Skyland One

by Aelius Blythe

  Harper stopped.

  So did the clomping boots.

  The door to Harper's room stood open in front of him. Zara lay on her side on the bed, both hands tucked under her head. Her back was to the door and Harper couldn't tell if she was sleeping or not.

  He froze.

  For a moment the thought of going in and telling her that he was going back, after everything, that he was going back to Skyland and she was going ahead to Den alone... it was too much. He stood there, staring at the silky black hair, watching her sides and chest move up and down just slightly as she breathed – he was almost sure she was asleep now. It was too much.

  "Sir?"

  What? Harper turned around at the strange title and looked at the young soldier who had spoken.

  "Sir, would you like a moment alone?"

  "Is that allowed?"

  The soldier nodded. "Yes, sir."

  He stepped back and Harper turned back to the room.

  He took a breath. One foot hovered in the air, a half-step towards the open door.

  You have to tell her.

  But really he just wanted to hold her and forget about the cold room and the angry, red-faced man and going back to Skyland or going to Den, or anything that was outside of this ship, this room, right now.

  He went in.

  He looked back at the young soldier who smiled and leaned back against the opposite wall, looking in. He didn't look angry, he didn't look threatening. He almost looked curious. Harper closed the door, slowly, watching the young soldier, as if daring him to stop him. But he didn't, and the door snicked closed.

  Harper turned away from the door.

  Zara stood behind him.

  Without a word she put her arms around him, leaned into him, pressed her cheek against his chest. He couldn't speak.

  She is okay...

  He hadn't believed it until he saw her. Though he'd tried not to let it show in the obsidian room, the angry man had scared him. Maybe not as much as the Sky Reverends, but Harper didn't want to think of the red-faced soldier slamming his fist on the table, threatening Zara. Now he saw her safe, the tension that had grown in the cold room were eased.

  But I will not see her...

  At the thought of leaving her to continue on to Den alone, Harper's nerves ratcheted up again. He rested his head on hear clean hair, and over her head he glared up at the black bulb in the corner of the ceiling.

  The camera.

  I said alone.

  But the bulbs were everywhere in the ship, in every hallway, every room that he had seen. He shifted, detangling just slightly from the arms around him and sat on the corner of the bed. Zara sat beside him.

  He couldn't bring himself to tell her.

  She continued to sit and mirror his silence, her hand brushing over his back, reassuring him, or maybe herself. Her lips brushed his shoulder, then she leaned in and rested her forehead against his jaw. Against his arm he could feel the rise and fall of her chest as she took in deep calming breaths.

  Tell her.

  He opened his mouth, closed it again, took a breath. Then, "Are you okay? Did anyone come–"

  "No." She shook her head and her hair brushed back and forth against his neck. "I'm fine. Only worried."

  "There was nothing to worry about."

  "I am worried about you."

  "There was nothing to worry about," he repeated. Tell her. "Don't you want to know what they wanted?"

  "I already know, don't I? They are after your father. Your father and the other Sky Reverends."

  "Yes." He sighed. "They are. And I need to go with them."

  "What?"

  "They want me to go with them to help them... investigate."

  "But, Harper... your own father?"

  "I will only help them find the soil. That is all."

  "You will not... you will not lead them to..."

  "How could I? He is my father. I will show them the soil only. Nothing else." Again he glared up at the dark bulb in the corner, though he wasn't sure if the cameras could hear as well as see. Listen to me, he thought. I told you what I would do.

  Zara pulled back and looked up at him. For a moment she searched his eyes, then she nodded, and looked away, but not before he caught the resignation in her eyes. The hopelessness. He recognized it because he knew the same feeling must show in his own face.

  She looked back and smiled, a little sadly. "You can't blame them, really. So many are dead... They only want to make sure no more follow."

  "So do I."

  "Is that why you are helping them?"

  "Yes. And because I don't trust them. How can I let them go to Skyland with ships and weapons and no... no knowledge of... " How much knowledge should they have? "...with no knowledge of the Sky or the Reverends and their weapons? How can I do nothing?"

  "But you said you will help them."

  "Only to find the soil without harming anyone, then to get out."

  "Do you think they will be satisfied with that?"

  "No, but I will tell them nothing else! I will help them with nothing else. They are not people we can trust."

  "Maybe..."

  "They are not. They are... an abomination." No. The words of his father were the only words that came to his lips. He wished he had others. "I mean... they are not better than the Sky Reverends. They are dangerous, to me to you. They threatened me, Zara." And you, too, he didn't say. She will be looked after... "They threatened me with charges if I did not help. And they will do the same to others when they get to Skyland. How can we trust people who threaten peaceful farmers?"

  "Peaceful?"

  "I mean us. We have done nothing to them. We are leaving Skyland. How can they think we are part of the danger there?"

  Zara leaned back against his neck and he felt her nod. She was quiet for a moment Then,

  "Is it really them you don't trust?"

  "Yes."

