Clockwork Phoenix 5

by Brennan, Marie

  Benito closed in on him in an instant, one arm sweeping around Casey’s waist. He tangled his other hand in tousled, sandy brown hair, then kissed Casey like a drowning man finally making it to the surface.

  He felt Casey tense and broke the kiss. Benito clung to him while biting his own lip. “Casey, I’m sorry I never—”

  “Ben,” Casey interrupted, pointing skyward.

  “Dammit,” Benito said. He looked where Casey pointed, through the spinning dust and debris. From the green-purple sky, a funnel grew downward only a dozen giant steps away.

  “I thought when I—”

  “Doesn’t work like that,” Benito said. He had to yell over the howling. “Once you call up a twister, it doesn’t go down again until it runs itself out,” He glanced back at Casey’s eyes, needing to see what he looked like there even as he dreaded it. “Or until someone goes in there and puts it down.”

  Benito kept watching, wondering if the tension he could feel in Casey’s back was fear of the storm or of him, if the shadow behind his eyes was the both of them going dark.

  Then the shadow wasn’t behind Casey’s eyes, but on his face. Benito spun around as one of the barn doors flew straight for them. Before he could do anything else, though, Sarah Mestrovich blocked out the sight of the door. She hugged both men to her. Benito felt a shudder go through her as he heard the crash and splinter of wood.

  “Are you both all right?” Sarah asked as she let the men go.

  “Are we all right?” Casey asked.

  Sarah shrugged. “Giants are tougher than regular folk our size,” she said, then winced. “Well, maybe it did sting a little.”

  “I told you to run away from trouble, young lady,” Benito said, recovering. He grabbed both Casey and Sarah by the hands. “Scolding later. Sarah, take Mr. Lawrence and find cover.”

  “Ben?” Casey asked. Benito put Casey’s hand in Sarah’s larger one.

  “This thing’s still growing,” Benito said, pointing to where the twister had finally touched down. It zigzagged its way forward. “It won’t stop here. Might not stop until it goes all the way through town. We can’t wait for it to wear itself out.”

  Casey paused just a moment, looking between Benito and the storm, then nodded. “Be safe, Ben,” he said.

  “Only if there’s no better options.”

  Benito couldn’t feel the pounding of giant feet as Sarah and Casey ran for cover behind him. Breezy, having more sense than most folks, followed the pair. The rumbling twister screeched and howled and pitched a fit. Benito wondered just how much of what was pent up inside Pete had fed this thing.

  There wasn’t time to care. Benito ran forward, felt the wind catch his feet out from under him. He rode the gust up into the bloody middle of the twister.

  Twisters didn’t talk, but Benito could feel it throwing out spite and challenge all the same.

  I can throw a steer clear across the county, howled the rage and venom. Rip a homestead from the ground without even trying, came with hate and a boil in the blood. Why should I listen to a little bit of nothing like you?

  The way they taught a Pac to answer was to reach into a twister’s heart. Dig in. Give back as much nasty rage as the twister had until it was whimpering and begging to be told which way to go. You beat a twister by showing it you were ten times meaner and stronger than it was. You beat a monster by showing it you were a worse one.

  Benito reached down into those nasty places he’d shut away from his life, felt the blood pounding in his temples, the rage burning in his throat, the screams bouncing in his ears.

  Then he caught sight of Sarah and Casey—or shadows he thought were them. It was hard to see much of anything from here. He wobbled inside. There was another rumble and howl as the twister threw something heavy at him.

  Benito barely managed to bend out of the way as Pete’s body flew past. He remembered Mei Wu from yesterday. Wouldn’t she be laughing an I told you so at him for turning his back on a monster that wasn’t dead after all his preaching at her?

  He felt an odd shudder in the wind. It wasn’t the same as grabbing a twister by the reins, but it also wasn’t the beast bucking him off. He’d never felt it before, but he thought, for just a minute, he felt jealousy out of the storm.

