by James Bow
Nathaniel ran his tongue over his teeth. “Your white box developed a fault when you passed the first turn on your trip home,” he replied. “It lost sound. So we don’t know all of what happened in the cabin.” His gaze bored into me. “What conversations you had, for instance.”
I kept my mouth closed. What had happened after the first turn? Nothing that showed on my instruments. But Isaac had said, Here we are in the middle of nowhere, sky to ourselves, an hour’s easy flying from any prying ears.
When I’d first heard that, I’d thought Isaac was being facetious. Afterwards, I’d been too busy being in a coma to remember that the white box would have recorded our conversation. Except that apparently ours hadn’t. Which meant …
But tampering with the white box? Isaac often bent the rules, but he didn’t break them!
“I also note that the selection of navigator was unusual for your flight,” Nathaniel went on. “Your maiden flight, isn’t that correct? Your older brother giving you your final grade? Surely that’s a little … irregular?”
Feelings of guilt washed over me again. Nathaniel was trying to spook me. And doing a good job of it.
But as I thought about it, a resolve crept up in me to say as little as possible. My last words with Isaac belonged to him and me alone. “I wouldn’t know, sir. I just followed orders.”
His frown deepened. “So, what did you talk about?”
We talked about Mom. Or, we started to. “Stuff,” I said. “Flying, mostly.”
“Can you be more specific?”
I’m not used to lying. “He … he told me how good it was to be a pilot. And … the scenery.”
He didn’t look impressed. “The scenery.”
“Yes, sir. You know, the cliffs, the fog and stuff.”
“He didn’t talk to you about the Grounders, did he?”
I stared at him. Why would Nathaniel ask about some flaky movement obsessed with moving our cities onto the foggy ground below, a place teeming with monsters? Why —
But Isaac’s words echoed in my head. “I’ve been working with some people …” “I think she was murdered …”
“No,” I said firmly. “Nothing about the Grounders. We didn’t get much of a chance to talk about anything before the batteries developed a fault and we had to try to repair the ornithopter in flight.” I leaned forward in my seat. “What is this? An interrogation? For what? My ornithopter developed a fault. We tried to fix it, but we couldn’t do it in time. Isn’t that what the white box said? What more could you find out from me?”
I glared at Nathaniel. He looked back at me. Silence stretched.
My resolve faltered. A question demanded to be asked. “What caused the fault in my ornithopter? Does the white box say?”
Nathaniel’s face betrayed nothing. “The evidence was inconclusive.”
There was a knock on the door. One of the mayor’s assistants poked her head in. “Officer Tal? The mayor’s ready.”
Nathaniel nodded. He wheeled me out and into the corridor, toward the reception area.
“I have never had the chance to say I am sorry about your mother,” he said.
I jerked, and tried to look up at him, but I couldn’t crane my neck that far. “It’s okay,” I lied. “It was years ago.”
“I worked with her,” Nathaniel went on. “An excellent assistant to the mayor. Her death was a great loss to the colony.”
“Um … thanks. I appreciate that.”
“I wish you well on your recovery.” He turned a corner. “You’ll be a great asset to the CommController.”
I looked up at him so sharply, it made my neck ache. “What are you talking about?”
“Didn’t you know?” He kept his eyes on the corridor ahead. “You’ve been deemed medically unfit to fly. I’m told that the flight master did what she could and pulled some strings, but there are plenty of flight instructors at the academy, I’m afraid, all with full use of their hands. Fortunately, the Communications Hub can always use additional personnel.”
It was like the accident again. I could feel the ornithopter flying apart around me. “No,” I said, all the strength gone from my voice. Not the Communications Hub. “I want to fly.”
Nathaniel shrugged. “It could be worse. You could be a battery boy. Here we are.”
He rolled me into the reception area, where the mayor and his entourage stood waiting, along with a crowd of onlookers. Leah and Calvert and Falk were there, along with the rest of my class. The press were there. Rachel stood at the edge of the crowd.
