by E. E. Giorgi
“Don’t drop the camera in the water, you fool!”
“He can’t hear you,” Lukas points out.
I groan. “Always so sensible, are you?”
And then Kael lifts off again, the river growing smaller before my one eye. The cliffs loom in the distance now, and the forest gets smaller and smaller at the edge of my vision.
Here we go, I think. Now he’s getting into unknown territory.
I spot the black scar of the gorge that splits the mesa in two. Kael lowers and follows it, a flat horizon opening ahead, smeared by yellow smoke. Tied to his right ankle, my eye swings at the rhythm of his powerful wings. At times he sinks even lower, making me cringe at the sight of pointy shrubs and rocks coming at me. But then he catches another thermal and rises again, and the view of black trees shimmering in the moonlight becomes mesmerizing.
“One mile in,” Lukas says.
I’m too focused on my missing eye to see what he’s doing, but I can picture him next to me with his legs crossed and the data feeder on his lap. “Are you recording everything?” I ask.
“Sure thing.”
“Detecting anything?”
“No radio transmissions so far.”
No signs of life, whether artificial or not, I translate in my head. So far, Kael’s flight has been steady and uneventful, the only exception the occasional dips that make my stomach squirm. The mesa seems plain from above, covered by shrubs and the occasional tree. I spot a swift movement and suddenly a pack of rats bursts from a shrub and scatters in all directions. Kael seems distracted by the movement. He wavers but then presses on. The smoke on the horizon becomes thicker and yellower. Down below, the black scar of the gorge widens.
“Five miles in,” Lukas announces.
The movement becomes a lull, the sight before my eyes so monotonous it disorients me. Every now and then I ask Lukas if he’s detected anything. He shakes his head, tells me how many minutes in flight. We get past the ten-mile mark and Kael’s still resiliently flying forward. At some point I doze off, victim of Kael’s hypnotic swaying. The mesa keeps careening before me as if it were a short movie looping over and over again: the same rocks, the same trees, the same gorge zigzagging through the land like an open wound.
When Lukas speaks again, I realize I’ve been dreaming. The landscape below has changed dramatically. There’s smoke everywhere, thick and yellow. Kael’s flight is more erratic now, as he jerks in and out of dense patches of fog.
“Twenty miles in and I’m detecting something now …”
“Twenty?” I drawl. “Wow, that last stretch went fa—Whoa!” Kael makes a sudden dip then jerks to the right. His wings feel unstable and I find myself wobbling and swaying with him. I want to throw up yet the adrenaline rush has me glued to the ground, watching through my right eye. The smoke is much thicker now, so thick I can’t see where Kael’s going. A flash and Kael swerves again. Something zips past my field of vision.
“Bullets!” I yell. “Damn, he’s being shot!”
“He’s getting to the end of the gorge!”
“The hell with the gorge, did you not see the bullets?”
“Yes. Sniper droids. But the gorge—”
“Damn it, Lukas, they’re gonna kill him! Since when do the Gaijins’ sniper droids open fire on animals?”
“Maybe… I think the transmitter gave him away.”
I jump to my feet but can’t hold my balance because the ground below me is tilting. I stagger and hold onto the wall, realizing there’s absolutely nothing I can do to get Kael out of trouble.
“On the plus side,” Lukas says, “I’ve registered the droid’s position.”
“You don’t get it, Lukas,” I say, failing to convey my enthusiasm at the news. “If Kael gets killed, there is no plus side to this.”
Kael on the other hand—my beautiful, brave Kael—keeps pushing forward despite the attack. He rides a thermal up, putting greater distance between him and the bullets.
Good boy, Kael, I think. Good boy. Now come back. Please come back.
The smoke gradually dissipates, and tall, wide towers emerge through the mist. The yellow glow shapes into a grid of lights delineating a network of pipes and metal scaffolding. Kael circles around the towers. He dodges a thick column of smoke, and suddenly I see it, the mouth where it all comes out from, like an open volcano, except it’s made of cement.
“Lukas,” I whisper, my hands flat on the floor as if they could actually steady me. “Do you see what I see?”
