by Rabia Gale
Rainbird pulled hammer and wrench out of the loops in her workpants. She hammered, banged, and pried at the gap in the duct, until the abused metal turned and twisted aside. It made such a racket, Rainbird was afraid someone would overhear and find her, still trapped in the heating system like a cornered rodent.
The thought only made her pound faster and harder.
Once the gap was big enough, Rainbird gingerly lowered herself through it, hung for a moment to check her landing spot, and dropped.
She landed on a small metal deck, the endpoint of a pointless metal causeway, a leftover from a prior design. Peering through the darkness, she traced the path of various systems: the heating ducts she’d just spent an eon in, metal piping for water and waste, an old message capsule delivery system, and the black rubber-insulated cables for electricity.
And nerve tissue.
Rainbird kicked off her boots, sent them spinning into the darkness below the deck. Then she clambered onto the railing and walked it, wings and arms spread out for balance. Just like a tightrope, only easier.
Rainbird tracked the loops of electric cable till one dipped down in a curve below her. Right under it was a solid-looking intersection of ducts. Rainbird climbed down the railing, hung from a bar below the walkway, kicked off towards a wall, missed her target and clamped onto a message capsule tube instead. It started to give under her weight and, heart pounding, she scrabbled until she found a foothold on a box of some sort attached to the wall.
Careful. She wasn’t as strong and as sharp as she normally was. Rainbird took several breaths to steady herself, then leapt off from there onto her chosen spot. She landed clumsily. The ducts shuddered but didn’t collapse.
Good.
Rainbird grabbed the black cable—it gave slightly—and cut a slit into it with her knife. She peeled the rubber aside, careful not to touch the innards, and exposed braided tissue and metal wiring. Electricity hummed through the cord.
Rainbird paused, fingertips poised above the cord, as if she were a pianist getting ready to play. The nerve wouldn’t hurt her, but an accidental touch of the wire could send a massive shock through her already-abused body. A headache still sat, heavy and dragging, behind her eyes.
With delicate fingers, Rainbird pinched the thickest part of the nerve tissue between thumb and forefinger.
And flew apart into particles, spiraling out of control, speeding through organic highways. Her consciousness splintered, heading in a thousand different directions. Rainbird applied mental brakes, slowed down, forced the pieces of her self back to herself, coalesced.
Into Rainbird.
Petrus. She conjured him up with every sense, from his thin frame to his smell of soup and shaving cream to the timbre of his voice.
And a greater consciousness, big and alien, responded.
Rainbird slid down the highway, faster, but still in one piece. A rhythmic booming turned to vast thunder and she spilled out into an odd-shaped cavern, a cage of bone and metal where something huge and muscular beat.
Rainbird ripped her hand away, before her fingers spasmed too close to live wire. Her knees were rubbery. The cable in her hand shook. It was some time before she could scrape the rubber coating back over the cut and gently drop the cable into place. Some conscientious part of her—one gotten from and trained by Petrus—wrapped the slit up with some sticky taping.
The dragon had shown her. She knew how to find Petrus.
The clench and release of the muscle was what guided her. It sent vibrations through metal and bone, and she attuned her feet and ears to its particular rhythm. By the end of her journey in the between-spaces, it had grown to a waterfall roar, pounding at her skull and spraying her with an energy that tingled over her whole skin, but concentrated under her ears, above her kidneys and even the dull-sensitive edges of her wings.
Eiree senses.
Rainbird faced a blank wall. No, not entirely blank, but the holes in it were too small for her to squeeze through, besides being otherwise occupied by pipes and wires. But her quarry thundered behind that wall. She just had to figure out a way to get through.
Rainbird narrowed her eyes at the muscle tissue creeping out from the chamber. Had the original makers been sloppy or deliberate in not encasing the whole organ?
Or had it grown over all these years?
She pushed the thought away and clambered up to where she could reach the tissue, pulsing with every beat. Like a tree root, it had pushed its way through cracks in the wall. It was not like flesh as she knew it. It wasn’t red with blood and spongy, but tough and braided, almost black, shot through with strands of silver. The wall it had plunged through was not metal, but some kind of sheeting. Rainbird pried at the wall around the tissue bundle, and the material crumbled in her fist. She ripped it away in pieces, scrabbling, and forced her way through the gap, squeezing past muscle.
