Wings of Creation (15 page)

He knelt down to pet Sasha. It was his way to disappear from his own presence from time to time. The fading light painted his hair a lighter shade than usual while it shadowed his face. I dug my fingers into his shoulders, trying to loosen the tension in them. All his life, his body had held onto his worries.

When he stood back up, he said, “I’ll look into it more. I’m sure there’s a good reason.”

Code for he’d talk to Marcus. “Marcus might not always be right.”

“I trust him.”

“Didn’t we used to say, never trust an adult?”

“We’re adults.”

“Not compared to these people.”

He sighed. “I know.”

“Keep in mind, little brother, that we could be in over our heads. Maybe we don’t want to help stop this war. We don’t understand it yet. Maybe it’s not our job.”

“Got any other plans?”

“Maybe we should make some.”

One of the small gray animals raced just in front of us. It was too much for Sasha. In one bound, she broke its neck. Her teeth crunched on the small bones.

“Well, someone’s happy,” I said.

Joseph laughed. “We’re alive. We’re happy enough. Aren’t we?”

“Sure.”

We waited until Sasha had completely consumed her dinner before we went in. Although we didn’t say a word to each other, neither of us said anything to anyone else about Sasha’s hunting either.

T
sawo knelt down, canted his wings back, and took three steps. On the fourth step, he threw himself at the sky and drew his wings down. He rose, three quick beats, four, five, and then he slowed into an almost eerie hover that drew a sweat out on his nearly perfect brow.

My turn.

I sighed. A light breeze filled Fliers’ Field with the thick honey-sweet smell of the flowers that lined it. Even though my shoulders screamed from the past ten attempts, I swallowed, took in a big breath, and checked my balance. I lifted my wings. I jumped into the first high, long step of my run, took the second. The wings felt heavy dragging against the air. Third step, fourth step. I drew my wings down as fast as I could. Fifth step, sixth, into the air. My wings rose and fell again, and again. I scrunched my eyes closed, counted wing beats. Four, five.

My abs hurt. My shoulders hurt.

“Good!” Tsawo’s voice floated down from above. “Let go. Don’t feel the pain.”

How did he know what I was thinking? Six. A little off. I listed right. Seven. I tried to correct, twisted to the left instead of the right.

“Hold! Take your time.”

My breath was too fast and I was too big to fly. I sank in the air, my feet almost dragging the ground. Eight, nine. Okay. That was better. Ten. Higher. I twisted right again, and sank fast. I lowered my
legs. With a disgusted backwing, I let myself down, hard enough to jar my knees. I’d landed on one of the red lines of flowers, breaking stems.

Tsawo landed right in front of me, the expression on his face as frustrated as I felt. To my disgust, a tear gathered in my right eye and insisted on falling down my cheek. I didn’t cry in front of people. I just didn’t. I felt another one gathering in the other eye, and lifted my wings up to hide my face, fumbling with the straps. At least I’d learned to free myself without falling down.

By the time I finished and held my wings in my arms, my eyes were dry.

To his credit, Tsawo didn’t mention the tears.

It wasn’t like me to cry. Lopali wasn’t what I’d expected. Hell, I didn’t know what I’d expected. To fly. I wanted to fly so badly I could taste it. I couldn’t bring myself to say anything until I’d taken the gear back and hung it up on its peg for the day. One more lesson day gone, and I’d gotten—what?—six feet off the ground? Maybe ten.

I stopped in the bathroom and washed my hands and face and brushed my hair, making sure I was in control before I went out to meet Tsawo. There was an hour before our afternoon nap, when I’d lie down and stare at the ceiling for an hour and he, presumably, slept. Fliers had unique weaknesses. I could run without a nap afterward, but they seemed to need to sleep to rebuild for the night. Once he’d skipped the nap and been slower than usual and his eyes had been red.

I’d learned that this time between lessons and downtime was often good for talking to him. He was, after all, supposed to teach me some of Lopali’s culture.

He was gracious when I caught up to him standing at the edge of the field, looking up at a group of human fliers like me, only better. They could keep up with their instructor. “You improved today.”

