by James Bow
Then, below me, Isaac’s chute caught fire. It ripped open from the centre like petals falling off a flower. And then Isaac fell, his body alight. He hit shadow like a shooting star.
The air was so hot my lungs refused it, making me choke and gasp. I could smell my hair singeing away. Below, the veil of shadow was closer, but I wasn’t falling quickly enough. I had forgotten to count. I had pulled the chute too soon. And now I was going to roast to death.
Of my brother, there was no sign.
Isaac. He had always led the way. I curled up, burning under the smouldering chute, and hoped I would follow him soon.
* * *
“Simon?”
A voice pulled on me like a cord. I woke from dreams of pain into soft white. The fog, I thought. I’d fallen into the fog. No. I was looking at a mottled white ceiling. It drifted above me.
“He has his eyes open. Simon, are you with us?
Monitors. Hospital smell. Out the window, the triangles and diamonds of the cables. Iapyx. My city. Workers were adding mylar and polishing the mirrors. My addled mind saw this and recognized the early preparations for Solar Maximum. That added to my confusion. How long had I been out?
I tried to turn to the voice, but when I did, my skin crackled with pain. It felt stiff. Plastic. My hands were curled into claws.
“Take it easy, Simon,” said the voice. “The skin grafts will make it hard to move.”
Skin grafts?
“Rachel?” There was a raspy sound that I could hardly believe was my voice.
“Simon!” Her face swung over me. The constellation of her features swam: the blond hair coiled in its snood, the freckles, the beauty mark star at the corner of her jawbone. The just-slightly crooked nose. Those eyes … In the hollow of her throat, the betrothal charm that had once been my mother’s hung like a star. “I’m right here, Simon.”
“Rachel … what … Isaac?”
There was a pause, and in that pause, I had hope. I had made it out. Had Isaac?
“I’m sorry.” She looked away. “He’s gone, Simon.”
Isaac. I closed my eyes. There was a long moment’s silence.
“How … How did they find me?” I said at last.
She forced a smile. “When you didn’t arrive at your prearranged time, the pilots scrambled to look for you. They found your parachute snagged against the cliff wall.”
“How …” I coughed and my chest cracked into a spiderweb of pain. “How long …?”
There was a pause that was almost worse than the news. “You’ve been in a medically induced coma for three months.”
Three months. I tried to get my eyes to focus. Rachel, her hair like the gentle sun of Old Mother Earth, leaned over me. There was a slash in her whiteness: a black armband on her sleeve.
Rachel, my brother’s widow.
CHAPTER TWO
REHABILITATION
Third-degree burns don’t heal. They leave behind scar tissue, raised and red, tight ropes of pain that pull every joint closed. My body curled in on itself: hands into claws, arms into a mummy cross, chin tucked, knees hooked up. If I didn’t work at it, I found myself lying fetal.
Michael Dere was assigned as my rehabilitation officer. He was as thin as a reed and looked young to be a doctor, but the embossed rod-and-snakes on the arm of his uniform — circled to show his specialist rank — clearly identified him.
“Hello, Simon,” he said as he introduced himself. He had a soft voice, but spoke quickly, like he had a lot to do. “Nurse Caan and I will work with you to get your body back to, well, about as normal as we can expect. Out of the bed, certainly. And out of the infirmary.”
My face must have registered disbelief, because he nodded at me. “I know this doesn’t seem possible from where you’re lying, but there’s a lot we can do to get you back to a more normal life. I won’t lie: it will be hard work. You’ll be getting to know me well over the next few weeks,” he said.
I tried to hold up my hand. “I have to go to the bathroom,” I whispered.
He nodded. “Yes. Getting to know each other very well.” He fetched a bedpan.
Rehab is long and boring and painful. Michael would pull my arms open until I shouted with pain. He put rolls under my neck and made me throw my head back. He fitted me with compression garments to shape my new skin, and massaged lotion into my scars, twice daily, until he announced that my scars were “mature.” I’ll spare you further details, unless you want to hear about the triumphant time I held a fork in the numb pincers my hands had become. Eventually, I could get into a wheelchair by myself, if I had time and someone was there to catch me if I missed the grab bar.
