Rainbird

by Rabia Gale

  Petrus sat up, alarmed, as another voice, loud and breathy, overrode the first on a private channel. “Watch out, Gallavant. She was digging up ancient history, asking about you and that eiree woman. She means us no good.”

  Inspectors were not a sociable lot but they looked after their own. Petrus leaned close to the talker. His voice was hoarse from sleep. “Thanks, everyone. I’ll make myself scarce.”

  Rainbird wouldn’t like him leaving the egg, but one interview with Miss Levine had been enough. Petrus glanced at the note Rainbird had left (Gone to meet the wiz) but he couldn’t summon up any anger. She was right. He was not fit to be clambering around outside.

  Petrus got himself into overcoat and boots and grabbed his inspector gear from habit. He pulled up the sunside hatch door, and half-climbed, half-slid down the metal rungs. The light on his helmet cut a thin tunnel of visibility in front of him.

  It was damp and musty in the bone. Petrus touched its cracked surfaces and heat rolled into his hands and up his arms. A short walk, and he peered down into the train tunnel a level below.

  Petrus sat down to wait, arms wrapped around his knees. He did not lean against the bone. He could fall asleep cradled inside the great beast. Rainbird liked to be outside in the cold, under the stars and vast spaces of sky, but he’d always felt at home in this warm close dark.

  Reverberation through the walls and a distant rumble gave Petrus enough warning to get stiffly to his feet. He crouched over the hole, light flickering below, as a long line of open cars clanked by. Petrus sat on the edge, legs dangling through the hole, then dropped.

  His heart sped up as he fell, his stomach tightened, and adrenalin rushed—perhaps he’d misjudged? But no, he hit the bottom of the car, awkwardly, stumbling over his own feet, then landing on his bottom.

  He’d have bruises, but by Gwipper, it felt good to be doing even this.

  He’d been a real inspector once. He’d crawled the sunway sides without safety lines, stood in the track while the sun passed by, sprinted from marker to marker with no mask, just a fungus pad around his mouth and nose.

  Rainbird would never know the foolish young man he’d been. Petrus wished that youth hadn’t wasted the strength he needed now.

  The train took him back to Headquarters, and Petrus clambered out, stiff and clumsy. He’d have been better off holing up in another egg, but while he was out, he could do something about the thought that had niggled him since yesterday.

  How had that bonerot gotten so big? Why hadn’t an inspector caught it long before, especially since they rotated sections regularly?

  Someone had been negligent, and Petrus knew just how to find out who had failed in their duties.

  Turnworth’s office was dark and shut up, shades down. Petrus looked around him. There were some workers offloading cargo, but no one paid any attention to this area.

  Besides, if caught loitering, he could always say he’d been waiting for the supervisor.

  The door was locked, as expected. Petrus jiggled the handle, then looked around him. No one watched him. He ducked around the building and pried at the back window. There was really no point in windows when you were inside the hollowed-out bone of a dead dragon, but old habits died hard. Huts downside had windows, and by Gwipper, so would the prefab buildings the Company shipped up to the sunway.

  It was a moment’s work to slide a knife between window and frame and unhook the inside latch. Getting inside would take more work. Petrus shed his outerwear and boots and climbed in. Good thing he was gaunt, good thing the illness had robbed him off the muscle he once had. Petrus pitched inside, pencil light stabbing the gloom.

  He kept the light beam low and away from windows, as he creep-crawled on the floor. Turnworth kept his office organized and Petrus had seen the book more times than he could count.

  The Flex Schedule.

  The Flex Schedule was the latest innovative bureaucratic nightmare that the Company had cooked up. Supposedly, they had math wizzes downside that came up with new formulae every month to figure which sections needed more oversight and which didn’t, so that the Company didn’t waste manpower. What that meant for inspectors was that their range and duties changed weekly. You could go from seven markers and welding to twenty markers and oiling the next week.

  Petrus crouched on the floor under Turnworth’s desk, the Flex Schedule open on his lap. Spreadsheets covered every page, full of rows and columns, names and marker numbers and obscure abbreviations, all written in a cramped hand and packed densely. Petrus shifted so he leaned against a desk leg. His back already hurt, and so he did his eyes.