Not really. Not nearly good enough. “I still think it would be easier to fly with wings like yours.”

“You’re obsessed.”

I hadn’t made any headway on this topic since the first time I’d broached it to him. And I still had my promise to Joseph, who was just as confusing and irritating as ever.

Although this was only the fourth day of lessons, Tsawo and I had a bit of a routine now. We couldn’t, of course, take a walk, or a long run. He couldn’t do that any more than I could fly. So we sat on two rocks, side by side, him on the taller of them so he sat above me, his wings falling just behind my back. Up close, his feathers were a thousand faceted colors of black when the sun lit them, so pretty it was hard to drag my eyes from them. He’d taken to letting me start the conversation, so I asked him, “So what do fliers do when they aren’t flying?”

“Sleep.”

“Very funny. I mean for fun.”

He grinned. “Well . . . we meditate.”

“I said for fun.”

“Some of us are artists. There’s an art building over at the university. Want to go there after our nap?”

It was a serious request. He spent the afternoons teaching me about SoBright. “Maybe. But I don’t see . . . I don’t see . . . play. What do you do for fun?”

He stood up and stretched, adjusted his wings, and then he sat back down. “When Marcus first asked me to teach you, I was willing to bet that you were supposed to act like a diplomat. I thought this was a job for you.”

I laughed and shook my head. “They don’t want me near them. They’re all doing important work.” I probably shouldn’t talk like this. But I was way past frustrated with Marcus for always shunting me off, and Joseph for letting him. “See, we were all made for something, the way you’re made to fly. Chelo’s our leader, Joseph’s our creator, our pilot, and a bunch of other things. He can do almost anything. On a space ship, he’s in charge of us. Kayleen is like . . . she can do part of what Joseph does. I guess she’s his backup. Liam is like Chelo, only he’s a scientist, too. He came from a roamer band.”

Tsawo had turned his face toward me and seemed to be listening really closely.

So I continued. “Bryan is our strongman. Our protector.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Tell me what a protector is for you.”

It went like this a lot. He was supposed to be teaching me about fliers, but he often asked me questions. Last time, it was all about
Joseph’s abilities. “If I answer you, will you answer a question for me?”

He sighed. “Maybe.”

“Why not?”

“All right.” He sounded wary.

“Thanks.” I didn’t want to push him, so I gave him as complete an answer as I knew how to. “Well, Bryan looks out for us. He’s always watchful. He’s a worrier. Like, my opposite. I’m a risk-taker, so sometimes I don’t think as hard as I should about something. Bryan often watches a situation and thinks about it. Sometimes he just does stuff. When he knows what to do. He also makes us work and stay strong. Even when we were little kids, way back on Fremont, he’d do that.” I smiled at the memory. “I used to look forward to coming to town twice a year so I could finally see people like me. I only saw him a few times a year then, but he always watched for me. Once he and Liam helped me escape after someone locked me up.”

He blinked at me. “People locked you up? Why?”

“They didn’t like me. I was different. They didn’t like me the most, but Bryan used to get beat up, too. Only Liam really had it easy.” I left it there, not wanting to go into our whole history. Tsawo wasn’t exactly a stranger, but some of it still seemed pretty personal.

He looked across the field. Even though we were far away from where I’d fallen, I could see the short, ugly break in the flowers where I’d stepped on them. They’d be fixed tonight; a Keeper would come through and clean up all the lines, cutting away the dead flowers. Not just the ones that I stepped on, the flowers that were through blooming and the leaves that had gone brown at the edges, too.

We were silent together for a few moments. I’d learned he liked that. Silence.

After a while he asked, “As protector, does Bryan make the decisions for you?”

I shook my head. “He thinks too slow. And he gets mad too easy. That’s why Chelo and Liam mostly run things, except here it’s really Marcus.”

He must have heard the bitterness in my voice since the next thing he said was, “And you don’t like that?”

“Sometimes Chelo hesitates. And Marcus doesn’t like me.”

He didn’t answer that. Maybe he couldn’t; Marcus had hired him. “I’m telling you all about us. What about you? If you don’t have any fun, what do you do?” I remembered the first feast, when Induan and I were invisible. “What do fliers fight about?”

