The door opened almost immediately and a tall chestnut-haired beauty threw herself into Dianne’s arms. “You did come back.”
Dianne’s return hug was more reserved than Seeyan’s, but for just a second I thought I spotted a tear in Dianne’s eye. But then she blinked and turned away for a short moment, and the next sight she let me have of her face showed her usual control. She disentangled herself from the other woman’s arms, and I got my first good look at Seeyan. She had the broad shoulders and wide-set eyes of a flier, but no wings. Her eyes were a deep brown, with reddish glints that matched her hair. Unlike everyone at the feast last night, she was dressed simply, in a loose flowing dress of pale green. She gave me a little bow, and said, “Pleased to meet you, Chelo. I’m Seeyan.”
I tensed for a second, then held out my hand. It wasn’t her fault she’d heard of me. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Would you come in?” she asked.
Dianne glanced at me, her eyes encouraging me to accept Seeyan’s invitation. Why not? If the children needed anything, Kayleen or Liam could manage for a bit. “I’d be happy to.”
Inside, the house was small, essentially three rooms: a bathroom, a large kitchen, and a single room that seemed to serve as bedroom and living room and study all at once. Plants and leaves hung from the ceiling in the kitchen in small bunches, drying, but still filling the air with pale, savory scents. Paloma would have a hundred questions for her, and I immediately made a note to myself to try and bring her here. This small place looked and felt more like home than anywhere I’d been on Lopali so far, and maybe it would help Paloma feel less lost. Was that why Dianne had brought me here? Because it was like home?
Seeyan offered to make us tea. When we nodded, she looked pleased, and clipped bits of the hanging herbs and placed them in mesh bags. The bags went into cups shaped like flowers, and she poured water into the cups with a ritualistic grace.
Even though I’d have sworn she poured in cold water, the cup was warm to the touch when Seeyan handed it to me, and then moments later it was so hot I set it down on the table.
As soon as we were all seated, Dianne looked at Seeyan. “Can you please tell Chelo your story, like you told it to me?”
Seeyan looked out of the window, then down at the table for a moment, then back at Dianne. “Will it help?”
“Perhaps. Chelo will be helping her brother.”
“I will.” Seeyan dropped her gaze to her slender hands and took a deep breath. Dianne leaned back, looking relaxed, watching us both. Seeyan started talking, her voice soft and her words slow in coming. “The first thing I remember is waking up inside a big space with tall walls and a high ceiling and a floor painted green. A woman held up a mirror, and I could see myself. I was a little girl, and I had wings on my back.”
She stopped and smiled at me, watching for a reaction. “Go on,” I said. “I’d like to hear.”
“My wings were a soft yellow, with brown on the ends and a red stripe. Even to this day, I haven’t seen any adult fliers like me. After a while, there was also a little boy with the same wings, and they called us brother and sister.” She sipped her tea, gazing through me as if I weren’t even there. One side of her mouth quirked up. “His name was Will, and he and I learned to open our wings and fan them and to jump up and start flying together. We learned this in a big cage on a ship. I didn’t know it was a ship then, or that there were fifty other flier children on board.
“Will and my teacher, Siona, were the only people I ever saw. And since I didn’t like Siona, Will was my only friend. We talked to each other almost all the time, and we shared the same locked-up bedroom, and since that was all we knew it didn’t seem strange at all.” She looked at me, as if shy for a reaction.
I smiled, hoping it would encourage her.
Dianne gave her a go-on gesture, hurrying her back into her story.
Seeyan’s words came faster. “Eventually, Will and I could both jump up inside the ship and fly around, almost to the ceiling. Siona was pleased. One day, she took us into a different cage—a big open cylinder with dirt on the bottom and some trees. She told us it was a park, and invited us to fly.
“We flew.”
She smiled wistfully.
