Authors: Brenda Cooper
Kayleen smiled, her face soft. “Me, too. I’m happy for the few minutes of rest.”
Of course she was. She’d had no break since we almost lost her. I had a map in my memory: Charmed wasn’t far; as close to Oshai as SoBright, but more of a tourist destination. We needed to start soon, or risk Lushia or whatever Star Mercenary was after us this time.
Finally, one of the two fliers who had chased Seeyan off landed right behind Matriana and Daniel, the look on her face drawing us to our feet. She had black feathers with a few orange highlights on the tips, and matching highlights in her short hair. She gasped for breath.
“What happened?” Matriana asked.
“Chelo . . . we saw her.” Gasp. “She’s with the bigman with the knives for nails.” She stopped for a few breaths. “He . . . he killed her.”
What? No!
“Killed Seeyan. Seeyan’s dead.” Her eyes closed slowly, and then opened again, still slowly. “Her neck broke. She has flier bones; she didn’t stand a chance.” She looked as if she were trying hard not to cry.
“Where are they now?” Daniel asked.
“Coming. Following Atoni.”
That must be the other flier. “What direction? Can you take us there?”
“No.” It was a command from Marcus. “Wait. Let them come to us. Let’s get the wings out.”
Wrong answer. “I want to go to her.”
He just stared at me.
“Why fly anyway? It has to be more conspicuous.”
“Most of the people trying to hurt us aren’t fliers. We should be able to avoid them.”
I wanted to knock him aside and race down the road to find Chelo. Of course, he was right. He was always right. The strategist as well as the Maker. I gritted my teeth and started pulling wings carefully out of the four-wheeler. What had the flier meant? Bryan—she had to have been referring to Bryan. How could he have killed Seeyan? I understood what the flier had said, had been deep in the sims and knew how fragile they were, but that didn’t really help me understand.
I just couldn’t see it. Her dead, or Bryan killing her.
We pulled a dozen pairs of wings out of the vehicle, one after another, so many it didn’t look as if they could have fit inside. I smiled when I saw Stark had included a set of power-assisted wings for Bryan. The efficient assistant. Just as I rested the last pair on the ground, Sasha whined, nearly drowning out the footsteps and wing beats that announced the arrival of a storm of our people. Chelo came first, racing right into my arms. She smelled of sweat and tears and of herself, and I breathed against her skin and clutched her to me, happy to hear her heart beating.
Kayleen flew past me and Chelo, heading straight for Paloma, who
was flanked by Jenna and Tiala. They ran one on each side of her, with Dianne close behind, so the three women had her cupped. As Paloma swung around in Kayleen’s embrace, tears glistened as the sun touched her cheeks.
I ran my fingers down Chelo’s cheeks. They were damp, too. She ran her hands through my short hair. “You cut it.”
“Induan cut it. Part of a disguise.”
The flier landed, a man with white wings spangled with small black spots, like a peppered egg. Atoni.
Bryan and Ming seemed stuck together, both of their faces hard to read but Bryan’s eyes angry and shocked all at once. Marcus stopped them, firing questions I couldn’t quite hear, and didn’t really care about. “Where’s Alicia?” I whispered. “Where is she?”
Chelo pushed back from me, and ran the backs of her hands along her cheeks to dry them. “She went with the fliers.”
“Who? Tsawo?”
“A gray flier. Gray wings, gray eyes. And a bright red flier girl, might be young. She’s small, anyway. I didn’t get their names.”
“We’re leaving,” I whispered. “We’re leaving Lopali.”
“What about the babies? Liam?”
“They’re coming.” They had to be. “With a man named Stark, maybe. Anyway, with someone.”
Her features hardened for a moment. “They better be safe.” She let go of me and went to Kayleen and Paloma, talking to them in low tones. I looked around for followers. Surely there would be some.
Nothing. Not yet, anyway.
Marcus must have had the same thought. “Come on. We have a lot of flying to do. We’ll have to go around Oshai.”
Dianne put a hand on his arm and whispered in his ear.
He leaned down to listen to her, and a frustrated look crossed his face. When he stood his message had changed. “Get them food and water. Ten minutes and we need to go.”
Of course. They’d been captives.
