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Got some more of these. They're longer extracts so if you read them then well done.

1 - top left - Binky's Juice Bar
   “What the hell is this?”
Cella wasn’t entirely certain herself, she’d just picked up whatever junk was small enough to pocket from Sky’s wagon.
“It’s obvious,” she lied, trying her hand at the old ‘con job’. “That there is a…a…carbon…refracto-matic…impulser.”
The drinks vendor just looked at her from beneath his sweating brow and Cella sheepishly raked the object back into her possession. “I don’t actually…have any…money.”
It was a painful confession to make but she hoped that if she made it sound miserable enough then she could melt a few hearts.
The vendor, it seemed, didn't have a heart and wasn’t impressed. “Take your carbon refractomatic impulser and get lost—NEXT!”
“But I—”
“I got it.”
Cella turned in surprise. It was that guy with the dust-mask lingering near the washed out menu board as if there was just too much choice to make up his mind over.
“Oh…thanks.”
He shrugged his shoulders and pushed in line behind her, much to the annoyance of the customer he'd just cut in front of—not that he even noticed. “I’ll have the same, but make it a double, my blood sugar is feeling kind of low.”
  Cella didn’t like how close he was getting, but given the confined space of the bustling cramped market, it was only expected when he leaned over to hand over his cred film.
Still, it felt like he was inspecting her really closely in a 'peek down the top' kind of way, though she couldn’t see his eyes behind the reflective dust-goggles.
    Taking her drink, she seized that opportunity to leave, never really having been one to hang around to ingratiate herself to a free handout. In her experience, no one ever gave anything up out of the goodness of their heart, and the sooner she got away, the less likely it was for him to hold it over her.
“I’d be careful going that way.”
Cella turned briefly at his voice, startled he may be following her.
“The ground could cave in,” he said, taking his own oversized drink and wheeling out of the line almost lazily, ever ignorant to the grumbling of the customer he’d barged ahead of.
“I’m not that heavy thank you very much!”
Tosser!
“Just saying,” he replied, somehow managing to lift the dust mask and take a long drag of the drink without even showing so much as an inch of his face. “The Brink isn’t safe. But if you want a one-way ticket into some ancient basement, or a free-fall down to the wastes without a parachute, then go ahead. Oh, and, by the way, that is a magnetic gyroid coil." He took another obnoxious slurp of his drink. "Maybe try to sell it a little more convincingly next time.”
“Weirdo.” Cella grunted, loud enough for him to hear as she heaved her bulk off, sucking on the straw of her neon hued Electric Tang ‘fruit’ cocktail. “I’ll go where I like.”

