by Spencer Wolf
Tenden nodded. “I’m ready.”
“As long as we stay out of the water,” Spud said. “We definitely don’t want to go back in the water.”
“Funny thing is, when I was younger, I never liked to get wet that much to begin with,” Ceeborn said to Meg, then grinned. “But my dad fixed me.”
“Then I know a way,” she said, and came closer. “It’s different and special. You should see it before we leave. I think you’ll find what you’re looking for. There’ll be all the dying you’ll ever need.”
He held his hand to his neck and looked up through the mist and mesh of the cage toward the flickering sky.
“No Chokebots will follow where we’d be going,” she said. “I don’t think they can. And maybe, just maybe, you might want to start calling me Terri.”
“Now why in the world would I want to do that?”
Her smile faded and she took a step back.
“Fine, then let’s do it,” he said. He was sure.
“It’ll be high,” she said.
“That’s okay, I can do high,” Spud said.
“We’ll go together, all of us, not alone,” Meg said.
“No problem, they’re my friends. I won’t leave them. The three of us are good climbers.”
“Don’t worry,” Meg said. “You won’t have to climb. Where we’re going, the sky will come down to you.”
TWENTY
IT’LL BE HIGH
CEEBORN, TENDEN, AND Spud hiked behind Meg’s lead up a slope toward a clean and modest white bulkhead at the far front of the ship. Rather than plod as they walked, the hike became easier the higher they climbed. The air was the same, but their footsteps were lighter. The hill narrowed with each step as it rose toward a point in the sky.
Ceeborn looked back over his shoulder at where they had come. The glandular fountain and footbridge he had bypassed were far behind, where the floor of the valley met the slope. But directly overhead was a vision more disconcerting. They were about to bump up against the flatness of the sky. But, on closer look, it wasn’t entirely flat; there was a brighter bulge down its center, possibly a tube, running all the way down the length of the valley to the screened-off gully at the far distant end of the ship.
As they climbed still higher, he imagined the long bulge was like a curled up paper held inside the larger roll of the ship. And a flattened sheet was stretched sideways to the left and right peaks of the valley like wings off a tubular spine. It was a new and wild perspective that at once set his mind at ease. The sky was a projection and Meg was taking them to the best of the show.
The end of the tube met with the center of the white bulkhead only a short distance ahead up the hill. A double-wide door was at its base.
“You don’t have to ask,” Meg said. “I’ve got the key.”
“I told you it was going to be neat,” Spud said as he ran ahead. “The sky tube goes straight back behind the white bulkhead. That’s where the ball is turning.”
“What ball?” Ceeborn asked.
“Ball and socket that holds up the axle,” Tenden said. “But we’re not supposed to be here.”
“Tenden and me, we used to come up here to walk around,” Spud said.
“You don’t have to tell them everything, Spud. Settle down,” Tenden said as he nudged Spud forward.
Meg held open the right side of the double-wide door. Inside was a clean, white room lit by four corner posts that flickered. The doors closed, the room jolted, then rose.
“Don’t worry,” Meg said on the ride up. “But I did warn you, it would be high.”
The lift stopped and Meg held her key at the door. “You ready to walk across the sky to the end of the world?” she asked Ceeborn. He was.
She turned her key and the doors opened to the long shaft of brightness. They exited onto a staging collar. A solid axle ran high above their heads down the length of the tube and far into its pinpoint distance. Spaced lengthwise around the axle were eight long rails that ran like tracks to its end. Spokes radiated outward periodically from the axle and held the thin and stretched cylindrical projection screen of the sky. There was room between the axle and the screen to move about, to fix things, if there was ever the need. From the valley looking up, the screen itself showed blue and puffy white clouds. But from inside its screen looking down, it was all terrifyingly clear.
Ceeborn attempted his first cautious heel then toe onto the transparent screen. The sloped hill they walked up below was only a mild drop away at first but fell quickly to the valley below like the shelf of a deep sea.
Meg folded her arms and waited as he bucked up his nerve. “If the height bothers you,” she said, “look up and follow the rails.”