  "They are just–"

  "They are pigs!" A drop of spit wet his lower lip. He pressed the back of his hand against his mouth. Stop. He was starting to panic. He reached for Zara's hand and tightened his own around it. His heart was starting to beat like a trapped bird, and the only words that were coming to his lips were the rote of the Sky Reverends.

  Zara pulled back again and looked at him. Her other hand brushed over his cheek.

  "Harper..."

  "What? They believe I am like him. They do not know the difference between my father and the rest of Skyland. Between my father and me."

  "But there is a difference."

  "I know."

  "Do you? You sound like him sometimes."

  "I am not like him," he said, even as his father's sermons swirled in his head. Abominations... abominations!

  "I know that. I know. I just wondered if you did."

  I don't know. He sighed. "I do. It's just these soldiers... they... they..."

  "Are you afraid?"

  "No. They are an... an... abomination, detestable, but not fearsome. They are cowards threatening farmers!" Stop. Stoppit. He ground his teeth against the hateful words.

  "Not of the soldiers. Of the Reverends. Of your father. Are you afraid of him?"

  Harper stood.

  Zara's hand fell away from around his. She stayed sitting on the bed. Harper stepped away.

  "I am not. I am not afraid of him. It's them. They are dangerous, they bring soldiers to Skyland. But I am not afraid of them either." His chin rested on one clenched fist.

  "Don't..."

  His eyebrows were knitted together, the corners of his mouth pulled down, his teeth clenched together.

  "Don't. You look like him."

  Harper covered his face with his hands. "I don't want to go."

  "I know."

  "I wish... I wish I didn't... But I have to. I have to..."

  "It will be okay. We will get to see our home again, that is something to be glad for."

  "Not we." Oh, my Sky, he thought, not we...

  "What?" />
  "No. They say you will continue on to Den."

  "No." She stood up now and pulled at his hands, pulled them down away from his face and looked at him straight in the eye. "No." She shook her head. "No. I will go with you."

  "You can't. You have to go on to Den."

  "Why?"

  "Because..." Why, indeed? "Because it is safer."

  "Really? Not just because the soldiers say so?"

  "They do. But also because it is safer."

  "No. I-I don't want to. Tell them I will go with you."

  "No!" He closed his eyes for a moment and shook his head. "I'm sorry," he said, looking her in the eye again and making his voice softer. "No. Do you think Skyland will be safe after Union soldiers arrive? After the Sky Reverends hear about them? Will my father welcome them with open arms? And the rest of the country folk, too? No. The safest place is far away from home."

  "Safe for me..."

  "I will be fine. It will work out. Don't be afraid."

  "But you are."

  He sighed and shook his head against the truth. "I know."

  "But I don't know why." Zara stroked his cheek with one hand. Her eyes searched his. "Harper, are you afraid because the soldiers think you were involved with the plots, or are you afraid because you were involved with them?"

  He just shook his head. I don't know. I don't know.

  Chapter Thirteen

  in which there is finally rest...

  The chair maker shivered.

  The tea was warm this time, but it didn't warm him. He drunk the little ships' reflections, black needles flying in the brown water. The water in the cup shrank with each sip and so did the reflections and so did the swarm of ships. The swarm was darker now, almost impossible to see in the dim light. The ships – or their reflections anyway – had disappeared some time in the night when the sun had set and the fires turned to smoldering ash. Then, he had only seen eerie lights flying back and forth in the cup and listened to the ships flying invisibly overhead. He wondered whose ships they were and where they had come from. He drank some more tea. Some more ships disappeared. Another sip and they were gone. He wondered when the real things would make like the tea and shrink out of sight.

  But his wonderings were not much of a distraction.

  He looked up. "Can't... can't I go back now?"

  The professor sat in the corner on the dirt floor, his back cradled against the crook of the wall. His arms were crossed over his chest and his head nodded down, bending weakly on its long, thin neck. His head bobbed up for a second to answer.

  "No, gramps. It's not safe." He leaned back against the wall. "Get some rest. It's almost morning."

  "I'm... I'm not tired."

  The chair maker was indeed sitting on a bed, and had been since sometime in the middle of the night when their hostess had been yawning, her eyes closing, and the professor had suggested they all try and get some sleep. He'd settled himself in the corner, their hostess had disappeared up a flight of stairs and the chair maker had been given the bed he now sat on. It was one of only two pieces of furniture in the room, and the only one made of wood. The other was a metallic table, a miniscule construction, the top no bigger than the pillow on the bed and resting on one spindly, pipe-like leg. An upturned bucket beside it looked like a makeshift stool.

  Get some rest.

  They had all been saying it since nightfall.

  But the chair maker's head couldn't stay on the pillow. Instead he sat and looked out the window and looked into the tea he drank and looked at the bed frame that could have used a new coat of polish, and looked at the spindly table that looked like anything more than a light breeze would knock it over (if there were anything other than a light breeze on Skyland) and looked at the professor who slept crunched up in the corner. The chair maker looked around at the home that wasn't his and thought about the home that was.

  He had sat like this all night.

