by Chloe Garner
“They paid their own way,” Troy said. “Some of them. Some of them are missing, but the rest are here, and you are going to rank them by threat potential. I will give you my notes from the original interviews, but I stopped paying attention…”
“Dude,” Slav said. “You got to sit in on interviews with foreign terrestrials and you zoned out?”
“I had more important things to do than listen to their stories,” Troy said. He opened a desk drawer and got out the stack of files with his paper notes on top. “Eyes only.”
“Sir yes sir,” Slav said. Troy was certain that that was mockery, but it didn’t bother him.
“We have shipments coming back to base that hold foreign terrestrial life. Plants and animals at this stage, but I am not ruling out sentient life forms, for what they paid for them.”
Slav’s eyes bugged.
“You will work with Conrad Leal to arrange for the safe transport and housing of the live material until we have a plan to either destroy or return them.”
“You can’t destroy them,” Slav said.
“I will if that’s the only thing to do,” Troy answered.
“Mission accepted,” Slav said. “I will find something else to do with them than that.”
Troy shrugged.
“You have more to do than you have time. You’ll have to prioritize, and saving plant life isn’t going to fall at the top of your list.”
“How did you end up here?” Slav asked. “You would have fought tooth and nail to keep everything, study it, when I was working for you.”
“I was fighting,” Troy said. “And then I stopped. I can see clearly, now, that we can’t save all of it, and the portal program takes priority over everything except sentient life.”
Slav shook his head, then picked up the files.
“Wow. Wasn’t ready for you to be jaded. Thought I was ready for anything, when they called me, but I wasn’t ready for this.”
“Work with Conrad,” Troy said. “You will be my liaison to the labs when Conrad is too busy to get here.”
Slav nodded slowly.
“All right. I can do that. You need Cassie here, though. You know that.”
“The minute you know where she is, be sure to come tell me,” Troy said, returning his attention to the list of international shipments. Legal was working through the recovery process for all of them; almost every single one of them required a unique set of authorities to work with, in order to get them back, and with a limited script of what he was allowed to admit to, he was running into roadblocks everywhere.
He needed to be able to use the threat of foreign terrestrial lifeforms invading an ecosystem, if he wanted to get sure-fire cooperation, but he knew that that would immediately hit the media and cause a panic that would certainly shut down the portal.
So he had to deal with it on a law-enforcement level. They’d taken possession of goods that the portal program had not had the legal rights to sell, and they needed to send experts to recover them. Someone from the labs would travel to Bosnia or Kuwait or Malaysia and come back with another box.
Another box, another problem.
Slav stood.
“Not like her, man,” he said. “Hasn’t been like herself since Jesse got here.”
“You never did understand her,” Troy answered, glancing up. Slav gave him a tight little smile and winked.
“Nope. I’ll get situated, and I’ll be in touch.”
*********
Olivia just blocked out the jump.
Just flat out blocked it. She didn’t want to think about it, and she didn’t want to ever do it again.
They went around the outside of the city for a long time, Band Rung stopping to look at them as they walked past. They had different builds, different figures, different markings, but Olivia knew that she’d have a hard time even picking Breath of Air back out of a lineup, if they all merged together and spread out again.
“It’s bigger than I thought,” Olivia said to Breath of Air. “There’s so much below the trees.”
“It grows up and out with each generation,” Breath of Air told her.
She reached out to touch a bronzed stone as they went by. She wondered where the stones came from, what they did about the trees continuing to grow from within the core of the city.
“Do the trees ever die and fall?” she asked.
“All things die,” Breath of Air said. “But they are a part of the city. They do not fall.”
“What holds up the city when they all die?” Olivia asked.
“We have pillars that go down to the ground below,” he said. She shook her head, struggling to imagine how they survived, long term, up this high in the air over a forest. In stone buildings.
Breath of Air motioned, and went in through an arched doorway. Olivia followed with Cassie after her, and two Band Rung following, one carrying Cassie’s box. Olivia wondered if that box wasn’t going to be a big deal, here in a few minutes, but she tried not to worry about it too much. There wasn’t anything she could do about it, at this point, and Breath of Air did seem to separate her motives from Cassie’s.
Not that that helped her much, when Cassie was her ride home.
Inside the first room, Olivia was surprised to find herself in a dim but diffuse gold light. She looked up, looking for the source of it, and found a window that shone light down at her from inside the city.
“That’s a neat trick,” Cassie said.
“How are they doing it?” Olivia asked.
“The metal plating up high,” Cassie said. “They get enough light during the day, here, that they can send it around inside, if they route the light correctly.”
Olivia could smell the smoke and see the dark marks on the walls over top of extinguished torches - that was their nighttime solution - but it was impressive to Olivia that they managed to get light inside like that during the day.
They walked further into the city, down hallways and past doors, Band Rung at work or talking to each other as they went past. They wove together around each other like tree roots, when they stopped to talk to each other, and Olivia felt intrusive, even looking over at them as she went by.