  He plunged gamely into Turnworth’s tables, immersing himself in the records, hunting for any references to Marker 37, where the bonerot had been found.

  He didn’t know how long he hunched over the book. His eyes smarted and blurred with tears, and when he straightened every muscle protested its subjection to such a cramped posture.

  But that was nothing compared to his shock. For what was laid out in the Flex Schedule was that Marker 37 hadn’t been properly serviced in months, if not for a year or more. The inspection ranges changed weekly, but somehow seemed to miss Marker 37 more often than not. And when 37 was included, it was for a cursory track check. In fact, the only deep checks scheduled for Marker 37 had been assigned to only one person.

  Petrus Gallavant.

  Petrus knew that he hadn’t been ordered to service that part of the sunway in years. He—and Rainbird—were being falsely implicated.

  Turnworth’s insistence on secrecy took on a sinister cast. And that conversation Rainbird had overheard between him and the eiree when she’d been down at the Up-High Market? Looked at in the light of recent data, it was just as likely that Turnworth was trying to bribe the eiree into not selling him the cheris gum.

  That bastard. Petrus heaved the book back into its place on Turnworth’s desk, then froze.

  Keys jingled in the lock. The door opened. A light snapped on. Petrus tried to make himself small. Turnworth’s boots stamped on the floor, followed by…

  …someone else.

  Something else.

  Rainbird’s stomach felt like a big pit had just opened up in it.

  The crack breathed out air, warm and old. At least they’d be less exposed inside.

  Get the wiz in. Get him warm. See if the crack goes up to the nerves or into the train tunnels.

  Rainbird hauled herself over the jagged edge, cutting her hands as she did so. She crawled on to bone and flopped the wiz down beside her. He rolled over to the edge and threw up.

  Rainbird used the opportunity to check the crack. It went back further than she could see. Hope and despair warred. If it went back to some opening inside the sunway, they’d have a chance of surviving. But if it did, the damage to the sunway would be bad. Very bad.

  Someone had noticed the explosion, surely. Someone would come to investigate. They’d stop the Day Sun, send it back to Headside, find Rainbird and the wiz, fix the damage.

  The wiz lay limp and white at the edge. Rainbird pulled him back and sat him up against the bone. It was barely warm, but better than the chill air. She shrugged off her coat and pushed his arms into it.

  He stared at her, his expression confused. “You have wings.”

  “I’m also a girl.” She crouched beside him. “How do you feel?”

  He ignored the question, still looking at her as if she were a puzzle he couldn’t quite solve. “You’re the eiree.”

  “Only half.” The eiree. He’d seen the posters. Everyone had seen the posters. She wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d plastered them all over his lab. “So,” she said, brightly, as she massaged warmth back into his fingers, “what’s your name?”

  His teeth chattered so hard she could barely make out the whispered “S-S-Sanders.” A name as pale and bland as the man who owned it. He sat up a bit and pushed her hands away. In a stronger voice, he managed, “You’re not Grit.”

  “No.”
r />   “Then what?”

  She hesitated. But if she were going to die here, she wanted to do so with someone who knew her name. “Rainbird.”

  He looked at her blankly. She could almost see his mental processes slowing down in the oxygen-poor air. And a wiz without a brain wasn’t worth much.

  “We should get deeper inside the crack. See if it leads into the cargo tunnels. Maybe we can find a bed of creepgrass.” Creepgrass produced oxygen. They could fashion pads of it to wear on his face.

  It was also not common, but the wiz was beyond considering such things. He leaned heavily against her as she hustled him along, deeper into the crack.

  It sloped upward, then splintered into several smaller branches. Rainbird picked one at random, but hoped it looked like she knew what she was doing. Follow the warmth, she told herself. Creepgrass liked heat.

  Several times she had to backtrack when a branch she took dead-ended. It was dark, very dark now, and only her eiree sense of direction kept her from getting totally lost. The wiz’s breathing was labored, a painful rasp against her ears.

  And then something warm blasted down at her face, carrying with it the smooth scent of oxygen. Even the wiz straightened at this, face straining towards the source of the current.

