“We’ve been waiting for you,” Darcy said.
“Yeah, man,” Hiram said. “We’re going to Little Earth, and you’ve gotta come.”
“Little Earth?” I asked.
“Where most of the humans choose to live,” Hiram said. “It’s an island that the Denzans gave to us after we saved their scrawny asses back in the big one.”
“I was actually thinking of checking out Keyhole Cove.”
Hiram groaned. “What’re you trying to catch fleas from some Vulpin? Hell no. Little Earth is mandatory.”
With that, he hopped up on the railing of the walkway. He balanced there easily. It was a forty-foot drop to the walkway beneath ours and probably a good mile down to the crater.
“It’s tradition with new Earthers that we race to the rail station,” Hiram declared.
“You told me you’d never had an Earth cadet before,” I replied.
“Well, tradition has to start somewhere, right?”
And with that, Hiram jumped. I raced to the edge of the walkway just in time to see him stick the landing. For a moment, I’d forgotten about our strength here. A drop like that was basically like hopping off a step stool. Hiram glanced back up at Darcy and me, let out a ridiculous whoop whoop, and started to sprint to the next railing.
Hiram was an asshole, which made me all the more inclined to chase after him and win this pointless race. Plus, I hadn’t gotten a chance to use my enhanced strength except in the confined environments of the Eastwood’s gym. I was eager to discover what I could do.
Darcy grabbed my elbow before I could start. “Hiram should’ve told you, but try not to hurt any bystanders when we race. That’ll get us in deep shit if it happens again.”
“I won’t,” I said. “Wait—again?”
In response, Darcy pulled the hat she’d given me out of my back pocket and yanked it down over my eyes.
“You’re already in last,” she said, then swept my legs out from under me and kicked me in the chest so that my body slid back to the wall. It didn’t hurt—I mean, not like it should’ve—but it definitely took me by surprise. By the time I got my bearings, Darcy was already two walkways below me.
“Cheaters,” I muttered and gave chase.
20
One of our most basic instincts as humans is to avoid falling off tall things. Each time I hurdled over a railing and took on the forty-foot drop to the landing below—arms waving, legs bicycling—my stomach curled up in a knot, and my brain screamed don’t do this, don’t do this, don’t do this.
And each time I landed—my legs feeling springy and loose, the impact barely noticeable, already gathering steam for the next jump—my body screamed go, go, go.
On Earth, I’d been a fragile creature whose ankles would’ve exploded from a drop half that size.
Not on Denza.
I was rewiring my brain, overwriting my instinct. Learning to function as a superhuman.
From the outset, it was clear that Hiram was letting us back in the race. Despite his head start, I could still see him as he finished leaping down the last few landings. He punctuated each jump with a flourish—a backflip, a midair twist, a ridiculous split where he touched his toes. He was more interested in showing off than in winning. Denzan bystanders leaped back when Hiram landed among them. Some clapped for his gymnastics, but others shot him dirty looks. Mostly, though, the locals seemed used to this kind of behavior.
Unlike Hiram, Darcy wasn’t a showboat. She didn’t waste movement, and she definitely didn’t go for style points. She skipped the landings entirely, instead leaping straight from railing to railing, sometimes landing in a handstand and slinging herself downward with power.
I couldn’t throw myself into the descent with the same reckless abandon as the other two. I jumped from each landing with a hitch of hesitation and made sure to bend my knees dramatically upon impact. When I landed near passing Denzans, they didn’t look pissed or amused—they looked worried for me.
I was only halfway down when Hiram reached the bottom, Darcy just a couple levels behind him.
Hiram landed in the midst of a circle of Denzan scholars sharing poetry. They recoiled at the disruption, but Hiram barely noticed them. He looked back at the cliff-side walkways, checking to see if I was following. Spotting me midjump, he hooted and waved. Then he saw Darcy bearing down on him and took off at a sprint.