They came to a hole in the ceiling where the wall had a texture to it, and Breath of Air sprung up through the ceiling, barely touching the wall on his way, and he reached down. Someone behind her lifted Olivia, strong hands gripping her ribs with bruising force, and Breath of Air grabbed her forearm and pulled her up through the hole in the ceiling like he was pulling up a rope. Cassie landed on the floor next to her, feet down and stable, while Olivia made sure she still had her feet underneath her.
The light here was fractionally stronger, and the walls were decorated with cut flowers and colored glass.
“It’s beautiful,” Olivia said.
“Gives Minan Gartal a run for its money,” Cassie agreed quietly. “With so much less to work with, they have a very elegant sense of beauty.”
“Is this what Band Rung cities look like, everywhere?” Olivia asked Breath of Air.
“I don’t know,” he told her. “I haven’t ever seen one, but we have famed builders who have traveled the world. They are the children of a small number of minds.”
Olivia shook her head.
She didn’t like adventures.
True.
But she had a hard time being bitter about getting to see this.
Even if it did mean that she kept getting thrown around as they went up story after story through the town.
They went through large rooms, spaces that would have fit hundreds of Band Rung comfortably, and they passed small spaces, scarcely wider than the hallways they mostly traveled, where Band Rung leaned against walls and worked at things with their hands or painted the walls or simply talked. They went past restaurants where Band Rung draped over stump-shaped furniture and ate dazzlingly colorful food. They passed a kitchen where the chatter was so overwhelming Olivia’s implant simply stopped working for a time.
The city was vibrant and alive, like the trees outside, but Olivia couldn’t help but think of the creatures, the ones that Breath of Air said weren’t alive at all, down below, in the darkness.
Cities couldn’t live above darkness like that without having some of it seep into them. She believed that. No matter how beautiful the light and the color was.
Finally, they reached a level where, as they walked down a hallway, Olivia felt a breeze, and the light coming at them from around the next corner was blue, rather than gold. They reached the end of the hall and turned, taking just a few more steps before the hallway opened up into a wide room lined with windows that looked out at a vast blue sky.
Olivia went to the window on her own, resting her palms on the sill, a thickness of stone that she could have sat across without fear of tipping, if she’d been willing to tolerate the height of the place. Her breath caught in her throat, looking out over the field of trees and stone, foreign and yet so familiar in a way.
“The elders are this way,” Breath of Air said. “This is where we will leave you.”
“Thank you,” Cassie said.
“You aren’t staying?” Olivia asked. “To explain what’s going on?”
Breath of Air tipped his face at her as the rest of the Band Rung started off in different directions, resuming their normal lives.
“Who would explain it more accurately than yourselves?” he asked. “I could tell them what I saw, but it wasn’t any more than you coming up out of the ocean and climbing our cliffs.”
Cassie went to get her box, and Olivia shook her head.
“If you don’t trust us, why bring us all this way and then just… leave us? Where are your…” And she found she didn’t have the word. Guards. Cassie gave her a soft smile.
“War is different everywhere you go,” she said in English. “They don’t have the vocabulary to support it, because they avoid it, but something is sapping their ability to support themselves, as they hide away here. Are you going to come find out what it is, with me?”
“Climb well,” Breath of Air said, putting his hands onto his own shoulders, a motion Olivia couldn’t have done, given she lacked his extra joint where his wrists should have been. She stood and watched him leave, feeling like she was losing a friend. Strange how quickly he’d felt familiar to her.
Cassie raised an eyebrow at her, a teasing motion.
“Well? Are you still in?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” Olivia answered, following Cassie down the hallway. There was a soft chaos of conversation as they reached a curve in the outer wall of the building, rounding it and finding themselves in a larger section of the room where slightly more than a dozen Band Rung stood or sat. Some of them were eating, and others drank out of stone cups. It was like interrupting a luncheon, and it took several moments for all of them to quiet as they turned to face Cassie and Olivia.
“Name yourselves,” one of them said.
“I am Beautiful Wanderer, and this is Tree of Cleansing Fruit,” Cassie said after a pause. Olivia pressed her mouth, realizing she’d just missed a second opportunity to choose her own identity.
“You come to the courts of Bollow,” the same Band Rung said. “Presumably under escort. Where is my son?”
“Probably jumping the gap by now,” Cassie answered.
“Indeed,” the Band Rung said. “Only he would usher you this far and then turn around rather than face me.”
“Explain yourselves,” another Band Rung said. “We will discuss Breath of Air through Spring Leaves later.”
“I came seeking a friend who is missing,” Cassie said. “I found a people who need my help.”
“Then you had best go help them,” the first Band Rung said. “But we hold you here for invading our territory, do we not?”
“I climbed the cliff here because I thought my friend had come this way.”
“Does your friend look like you?” the Band Rung asked. “Because you are the first creature of your very odd configuration I’ve ever laid eyes on.”
“No,” Cassie said. “You wouldn’t recognize him by looking at me.”
“Do we have any reports of other strange creatures coming into Llargon, then?” the Band Rung asked the room.
