Skyborn

by Cameron Bolling

  Palila took the pick in both hands, looking up to Oleja with wide eyes. The weight of the tool made her wobble, but she held her balance.

  “Are you sure?” she asked, but the relief already rose in her voice. Oleja nodded. Palila rushed forward and hugged her, an awkward embrace given the pick pressed between them. She spoke a muffled thanks into Oleja’s shirt, then hurried away, vanishing into the darkness.

  Oleja retook her seat on the bench. She looked over the pickaxe head again. She had no intention of repairing it, and if all went well, she would never need to. Gathering her tools, she repacked her bag, placing the bent pickaxe head at the bottom.

  She must be so good at this because she’s skyborn. She smiled, thinking back on the child’s words. No secrecy shrouded who in the village held the skyborn name—the title was not particularly rare, though certainly not common either. It indicated someone born outside the canyon walls—a peculiar phenomenon indeed.

  Only newborns arrived in the village—never adults or even toddlers—and so they brought with them no news of the world above. In fact, the oldest person to ever arrive in the village had been no more than a week old. The people of the village called these individuals “skyborn,” babies who arrived in the village in shaky parachute-topped bundles.

  Some believed the skyborn possessed some special essence after being created in the clouds. Others considered this a myth and believed the skyborn to be nothing but regular babies. It seemed the latter won out as time went on, because these days the only special badge bestowed to skyborn children were the two extra letters tacked onto their adopted parent’s name when they acquired it as their surname: “ri.”

  But even still, the skyborn carried an air of mystery. Even if the eclipsers sent them down as some assumed, where did they come by children never more than a few days old? Human blood ran through their veins, certainly—not eclipser blood. That much Oleja knew.

  Because, just as the children said, she was one of them.

  After she arrived in the village, she was adopted by her father Uwei and mother Rasea. They named her Oleja, and as her mother’s daughter, she became Oleja Raseari. They raised her for the first eight years of her life until a cave-in took both of their lives, among a dozen others. For the eleven years that followed, she’d cared for herself. And as far as she was concerned, she could continue doing so for the rest of her life.

  Leaning back, she cast her gaze upwards again. The stars had exploded in number, now set against a backdrop of black in place of the deep blue. Someone told her once that in the Old World people made pictures with the stars. She smiled at the thought. Soon she would behold the masterpiece in its entirety.

  Chapter Four

  Of all the things to do first thing in the morning, climbing up a hundred-foot high pile of scrap metal and junk took the award for the best and certainly the safest. The Heap stood like a sentinel at the north end of the canyon, shrouded by the grey light that pooled across the landscape before dawn. The sun had not yet emerged for the day, lingering somewhere beyond the canyon walls, but the sky lightened just a bit in anticipation, from black to a shade lighter, approaching something that eventually could be called blue.

  Oleja had slept a few hours, but nothing more. Grogginess clouded her mind; it would make scaling The Heap even more of an event. She preferred not to rise so early, as there was never any danger of others beating her to the best of the morning’s scrap. Today, though, more pressing aims than twisted metal drove her. Her plan to free the village hinged on her ability to get herself out of the canyon first. The glider would keep her from plummeting to her death—an indispensable service, truly—but before it could be of any use, she needed elevation. A glider could only prove so useful from the ground.

  At the base of The Heap she let out a long breath, shook the sleep from her mind, rubbed her hands together, and began her ascent.

  She had climbed the slopes on several occasions. Sometimes the pieces she needed were higher up in the pile, or sometimes, if she couldn’t find them near the base, she wanted to believe she would find them with a bit of climbing. Sometimes the sentiment rang true, sometimes it did not. Apparently, her wants did not influence the whereabouts of scrap metal.

  Higher and higher she climbed. Sometimes the structure shifted under her weight and she slid, but always she managed to keep her balance. One wrong step could land her with deadly consequences, but death was not an option. At intervals she stopped to turn and look down at the canyon below. Only once did she see someone moving around through the village, and that lone figure quickly disappeared through a doorway, making no indication that they saw her in her escapades. Everyone else still slept, though not for much longer. She could feel the village beginning to stir.

  No rules dictated that she couldn’t climb The Heap, but if they spotted her, people might flock over to see what business propelled her to the top of the mass of junk. Prying questions put the truth at risk, and Oleja would not risk jeopardizing all of her work. Therefore, she decided it best to go unseen.

  But as she reached the top and surveyed the ground below again, that didn’t seem to be an issue. Nothing moved in the village.

  Oleja set to work. She located a wooden beam, wider in surface than it was thick and so long that moving it was a tricky task. Dragging the beam through the scrap dislodged bits and pieces and sent them skittering down the slopes, letting out a new clang with each bounce. If she aimed to keep her business quiet, she did a poor job of it. Sounds from The Heap would only get louder though; they did every morning. Daybreak marked the time when the eclipsers threw down the day’s hoard of junk.

