by L. J. Hatton
“Get up,” Anise snapped at me.
“She’s dead.”
I’d become a broken doll, left and forgotten on the floor, as helpless as Evie when I’d seen her in the Center’s prison.
“Penn, you have to get up. We’ve got to leave,” Jermay said.
“But she’s dead . . .”
“Come on.” Birdie lifted my arms and pulled back, angling her body for leverage until her thick, asymmetric braids almost touched the floor. I was too heavy. “Penn, please. I want to find Mama and Papa.”
She broke my heart, but I couldn’t move.
“We were supposed to help her, but she’s dead.”
Reality tilted. If I couldn’t save anyone, what was the point of standing or walking?
“Winnie, you’re going to have to make her move.” Birch had been quiet since our escape from the Center, speaking only when he was alone with me or Winnie. Now he’d found his voice and used it against me. We weren’t supposed to turn on each other. “Get her on her feet.”
Winnie squatted down so that we were eye level. She was saying things, and in the back of my head, I knew I should have been reacting to them, but there was a fogbank inside my brain that she couldn’t breach. Birdie had stopped pulling, but she still had my hand. It was the one point on my body where I could still feel warmth. Everything else was ice cold because Evie was gone, and she’d taken all my fire with her.
“Can you hear me, Penn?” Winnie asked. To the others, she said: “She’s in shock. I can’t get through.”
“Please get up,” Birdie begged. “Please! We can’t go without you! Klok, do something!”
Klok was too busy packing up the workshop. He’d collected bags’ worth of provisions and gear that Jermay and Birch were securing on each person’s shoulders while Klok activated Xerxes and Bijou. At full size, they took up most of the space, forcing us to the fringes.
I wished they’d grow bigger. Push us into the wall and let the sediment close over me. Imbed my bones beside my sister’s, where I couldn’t be a weapon or a failure.
“Help me get her on his back.” Jermay threw one of my arms over his shoulder so I’d rise with him when he straightened up. Winnie and Birdie were still in sight, so it had to be Birch who took my other side.
“Evie’s dead,” I said again. Why wouldn’t someone acknowledge that we’d lost her? I felt like I was the only one who had noticed.
“We’re going out blind,” Anise told them as I was hoisted onto Xerxes’ shoulders. Something tightened around my waist. I looked down to see Birch had belted me on with vines he’d grown on the spot. Jermay climbed up behind me, and Birdie sat in front, clinging to Xerxes’ neck. “We don’t know how many men that warden brought with him or how close they’ll be.”
“Files,” I said.
“What?”
“His name’s Warden Files, from the Midlands. He has a preference for firstborns from touched families because the fear of fire is primal. That’s why he wanted Evie.” My words were still dull and toneless, repeated from what Greyor had told me at the Center. I couldn’t find the switch to turn my emotions back on.
Anise laid her hand against my leg, looking up at me.
“Penn, I need you to snap out of this. I’m going to open an escape tunnel straight up. If they’re on top of us, we’re going to need you.”
How was I supposed to help anyone? Didn’t she see me fail?
“I needed Evie,” I said.
“We couldn’t save her, all we could do was stop her, so I did. Now is not the time for this conversation.”
She slapped my leg, making it sting, and a new spot of warmth formed in the shape of her palm. She climbed onto Bijou with Winnie, Klok, and Birch, and both golems lifted off.
“Ready?” Anise asked us.
She raised her hands above her head and punched a hole.
CHAPTER 3
Every night, there comes a time called the Magic Hour. Sailors on the ancient seas called it the Time of Knowing, because they believed that the hue foretold what weather they would face on the new day. Travelers called it the Faery Hours, believing it to be a daily convergence between the mortal world and the Court of Seelie. It’s a moment so surreal in its perfection that it can’t possibly be natural, but it is. The sky blossoms into colors our eyes have forgotten to look for; we certainly don’t have names for them. The light no longer burns; it beautifies, and even if they don’t realize they’re doing it, people hold their breath because on some level they don’t want to break the enchantment.
My father used to say that the Magic Hour was the moment hope entered the world. It had to come at night so that it could become dreams of better days while people slept. That was why he chose to open The Show at twilight. Hope was part of the experience, but it wasn’t something he could manufacture.
When we burst out of the ground, we fled from the Hollow into the Magic Hour, and it was the only hope we had.
Anise shifted the rock above our heads so that the shaft she created appeared to have always been there behind our ceiling. Not a single grain of dirt fell to the floor; we didn’t breathe it in as we rose. Evie stayed behind, still dead where Anise had buried her.
Warden Files’s men were swarming the area on foot and in trucks. We caught them by surprise.
“There!” someone shouted when we emerged. “The assets are running!”
Idiots, I thought. We were flying, not running. Jermay’s arm was around my waist. I was hanging tight to Birdie to keep her from slipping off Xerxes’ back, and we were flying.
I expected to see the glimmer of holographic unnoticeables, as that had always been the Commission’s tactic before, but none came. Maybe the Center in the sky was the only platform capable of producing them, or perhaps Warden Files and his fellows really were racing to pick up Nye’s scraps before we were found by someone else, and he didn’t have official support.
