When We Have Wings

by Claire Corbett

  Finch took off down the steep grassy run that was their favourite launch point and Peri watched how she rose high and fast above the cliff to avoid blow-back and rotors over the ridgeline. After a few moments Peri followed, copying Finch’s manoeuvres precisely.

  ‘Finch, tell me about this mission,’ Peri said once they were high above Heavener Ridge and flying wingtip to wingtip. ‘It sounds dangerous. And illegal. Niko said L1 hadn’t been hit yet. What’s he talking about?’

  ‘Easier to understand once we get there,’ said Finch, turning east into the faint grey pre-dawn. ‘It is dangerous and illegal, which doesn’t sound too different to some things you’ve been up to lately. You’re lucky this was planned by Niko; he’s cautious and he’s never lost anyone. Niko’s interested in change, the big picture. Have you noticed there are more women than men in Audax?’

  Peri shook her head.

  ‘Niko’s policy,’ said Finch. ‘Women get the job done, no grandstanding, he says. Doesn’t like too many men in any one group; says they’re show-offs. Jay isn’t like that though. Raf’s our daredevil but we need at least one.’

  Below Finch and Peri puffy cloud rolled to the horizon, crimped with blue shadow and pink light, regular and sinuous as braided hair. After the sun rose, Finch took them beneath the cloud.

  ‘Just so you understand our strategy on this day’s flying,’ said Finch after thirty minutes, when they were warmed up and in the rhythm, ‘there’s a saying: you fly the sky or you fly the ground. If you’re on a short joyflight you fly the ground: you look for ridgelift, you watch out for rotors and low wind zones, you look for thermal generators and avoid lakes because they don’t generate thermals, and you scout for LZs.’ In the strengthening light Finch pulled a pair of tinted goggles from her waistband. She slung them across to Peri, who had to dip a little to catch them, and then pulled out another pair for herself, adjusting them as she spoke.

  ‘But on a long flight like this we’re going to fly the sky. We’re flying near to cloudbase or top of lift. We’ll harvest the thermals powering the clouds and be virtually invisible to anyone on the ground. That means we’re looking for cloud streets—cumulus forming parallel rows along the direction of wind flow with all their cloudbases at the same level. We might even luck into a blue street. Blue streets form when you get the same long line of lift but it’s too dry for cloud formation—so they’re much harder to find because you can’t see them.’

  ‘I’ve never flown a cloud street,’ said Peri.

  ‘Really?’ said Finch. ‘They’re quite common over the ocean. They can stretch for hundreds of kilometres.’ She sighed. ‘It’s glorious, sailing along on the might of all those thermals under the rows of cumulus, and if you’re clever enough at jinking from one cloud street to another you can keep it going, oh, for ages.’

  ‘I haven’t had that pleasure,’ said Peri. ‘I couldn’t go looking for cloud streets. I was lucky to make it to my Flight Gym classes. Even if I’d had the time . . .’

  ‘What?’ said Finch. ‘What is it, Peri?’

  ‘Have you heard of Flight Checks?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Finch. ‘I’ve heard of them.’

  Peri looked at her grey bracelet. Jay hadn’t told her exactly what it could do. Ruthless of him, really, and shrewd, building up that anxiety in her; it tracked her but was it also a leash, able to pull her up short whenever he wanted?

  ‘Bet you never had one put in against your will. Anyway, you know they limit your flying range. Parents fit them to their fledglings but the ones they put in adults, those ones can pull you down like you’ve been shot.’

  ‘So no ranging over the ocean searching for cloud streets for you then,’ said Finch. ‘That’s too bad. I hope we’ll swan along the white road at least once today.’

  Peri concentrated on looking forward to that—her first cloud street—rather than her fears about where it might lead her.

  The land below was wilderness. The lack of sharp edges was the clearest sign of this from the air; the pure and plain demarcation between field and field, the precision of fences, the slicing geometry of roads, were all missing. Instead they flew over expanses of mottled brown and grey, the earth scored with irregular oval lines, shapes that reminded Peri of the lagoons and fringing reefs she’d seen as she’d flown down the coast. With its worn, softened contours, it looked as if they were flying over the flat, dry bed of an ancient sea.

