When We Have Wings

by Claire Corbett

  ‘What—why—’ began Peri.

  ‘One of our most important areas of exploration is night flying,’ said Finch as she unfurled her wings. ‘Jay is taking a group but I think you and I should start off alone.’

  Together they soared into the warm night. Peri kept silent, concentrating on mirroring Finch, as much as she could mirror the dark outline flying against the night sky. Peri was acutely aware of how much larger and clumsier all her movements were. So hard to concentrate only on her flying. It felt wrong. There was always that rushing panic, beneath thought, when she left Hugo. She was certain disaster would overtake them both when she was not with him, especially if she concentrated on something else and let go her constant, diffuse awareness, as if she held him in the world with the net of her thoughts and bore him up safely only with the force of her continuous attention. He might wink out, a falling star, if she lapsed.

  Flying at night felt more three-dimensional than during the day. All Peri’s senses reached out as the night engulfed her. The dark wrapped tight around her and extended in every direction. She floated upwards. There was still warm air rising but no proper thermals to do the work for her. She was strong. She could power herself up.

  Peri watched Finch, imitating the angling of her wings and body. Finch slowed a little and Peri caught up, staying behind her right shoulder. Finch was teaching her. This was a flying lesson, with Finch exaggerating her movements a shade more than was natural. There was a flow to Finch’s flying as easy as walking. She didn’t think how to do it. She just did it. Peri began to hope this might be possible for her.

  Finch moved in closer until she was flying wingtip to wingtip with Peri. ‘Ordinarily, I wouldn’t take an outsider like you on a flight like this but Jay thinks that the sooner you feel part of the group, the better. Jay already made that decision, now we have to follow through. We took responsibility for you by saving your life, we took you over, really, but for this to work you owe us much more information. For a start, you can tell me what the hell you were really doing out there in a storm with a baby.’

  Peri drew her breath in sharply.

  ‘You have to tell me,’ said Finch.

  ‘I know.’ Peri looked across at Finch’s dark shape against the stars. ‘The weather was fine when I started. It was stupid to fly without better tracking of the weather but I had no instruments. I had a flight plan but it wasn’t nearly detailed enough.’

  ‘We do that all the time,’ said Finch. ‘Flying without instruments. But not for long journeys. Something was driving you. What was it? We need to know if what you’re running from is going to come looking for us.’

  Peri sighed. ‘I was working in the City. For a family. Well, they weren’t a family. Yet. The agency that sent me to them had worked out what I wanted. What they wanted. How both of those things could come together.’

  Peri could feel Finch staring at her.

  Peri bowed her head. ‘I would give them a baby. They would give me wings.’ It was painful to speak these words, hard to believe she’d spoken these terrible words twice in a few days when she’d never said them before, not even to herself. To admit the starkness of the bargain she had made. She sank down in the air, her very muscles weakened by sadness. She was the bad mother in the fairytale, giving away her firstborn for salad greens.

  But the child was not mine. I did not think he would be mine. That’s no excuse. I know that now.

  ‘My god!’ exclaimed Finch. ‘Peri, you poor thing. That’s dreadful. So you took him and flew away?’

  Peri shook her head. ‘It’s complicated. My friend was killed. She’d made the same deal as me. And they were going to send Hugo away. You’ve no idea how they . . . Anyway, I had no idea what I was agreeing to,’ she said. ‘I was so stupid. I had no clue; I’d never been pregnant. I didn’t know . . . how could I? . . . what it does to you.’

  Finch blew out her breath noisily in a sigh that could have been disbelief, pity, outrage. ‘So, no-one knows you’re here?’

  ‘How could they? I don’t even know I’m here. I don’t know where here is.’

  ‘But they’ll be looking for Hugo. What do you plan to do?’

  ‘I was going to take him to—well, a long way away. But I changed my mind. I’d decided I had to return Hugo, that ultimately he was better off with his family, but then the Raptor was after me. Finch, you have to let me go. I have to take Hugo back. Soon. Or god knows what will happen to me, what they’ll do to me.’

