Air Born | Generation Icarus #1

Kestrel - The Flight Begins

As we ate a strangely satisfying breakfast of rehydrated scrambled egg and potato mash with a side of cereal bar, the sun skipped higher and the shadows shrank back as if they were seeking shelter in the rocks too. The temperature was already climbing. The dry heat of the desert air made a sharp contrast to the damp chill of the forest.

I put my empty plate on the ground and sighed. "That feels so much better."

"Hell, yeah." Hawk also flexed his brown wings vigorously. Then a loud ripping noise made him freeze.

"What was that?" He tried to turn and see what had happened.

I started laughing, and some of the others joined in. "You've ripped your shirt."

As Hawk experimentally moved his wings, he discovered there was more air brushing across the skin of his back than a few moments ago. The two slits in his t-shirt were now ragged tears that ran from his shoulder blades to the hem, leaving a dangling strip between his wings, and the sides flapping open.

"Oh, damn," he said, disgusted. "I'm going to run out of clothes."

I grinned. "You'll have to go native and wear a loincloth. Very angelic, or so I hear."

Falcon wolf-whistled and Hawk flipped him the bird. "I refuse to cast off civilization just because civilization has cast me off," he said with great dignity, which was undermined by his efforts to tuck the end of the new strip and two corners of his shirt into the waistband of his jeans.

I saw that this attempt to control his clothing wouldn't last long and wondered what on Earth we were going to do as our wings kept growing and complicating the mechanics of simply pulling on a t-shirt. It seemed increasingly obvious that regular human clothes weren't going to be practical for much longer, and I had a brief vision of the seven of us running around like feral children in the torn remains of human fashion. The loincloth joke suddenly blossomed into a new idea.

"Hawk, turn around," I said, gesturing with my finger.

Looking bemused, Hawk obeyed, then yelped in protest when I grabbed the loose strip and ripped it free from the rest of his shirt.

"What the hell, Kestrel?"

"Stand still, I'm not finished yet."

Later I was impressed with myself at how bold I'd been, but at the time I was too focused on the experiment to think about how close I was standing behind Hawk or how confidently I nudged his large brown wings aside and reached forward to wrap the strip around his belly, stretching it as long as the material would give. It wasn't quite long enough to tie off at the back, but then Tui appeared beside me with some safety pins from the kit we'd lifted from the department store.

When I finished, I stepped back and dramatically brushed off my hands. "How does that feel?"

"Weird." Hawk tried to look over his wings to see what I'd done.

"Not too tight?"

He snorted. "How tight is it supposed to be?"

"Snug enough to keep your clothing on and loose enough so you can breathe and move, you spoon."

Tui laughed briefly, but her face was full of speculation as she eyed Hawk's new fashion.

Hawk experimentally flexed his wings and twisted from side to side. "Seems to be working so far."

"You're welcome," I said pointedly. "It'll do for now, but if our wings are going to keep growing like this, then we'll have to find more practical, long-term clothing solutions.