It was firm and warm against her back, and the heartbeat throbbed through every fiber of her being. Her eiree senses flared to painful life—star music pierced through her eyeballs and into her brain—and once again something’s attention shifted.
Rainbird pushed forward, breaking physical contact with the organ, and landed on her hands and knees. The chamber was huge, dark, and warm, its vastness filled with the dead dragon’s living heart. The smell of age and damp filled her nostrils, the scent of metal and blood kissed her lips. Rainbird edged past piping and machinery and slid off a platform onto the floor. Tissue stretched across the walls and over her head. The heart glistened blackly, its surface rippling with every clench and release. The power of it thrummed through the floor, set the chamber constantly vibrating.
Rainbird wrenched her gaze away from it and scanned the floor—there! A dark figure huddled in a chair, head drooping to its chest.
“Papa!” Rainbird sprinted over to it. She threw her arms around Petrus. “Are you all right? What did they do to you? Papa? Talk to me!”
Petrus lifted his head up, slowly. He looked ghastly, face pale, eyes sunken in behind his spectacles. He blinked, and then his eyes widened. “Rainbird! What are you—? No, you must leave, now!”
“Not without you.” Rainbird ran her fingers across the ropes that bound Petrus to the chair and tugged at the knots. Too many of them, too tight. She reached for her knife.
“You don’t understand. They have a creature here. A thing that you can’t fight. Rainbird, get out of here.” He tried to shove at her, then collapsed, panting.
“We’ll get out of here together.” Rainbird sawed at the ropes, the minutes stretching taut. Almost there.
Behind him, something moved. Ropes parted. Rainbird thrust her knife into Petrus’ hand and put herself between Petrus and danger, falling into a fighting stance.
She barely saw the thing move. Between one blink and the next, it was upon her. Hot breath in her face, heavy muscular body colliding with her own, knocking her down. Rainbird squirmed and managed to get out from under it. It recovered fast, too fast.
What was this creature? The way it moved, the way it crouched…not human, not eiree, too big to be a dracine or thyrine and…Rainbird scrambled back as it unfurled wings and sprang at her.
Wings. It had wings. Rainbird dropped to the ground on her belly, as it passed over her. She rolled and managed to hook a leg around it, throwing it to the ground. She jumped it, going for the dominant position, found herself staring into a snarling face—all teeth and fierce black eyes and obsidian skin. She punched—hard—the blow ringing through her bones, but the creature’s skull was like iron. Leathery bat-like wings and strong arms wrapped around her, squeezed, pulled her in.
Not good, not good! What was this creature? Some strange hybrid of thyrine and eiree? And if it was, would it have the same weaknesses?
Rainbird’s flailing fingers found the hammer in the loops of her workpants. She smashed it against the creature’s face. It emitted a grunt of pain, wings and arms loosening slightly. Rainbird ducked out of the hold, grabbed an arm and
a wing with both her hands and pulled, hyperextending both. Thyrine joints were rigid, inflexible, weak. The creature snarled and its sharp-nailed other hand flew at her. Rainbird let go, and felt for the flashlight tucked into her belt.
“Papa,” she yelled. “Out of the way.” For Petrus hovered at the edges of the fight, holding her knife, trying to find a way in. Armed with a small pocket knife against a brute of iron-hard muscle.
The creature lunged for her and she clicked on the light, aiming for its eyes. It growled in sudden squinting pain, but kept coming. Rainbird dodged it easily, but its vision would adjust soon. It had been too much to hope that it had the extremely light-sensitive eyes of a thyrine.
We’re not going to win this one, thought Rainbird, grabbing Petrus’ arm. He stumbled as she pulled him, not towards the doors which were bound to be locked, but for the heart.
