by L. J. Hatton
I had absolutely no idea what to do with myself.
The kitchen was clean, and I didn’t feel right poking around the house without its owners at home. My father’s room was occupied, so I couldn’t get another crack at the computer without answering questions. And since it was Klok doing the occupying, those questions would be detailed and drawn out. Jermay with access to running water meant at least an hour without him to distract me. Even the creeper lights had gone dormant for the brightest part of the afternoon, charging their batteries so they could be used at night if called on.
I was suddenly exhausted by a day that had begun the night before. One that contained grief and joy, fear and confusion, and a blitz attack by a very angry kitchen. There’d been so many highs and lows and so little time to catch our breath, we should have all had the shakes from spiking adrenaline. To make it all fit, time would have to be as modular as Baba’s house, pushing things of less importance out of the way to hold what was happening in the moment.
I’d been pushed too far. My body and my brain were demanding rest. I wouldn’t presume to use any of the rooms without asking, but there was a sofa in the living room. Hopefully no one would feel the need to test out the kitchen repairs while I was in there.
CHAPTER 10
I didn’t miss the room I grew up in. Any happy memories I’d saved from the destruction of our train had been obliterated by Warden Nye’s attempt to re-create my home at his Center. But I did miss the soothing sound of movement, the constant heartbeat of wheels against the tracks, and the lullaby of wind outside my windows.
I thought I’d never sleep without them, especially on the Mile, with its uneasy sway through the clouds. The Center came equipped with a stabilization system that made walking its corridors as smooth as walking the halls of an earthbound house. The Mile pitched and rolled like a midnight trawler lying in wait for fish too smart to surface during daylight. It spoke to me with words I’d never heard before and always seemed to be mocking me.
Exhaustion eventually won out, but the drunken lurch of upper air currents invited itself into my nightmares: me falling with the flaming debris from the Center, tangled in the strangling spindle-legs of a climbing lantern that hoped I might save it, tumbling with the bodies of my dead friends and family because I couldn’t save them. I could never save them, no matter how hard I tried.
Evie slipped into an empty space beside me, her open, washed-out eyes accusing me of another failure. Behind her, everyone else was burning.
How many times had Evie told me that there was nothing the Commission could do to hurt me? I was too strong. I was too special. I was Celestine, and I could break them.
I’d lived my entire life hearing that whispered in the shadows where no one else could overhear, but when it came time to prove it, I’d ended up the one broken.
Evie never lied to me, so the problem was mine. I wasn’t good enough, and because of that, I was losing everything.
The sky turned pinkish-purple, blistered with the encroaching shapes of jellyfish-like creatures that blocked the sun. The legs of the climbing lantern became the unfurled arms of a Medusae wrapped around my body to stop my fall. Most people wake up when they feel themselves falling in a dream, but I didn’t snap out of it until I bounced in its embrace like a bungee jumper who had reached the end of her rope.
I opened my eyes, but I was still falling, cartwheeling end-over-end in a dizzying spiral that wouldn’t stop.
Panic set in before I could wake myself up all the way, keeping me anchored in the nightmare. It taunted me with whispered words: “Stars fall. Stars fall.” A sinister promise that I would meet the end I deserved. I’d rained fire down on those who hurt me. I’d killed my own brother by crushing him beneath the weight of heaven. Now it was my turn. I’d be nothing more than a flare in the dark, streaking across the sky and destined to disappoint anyone who tried to wish upon me as I burned.
My mind had become a very dangerous place to dwell.
My senses broke through, chipping away at the dreamscape and replacing it with reality. I was spinning in place, not getting closer to the ground, and it wasn’t ground, anyway—it was a floor with rugs. Each rotation brought glimpses of walls and furniture. The air was layered with the sweet-sour twang of stale burnt tea and worn metal.
“Not falling,” I told myself. “I am not falling. Not falling.”