  As the dim room around him began to grow less dim, he sat.

  There were others in the house, he could hear them in the creaking of the floorboards above his head and the soft footsteps on the dirt floor behind him, but he did not look towards the sounds. He looked down into the tea and out the window onto the lightening landscape and at the furniture, and occasionally at the professor urging him to sleep.

  The professor had taken off his broken glasses and his eyes just looked baggy now. Dark circles hung under them and the skin around was puffed slightly. The rising sun shone yellow on one side of his face. The skin on the other side was like a pale moon in the still-shadowed corner.

  The hot night was turning to scorched day.

  The chair maker looked out the window again. The landscape was new. He hadn't really seen where they were before. Not last night. Last night he had only stared blankly out the window, eyes, mind frozen. Now he looked.

  Buildings rose in the distance, but immediately on the outside of the window and for half a mile at least, everywhere he looked, there was nothing. Powdery dirt, sterile and dusty, packed on the ground or floating on the breeze, glowed yellow-brown in the morning light. The bridge rose white over the ravine in the distance, between them and the city. In the chair maker's mind, the trickling river – too faint to hear from this distance – ran under it.

  This was the country.

  More accurately, they were on the outskirts of the city. And if the chair maker had looked out another window he would have seen one or two buildings, a house or maybe a tall brick structure, one of the maintenance towers for the city. But the chair maker had spent his long life in the old neighborhoods in the city and this was as far out as he had ever been. To him, it might as well have been the other side of the planet.

  "More tea?"

  The woman whose name he still did not know patted his shoulder. She looked sad, her eyes heavy, puffy with little sleep, but she smiled with her lips. Her downcast eyes were reflective with a sheen of tears, unshed under the puffy lids. She was pretty despite them.

  "Yes, please."

  He didn't really want any more tea but he didn't want to be rude. He held out his cup and the woman poured water over the soggy leaves.

  Crash!

  The chair maker threw himself off the bed onto the ground, arms over his head. For the third time, shards dug into his hands. He drew his knees in and covered his head, lay fetal on his side, broken shards cutting into the calluses on his hands. The house seemed to rattle around him.

  But it was not an explosion.

  There was no heat, no fire. Not in the house, not outside. No glow in the air, save for the sunlight beating in the window. No smell of melting plastic, no crackling of charring wood. The chair maker looked up. The door hung off his hinges, but it wasn't flames devouring the house.

  It was men.

  Something stuck in his neck, a splinter or needle or a shard of the broken teapot or something... he raised a hand to feel it, to pull it out.

  Then he slept.

  Chapter Fourteen

  in which there are chains (of some sort)...

  The links in the chair were plastic. Or rubber. Or something else that wasn't metal. But they still felt like chains. Chair was probably not even the right word. Harness perhaps was closer. Swing maybe. The seat was like a bag. A hanging bag of plastic links. Straps in the shape of an X fastened over the shoulders and held the passenger in place like a seatbelt.

  They felt more like shackles.

  Harper shifted yet again in the uncomfortable seat as it swung ever so slightly, mirroring the ship's vibrations through space.

  He shivered.

  Space... space... infinite space...

  He could feel the space around the ship. This one moved differently. He felt every movement as it tunneled through the empty, empty space. On the giant ship of Skyland, the gentle humming of the floors and the wall had been unsettling. But this was terrifying. He could feel every movement. The ship of the Union troops was as long as the Skyland ship, but thin as a n
eedle. Every movement went right through it.

  Space...

  Harper looked out the window. He couldn't not look. If he closed his eyes, there was nothing to distract him from the movement. Barreling through empty, empty space, every shiver, every jolt of the metal thing around him was a siren in his head, wailing over everything, every tiny vibration of the nothingness echoing through his body.

  It made him sick.

  So he looked.

  It wasn't much of a window to look at. But it didn't matter. Space continued forever. Even a pinhole would look out on infinity. There was no observation deck here, no sweeping bay window that opened up like a giant mouth to the blackness around it. This window was barely the size of his head. And, still, it looked out on forever.

  Immediately after arriving on the ship of the Union troops, Harper had been brought here. To this bag-chair and this harness and this little window in this bland obsidian room. The only thing absent in this obsidian room was the cold.

  He breathed, mouth wide open, but no clouds of mist rose from his breath this time.

  So it is the cold.

  The angry man who had first interrogated him was nowhere to be seen. The young soldier, the stringy one who'd waited outside his and Zara's room, guarded the door. At least, Harper thought, he was supposed to be guarding the door. He was sitting at a table near the door, alternately picking at a stack of little brown crackers and trying to flatten wrinkles in his dirt brown uniform. Every once in a while he looked up from the wrinkled sleeves and the crackers and stared around the room, as if looking for something more interesting to do. There were no other soldiers in sight.

  Harper suspected they'd come to the same conclusion he had: he was well trapped. He had no weapon, or even anything resembling a weapon (everything in this ship was fixed hard in place), and no means of escape. With no place to go even if he did escape, he might as well be in a cell.