  I don’t have to be meaner and nastier than you, Benito pushed back with a smile. I don’t need any of that, because all you have is the next few minutes. You have however little time you can snag to tear things apart, and then you’re gone.

  After, there would still be the stubborn refusal of a little girl to let a snake bite scare her off, the sweet juice from a Seeder apple, the proud voice of a slightly tipsy jackalope. There would still be a giant child’s oversized grin of pride and the warmth of rotgut and straight talk. There would be the smell of loam and prairie grass after a storm.

  The wind began to collapse below Benito, and he rode it downward, smooth and careful. By the time his boots touched the ground, there was nothing left but a soft breeze.

  Casey and Sarah moved back into the open cautiously. At a wave from Benito, the pair ran to join him. Casey all but knocked Benito over as he wrapped his arms around Benito’s waist, but he held back from a kiss, eyes searching for something in Benito’s face.

  Benito smiled. Casey returned it, pulling Benito close for a hug filled with desperation and relief. Benito breathed him deep as the sky washed itself clean of the sickly colors of the storm.

  “I have never seen anything like that,” Sarah said as the pair broke their embrace. “You have to teach me how to do it.”

  Benito had the briefest flash of the rage and bile that would bubble up on Pacos Bill’s face if someone taught a giant, of all people, how to wrangle. He bit down on a chuckle.

  “We’ll see,” was all he said.

  “Ben?” Casey asked. “Are you all right?” He took Benito’s face in his strong hands.

  “I’m fi—” Benito started, then stopped. “I’m tired,” he said instead, “and sore. A little queasy. I know we have to talk, and I want to. I really do, but right now, sweetie, right now all I want is you, and a cool bath, and a piece of rhubarb pie.”

  A soft breeze played in Benito’s hair. It carried the pungent scent of horseflesh and the jangle of Sarah’s nervous giggle. The sun stung the back of his neck. Casey’s lips tasted of dust and grit and the slight tang of sweat as Benito kissed him gently and let the world melt into them for however many breaths it could last.

  The Fall Shall Further the Flight in Me

  Rachael K. Jones

  There are things that fly and things that fall. You must remember this distinction, because they are not the same.

  Devils are flying things that learn to fall. Lovers are falling things that learn to fly. Do not confuse them.

  * * *

  Saints do not fly, precisely, although they may seem to as they bear our prayers up the sky. They merely learn not to fall. It takes long years of repentance to master this art, and even then, some saints fall anyway, like my mother did.

  I repented of my first sin at the age of eight. I do not remember the reason, but I recall the lonely, still hours in the garden, kneeling among the wild onions, the sun’s heat my only company, and warm blood beneath the rose stems wound round and round my wrists. High above the willows, my grandmother cut a dark shape from the sky as slowly she raised a naked foot for the next step.

  Even then, I dreaded the day I would climb the air to take her place. I feared it more than falling. From the time her feet left the ground, years before my birth, no one had spoken a word to her, lest they cause her to sin and fall. I couldn’t fathom a life spent with only the darting chimney swifts for company, and seeds for food.

  I prayed I might be spared, but there was no saint to carry the prayer upwards, save for me, and my time of ascent drew near. If I did not go, who would walk to Heaven to ask for rain?

  One evening, as I peeled rose stems from my stinging legs, I looked up at the darkling sky and saw a
dazzling thing, neither bird nor saint, plummeting toward my garden.

  * * *

  Imagine a star falling to Earth.

  From a distance, it appears to fly across the dark shell of the atmosphere. If you are too close—if it is falling straight toward you—it seems fixed like a star whose inner fire is growing brighter and brighter until the illusion breaks, and the heat is upon you, and the light, and the sound, and then the collision, flesh on stone, flesh on bone.

  Imagine finding it was not a star at all.

  * * *

  A taxonomy of flight:

  Flying things stay aloft in different ways. There are gliders, floaters, and Mab-like things that catch and ride atoms of air. Certain fish glide by leaping with kitelike fins, while spiders make silken parasols and float like balloons. Still others fly on deep, booming music loud enough to stop your heart. These include shooting stars. Some eschew music and ride on light and heat, like the falcons who soar on the ever-changing thermal winds near Heaven.