Then with a leap of faith, he stepped, then skipped, and found his footing. “This is amazing,” he said. He ran in spurts up to full speed as if he were escaping across the clouds to the ends of the world. “It’s beautiful. You’re beautiful.” He stopped and turned for her reaction. Her blush had returned. She was elated. “Thank you for letting me measure the sky with you. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Tenden and Spud hopped out for their try.
“You sure the patrols can’t come up here?” Ceeborn hollered down the tube.
“No,” she shouted. “The screen’s too sensitive.” She jumped out behind Tenden and Spud. “Their claws will poke through!” she yelled as they ran to catch up.
He hopped over small runs of water that trickled and pooled along the flow of the screen. The water itself had risen through the porous material and condensed on the rails of the axle, where it hung as teardrops along the long lashes of the world. With the right pressure, the clouds would open and the mists would fall as a filtered rain, a dusting or cool sun shower over the valley below. The trickling streams that congealed and remained above the clouds ran off for collection in cisterns behind the white bulkhead at the clean end of the sky.
High above the valley’s expanse, Meg pointed down toward her adobe village. She showed them all through a break in the clouds. They could see the empty swings at her school, the treetops along the path to the zoo. The adobe village, the garden, the fields, and the sections all around were partitioned from each other by scalable mounds or low, rib walls. Sixteen sections joined in a line to form a neighborhood; four neighborhoods formed a community. Each community comprised sixty-four sections and was bordered by a river, either veinal draw or artery feed. Astride each river was another parallel community. Four communities in total made a complete wrap around the sky. The inside of the ship held a spectacular 256 sections to count.
“I came up here once,” she said. “I could see you.”
“How?” Ceeborn asked. “I was never out here like you.”
“Not here,” Meg said. “I saw you from up ahead, down through the other end. I’ll show you when we get there.”
And with a sudden flicker, the sky all around changed its images of clouds to an enormous projection of the ship’s schematic design. The image was painted beneath their feet as they walked like passengers riding on a long, tubular plane.
Far below at the planetarium, the expeditionary officer looked about the size of an insect as he stepped outside of the dome. He looked up toward the sky and the outlines of the ship as its live image detail filled in. Starry-eyed crowds gathered around him to witness the promised show of their arrival.
Ceeborn, Meg, Tenden, and Spud were walking on the schematic nearest to the center of the ship’s body. Far ahead in the projection, the ship’s eight long arms flared out to a parasol as the ship rotated on the screen. The cheer of the crowd by the planetarium below rose up like an echo of thunder.
But the ship’s rotation projected under Ceeborn, Meg, Tenden, and Spud’s feet, superimposed over the actual ground below, caused an instant bout of vertigo. The off axis sensation caused them all to wobble and reach down for the ground. A glorious, painted planet crested over the peak of the valley.
“Is this happening now?”
Spud asked. “Did we arrive? Did we miss it?”
Animated launch doors opened all along the length of the projected arms and masses of simulated ships sprayed forth and shot through the tube of the sky.
“No,” Meg said as she regained her footing. “It’s only a preview. They showed it to us a million times before at school.”
A geyser of blackened water shot up from the vent at the spiral garden. Then the whole valley shook and with it, the sky buffeted them side to side. It was no projection.
Ceeborn looked at Meg. Spud rose up from all fours on the screen.
“I don’t think that was part of the show,” Meg said.
From their height in the sky, they could see down, up, and around. Blackened ooze saturated the ground around the garden. The crowd on the ground couldn’t see to the same distance and applauded the continuation of the show.
A more distant section’s glandular fountain bubbled, then blew into a vertical geyser. The whole of the land was checkered by section, each either erupting with a pressurized fountain or turning off with a blackened ring of ooze.
Among the quickening pattern of chaos, a beacon of light emerged from the dome of Robin’s clinic, then its vents, walls, and windows. Its light was unmistakably blue.
“What is that?” Ceeborn asked.
Meg jumped up from the screen into a run. “Come on. We’ve got to tell my mom!”