  ‘I see,’ said Finch. This time, Peri could hear Finch believed her.

  The stars were tantalisingly near. Peri drove herself higher. She wanted to get closer to them, further from the ground. She’d never flown at night before without Hugo in her arms, without navigating carefully, concentrating hard. This was different. Lighter. How high could she fly? The air chilled along her arms but she was warm from the work, the soft feathers of her wings skimming her back. It would be glorious just to see; after all, they had talked about pushing the envelope . . . and the night was so calm.

  Higher and higher.

  The stars were so bright. Surely it was possible to get closer to them? They were glassy and sliding, like melting ice. They were singing. What were they singing, in those high shivery voices? She had to swallow, make her ears pop so she could hear them.

  Up here the air was freezing, stinging the frostnipped skin under Peri’s bandages and each breath, each wingstroke, was hard work in the thin air.

  She was dizzy.

  Where was Finch?

  She looked down.

  Nothing.

  How high was she?

  Below, all was dark. No landmarks: no campfire, no pale thread of waterfall, no darker and lighter shades of cliff face. A layer of cloud had gathered, far, far below, too distant to make out any shapes. Cloud formations were still described as if from the ground, looking up. Peri was not yet used to seeing them from above.

  In her rapture under the stars she had no idea where she was or even whether she’d kept her wings level; was she dizzy because she was spiralling down and didn’t even know it?

  Peri tried to power upwards. The only safety lay in gaining more height but she was gasping for breath. The singing of the stars was higher too, piercing. They were too high. She was too high, but it was dangerous to drop; she might dive out of control. No visible horizon and the stars are no help, shrilling in my ears like that, can’t tell if my wings are level. Don’t panic, breathe, can’t breathe up here—

  A wingtip brushed briefly across her back.

  Finch was flying next to her. Where had she been? ‘Concentrate. We need to fly lower so you can breathe better. Don’t worry so much about keeping your wings level. We’ve found there’s an internal gyroscope of sorts. It’ll work; you have to learn to feel it. Most fliers are too frightened to practise this or trust it. You need others to help you through the first few times.’

  Finch coaxed Peri down into warmer, heavier air and they flew eastwards over dark country. As the wheel of stars revolved over them, Peri relaxed into the cadence of long-distance flying, her wingbeats and heartbeats slowing into the rhythm. They had been flying this way for about an hour when she said, ‘So, what was that?’

  ‘You were flying high,’ said Finch. ‘That was good, just under five klicks.’

  ‘You’re joking!’ said Peri. ‘Why did you let me?’

  ‘Come on, Peri. I’m not your Flight Gym instructor. We’re not here to hold your hand every minute. We’ll help keep you safe but you have to push yourself. You have to feel these things for yourself. Feel the joy of it, too. Find your own reasons to fly.’

  ‘Doesn’t seem possible to fly that high.’

  ‘You’d be amazed. Cranes can fly at six thousand metres. Some geese fly higher—they even surf along the jet stream. You need to find your own ceiling, work out
what’s safe for you. Raptors experiment with that.’

  ‘And the gyroscope? The internal horizon?’

  ‘There’s a lot of controversy about that. I am certain there is one, that it has also come through in the modifications, whether in bird DNA or in some added spec, which would make sense to me, but no-one’s discussed it in the official literature; they just recommend you don’t fly in cloud without an altitude watch. Some experts argue that some have the gyroscope and others don’t. That it’s only present in some treatments. Impossible for us to check because we don’t know where in the sequence it’s coming in.’

  ‘That would explain why no-one speaks of it,’ said Peri. ‘If only some have it, and they don’t know who, it’s too dangerous to mention.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Finch. ‘But I think they don’t understand it yet.’

  ‘You mean it’s part of some other modification and they haven’t realised it?’