  Jutting up from the top of the immense pile poked the end of some contraption. It was large—too wide to fit through a doorway in all directions and too heavy to move. There were many of them in The Heap, all in various states of disrepair and each differing in exact size and shape. Oleja had never been able to discern quite what they were beyond large box-like things, some of which still had a number of opening hatches which only revealed more complex—and terribly rusted—contraptions inside. She gave up trying to find a use for them long ago, but this one could serve a purpose. The end that stuck out rose just high enough above the surrounding scrap for her plan. Shifting the wood onto the peak, she gave it a quick test. The beam teetered back and forth when she put weight on the near end.

  A short distance down the slope lay a chunk of splintered wood and grey stone approximately the same size as her. Heaving it up in front of her, she managed to push it to the top and get it on the surface of the far end of the wooden beam. After a moment to check that everything was positioned the way she wanted it, she started her descent.

  Descending The Heap was no less precarious than ascending, and she slipped a few times on her way down as well. Relief came only when at last her feet hit the solid stone ground. From there, she hurried off south a ways. Up ahead she spotted a section along the street lined with tables for making baskets or preparing food. All lay empty at the moment. Oleja ducked behind them and seated herself at an angle from which she could see The Heap. Then she waited.

  The sky continued to get lighter, and the air warmer. A few people emerged from their homes, though the majority of the village remained asleep. Then, just as day broke, something moved on the metal walkway above The Heap.

  The structure stuck a few hundred feet out from the edge of the canyon, leaning heavily on supports of rusted metal. The jagged end scraped at the sky, indicating that the structure might once have been longer but had since broken. The supports formed the beginnings of an arch, but those, too, stopped abruptly in a mangled and bent salute to their former glory. The eclipsers used the ledge to dump their scrap during the one regularly-recurring instance at which the people below could catch a glimpse of their masters, albeit from a great distance.

  A pair of two figures walked along the ledge, each silhouetted against the grey-blue sky. Their forms were a darker grey—tall, hulking, but beyond that, im
possible to make out. Between them rolled a wide, flat cart laden with a heaping mound of discarded odds and ends that towered over their heads at least twice their height. Slow and straining, they proceeded down the metal walkway as they guided their heavy cargo.

  The eclipsers possessed impressive strength. Though the two loomed larger than humans in stature, the cart surely weighed an immense amount, and Oleja doubted even she could exert the force needed to move a proportionally large and heavy burden with the ease they did. She was certainly strong—her thickly-muscled arms were quick to betray that fact, a side-effect of her work mining and training and forging contraband armor and weaponry in the depths of the mines—but the strength of the eclipsers exceeded beyond that of a human. They could not be bested by brute strength alone; Oleja relied on her ability to outwit them during the first stage of her plan and outnumber during the second. That was how she would play her cards.

  At the end of the walkway, the eclipsers stopped and moved to the back of the cart. With one great heave they lifted the end in unison, spilling the contents down the sloped surface and over the edge. They raced towards the top of The Heap. Oleja held her breath, her eyes wide as she absorbed every detail.

  Something big hit first as the smaller debris rained down. At the moment of collision, the wooden beam whipped upwards, catapulting the wood and stone dummy with the force of the scrap thrown from hundreds of feet in the air.

  Oleja tracked the dummy in its ascent. One of the eclipsers pointed, and though the pair stood too far off to tell, it looked as if they laughed as they watched the object fly through the air.

  As the dummy reached the top of its arc, Oleja tried to estimate the height. One hundred feet above the top of the canyon? More? She grinned. That should be enough.

  The dummy hovered in the air for a moment as the momentum carried it to its zenith, and then it raced back for the ground at the bottom of the canyon.

  Oleja flicked her eyes across the projected impact zone in an instant. Few had emerged from their houses, and most of the ground remained clear of bleary-eyed miners. No one looked to be in danger of an unpleasant wakeup call.

  When the chunk of wood and stone landed, it crashed into the river. The splash sent a wave across an impressive radius, raining droplets down in something reminiscent of the rare rainfalls, though with twice the excitement and none of the relief, as it stopped a split second later. A few drops pelted Oleja, one hitting her just above her eye. She wiped away the water and moved from her hiding spot. The few conscious villagers looked around in shock, still processing the events that had just unfolded before them. More emerged upon hearing the commotion, hovering in their doorways, looking about in confusion and trying to discern what, exactly, they missed. Oleja paid them no mind. She had the information she needed. Her plan was set, and she knew it would work. All that remained were the final preparations. Tomorrow morning, she would be on the end of that catapult, and by midday, when the bloodshed ceased, the people of the village would be free.

  Oleja left the street behind as she slipped down into the mines. It was time to get ready for a war.

  She didn’t surface until late in the evening when most people in the village slept—equal parts due to her desire to avoid Jisi during her final evening of being expected to drag up a haul from the mines, and from her desire to conceal what she carried. Thrown over one shoulder, wrapped carefully in burlap and placed within a dirtied sack, was the suit of armor she had spent so many months perfecting. No one would be able to tell what the sack contained from how Oleja packed it, nor would anyone suspect she carried a suit of armor any faster than they’d guess a bag of live snakes or a baby eclipser—if the wretched things had babies, that was. Still, the bag could be mistaken for a mining haul, and if someone called upon her to add it to the trough with the rest by the lifting site, the ensuing conversation would be awkward at the very least.