“The park was a beautiful flyspace, with more open air than we’d ever seen. I soared and banked and turned, and I loved the wind against my wings. It was hard—and my wings and back hurt after each flight. For six weeks we went there every day and flew, just me and Will. And after every flight, Siona rubbed ointment into our long wing bones. She tugged and twisted our wings and shoulders, hurting us, all the time whispering she was helping us fly.
“Will had more trouble than I did. His body was heavier than mine, and his wings were the same size, so he sank when I glided, and he couldn’t follow me all the way to the top. Siona saw this, and she promised he would get stronger as he got older, and we’d both be able to fly as high as we wanted.”
She paused and sipped her tea, and her gaze fastened somewhere through the window. She took three deep breaths before she started again. “They started changing the conditions on us, making us heavier. I didn’t know it then, but we had started flying in almost no gravity. They began adding and adding, with the idea that we would be strong enough to fly here by the time the transport ship arrived.
“But we were only halfway when Will fell out of the sky one day. He just fell.” She swallowed and licked her lips. “One of his wings broke.” She pointed to a picture on the wall of a flier with widespread wings, and touched a place halfway along one broad wing. “I could still hear him screaming as he went down, and worse, his silence when he landed.”
She fell quiet and I imagined her hearing her brother’s screams again.
“I never saw him again. I asked, and I cried, but Siona would never answer me.”
I wanted to strangle Siona. Maybe I’d get to meet her some day.
“After that, I was afraid to fly. Siona was gentle with me at first, but I kept seeing Will fall. I knew that if I flew, I’d die, too. I thought maybe if I fell and my wings were cut off, I’d find Will.”
“Did you?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Of course not. I know the statistics now. There were fifty of us on that ship. Every one of us cost the families who wanted us over two years of work. Flier families chose us before we were born, even helped choose traits like hair color and eye color and the tint of our wings. Of the fifty that were made, twenty are fliers now, seven are like me, and twenty-three died.”
I’d heard about the death rate; Seeyan’s story made it real.
“Will and I had been meant to be brother and sister to a family that lives in Oshai, near the spaceport. I see them sometimes, and I want to cry every time I do.”
“So Will died?” I asked her, imagining Joseph dead.
She nodded and got up to get more water for her tea. In spite of how I could see that telling her story affected her by the look in her eyes and hear it in the cadence of her voice, there was an ethereal grace to her movements.
“So what do you do now?”
She smiled. “What they tell me to. I’m a Keeper. That means I get to live here, and watch over the land between me and the next Keeper’s plotline. It’s about as far as I can walk for two hours in every direction except the town.”
“What do you watch for?”
She frowned. “Death. Imbalances. Unwanted evolution. A plant that grows too fast, or too slow, too high or too wide. Keepers also manage the aesthetics of plant and stone—what is placed next to what.” Again, she looked out the window. “I’m not a very important Keeper yet and this is only a small plot meant for people like me, and not for spiritual growth, except in the way that all things are for truth. It’s a garden of the town, not a garden of the soul.”
I wondered what a garden of the soul looked like.
“If I become accomplished, I might get to work in the gardens we make for visitors.”
“Do you like being a Ke
eper?”
She shrugged. “All fliers live with few choices. It would be easier if I could also fly.”
“Well, I can’t fly either, so you’re no more failed than me.”
“It’s different.”
“How old are you?”
Dianne interrupted me. “It’s a rude question.”
“No,” Seeyan said, “I’ll answer. I’m only twenty-five. People like me, well, we only live to be thirty or forty. Our bodies were meant for wings.”
Twenty minutes later, Dianne and I were on our way back. I understood why she brought me to Seeyan. How could I help but want Joseph to succeed now? Not that it would actually help Seeyan. But she was a pseudo-slave the way we had been once, except she was enslaved for lack of abilities, while we’d been in trouble for having too many.
“I like her,” I told Dianne. “But why won’t she live longer?”
“Fliers have a faster metabolism than most people. Even with the nanotechnology and drugs that they need to stay healthy, they don’t live as long as the rest of us can.”
The implication soured my stomach. “So they don’t give their own failed children the tools for a long life?”
