Despite his clear curiosity, Tomas kept silent up until a startled yelp escaped his mouth when I tested the fans without warning him. Surprise turned to amazement when I showed him the camera feed on the tablet while the drone scooted out from under the rock and then down the wash toward the plains below.

  “Wait, how? That’s amazing, but how?”

  “You’d probably just say it’s magic,” I replied with a bit of a grin. “But it’s not, not really.”

  Tomas leveled a flat stare at me.

  “It’s a bit like the mechanical clocks I saw in Rowan’s office, but with electricity, mostly.”

  Tomas’s sudden squint made me chuckle. “So, you’re telling me you harness the power of lightning to make it fly?”

  I nodded and held the tablet up. “And for it to communicate with this, but it’s more like tiny lightning, not big lightning.”

  Tomas’s face carried equal measures of mental pain and disbelief. “Tiny. Lightning.”

  “What? Anyone can learn how to do this; it’s not magic. Though, you’d be better off asking Jenna for details. She’s the expert, not me.”

  Tomas settled down next to me, eyes glued to the camera feed on the tablet. “Sounds like magic to me.”

  “Nah, check this out.” I spent a minute pointing out the basics controls covering traversal, altitude, and the secondary camera and then dropped the tablet in his lap.

  Tomas started sputtering almost immediately as he stared down at the tablet like it was a snake.

  “Relax, I just showed you the controls. Don’t worry, in this control mode it basically flies itself.”

  Subtle horror crept across the bard’s face. “Flies itself? Are you saying it’s intelligent?”

  I shrugged nonchalantly. “I mean, it’s smarter than most people when it comes to flying. Really, you’re more telling it where you want it to go than flying it yourself.”

  A subtle shake in his finger, Tomas poked at the tablet’s surface, sending the drone darting overhead. A tap on a different point brought it to a sudden halt. Tap. Sudden speed. Tap. Halt. “Huh.”

  I squeezed his shoulder as I started to stand. “Let’s head up top. Rock gets in the way of the signal.”

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  Despite clearly not quite understanding what I meant, Tomas rose and followed me a little higher up the draw, then out onto the exposed finger we’d been sheltering underneath.

  I let him fiddle with the controls for a few minutes. “Okay, so you comfortable with it?”

  Tomas shot me a quick glance. “I think so? Why?”

  I leaned over, tapped open a tab, and hit auto-return. “So, you can set navigation shortcuts in that thing I opened. What I just hit will have it come back to us. I brought it along so we can scout ahead with it when terrain is shitty.”

  Tomas’s eyes dropped to the tablet with newfound respect. “That would be tremendously useful out here.”

  I nodded. “Only problem is the battery lasts a little under an hour and that the solar charger isn’t terribly fast at topping it off.”

  Tomas tilted his head a little.

  “Yeah, that shiny, dark roll with the weird shapes on my pack collects sunlight and converts it to something the drone can use. It’s not fast, but as long as we have sunlight, it will charge. Up there in the corner, the green icon with the numbers? That’s your battery level. As it goes down, it’ll change to yellow, and when it gets low it’ll go red.”

  Buzzing filled the air as the drone approached.

  As the drone came to a halt overhead, Tomas glanced over at me. “Could we use magic to charge this battery?”

  I shrugged. “Honestly, if we could, I don’t know how. That’s a Jenna question.”

  After a quick explanation of how the in-flight compass worked, I had him steer the drone a few hundred yards to our east and up before showing him the quick controls to park it in hover mode.

  Once the drone came to a halt, I tapped the screen to open the controls for the secondary camera. “Okay, so using this will drain the battery a little faster. The secondary camera is—” I realized what I was about to explain wouldn’t make any sense to him. “It’s more capable so it eats more power.”

  Beside me, the bard nodded. “Makes sense to me. Spells are like that.”

  I pursed my lips and gave him a quick run-down on how to manage the drone with the secondary camera feed running. Thankfully, the camera views showing up as picture-in-picture in this mode made that much easier.

  In no time, he’d scouted a decent distance along the ridge with the drone, pointing out paths we should probably take. The moment the battery level changed yellow, he hit the return feature and looked over at me. “Sam, this is simply amazing. I can’t believe you trust me with this.”

  I answered with an honest smile and cuffed his shoulder. “Tomas, you and I have been through a lot together, of course I trust you. Besides which, with small units, the key to survival is sharing what we know. If I get hurt, you need to know how to use my tools. If you get hurt, I need to know how to use yours.”

  Smiling, Tomas turned to look for the drone as it returned. “I don’t know what to say, other than thanks, Sam.”

  As the drone neared, I held out my hand for the tablet. “One last thing to show you before I set her down.”

  “Oh?” the bard asked as I took the tablet.

  “Yeah, so the secondary camera has a zoom function, right? It also has infrared.”

  “Infra-what?” he asked as I hit the toggle and the screen blinked into monochrome. “What the hells is that?”

  “Relax, Tomas. Basically, it sees heat.” I panned the camera down toward us. “See?”

  The bard leaned in a little. “Oh. Oh! I didn’t recognize it at first.”

  “At first?”

  “Yeah, when it’s dark enough, that’s more or less how I see things. That’s just a lot clearer and goes out— hold on a second.” He tapped the zoom controls and panned the camera up. “Gods, how far can this thing see? How? How can it see like this in the day?”