  Some things only appear to fly, like the sun and moon, which are actually falling like arrows away from the universe’s birthplace, toward some unknown thing. In the same way, given enough distance, raindrops would become racing comets with tails of ice.

  * * *

  Falling is not always failing.

  * * *

  She was not like any angel I ever imagined, but I knew her nature by her wings. She had six: two on her left ankle, one on her right, one sweeping down from each collarbone, and one sticking straight out from her back like a stabbing knife. Her feathers glistened, dark as the night sky, black to my brown. Blood slicked her limbs, congealing into black scabs. Jagged white bones protruded from the wreck of her skin. She had too many wounds to count, too many sharp bones for one body. They reminded me of prickles on a plucked hen.

  When I bent to pick her up, I found her unbearably light. I almost lost her to a snatching breeze. She had all the substance of a dead leaf.

  * * *

  A taxonomy of falling:

  There is only one way to fall: toward something.

  A goal. A destination. A stopping point.

  * * *

  Imagine a place where falling is not the law, a realm cloudy with sky-people as they sail from island to island in the buoyant air. They are wings all over, too many to count. Whichever direction they throw themselves, they soar like dandelion puffs on an eternal wind.

  Far below, they see the earth swimming in orange and green and blue. It haunts their legends. They call it Paradise and believe their spirits go there in death (never their bodies, whose skeletons are too light and angled to obey gravity). But no one ever goes there. No one falls to earth, except through a special act, a miracle, and no one ever quite gets there.

  Their hatchlings have dreams of plummeting like rockets toward the fast-approaching earth, wings outstretched to embrace it, their fearless faces burning with the anticipation of impact. Other times, they dream of falling in slow motion, oaring toward the ground in desperate strokes, as if all the forces of physics conspired to keep them apart.

  Only their saints and heroes fall to Earth. It is the mark of a holy woman to attempt it. Among them there are ascetics, mad devoted ones with their sights set on Paradise who spend their lives studying the art. The best among them, pious Icarus-saints, will bring the Earth so close that its scourging, purifying pressure rakes against their scalps before flight yanks them back to the sky.

  * * *

  I thought the angel a strange omen in my time of cleansing. I feared someone would discover her, so I locked her in my hut. No one disturbs a holy woman purifying herself for the ascent, but once a week, my mother would bring me seedcakes and roses and a little news from the greater world. I intercepted her when she limped up the path on her crooked cane, and I heard the news she brought. The drought had grown worse, spread to the lake country where the wheat fields wilted from thirst. The clouds roiled and flickered but did not weep.

  The people prayed for rain from Heaven. Someone must take those prayers upward. Me.

  After my mother left, I salved the angel’s wounds with a paste of crushed rose petals. “What is your message?” I asked, because angels always bring messages. It is what they exist for. Perhaps I needn’t make the ascent, or carry prayers on sinless feet up the darkling sky.

  But she did not wake for two days and nights. On the morning of the third day, she opened her eyes. “Ananda,” she said in a voice like birdsong. How did she know my name?

  “I am here,” I told her.

  She sat up, shedding all the bedclothes except a sheet. She gawked at the laundry line strung between the rafters. She dug her toes into the dirt floor. A large pink snail on the windowsill made her laugh outright, a sound I hadn’t heard since my first repentance. Winged things stirred in my heart and fluttered inside my throat, and I laughed too. Then the angel marveled at me.

  She traced the tiny muscles that joined my neck to my collarbone, pausing in the hollow that held my drumming pulse before continuing along my shoulder. But when she reached the thorny stems of my repentance twisted around my arm, the swollen black scabs, her eyebrows knit together. Her fingers gently picked apart the thorns. I struggled not to gasp or flinch. I bit my lip and focused on the angel instead—her trembling black wings, the sheet that draped her body, and beneath that, rose petals stuck to her skin where I had treated her wounds. She gathered some loose petals and pressed them against my bleeding arm. The warmth of her touch spread through my shoulder and down into my belly. My mind tumbled like swifts in a gale. I thought I should pull away, but it was already too late.