“No.” The set of her jaw told me she approved of the situation as much as I did.
But I did like Seeyan, particularly her grace and fluidity. “Can I go back there sometime? I can find my way.”
“If we have enough time here.”
“Why wouldn’t we have time?”
“The Port Authority is looking for us. The Star Mercenaries may look for us. Someday, we’ll be found.”
“And then what?”
“Then we go someplace else.”
I want my children to grow up under a sky.
The sun warmed everything now, the colors of full morning golder than back home. Even though everything around me had been manufactured and placed, I looked for small senses of the wild, and found them. We passed through copses of trees, bright wildflower meadows, each with a stream, and back into trees. Sometimes blue flowers stuck up from fields of red, or one plant waved above my head while the others like it grew to my elbows.
Far above, fliers flashed by and, closer to the ground, a flock of small bright songbirds with blue heads and green wings flickered from tree to tree.
In front of me, Dianne gasped and stopped, her back rigid. I stopped, too.
Just ahead of us both, a flier blocked the path. I didn’t recall seeing him at the feast, but we had seen hundreds. His wings were an iridescent, shining black, his eyes as dark. He wore plain black boots over his long feet instead of the usual jeweled creations. His hair was short and simple, too, and his only jewelry was a band of blue leather around his neck, with a small, single pale blue feather hanging from it. His luck?
He stepped forward and spoke over Dianne’s shoulder, addressing me. “Chelo. It’s not safe to wander the side roads here with the riffraff.”
Dianne tensed, but said nothing.
He didn’t like Dianne because she was Islan? “Dianne is my friend. She left Islas.”
His lips thinned, and puzzlement covered his face before disappearing back into the haughty look. He hadn’t meant Dianne at all, but Seeyan. After a moment he nodded. “Well enough said. But out here, not everyone is friendly to us, which means they are no friend of yours. You are,” he hesitated for a fraction of a second, “encouraged to stay in the gold guest house, in the area around it, in the city center, and wherever your brother goes.”
“Encouraged” was not exactly a rule. I chewed on my upper lip for a moment. He stood taller than even Dianne, but would be no match for me on the ground. I would never have to match him in the air. So which choice? Stand down, and set him up as a keeper of mine, or risk angering someone of rank? I usually liked the middle, but there wasn’t a clear one. Dianne drew in a breath and I spoke before she could speak. “Thank you for your kind consideration. I have enjoyed my morning walk, and I find Lopali to be very beautiful.”
His body language did not relax.
“You know my name. I don’t have that advantage.”
He hesitated, and then said, “I’m glad you find it to your liking here. Just remember that a pretty façade can hide dangers. Not everyone wants you to fix what you came here to fix. I am speaking for your safety.”
He lifted his wings, and just before he crouched and drew them down to take off, he said, “I am a protector.”
Protecting us from? The wind of his wings in my face was warm.
We stood and watched him go. Dianne put a hand on my shoulder. “Well done.”
“Thank you.” I had been bred to be a diplomat, and I wasn’t exactly sure I’d done the best possible thing, but I hadn’t given all of my own power away. Maybe the middle didn’t really work, and being strong worked better.
I hadn’t expected to need strength so quickly.
9
JOSEPH: WAKING ON A WORLD
For the first time in years, the light of a sun poured in on my closed eyelids and drew a promise of heat across my skin. Alicia sat on the edge of the bed in her underwear and a thin shirt, her face bright with joy as she gazed out the window. When she saw my eyes open, she leaned over and kissed me, squeezing my hand before jumping up to stand at the windowsill. “Come look, honey. It’s the most beautiful place in the world.” She paused. “That makes no sense. Every place is the world to itself. It is the most beautiful place in the universe.”
I joined her, close enough to smell sleep on her skin. Outside the window, fliers danced in the air, flocking in groups of three or five or even twenty. Some seemed to have places to go, and others to fly for joy. The ground was splashed everywhere with the bright colors of flowers, like the Grass Plains three days after the first spring rain. I heard birds, and here and there, butterflies moved almost in precision.