  ‘A blue day,’ said Finch. ‘Good lift but no cloud streets because the lift is too high; there’s no real lid to it.’

  The brown land ran out into salmon-coloured earth or sand, folded with swirls of vegetation so dark that its green colours edged into purple. Then they were soaring over jumbles of rock the same rich orange-red as the earth, the rock fissured into gorges of unfathomable shadow.

  Peri and Finch flew all day, stopping briefly only three times where there was good cover of trees for rest and food. As they drew further away from Heavener Ridge, they occasionally dropped lower for Finch to check their progress against landmarks. Then they used a thermal to take them back up to near cloudbase.

  ‘Watch the cloud shapes, particularly height relative to base,’ said Finch, as they headed for some towering cumulus. ‘Stay away from clouds that are much taller than they are wide because they may overdevelop, as you found out with your storm. Also watch out for clouds with a wide base; those ones can overpower you. When you’re pulled up irresistibly into the cloud, when you can’t get away, that’s cloud suck. That’s too much lift.’

  It was the shadows that Peri noticed first. They were flying over a wide green and brown plain and to their right was a long ridgeline. East of the ridgeline she saw a broken line of shadows dropped over the land. Peri looked up. Above the shadows sat a row of flat-bottomed puffy clouds.

  ‘Finch!’

  Finch turned her head. ‘Yes,’ she said and headed straight for the clouds. ‘You need to dolphin. Dolphining means you slow down for the lift under the clouds and you speed up for the sinking air between them. The point of that is to stay at the same altitude. Takes practice.’

  Then they were in it, lofting like dandelion seed. To the west humped the dragon’s spine of the ridgeline and below them stretched the long, irregular line of shadow. But it was a line just the same, all ahead of Peri, running for kilometres and kilometres of towering multi-thermalled lift. This was almost as intoxicating as glass-off, this was flying as she’d always dreamed it would be, this effortless rush, this dash across country that felt as if it would never end.

  The gap between the ridgeline and the white cloud ahead showed up as intense blue in the distance.

  ‘Blue hole ahead,’ said Finch. ‘Look, we’re in luck, we can jink over to the next one.’

  Peri felt as if she were flying down the side of a mountain as she hit the sinking air, accelerating like a rollercoaster, then came the swoop up and slight slowing under the next cloud street.

  ‘Oh my god,’ said Finch. ‘Look at that. I have never seen that before.’

  Peri was wafted up by strong warm air. Above them unspooled a long curving roll of cloud with none of the puffed edges of the squat clouds they’d seen earlier. On either side of them at the same height ran more long tubes of cloud, white and as precisely cut as fat noodles side by side on a blue plate.

  ‘The sky is striped!’ said Peri.

  ‘Like a tube of freakin’ toothpaste. Unbelievable. Look how defined the edges of the cloud streets are.’

  After an hour of rapture they ran out of cloud streets. ‘Looks like the sky gods really turned it on for you today,’ said Finch. ‘For your first time. Happy?’

  Peri nodded.

  ‘You should be. You could fly for years and never experience that.’

  The country began to look less wild, to show more recent scars of neglect and abandonment. One of th
ese, a dead hydroelectric dam, made Peri shiver. The great hole in the earth lay empty. Below the crumbled rim of the dam, massive chunks of concrete bristling with its steel reinforcing bars torn from the ruined curtain wall were scattered and broken down the dry wash of the extinct river like the discarded toy blocks of a giant. Concrete leaked rust stains the colour of old blood.

  They followed the scar of the dead river until it petered out into exhausted land left to rising salt, its deadly white scribbles stitching scars of raw earth, eroded hills and crumbling levees. The bones of splintered farmhouses weathered under the white sun. They saw few birds, except, here and there, a crow.