Their stories unfolded as we fed them. As I learned about Seeyan betraying Chelo, and Juss being a bad guy, I had to work at it not to be glad Seeyan was dead. Except I’d liked her, and I guess sometimes the people you like aren’t what they seem. Like this whole planet.
We each selected wings. One set lay out on the ground unclaimed. Alicia’s wings.
No one knew where Alicia had been taken. The women who had been imprisoned with her mostly thought she’d gone of her own accord; not a prisoner at all. Enough seemed sure she wasn’t still in the compound to keep me from wanting to stay here.
Would she have left me of her own accord? A hole seeped into my body, the one she filled when we were close, when her head rested against my chest and we talked.
I was angry with Alicia and the gray flier, and mad at her for the gray flier, and I missed her.
I strapped my wings onto my biceps. As I fastened the chest belt, Sasha gave out a forlorn whimper, and I remembered she couldn’t fly.
I knelt down. With my wings serving as balance, I kissed her wet, dark nose and whispered, “Run along with us. I’ll carry extra water for you. I can’t fly fast anyway.” I wasn’t willing to leave her here, not after I’d brought her all the way from Fremont.
She was a normal dog from home, with no enhancement at all, but she understood me. She licked my face and sat, her head cocked to one side, so she appeared to be listening for something. She was so patient and steady, so true. “Sash,” I said to her, “you’re my role model.”
She merely cocked her head to the other side.
Chelo came up beside me. She had been crying. “Help me look out for Bryan.”
I couldn’t hold her because we both wore wings. “Of course. Did he really kill Seeyan?”
She nodded miserably. “He didn’t mean to, and he hates it. It’s hurting him. I thought . . . maybe . . . maybe you had a similar . . . you could help him.”
I could. “As soon as we get away safely. There’s not time now.”
“I know. Thanks.”
“Let’s go!” Marcus called out. “Matriana and Daniel will lead. Then Chelo and Joseph, then Kayleen and Paloma, Jenna and Tiala, Bryan and Ming, and then me.”
We went, following his order. Matriana and Daniel stayed really low through town, flying straight back the way we’d driven in.
The other two fliers, Atoni and the woman with black-and-orange wings, flew high above us all, as if watching for unexpected threats.
Sasha flowed along the ground below us, running all out. It was harder for her—we could fly straight and she had to go up and down the hills, and sometimes, around obstacles. I’d have to fly slower if she was going to make it. I might have counted on Seeyan to help me before, like she’d brought Sasha to the cave, and the thought made me bobble and lose altitude so fast Chelo yelled at me. When I got straightened back out, flying at the right level and beside my sister again, my dog had fallen behind. I thought I saw her topping a rise of hill behind me, and below the last of our group, but I couldn’t be sure. It was too hard to look backward and fly frontward all at once.
We left the city behind and flew over open fields, our path keeping us from roads. Here, Matriana and Daniel led us higher in the air, and more fliers came in to join us, one by one by two by one. Soon we had an escort of twenty or thirty, which wasn’t exactly a way to avoid attention.
Maybe
. My thought felt bitter.
Maybe Marcus was making this into a story to spin for the world and he needed visuals.
We flew over an hour before Marcus called a halt. The whole crowd of us landed by a copse of trees near an open field, and three Keepers jogged out of the trees and gave us water and nut-buttered bread and fruit, hand-feeding us so we didn’t have to take off our wings. The man who fed me and Chelo kept his head down, and his hands shook. He had a huge smile the few times he let us see it, a clue the shaking was more from pleasure than from fear. As he left he said, “Bless you. Bless you all.”
Chelo and I looked at each other, and her eyes looked like I felt—like she was caught up in some strange dream and that the dream itched. We didn’t talk about it, but just checked the buckles and straps on our wings. I watched for Sasha, hoping to see her bound up over a rise, ears flapping.
She didn’t show.
My shoulders felt the strain by the time we finally got close to Charmed, and I had fallen farther to the back. Chelo flew next to me. Kayleen looped back and forth between us and Paloma. Marcus had the rear, with at least four or five of our ever-growing escort. I couldn’t really be sure how many were behind, but when I’d last
counted the escort it had grown to over thirty, plus the eleven of us. Bryan and Ming were in the front, Bryan looking almost graceful in his power-assisted wings.