I was still in Baba’s house, caught in a flare of Vesper’s aerokinesis and unable to fight my own momentum. I couldn’t put myself inside a stone cell this time; there was no bedrock beneath the house to call up. I had to find another way to calm down.
Slowly, I pulled one arm into my chest, then the other. I drew my legs up and let myself drift without fighting the current. It bounced me across the room to the window looking into the kitchen, where I was able to grab the upper ledge and hold myself still.
I unfolded my legs, but they still wouldn’t touch the ground. I tried maneuvering into the window itself, where I could sit on the counter built into the opening, but I kept bobbing back toward the ceiling. For now, down wasn’t an option.
At least nothing was on fire this time.
“Hello?” I called into the house. “Is anybody home? Jermay? Klok? Anybody?”
A door slammed in the kitchen. Using my hands for leverage, I turned myself around. Xerxes and Bijou were loose in the room, tag-teaming the cabinets to get the doors open and see what was inside. The mess in my father’s workroom was starting to make more sense. Klok hadn’t tossed the place; the troublemakers did it. This was their payback for making them stay small.
“A little help?” I asked.
Bijou blew a puff of leftover smoke from his snout and wriggled into the nearest cupboard. An avalanche of cooking pots tumbled onto the floor; Bijou rolled out on top of them, with a lid on his head, grinning in the particularly disturbing way that only a dragon can pull off.
Not quite what I had in mind.
“Xerxes? Help me.”
That plea never failed.
Xerxes beat his wings, rising up to face me.
“I don’t know how much of Magnus Roma you actually have inside you, but if you’ve got a fifth of his intelligence or a tenth of his ingenuity, I could use some of his ideas,” I said. “I need my father.”
I gave up on trying to keep myself level. It had taken Vesper more than a year to master walking on air, and that was after she’d spent twelve years with her touch. I’d only had it for a few weeks. It was a miracle that this was the first time it had turned on me.
Xerxes pushed me down with one paw; I popped back up. He repeated the experiment, marking his results with a click similar to the one made by my father’s favorite pen when he took notes. He held me down with both paws, but it made no difference. As soon as he let go, I was floating again.
He squawked at me, gryphon-speak for “hang on a sec,” and leapt to the top of the cupboard. He surveyed the room, forming ideas and discarding them. Another of my father’s tics he’d absorbed with eerily human precision.
Xerxes deployed his wings and glided to the light in the ceiling.
A mistake, as it turned out. The light didn’t like being touched.
All of the bulb-tipped octopus arms rattled at him like a nest of angry titanium snakes startled out of sleep. Xerxes hissed back. He grabbed a tentacle in his claws and attempted to drag it closer to me. The light fixture coiled up, pulling its arm right out of his grip. Undeterred, and quickly losing his temper, Xerxes turned around to bite it.
Bijou, still wearing the pot lid for a helmet, rushed to his fellow golem’s aid. But they were outnumbered by several arms, and it didn’t take long for the light to tangle poor Bijou beyond escape. Xerxes tried baiting the lamp, flying evasive maneuvers to tie it in a knot.
My rescue had turned into the clash of the world’s smallest titans. If Klok didn’t straighten them out soon, we were going to have to find a psychiatrist who specialized in artificial life-forms.
; “What’s going on down there? It’s louder than the animal cars at feeding time!” Winnie shouted from upstairs; I heard her feet running down the steps. “Penn’s trying to sleep!” she scolded from the staircase.
“No I’m not!”
“Penn?” She looked at the empty couch, then scanned the room.
Winnie hadn’t changed out of her pajamas. The sack holding her new clothes was still on the coffee table in front of the sofa.
“Up here!”
“Penn? How . . . never mind. How do I get you down?”
“I don’t know? Pull?”
She took my hands and leaned backward, but even when I managed to get near the floor, I was upside down with my feet floating behind me.
“I feel like I’m staking out one of the balloons for the big top,” she said.
“I can’t help it. The harder I try to land, the worse it gets.”