He held up a hand. “That’s three questions. I promised I’d answer one question.” He tried to look serious, but one side of his mouth quirked up. “So think about the question you want to ask.”

Okay. The rock was getting hard, so I stood up and walked around, pacing in front of him. What did fliers fight about? But I wasn’t sure he’d give me a complete answer. But would he answer anything? I really wanted to know if he had a girlfriend, but he was always so careful to keep his distance I was willing to bet it wouldn’t matter even if he didn’t. What did we need to know?

I stood in front of him, pondering, making a bit of a show of it. At first he didn’t look like he liked the way I was playing with him, but after a few minutes he lost his ability to keep a straight face, and burst out laughing.

“See? Fliers can have fun.”

“There’s not much time for that. And it’s nap time. What’s your question?”

“Chelo told me that you told her you’re a protector. What did you mean by that?”

By the way he sighed, I could tell he was hoping for a different question. But I knew he’d answer. I stood as quietly as I could, waiting. Fliers valued quiet and patience. I had to count to ten over and over in my head to keep looking patient.

“All right. This is going to take some education. It’s a longer answer than you bargained for. Are you sure you don’t want to change your question?”

“I’m sure.”

“All right. Well, at least sit back down.”

I did. On the grass, at his feet. The sun was almost directly overhead, so his shadow and my shadow pooled around us, barely touching.

“Tell me what you understand about how fliers fit into the Five Worlds, so I know where to start.”

“Well, you’re the only humans that can fly. People come from all
over to learn from you. Marcus thinks whatever side of the war you come down on will win.” I hesitated. “I saw the first flier. A statue of her. The artist made her very beautiful.”

He didn’t react to that. He just asked another question. “What’s our relationship with Silver’s Home?”

“They made you. You need them to make more of you.”

“All right. You get the basics. So here is the rest. A lot of people love us, and many people want to be us. That’s because they want the peace we’ve made here. They . . . romanticize our lives. But they don’t understand our lives at all. They don’t know the hard choices, or how many strings others try to pull on us. We do have some freedom, but it’s very hard to keep.” He stood up and stretched his wings again. “They want things from us. Feathers. Peace. Songs and ceremonies. A place to come to get away from their own lives. They never get to stay here—we send them all back.”

“Really? All?”

“Almost all.”

“But you let some try to become fliers.”

“You’re obsessed.”

He was right. “So what do fliers need to be protected from?”

“From giving away so much of ourselves that there’s nothing left.” He watched me carefully.

“We all worked hard to help the people on Fremont. We were stronger and braver and smarter and faster. Jenna—Jenna used to have one eye and one arm, and she was the best hunter of Fremont. But they tried to kill her.”

His answering smile was soft. “So then you understand that we need to be protected from others. But why do you think we need to be protected from ourselves?”

“So you don’t kill them all?”

He nodded.

A
fter five days here, we’d starting finding patterns. At the moment, Kayleen snored quietly beside me. Something in the way the data flows worked here was soothing to her, and she’d actually started sleeping through the night again, and looked happy. Maybe too happy, and maybe that wasn’t a better problem. She didn’t feel like herself.

Caro and Jherrel stirred in their small bed against the wall, and I looked forward to them waking. Even with all the mysteries on Lopali, I loved being bound to a ball of life instead of held inside a metal shell. The children liked it, too, except that they pined for the little robots, which had followed them around on the ships.

Alicia’s voice carried from downstairs as she said good-bye to Ming and Bryan, who were up early with Liam, getting ready for a trip to Oshai. The door closed, undoubtedly after letting Alicia and Induan out into the wild to be our invisible spies. I worried about her, but I worried more and more about us as time passed here.

Kayleen rolled over and blinked sleepy eyes at me. “Good morning.”

“Yes.” The door above us opened and closed as Joseph left his room.

“Ah . . .” Kayleen whispered. “I predicted immediate emergence. The two who used to be never separated always get up at different times now. How long do you think it will be before they want separate rooms?”