“What is it?” Tenden asked.
“If it’s true, you won’t believe it,” she said.
“Believe what?” Ceeborn asked. He looked down again at the clinic’s dome that shone like a spotlight of health.
“My mother incubated your bins,” Meg said as she skipped backward in her run. “She left on the show. If those are your picks, then they worked. The bins. You picked from the bins!”
“The cure?” Ceeborn asked, and as he started to run, Spud pulled back on his arm.
“You picked them. C, E, and S,” she said. “I think you found it. Come on!”
“Wait,” Spud said. He held back. He sensed something and grabbed Ceeborn’s sleeve. Then he ducked as he spun around.
A Chokebot had stalked them into the tube. It scurried upside down with claws locked onto the axle’s two lower rails. Tenden pushed Spud aside as the Chokebot flipped down from the rails. It landed upright and poised on the thin projection screen.
“Run!” Tenden yelled to Ceeborn and Meg, but the Chokebot jumped and tackled him from behind. Tenden took the full brunt of its weight on his back. He fell to the screen, elbows bent, hands tucked and fisted under his belly. The Chokebot’s two rear legs clamped to his ankles, its middle to his waist. Its front two claws pushed under and found his wrists. He resisted the pull of its pincers, but was no match for the Chokebot’s ratcheted, mechanical strength.
It wrenched out Tenden’s arms, flattening him to his belly, and with a sudden mechanical pop, ripped his bent elbows outstretched, tearing the tendons from his forearms. Tenden screamed in his splay. The Chokebot locked its six shoulder cuffs into place and reddened its dome as Tenden wailed.
Spud kicked at the Chokebot as Ceeborn ran back to pry its unmovable joints with his hands.
Tenden whimpered through labored breaths. The locked Chokebot shaded its dome a gentler orange in its feedback scale. It wasn’t getting the calming response it sought. It changed the color of its dome to yellow then blue, but Tenden’s cries of agony remained. The Chokebot tilted its dome and clacked its keys, deciphering the spasm of Tenden’s hand on the screen as a wrestler’s tap of give.
The Chokebot unlocked its limbs and dismounted. Its dome clicked as it backed farther away.
Ceeborn and Meg lifted Tenden up toward seated at her lap. Tenden cradled his torn arms beneath his chest as he rocked in tears. But worse, something awful had happened. He moved his shoulder, reached his hand into the front pocket of his hoodie, and then looked up. He pulled out the rivulus case. He trembled.
The case was wet. Its side was crushed.
“I don’t know what happened,” Tenden said. “I was carrying him and I got hit.” He looked back. “I couldn’t protect him. You understand?”
“I do,” Ceeborn said. “It hit you first, that’s all.”
Ceeborn took the case a short distance away from Tenden’s grip. He opened it over a stream of the sky and let the rivulus slip loose. The trickling current took the rivulus and it moved with the water, or maybe it swam away on its own. It would be best to think that it did.
Ceeborn turned away from the pacing Chokebot and kneeled to help Tenden up to his feet. As Ceeborn lifted, he winced and grabbed his hand against his neck. His sting was bad, and getting worse.
The projection of the ship’s schematic on the screen reset with a spin, reacting like a compass needle fixed to the ship’s actual orientation. Live status images of the ship’s rear tank in distress were broadcast for all to see.
“We’re almost there,” Meg said to Tenden as he cupped his arms and walked behind them with Spud. “When we arrive,” she said, “the ship’s spinning is supposed to slow, the water pressure is supposed to fall, and the rivers are supposed to flow back into the tank.”
“What are we supposed to do then?” Ceeborn asked.
“We’re all supposed to go to the arms,” she said as the sky darkened all around them.
Ceeborn led forward. Two other Chokebots responded to the networked call of the first. They were fast. They rushed through the tube, not below on the axle’s rails, but above and out of sight. Spud looked back through the tube, sonar pinging with his facial disk into the emptiness, but saw nothing.