There was silence and the stern eyes turned again to Cassie.
“Once more, we are left with no more to discuss than why you came past the border.”
Olivia found herself backing, step by step, very slowly, away from the line of Band rung, her hands behind her back. This was exactly the kind of confrontation that she’d never been good at. The Band Rung tipped her head, exactly the way Breath of Air had, and turned her attention to Olivia.
“You should know that when we determine that we have thieves or spies in our midst, we give them flying lessons.”
Olivia stopped cold.
“One warning,” Cassie said sharply. “You do not threaten her. I will not permit it.”
“Ah,” the Band Rung said. “I thought as much. You have the look of a predator to you. The type who thinks that simple aggression will win your way.”
“Why are your trees dying?” Cassie replied.
“Thieves and spies,” the Band Rung said.
“Why do we have to be one or the other?” Olivia asked, taking a step away from the window.
“Why would you climb our cliffs, otherwise?” a new Band Rung asked.
“You’re climbers,” Olivia said. “You mean to tell me that you never climbed anything just to see what was up there?”
She saw Cassie grin, but Olivia shook her head.
“I didn’t even ask to come up. Your son just carried me up and hauled me all the way here.”
“Are you with this one?” the first Band Rung asked.
“Does it matter?” Olivia asked. “I’m not much of a spy if the only reason I’m here is because you dragged me here.”
Once more, Cassie grinned.
“Then who are you?” the Band Rung asked.
“Interesting that you ask her that,” Cassie said, stepping forward. “Seeing as she’s a universe-quality tree expert. What is killing your trees?”
Olivia found herself deeply flattered.
And resenting how much it meant to her that Cassie would say something like that.
“For as long as Band Rung have lived in the trees, we have cared for them,” the Band Rung told her. “We are the experts on our own trees.”
“Very well,” Cassie said. “But it still doesn’t keep them from dying, does it? You know what’s wrong, but it means you can’t fix it. And maybe I can.”
“Brings the Light of Dawn, you are fighting again. Maybe now is the time to listen.”
The Band Rung who had been talking to Cassie turned its head to look at a new speaker, who stepped forward.
“I am Sound of Ocean Waves at Midnight,” the Band Rung said. Male, Olivia guessed. Maybe. Probably. Yes, male.
“I understand mistrust,” Cassie said. “I’ve never found people to get past it but by trusting. There are always questions without answers.”
“Trust is like climbing,” Sound of Ocean Waves said. “It’s always about the next hand-hold.”
Cassie grinned.
“Exactly so.”
“We do not know how many Band Rung cities there are in the world, but we do know that they all must be near ocean, because the ocean is the source of the crystals that we use to feed our trees. Llargon has been here many generations; you can see it from the age of our forests, but they die without the crystals that we plant at their roots each year.”
“Where have they gone?” Cassie asked.
“Thieves,” several Band Rung murmured.
Sound of Ocean Waves turned his head to look at them, then returned his attention to Cassie.
“Side-walkers,” he said. “They can swim and we cannot, and they come to our shores and take the crystals before they reach the beaches. We should have hundreds stored away by this time of the year, for the planting festi
val, but instead we have merely tens.”
“Why can’t you swim?” Olivia asked.
“They’re too dense,” Cassie answered. “And their respiratory systems don’t protect from water. They drown.”
Olivia frowned. That didn’t make any sense. Cassie turned her head.
“You haven’t noticed?” she asked with a half a smile. “They’re much more efficient processing air than we are, because they have a dual-valve system with air in and air out separate.”
Olivia hadn’t noticed. She hadn’t noticed anything at all about how they breathed. As she focused, she found that all of them had chests that rose and fell in a breathing pattern, and there was nothing about that that she could identify as unusual. They didn’t have noses, which… She didn’t know what that meant.
“Routing air and nutrition through the same path is a huge risk,” Cassie said. “If you have two completely separate systems, you don’t choke, and your risk of infections goes down, as well. They breathe through the two holes in their chest, one bringing air in and one pushing it out, but they don’t have to breathe deep to get stale air out of the bottom of their lungs. There’s a natural flow pattern that gets fresh air to their entire respiratory system at once. It’s beautiful, actually.”
“Why does that mean they can’t swim?” Olivia asked.
“They can’t just hold their lungs firm against the pressure of the water,” Cassie said. You put pressure on their lungs, the water gets in.”
Olivia thought about it for a moment, then nodded.
“I get it. They need stronger one-way valves to keep the water out.”
Cassie shook her head.
“That would only buy them depth. It doesn’t fix the problem.”
“What about plugs?” Olivia asked. Cassie grinned.
“What about them?” she asked, addressing Sound of Ocean Waves now. “Can’t you just block your lungs and learn to swim?”
“We sink,” he said. “We must avoid water, because a Band Rung who falls in will never come out.”
“They’re such strong climbers,” Olivia said.
“I took your shoes off because they’d drown you,” Cassie answered. “Swimming when you’re heavier than water is harder than you think.”