Charmed’s spaceport looked a lot like the one at Oshai, complete with cargo vehicles and a ring of perch-trees. Sunshine gleamed on two of the most elegant deep-space ships I’d ever seen. They stole my own attention from my aching shoulders and lower back. Both were tall and slender, one twice the size of the other. Something about them spoke of the joy of flying, although I couldn’t have identified what piece of the design gave it such elegance if I’d been asked directly. The smaller one was the same class of ship as
Creator
, and the bigger could have held our group ten times over. Its sleek exterior suggested it hadn’t ever dirtied itself carrying much cargo. Probably we were going to take the bigger one.
To test, I let myself sip the spaceport’s data. Flier ships. I couldn’t wait to get in one and see the details.
The fliers at the front of our group pulled up, gaining height. Making room for us to go in and land by the ships? I glanced toward Marcus, hoping for a clue as to which ship, so I could make sure I had the right trajectory. He was too far away for me to see the expression on his face.
More fliers rose from the perch-trees. Ten, twenty, thirty.
They were beautiful, flying up into the late morning sun. They rose, and rose, and rose.
Our escort rose with them.
More fliers leapt off the perch-trees. Seven waves of ten or fifteen each.
Too many.
Marcus figured it out at the same time I did.
Joseph!
he screamed inside my mind.
Get down. Land. Protect yourself
.
Kayleen’s voice,
No!
The fliers from the spaceport were heading toward us all, mixing with our vanguard already.
Get down!
Marcus repeated.
Fliers weren’t supposed to use weapons.
Bryan and Ming were already surrounded. They still flew forward, and the other fliers hadn’t struck them or anything, but they flew very
close to each other, and close to Bryan and Ming, closer than any of
us
would dare fly to each other. Among them, I spotted the blond woman with the blue dots on her wings, which made me snarl.
I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like a few of our fliers were circling outside the group that surrounded Bryan and Ming. It looked more like a ball of waving color in the sky, maybe a huge seething kite, than a bunch of winged ones surrounding a wingless.
What do they want?
I needed to know.
To make you land,
said Marcus.
So you want me to land?
If they make you fall, you’ll die.
Kayleen? What should we do?
She felt unusually calm, like the girl we’d pulled back from the nearly dead.
I’m going to go tell Mom to land, then I’ll go down.
Smart. Luckily, Paloma was close ahead. Kayleen added length to her wing beats and left me behind. I looked for Chelo, found her on my right. I turned and flew toward her.
Stay separate!
Marcus commanded.
Make them work harder.
Groups of fliers converged on each other in front of me. Except for wings I recognized, like Daniel’s orange and Matriana’s silvery white and gold, I couldn’t tell who was on our side and who wasn’t. A large group headed toward me and Chelo. “Down!” I yelled.
She nodded and immediately began to slow and spiral toward the ground. Half the group of fliers heading toward us went down after her, the other kept chasing toward me.
None of us, not even Kayleen, could outfly a real flier.
I took another quick look around. Everyone else was too far ahead, already engulfed in the strange wings.
Marcus, loud, insistent, fear lacing his sending.
Down. Down before you die. They’re trying to stop you. They won’t use weapons. Hold onto your balance.
Huh?
Then the wind of the other fliers surrounded me. A man with dark hair and angry brown eyes flew in my face, swooping past me, beating his wings hard; the wind lifted my right wing. Another blast of wind from an enemy I couldn’t see drove my left wing down.
Two more fliers did the same thing, and then two more, and I bobbled seriously, tilting sideways to the ground.
I couldn’t watch out for anyone anymore. I focused on my wings, on my posture, on swinging my feet down and starting the right downbeats to land, although I was way too high. Tsawo’s voice played in my head from an early lesson. “If you have to fall, sacrifice your feet. You can get new feet, no one can make you a new head.” Tsawo was like that, literal and dry.
Three fliers came so close to me I slowed lest I hit them. A near-stall. Fear gave me the power to go again, forward now, no ideas about landing yet, just getting away.
I didn’t know where to go. Everywhere I saw wings. Blue wings and black wings and bruised purple wings. Even a pair of white wings, white as summer clouds, trying to knock me out of the sky.