  Ahead of them, glinting on the horizon, was something exquisite and unsettling. Vast belts of deep jade, kilometres long and wide, alternated with shocking crimson and magenta. There was no variation within the bands; there was not one grain of colour Peri could see that was paler or darker than any other. Where the bands ended began an even more remarkable phenomenon: a broad square of blue extending as far as the eye could see. This blue was broken up into a mosaic of giant squares, graded exactly from one to the next by increasing depth of colour of every shade of aquamarine, from almost white to the pure blue of a warm shallow sea.

  The squares gleamed in the sun as if they’d been lacquered.

  ‘Well,’ said Finch, ‘I’ve seen the green and pink bands before. Blue squares are new, though.’

  ‘I know what it is,’ said Peri.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Andy Silver. Must be.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Andy Silver, the artist. You know her?’

  ‘No, why should I?’

  ‘Oh. I just thought . . . well, Peter and Avis had pictures of her artwork.

  Finch snorted. ‘Artwork? Those are salt extraction ponds.’

  ‘Yes, it is salt but it’s art too. She says she makes art that becomes an environment fliers fly through, like feathers of colour that contour the wind, fly up into the clouds and dye their edges. Colours from algae swirling in ocean currents. She must be living out here, making these blue squares with salt, out in the wilderness for months, maybe years.’

  ‘Let’s hope she doesn’t turn Wild in the process,’ grunted Finch.

  Peri couldn’t understand Finch’s indifference. Peri had been tiring but now she was flying in a trance of blue. In the heat the blues vaporised, powdering her; she tasted hot blue salt. She was like one of those giant manta rays she’d seen in nature films, flapping its wings through a transparent tropical sea. On and on she soared over enamelled shifting blue as if driven onwards by it, forgetting fatigue, pain, fear. They were lifted by the blue as if by a thermal and perhaps it did have special thermal properties; perhaps, Peri thought, this was their blue street except it lay below them instead of invisibly above.

  ‘Careful,’ said Finch. ‘You’re sinking into it.’

  Peri shook her head and urged herself higher, alongside Finch, aware she was sacrificing airspeed to do so.

  ‘You have to watch out for that,’ said Finch. They were now flying over heavily treed hills. ‘You fly straight to whatever you concentrate on. Someone I knew ended up crashing into a lone tree in the middle of a field with hectares of open space all around him. He was focusing on what he wanted to avoid, but instead you have to focus on where you want to be.’

  They flew for several more hours until twilight. The sun fell into the west behind them, washing the trees and plains below in gold while the land and rising hills ahead sank into blue, deeper blue and lavender. Peri pulled off her flying goggles and stowed them in her waistband. Below her, the tops of the trees flickered with rose fire as they tossed their crowns in the level rays of the sinking sun.

  A road unrolled beneath them, pale strip against darker unlit country. No lights, no cars.

  ‘Did you know,’ Finch said, ‘that birds navigate by roads too? Easier for them. Often they follow roads even when that makes their journey longer. They’ll even zoom around roundabouts.’

  ‘So much for distance as the crow flies,’ said Peri.

  ‘Don’t know about crows,’ said Finch. ‘But birds do follow the routes we make. One more way we’ve left nothing unchanged in this world. Suppose they’ve done it ever since Romans built roads, or since tribes made paths through the grasslands.’

  After a while Finch said, ‘L1 is isolated. You’ll see why when we get there but it also makes it easier for us.’

  ‘Niko said something earlier about the usual routine. Does that mean you’ve done this kind of thing before?’

  ‘This is the biggest strike so far,’ replied Finch. ‘At least in my time with Audax. Till now we’ve kept a low profile, didn’t want any- one to come looking for us. But Niko’s growing more ambitious. He wants to attract attention this time.’

  After another hour they landed in a field and got into cover, a belt of bushes and trees forming a thick windbreak along the edge of the field. ‘The others will be nearby soon,’ said Finch.

  They ate a little, dozed and waited for another two hours. It was nearly midnight. Peri could see from her slick that L1 was slightly to the east although she couldn’t tell how far away it was. After another half-hour their slicks vibrated with a message from Niko.

  ‘Now,’ said Finch. ‘Follow me.’