2 - top right

"Believe what you like my dear," Apollo replied, expertly maintaining his balance even as the flying machine listed sideways. Then again, lizards could cling to any surface. "The Unity Corps are here to ensure that you and your offspring arrive safely to your new home. Despite all efforts to keep your whereabouts secure, listening ears are ever flapping, and certain terrorist groups would enjoy nothing more than getting their hands on you."
"Terrorist groups?"
Shit, it just got worse.
"So, you see, whatever you may believe," Apollo went on. "Is not my concern."
He then turned his attention to Aeselfrith, who had been listening at an angle.
"Make those soldiers presentable Brother, you're an Auraculur Aurum for Sky's sake, not some slovenly cack-hand training alley roaches! Bind them tighter!"
"I never Bind them."
"You what?"
"It is an unnecessary cruelty."
"If I say Bind them, you do it without comment." Apollo said evenly. "Or do you want 'heretical sympathies' - of which you are already dangerously suspect - to be added to the list of behaviour at the Inquest?"
Cella was only half listening as the blood rushed to her ears like thunder and her body began to feel weightless as the world and its sudden constraints tightened around her.
Her vision was tilting, and it wasn't from the motion of the bladeskimmer.
"Please..." her voice was a gasp, a croak, Lear's weight nothing more than a cloud as everything started to just....drift away...and Apollo continued in his cold hissed lecture, the men's faces close, sharp and angular. "...why's it so...hot in here?"
  There was a heavy bump, a collision, something - perhaps it was the skimmer landing, perhaps it was her body hitting the floor of the cabin, but the next thing Cella became aware of was Lear's shrieking, and bony fingers against the side of her throat.
The hum was just under her skin, tingling her alert
"How is she?" Apollo sounded more annoyed than concerned. "Stop that child screaming!"
Her head was resting on Aeselfrith's knees and she opened her eyes just as he was shooting Apollo's back an unsettlingly deadpan glare.
"Get her on her feet and presentable immediately. I want her standing in two minutes even if you have to Bind her as well."
Apollo then swept into the cockpit to relay something to the pilot.
"Are we meeting someone important for him to get his knickers in such a twist over?" Cella asked in a dry cracked voice. Lear was snivelling and whimpering in the arms of another surrogate soldier - the sight of which never failed to look ridiculous as he stood there impassively with a pudgy lump in his arms.
"The Auracular Fathers have sent their representative." Brother Aeselfrith replied. "Sit up slowly when you can."
The proud bitch in Cella forced her to sit up immediately, making her head spin and she slumped embarrassingly against the Aurum.
"I wasn't aware I was such a specimen to be gawked at." she grunted, trying to rearrange her legs under her - there was a lot of weight to shift upright, and she was not ashamed to admit that she was glad when the man hauled her to her feet - though she was surprised he could manage it with his skeletal frame. "Is it true, what he says about...terrorists?"
There was an uncomfortable silence and Cella chanced a sidelong glance back to see the Aurum looking furtively at the cockpit as though he were hesitant to speak.
"You've heard of Oculus?" he eventually asked - though it seemed to Cella as though he had wanted to answer differently, but chose the flat response instead.
"I have," she replied petulantly. "...maybe. Ok, I don't think so, there are so many cruddy gangs and 'organisations' in the Dust that after a while you stop paying attention to the losers or wannabes slapping an 'edgy' name on their little club."
"They're-"
"These are more than disorganised knuckle draggers," Apollo slithered out of his hole again and it wouldn't have surprised Cella to know he'd probably been listening in. "They're guerrillas and anarchists, intent on toppling order with their misguided dogma. There's nothing more dangerous than intelligent heretics - isn't that right, Brother?"
"They're all of those things at once?" Cella couldn't help but ask with a mocking tone. "Seems a bit overkill to me."
"Your Dust sensibilities are charming," Apollo replied almost genially. "But Oculus are a very serious danger you need not worry yourself about. You are under Auraculairium protection. Now come, we still have quite a journey before we arrive home."

