She leaned back on her wings and smiled when the first star streaked across the sky.

With the vid recorder aimed at the sky, she settled in for a good show.

The lights took on different colours as they streaked through the sky, each denoting another primary mineral in the rocks that burned on entry into the atmosphere.

It was the rock that burned toward her and didn’t shatter into nothing that had her sitting up. “Oh, crap.”

If she didn’t miss her guess, she was witnessing a crash.

The ship was coming down hard.

She rolled up her stuff and rammed it into her bag. She clipped her vid recorder onto the exterior of the bag and took off, following the flight of the ship and its rapid descent to the surface.

The impact sent a shockwave through the air that spun her around, but she refocused and continued toward the crash site.

The ship was about a hundred feet long, so it was a short-range vessel. The power cores were ruptured, but the containment foam shell had been discharged to seal them.

Ty knocked on the hull with her fist and listened for a sound. The slight ticking of the metal was all the warning she got when the door flew off and skidded across the rock face.

A man covered with blood crawled from the wreckage, one of his black wings was hanging at a painful angle, and Ty hissed in sympathy.

“Let me help you.”

He grunted and didn’t look up. “Thanks but unless you can relocate a wing…”

Ty moved behind him, put a foot in his back and snapped the joint back into alignment. He screamed, but she held him in place while his wings flapped until they relaxed.