broken from jerking against the safety restraints, and a concussion from where his head hit a worn area of the helmet (stolen from a warehouse like the rest of their possessions, so what could you expect?), and the cut across his eye and a goodly part of his cheek threatened to fester more in the heat...seven days, and then he'll turn out okay. He would, and Kyo intended to make sure of it.

Seven days? Craikia, when was the last time he'd had a smoke?

He rested his head back into nest of a chair, and settled into his trenchcoat, long abandoned with a few other layers of his clothing in the humidity of the closed room. Better to keep Jet warm when he was chilled with downs combined with the retreating infection in his wounds. And he couldn't smoke in here, the smoke had nowhere to go and would soon turn the room stagnant. And he couldn't leave for a drink, what if Jet woke and needed him?

...when had he become so motherly? Shaking his head, Kyo shuffled around in a pocket and pulled out an olive canteen, shaking it and grinning with relief as he heard the familiar sloshing inside of it. Who said dims didn't think ahead? Still grinning, he opened it and brought it to his lips.

Kyo jumped as the white vegetable on the bed moaned and shifted, as if to raise a hand to his head. In two seconds Kyo was out of his self-made nest and at Jet's side, canteen thrown, forgotten, over his shoulder.