“Then stop trying! Tread water.”
Spoken like a real carnie girl. Once the obvious doesn’t work, look at the problem from a different angle, and you’re bound to find a trick that will.
I changed my focus. I stopped fighting the current and let it right me on its own. Small movements kept me from spinning out of control, while the air kept me buoyant. Moving my arms up or down allowed me to control how high I went.
“That’s better,” I said, crisscrossing my legs. “Where is everyone? I tried calling for help, but no one came.”
“We didn’t want to disturb you. Baba’s holding a community meeting at the shop to make nice with the neighbors—glad I’m not there. Klok’s locked himself in Magnus’s room. Birch is better off at the garden without me to cause him trouble for a while, and everybody else is off checking out the Mile. I wanted some time to myself.”
“Jermay left, too?”
“Hours ago. What do you think would happen if I tethered you to a chair? Would it hold you down or float with you?”
I thought that Jermay would make jokes about me being tied to a chair as soon as everyone came home. Anise would scold him for inappropriate humor in front of Birdie and Dev, Klok would defend the right of boys to be inappropriate, and the rest of the evening would crumble from there. It would also likely include the madcap misadventures of a pair of glitched-out golems and a pot-lid helmet.
“Think of something else,” I said.
“I can try ordering you down.”
“I already want to come down.”
“Fine. Stay there.” Winnie went to the table in front of the sofa and dumped out the sack, spilling her mother’s red shirt and black pants onto the floor.
“Why didn’t you change clothes?” I asked. She’d cleaned up, but left Nafiza’s gift untouched.
“Because those came from her, and I don’t want anything she has to give. Hold this. We’re going to make a counterweight to keep you grounded.”
She shoved the bag into my hands, then started pulling large books from a shelf and stacking them nearby.
“What did Nafiza do to you?”
“She told everyone here that I was a land mine waiting to go off, and they believed her. Community first and majority rules; that’s what fuels the Mile. I got voted out.”
She dropped two books into my bag; the weight dragged me a couple of inches lower.
“But you were a kid,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter. Nafiza’s never wrong as far as they’re concerned. She saw disaster. She saw me. The others decided that if they got rid of me, the vision as a whole would have to change. That’s why they’re all so weird around you, you know. She had another flash yesterday. Nafiza said destruction was due on tomorrow, yesterday, three weeks from last Thursday, or whatever, and then we arrived. Ollie, Esther, and the others think we’re the fulfillment of some stupid prophecy.”
She handed me another book.
“That’s crazy,” I said.
“Not much is considered coincidence around here. Baba and a few others opposed when she got me tossed. They wanted to wait for Magnus, at least, but then Nafiza started rambling about seeing me alongside a warden. Everyone assumed that meant me as a hound, spilling their secrets, and that cost Baba most of his support. I know she can’t help it. I know it’s not fair to hate her for it. The words come out whether she wants them to or not, but I didn’t even understand what was going on. I went to sleep up here and woke up down there. I still don’t know who booted me.”
“They just left you?”
“I think whoever did it was trying to get me to Magnus. The town I woke up in had hosted The Show, but I was too late to catch the train, and I had no way to get back up here. I hid for as long as I could, but three weeks later the Commission caught me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It wasn’t your fault.”
The air bubble popped, plopping me into the chair below. I landed backward, but thankfully upright. Apparently the secret to controlling my touch was to stop trying to control it. Once I stopped thinking about how I couldn’t get down, the air currents that kept me aloft died out.
“I’ll spot you points for sticking the landing, but your technique is atrocious,” Winnie said. “Birdie would be embarrassed for you.”
She smiled through one side of her mouth. It would have looked cruel to someone who didn’t know her, but it was actually a laugh.
“It wasn’t Nafiza’s fault, either. She wanted me to tell you that . . . or she knew I was going to tell you that. Maybe I only said it because she told me I was supposed to. Whatever. It wasn’t her fault. She’s sorry, and she said the clothes she sent you belonged to your mother.”