  Straight above them.

  Rainbird reached up on tiptoe. Her fingers met the edges of the gap, traced around it. “It’s big enough,” she reported to the wiz—Sanders, she corrected herself—who slumped against the wall.

  He didn’t answer, but then she didn’t expect him to. “I’ll boost myself up. I want you to stand right here”—she nudged him into position—“and stretch your arms up as high as you can reach when I say so. Got it?”

  “Think…so.” Good. He was at least a little lucid.

  “I’m going up now.” Rainbird crouched, then leaped up, high and straight, glad for her strong legs. She caught the lip of the crack and heaved herself up. A strong smell of organic material and a wave of warmth rolled over her.

  Sanders would survive here. She hadn’t gotten him killed after all.

  “Reach out your hands,” she called down to him.

  No answer. No movement.

  “Sanders?” Her heart beat so fast and loud, she couldn’t even hear his breathing, though she strained for it. She forced the panic down.

  “Give me…second.” Faintly whispered.

  “All right. Don’t worry. I’m right here. No rush.” His sense of time was all messed up, she bet. Rainbird listened for the rustle of movement, then swiped her arm through the crack. Her forearm smacked his hand on the third sweep; she caught one hand, then the other.

  “I’m going to pull you up, all right? See if you can kick off against the wall, give me some leverage.”

  Sanders may have been thin-looking, but he was not a lightweight. Rainbird heaved, worried about his shoulder joints. She felt him kicking around for purchase, and his breathing was so loud and painful, her lungs burned in sympathy. She finally got her hands under his shoulders and pulled. The wiz slithered up, fast, and they both fell over, breathing hard.

  But safe.

  They were in a tunnel of some sort, close and round and old. Not a whiff of steel or oil in the air at all, just a flexing as if of muscle, moving the air around them. Rainbird reached out a hand, touched a bundle of something that gave slightly, something fibrous.

  Electricity…sparks…messages flying back and forth…and under it all the ghost of a whimper.

  Rainbird recoiled, bumping her head into Sanders’ jaw. “The spinal cord.” She shuddered.

  “Wha—?” Sanders inched out from behind her, groped for the spinal cord. “It really is.” Awe suffused his voice. Rainbird resisted the urge to make a tart remark about his insinuation that she couldn’t tell what she’d bumped into. He sounded alert, he moved better. Even his breathing was less labored.

  “Are you feeling all right?”

  He slumped in the dark. Rainbird reached out to steady him. “I—tired. Dizzy. If only…tools…wireless.” Rainbird had to lean in to hear his words. They rustled like faint breezes. “Could…hook…to…muni…tions... tems…”

  He wanted to tap into the cord itself, into the conduit that was even now transmitting signals—from Headside to Tailside, from egg to egg. Was the news of the bomb being relayed even now?

  Great Glew! Did Petrus know? Rainbird sat up bolt upright. I have to get back to him before he does something really crazy! Oh please, let him still be out cold! She should’ve laced his soup with sleeping powder.

  Rainbird pulled Sanders to his feet, draped one limp arm across her shoulders. “There are access tunnels all along here. It might be a bit of a hike, but we’ll get out of here, don’t you worry.”

  Back out on the nightside. Rainbird’s spirits lifted, then an unnerving thought struck her.

  Someone had planted a bomb on the sunway. Had the saboteurs wanted to attack the already bonerot-weakened section, or were they hoping for fatalities as well?

  Had Sanders and Rainbid been unlucky, or had they been picked as victims?

  Regulations stated that there had to be a full suit of outerwear and an emergency kit at every access tunnel. What Rainbird actually found were the odd pieces from three different suits, a radio that didn’t transmit and received only static, a flashlight with a dying battery, and a bar of some unidentifiable substance that had once been food. Dried beef, perhaps. Rainbird didn’t sniff it too closely and avoided touching it.

  She bullied Sanders into taking off her coat and bundled him into the outerwear. The coat was too short at the hem and the pants too large—his legs looked as if they’d gone swimming. She jammed the gas mask over his head and face, after giving the inside a wipe with her sleeve. The fungus inside had had a party and invited all its friends—it was probably covered in spores. She hoped the wiz wouldn’t go into allergic shock; he seemed the type who would.

