Windrunner's Daughter

by Bryony Pearce

  “No-one’s home. I’m going to find help.”

  “What kind of help?” Her mother struggled to sit.

  Wren pushed her gently back. “There’s medicine here.” Wren put the plate on the floor. “Have some when you need to, I’ll bring more back with me.”

  “You’re scaring me. What have you done to yourself?”

  Wren pushed one hand through her shorn hair. “All these cups have water in and here is food. Do you understand?” She held her mother’s hand until she nodded.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to find Colm and Jay.”

  “Y-you’re going on a Run?” Her mother sagged.

  “I can do it.”

  Long fingers tightened in Wren’s, so dry the skin crackled. “It’s forbidden.”

  “I know.” Wren hid a shiver. “I’ll be fine.”

  “It’s dangerous.” Shadows filled her mother’s eyes. “I know you’ve listened to your brother’s lessons, but you can’t do your first flight alone. And you don’t know the route your brothers took.”

  “Then I’ll find a cure myself.”

  Tears teetered on her mother’s cheekbones. “What if something happens to you?”

  “I won’t let you die.” Wren set her jaw.

  Her mother huddled over a coughing fit that brought tears to Wren’s eyes. “You’ll be leaving me alone,” she gasped. “Like your father and your brothers.”

  “I’ll be back in two days. Three at the outside. I promise.”

  “Three days.” Her mother touched Wren’s face with hands that still shook from coughing. “You look so much like your father.” They sat like that for a moment, neither wanting to let go, then Mia’s arm dropped, too exhausted to hold on. “But you have my eyes,” she sighed and closed her eyes. “When you see your brothers, tell them I love them.”

  Wren nodded and her throat felt like wood. “I love you.”

  The reply was so quiet she could hardly hear it. “Love you too.’

  Wren left her mother’s curtain open so she could see the airlock, then she hung Jay’s spare goggles over her wrist, scooped up the wings and walked away.

  With a breath that tasted of hope, Wren pressed her palm on the pad and, when the airlock cycled round she stepped outside. She did not look back.

  Chapter three

  It was a short walk to the Runner Station perched on the landing strip. No-one had been in since Wren had cleaned up after her brothers a week before and the smell of stale sweat lingered; she could taste it even through the filters of her mask. Wren left the airlock open in an attempt to freshen the room and a tiny sand snake slithered inside.

  All but one of the wing stands stood empty. Wren stiffened as she tried to remember the last time there had not been at a full complement of wing-sets in here. Where were all the Runners? Maybe she would find out.

  With a shudder, Wren unwrapped Jay’s old wings. They emerged from the blanket like a butterfly from a chrysalis and when she hung them from the stand the silvery material dropped in folds to hang a hand-span above the floor, only slightly shorter than the larger pair on the stand behind them.

  The thin metal struts of ‘her’ wings looked fragile as bird’s bones and when Wren breathed out through her mouth, the material rippled.

  Her hands shook as she stroked one rubbery airfoil; then she turned and slipped her arms inside the straps that hung from the front. She buckled the belt tightly across her throbbing chest and found that her wrists fit comfortably into the bracelets.

  Wren studied her hands; unexpectedly steady. She took a deep breath. She was going to find her brothers and help her mother.

  “What are you doing?”

  Wren spun as the airlock filled and instinctively she stepped back, trying to hide her wings in the gloom.

  “I knew it - I knew you’d do this.” It was Raw. Triumph glowed like emerald fire in his eyes.

  “What are you doing here?” Wren hissed. Her hands came up and Raw laughed.

  “You think you can fight me?” He stepped forward and the lock cycled shut behind him. “Do you know what the Council will do when they find out what you’re planning?”

  “And you’ll enjoy telling them. Go on, run.” Wren glanced towards the closed exit and her heart thudded.

  “You think I’m stupid as well as ugly.” Raw glowered. “I leave you alone and you’ll be gone when I get back.”

  Wren glared.