Wardens hated to share, and they seemed to spend so much time snatching things from each other’s grasp that they hardly concerned themselves with their actual function.
“We have to get out of these trees!” Anise called. “They’re holding us down!”
Xerxes and Bijou had to maneuver between the branches. It was slow going, and the deeper we dug our path into the woods, the denser the coverage became. We were low enough that if the warden’s men had stood atop their trucks, they could have reached us with a jump. Most of them had stayed behind to see if our escape tunnel would allow them access to the Hollow, but there were sounds of pursuit headed our way.
“Birch!” Anise shouted. “First line of defense!”
“You’ve got it,” he answered.
On either side of our escape route, two-hundred-year-old trees bent over like three-week saplings, filling in the road so no one else could pass. They became braided ribbons of oak, strong as iron and an anomaly for future generations to puzzle over, because there would never be an explanation for their new configuration—not for anyone who’d never seen Birch work his magic.
It really felt like magic.
Younger trees uprooted themselves to serve as sentinels at our back, following behind us like they’d been born not only to run on their roots, but to outrun.
The Commission had underestimated Birch since he was a child, and now they were paying for it. Like me, he was a rare “Level-Five,” a fifth-born twin in a touched family. Being a boy made him a wild card that no one had been prepared for. Birch had learned to use plants as a tool, and he’d taught them to answer his call. Now they were his soldiers.
“Once we’ve got enough space between us and them, get us out of here,” Anise said. “Make sure they can’t see us when you do it. I don’t want them to know where we’re going.”
Birch nodded, and the woodland guardians dipped their branches with him.
“After we’re clear of the trees, we’re still going to need cover,” Jermay said behind me. “That’s you.”
“I know.”
&nb
sp; I sat up straighter, making sure Birdie had a firm grip on Xerxes. My worry was unnecessary, considering she had better balance than the rest of us put together. She was so little that her slim brown fingers could grasp him where one row of feathers stacked on top of the next.
“Don’t let go,” I told her. In our former life, I’d been the circus’s ringmaster. Safety was my responsibility when my father wasn’t around.
“You’ll catch me if I fall,” she said, without doubt. “We’re family. I trust you.”
I used to trust my family, too.
I held my hands together in a cage like the one my father had built around our circus grounds, where blue lightning had danced along the lines every night.
“Spark,” I whispered to myself. I blew into my hands, summoning the thick white air Vesper used to create the bodies for her owls. A tiny storm raged inside my fingers, and I held it steady, testing myself.
“Do you think you can do it?” Jermay asked. He was peeking over my shoulder, and his voice was heavy with so much hope, I didn’t dare disappoint him.
“Penn, are you ready?” Anise called to me.
I nodded because I didn’t want to speak to her yet.
Birch swished his arms over his head, and the trees spun into a cyclone of twirling branches. We rode the current up and out, emerging over the treetops into the clear night. Behind us in the distance, something was burning, turning the sky a violent and mournful red I’d only seen once before—the night we lost the train.
“It’s gone,” I said.
The only home I had left was gone, and my past with it. My sister was buried there. Jermay’s father was buried there. The memory of my brother was buried there, with a million other family secrets. It was sacred ground; Files didn’t have to burn it.
“Give us a storm,” Anise prompted.
Another familiar feeling overtook me, searing through my heart. It wove a string between me and the stars above, trilling musical notes that no one else could hear. I’d give her a storm. If Files was so fond of fire, I’d ignite the rain around him and torch the sky with burning hail.
The song in my soul was a funeral march peppered with billowing flares of anger. The stars were lining up, and I knew that this time they wouldn’t ignore me.
I raised my eyes to the sky and whispered, “Fall.”
We flew for hours.
Sunrise looked different above the clouds than it had watching from the train. It was brighter, with bands and rings of light that seemed nearly solid, as though I could reach out and put some in my pocket to carry with us for later. That was the sort of a thing a person called a Celestine should have been able to do. There was darkness approaching; we could all feel it, and having an extra shine in hand could come in useful.
Anything I could do would have been useful, but I’d made no move to use my abilities since I sent the stars down on top of the men who burned the Hollow. I didn’t have to see it happen; they hit their marks, and I wasn’t sorry. Only humans felt remorse. I was a monster, and accepting that brought me a freedom I’d never expected.
The morning air was crisp and clean, without the choke of industrial smoke that came from passing through cities and towns. There was no rumble of machines beyond the sound of Xerxes’ and Bijou’s wings slicing air. We were nearly as high as we’d been inside the Center, and it was cold. Skinny-dipping in the Arctic Circle cold.
With my bare legs stretched across Xerxes’ copper-plated back, it was worse. The cold sunk in past my thin nightshirt and skin until it ran like ice in my blood. I’d never minded the cold before, but since I’d begun showing signs of the gifts my sisters carried, my perceptions had been changing. Now I was as intolerant of low temperature as Evie and her fire spouts.
Or it might have been the shock.
“Turn right,” Winnie instructed. “Be careful of the jet stream; it’s pulling us off course, and it’s only going to get worse the closer we come. The place we’re going doesn’t want to be found.”