3 - middle left - Binding Rings

"I wondered how long it would be before you came looking, Terish." Galloglas said, slowly letting the filthy rag slop back into the tin pot. He was a creature of skin and bone and wiry muscle.
“Keep your hands where they are.” Terish commanded, taking note of the rifle and knives propped up against the collapsed wall of the burned out ruin he was camping near. “Why are you here?”
Galloglas watched them warily at an angle. “Hunting.”
“I understand you belong to the Auraculairium, how are you here unsupervised?” Yianis asked, forgetting his promise to be silent in haste to get to the bottom of this and take charge.
He half hoped it would redeem him in Petrish's eyes.
  Galloglas tilted his jaw up to meet his gaze, acknowledging him for the first time since they’d walked into camp. The Condemnation Collar around his throat had been covered by the scarf about his neck when first they met, but now Yianis could see it woven into flesh with its glowing Aurulite threads.
It made his own mouth dry.
Only the worst criminals were fitted with such inhumane things.
“I go where they tell me.” Galloglas said. “Hunt whatever they tell me. Beasts with a taste for humans, cultists sacrificing people, men…crazed…by the Tear. Whatever has become too dangerous. I bring back what’s left. Of the killer. Or the victims.” The Kern hunter indicated the human remains being preserved over the acrid smelling fire. "I never said I was alone."
Galloglas looked vaguely in the direction of town to indicate where the other was.
“It’s only been five years." Terish remained where she was, and if she was disgusted it didn’t show. "You seem tired already.”
“I am.” Galloglas replied. “Tired. Of being the one left standing.”
“How unfortunate for you, but you could always end it with a bang by taking that collar off.”
Galloglas just looked at her, neither angry nor amused.
“Can I?” he asked.
He moved closer and Terish indicated to Petrish not to shoot.
“It’s what he wants.”
“I’ve died a thousand times already,” Galloglas said, stopping a few inches short of her. “In every way you could imagine, and worse. They make it feel real, with their...punishment...but none of it was...real.”
  He tried to hook a finger under the collar embedded into his skin, but his arm, also stitched with Binding Rings at the joints spasmed and seized up in atrophy, before dropping numbly as a dead weight, fingers twitching now and then from the nervous reprimand.
“They don't let you escape. Not here, or here.” he hissed, tapping his skull. “But one day. Maybe soon. Maybe never..." He just let the words die. "Until then I hunt."
“You have your prey?” Terish asked.
“Not yet.”
“Another mimic?”
“Something like that.” Galloglas replied. "I am still searching for a scent. But I am close...now."
Terish nodded.
“Perhaps it’ll be the one to end it.”
“Perhaps.”
Terish once more as an indication of leaving and he returned the gesture, turning back to his tin pot of bloody water, uninterested in them.
Terish is from the Anchun clan, Galloglas is from the Kern clan. They do know one another in passing, and Terish is well aware of Galloglas' crime despite it not being a part of her clan. She's simply troubled he's there

4 - middle right - The Tap House

  It was Cella, Terish was almost certain, she was buying a chemical blue drink and had the same bleached blonde hair and single highbright green hoop earring. but where were Lear and Cain? Terish had only gotten a brief glimpse of her before a man in a dust mask pushed himself towards the counter, blocking the way.
  Terish would have moved forward from where she had stopped by a vending machine, but she felt someone watching, and knew, from the periphery of her vision, not to as the hairs of her scalp raised.
How she hadn’t seen him was enraging, as he stood out like an ugly smear amidst the colour, as out of place as a Stone Cultist in an Aurery.
Galloglas.
  Perhaps it had been the stillness in which he sat, or the very slow way he cut splinters of ivory from the bone he was carving, but the lack of any movement had, until that point, made him invisible on a bench at the tap house opposite.
Terish could feel the sharp bloodshot whites of eyes beneath his hat, rolling pupils in the direction she was gazing.
Shit.
Was she the bait, or the prey?
“There you are! Look what I got!” Sky’s jovial form thrust itself between Terish’s line of sight, breaking the tension like a cactus popping a soap bubble. Obliviously, he swung a plastic bag around to show off his latest haul of junk food as if it were gold. “Look at all of this! Just look at this, FAKE ‘Ranklin cracklin’, I wonder what it’s really made out of. Who needs real food at all I ask you?”
Terish peered around him as he squirrelled around in his bag, blathering about his purchases in delight.
The hunter was gone and her heart began to beat much faster than it had before, as so was Cella.5+6 - Queenie

