When We Have Wings

by Claire Corbett

  There’s the Platform below, the fake islet sending up its glow into the night; finally I’m leaving Peter’s world, my life from now on will truly be lived in unknown territory.

  She looked over her shoulder. The sea, almost still, purled over itself like a rumpled silver-grey shawl under the moon. The sky fell away all around, empty and quiet.

  Peri flew without stopping, willing the darkness to extend another hour, another minute, racing against dawn. Have to reach Janeane’s before the sun rises. She knew, from the moment she’d found Luisa, that she’d need Janeane’s help, but she hoped her ruse of flying to the Platform first would confuse pursuers. The sea was not the City. It wasn’t RaRA-land. It wasn’t anywhere. Too bad she couldn’t just keep on flying over it. Wish I could’ve planned the flight to Janeane’s better. Warned her. Made sure of getting there under cover of darkness.

  Soon, the sun would rise behind Peri but already its light shot the clouds through with colour, lightening the darkness ahead. Not far now, not far. Push hard. So strange to fly over this country, which looked both familiar and alien, to see it from the air, the way she never thought she’d see it, the morning bringing it to life below her, colour licking over the hills like flame. She’d have been happy never to leave the City. This was only the second time she’d approached the Owls in darkness. The first time it had been nightfall. She’d been very small. Three? Four?

  That morning, almost her earliest memory, she’d woken crying from her nightmare as she so often did. It always started the same way: trembling with cold, her hair knotted by the freezing wind. Ahead stood dark towers spotted with light and between them flowed lines of light and beyond them lay dark plains sprinkled with light. Warmth, softness, held her: Don’t move. You must not move. You’ll fall. Wait. No more warmth. She couldn’t move, her arms and legs were numb. She’d been excited by the light and the dark and the cold but now a cooing and whirring surrounded her and she was so afraid, closed in by a whirl of feathers and they came closer, suffocating, then bursting above her, a grey storm. She was alone. Whooosh-whooosh-whooosh, the sound fell down to her from above. Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh, a turning rhythm; she could not twist her neck to look up to see what it was. She must not move. You’ll fall. The edge. Don’t move. Dark brightening. The edge closer. Light brought terror. You’ll fall. Cold metal underneath warmed, then burned. The grey feathers had flown away. Left her. They didn’t wait. She couldn’t see, light burned her eyes, her skin. Don’t move. You’ll fall. Nothing but light. At first stretching out into the warmth then crunching into a ball as the sun grew stronger. The light pinned her to a point on the edge of the world. Wait. Nothing beyond the wall of sun. Peri woke with tears on her cheeks. You’ll fall.

  The strange woman who woke her up that morning put her in a car and they drove for a long time. ‘Are we going to see Mummy?’

  ‘We’re going to see your new mummy.’ The woman bought her lunch but Peri couldn’t eat. ‘Poor little mite.’ The woman shook her head.

  As darkness fell, they drove down a winding dirt road, passed through a gate, the sign reflecting their headlights: The Owls, in rusting letters, next to a metal owl with glass eyes. At the farmhouse the little girl hesitated in the doorway, between the dark and the light. Two women looked at her, one smiling, the other all sharp angles, but it was the smile that frightened her. It was blurry, unfocused. It wasn’t for her. Not really.

  The smiling woman was called Bronte. ‘Your foster mother,’ said the woman who’d driven her there.

  Tears started down Peri’s cheeks as Bronte hugged her too tight. She struggled free. ‘Where’s Mummy?’ Bronte was not her real mother. She felt wrong, too dry and thin. She couldn’t comfort the little girl. Like she hadn’t enough herself to give anything away. Her smell was wrong too, like something abandoned in a closet. You couldn’t say that but it was real. Had Bronte ever felt anything for her? Peri’s own fault, a belief down to the bone; she’d messed it up from the beginning.

  There below was the farm, there was the farmhouse, every minute she could see the old place more clearly as the sun rose behind her. She banked, came around again; she could land in the patch of rough grass in front of the verandah. A figure was already out and about, moving among the banana trees. Peri dipped lower. Janeane. Must be. Janeane and her eternal bananas.

