Faster Than Falling: The Skylighter Adventures

by Nathan Van Coops

  Samra wanted to kick him in the shins, but she held herself back. She wasn’t going to make a scene. Not again.

  “Enjoy the party, Eric,” Captain Savage said. She turned her back on her brother and grabbed Samra’s arm. “Come on. We’ve got better places to be.”

  Eric smirked and watched them go. “So glad you could be here, Sis. Have fun with your toys.”

  Samra fled from his laughing stare and followed the captain and Sunburn. They were navigating the crowd of partygoers and making their way toward the exit. Samra caught the captain slipping her hand into Sunburn’s and giving it a squeeze, before releasing it as she forged ahead through the crowd.

  There was something about the gesture that spoke of another world between them. A world Samra was not a part of.

  They burst onto the landing platform and into the cool night air.

  The wind pulled at Samra’s dress and tugged at her carefully coifed hair. When they reached the elevator, it wasn’t there. They were forced to wait.

  The captain patted Sunburn on the arm and turned to look at Samra.

  Samra’s view of the captain was blurry through her watering eyes. She ran a hand under her nose and sniffed. Her hand came away smeared with make-up powder.

  “Don’t let him get to you,” Captain Savage said. “Eric is a terrible person. They pretty much all are, but mostly just the ones I’m related to.”

  “Why did you bring me tonight?” Samra asked, brushing a tear away from her eye with her fingertip and trying not to let her lip quiver.

  “Because I needed a reminder,” Captain Savage said. “That underneath all this, we’re still creatures of the air. We both are. And no matter how they dress us up, we’ll never belong here. We’ll never be like them. Not ever.”

  “You don’t think I’d ever fit in here?”

  “Lord, I hope not,” the captain replied. “But having you with me tonight was a way to show them. You were my talisman of the wild. Evidence to these people of what’s really out there. Our true life in the sky.”

  “But I don’t want to be anyone’s talisman,” Samra replied. “I want to be me.”

  “So do I, kid. So do I.” The elevator arrived and the captain moved to the door. “Come on. We’ll get back to the Fury where we belong.” She gestured for Sunburn to follow but he wasn’t moving. He was simply waiting in the middle of the landing, silhouetted by the party lights behind him.

  “I can’t leave,” he said. “I haven’t completed my assignment.” The captain cocked her head in confusion, but Sunburn simply extended a hand toward her. “It was my captain’s order.”

  The music from the party was drifting through the windows. Couples now whirled around the dance floor.

  Samra watched with curiosity as the captain’s resolve slowly melted and a smile turned up the corners of her mouth. She took a step toward Sunburn and finally took his hand. He grinned and spun her to him. The captain laughed. Samra couldn’t help but smile, too. She felt she was witnessing an entirely different person who had replaced the captain. This woman looked happy.

  Sunburn and Captain Savage stepped in time to the music and turned circles around the dock. After a few minutes, they separated and Sunburn turned to Samra, bowing low and extending a hand. “May I have the honor, young lady?”

  Samra smiled but shook her head. “I don’t know how to dance.”

  Sunburn took a step forward and simply scooped an arm around her waist, hoisting her in the air and spinning her around the dock. She laughed as they spun, the lights of the party blending with the starlight and streaking across her vision in a blur.

  The blur suddenly stopped when Sunburn froze. The world was still spinning a little as he set her down, and she turned to face what he was looking at.

  Marlow and Eric Savage had emerged from the party accompanied by their attendants. Eric was chatting with his father gaily and grinning his self-assured grin, but as they approached the boarding ramp of the Savage Stranger, they paused and watched what was coming down. Two men were struggling out of the hold of the ship and they were carrying something heavy. Another person?

  Samra rested a hand on Sunburn’s arm and gripped it tight. The something was dragged onto the dock and brought into the light.

  It was a dead body, and Samra knew him.

  31

  ABDUCTED

  Lights flickered in Kipling’s brain. They flashed by like his thoughts, and the voices came with them.