These are together because I couldn't decide which composition was better, so kept both.
"You alright back the- shit! Take the wheel a moment would ya? Just follow the screen and keep us steady. Seems we've got ourselves a little problem needs taking care of."
Chloe bellowed a victory ululating, and the sound of someone climbing through the pilot seats peeled Cella's eyes out of her arms.
  The shadow of a well-muscled woman in cargo pants passed her by and seized hold of Aeselfrith, who'd seen her approach and intent and wasn't going down without a fight, twisting her arm aside and sending the injector gun skittering across the deck from her fist.
To which she punched him, stemming the flow of Aurumancy as it began to thrum through the metal.
"Oh no, you don't!"
  Yianis shrieked in alarm, pulling himself aside to avoid being trampled in the fight while Cella's brain struggled to catch up to what was happening. Chloe – always raring for a good brawl - was hollering from the cockpit just to add to the confusion.
  With a roar, the pilot threw her weight forward in a shoulder charge, slamming the Aurum right over the edge of the wing-guard – he slipped along the smooth surface of the wing, flipped by the wind, human hand skidding and claws screeching across the metal before finally sinking deep enough to stop him from plummeting right the way over into mid-air.
"You've done it now son, scratching up my girl Gertie! I'll wreck you!"
"What the hell are you doing?" Cella shrieked.
The woman gave something of a square-jawed grin – missing a tooth (presumably from before the altercation)- hefting a long metal cleaning pick from its sconce with singularly focused intent. "Taking out the trash, what else?"
"No! He helped us!" Cella was so breathless she was surprised the words even came out. "Pull him back! Quick!"
"What?"
"He's not the enemy for Sky's sake! He opened the sandlock! It was him! Now PULL HIM BACK!" Cella was surprised at the power of her command, but her heart was up in her throat, screaming in alarm.
Manoeuvring the pole in haste, the woman swung the pick to the end of the wingtip.
"Grab a hold, I'll hoist you in!"
  The Aurum's face was so white Cella was afraid he might be frozen in terror, but he managed to seize hold with his human arm, struggling to pull himself in with his injured shoulder before Yianis' helped haul him back over the wing-guard. He was shaking so hard he couldn't stand.
"You alright?" the pilot asked. "Just take it easy – long deep breathes now – that's it, you're all right - fuck, why didn't you say anything earlier?"
"You never gave anyone a chance!" Cella barked.
The woman blinked, surprised, then laughed a booming laugh.
“Yeah well, that's my trouble. Always charging in before I think. It's the uniform, I just went wild. No harm done though eh? Name’s Queenie."

I love Queenie, and Queenie loves her bladeskimmer 'Gertie', she and Drone are two of the pilots for Oculus. I feel they need their own adventures.
His eye was like that before the fight, it kind of ruptured from the pressure of opening the sandlock on his own. No one said Aurumancy was without risk. His arm also ended up like that somehow. It's very alarming, but there is an explanation, and it's one the Auraculairium would not like being theorised.
Related

Description

Got some more of these. They're longer extracts so if you read them then well done.

1 - top left - Binky's Juice Bar
   “What the hell is this?”
Cella wasn’t entirely certain herself, she’d just picked up whatever junk was small enough to pocket from Sky’s wagon.
“It’s obvious,” she lied, trying her hand at the old ‘con job’. “That there is a…a…carbon…refracto-matic…impulser.”
The drinks vendor just looked at her from beneath his sweating brow and Cella sheepishly raked the object back into her possession. “I don’t actually…have any…money.”
It was a painful confession to make but she hoped that if she made it sound miserable enough then she could melt a few hearts.
The vendor, it seemed, didn't have a heart and wasn’t impressed. “Take your carbon refractomatic impulser and get lost—NEXT!”
“But I—”
“I got it.”
Cella turned in surprise. It was that guy with the dust-mask lingering near the washed out menu board as if there was just too much choice to make up his mind over.
“Oh…thanks.”
He shrugged his shoulders and pushed in line behind her, much to the annoyance of the customer he'd just cut in front of—not that he even noticed. “I’ll have the same, but make it a double, my blood sugar is feeling kind of low.”
  Cella didn’t like how close he was getting, but given the confined space of the bustling cramped market, it was only expected when he leaned over to hand over his cred film.
Still, it felt like he was inspecting her really closely in a 'peek down the top' kind of way, though she couldn’t see his eyes behind the reflective dust-goggles.
    Taking her drink, she seized that opportunity to leave, never really having been one to hang around to ingratiate herself to a free handout. In her experience, no one ever gave anything up out of the goodness of their heart, and the sooner she got away, the less likely it was for him to hold it over her.
“I’d be careful going that way.”
Cella turned briefly at his voice, startled he may be following her.
“The ground could cave in,” he said, taking his own oversized drink and wheeling out of the line almost lazily, ever ignorant to the grumbling of the customer he’d barged ahead of.
“I’m not that heavy thank you very much!”
Tosser!
“Just saying,” he replied, somehow managing to lift the dust mask and take a long drag of the drink without even showing so much as an inch of his face. “The Brink isn’t safe. But if you want a one-way ticket into some ancient basement, or a free-fall down to the wastes without a parachute, then go ahead. Oh, and, by the way, that is a magnetic gyroid coil." He took another obnoxious slurp of his drink. "Maybe try to sell it a little more convincingly next time.”
“Weirdo.” Cella grunted, loud enough for him to hear as she heaved her bulk off, sucking on the straw of her neon hued Electric Tang ‘fruit’ cocktail. “I’ll go where I like.”