Held up by wires and tubes, the heart was a dark throbbing mass that looked both alien and eerily similar to the drawings Rainbird had seen in anatomy books. It was splayed open at the bottom, with tubing inserted into it, and it gleamed wetly in the dim light. Rainbird pulled Petrus up to the platform and ducked into its massive folds, surrounding herself in slimy organic material, which gave way as she went further in, to the reek of metal.
Behind them, the hybrid creature gave an angry bellowing cry.
Petrus’ voice was choked and strained. “Rainbird, I…” He fell to wheezing, but Rainbird knew what he meant to say. They were trapped in the organ. She couldn’t expect Petrus to crawl through the ventricles and try to squeeze through valves and what was left of the dragon’s arteries—wherever those might now lead. She stood on muscle and shivered as the heart squeezed again, slow but incredibly powerful. The floor buckled under them and they stumbled against its walls. Air whooshed around them, sucked into the chambers above.
Would the hybrid come in here after them?
Rainbird put a hand against the heart to steady herself, then snatched it away as needles of electricity pricked through her arm. She couldn’t fight the hybrid, but maybe, just maybe, what remained of the dragon could.
Rainbird closed her eyes and dug her fingers into the old bloodless tissue, held together now by a colorless solution that wept into the chamber in thin trickles. Help us. She sought out the paths of electricity, the way they looped around and through and in the heart. A part of her could touch them, could redirect their flow. If I coax this current here…
A powerful surge sent Rainbird spinning back into herself. Static sparked in the air. Her ears buzzed and her fingers and toes tingled. The heart shuddered and a cry pierced through the old blood-tinged air. The hybrid, beating on the outside, driven back in pain.
Was it enough? Rainbird pushed back into the electric flow. The heart shuddered again as she directed more energy to it.
Then it stopped, rhythm broken.
“Rainbird?” Petrus’ voice was thin, thread-like.
“It’s—it’s…” Rainbird waited, breathless. She couldn’t have stopped the organ, could she?
No.
But the heart didn’t pump, though the moments ticked by. The hybrid, recovered, moved along the outside, trying to squeeze its massive body in after them.
Come on! Rainbird dug her fingers into the muscle wall. She threw herself into what remained of the dragon’s subconscious, that dark space where shattered pieces of it still dwelt: reflexes, snippets of memory, flickers of thought. She went in deeper than she’d gone before. Move, please. Beat. Breathe. The heart—the energy it generated, the pulses it sent—was essential to the sunway. She couldn’t have broken it. That was almost as bad as destroying the Day Sun!
“Rainbird.” Petrus doubled over, coughing.
She couldn’t deal with him now, not until after she fixed what she had broken. She swam deeper in the sea of leftover desires, arrowing for some kind of control center. She reached something that was a quivering gelatinous mass of suppressed desire and sleep—and she kicked it as hard as she could.
Beat! Wake!
And the creature woke.
It woke with a soundless roar, a wordless cry that echoed through Rainbird’s skull and into the vastness of space itself. It woke into a waterfall rush of pain and fury. It woke to a stripped-bare body, a flayed self. The world shuddered, a jolt sent Rainbird tumbling onto her rump, connection broken.
Rainbird dragged Petrus out of the ventricle, just as the heart squeezed so tightly she thought her chest would burst in aching sympathy. They fell onto the platform and covered their ears as the heart let go with a hammer-boom. Tissue came alive, no longer black, but flooded bright. Rainbird and Petrus backed away from the heart and its wires and tubes, but the hybrid was not so lucky. It was too close to a thick muscle mass, which swelled and touched him just as the dragon’s madness and grief came flowing through in electric fury.
The blast knocked the hybrid off its feet and into the wall. Sheeting broke and crumbled. The heart thudded, faster and louder. Tubing wrenched out of the muscle, spilling clear fluid. Wires sizzled with a power they could not hold. A great rattling sound broke out, as if the entire Hub shook with the dragon’s awakening.
“What happened?” whispered Petrus. “What did you do?”
“I…” Rainbird had no words to explain.
The door burst open and a horde of binneys spilled into the chamber. Rainbird glimpsed Miss Levine’s purple in their midst, then heard her calm voice. “Take the unauthorized eiree/thyrine hybrid first. Turnworth says this whistle will bring him to heel.”