  “There’s something else up here. Looks like an old lantern.” It sounded like a young girl speaking.

  “Oi! Watch out!” someone else shouted.

  Something hissed and flapped around Kipling’s head.

  “Grab it! What is that thing?”

  The hisses and squeaks filled the alcove.

  “Oh lord. Should we kill it?”

  “No. Grab one of the sacks. Might be worth something.”

  Some rocks shifted around. “Hey, looks like that creature might have been guarding something . . . there’s a kid back here.”

  The voices and lights faded away, and when they returned, Kipling found himself moving. He was being carried on some sort of stretcher, borne beneath the flickering lights of torches and the dangling stalactites of the caverns. A man walking beside the stretcher was carrying a heavy hammer with his torch.

  “You think the ship still flies?” the young girl’s voice asked.

  “It will once we get it back.”

  “Never had such a lucky day.”

  “Hey! Shut up back there and keep an eye out. Still more critters in these holes.”

  Kipling drifted away again.

  When he opened his eyes the next time, he was being given water. It was sweet and tasted like rustleberries. He gulped at it.

  “Hey, now. Not too fast.” The person speaking was glowing faintly and squatting next to him. He was the pleasant brown of an aged Skylighter. A young girl was there, too, staring down at him. A pair of round-lensed goggles held her hair back.

  “Samra?” Kipling muttered, his eyes only partly open. But it wasn’t Samra. This girl was a Grounder.

  As the girl leaned closer, he got a better look at her. She had freckles across the bridge of her nose in the places that weren’t sooty, and her hair was a mousy brown under the lantern glow. “You think he’ll live?” Her voice was the same as the one from the cave.

  “Oh, certainly,” the glowing man said. “Poison was minimal. Just got to get some decent food in him now.” He tipped the container of juicy water again and Kipling sputtered a bit, but drank.

  He was next offered a slightly battered-looking clump of air kelp bulbs. Not his favorite food usually, but right now it seemed like the best meal he’d ever seen.

  “You’ll start to get your strength back soon,” the man said, as Kipling devoured the bulbs.

  A poultice of soggy leaves was wrapped around the wound on his arm.

  Kipling propped himself up a little straighter to get a better look at the man. He was a Skylighter, though nobody he recognized. Based on his skin color, Kipling guessed he was around his mother’s age.

  They were inside a room hollowed out of the rocks. One side had a doorway leading to some other interior spaces and another door looked like it led outside. A single window broke up the wall near the door but beyond it was darkness and Kipling could get no sense of the outside world. His warhook was lying on the floor nearby, along with a burlap sack tied at the neck. The sack moved a little and issued a squeak.

  “Oh no!” Kipling said, and crawled toward it.

  The Skylighter tried to hold him back. “Whoa, where are you going?”

  “That’s Fledge,” Kipling blurted out, his fingers stretching for the bag and finding the cords.

  “Hey, don’t let that thing loose in—” the Skylighter was saying, but Kipling already had the knot free. Fledge did the rest. He burst from the sack, flapping and screeching, bouncing from the floor to the ceiling and off the walls. The Skylighter
dodged an attack on his head and flung open the door, ducking as the cliff fox soared over him into the passageway outside. The old Skylighter slammed the door shut.

  “No!” Kipling yelled.

  But the flapping and squawking subsided, and when the Skylighter cracked the door again, the cliff fox was gone.

  “He’ll make it out,” the man said. “There are openings.”

  Kipling stared forlornly at the door, then collapsed on the floor again. It was only when the Skylighter came to prop him back up that he tried to assess his situation again. He needed to get out of here. Find Atlas. Find Samra.

  “Which colony are you from?” the man asked.

  “I’m from the Globe Mother,” Kipling replied, wiping dirt from his face with the back of his hand. He righted himself and slid back to the wall, picking up the strand of kelp greens again. It was already making him feel a little better and he was going to need his strength. He noticed the girl with the freckles studying him. She was crouched on a woven rug near his feet and watching him take another bite of a bulb.