  ‘Aunty Jan, Aunty Jan, wait!’ Peri used to call as she tagged after Janeane.

  Janeane showed her stands of the special banana trees she grew. ‘Never eat from these trees, see?’ she said. ‘You never eat any bananas unless I give them to you, right? Or you’ll get very, very sick. You could die.’

  ‘I won’t, Aunty Jan.’

  Now the figure came out of the trees, looking up at her as Peri swooped over dry paddocks drowning in gold, flooded by the risen sun. The figure was raising her arm. Peri waved.

  A flash, brighter and colder than the melting coin of the sun. A loud crack, the fall of a dead branch.

  Aunty, don’t shoot!

  Peri folded her wings, fell like a stone.

  I woke early from broken sleep. Monday morning, forty hours since Peri had fled. Too long, too long. Peri was a flier. She could be anywhere and the circle of her possible locations widened with each passing hour.

  It was only just light when I stepped outside to take Frisk with me on my early-morning run. Street sellers setting up their stalls before dawn, still rubbing their eyes, rubbed them harder when they saw a lean sandy man run past them with a lion on a lead improvised from a piece of flex cable.

  When I rang Chesshyre he said he’d heard nothing and then said he had to go, he had an early briefing. I interrupted to ask him how Peri got her wings and why hadn’t he mentioned them?

  ‘Fliers are normal to me,’ said Chesshyre. ‘I don’t mention wings any more than I point out that someone has two arms. It’s hardly a secret; you saw the security images.’

  ‘But Peri’s not one of you. She’s a nanny.’

  ‘She wanted wings. We paid her well.’

  ‘I would’ve thought winged nannies wouldn’t be too popular. I mean, she’s just flown away with your baby.’

  ‘We thought otherwise,’ Chesshyre said. ‘I thought it would be useful, essential actually, to have someone who could keep up with Hugo once he fledged. You’ll find a few other families like us.’

  ‘I need the name of her doctor, then. The one who oversaw her transition to Flight.’

  Chesshyre said, ‘No idea. I took no particular interest in her transition.’

  My ears pricked up. Surely this was a lie. There must be something at stake in this question.

  I feigned innocent incredulity. ‘Surely you recommended someone to her? You’d know all the best specialists.’

  Chesshyre gave a hollow laugh. ‘I said we paid her well. I didn’t say we paid her well enough to use our specialists.’

  This answer was just plausible enough to give me pause. It hadn’t occurred to me there might be a range of treatments for Flight, from premium to third-rate.

  Chesshyre couldn’t wait to finish our conversation. What was his hurry? For the first time I wondered if I was not the only person looking for Hugo.

  After arranging an appointment with Mrs Harper from Little Angels, it was time to get down to the tiresome task of finding the Katon-Chesshyres’ doctor. I began calling each number on my list in turn, routing my call so it looked as if I was ringing from Canobolas-Gerschenkron Pathology. I said I had test results for Hugo Chesshyre and Peri Almond to send through. After four blanks I struck gold. I might’ve known; Dr Eliseev’s practice looked to be just about the most fashionable and expensive on my list. Then I called the personal assistant service I occasionally used and got them to make me an urgent appointment with Dr Eliseev.

  In order to interview both Harper and Eliseev, I had to take my first trip into Flierville, the
fancy district taking up most of the City’s old CBD, now remodelled for fliers.

  As I walked to 80 Metre Road, the station nearest to my flat, I wondered what it meant that there’d been no ransom demand. If Hugo was kidnapped for money his chances of survival were slim but if the crime was driven by passion then Hugo’s fate was frighteningly random. He was as likely to fall victim to bad luck as to evil intent.

  At Central Lines, the City’s major rail hub, I had to change to the light rail, which took me to the Point, the only stop within walking distance of Flierville. On my way from the Point towards Flierville, I paused to watch the fliers, intrigued to see the dark shapes high above me all entering Flierville in a clockwise direction. Fliers approaching the airspace above Flierville looked as if they were flying around a roundabout in the sky visible only to them. They circled like a flock of gulls rotates above a tower, and every now and then one dropped down. One flier with showy pale wings missed the dropout point, then arrowed down after coming around the circuit again. Did Flierville have traffic rules known only to fliers?