  “Are you an angel, then?” I asked, swallowing back the frantic wings beating in my throat.

  “I thought perhaps thou wert,” she said. I floated on those rounded syllables and leaned into her breath, her arms, her wings, her everything. My world’s center shifted, and I fell toward it.

  Then she kissed me.

  * * *

  Falling is a kind of attraction—it is clasping gravity to your breast. This is why we fall in love, not fly in it.

  * * *

  It took me a week to purge the sin of her kiss, rose stems wrapping my arms and legs. Holy women mustn’t love. The sin would weigh me down on the ascent so I would die before I reached Heaven.

  It took a long time to ascend.

  Love made my mother fall, so hard and fast her body never fully healed from the impact. A fallen saint is worst of all, for she drags the prayers of others to Earth with her. Now I must be holy in her stead.

  I locked the hut’s door and slept under the open sky, but the chirping swifts in the eaves kept me awake.

  “Hello?” said a voice behind the door. “Art thou well?” Six wings thumped against oak rafters. “Art thou there? Is it thee that is in’t? I am after falling with an urgent message. Wilt thou open the door?”

  * * *

  It took my grandmother forty years to ascend. When I was little, I would watch her on clear days high above the tree line, receding by inches as the sin sloughed off until she was light enough to take the next step.

  The chimney swifts fed her on seeds carried from my family’s garden. Poppy and parsley, mostly, and rose hips in the winter. We would lay out sweetened seedcakes on holy days as a special treat, and the birds would swoop low and bear them up. Seeds are the only food a holy woman should eat. Anything else is weight.

  One day, while pruning roses, I shaded my face but couldn’t see her anymore. I ran for my mother and brother, but their eyes could not find her either. No one knew how long she had been gone. She had disappeared like a steady star which quietly shuts its eye in the night, unmarked and unmourned.

  The forty-year drought broke a week later.

  She was the last saint to make the journey in living memory. Now all their prayers weighed me down.

  * * *

  Fall is both a season and an action. So is spring.

  To spring is to act against entropy, but it is
not true flight; it’s just another kind of falling. The darling buds of May belong to the Earth, not the sky. But you can find them in the sky-people’s gardens anyway, because the chimney swifts bring them seeds.

  * * *

  “Now then. Thine Paradise here, it does not be what I am expecting to find, sure,” she said through the door, voice so low and close I thought she must be leaning cheek to cheek with me through the wood.

  “Well, what did you expect?” I asked, because I was lonely and bored from long hours of repentance.

  “Gods and gardens. Whole cities of earth-walkers.”

  “Well, we do have cities. Just not here,” I said. “I have to live alone because I’m holy.”

  “With our holy women, so they do, too.”

  “Do I disappoint you?” I asked.

  “Well, thou dost not, precisely. Only, to be sure …” Her flapping wings stuttered to a standstill. “Thou dost not seem so happy as I expected thou wouldst.”

  * * *

  The chimney swift spends its whole life in the air, and comes to Earth only to build a nest from things caught in the wind, joined together with its own saliva. It sleeps on the wing, drifting in a torpor as it rests.

  It dreams, perhaps, of falling.

  A swift isn’t sure what would happen if it ever stilled its wings. Perhaps, like certain sharks, it would die if it stopped. Perhaps it would transcend its own nature, become a mad bird-saint hell-bent on betrothing Heaven to Earth.

  * * *

  We chatted through the door whenever I wasn’t purifying or repenting. I could feel myself growing lighter each day, light enough, perhaps, to bear the prayers. My mother had begun her ascent at a younger age than mine.

  “Are you hungry?” I would ask the angel. “Do you need anything?”

  We shared the seedcakes beneath the gap under the door one bite at a time. When they ran out, I dug up wild onions in the garden, and we ate those. That repentance was easy. Harder, though, to repent of her.