2 - top right

"Believe what you like my dear," Apollo replied, expertly maintaining his balance even as the flying machine listed sideways. Then again, lizards could cling to any surface. "The Unity Corps are here to ensure that you and your offspring arrive safely to your new home. Despite all efforts to keep your whereabouts secure, listening ears are ever flapping, and certain terrorist groups would enjoy nothing more than getting their hands on you."
"Terrorist groups?"
Shit, it just got worse.
"So, you see, whatever you may believe," Apollo went on. "Is not my concern."
He then turned his attention to Aeselfrith, who had been listening at an angle.
"Make those soldiers presentable Brother, you're an Auraculur Aurum for Sky's sake, not some slovenly cack-hand training alley roaches! Bind them tighter!"
"I never Bind them."
"You what?"
"It is an unnecessary cruelty."
"If I say Bind them, you do it without comment." Apollo said evenly. "Or do you want 'heretical sympathies' - of which you are already dangerously suspect - to be added to the list of behaviour at the Inquest?"
Cella was only half listening as the blood rushed to her ears like thunder and her body began to feel weightless as the world and its sudden constraints tightened around her.
Her vision was tilting, and it wasn't from the motion of the bladeskimmer.
"Please..." her voice was a gasp, a croak, Lear's weight nothing more than a cloud as everything started to just....drift away...and Apollo continued in his cold hissed lecture, the men's faces close, sharp and angular. "...why's it so...hot in here?"
  There was a heavy bump, a collision, something - perhaps it was the skimmer landing, perhaps it was her body hitting the floor of the cabin, but the next thing Cella became aware of was Lear's shrieking, and bony fingers against the side of her throat.
The hum was just under her skin, tingling her alert
"How is she?" Apollo sounded more annoyed than concerned. "Stop that child screaming!"
Her head was resting on Aeselfrith's knees and she opened her eyes just as he was shooting Apollo's back an unsettlingly deadpan glare.
"Get her on her feet and presentable immediately. I want her standing in two minutes even if you have to Bind her as well."
Apollo then swept into the cockpit to relay something to the pilot.
"Are we meeting someone important for him to get his knickers in such a twist over?" Cella asked in a dry cracked voice. Lear was snivelling and whimpering in the arms of another surrogate soldier - the sight of which never failed to look ridiculous as he stood there impassively with a pudgy lump in his arms.
"The Auracular Fathers have sent their representative." Brother Aeselfrith replied. "Sit up slowly when you can."
The proud bitch in Cella forced her to sit up immediately, making her head spin and she slumped embarrassingly against the Aurum.
"I wasn't aware I was such a specimen to be gawked at." she grunted, trying to rearrange her legs under her - there was a lot of weight to shift upright, and she was not ashamed to admit that she was glad when the man hauled her to her feet - though she was surprised he could manage it with his skeletal frame. "Is it true, what he says about...terrorists?"
There was an uncomfortable silence and Cella chanced a sidelong glance back to see the Aurum looking furtively at the cockpit as though he were hesitant to speak.
"You've heard of Oculus?" he eventually asked - though it seemed to Cella as though he had wanted to answer differently, but chose the flat response instead.
"I have," she replied petulantly. "...maybe. Ok, I don't think so, there are so many cruddy gangs and 'organisations' in the Dust that after a while you stop paying attention to the losers or wannabes slapping an 'edgy' name on their little club."
"They're-"
"These are more than disorganised knuckle draggers," Apollo slithered out of his hole again and it wouldn't have surprised Cella to know he'd probably been listening in. "They're guerrillas and anarchists, intent on toppling order with their misguided dogma. There's nothing more dangerous than intelligent heretics - isn't that right, Brother?"
"They're all of those things at once?" Cella couldn't help but ask with a mocking tone. "Seems a bit overkill to me."
"Your Dust sensibilities are charming," Apollo replied almost genially. "But Oculus are a very serious danger you need not worry yourself about. You are under Auraculairium protection. Now come, we still have quite a journey before we arrive home."