Meanwhile, Rachel was in charge of getting me off the morphium. I gave her no trouble. It’s addictive, knocks you out and gives you strange dreams. For me, those dreams were of fire and falling. Most days, I’d rather have the pain than the dreams.
And I liked having Rachel there. I liked having her haul me up to drink the water to down the pill. I liked the way she brushed back my hair after she caught me from collapsing, and eased me back onto the pillow.
But as I lay in recovery, Rachel and I didn’t talk. Oh, we had things to talk about: how the treatment was going, and how much less morphium I was going to take. But Rachel didn’t ask me what happened on the ornithopter and, unasked, I couldn’t find the courage to tell her. Our clinical conversation fell to awkward silences, and she had other patients to see. She drifted out. Like a ghost. Like a widow.
Is widow the right term? Isaac and Rachel had been betrothed, not married. It was almost the same thing, but they’d never taken the vows at Nocturne. What term do you use when someone’s betrothed dies? Maybe widow serves.
I’d first met Rachel when we were kids. We were in second grade — or was it third? — and I just noticed her one day. She was walking from the art table to the hydroponic rack with scissors in her hand. I don’t know what caught my eye. The way she moved, maybe, with such purpose. I watched her, holding a dripping paintbrush.
Well, we can be friends, I thought. And so we were.
But then, at Nocturne … it got complicated.
I remember a toy ornithopter my father had given me once. His face was a kind blur but I could remember his hands, the bar of calluses across his palms. The weight of the little toy, the crackling of the wings he’d made from bits of cable shielding, the smooth-sanded wood of the needle-body. “I’m a pilot!” I shouted to him. To this day I swear it was my dream first — flying — and not Isaac’s. But he was older. He always led the way. Even with Rachel.
And now with Isaac gone … things were more complicated still.
* * *
At first, Michael and Rachel and an assortment of nurses and doctors were the only people I saw. That disappointed me. I had no family, and my friends from vocational school had moved on to jobs or apprenticeships, but the flight academy? I’d made time to socialize. I’d made friends. Or so I thought.
I suspect Rachel noticed my loneliness. She may have gone down to the flight academy and lit into them like the sun. Whatever she did, the next day I got a visit from much of my class.
They came in one group, bearing gifts.
“Hey!” Leah led the way into the room. She was the hotshot in our class. Liked speed. Had to be warned against doing barrel rolls in the chasms. “How’s our downed bird?”
The room filled with people. I was delighted, but also embarrassed. I was wearing nothing but a hospital robe. I pulled the sheets higher. “Hey!” I reached for the crank to raise the bed, but I was nowhere near ready to lever myself up. I pointed at it. “Could you …”
“How you doing, lazybones?” Calvert came forward to crank me into a sitting position. He was a steady flyer, but preferred the mechanical side of things. He moved to slap my shoulder, but stopped short just in time. He patted my arm instead.
“You’d best get better soon,” said Falk, “or I’ll tell the flight master you’re goofing off.”
We
all laughed at that. Well, them more than me. They laid their gifts on the bedside table. They had books from the library and flowers from the arboretum. They’d all signed a card. They talked in cheerful tones, but from the looks on their faces I knew I wasn’t up to facing a mirror yet. It wasn’t long before an awkward silence stretched.
“So,” said Falk, his tone joking, “you got many calls from the press?”
The others glared at him. Leah slapped the back of his head.
“Sorry?” I said. “What?”
“Don’t worry about that,” said Leah, looking serious. “We’re just glad you’re alive.”
“Yeah, we all are,” said Calvert.
I kept waiting for somebody to make a joke, break all this seriousness, but nothing came.
A nurse rescued us, telling us visiting times were over. They said their goodbyes and left. I noticed that they hurried out of the room a lot faster than they hurried in.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. We were pilots. We were young. We thought — they thought — they were immortal. I was a ghost they didn’t want to face.