  “Give me the wings.” Raw held out his hands, as if she would just take them off and hand them over.

  Wren shook her head. “I can’t give wings to a Grounder! I’m going to find my brothers. You can’t stop me.”

  “Watch me.” Raw stepped closer, his bulk filling the hut. “Women don’t Run. You said so yourself. It’s sacrilege.”

  As he reached for her, Wren retreated behind an empty stand. Swiftly she grabbed the heavy tripod and hefted it in front of her. Raw paused long enough for Wren to give the wood a swing. The stand whistled past his face and it was his turn to take a step backwards.

  “I hate you,” he hissed. “I hate your family.”

  The wooden stand felt as heavy as a tree under the weight of his hatred. “But you helped me before, why?”

  Raw sneered. “I wasn’t thinking straight. Give me the damned wings.”

  “No!” Wren gripped the stand tighter. “Why do you hate me so much?”

  He made no answer, but his eyes glittered in a shaft of light.

  Wren blinked. “I’ve done nothing to you.”

  Raw’s sudden laugh made her scuttle backwards. She stumbled against a low shelf and almost fell. At the last second she remembered to raise the stand and caught Raw in the ribs as he lunged. The impact shuddered along her arm.

  He stopped his advance. “You’ve done nothing to me?” He turned his face so that his scarred cheeks caught the light.

  Wren flinched. “I didn’t do that.”

  “Runners did it,” Raw spat.

  “Did not.” Wren’s denial was immediate, but Raw simply looked at her until her defiance faded.

  “Five years ago my mother was ill, remember Caro’s disease?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “Your father was having a dispute with the Council. He wouldn’t Run for the cure until they agreed payment terms. We thought she was going to die. So I came up here …”

  Wren gasped. “You tried to steal some wings. That’s … that’s …”

  “I had no choice.” Spittle spattered her wings like beads.

  “But if we lose wings they can’t be replaced. Every time a Runner goes down, another wing-set gets lost and there can be fewer trades, fewer messages.” Wren shuddered.

  Raw gestured at the straps over her chest. “You’re doing it.”

  Wren opened her mouth then closed it. She’d heard her brother’s lessons, she was better prepared than Raw, but really, was what she was planning any different?

  Raw saw her face and snorted. “Your father beat me and kicked me out, then he Ran for the medicine. Gave us enough for my mother … but nothing for me. That was my punishment.”

  “You got the cure.” Web frowned. “You wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

  “He relented … eventually. But not before this.” Raw ignored the wavering stand and leaned so he could hold his scarred face close to Wren’s. She winced as he pointed, unable to take her gaze from the pocked landscape that was his left side. Her hand with the stand in it began to sag.

  “You want to know the worst thing?” Raw’s fists clenched. “It isn’t that my mother nearly died because of your family. It isn’t that I’ll never be able to take my turn on the Council, because no-one will deal with me. It isn’t that I’ve been forced into an apprenticeship engineering airlocks and maintaining solar panels, so no-one will see me in the Dome. It’s that I’m now so ugly and so useless, that the Women’s Sector won’t even consider my application for the choosing. I
’ll never have a partner.”

  Wren’s eyes widened as the truth of his words crushed her heart like a fist.

  “That’s right.” Finally he reached for her. “Why should you get to save your mother when I had to wait for your father to save mine?”

  Wren used the stand to knock him sideways. “Get away from me.”

  His hands clawed at her shoulders, but she twisted and ran for the door. She felt her wings catch on something and knew he had her. But the material was slippery as oil and Raw’s curses followed a crash as he lost his grip and fell into one of the other wing-stands.

  Wren tossed her weapon aside and slapped at the airlock, racing out before it had completely cycled open. Then she sprinted like never before, heading unerringly towards the edge of the cliff. She had thought to take some time to prepare herself, to replay her brother’s lessons in her mind, but now she would just have to Run.