“Holy smokes,” Lukas says. “It’s a factory! The Gaijins built a factory on the other side of the mesa! No wonder the fire would never stop burning.”
Dad’s in trouble, I think. It’s just a fleeting thought and I really don’t know where it comes from, yet as Kael surveys the place, I instantly know I have to go there.
“Kael should turn around, now,” I say, willing Kael to return even though that’s not what I taught him in training. I wish I could take it back now that I see the danger I’ve put him through.
“Let me get a sense of how big the place is. Right now he’s flown twenty-two miles from the Tower and I’ve got five sniper droids scattered mostly within a two-mile radius of the factory.”
“Five?” Crap. And the distance to the firewall—the factory—is farther into the mesa than we’d originally thought.
Kael emerges out of the smoke and the factory comes into full view, its metal skeleton traced by blue and yellow lights dotting the night. I hold my breath, struck by how huge the whole structure is, a city sprawling along the brim of the mesa.
“Wow,” Lukas whispers.
“It’s enormous,” I say.
Another jerk and this time Kael dips down and dodges the metal fence by a hair while circling the perimeter of the factory. I see flashes coming in rapid succession. I can almost hear them in my head even though only my eye is there with Kael, not my ears. Yet I feel the pain and the screeches and I can’t help but scream, “Get outta there Kael, now!”
Kael is wounded, I know because he’s struggling to take off again.
Come on, buddy. Come back, come back!
“We’ve got to get him back!” I say, struggling to stand up. “We can’t just stay here and watch.”
Lukas blinks. “But we…”
I can’t keep my balance with one eye dangling off Kael’s ankle, so I turn it off then regret losing the connection and turn it on again. And as I stand there, my thoughts reeling, unsure of what to do, I hear steps at the other end of the floor. And a mew.
“Athel?”
Ash comes trotting to me and rubs his side against my legs, purring.
I squint at the silhouette emerging from the darkness. “Dottie! How did you—?”
“Ash woke me up,” Akaela says. “You weren’t in bed, and when I leaned out the window I heard screaming.”
My attention strays back to the images from my right eye: I see branches snapping and droplets of blood. Kael’s hopping on the ground now, my eyeball bouncing off a rugged terrain covered in twigs and dead leaves.
What the hell is he doing? Why can’t he take off again?
And then, just like that, Kael flaps his wings and he’s airborne again, snapping off branches as he frees himself from the shrub he’s fallen into. He’s swallowed by smoke again. Below, the lights of the humongous factory grow smaller, the smoke thicker, and it all fades away as if it were a bad dream. I push the control key on my arm flap and my vision shifts back to my other eye. The empty darkness of the sixtieth floor of the Tower envelops me. Lukas is still sitting on the ground, his legs crossed and his data feeder on his knees, and Akaela is staring at me, eyes bulging and alarmed.
It wasn’t a dream.
There’s a factory out there and it’s as big as a city.
Dad is in danger.
Chapter Nine
Akaela
My brother’s an idiot. Had I known what he was putting Kael through I would’ve stopped him. What was he thinking,
sending him out into unknown Gaijin land, at the mercy of sniper droids? I don’t care that the firewall turned out to be a factory. I don’t care that Lukas now has a map and we can use it to go find Dad. I would’ve gone to find Dad anyways. It’s Kael I want back now.
Alive and unharmed.
I’m so mad I want to punch Athel in the face except I’m dead worried about Kael that I can’t waste any time with him. As much as I have no fear for myself, I can’t stop worrying for the beings I care for, and Kael’s one of them. I run to the open ledge, ready to jump into the night. Athel tugs my shirt and pulls me back.
“Don’t do anything stupid, Dottie,” Athel says. “There’s no way you can cover twenty miles with your glider alone. We need a plan, let’s think first.”
He stares at me with one eye, his right lid caving in over an empty orb. The sight makes me cringe and seethe at the same time. “You’re the one who did something stupid, Athel,” I snap. “What the heck were you two thinking, sending Kael out there?” I stretch my hand out and raise a finger to scan the direction of the winds. I know it’s dangerous to jump from the Tower, especially on a flat night like this one. After blowing ashes all day, the wind has finally died out. Without enough lift, I could slam back against the wall. It’s not my own safety that concerns me, but Kael’s. If I can’t ride the air current on my first jump, chances are I damage the glider and waste even more time.