3 - middle left - Binding Rings

"I wondered how long it would be before you came looking, Terish." Galloglas said, slowly letting the filthy rag slop back into the tin pot. He was a creature of skin and bone and wiry muscle.
“Keep your hands where they are.” Terish commanded, taking note of the rifle and knives propped up against the collapsed wall of the burned out ruin he was camping near. “Why are you here?”
Galloglas watched them warily at an angle. “Hunting.”
“I understand you belong to the Auraculairium, how are you here unsupervised?” Yianis asked, forgetting his promise to be silent in haste to get to the bottom of this and take charge.
He half hoped it would redeem him in Petrish's eyes.
  Galloglas tilted his jaw up to meet his gaze, acknowledging him for the first time since they’d walked into camp. The Condemnation Collar around his throat had been covered by the scarf about his neck when first they met, but now Yianis could see it woven into flesh with its glowing Aurulite threads.
It made his own mouth dry.
Only the worst criminals were fitted with such inhumane things.
“I go where they tell me.” Galloglas said. “Hunt whatever they tell me. Beasts with a taste for humans, cultists sacrificing people, men…crazed…by the Tear. Whatever has become too dangerous. I bring back what’s left. Of the killer. Or the victims.” The Kern hunter indicated the human remains being preserved over the acrid smelling fire. "I never said I was alone."
Galloglas looked vaguely in the direction of town to indicate where the other was.
“It’s only been five years." Terish remained where she was, and if she was disgusted it didn’t show. "You seem tired already.”
“I am.” Galloglas replied. “Tired. Of being the one left standing.”
“How unfortunate for you, but you could always end it with a bang by taking that collar off.”
Galloglas just looked at her, neither angry nor amused.
“Can I?” he asked.
He moved closer and Terish indicated to Petrish not to shoot.
“It’s what he wants.”
“I’ve died a thousand times already,” Galloglas said, stopping a few inches short of her. “In every way you could imagine, and worse. They make it feel real, with their...punishment...but none of it was...real.”
  He tried to hook a finger under the collar embedded into his skin, but his arm, also stitched with Binding Rings at the joints spasmed and seized up in atrophy, before dropping numbly as a dead weight, fingers twitching now and then from the nervous reprimand.
“They don't let you escape. Not here, or here.” he hissed, tapping his skull. “But one day. Maybe soon. Maybe never..." He just let the words die. "Until then I hunt."
“You have your prey?” Terish asked.
“Not yet.”
“Another mimic?”
“Something like that.” Galloglas replied. "I am still searching for a scent. But I am close...now."
Terish nodded.
“Perhaps it’ll be the one to end it.”
“Perhaps.”
Terish once more as an indication of leaving and he returned the gesture, turning back to his tin pot of bloody water, uninterested in them.
Terish is from the Anchun clan, Galloglas is from the Kern clan. They do know one another in passing, and Terish is well aware of Galloglas' crime despite it not being a part of her clan. She's simply troubled he's there

