When We Have Wings

by Claire Corbett

  Now I was sure he’d done exactly this to Peri: brought her here, taken her in this terrifying place, Peri long-limbed, fragile, Chesshyre’s blue wings covering her, high on this spar in the gathering twilight.

  Chesshyre pulled me to the middle of the bridge. The cloud swirled down, wrapping us in cold grey. ‘I have to know if I can trust you,’ he growled, his voice deeper and angrier than I’d heard it before. He transferred his grasp to my shoulder and I winced as his fingers gripped me. ‘You’ve already taken this case to the police, haven’t you? Don’t lie to me!’

  I stared up at him. I knew he’d had me followed and now, too late, I understood why he’d brought me here onto this bridge, where he could interrogate me, use my vertigo to torture me until he was satisfied I was telling the truth. I’m no innocent when it comes to interrogation techniques myself and I should’ve seen this coming. As a cop I’d experienced how quickly an encounter could turn from a businesslike meeting to an ambush that threatened my life but now, as a private operator, situations like this were more ill-defined. When did I challenge Chesshyre as the contract between client and investigator switched to the stalking of hunter and hunted? We slipped back and forth across that line without acknowledgement, like the night before when I’d surprised the Raptor spying on me.

  ‘Of course you can trust me,’ I gasped, he-knows-I-lied-he-knows-I-lied-he-knows-I-lied racing through my mind. Structures hundreds of metres below swam up to greet me through gaps in the mist. There was nothing I wouldn’t have said. ‘I didn’t go to the police. I got help from an old friend. That’s all. Don’t you think they’d have knocked on your door by now if I was lying?’

  Chesshyre stared deep into my eyes. His breath was hot on my cheek. His fingers gripped my shoulder tighter, causing me real pain, but to shake him off would be suicide.

  My slick vibrated in my pocket. Thank goodness. Here might be solid proof I was telling the truth, enough to get me off this bridge alive. ‘Can’t talk here,’ I panted. ‘Something I have to tell you, very urgent. About Hugo.’

  ‘What?’ said Chesshyre.

  ‘Off the bridge first.’

  Chesshyre stared at me a moment longer, then grabbed my wrist and led me off the walkway which at its end opened directly into a transparent room hung over the abyss like a flower bowing over its stem.

  Once safely away from the doorway, I fumbled for my slick and saw that it was, finally, a message from Janeane.

  ‘That was confirmation,’ I said, still trembling with fear and pain, ‘that Peri is on her way to the City, with Hugo, as per our agreement. You can stop spying on me. Maybe now,’ I added, ‘you’ll believe what I tell you.’ Chesshyre snatched the slick from me. He was lucky I didn’t punch him for what he did up on that bridge. I felt like laying him out cold.

  So I had mixed feelings when Chesshyre handed the slick back, with an expression I’d never seen before, his face glowing with pure, unalloyed joy. It surged over him so strongly I felt the backwash of it too. If I’d not been so light-headed with reeling from terror to anger to relief myself, I might almost have been embarrassed to see such naked feeling on the face of someone so reticent. He looked expansive, a man who was unexpectedly friends with all the world.

  ‘That,’ said Chesshyre, ‘is wonderful news. Thank you.’ He was almost giddy. ‘Wonderful,’ he repeated. ‘You’ve done a great job.’

  I stood for a moment, catching my breath and looking around me. Room was too ordinary a word for this place. Pod might be a better description for this undulating transparency where there was no abrupt angle between floor and walls and roof, its material as clear as water, like the walls of Ruokonen’s treehouse. The view was now mostly the texture and drift of cloud.

  ‘This is my office,’ Chesshyre said.

  Of course. It was worthy of him. He’d created this, the premier spot in his own building, and why shouldn’t he claim it for himself?

  So this was how it was to be. We were to pretend nothing had happened on the bridge. Now I had to put aside my anger and fear and accept Chesshyre’s sudden sunniness. What choice did I have?

  A drift of grey cloud cleared below and I found myself staring down at what looked like a giant chessboard, its black and white squares bounded by a dark embankment.

