Mallory made her way over to him with the exact forceful staccato jabs accross the ice he expected of her, and stopped herself with the same precisely calibrated movement, inches from him. “So, what’s your problem?”

“You have a hell of a way with words,” Winterwing remarked.

“You cringe every time someone comes near you,” she said. “You’re barely standing up,” she gave him a shove, which he over corrected for, and nearly fell over. “Did you not learn to skate or something? They not have ice on your side?”

“I said I didn’t want to be here,” he said, through gritted teeth. His fingers ached from gripping the low wall to his side.

“You said a lot of things,” she agreed. “You didn’t give an explanation.”

“I don’t have to give you an explanation, it’s hockey. The physical abuse that you call training and the verbal abuse that you call instruction is for your mission, so I put up with it, this is a waste of time.”

“Sure, except the part where you are supposed to be on a team,” Mallory gestured to the ice. “This is a team sport.”

“Fuck off. If you thought it was important Emily would be down here too, but no one felt like dressing her up for this, did they?”

Mallory narrowed her eyes. “Are you threatening me?”

“You’re the one who came over here looking for an argument! I-” he stopped, cocking his head to the side. “What’s that sound?”

“Stop trying to change the subject,” Mallory began, but the building beneath her feet began to vibrate.

At first he thought it was an earthquake. There had been slight seismic activity in Winterwing’s short time there. The Pond itself had been designed with such things in mind, and the base underneath even more so. But there was something else that didn’t quite match with the previous experience, a sound that he could have sworn was mechanical creaking rather than natural. The buzzer for a home-goal sounded, and the ice split in a neat line down the center, width-wise.

The play to one side had stopped dead at the tremor, and it was Mallory who first realized what was about to happen. She screamed “GET OFF!”

Winterwing took her instruction immediately, having already been positioned at the edge by the home team’s side. He hopped over the wall, with Mallory easily vaulting it behind him. The ice continued to split, and whatever else he had imagined to be under it, what he was met with was a gaping maw of moving machinery, illuminated by the stadium lighting above and hazard lights below.

Winterwing looked accusingly to Mallory. “Have the rules of hockey substantially changed?”

Tanya, Nosedive and Grin were split to the away side, and had to scuttle as the panel they were standing on neatly tucked under the ice before them. Duke and Wildwing, on the team side, were stuck without recourse. The retractable roof opened, exposing the arena to the light of day, and the jumbo-tron slid away with it. The two drakes watched watched, confused as the rest of them, until the platform with the Aerowing flipped over and locked into position, and finally they realized their peril. Both hustled out of the center, though the sound of their movements was completely overtaken by sound of hydraulics underneath all of them coming to life, slingshotting the Aerowing as they had hundreds of times before.

It was supposed to be enough force to compensate for a lack of runway, but her engines never fired. Instead, the mass of the fighter was flung from the platform, its landing gear clipping the top of Wildwing’s goal post, smashed the safety glass behind it, and then the entire fuselage plowed into the stands.