Athel doesn’t let go of me. “We have a map to the factory now. We can go rescue Dad and the other men. Kael showed us the way, and it’s all recorded on Lukas’s data feeder.”
I scowl. “What makes you think Dad’s not coming back? Every time Mom asks Tahari, he says he’s been sending regular updates…”
“I don’t trust Tahari,” Athel says with a fierceness I’ve never seen in my brother before. “I don’t trust anyone. Dad’s in danger. What I saw while Kael was flying over the factory… you have to see it, Akaela! That thing is immense, guarded by sniper droids. We need to act now.”
Ash comes mewing at my feet. He senses the tension between Athel and me, and he doesn’t like it. I want to jump. I’m mad at my brother and I just want to go get Kael. But I know that jumping with no wind would get me nowhere. I step away from the ledge and pick up Ash.
Without ungluing his eyes from the screen of his data feeder, Lukas gets on his feet. “Uh—guys? Kael’s flying back,” Lukas says. “He’s back over the mesa.”
“Let me see!” I say.
We spend the next two hours cheering Kael back home and plotting out a plan to get back to the factory. Lukas shows us the map he’s been able to reconstruct from the video recording through Athel’s eye. He claims the factory extends at least two miles out from the bottom of the mesa and it’s at least another two miles long, with sniper droids posted along the perimeter.
“What about the gorge? Do you think they might be deployed along the gorge, too?” Athel asks.
“Hard to tell,” Lukas says. “Kael followed the line of the gorge but never went down. If they have radars or transmitter detectors they would’ve seen him, but it could be that he was too far.”
Ash climbs up my shoulder and plays with my hair. I watch Athel close one eye and check on Kael’s progress.
“How’s he doing?” I ask.
“He’s tired,” Athel murmurs. “He’s slowed down quite a bit.”
I want to snarl at him again but I hear the regret in Athel’s voice and for once I keep my mouth shut. “I can try and glide over the gorge as a look-out.”
Athel rolls his one eye. “We’ve been over this already. You know you can’t glide that far. We’ll take Kael with us.”
“And risk getting him shot again? No way.”
Lukas taps on his data feeder, taking notes. “We’ll need to bring equipment,” he points out. “First-aid kits and tool boxes. You guys, maybe we should tell one of the adults—”
“No,” Athel interjects. “The adults do whatever the Kiva Members tell them. Their instructions were clear: they sent off the ambassadors and ordered the rest of us to sit and wait.”
“Ow.” Ash is pulling my hair. I gently bring him down to my lap, but he climbs up again. “How do you know all this?” I ask Athel.
“I eavesdrop on them. I have a way.”
“You never told me!”
“That’s because you’ve got a big mouth!”
We start bickering again. “You guys,” Lukas interrupts us. “Kael’s almost here.”
I turn toward the broken walls. The vines sway gently and beyond them the faint light of dawn peeks through.
“He’s over the waterfall now,” Lukas informs us, following Kael’s path on his data feeder.
Both Athel and I run to the ledge. Athel activates his right eye and whistles, stretching out his gloved arm. I cup my hands around my mouth to call him, but Athel stops me.
“You’ll wake up people!” he says.
All windows in the Tower have turned into open holes, the last glass panes shattered during the Gaijins’ bombardment, the year I was born. Temperatures haven’t dropped below zero in decades, so the only problem having open windows causes is lack of privacy. Athel is right. I bite my tongue and squeeze Ash to my chest, eager to spot Kael’s black silhouette gliding toward us.
The rim of smoke blanketing the horizon turns pink, the night quickly fading away.
“I see him!” I shout.
As the nascent light turns the sky red, the outline of Kael’s tired wings makes its way toward the Tower, slowly growing bigger and bigger. I jump up and down in excitement. Concerned, Athel pulls me away from the ledge. Ash wriggles away from my clasp, which is okay, because now I can open my arms wide to greet Kael back.