  ‘There’s something I’ve wanted to say to you,’ I said, turning back from the outer wall to face Chesshyre. He’d picked up a slick from his desk and now glanced at me, his eyes widening in alarm.

  ‘Sanctus Ivo erat Brito, / Advocatus, et non latro / Res miranda populo.’

  He stared at me. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. You went to St Ivo’s?’

  I smiled.

  ‘Jesus, your dad must be disappointed. A St Ivo’s boy going into the police.’

  I laughed aloud at that. ‘No. Well, yes.’

  He recited, ‘Saint Yvo was a Breton and a lawyer, But not dishonest —An astonishing thing in people’s eyes. I used to look at that painting of him every morning in assembly: lawyer, book in hand, enthroned between rich and poor litigants, an angel at his head, a lion at his feet. Remember what they called him?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Every day of my police training. Saint Ivo: advocate of the poor. Patron saint of judges, lawyers, jurists. And orphans. An interesting list.’

  ‘And abandoned people,’ said Chesshyre. ‘Don’t forget them.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I spend my professional life trying not to forget about them.’ But you designed the Church of the Seraphim. Do you go there now, instead of the church of your childhood? Not only will fliers have their own city in the clouds but there’s a religion just for them too, though angels were now out of a job, what with all these winged types turning up at the gates of their very own heaven.

  Chesshyre motioned at the shadowed wall opposite and the entire surface lit up, glowing with a complex, many-layered design; he circled his hand in mid-air and the design rotated. The design was a section of Cloud City.

  ‘Look at this,’ Chesshyre said, using hand gestures to flick through cross-sections of Cloud City. For the first time I could grasp fully the size and intricacy of the proposed city, which was much larger than the complex we were now standing in; far-flung sections of it extended over the entire central area of the City. Cloud City would frame a complete existence for fliers. They could live, work, play, study, shop, swim and fly without ever leaving it. When this city-in-the-sky was finished, we non-fliers would be living in the shadow, literally, of their new world.

  My head was spinning. I pictured Thomas living in Cloud City, working in these vertiginous offices, flying to a perch at the top of a waterfall, playing with his children in that park hung on the edge of a chasm, living his entire life without touching the ground. I saw myself visiting him there, an old man who’d have to meet him down on the lower levels while Thomas’s real life would be inaccessible to me, beyond my imagination.

  I pointed to parts of the design that looked as if they were ruined, melting into air, reminding me of the roofless feel of Chesshyre’s house. ‘Those areas aren’t really unfinished, are they?’

  ‘No. Flier spaces let in the sky as much as possible. We hunger for space, even in the form of drops, chasms. It’s one reason fliers and non-fliers aren’t good at sharing spaces. We get claustrophobia; they get vertigo.’

  So I belonged to a they now.

  I sat down on a bench against the wall, staring at the new city, overcome with awe. Was this what Chesshyre had wanted to show me? Chesshyre moved in a different world to any I’d known before and, like Peri, I could not see any space for Hugo to share in it. This irony seemed to escape Chesshyre, who’d created this separate world for fliers— fliers and non-fliers aren’t good at sharing spaces—before coming to terms with Hugo’s failure to fledge. Chesshyre and I were mirror images of each other, struggling with the same dilemma. He’d be
a flier father with a non-flier son; I was a non-flier father with a flier, maybe, for a son. Each of us contending with a child completely unlike the one we’d expected, hoped for or could understand.

  Chesshyre moved closer to me. ‘Truly, Hugo was well?’ he asked, the lines between his eyes deepening. He put his hand on my arm for a second, as if he could feel whether I was telling the truth.

  I nodded.

  ‘The arrogance,’ Chesshyre said. ‘The presumption of that little—who the hell does she think she is? How could she think she’d do better for Hugo? And she’s subjected him to who knows what dangers! We’ve given Hugo everything. Everything.’

  No doubt you have. But how can Hugo, without wings, inherit your world?

  Chesshyre was pacing. Now he stopped. ‘Fowler, what did Peri tell you?’