  Ahead rose an uneven edge of green, the trees lining the famous (or infamous) Ring Canal circling the entire district like a moat. Some had said it isolated Flierville, so two narrow footbridges spanning the canal were built. Others said the canal was an ingenious solution to the rising harbour; the water was diverted and at the same time gave Flierville a unique identity. Sightseers loved to look down through the water over the drowned buildings and streets just as much as they enjoyed seeing fliers going about their business in their towers.

  Larus Marinus Bridge was deserted when I stepped up onto it. The barrier gate slid open when I swiped my slick, having extracted my personal details and, outrageously, a fee. Welcome to Flierville, Mr Ezekiel Fowler, said the barrier gate.

  I headed for Little Angels, wondering why the streets I was walking along appeared so unreal. Then I put my finger on it. Flierville did not feel like a theme park because of the Ring Canal; it seemed artificial because it was the wealthiest place I’d ever seen. Where was the garbage? The crumbling buildings? Everything was too clean, too quiet, too new. There were no signs warning of repairs begun years ago and abandoned. No ancient notices detailing interruptions to basic services and expected resumption dates that had never been honoured. No derelict public works. No bicycle-riding vendors and their tiny mobile market stalls that whizzed around the City selling everything from fresh eggs or cups of chai to paper-thin slices of sun-dried vegetables and meats and even flier energy strips, just one of which had enough kilojoules to keep an office worker going all day. No constant jangling of bicycle bells, no chants of street sellers or squawking chickens or shrieking kids, not even the tinkle of monks’ bells. I’d have expected to see their white and saffron robes in Flierville, but rich people are famously stingy and a monk can’t spend all day begging for his or her meal.

  This was the one place I could be certain Peri wouldn’t have gone to ground.

  The streets were so still but how busy the air above me was with darting fliers silhouetted against the burning sky. I had to be careful. Everywhere I was reminded this place wasn’t intended for me. Streets and alleys fell away, sheared off at the end over horrifying falls into concrete gorges. The first time I was confronted with the unfenced drop at the end of one of these streets, I found myself nearly stumbling over a sheer urban cliff below which twenty-storey buildings soared up to greet me, their roof gardens bright with flowers and vegetables and trees. I had to sit down on the kerb quickly, hoping I wouldn’t be sick.

  Someone yelled behind me and I ducked, nearly flattening myself against the ground. Seven fliers in bright clothes zoomed low over my head and to either side. They’d plunged from the building behind me and now swooped along the edge of the drop just in front of me.

  I swivelled my head to the left to watch them veer and half run, half fly up the clear ramp next to me which I hadn’t seen till I was virtually upon it. The way they bounded along it as it curved up, up, up into the air made me dizzy and I had a sudden violent imagining of running up the incline after them and jumping into the blue. Now that I knew what the take-off ramp looked like, I realised I was seeing them everywhere, jutting out at different levels from roofs and the sides of towers. I’d assumed they were decorative but no, they were runways and landing pads.

  The fliers leaping off the ramp in front of me dived towards the towers below. Their bright clothes made them easy to track and I watched them fling themselves onto windowsills and ledges, then launch themselves into the air again. They seemed to be improvising, snatching at any sign or beam or tree branch and using their momentum to swing them into the next part of their lurching trajectory, as erratic and looping as a butterfly’s. They swung by one hand from a streetlight or ran up the smooth side of a building for a few steps, then they’d leap into the air again. These fliers were playing, athletically, exuberantly, using the whole of Flierville as a gigantic jungle gym, pushing themselves to the limit of their ability to manoeuvre safely, now high, now low, now vanishing sideways into a narrow gap, now whooping and bellowing as they plunged from the highest towers.

  Reeling with vertigo, I watched the coloured dots till I couldn’t make the fliers out any longer. Then I looked down at my slick, which had in fact run a warning about the drop-off from this street but I’d been too busy gawking to pay attention.