4 - middle right - The Tap House

  It was Cella, Terish was almost certain, she was buying a chemical blue drink and had the same bleached blonde hair and single highbright green hoop earring. but where were Lear and Cain? Terish had only gotten a brief glimpse of her before a man in a dust mask pushed himself towards the counter, blocking the way.
  Terish would have moved forward from where she had stopped by a vending machine, but she felt someone watching, and knew, from the periphery of her vision, not to as the hairs of her scalp raised.
How she hadn’t seen him was enraging, as he stood out like an ugly smear amidst the colour, as out of place as a Stone Cultist in an Aurery.
Galloglas.
  Perhaps it had been the stillness in which he sat, or the very slow way he cut splinters of ivory from the bone he was carving, but the lack of any movement had, until that point, made him invisible on a bench at the tap house opposite.
Terish could feel the sharp bloodshot whites of eyes beneath his hat, rolling pupils in the direction she was gazing.
Shit.
Was she the bait, or the prey?
“There you are! Look what I got!” Sky’s jovial form thrust itself between Terish’s line of sight, breaking the tension like a cactus popping a soap bubble. Obliviously, he swung a plastic bag around to show off his latest haul of junk food as if it were gold. “Look at all of this! Just look at this, FAKE ‘Ranklin cracklin’, I wonder what it’s really made out of. Who needs real food at all I ask you?”
Terish peered around him as he squirrelled around in his bag, blathering about his purchases in delight.
The hunter was gone and her heart began to beat much faster than it had before, as so was Cella.5+6 - Queenie

These are together because I couldn't decide which composition was better, so kept both.
"You alright back the- shit! Take the wheel a moment would ya? Just follow the screen and keep us steady. Seems we've got ourselves a little problem needs taking care of."
Chloe bellowed a victory ululating, and the sound of someone climbing through the pilot seats peeled Cella's eyes out of her arms.
  The shadow of a well-muscled woman in cargo pants passed her by and seized hold of Aeselfrith, who'd seen her approach and intent and wasn't going down without a fight, twisting her arm aside and sending the injector gun skittering across the deck from her fist.
To which she punched him, stemming the flow of Aurumancy as it began to thrum through the metal.
"Oh no, you don't!"
  Yianis shrieked in alarm, pulling himself aside to avoid being trampled in the fight while Cella's brain struggled to catch up to what was happening. Chloe – always raring for a good brawl - was hollering from the cockpit just to add to the confusion.
  With a roar, the pilot threw her weight forward in a shoulder charge, slamming the Aurum right over the edge of the wing-guard – he slipped along the smooth surface of the wing, flipped by the wind, human hand skidding and claws screeching across the metal before finally sinking deep enough to stop him from plummeting right the way over into mid-air.
"You've done it now son, scratching up my girl Gertie! I'll wreck you!"
"What the hell are you doing?" Cella shrieked.
The woman gave something of a square-jawed grin – missing a tooth (presumably from before the altercation)- hefting a long metal cleaning pick from its sconce with singularly focused intent. "Taking out the trash, what else?"
"No! He helped us!" Cella was so breathless she was surprised the words even came out. "Pull him back! Quick!"
"What?"
"He's not the enemy for Sky's sake! He opened the sandlock! It was him! Now PULL HIM BACK!" Cella was surprised at the power of her command, but her heart was up in her throat, screaming in alarm.
Manoeuvring the pole in haste, the woman swung the pick to the end of the wingtip.
"Grab a hold, I'll hoist you in!"
  The Aurum's face was so white Cella was afraid he might be frozen in terror, but he managed to seize hold with his human arm, struggling to pull himself in with his injured shoulder before Yianis' helped haul him back over the wing-guard. He was shaking so hard he couldn't stand.
"You alright?" the pilot asked. "Just take it easy – long deep breathes now – that's it, you're all right - fuck, why didn't you say anything earlier?"
"You never gave anyone a chance!" Cella barked.
The woman blinked, surprised, then laughed a booming laugh.
“Yeah well, that's my trouble. Always charging in before I think. It's the uniform, I just went wild. No harm done though eh? Name’s Queenie."

I love Queenie, and Queenie loves her bladeskimmer 'Gertie', she and Drone are two of the pilots for Oculus. I feel they need their own adventures.
His eye was like that before the fight, it kind of ruptured from the pressure of opening the sandlock on his own. No one said Aurumancy was without risk. His arm also ended up like that somehow. It's very alarming, but there is an explanation, and it's one the Auraculairium would not like being theorised.
Related