  Raw’s shouts spurred her on, but she couldn’t lift off without Jay’s goggles. Barely missing a step she pulled them from her wrist and slipped them over her eyes. She was pulling up her hood as her feet hit the platform; it bounced slightly under her soles, boosting her to run even faster.

  Wren returned her focus to her sprint. She knew Raw was behind her, but she didn’t turn. She had to be running as fast as she could when she leaped from the platform, and she couldn’t go any faster than she already was.

  Her arms pumped by her sides and her wings flapped noisily, muffling Raw’s shouts with their music.

  A blue line blurred past her feet. This was her last chance to stop. Once she passed the red line, a few strides further on, her momentum would take her over the edge, even if she changed her mind.

  For his sake, she hoped Raw stopped chasing her in time.

  Wren did not consider stopping. She pounded past the red line and the ground fell away. She was no longer on Elysium Mons. Now she was running on a platform built over air.

  Twenty lengths below her a net waited, but a falling Runner could miss it if caught by the wind and kilometres below there was only the bone-yard, where every Runner who had ever made a mistake lifting off or landing at Avalon inevitably ended. She put the idea from her head. She had to think only about her own launch.

  The end of the platform was a blur. Wren’s heart pounded in time with her feet. She had seen her brothers do this a hundred times, she had heard their lessons; she could do it too.

  Two steps before the platform ended there was a green line. As her right foot thudded onto it Wren threw out her arms. With a flick of her wrists she locked the wings. She allowed a wave of relief to wash over her then she squeezed her eyes closed and leaped from the spring-board. Her body arched.

  At the end of her jump she lurched downwards, but Wren kept her elbows locked as she had seen her brothers do it and the wind caught her. It swept her up, filled her wings with a rattle and whisked her away from Raw’s angry cries, the safety net and Elysium.

  At first, Wren let the air simply carry her. Fighting an impulse to return to Avalon, she focused completely on the tension in her arms and legs and the anticipation of another nauseating drop.

  Gradually she became used to the idea that she hadn’t plunged to her death and her breathing began to slow. She kept her legs stretched behind her and her arms straight, but, tentatively, she relaxed her muscles, allowing the wind to hold her limbs in position.

  She still hadn’t opened her eyes.

  She was picturing her brothers reciting their lessons at the table. The boys often struggled to recall the instructions that her father gave them while Wren stabbed her sewing with vicious frustration and offered the answers in the confines of her head. A thrill of fear shivered through her as she thought of how her father would react to her flight.

  Had Raw been telling the truth? Her shoulders shook and she wobbled and scrubbed the thought away. She had to picture her father’s flying lessons, not imagine him refusing medicine to a dying boy.

  His voice rippled through her memories. “Relax your tongue first and your other muscles will follow. You don’t believe me? Try it now.”

  She tried it. Only when she focused on her tongue, making it flop loosely in her mouth did she realise how much tension she held there. Pleased that the trick had worked she thought about his next instruction.

  “Open and close your fists to make sure the blood continues to flow.”

  She clenched her fists and realised how numb they had become. Opening her hands she repeated the exercise until her arms started to tingle.

  “If you want to go right, dip your right shoulder by one thumb joint.”

  In her memory her father held up his right thumb and shook it to make his point, but one joint didn’t sound like much. Wren ducked her right shoulder as far as she could and tipped into the wind. Her body turned towards the dipped shoulder but, with rising alarm, she realised that she could not straighten herself out: she was in danger of rolling.

  She teetered like a balancing toy as she fought the wind, unable to bring her right arm up. Then it struck her: instead of bringing up her right arm, she should dip to her left. She would need to be very careful, if she tipped too far her wings would flap shut and she would fall.

  Moving her attention from her right arm to her left, Wren shifted her shoulder muscles. Gradually she felt a slight relaxing of the pressure on her right. Again she shifted her left shoulder and felt herself straighten out a little more. One more dip and she was level.

  Unclenching her fists, Wren tried shifting her left shoulder no more than the length of one thumb joint and rolled gently left, changing course again, but maintaining her smooth flight. “Sorry, Father,” she whispered.