  Rainbird breathed in lungfuls of clean frosty air when they once again stood on the nightside. Even old Glew, glowering down at her, was a welcome sight. She raised her arms, rose up on her toes, stretching out her muscles and the kinks in her back and legs, listening for that brush of music against her ears.

  Sanders ripped off his gas mask, sank to one knee, wheezing. “Can’t…breathe.” He gestured to the mask.

  She stared at him, dismayed. So close. He couldn’t die now!

  “You need to cover up. Your face is too exposed.” She was already winding a musty woolen muffler around his neck and ears and head. “Here, hold it to your mouth.” Sanders’ hand shook so much that she had to guide the mask into it and bend his elbow so his nose and mouth were angled close to the fungus.

  Sanders sucked in one gasping breath, then broke out coughing. “Where are we?”

  “Marker 44.”

  “My lab…not far…”

  “Where is it?”

  “46.” A two-marker walk was nothing to her, but to him, in his condition?

  It’s closer than our egg, closer than Headquarters. It’ll be warm and he’ll have a radio. Rainbird peered about, hoping to see a rescue vehicle, but the air was still. All the frenzied activity was on the sunside where they’d be bringing in bridging track. Already the Day Sun was gliding down to Headside to wait out the repairs. The Headside industrialists would be delighted. When not moving on the track, the Day Sun powered factories at either end of the sunway.

  “Maybe we can transmit now that we’re in the open,” said Rainbird, hopefully. Sanders gave her a bleak look from behind his mask.

  Rainbird knelt beside the radio and twisted its dials. Static whined at her, but there were words within its shrieking. Rainbird moved the knob slowly, delicately, and suddenly words jumped out. Loud and clear.

  “All sunway personnel are advised to be on the lookout for Jediah Sanders, former alloy development specialist and known smuggler, and his accomplice, a halfbreed eiree named Rainbird. We have strong reason to believe they are involved in the plot to t
ake out the sunway. All suspicious activity must be…” Rainbird rocked back on her heels in shock, not listening anymore. Sanders a smuggler? The Company thought she and Sanders had bombed the sunway? What the—?

  Petrus.

  “Come on, Sanders.” Rainbird pulled the wiz up. “On your feet. We’re going to your shroom.”

  She got the wiz moving again, but by the time they got close to Marker 46, she was mostly just dragging him along. Rainbird touched the marker as she passed it. It was smooth and worn bright by hundreds of such touches over the years. One last bony spine stood in front of them and comparative safety—or a trap.

  Anxiety jangled through her bones. “Stay here.” She pushed Sanders down into a hollow—he’d be all right—and crept up that last hill. She peered over the top. The shroom’s chimney stuck up from the edge of the sunway. Nothing looked amiss.

  But tension bunched into her shoulder muscles. They must have sent someone to keep an eye on Sanders’ shroom. Or maybe they didn’t expect us to come back to it.

  But Sanders needed help. He wouldn’t survive otherwise.

  Rainbird slid down the other side, walked over to the hatch. The door was shut, but a draft of warm air came from around the edges. Hatches were meant to be airtight, to keep in warmth and pressure. Somehow she didn’t think a metalworking wiz would have loose-fitting doors.

  She looked at the bent lock on it, noted the scratches and dents on the door. Broken in?

  Rainbird hurried back to Sanders. He pulled the mask from his face and looked at her in an exhausted way, as if to say, “Now what?”

  She couldn’t blame him. In her company, he’d been bombed, nearly frozen, crawled through the insides of an ancient skeleton, accused of terrorist activities, and pushed to walk two brutal markers in the high altitude.

  “Someone’s been in your lab. Might be still there. Unless you usually keep your door so battered?”

  His mouth pinched even more. “My work.”

  The alloy. Oh dear. “You have a lab downside, right?”

  He shook his head. “Brought it all up here.” He grimaced as if just breathing hurt. “No one thought it’d work. No one cared. Just me.”