  They moved among the trees, then ran along the fenceline until they came to a thicker patch of trees. Finch led Peri to a clearing down on the far side of the hill. From the edge of the clearing, hidden by a rim of trees, Peri could look across and up to a rounded hill, its sides smooth as glass. That must be L1. Nothing called attention to it except the too-perfect shape of the hill.

  Peri saw a dark figure and shrank back.

  ‘It’s only Raf,’ whispered Finch.

  Rafael came over to them, followed by Jay and Leto.

  Finch gathered the fliers around her and they crouched in a circle. Peri could see they all carried crossbows except her. ‘We’re going in in two parties,’ said Finch. ‘Leto and Peri, come with me; Jay and Raf, you two know where you’re going and what you need to get. We’ll be picked up by remote tracking so put these on.’

  Finch handed them each a slip of material that unfolded into a dull, dry film which clung to their faces. Peri could see and breathe through it but it was disconcerting to see the faces of the others as obscured as if they were wearing veils.

  ‘We’ve got forty minutes if we assume surveillance picks us up right away,’ Finch continued. ‘We’ll get in without setting off any alarms—Niko’s seen to that—but they’ll still have visual scanning. We could have up to seventy minutes if they’re a bit slow but we can’t count on that. Diomedea believes L1 is safe because it’s isolated; non-fliers can’t get near the place and City fliers wouldn’t bother coming this far out. Hardly anyone knows it’s here. So this is our best chance. It’ll be much harder after tonight. That’s why we’ve waited, till we know what we take will be significant. They shouldn’t catch us so the main thing is not to be tracked back. We’ll fly back in our two groups and we’ll leave no later than two-twenty am.’

  Finch stood up. ‘There’s a few things I want to make clear before we go in. First, no wilful destruction. We’re after information, that’s all, and a few supplies. We’re not here to destroy anything or to stop Diomedea’s work. You know what Niko thinks: Diomedea’s breaking the law and we’re the avenging angels. You’ll see things you don’t like. Tough. Deal with it. You’ll have a better idea of what goes into giving you wings. Think anyone in the City wants to know? We’re not here to condemn the ethics of Diomedea’s research; we’re here to make the true results of that research available. If you don’t agree with that, you’ll have to do something about it on your own time. We all have wings, we’ve all benefited from their research, and from MicroRNA/Corvid and the others. So get as much as you can, as fast as
you can, don’t do any damage, and get out.

  ‘One more thing. Do not even think about releasing anything you see in there. That would be cruel, possibly catastrophic. You don’t know what’s been done to them or if any of them has a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving five minutes outside of L1, let alone the danger of spreading modifications into remnant wild populations. Understand?’ They nodded back at her, faceless ghosts in their masks.

  ‘Good,’ Finch said.

  The apprehension that had been building in Peri all day, so like the anxiety she used to wake up with on the mornings before her medical procedures, now curdled in her belly and in her blood, setting hard into fear. What did Finch mean? What were they going to see in there? Peri thought with envy of her future self: in less than two hours, she hoped, she’d be back outside this place, would never have to see it again. She drew in a deep, deep breath. In a sense, she was that future self, right now. She must hang onto that idea: she just had to get through the intervening time, minute by agonising minute.

  Jay took Finch aside and they had a brief, low discussion apart from the others. Finch paced a step away, came back, movements springy, tense. Jay shook his head. ‘Just a contingency. Look, it’s okay, if she’s really—’ Jay looked over at Peri, dropped his voice further.

  ‘I know what to do,’ Finch said, walking away.

  God. What were they going to do? Finch and Jay were talking about her. They must be; everything else had been worked out, she was the variable, the wild card. The problem. Were they going to abandon her here? They couldn’t be that cruel. No running away from whatever they’d planned; they were her only way back to Hugo.

  Rafael and Jay took off, invisible against the dark sky. No moon; no doubt a factor in the timing of this raid. Peri, Leto and Finch flew in tight formation over the ramparts at the crown of the hill and down, landing on a paved courtyard near a set of doors. They were in front of a complex of low buildings topped with one high dome.