Rainbird took Petrus’ arm, pointed up towards the ceiling. Turnworth was caught, his plot foiled.
Time for us to make an exit. She pushed Petrus up the scaffolding and into the vent she’d picked out from the schematics. Binneys’ voices echoed behind them, voices raised in consternation and dismay as another powerful contraction shook the sunway. They were coming faster together now, a panicked response from the beast that had woken to such a nightmare.
They did keep the brain alive, then. The fools.
Rainbird crawled through the short tunnel, slow going since she had to nudge Petrus on. When he stopped at a hatch, she reached around him, unlocked it, and pushed it open. Air sucked greedily around them. She caught the breath of fresh air from outside, saw an unbroken square of sky.
Diamada. Thank Glew, thank Dorak’s God of Small Things.
The heart jittered again, and the vent pitched steeply. Rainbird pushed at Petrus until they were at the hatch. The balloon bobbed right next to it, its basket swinging wildly in the sunway quake.
That had been Diamada’s idea. After all, it had worked once.
Rainbird helped Petrus into the basket and forced a mask onto his face.
“The sunway,” he gasped.
“It’s okay, Papa.” Rainbird checked all the connectors.
“No! The weakened section…the Day Sun…it…”
Another tremor almost pitched her into the basket with him.
“I’ll take care of it, Papa.” Petrus’ face was all pale around the ill-fitting mask, and his eyes were wide and wild behind the crazily-tilted spectacles.
“Rainbird.”
“Go, Papa. I’ll take care of it.” She cut the rope. The balloon jerked away from the sunway, straightened, then started to drop. A gentle descent, Sanders had promised, as he rigged the automatic landing system.
“Goodbye, Papa.” Rainbird put her fingers to her lips in a last kiss neither given nor taken. Her cheeks, she noticed with dull surprise, were damp.
Rainbird crawled back down the hatchway and dropped into the heart chamber. She stood, watching the scene of chaos. Six binneys trussed up the hybrid in markers of rope while a circle of eight more ringed around them, stingsticks at the ready. Inspectors and techs scurried all over the room, poking at tubes, clamping wires, tripping over each other. Miss Levine stood in the center, ordering everyone else about. Turnworth slumped sulkily between two binneys, his hands cuffed.
Sa
nders was also there, hunched over a console, fingers flicking buttons and switches. As Rainbird’s gaze brushed over him, he twisted around.
“Rainbird!” His frown cleared and he strode over. “There you are! It’s all right, I talked to Miss Levine, you…” He stopped, peered over her shoulder. Rainbird quelled the desire to turn around. “You sent him down.” It was not a question.
Rainbird’s face felt like a clay mask, stiff and suffocating, yet fragile, too. She must not crack it. She gave a slight nod, and stepped away from Sanders. “You talked to Miss Levine?” She slid away from the subject of Petrus.
“Yes, I—” The floor lifted, then slammed down. Metal groaned and twisted. Wires sprang loose and a pipe smacked into the floor, gushing fluid.
“Ah, Sanders, there you are.” Miss Levine was beside them. She gave Rainbird a regal nod. “And it appears you were right about Turnworth after all, Rainbird. Though the conspiracy must go up to the top of the Company, as well, for I wonder how else Turnworth got the use of this chamber or smuggled the hybrid onto the sunway.” She turned slightly, pitching her voice so Turnworth could hear.
He looked up from the contemplation of his shoes and scowled at the three of them. “Oh, I’ll sing, all right. If I go down, then so will everyone else involved. I know more than they think.”
“You will have ample opportunity to spill your secrets, Turnworth.” Miss Levine turned away from him. “Sanders, do you think this situation is salvageable?” Her raised brows indicated the cracking walls, the falling equipment, the harried personnel who were, as far as Rainbird could tell, running about like headless chickens. And above it all, the great heart, now a maroon color, beat and with every beat the sunway shuddered, as if trying to throw off all the humans that crawled over it.
Sanders shook his head. “We need to evacuate, ma’am,” he said quietly.