  Finally, the question I’d been expecting all along. It wasn’t in Peri’s interest for me to answer it.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Mr Chesshyre. I was hired to do a job. I’ve done it. I want what you want: Hugo home, safe and sound.’

  ‘Of course.’ Chesshyre straightened up, rubbing his neck. ‘I can’t bear the waiting. Every minute drags like an hour.’ Then as suddenly as a cat scratching at a flea bite he grabbed an odd-looking comb from the top of the desk and raked at a spot on one of his wings.

  He flung the comb down and pressed his hands into his eyes. ‘You want to know the truth, Fowler? I love my son. Whatever that girl has said or done, that’s the truth.’

  I could see the pain on his face. He looked tired. I did feel for him, then.

  ‘You’re asking a lot of me, Fowler. I have to trust you, I have to wait for Hugo.’

  There it was, that was as close as Chesshyre would get to apologising for threatening my life on the bridge.

  ‘It won’t be long now,’ I said, more gently than I felt. ‘But, Peter,’ I added, using his first name unexpectedly and watching him startle, as I’d intended, ‘you really do have to trust me. Peri is returning, as you’ve seen. Don’t do anything to put her or your son in danger. You must call off your Raptor.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Peter, come on! That bloody thing was at my flat last night. It was terrifying—’

  I broke off. I’d been about to add that he’d put my own son at risk but the look on Peter’s face of stunned confusion, followed by fear, was so real that I fell silent. He truly did not know what I was talking about. And that was the worst news I’d had in a long time.

  I frantically ran through a list of people who knew about this case. Avis. Harper. Eliseev. Who else could have put a Raptor on my trail? Why?

  ‘I must go,’ I said. I really wanted to get back down to the ground. Through the dimmed walls I could see flashes of lightning and hear the deep collision of thunder.

  Chesshyre blinked, came back to life. ‘Come this way.’ He stepped out of the room and to my great relief did not aim for the bridge but climbed downwards along a walkway I hadn’t even seen from above as we’d first entered his office. This walkway led to a door that opened into the curving buttress underneath the prow itself. As we approached the door, thunder and lightning brawling around us, it slid back and I hurried inside to safety.

  As we paced along a corridor with rooms opening off from it to our left, I could see to our right thick rain falling past round windows that looked like portholes.

  After a moment the rain hardened into a barrage of white and I heard a heavy banging, as if a mob were throwing stones at Cloud City.

  A flier was walking, no, striding towards us down the corridor and Chesshyre called out, ‘Halley!’

  ‘Peter. I’ve been trying to get hold of you. I know you’ve been working twenty-hour days but you just cannot go to ground in the weeks before SkyNation. Especially as you’re the star this year.’

  SkyNation. I’d heard of the annual SkyNation parties but hadn’t taken any notice. A three-day debauch for wealthy fliers hadn’t held any interest for me.

  A tall woman in youngish middle-age swept up to us, bringing a breath of lustrous cold with her, as if she carried the wild weather in from outside on her feathers. Ice crystals slicked down her hair and feathers as if she’d been dusted with sugar. Her coat and dark trousers were spattered with mud. There was that light in her eyes and on her pink cheeks that you see on children when they’ve been running and playing.

  She shook out her feathers, then looked at Chesshyre and me, inquiring. It was clear she expected him to explain my presence; she was the first person I’d seen who assumed an air of authority around Chesshyre.

  I was taken aback. The woman was striking, sturdy for a flier and all dark and light, pale skin and dark gaze, her wings patterned and barred, grey and black and cream, like a hawk’s, her dark hair piled up on her head.

  ‘This is Zeke Fowler,’ said Chesshyre. ‘Zeke, Halcyon Kohn.’ Well, that explained her self-possession. This was Halcyon Kohn, the celebrated Halcyon Kohn. I’d just been introduced to the senior partner of the firm. I thought of Peri on her lonely flight back to the City with Hugo. That an abandoned girl from RaRA-land had joined this elite even as a servant seemed more remarkable to me the more time I spent in their world.

  Kohn inclined her head, then surprised me by shaking my hand. She turned to Chesshyre, saying, ‘Peter, Arto Flores has been asking for you again. He’s getting so desperate he’s taken to pestering me.’