“You made that up.”
“I swear on my terrible acrobatic skills.” I rolled backward, meaning to do a somersault, but ended up kinking my neck with another lousy landing. “I’m very dedicated to their awfulness.”
While I righted myself, Winnie sat down on the sofa, staring at her mother’s clothes.
“These were really my mother’s?”
I’d never seen that look on my own face, but I’d felt it a million times. It was easy to think of the dead as a dream or an idea that would pass, especially the dead you’d never met. They were stories and pictures, not people. Artifacts made them people. They could be touched and cherished and lost. Clothing gave Winnie’s mother a body to wear it. A breathing chest to make the red cotton rise and fall; arms that would have held her as a child had fit within those sleeves. Her mother’s fingers had worked the buttons.
“Do you think they still smell like her?” she asked. “I’ve seen her face in pictures, but I don’t remember her voice or anything. I don’t know how tall she was or if she snorted when she laughed. It would be nice to know what she smelled like . . . that’s silly, isn’t it?”
“Not to me,” I said. I’d been mourning a robot. Compared to that, wanting to know her mother’s brand of perfume wasn’t much to talk about.
Winnie picked up the shirt and held it to her nose, then stuck her hand in the sleeve to feel the material at the cuff.
“I forgot what it was like to miss my mom,” she said. “When I lived here, I thought about her all the time, but down there I had to worry about other things. I had no one in the Ground Center—except Birch, but he wasn’t family. Then Greyor . . . and now Greyor . . .”
She hid her face behind the shirt so I wouldn’t see her crying, but the material didn’t completely muffle the sound.
How many people could one girl lose without it costing her more than a few tears?
She had no parents, and she never mentioned her other siblings, but for her to be in Nye’s database of twin pairs, she had to have them. I assumed Greyor was her twin, although I’d never seen him exhibit an ability like Birch’s. But Winnie wasn’t even eighteen years old. Her first escape from Warden Arcineaux was at fourteen. How could Greyor have gotten a Commission job that young?
“He was spectacular,” she said. “He used his touch to create the perfect specimen for duty at a Commission Center.
It let him sneak around with different faces so no one caught on. After he released me and the rest of the girls, he stayed behind to try to save the boys. He never got the chance.”
“Arcineaux recognized him at the Center in the sky,” I told her.
“I warned him not to keep one face for so long; he should have known better. Do you want to see what he really looked like?”
“Sure.”
Greyor had helped me, too. It was strange to think the face I knew was a fake.
“There’s an electronic frame on the shelf. I’ve been trying to set it to a specific photo to use for a memorial. I already found a candle under the sink, but there are too many photo files. Do you think you could find it?”
I was definitely willing to try. Winnie had done nothing but look out for me from the first word I ever heard her speak. Helping her locate a photo wouldn’t even dent the debt I owed her.
I took the frame from her and concentrated on the memory of Greyor’s face, even if it wasn’t his real one. The most vivid image was the moment he died, leaving me with the dread that the frame might somehow construct that picture out of my thoughts and show Winnie something she really didn’t need to see.
All of the photos saved in the frame started spinning faster than a human hand could swipe through them. When they settled, I was looking at a boy who was maybe twelve, with shaggy black hair that curled around his ears. He had Winnie’s big brown eyes and the same pointed chin, and he was sitting on the back of a girl the same age—Winnie. It looked like he’d knocked her into the dirt and was declaring victory while she pretended to bite him in the leg.
My Greyor looked nothing like this boy. His face had been longer and his eyes lighter. He’d kept his hair sheared neatly per Commission regulation. I would have sworn he was twenty-five, at least. It had been a perfect costume except for the fact that it couldn’t save him.
“That’s it!” Winnie exclaimed. She grabbed the frame from me. “That’s my idiot brother, just before I had to leave. I knew Baba hadn’t tossed it.”