  The only noise in Wren’s ears was the rustling of her wings. Soothed, Wren finally allowed herself to open her eyes.

  She had been imagining that the wind cradled her in gossamer arms, so when she saw nothing between her and the desert but wisps of cloud, the shock made her squeeze her eyes closed again with a whimper.

  Several shaky breaths later, Wren cracked her eyes open once more. Unable to look down, she peeped straight ahead.

  For a moment, confusion clutched at her thoughts. She was staring towards a cliff with a tiny ‘sphere gripping its edge.

  Where was she?

  She circled, mystified. Beyond the ‘sphere a belt of green surrounded a much larger biosphere, the sun glinted from the panels that ringed its roof. Trees stole out from it, merging into ferns, then into wide flats of green, which looked almost like lakes themselves, and only then finally into the red wasteland of the mountain top, like a patchwork quilt creeping from a bed.

  Her eyes went back to the stubby Runner platform which ended by a biosphere that looked tiny as a shell on a riverbank.

  Wren had turned herself completely around. She was looking at her own home.

  Suddenly her breath caught in her throat. Out by the Runner hut someone was moving: a figure wearing wings. While she had being flying with her eyes closed, one of her brothers had finally come home.

  She had her sign. Wren smiled on a long exhale as she circled low towards the Runner-sphere. Tension lifted from her shoulders. She wouldn’t have to commit any further transgression. Whichever of her brothers was back, she didn’t care. She would land, send him to set out again to save Mother and hope he didn’t tell Father what she had done.

  But the Runner was heading away from the house. He was running towards the platform and he wasn’t removing his wings.

  Wren frowned as she swept closer. The Runner’s build was unfamiliar; too wide to be Colm, too tall for Jay. It certainly wasn’t Father.

  The figure started to sprint along the platform. The metal juddered with the thudding of his feet. Suddenly the straps over her chest felt too tight. It couldn’t be … but there had been one more set of wings in the hut.

  “Raw!” Wren’s voice sank like a rock into the wind. “What’re you doing?”

  Wit
h tension winding her shoulders together, she willed herself faster. What was Raw thinking? Did he imagine he could catch her? Punish her? He’d heard none of her brother’s lessons. He would fall from the platform, plunge through the clouds and be lost in the bone-yards - with the last set of wings on his back.

  Her skin crawled. These weren't training wings, they were full sized adult wings; her Uncle Hawk had worn them until his accident. They were waiting to be cleansed and passed down to the next Runner in the generation. No Runner would wear another's uncleansed wings. It was like taking someone's dirty underthings. Or their very skin.

  “Stop!” she cried as she hurtled towards him. But it was too late - he was passing the red line.

  Wren howled and Raw looked up, his eyes narrowed in bright determination. He wasn’t even wearing goggles. “Jump you idiot.” She swept past and wheeled as hard as she could. “Jump!”

  Chapter four

  Raw leaped from the end of the platform and his arms whipped out in a fair imitation of Wren’s own launch. The breath whooshed out of her as the wings locked into place and lifted his weight.

  Then he panicked.

  “Turn back.” Wren yelled so hard she thought her throat would tear, but Raw was beyond hearing. Instead of trying to circle back to Elysium, he lurched into a current and headed beyond the safety net and over the delta.

  His flight was no smooth meeting of wings and air; he rocked like Jay’s lost kite launched into a gale, yawing and wobbling alarmingly.

  Wren could barely swallow; her throat was blocked with fear as hard as gristle. Any moment those wings would snap shut, he’d be gone and she knew who would be blamed.

  She drove herself into the same current that had taken him and felt the wind flow around her, drawing her past the cliff. Refusing to look down she kept her gaze focused on the fluttering wings ahead of her.

  Wren’s flight was much smoother than Raw’s and her wings held a better angle. It wasn’t long before she caught up. From above, Wren saw Raw fighting his pinions. “Can you hear me?”