I might have been new to Primclef, but it wasn’t difficult to find the train station. Just needed to follow the tracks to the central building twenty blocks east of the institute. There weren’t really roads here, because the Denzans didn’t have cars. They mostly walked or used electric-powered scooters or piloted airborne skiffs like the one my uncle chased us with on Earth. Even without cars and with a good amount of air traffic, the pathways to the station were pretty busy. There were multiple outdoor tea shops and restaurants, a farmers’ market, and a small park’s worth of tables where older Denzans huddled over holographic game boards. Too many obstacles down there, I figured.
Hiram seemed to relish the challenge. He bulled through pedestrians or leaped over them, shouting greetings and apologies in the same breath.
Darcy soon overtook him. She kicked Hiram’s back leg into his front leg and sent him spilling into a cart of mushrooms, the Denzan merchant’s hair flaring up in anger. She held the lead for only a few seconds before Hiram—more focused on the race now that he’d been shown up—tackled her from behind. It went on like that, the two of them pausing to wrestle every few blocks, Darcy’s dirty tricks often overcoming Hiram’s superior strength.
I wasn’t going to mess with all that.
The quickest route didn’t involve charging down a crowded street making an asshole of myself.
On the second-to-last landing, with Hiram and Darcy already brawling halfway to the train station, I waited. My shortcut was on its way.
A low-flying skiff passed overhead. I leaped up and grabbed ahold of the pyramid-shaped ship’s edge. At first, my hands slipped right off the smooth metal. My adrenaline was running high, though, and my fingertips dug in, creating little dents to hold on to.
I was sure those would buff right out.
I sailed over the streets below. The skiff was on a direct course for the busy rail station. I’d float right in, way ahead of Hiram and Darcy.
A panel on the side of the skiff buzzed down, and a Denzan woman in a high-necked dress poked her head out. One of her eyes narrowed when she spotted me.
“Human,” she said, then took a closer look at me and corrected herself. “Youngling, that behavior is quite dangerous. You’re compromising the integrity of our transport, and we’re already late for an appointment.”
A trio of Denzan children poked their heads out the window, climbing over one another to get a look. They clapped and whistled, grinning like I was some kind of superhero. I crossed my eyes at them.
“Sorry, ma’am,” I said. “I’ll drop off here.”
I hung by one arm and clicked my heels—I guess I had a little bit of the Hiram showboat in me too, at least when it came to clowning for some kids—then dropped lightly to the roof below.
My attempt at hitchhiking hadn’t been for nothing. While I was in the air, I’d made note of a route across the rooftops that would get me to the station quickly. It zigzagged a bit across the main thoroughfare, but if I stuck to the map in my head, I’d be leaping across buildings that were uniform in height, no climbing to slow me down.
Easy, right?
Leaping across rooftops. I did that now.
I bounded forward, taking the gaps between buildings easily. I wasn’t sure where Hiram and Darcy were until I felt the wall beneath me vibrate just as I was about to jump. The two of them had crashed flush into the front wall of this apartment building. The wood and stone creaked a bit, dust shaking loose.
“Oof,” Hiram grunted as Darcy pressed her forearm into his neck. “Where’s Syd?”
“You probably scared him off with all your shit t
alk,” Darcy replied.
“If he scares off that easy, then we don’t want him around,” Hiram said, shoving Darcy away from him.
I glanced back the way the two of them had come. They’d left a bit of a mess in their wake—overturned tables and carts, some Denzans brushing themselves off after getting knocked over.
I wasn’t sure this was the best example for human-Denzan relations, but then I wasn’t from here. Hiram and Darcy were. If they treated Primclef like a playground, who was I to argue?
On my next jump, my shadow must have been caught in one of the streetlamps, because I heard Darcy shriek from below, “He’s above us!”
“Damn!” Hiram bellowed. “That’s the kind of cheap shit you would pull, Darcy.”
Now that they were onto me, I needed to haul ass. The two of them scrabbled up a wall, and soon their footfalls were pounding behind me. I could tell Hiram was gaining because he insisted on screaming bloody murder every time he made a simple jump from one rooftop to the next. I tried to push myself into another gear, but they were both faster than me.
Hiram pulled even beside me. “Hiya,” he said, grinning.