  Though Little Angels was smack in the middle of Flierville, in an antique eight-storey building that breathed the scent of old money in its clean sandstone, in the worn granite treads of the steps at the entrance, in the handrails made of real wood leading up the marble stairs, its director, Mrs Harper, was not a flier. She was one of those bullet-proof women of well-off middle age, with the low confident voice, the gunmetal hair and ropes of gold looped around her neck and wrists, setting off her black clothes. I knew her type. Sool her lawyer onto you as soon as say good morning.

  ‘Hello, Mr Flower,’ Mrs Harper said. ‘Mr Chesshyre mentioned to me that you would be calling today. I’m devastated to hear that there’s been a . . . difficulty.’

  Mrs Harper didn’t sound devastated. I extended my hand, sure her dismissive screw-up of my name was tactical. People like her were masters at making others uncomfortable, keeping them off-balance. ‘Fowler. Zeke Fowler. Registered investigator.’ Her handshake was non-committal. I handed her my slick.

  Harper studied it. ‘The Charon nightclub case?’ she said, eyes widening. ‘The political kidnapping?’

  I nodded.

  Harper was looking at me more warily now. I’d had my brief episode of fame, or notoriety, in the never-ending serial drama of true crime and she was just the type to respect that. It’d been one of the top news stories most days for months: the twin teenage daughters of a cabinet minister taken from the Charon nightclub, my eventual discovery of them, brainwashed into living in the central Origins cult compound in RaRA-land under the personal ‘supervision’ of the cult leader, His Incandescence, the Most Serene Trinity Jones himself. After that followed the uncovering of links between the cult and a number of businesses, some of which were donating money or otherwise closely entwined with the Opposition. On and on the scandal went until even I, the head of Taskforce Advent, couldn’t hold all the threads in my head at once. We’d rescued one daughter, who was still undergoing rehabilitation, with her parents caring for the child that she’d brought back. The other daughter was still lost, her father powerless to force her back from the wilds of RaRA-land.

  ‘You know why I’m here,’ I began.

  Harper did not react. She was not about to do my job for me.

  Then followed fifteen minutes of skirmishing about Peri. Harper confirmed Peri had not had wings when she began work for the Katon-Chesshyres. She refused to speculate as to how or why she’d obtained them except to observe that good help was hard to get, many staff received ‘generous benefits’ and I had no idea of th
e demand for the ‘right kind of girl’.

  But why was Peri the right kind of girl?

  I swiped through the pages of the Little Angels catalogue Peter had given me. ‘I see from your listings that Peri had virtually no experience. Also she’s from RaRA-land. Why do you give her to one of your best families, who then reward her so handsomely she ends up with brand-new wings?’

  Mrs Harper shifted in her seat. At last, I was starting to make her uncomfortable.

  ‘Do you know of anyone else who has got themselves wings this way?’

  ‘Mr Fowler,’ said Harper, ‘I would not be party to such arrangements, if indeed they exist. Who knows how she got them?’ She gave me a shrewd glance.

  ‘You hire someone with no family, no connections, from nowhere. I see you’ve got a few other girls from RaRA-land too. Why? Not enough poor girls in the City?’

  ‘Plenty,’ said Harper. ‘But girls from RaRA-land have their uses.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Harper sighed. ‘They come from RaRA-land. They’ve only got temporary work permits. Their employers have to keep renewing them. Or, rather, we organise that on their behalf.’

  ‘So they’re easy to get rid of.’

  ‘It’s more that their incentive to perform is continuous and goes beyond the purely monetary.’

  ‘But why Peri? Why the Chesshyres? There must be a reason.’ I stared at her. Hard. A minute passed. I can outwait you, lady. I don’t embarrass easily. Another minute. There it was. She was going to speak. She’d decided she had to toss me at least a morsel of information to get me out of her office.

  ‘Yes,’ Harper said finally. ‘Yes, there are some things training and education won’t get you. She was willing to do something for them. Something they were prepared to pay well for.’