The live images of the tank on the projection screen ahead showed the remaining cable of the half-sunken gondola reaching down through the water’s punctured skin. The skin was in a constant state of tearing as the submerged gondola twirled. Water was escaping in waves. A Chokebot, inverted on the ceiling of the tank, sliced through the remaining cable to set the gondola free. The cut ends of the cable hovered at first, then drew down and sank beneath the water. The unencumbered gondola drifted down and swirled away into the current. It sank toward a filter in the tank that fed into the ship’s rearmost accelerator module. The gondola stopped at the outside of the filter, but the thin, flexible cable drew in.
Ceeborn turned away from the images in horror. A shiver ran from his neck through his spine. The extent of what he had done was suddenly upon everyone.
The sky all around them in the ship turned from clear to a hellish, choking red.
Spud looked back again into the tube. He jutted his head left, then right. The two rails of the axle above their heads were empty. “I think something is behind us.”
The cable wound deep inside the accelerator module in the projected tank, then jammed. The gondola began to spin in the water like a stone at the end of a string, churning faster and faster, reaching up and shredding the water’s skin, whipping the water into a cyclonic funnel. The entire orientation of the water was changing. It rode up the side of the tank toward its veinal inlet door and vacated from its arterial outlet, sending the whole ship horribly out of balance.
Spud whipped back around in a panic. He sensed it, his cheeks flared. He saw the two Chokebots coming in fast. “Run!”
The skin in the tank swelled from the reverse of the water’s pressure, stretched, and burst wide open. The cable snapped from the gondola and wound in through the filter. It tied. An inner artery ballooned and ruptured with a click. The accelerator module buckled with an enormous, reverberating seizure that shot through the ship.
Ceeborn and Meg watched the ripple approach from ahead on the sheets of the sky. Then the actual wave hit full force. The projection of the planet on the tube exploded into a kaleidoscope of horror as the bellowing convulsion ripped through.
Spud jammed his hands over his ears and fell to the screen. He screamed. “Is this happening?!”
“Let’s get out of here!” Tenden shouted with his arms hanging limp at his front.
Ceeborn and Meg dove flat on the screen.
The sky tilted.
The ship started to list.
The far white front of the tube rolled as the hill cracked away from the ball and joint behind the white bulkhead.
A rush of water swelled the rivers below.
Great plumes shot across the chest of the ship and splashed the underside of the sky.
Ceeborn was lying face down on the screen beside Meg. The ship was being destroyed, not by fire, but by the power and percussion of water. It was all a result of his doing. The world was drowning from the flow of its source.
Meg lay prone on the sky screen and looked away in her terror. She was trembling. The back of her hair soaked in a trickle of water that ran between them. Even the wet tips of her hair shivered as her back rose and fell with the fits of her breaths. The hem of her pants shook with her legs. The toes of her shoes tapped unnerved on the clear sky as the overwhelming vertigo over the valley below was unbearable. No one deserved to be so afraid, least of all Meg. He had to move, to get her to the arms of the ship.
He reached for her hand as they lay and she turned her head to face him. Her eyes stared long. He tried to smile but his cheeks wouldn’t lift more than a twitch from the corners of his mouth. He, too, was terrified. He loved her. He wondered which of the two would show more.
His neck was soothed by the trickle of water as it ran and dripped through the porous sky. The water flowed as the lifeblood of the ship, but Luegner owned the water. No wonder the ship cried from its sky. He touched his neck’s wound and saw its reddened wetness between his fingers. Meg didn’t blink. It was bad.
The racking vibrations stopped long enough. It was time to get up, and run. The violent structural twist of the ship had shorted out the projection screen from fore to aft. Now it all became clear. The living world of Meg and the dying gully world were united. Huge swaths of the screen had fallen from the sky, opening all of the ship into one.
People dodged from the squared and falling panels of the sky. They saw to the tops of the villages, the fields, and communities on opposite sides of their cylindrical world in the joining of two opposing semi-circular valleys. They froze in horror, the absolute vertigo of spotting the panicked people on the other side of their world also panicked and looking back down on them.