It was beautiful, in the way Marcus’s garden on Silver’s Home was beautiful, except the scale was entirely different. In spite of the harmony of the view, it made my skin crawl. I couldn’t really get at why, but the words that came out of my mouth were, “Jenna was more interesting before her eye and her arm were fixed.”
Alicia turned and gave me a funny look. “What do you mean by that?”
“I don’t know. I guess Lopali looks too pretty, like a painting instead of a real thing.” I pointed down at the grass below the window, where small mammals grazed in a herd of about ten. “Look—those animals aren’t afraid of anything. They’re not even watching for predators.”
“So it’s a safe place.”
“Maybe.”
“I think you just want to find something wrong.”
I shook my head. “Maybe I just dreamed badly. Let’s eat.”
Alicia went with me to take Sasha out. The dog pranced about with her tail waving in the air. She looked better than she had all trip. So maybe I shouldn’t feel so out of sorts. Maybe it was because I remained shielded per Marcus’s instructions, and I missed the chaotic fullness of data. Or maybe I was feeling the pettier results of having become used to the role of ship’s captain until we ran back into Marcus, who still saw me as student. Whatever the reason, I chafed.
Alicia must have felt my mood. She paced, then took my hand and led me to a tree, leaning me back against it and delivering a thoroughly improper kiss that echoed in my belly. Then she cocked her head and smiled. “Relax. I know you’d rather be on a ship, but this is better. There’s a lot to see here. We can start today.”
I didn’t want to ruin that moment by reminding her that my day had been planned. I turned her around, so her back nestled against my chest, and rubbed her shoulders and nuzzled her hair, wallowing in the smell and feel of her, skin and girl and excitement.
By the time hunger drove us back inside, Jenna, Marcus, and Tiala sat at the table, laughing and joking with each other. Marcus cocked an eyebrow at me, a half grin on his face. “Sleeping in on the first day of work?”
It wasn’t the first day of work. He’d had me in privat
e classes on biology and chemistry and nano and genetics and politics since the day he found us at Jillian May. “The fliers’ unborn won’t mind giving me an hour of sleep, all the better to think about their problems with.” I poured a cup of col from the pitcher on the table, and made a face when I tasted it. One of Marcus’s favorites, bitter and a little like licorice root. “You’d have woken me up if you needed me.”
“We’re leaving soon.”
Alicia looked over at Marcus. “Can I go? I can help him.”
He gave her an appraising look. She wasn’t his favorite influence on me, but I’d thought he’d come to terms with her some on the way here. His voice gave nothing away as he said, “No, I need Kayleen and Chelo.”
She looked like she wanted to give him a few choice words before she seemed to notice the pleased look on his face and the silly, “got you” grin of his. Then she just cocked her head at him, waiting.
He nodded and said, “You have a surprise coming any moment.”
“Huh?”
As if on cue, a flier glided up near the house and back-winged perfectly, coming quite close to the window. I admired his wings, so black they looked purple, and the way he moved like a precision machine. A flash of dark eyes and pale face, a glimpse of white teeth in a smile, and then he lifted himself up and disappeared from view.
Marcus pushed a button and a section of the roof slid open. The flier came through the hole in the ceiling, slowly and elegantly, and stopped close to the kitchen table. A light sweat ringed his lips and eyes, and his breathing sounded faster than ours but not labored. He looked—mischievous—as if flying in here gave him a guilty pleasure. A risk-taker like Alicia? Did the fliers have such a thing?
Marcus grinned. “Alicia, meet your flying instructor, Tsawo.”
Alicia stood and held out a hand, her face and body so infused with excitement it made me want to take her back upstairs and lock her in—maybe both to keep her safe and because she was looking at this Tsawo with as much pleasure as she ever looked at me. But then, everything about my emotions seemed off today, so I probably saw things that weren’t there.
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