  Few others walked the street, creating an atmosphere reminiscent of the quietness of the morning. By the time she reached The Heap, no one ambled about to witness her climb. She stowed the armor by a stone outcropping beside the river and then began her ascent for the second time that day.

  No matter how often Oleja climbed the slopes of The Heap, it never got any easier. It was a constantly shifting terrain of junk, never the same from one day to the next as pieces moved and slid. When she came to the top, she found it more or less the same as it had been that morning, though with the wooden beam pinned below the immense carcass of whatever metal contraption had landed on it.

  A good deal of heaving and huffing ensued as she pulled it free while also keeping the large boxy object from careening down the slopes, waking the entire village as it went, but eventually she managed and got it back into the proper position. With the site set, she made her way back down and retrieved her armor.

  Her second errand of the night drew her to the opposite end of the canyon. She planned to stow her armor just inside the gate by the southern wall. Wearing it during her flight would add too much weight, and she carried a lot of that already. When she launched, she would take her quiver and bow, plus her tinkering bag in case she needed to throw something together on the fly when she got to the gate, or in case she needed the tools. Besides, the idea of parting with it was one she couldn’t bear, so she elected to bring it despite the added weight to her flight. And then, of course, there was the weight of her own body. That was not something she could cut down on in any easy manner save amputation, and she preferred to avoid that if possible. She was quite fond of her limbs.

  With any luck, she could avoid the need for the armor until she got the gate open. Once she landed, her goal was to alert as few eclipsers to her presence as possible while she went to the gate and opened it. She couldn’t avoid the ones who carted the scrap, that she knew, but beyond them she hoped to keep the number of eyes that spotted her to the barest minimum manageable. After she opened the gate, she could grab her armor, don it, and lead the people in a charge against the eclipsers. With stealth as her objective, the armor wouldn’t be necessary. Hopefully.

  The walk from the north wall to the south took up the better part of an hour, and when at last she turned the final bend and came before the wall, a good twenty minutes had passed since last she saw someone else walking the streets.

  Few dared approach the south wall. The gate loomed in the eastern side of the canyon not far from it, a feature that by nature the people of the village opted to avoid. Carved from what looked to be one massive slab of stone, the gate towered at least a hundred feet tall, set part of the way up the cliff and reachable by a staircase of wide, steep stairs. Above the gate, the stone of the canyon side continued, maintaining the height of the wall. Oleja had spent a night investigating the colossal doorway several years back after first hearing of Tor and becoming obsessed with the idea of escaping and heroism. As far as she could tell, the slab looked to be on some sort of track and would slide southwards into the stone of the cliff.

  The gate had not been opened in Oleja’s lifetime, or in the lifetime of anyone currently living in the village, but the story of the last time it opened was still quite alive. The tale was a bloody one. Some said that one morning the people awoke to find it just… open. Many feared what it meant and went about their business, but others rushed the doorway. Eclipsers killed those who tried to flee—shot them dead before they even crossed the threshold. The gate didn’t close immediately, however. It stayed ajar for the remainder of the day. Occasionally throughout those hours, a lone individual attempted to sneak through, or sprint as fast as they could, or try some other tactic. All were killed.

  Though it almost always stood unused, the gate drew fear about it in the minds of the people. No one wanted to risk being nearest to it in the event that it open and a wave of bloodthirsty eclipsers rush in.

  Oleja climbed the steps. The gate did not strike fear into her, only curiosity. Well, curiosity and determination.

  At the top, she searched for a concea
led place to stow her armor. She found what she searched for in the form of a pile of boulders, behind which hid a crevice just wide enough for her to slide the burlap bag into and where shadows and outcroppings of stone kept the bundle out of sight. Not that she expected anyone from the village to be poking around at the base of the gate—most feared even rounding the last bend into the southern end of the canyon. Her armor would be safe there.

  “Hiding things?”

  Oleja whirled around, but even before she saw who spoke, she recognized the voice.

  “It’s late, Ude.”

  “I could say the same to you,” said the old man. He sat on one of the steps halfway down the staircase. Oleja descended to where he waited and took a seat beside him.

  “Tomorrow is the day,” she said. She fixed her eyes straight ahead as she formed the words.

  “I know. The whole village is talking about it.”

  Oleja turned to face him with a start. “What? They are? How…”

  “No. They are not. It was a joke.”

  Oleja sighed. “A bad one.”

  Ude pursed his lips. “Don’t you think perhaps they should be? I mean, they are the ones expected to fight. Shouldn’t they be ready?”

  “They’ll be ready,” Oleja assured him quickly. “They’ll be armed with picks, ready to go down to the mines for the day. As soon as the gate is open, they’ll take up arms.”

  Ude studied her for a long moment. At last he turned away.

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “I am.”

  “I believe you.”

  Silence settled between them for several long minutes.

  “I take flight at daybreak.”

  “I will be there,” said Ude.

  Another silence.

  “Oleja?”

  “Yeah?”