Nathaniel rolled me up beside the mayor and stepped back.
“Simon Daud,” the mayor recited, raising a disk on a coloured ribbon and draping it around my neck. Flashbulbs burst, reflecting off the shiny surface, dazzling me. My eyes watered. “In recognition of your bravery in the face of danger, it gives me pleasure to honour you with this award of service on behalf of the citizens of Iapyx, in the name of the Creator of the Stars and the Captains of the Icarus.”
Then he shook me by my ruined hand. “And congratulations on your reassignment to the Communications Hub.”
CHAPTER THREE
LIFE GOES ON
I should have known my flying days were done. I could hardly hold a fork; how could I pull back on the wing levers? If I’d been honest with myself, the only career I had left to look forward to was with the battery boys.
A nurse-intern wheeled me to my room. I sat by the window, brooding.
The canister that had arrived ahead of the mayor sat beside the pneumatic receptacle. I pulled it onto my lap and fumbled with the latch. My clumsy fingers ripped the envelope, and papers scattered over my lap and onto the floor. Across my knee was a picture — a parachute snagged on a cliff face. From the parachute dangled a broken boy, his dark head bowed.
An artist’s sketch of me.
It was the Iapyx newsletter, sent with the papers announcing my medal and my transfer to the Communications Hub. Everyone in the colony would have seen the picture.
I started reading. It was about a brave fallen pilot, and his brave friends who had bravely rescued him. There was an update about his brave fight for life. I was still trying to find someone I knew in this story when Rachel knocked. Her breath caught when she saw the spill of papers.
I held up the newsletter. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t know they’d give you a medal today,” she said. “I didn’t know they’d do it in the infirmary.”
“Not the medal,” I shook the newsletter. “This. Does everybody think I’m a hero?”
Rachel opened her mouth, but I cut her off. “I didn’t do anything! I just tried to hold the ornithopter steady while Isaac checked the connections! I just tried to keep her out of sunlight. I followed the rules and, you know what? I failed! How does that make me a hero?”
Rachel didn’t say anything.
“I’d like to go to bed now.”
She helped haul me out of the wheelchair and onto the bed, then pulled the covers over me. I thought she’d leave, but she stood there looking down.
“You’re a hero because you lived,” she said. “The pilots rescued you. People like to hear news like that.”
“They had to pretty it up, though, didn’t they? Wait till next week’s photo, when they can see what the sun left behind! Do you suppose they’ll like that?”
Rachel reddened, but I turned away. I listened to her footsteps recede.
The next few days, I picked at my food. Michael came and made me stretch. Rachel tried to cut my morphium; I snapped at her. There followed more exciting days of lying in bed. More pointless stretching. Pointless pain is harder. Rachel banned me from lying down during daytime hours. So I sat in my wheelchair.
One morning, Rachel came in with a cane under her arm. “Good morning, Simon,” she said crisply.
I barely looked up. “Morning.”
“It’s time to start your walking exercises.”
I sighed. “Do we have to do this now?�
��
“Yes. Your muscles have atrophied. Every day you don’t get on your feet, you’ll get weaker. Eventually you won’t be able to walk. After that you’ll get pneumonia and probably die.”
My angel of mercy was in fine form this morning. I studied the wall.
Rachel gripped the handles of my wheelchair. “You’re no use to the CommController if you can’t walk from a pneumatic tube to a table. You need to get started. You’ve been in bed for seven months.”
“It’s not like it’s my fault!”
Abruptly, Rachel tipped the wheelchair up, sending me sprawling to the floor.
“Get up!” She thumped the cane down next to my ear, then held it out for me. When I rolled over and grabbed at it, she pulled it away.
“Rachel, what are you doing?” My joints were sparking.
“The question is, what are you doing, Simon?” She pulled the cane away again. “Are you just going to lie there, or are you going to get up?”
“You threw me to the floor!”
“You’re an idiot, you know that?” She thumped the cane near my ear again. “You’re alive. You’re not the one who died, Simon!” She stopped then.