The light above my bed kept flickering, and twice it went out. Battery boys came to change the battery, and then the bulb, but it didn’t help. It felt like something dark was coming.
I thought of Isaac. I thought of Mom. I don’t think she jumped, Simon.
I even ordered up the coroner’s report on her, but it had been routine, and long since recycled. I wasn’t surprised. When your only source of fibre for paper is a forest inhabited by monsters, you don’t keep records around for the heck of it.
Still, somewhere, someone made note of my request for the coroner’s report, and decided it was time to turn Simon Daud, pilot, into something else.
* * *
It was just bad luck, I think, that the news came the day Rachel and I finally got around to really talking to each other.
She came in with my pills in a little cup. “A quarter grain.” She sounded pleased about it. “Your last step-down, Simon. We’ll have you off morphium entirely next week.”
“Oh,” I said. “Good.” It was good, but it’s hard to get excited about withdrawal tremors and rebound pain.
“I’m sorry. But it really is better.” Rachel sat down on the edge of the bed. “You’re being very brave.”
I wasn’t being brave, really. What I was doing, what I was good at, was following the rules, trusting that the people in charge knew what they were doing. Still, I wasn’t about to contradict her. I liked her sitting there. The light through the mylar sheeting over the window was metallic, tarnished. Her white nurse’s uniform looked silver. Her honey hair looked like polished wood.
Her — wait. “You took off your armband,” I said.
Rachel glanced away. One loose curl of hair had poked through the netting of her snood and curved over the top of her ear. “Six months today.”
“Is it?” Time had shortened and stretched for me in the hospital. The accident felt like last week. It felt like a million years ago. “Six months. Wow.”
“Six months. And I still don’t—” She cut herself off, stood up and put the pills on my tray. “I don’t know what happened, Simon. No one has told me.”
That would be because someone was a rat-fink coward. She’d loved Isaac. We could have shared that. But we hadn’t.
She looked at me, waiting, and then her face folded up and she turned to leave.
“Rachel,” I called after her. “Wait.”
She turned. She waited.
“He died—” my voice cracked. “There was a faulty battery. He climbed onto the tail to check the connections. The weight made us go up …” I stopped, realizing I was holding out my hand, like an ornithopter, tipping the fingers upward. Beseeching. “We — ran out of room.”
“A faulty battery?” she echoed. She glanced up at my troublesome light.
“I—” I didn’t know what to tell her; it was such a stupid reason to die. “He was trying to save us, Rachel. He died trying to save me. I’m so sorry.”
“Simon …” She turned back to me. Then the voicepipe connecting my room to the infirmary’s central desk squeaked. She glared at it. “Oh, for heavens’—” She stalked over and pulled the end of the tube to her mouth. “Nurse Caan speaking.” She put it to her ear.
As she listened, her frown deepened. “Are you sure?” she said into the tube. “He’s just had medication …” She put the tube to her ear. “Well, why wasn’t I informed?” I couldn’t hear a thing, but Rachel’s frown deepened. “I don’t care if they sent a message, it isn’t here now, is it?” Rachel’s voice was getting more clipped by the second. “Well, yes, he is getting better, but—” Her lips tightened. “All right. I’ll ask him.” She hung up the receiver and turned to me. “You have visitors.”
I sat up in my bed, wincing as my joints protested. “Really? Who?”
On the wall, the pneumatic tube clicked as a message container thumped into place. Rachel frowned, then went over and pulled the canister from the receptacle. She looked perplexed, and worried.
What visitors had to be heralded by message tube?
“Rachel.” She looked at me. She was pale: I could see her freckles. “Who’s here?”
Before she could answer, the door burst open. My hands went to my side and I sat at attention as Mayor Matthew Tal swept in, his robes of office billowing behind him. His entourage followed, carrying clipboards and pads of paper. One held a camera. All wore white, with the arrowhead insignia of Iapyx surrounded by an embossed circle, denoting the mayor’s office.