“Kael!” Athel whispers, raising his arm.
Kael approaches and my excitement turns into anguish. His left eye is covered in crusted blood and two of his left talons are gone. He veers to the Tower and lands, letting out a long squeal of distress. Athel and I jump on him and hug him, cooing and crooning as if he were our baby. Athel is so happy to see the falcon back that he even forgets about his eye still dangling from Kaels’ right ankle.
Kael hops and trips. He looks at us with his one eye, his beak hanging open as if to ask, Why? Tears roll down my cheeks.
“Darn it, he’s a mess,” Athel says.
“We should take him to Uli,” Lukas mutters.
I pick up Kael and examine his wounds. I’m not sure if he lost one eye, but two of his left talons are gone for sure, cleanly severed at the junction.
“Oh, baby,” I murmur, checking his other foot. The makeshift camera is still attached to the ankle, but there’s something else stuck between Kaels right talons.
Athel scolds Lukas for even mentioning Uli. “How are we going to explain this?”
“What? You’re gonna risk him getting an infection?” I say, trying to pry the small object from Kael’s talons.
Lukas gets to his feet. “In case you haven’t noticed, the sun’s almost out. If we don’t get back now, we’ll have a lot more to explain than just an injured bird.”
Athel stoops down to pick up Kael. I look up at him, my fingers clasped around the tiny object I just retrieved from his talons. My brother peers at me and frowns.
“What is it?” he asks.
I swallow, words failing me. “Dad,” I whisper, and show him the flap of metal Kael has brought back. There’s a serial number engraved on one side, Z1633, one I’ve memorized a long time ago. One edge is chipped and covered in dirt. And as I brush my finger along the broken edge, the crust of dirt breaks into fine flakes that waver down to the floor.
Fine red flakes.
Dried blood.
Dad’s serial number encrusted in blood.
Athel was right. Dad is in danger.
Chapter Ten
Athel
Day Number: 1,532
Event: We now have a map, but we need a plan.
Number of Mayakes left: 431.
Goal for
today: Meet at the stables and discuss a plan.
Kael’s head flops to the side and his legs give out. Uli lays him on a white sheet of paper and feels his heart.
“He’s fine,” he says, “but he ate half his battery life.” He slides two fingers under the scapular feathers at the top of the right wing and inserts the TCB charger into Kael’s port. “The eye should recover in a couple of weeks. The two missing talons on the left foot sadly won’t grow back. But I’ll disinfect his wounds and increase the antibiotic release through his implants to avoid an infection.” He drops his chin and stares at us. “Are you two going to tell me what happened to him?”
Akaela and I exchange a glance. “He came back like that this morning,” I say, before my sister has a chance to reply. I rub my right eye and blink.
“And what happened to your eye?” Uli asks.
Damn, why am I so bad at hiding things?
“Nothing,” I say, and rub it some more.
We’ve rushed Kael down to Uli with no time to fix my eye. I plucked it out of the makeshift camera right before leaving the sixtieth floor and popped it back into my socket. Lukas promised to meet me as soon as I’m done with Kael so he can solder back the wiring. In the meantime, the eyeball keeps moving in its socket and I can’t refrain from rubbing it.
“Will Kael be ok?” Akaela asks.
Uli examines Kael’s left foot, where two of his talons went missing. “The implant should prevent him from getting an infection. I wonder what happened to him. This doesn’t look like an animal attack.” He stares at the two of us, both sitting back-to-back on a recharging chair looking as innocent as we possibly can.
Which is not a whole lot.
I know Akaela is dying to tell Uli the whole truth, especially about the piece of metal with Dad’s serial number on it. Lukas examined it and, with his usual lack of empathy, stated that the piece of metal came from the shoulder socket of Dad’s robotic arm. He explained that shoulder sockets are connected to the bone through reinnervated nerves, and therefore the piece of metal couldn’t have come off naturally. So yes, something bad happened and our fathers are likely in danger, Lukas concluded. And then, as he handed us back the piece of metal, I saw a little emotion twinkle in his eyes.