“Rachel?” I looked up. She turned away. “Rachel, are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” Her voice was muffled. She’d covered her face with her hands.
I struggled. Without the grab bars, it was hard to sit up, but I managed. “Rachel,” I whispered. I crawled closer. I touched her knee, wishing it could be her shoulder.
She turned to me and knelt, and I hugged her. She buried her face against my chest, and I buried my nose in her hair. It smelled of flowers. We stayed there a long moment. My cheeks were wet.
When the silence wore out its welcome, I whispered, “I’m sorry.”
“So am I,” she whispered back. “Live, Simon. For him. Promise me?”
My voice caught, but I forced it out. “I promise.”
“Well,” she said, her voice muffled by my shoulder, “you’re sitting up. That’s something. Can you stand?”
“No way!”
She straightened up, kneeling tall, and put her hands under my armpits. She heaved, and I tried to help, and before I knew it I was on my feet, holding on to Rachel for dear life while my feet screamed with pain and the room faded and spun around me.
She held me. Her face was close. Very close. Her eyes looked into mine, and I felt a tug like a pull of the parachute.
* * *
Weeks passed, and I began to walk again.
The stim technology Old Mother Earth had developed to keep early astronauts from withering away in cryosleep had not been lost, and it helped, but still, it took me a long time to rebuild my muscles. But I did it, for Rachel, for Isaac, and I tried not to think how I was walking toward a future I did not particularly want.
Meanwhile, the fall of Iapyx was beginning.
It started slow, and I missed the early warning signs. Isaac would have put it together, but he would have known what to look for. There was the flickering light above my bed. There was a cancer survivor in my rehab group who’d hurt her back when an interior stairway suddenly fell dark. Then there was a rush of people to the burn ward, from a rash of steam-pipe bursts. There were the message canisters that showed up for no reason — I missed them all. Even the last one, which was delivered right to my room. But, then, I had something else on my mind.
It was the day they issued me my Communications Hub uniform. I stared at the icon of a winged envelope on the sleeve — my sleeve — before I shrugged it on. I’d become flexible enough to get my own clothes on, but buttons were tricky. I was struggling to do up the collar, and working myself up into a good mope about the fact that it wasn’t a pilot’s jacket and never would be, when the message tube whistled and clunked.
I frowned at it in irritation. It had been the third one that week, and that was just canisters to my room. If I was getting that many misdeliveries, how many were being sent astray elsewhere?
I’d previously let the interns handle it, but this time I limped over. Wasn’t this supposed to be my job in a few days’ time? Maybe I should take care of it.
I peered at the label through the hatch window, and got a shock. It was from the semaphore office. To the flight bay. A flight plan. Somewhere out there, an ornithopter was hanging by its tail, waiting for clearance. Which wasn’t coming. Because clearance authorization had been sent to me.
I stared at this ghost from my pulped past, then reached to open the hatch, and looked at my mottled hand. Stretching my fingers open, I took the canister in both hands and pulled it out. The weight surprised me and I almost dropped it. I steadied it against the wall while I gathered my strength. I can do this, I told myself. Then, with arms shaking, I inserted the canister into the intake tube, closed the hatch, and pressed the button to send it on its way.
As the hiss of delivery faded, I stared at my shaking hands. Was I really ready? For this? For everything?
I closed my eyes, closed my fists, and lowered them to my sides.
Rachel came in, then, like a ship at sail, striding as she had the moment I’d first noticed her. She beamed at me. “Simon! Your uniform!” She did up my top button, which I still hadn’t fastened. Then, still close, she put her hand on my shoulder and said softly, “I know it’s not the uniform you wanted.”
“It’s all right,” I said. And it sort of was. Communications workers were useful, in a modest sort of way.
“It’s good to see you in anything besides a patient’s smock,” she said. “Are you ready to face the world?”
I drew back. It was one thing rebuilding my body behind the closed doors of the infirmary. Heading outside made this more real. Out there, I would either succeed or fail. I wasn’t ready to face the possibility that I might fail.