  ‘Perhaps. So far, everyone we’ve worked with has had it. That’s the interesting part. The difficulty is that there’s no easy, surefire way of getting you to feel it and trust it. We just have to work on it as best we can.’

  ‘You don’t wear an altimeter or any other instrument,’ said Peri, as they turned to head back. During the turn she tried to experiment with how she might feel an internal horizon but it was frightening and didn’t make sense when she could use the stars to help her as she banked. They righted themselves and checked their heading.

  ‘Ooooh, cranking and banking a bit there, weren’t you?’ laughed Finch. ‘That was a sharp turn.’

  When Peri didn’t answer, Finch continued, ‘Birds have navigational abilities so remarkable that we’re still struggling to understand them. Echoes, ghosts of these, have come through in the modifications. If we work at it, we believe we can become more perceptive and skilful in using them, but you can’t do that if you’re relying on an altitude watch. You know that birds have a barometric sense in their ears but did you know that if you were as sensitive as a duck, you’d be able to tell which floor of a building you were on just by sensing changes in barometric pressure? That’s useful for avoiding storms too, of course, as well as for telling whether the air you’re in is rising at a constant rate or sinking at a constant rate. I mean, you can tell when you enter a thermal, you can hear it, specially if you get a boomer, but without a variometer most fliers don’t know whether the air they’re in is rising or sinking. We’re not as sensitive as ducks yet, that’s for sure, but I’ve flown enough to know my height under most conditions.’

  Finch began to fly faster and, despite her fatigue, Peri forced her wings to match the new rhythm.

  ‘Even more remarkable is compass sense and map sense. Compass sense, knowing where north is, requires an internal timer to work if you’re cueing from the sun. Some birds, like homing pigeons, can navigate as if they knew their latitude and longitude at all times. That’s map sense and we can’t explain it. It doesn’t rely on orienting to sun or stars, though birds can do that too, but homing pigeons can home just as accurately when it’s overcast and when they’re released somewhere they’ve never been before. Don’t you think it’s worth investigating abilities that astonishing?’

  They flew on over dark country, the only sound the wind through their feathers. Peri wanted to keep flying but she needed to rest her wings. The analgesic Jay had given her had worn off and she felt every one of her bruises, as well as aching from her overworked muscles.

  Finch said, ‘The flight watches have everything: altimeter, artificial horizon, satellite navigation, time, wind, airspeed, pressure, variometer, weather forecasting and more. It’s all there and you don’t have to do any of it yourself—and why would you? It’s dangerous and it’s hard. The problem is, you will never feel what it’s like to fly if you use those all the time.’

  ‘And I will never feel what it’s like to hit the ground at two hundred k an hour either,’ said Peri.

  ‘Well, you will if you don’t learn to deal with the dragons for yourself.’

  ‘Dragons?’ said Peri. ‘I don’t understand the way you people talk at all.’

  ‘That’s because you’ve barely flown outside of Flight Gym, and you haven’t flown with other fliers, have you?’

  ‘No,’ said Peri.

  ‘Dragons are all the unseen dangers fliers face. Turbulence, rotors, wind shear, even gravity waves. For example, when you fly you’ve got to look for rotor triggers and avoid them. No instrument can help you do that. And if you’re not willing to do that work, why bother flying at all?’ added Finch. ‘It’s a lot easier not to.’

  They were flying in a black sphere, its top half pricked with light. Peri felt as if she extended beyond her body, as if she reached out through her head, through each feather in her wings, into the darkness. She felt extended through her great primary feathers especially, as if they were sensitive antennae, picking up messages vibrated through the air. There wasn’t a clear boundary. How far out could she feel her way?

  Finch said, ‘If anything happens to your watch, if it slips off your wrist or the satellite link is down or you bash it against a rock or land badly or it just stops working, what then? You’re disabled. Flying blind, without any of your own abilities. You’re not really a flier. Just a tourist. That’s all most fliers are. Just tourists dependent on expensive gadgets and an even more expensive drip feed of drugs.’