  “You’re from Corra Mara?” The man raised his eyebrows. “What in the world were you doing under the mountain?”

  “I’m looking for my friend,” Kipling replied. “Why are you here?”

  The man frowned. Instead of replying, he leaned back on his haunches and lifted the leg of his pants slightly, exposing the remnants of a metal shackle around his right ankle. “Didn’t have a choice. Got brought here to work the mines after they found us.”

  Kipling stared at the shackle in disbelief. “They stole you from your patch, too?”

  The Skylighter shook his head. “Patch came down on its own. We went three years with no globe sons to pollinate the daughters. It never bloomed and the families on the patch started getting sick from lack of new growth. We ran into a big column of kelp near the end, thought it was going to keep us fed for a while, but it was infested with drift rats. They got aboard the patch and started eating everything they could get their teeth into. Didn’t have enough folk left to salvage the globes and keep the patch afloat. Went down in the desert. That’s when the raiders found us. Never even had time to get word to the council.”

  “What was the name of your colony?”

  “Loma Dura.”

  Kipling studied the face of the man with new appreciation for the lines and creases in his skin. Loma Dura had disappeared years ago. Samra had been wrong about the flying sharks. It was the lack of globe sons that had spelled its doom. Had this man been living underground all that time?

  “We haven’t seen any of the globe sons reaching the Mother, either,” Kipling said. “The council has been receiving messages from colonies all over the skylands. None of them have been getting pollinated.”

  “And none of them will,” the Skylighter said. “The globe sons are here.”

  “In this cave?” Kipling asked.

  “No. Up top. In Port Savage.”

  Kipling recalled the last bundle of the Mother’s globe son pods getting stowed aboard the ship that had stolen Samra. As much time as he had spent thinking about getting her back, he hadn’t fully considered the repercussions of their loss. This weathered Skylighter in front of him gave him an entirely new appreciation for the patch’s potential future.

  “I’m Laslo Marku. I studied aboard the Globe Mother when I was young,” the Skylighter said. “I apprenticed under Grower Master Roose for a time.”

  “That’s my father!” Kipling exclaimed.

  “You’re Kole Roose’s son? How is he? Has he made a plan to save the colonies?”

  “We got a message from the patch messenger just before I left,” Kipling said. “Near the Rift Valley. A Grounder pilot had brought word from the other patches. I think they were trying to get him to communicate back with the other colonies for us.”

  “Oh, good,” Laslo said. “Your dad will know to preserve the pod stores he has left aboard the Mother and get them out to the other growers.”

  “But the pilot got abducted in a raid,” Kipling added. “Our pod stores got taken, same time they took my friend. And Father got separated from the patch. We’re all split up now.”

  Laslo frowned. “That’s terrible news. Who did the council appoint as your father’s successor? An apprentice grower perhaps? Who is giving them guidance on how to save the patch now?”

  Kipling fidgeted with the kelp stalk in his hands. “They did appoint a new grower, but it was me.”

  The Skylighter wrinkled up his forehead in confusion. “The council appointed you to care for the patch? Then how is it you’re here?”

  “I . . . I left,” Kipling said. “I needed to find Samra.”

  “You left? In its most dire time of need?” Laslo stood up and put a hand to his head. “Who is going to keep the Mother alive another season? She is the source of our entire culture. You left her alone with no care?”

  “There are still people on the patch,” Kipling stammered. “The guardians and the council members . . . Someone will still take care of her.”

  “Are any of the council members master growers? Has anyone else been trained to care for the Mother the way Master Roose has?”

  “Well, no, but it’s a big colony. Someone will be able to . . .” He trailed off as he thought about the colonists left aboard the patch. It was true. No one had anything like the training that his father had imparted to him over the years. Dimli Bottlebrock helped his father often enough in the pod groves, but he barely spoke most of the time, and he was hardly a person the council would listen to.