Rachel patted my shoulder. “You can do it, Simon.”
I let her lead me through the corridors. Walking with my cane, I stepped outside the protective double doors of the infirmary and looked out onto the rest of Iapyx for the first time in nine months. People walked back and forth, heading to and from work, the library or the galley. Some looked at me, and some looked very quickly away, but nobody stopped to stare. Everybody was busy needing to be somewhere else.
I spotted a bench across the corridor and made for it, my cane clicking on the floor. Suddenly I felt a hand on my arm. Rachel was smiling at me, sympathetic, even as she shook her head. And before I could say anything, she turned and walked away quickly through the crowd. If I didn’t want to lose her, I had to follow.
I struggled forward, dodging between moving people — or, rather, having them dodge around me. My body wasn’t ready for quick movements yet. I followed Rachel until I got to the last corner, turned it, and stepped into the Great Hall.
At first I was startled by the expanse, though I was as familiar with it as anybody else on Iapyx. The mounded hills of grass, the trees rising up to the lights in the rounded ceiling, were still a shock after the grey corridors around it.
And I couldn’t see Rachel anywhere. I looked out among the people walking around, individually or in pairs, a young family enjoying a picnic, and my heart twisted.
Then I felt her hand take mine, and my heart lifted.
“Another rehabilitation exercise?” I asked.
She smiled. “Michael’s orders. He said you needed more than walking across a corridor to a bench. I just … interpreted his request a little creatively.”
“Thanks,” I said. I gave her hand a clumsy squeeze. She kept her hand in mine.
I suddenly felt awkward. I could feel the blush rising in my neck, where it broke against the scar tissue of my cheeks. I hadn’t been to Iapyx’s Great Hall since two Nocturnes ago. And that Nocturne had been with … I suddenly couldn’t meet Rachel’s gaze.
Nearby, someone shouted “Ticktock!”
I jerked up, then winced as my joints protested.
In a nearby copse of trees, a young boy was wandering around with eyes c
losed and arms outstretched. As he neared one of the trees, a young girl jumped out. “Ticktock!” she shouted. The boy jumped away before she could pounce at him. He staggered toward another tree, where another boy jumped out. “Ticktick!”
I chuckled. Just kids playing ticktock monsters. Two generations, that’s what it takes to turn a nightmare into a children’s game.
I looked out at the people sitting on the grass, or walking between the trees. “It’s strange,” I said again. “Everybody going about their business. I’d forgotten that people still did that.”
I was turning to say something more to Rachel, something brilliant, doubtless, but when I turned she was looking at me, her eyes brimming. Her face was very close. Before I could do anything, she leaned up on tiptoe and kissed me.
On Old Mother Earth, there had been an ancient tradition about marrying your brother’s widow. We had made a small revival of it on Icarus Down, and why not? We were also pilgrims, also refugees. I actually thought some of that, while my skin softened like butter under Rachel’s lips, and my whole heart melted away. Simon Daud: looking for a rule to play by.
Rachel leaned back. She was flushed, and she was no longer crying. “See?” she said. “Life goes on.”
CHAPTER FOUR
NOCTURNE
I should explain Nocturne. It may not mean anything to us now, but in our bleached-out colony under a too-bright sun, it was everything.
The life of Icarus Down swung around two points, as the planet spun on its slow fourteen-month-long day: Solar Maximum, when the sun peeked over the rim of our nearly polar canyon and for a few days (that’s the twenty-four-hour-long Old Mother Earth variety) blazed at our city, and Nocturne, the few days when it set.
It was my last Nocturne that I’d last seen Isaac, before he’d met me on the gantries of Daedalon’s flight bay. And it was during that same Nocturne that I lost Rachel to him.
I’d stood in the Great Hall of Iapyx, shoulder to shoulder with my fellow citizens, staring at the sun.
“It’s just a projection, you know,” said my friend Aaron. “A fake.”