She’d been saying things like that for an hour or so, speaking of this great unknown as though it were a sentient beast that could choose to devour us rather than give us shelter.
Xerxes and Bijou peeled off in turn, taking up their new heading. As we shifted away from the sun and the glare faded, I wound up staring straight at Birch on Bijou’s back. It wouldn’t have been so bad, but he was watching me, and he wasn’t practiced at keeping his feelings off his face. Worry for me was written clearly on his features. He’d grown up without a family, and he didn’t know what it was like to lose someone like Evie. He’d been my ally inside the Center, but now I didn’t know what to do with him.
It was a different kind of cold between us, but still unbearable.
Even Jermay felt cold behind my back. He’d barely spoken since we left the ruins of the Hollow and the grave where his father had been laid to rest.
“I don’t like the way Mulch-Head is looking at us,” he said. “There’s something off about him.”
“Being raised as a lab rat in a cage can have that effect.”
Jermay didn’t know what Birch’s life had been like with the wardens. He’d only seen the boy who thought of Nye as a father and wore the clothes of a Commission underling, not the prisoner who hadn’t been able to escape with his friends and suffered for it. He’d never seen the terror in Birch’s eyes like I had.
“Please tell me you’re not jealous of the guy who helped me save your life,” I said.
“I don’t trust him.”
“But you do trust me, so believe me when I tell you that you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
“No promises if he keeps staring like that.”
Xerxes drifted closer to Bijou, and Birch finally glanced away.
“How much farther?” I asked Winnie.
“We’re here,” she said.
An ironic turn, you could call it. When I’d first told Jermay and the others that we’d reached the Hollow, no one had believed me. They couldn’t see it, though it had been right in front of their faces. Now I’d taken the same position, confused by the endless stretch of clouds and sky. Where was Winnie taking us?
“I don’t see anything down there,” Jermay said.
“We aren’t going down.”
Not exactly safe, but no Commission, Winnie had promised. We had agreed to follow her, though we knew it wasn’t possible for such a place to exist on Earth. No one noticed that she’d never mentioned it actually being on Earth.
“Do you see the cloud bank up ahead?” she asked me.
“Of course.” It loomed up white and solid as any wall, too wide to go around. But closer scrutiny brought out details that weren’t quite right for natural clouds. There were strange tinges of blue and pink that shifted, threading in and out of sight, and while the rest of the clouds moved with the currents, these didn’t.
“Can you move it?” Winnie asked.
For years, I’d thought her mute, not realizing that her lack of words was a choice rather than a necessity. Then her voice had been stolen and locked away by evil men like Warden Arcineaux who couldn’t stomach knowing that she had power over them. They had fused a metal plate over her mouth, and even though Klok had removed it, she had scars and fresh wounds that broke open whenever she had to say something.
Winnie held her mouth strangely to cut the pain I knew she had to feel with every word. I tried not to ask too many questions of her; I didn’t want to make it worse.
“Just try and thin the clouds,” she said, waving her hands for a cue, as though we were still circus girls and putting on a show.
I nodded, but the gesture was surer than I felt. Vesper could have done it, and until my abilities had failed me at the Hollow, I would have believed I could, too. But there was the same chance that I would fail again.
I tried not to think of where Vesper might be. She looked so much like me that imagining her in pain was like seeing it on my own face. I brushed aside the gloating words of the warden who
had claimed her for a prize. All that mattered was finding the currents, weaving them like patterns in a massive loom. Pull one thread and the others all responded, creating a tear in the middle of the cloud bank big enough to see through.
“What is that?” Anise asked, leaning forward in her perch.
Hazy colors appeared at first, bright and startling against the void of near-white. It looked as though the sun were rising both ahead of and behind us. As we came closer, the colors formed shapes: round balloons, oblong pontoons, glistening cables mixed with ropes to anchor everything to baskets and floating bridges. It was another city in the sky, but as far removed from the Center as The Show’s train had been. As far as a daydream from a nightmare.
Here and there several well-made pieces filled the sky, interspersed with air-filled creations of quilted squares, patched where they’d sprung leaks and covered with gardener’s tarp to protect them from the elements. Some had full articles of clothing sewn into the gaps. A pair of men’s trousers formed a sideways V along the seam of a green-and-gold concoction, while a bright-orange skirt made for a young girl flapped off the edge of a blue one like misplaced fringe. Rattan baskets hung empty from most of the smaller floats, but others had been woven together, shaping organic dwellings that were connected to the city’s central platforms like fungus sprouting off the rim.
Here there were no gyro-rings like those that powered the Center and kept it aloft. This place was solely dependent on air and engines.
“Where are we?” Jermay asked.
“Home,” Winnie said. “Welcome to the Golden Mile.”
CHAPTER 4
For generations, the Golden Mile had been a lightning rod of commerce for the entire nation. It wasn’t actually made of gold, but the name made people want to go there. Someone could ask for directions and feel like they’d been let in on some great secret when they found it. Once upon a time, metallic banners hung from the streetlights, and the roads were painted yellow with black stripes instead of the usual yellow stripes on asphalt, just so people would know they’d arrived. But that was a quarter century ago, before they came.