  Peri thought. She could see that for many fliers what Finch was saying would never matter. They’d use their watches and fly barely conscious of all the forces at work in their new world. They would not give themselves to this new life. Who knew what it might mean? For many of them, wings had not come at such great cost as they had to her. But she, who’d sacrificed so much, could she bear to feel that barrier between her and Flight for the rest of her life? If she didn’t make the element her own, how could what she had gone through be worthwhile? There was no way forward other than the one Finch was showing her.

  ‘Does your group have a name?’ said Peri.

  ‘We’re called Audax.’

  ‘It’s more than you were used to at Flight Gym, isn’t it?’ said Finch as they splash-landed in the black water pooling above the waterfall at the edge of Heavener Ridge. Peri hadn’t seen any sign of the Audax camp from the air. Even though she could now see the small fire in the clearing, shielded from above and on three sides by a kind of metal oven, there’d been no telltale spark of light through the trees. She only recognised where they were from the twisting strands of water down the cliff face.

  ‘You know, they don’t have a clue in the City,’ Finch said as they walked out of the water, passing a group of three black-clad fliers on their way to the cliff edge. Peri assumed they were a patrol. ‘There wouldn’t be ten people in the City who really know how to fly. Wings are a fashion accessory or at best an extreme sport to them. It’s too scary to become a real flier. Because you know what? Wings are heavy unless you give something up. Otherwise no freedom. No true Flight. Becoming a flier is not just about gaining wings; it’s about letting other things drop away.’

  Before Peri could say, What things? What do I have to drop?, Jay appeared and spoke to Finch. They left on some mysterious errand, telling Peri to help herself to the food hidden in the cool larder among the stones under the water.

  Peri found Phoebe sitting outside the circle of firelight with Hugo wrapped tight, sleeping, next to her. After bolting fruit and energy strips standing up, Peri settled herself next to Hugo. Phoebe, who had acknowledged Peri’s return with the slightest tilt of her head, was grooming her wings by a lightstick, which was hung under cover in a tree. No-one flying above, or approaching the camp from any direction other than from the river, would be able to see it. After a few moments Peri began grooming her wings too.

  Something relaxed in Peri as she worked over each feather until it gleamed in the blue light. Finch’s
words had loosened the tightly pulled knot of self-loathing and fear around Flight that she’d felt ever since gaining her wings.

  If no-one in the City knows how to truly fly, then maybe I’m not hopeless after all. With these people, maybe it’s possible to learn to fly. How could I have known this was what I needed? Flight Gym was supposed to be enough.

  Before the transition, you never think beyond getting your wings and your first flight. Like giving birth—you couldn’t imagine what happened afterwards, until you did it. Then you understood, though no-one could tell you, that birth was just the beginning of your transformation, not its end. No-one warned you that you could feel just as lost after the transition to Flight. Well, who was going to confess their own doubts and weaknesses? Luisa, maybe, but we had so little time together. I need to learn from these people. There’s no time now; they have to let me take Hugo back to the City, but maybe I could come back here?

  Exhausted, Peri picked up the bottle of repellent from where it sat next to Phoebe and covered herself and Hugo with the gel again, laid one wing over Hugo, covering his little body from neck to toes, pillowed her head on her other wing and slept.

  When Peri woke it was deep night. She and Hugo were alone but then she heard fliers splashing down into the river. Hugo snuffled and snorted and started to wake up. She cradled him against her breast and he suckled briefly. As Peri watched fliers wading out of the river and up to the lightstick she thought about how much food they must need, and the waste pit they all had to use, across the other side of the river and well away from the water. A new pit would have to be dug soon. Even this small flock put pressure on the wilderness.

  Finch materialised from the trees behind the river flat and sat next to Peri. Two young male fliers walked by and as they passed the tall one with blond hair looked over to where she was nursing. He turned back to his friend and said, laughing, ‘Man, there’s some serious ground- suck potential there.’