“Mr. Daud,” the mayor exclaimed. He glanced at his notes. “Simon! You’re looking much better. In fact, you’re looking great!”
“Um.” I’d seen the expressions of my fellow pilots. I was fairly sure I didn’t look great. “Uh, thank you, sir.”
The mayor sat on the chair beside my bed. The room lights reflected off his bald spot and his chain of office. “Something like this deserves something more than just a lowly official, doesn’t it?”
What was going on?
“Don’t mind the photographer,” the mayor went on. “For the newsletter, you understand. Iapyxians will want to know how the fallen pilot that his brave comrades rescued is faring.”
The photographer raised his camera before I could react. The flash blinded me; I flinched, reminded of sunlight.
Another of the mayor’s entourage leaned in, clipboard and pen at the ready. “So, Simon Daud, could you tell the citizens of Iapyx how your recovery is going?”
“Uh … Fine! They’ve been taking good care of me. I’m working hard.” I can even hold a fork.
“Very good.” The mayor slapped me on the back. I winced, but did not cry out. Rachel coloured red.
“Thank you!” I said, before she could jeopardize her career. “Thank you, sir; it’s an honour.”
The photographer spoke low near the mayor’s ear. “Excuse me, sir, but we’ll need to do the ceremony somewhere else. The lighting in here is totally inadequate.”
“Hmm …” The mayor nodded. “The infirmary reception area, perhaps?”
“That will do nicely.”
“Excuse me,” I cut in. “What ceremony?”
The mayor beamed at me. “The ceremony where we award you your medal, son. Didn’t you receive the papers?”
Rachel and I looked at the pneumatic canister that had arrived too late.
The mayor turned to the photographer. “Set everything up. Nurse, see to a wheelchair for Simon here.” He turned his smile on me, like a semaphore shifting. “We wouldn’t want you to miss your own medal pinning!”
There was organized chaos as the mayor and his entourage left the room. Rachel blinked, bewildered, but she went to a corner and pulled out the folded wheelchair.
A dark-sleeved arm gripped the armrest. Rachel looked up. Her eyes widened.
The man must have been standing by the wall the whole time. We hadn’t noticed him.
“Nurse,” he said
. “Please go help the mayor. I’ll see to Mr. Daud. Thank you.”
It wasn’t a request. Rachel looked from the man to me, flustered. Then she lifted her chin and marched out the door.
Once the door clicked shut, the man turned to me. My throat tightened.
Nathaniel Tal, the mayor’s older brother, had been Iapyx’s chief of security for as long as I could remember. He was tall and, like the security officers he commanded, wore the only colour to be found on clothes and uniforms on Iapyx. That colour was grey. His black hair was streaked with white. He was like a column of smoke standing behind the mayor’s left shoulder. I had no reason to be afraid of him.
I was afraid of him.
Nathaniel rolled the wheelchair to the bed and unfolded it. He held out a hand for me. “Mr. Daud.”
I took it, clumsy, and used the support to heave my legs to the side of the bed and over. He guided me into the chair. Once I was there, he put his hands on the armrests and looked me in the eye. “I want to talk to you about your last flight.”
My stomach lurched, as it had when my ornithopter dropped off the gantry at Daedalon. The way he asked the question made me feel instantly guilty. “Okay.” I fought the urge to look away. “What do you want to know?”
He leaned back. “You departed Daedalon soon after you sent a message by semaphore to Iapyx. You had a normal flight through the first turn, but then you dropped three quarters of a kilometre before rising again into sunlight.”
I nodded. “The batteries developed a fault. Isaac — the navigator — wanted to go out onto the tail to check the connections. He told me to fly down so we’d have room to rise. There wasn’t enough room.” My brow furrowed. “How did you know what we did?”
“Your white box told us,” Nathaniel replied.
The white box. They’d found it.
“Then you know what happened.” I felt a sudden rush of courage. “It’s been six months. Wasn’t there an inquiry? The white box should have told you — everything.” Including what had caused the batteries to fail.