I sucked in a breath and tried to surge forward.
He face-palmed me with enough force to send me flying off the roof.
Not going to lie—I wailed like a banshee going down. I hit the ground on the back of my head, bounced, and skidded about ten feet on my shoulder.
It hurt. I can’t say it didn’t hurt. But falling off a building and landing on my head shouldn’t have hurt—it should’ve killed me. I was lightly stunned, at worst. I reached around to touch the back of my head. There was no blood, not even any swelling. Maybe what stung the most were my cheekbones where Hiram had shoved my face.
We were only a block away from the train station at that point. Darcy finished at a sprint across the rooftops, but Hiram bounded down to street level to help me up.
“Didn’t hurt you, did I?” he asked, gruffly brushing me off. “I’m never sure how far is too far with you halfies.”
“Yeah, chucking me off a roof was maybe too far,” I said. I should’ve been pissed off, but that didn’t come through in my tone. I was laughing. Giddy. Hiram grabbed my shoulders and shook me.
“I love that look in your eye. It’s really sinking in now that we’re off the ship, isn’t it?” he asked. “Fucking invincible, pal. It rules.”
Darcy was waiting for us aboard the train. The interior was designed a lot like the Eastwood—soft lighting, wood paneling, plush private seating compartments. I followed them down the aisle until they picked out an empty booth and piled in on one side.
I glanced over my shoulder. “Don’t we need to pay for a ticket?”
Hiram snorted. “I always forget, they charge for everything on Earth, don’t they? You sound like my grandpa. He grew up in someplace called Detroit. He’s always worrying about how much things cost even though everything on Denza is free.”
“Don’t listen to him. Everything is not free,” Darcy said.
“I’ll let you in on a little secret,” Hiram said, leaning into my space as soon as I sat down across from him. “They love us here. Forget those fish-dicks at the spaceport this morning. They’re like a tiny minority. Most Denzans worship the ground we walk on.”
Darcy crossed her arms and slouched in her seat, frowning but not contradicting Hiram.
“That lady whose mushroom cart you wrecked didn’t seem happy to see you,” I said.
Hiram snorted. “Man, she’ll go home and tell her husband about how lucky she got. I’m telling you, I can walk into any food hall in this city and they’ll be lining up to serve me. Our species saved this whole planet. It’s a debt they can’t repay.”
Our train started to move, zooming forward like a bullet, yet the ride was completely smooth and soundless, the tracks curving across a series of columns that rose up out of the ocean. The water was tinted purple right now, one of the moons blotting out the sun, but we were riding right into a panel of shimmering light, speeding straight out of the eclipse.
A uniformed Denzan woman appeared at our compartment. Darcy refused to look up at her. “Greetings. May I offer any of you a complimentary beverage or a hot towel?”
“Fuck yes, hot towel, please,” Hiram said. He draped the towel around his neck. “Is the snack car open?”
“Yes, sir,” the attendant replied, proceeding on her route.
“Watch,” Hiram said to me, standing up. “I’m going to come back with so many free salty-doughs, you’re going to shit.”
I doubted that I would shit, no matter how much free food Hiram scavenged from charitable Denzans, but I flashed him an encouraging smile. It’d be a relief to be without Hiram for a few minutes.
Once he was gone, Darcy and I were quiet. She thumbed her lip, blatantly staring at me. I could tell there was something she wanted to ask me.
“Your dad was Denzan,” she finally said.
“Is Denzan,” I corrected. “Yeah.”
“He’s the one whose cosmological tether you’re carrying around.”
I touched the chest pocket of my uniform. Everyone on the crew had seen my confrontation with Arkell. There was no point in lying.
“Yeah.”
Darcy nodded thoughtfully. I expected her to ask something about my accident with the Wayscope or the run-in with the Etherazi. She was sharp and observant; I thought maybe she’d push back on the story Captain Reno and the others were feeding her.
“Do you think he loved you and your mom?” she asked instead.
I blinked. “What?”
She looked away. “Nothing. It’s stupid. Never mind.”