  “Where’d you get the ship?” The girl with the freckles finally spoke up.

  “The Sun Dragon? It’s not mine. It belongs to my friend. A different friend. One I met on the way here.” He looked around the room for any sign of Atlas. Where was he, anyway? “Is he here somewhere?” he asked the girl.

  “Didn’t see anybody else. Just you and the flying dog thing.”

  “That’s Fledge. He belongs to my friend, too.”

  “And you don’t know where this friend is currently?” Laslo asked.

  Kipling shook his head.

  “That’s good,” the girl said. “Because I need to borrow his ship.”

  A rap came on the door and a head poked inside. It was a boy of perhaps ten. He looked immediately at the girl with the freckles. “Your sister’s back, says she needs to talk to you right away.”

  The girl stood up and moved to the door. She held it open and paused, then turned back around. “My sister is a pilot on a fleet harvester ship. She was just up north. She might know where your friend is. We could ask her.”

  Kipling lifted his head. “Really? You could take me to see her?” He slid his hands underneath himself and pushed off the floor.

  “You should take it easy,” Laslo said, but he gave Kipling a hand up. “You’re still undernourished and probably dehydrated.”

  “I feel a lot better,” Kipling said. The thought of learning Samra’s whereabouts was giving him new energy. He swayed and steadied himself against the wall.

  Laslo handed him another string of air kelp bulbs. “Take this with you and try to get some more down. Sky plants can be hard to come by in these parts.”

  Kipling accepted the gift and nodded. “Thank you.” He picked up his warhook, slung it over his back, then walked unsteadily to the door, pausing when he reached the girl. He extended a hand toward her according to Grounder custom. “I’m Kip. It’s nice to meet you.”

  “Quimby,” the girl replied. She shook his hand and then rested her other arm across his shoulder. “Listen, Kip. Finding that ship in the caves today was a big deal for me, okay? It could mean me getting to be a pilot like my sister instead of being a tunnel runner. Only thing keeping me from practicing my flying has been not having a ship, but my sister’s taught me plenty on the side. I’m ready. So if anyone asks, you tell them it’s your ship and you’re letting me use it.”

  “But it’s not my ship,” Kipling said. “My friend Atlas�
��”

  Quimby tapped her finger on his chest. “You want to find out what happened to your friend, or don’t you?”

  Kipling paused. “That’s my ship, but I think you should use it.”

  Quimby smiled. “Well, thanks, Kip. That’s really nice of you. Let’s go see if we can find your friend.”

  The other side of the door was a sloping hallway dividing more abodes like the one they had just exited. Kipling followed Quimby past tightly-occupied hovels hardly bigger than the tendril pockets aboard the globe patch. Men and women alike were coated in dust from a long day’s work. They were thinner than the Grounders he had met in Womble. These people had lean faces and deep creases in their skin. Their clothes weren’t much more than rags.

  “You’re miners?” Kipling asked.

  “Some of us,” Quimby replied. “Lots of these folks work the mines, but some are dedicated to the ironworks or feeding the forges. We’ve got lots of jobs: water transport, tunnel construction, and nearly all the engineering to keep the mountain stable. That’s probably the toughest job, seeing how many times these tunnels try to fall on us.”

  She was moving quickly but Kipling paused when they reached a passage in the tunnel that led to the surface. He caught sight of the sky and soft glowing lights in the distance. His heart suddenly ached. It looked like the patch. It looked like home.

  He turned down the passage without speaking, working his way up the slope till he could reach the ledge that overlooked the valley.

  It wasn’t the patch. It was a long gash in the mountainside leading into a mountain valley with a view of the sky above. The lights were coming from airships—hundreds of airships—clustered together to form a city. He’d never seen anything like it. He was disappointed to not be viewing the patch, but he couldn’t help but admire the beauty of the view.

  “That’s Port Savage,” Quimby said. She stepped up beside him and took in the scene. “That’s where I’ll be living soon. Once things are better.”