  Chesshyre’s mood had fractured; moments ago he’d been delighted by the news that Hugo was returning but now he looked almost as uneasy as I felt. Fliers were so mercurial; was it the treatments, all the drugs they took? Chesshyre raised his eyebrows slightly at Kohn as if to say And?

  Kohn smiled, puzzled. She said, ‘I don’t understand why you don’t just take him on. He’s rich and he wants to build a dance training centre for fliers. Are you just showing him who’s boss or what?’

  ‘I’m busy,’ said Chesshyre. ‘Look, Halley, I like Flores but he’s living proof you can be the smartest guy in the room and still have no more visual sense than a fruit fly.’

  Halley. So that was her nickname. These two were close then. I’d never seen Chesshyre speak with such energy to anyone else.

  ‘I don’t have time to educate him and I’m not in the mood to have someone fight me every step of the way.’ Chesshyre looked so austere I almost laughed. What tests did clients have to pass for Chesshyre to condescend to work for them?

  Kohn caught my expression and allowed the slightest creasing around her eyes to suggest her thoughts might be similar to mine on that subject.

  ‘Alright, alright,’ Chesshyre said. ‘I’ll speak to him myself.’

  ‘Do it now,’ said Halcyon Kohn. ‘Or you never will. I can show Mr Fowler out. I want to look in on level thirty myself.’

  ‘I’ll keep you informed,’ I said to Chesshyre as Kohn led me away.

  Kohn matched my stride as we walked; she was at least my height, though of course her wings made her more massive. She tilted her head like a great falcon, and said in a low voice, ‘So you’re looking for little Hugo? It’s going well?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So Hugo is safe? He’ll be back soon?’

  ‘Yes,’ I repeated. ‘He is safe.’

  She let out a sigh. ‘That is such a relief. We’ve all been beside ourselves and I hardly dare ask Peter anything. I don’t know how he’s kept working through all this. I suppose it’s just as well that he has.’

  ‘Yes.’

  So Kohn wanted to question me. Well, that was fine because I wanted to question her too. An opportunity to speak to her alone about the case was too good to pass up, especially now that things were happening, like a Raptor checking out my flat for reasons I couldn’t yet grasp. I didn’t know everything that was going on and, worse, it seemed Chesshyre
didn’t either.

  ‘So, you know Hugo then?’ I began.

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far. I’ve seen him a few times.’

  The porthole windows we were passing showed bright sun striking down through a stream of falling water, water the building was shedding after the rainstorm.

  ‘And Peri Almond?’

  Kohn frowned.

  ‘The nanny.’

  ‘Yes, yes of course. She used to wait for Peter here sometimes, at the office, when she’d been in the city with Hugo.’

  ‘Did you find it odd that a country girl like Peri had wings?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, Mr Fowler.’

  ‘Ms Kohn, it’s very important that you tell me anything you know about how Peri got her wings.’

  Kohn was silent for a moment. ‘How is this relevant?’

  ‘Peri took Hugo,’ I said. ‘Hugo will be returned safely but he’s not back yet and I have to know what factors will influence Peri’s behaviour.’

  Kohn stopped and turned to look at me. I returned her stare. She ruffled her feathers and the movement shook a heady powdery floral odour from her wings. She narrowed her eyes, then stood up straighter. I felt the stab of elation I always got when I could see someone had made up their mind to speak.

  ‘I knew that Peri looked after Hugo.’

  ‘Did you think she was good with him?’

  ‘Yes,’ Kohn said. ‘She had an ease with Hugo and maybe that irritated Avis. That was the feeling I had. It’s a cliché, I guess, because there’s truth in it. The mother’s jealous that the nanny who spends all the time with her baby is more at ease with him than she is.’

  ‘You don’t think Peri could have been a bit . . . unstable?’ I ventured.

  Kohn shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t know. Obviously something was wrong. Avis—’ She hesitated.

  ‘Please,’ I said, very quietly. ‘You’re not being disloyal. Anything you can tell me might help . . . Peter. And Hugo.’