“No, it’s not—you just caught me off guard,” I replied. “I mean, I didn’t really get to know him. I was young when he left. But from everything I remember and the stuff my mom told me . . . yeah. He’s my dad, right?”
“My mom was in the Merciful Rampart,” Darcy replied quietly. “I was her assignment.”
I squinted. “What does that mean?”
“They aren’t all geeks like those ones being all polite at the spaceport,” Darcy said sharply. “They think humans are brutes and savages. That we’ll try to take over someday. They think hybrids like you and me are Denza’s only hope. Human in body, but Denzan in mind. They want to breed ones like us to fight off the other humans if they ever get out of line.”
I took a deep breath. That was the most I’d ever heard Darcy speak at once, and it was a lot. Heavy shit. No wonder she stalked around like a living storm cloud all the time. I couldn’t help but see a parallel between the Merciful Rampart using hybrids to protect their planet and my mom wanting to bring enhanced humans back to Earth to save ours.
I struggled to find the right words. “That’s fucked up, Darcy. But, uh, just because her politics are weird doesn’t mean your mom doesn’t—”
“I don’t need your reassurance,” she snapped. “I just wanted you to know. In case your dad’s the same way. He could be, you know.”
I swallowed. Knowing what I did about my dad—how hard he’d researched a cure for the Wasting, how he was down with my mom’s plan for world domination—I kind of doubted he was a double agent for the Merciful Rampart. But I couldn’t tell Darcy all that.
Hiram came back a few seconds later. Empty-handed.
“The snacks sucked,” he pouted.
I sighed and looked out the window.
It was a forty-five-minute ride to Little Earth, our train stopping at five other island hubs on the way north to the equatorial island. Hiram spent most of the time complaining about the classes he was taking, then started grilling me about the ones I’d signed up for.
“You’re never going to get in shape if you don’t spar with other humans,” Hiram said, shaking his head. “Come on. Join my judo class.”
“I did sign up for a class on the Etherazi war with a guy named Rafe Butler,” I said, trying to change the subject. “Do you know him?”
“That’
s my grandpa,” Hiram said. “He was one of the First Twelve, like yours. You knew that, right?”
I played dumb and shook my head.
“Damn,” Hiram said. “I thought everybody knew Grandpa. Even backwater Earthlings.”
Darcy smirked at me. “You signed up for Propaganda 101? Without the Chef even asking?”
“The Chef?”
Hiram slouched in his seat; it was the first time I’d seen him look embarrassed. “Grandpa teaches that same class every semester. Tells the same old war stories. Says it’s good to remind the Denzans what we did for them. He expects every human who comes to the institute to take it.”
“You didn’t have to take it,” Darcy said to Hiram.
“Please, do you know how many times I’ve heard about the time he killed an Etherazi with the legs of his Battle-Anchor malfunctioning? It’s like every weekend for me.” Hiram slapped my knee. “He’s going to love that you signed up, though. He would definitely have tried to twist your arm.”
Darcy elbowed him. “We didn’t tell him he’s supposed to meet the Chef.”
Hiram snapped his fingers. “Oh, right. So, this isn’t totally a spontaneous hangout. We were asked to bring you to Little Earth so that Grandpa could get a look at you. Size you up.”
I leaned back in my seat. The island was coming into view now, our train zipping around a curling reef of neon coral, silver-beaked birds taking flight as we scared them off their roost. From our upraised perspective, I had a good look at Little Earth. The buildings on the island lacked the precision of Denzan city planning, that mathematical strictness that was like a balm to my half-Denzan brain. Instead, the island looked like the suburban sprawl of Earth, as if the first buildings had gone up without any foresight, then bigger ones followed with no thought to the skyline, then others randomly set farther away, all this connected by circuitous roads. It was a bit like being home again.
“What does he want with me?” I asked, turning back to Hiram and Darcy.
Hiram shrugged. “Grandpa is friends with everybody. It’s a little ridiculous.”
“He runs things here,” Darcy added. “For humans, at least. He’s like a mayor. If you’ve got a problem, you visit the Chef.”
Ashfall Legacy Page 18
