Faster Than Falling: The Skylighter Adventures

by Nathan Van Coops

  Atlas refused to look his aunt in the eyes on the way home. He sat behind her on the ride back to the farm and, despite their proximity, he may as well have been a mile away. He avoided looking at her as she unsaddled Destro, instead making his way directly to the garden, tucked away in the canyon behind the warren.

  He ripped up weeds and hurled them into the bin with as much ferocity as he could muster. Each twisted root that dared to cling to the soil was his enemy. He yanked and tore them from the dirt without mercy. When he finally wheeled the overloaded bin into the caverns to feed the goats, he ignored the playful tugs and bleats of the kids as they bounced and hopped around him. He would have laughed at their antics any other day as they careened into one another or attempted to head-butt his legs. Today there was no humor left in the world. He was a prisoner, and these were his tormentors—an underworld meant as punishment for those who dared to dream of the sky.

  He didn’t touch his dinner. Cathy made a few attempts to bridge the gulf of silence between him and his aunt, but her charm was wasted against their impassible walls. He scrubbed the dishes with the same ferocity he’d dealt to the weeds, and later he washed the dirt off himself with the same energy. It was only when he was in his room readying for bed that Amelia finally approached him.

  She stood in the doorway, backlit by the hallway lantern. Atlas hadn’t bothered to light the lamp in his room so her features remained shadowed as she spoke. “It’s my job to raise you right, Atlas. It’s my responsibility. We all have responsibilities.”

  “Nobody asked you to,” Atlas replied. The words came out colder than he’d intended, but he couldn’t stop them.

  “That’s true,” Amelia replied. “They never got the chance. But I know what they wanted for you, and that’s what I’m trying to give you.”

  “Mom flew. She flew every day. Grandpa said so.”

  Amelia crossed her arms and leaned against the doorpost. “And your dad worked this farm every day.” She scuffed a worn boot across the doorjamb absentmindedly. “They both did.”

  Atlas flopped onto his bed and stared at the ceiling. The light from the open doorway cast a long triangular swath across it. He tried not to look at his aunt, but kept her in the corner of his eye.

  “They worked this farm to give you the kind of life they thought you deserved. So you’d grow up to be the kind of person they knew you could be. They worked hard and they made a good life here. To keep you safe.”

  “And they flew,” Atlas stabbed the words at the ceiling, as if to puncture it.

  “Look where that got them!” Amelia blurted out.

  She lifted her arms from her sides and raked her fingers through her hair with both hands before turning and facing the wall. “That’s not what I wanted to say.” With her hands still on the back of her head, she leaned her elbows against the wall of the hallway and stared down at her feet. “I know they loved to fly. And I know they wouldn’t have kept you from it. I’m not keeping you from it either. I just need you to try, Atlas. You need to show me you care about this life we’ve made here.”

  Atlas couldn’t tell if her eyes were open or closed. He studied her back—her shirt pulled tight against her spine. She was a coil again. A wound-up piece of clockwork tensed to spring apart.

  Somewhere there was a sentence. Some assembly of words that could unwind that spring, release the stress between her shoulders. There was something he could say that would ease the strain that permeated the space between his bed and her bent form in the doorway.

  Atlas stayed quiet. He rolled over in bed and faced the wall.

  He counted his breaths against the pillowcase. In. Out. In . . .

  After a while the triangle of light on the ceiling narrowed to a line, then vanished as the door clicked shut behind her.

  8

  THE FESTIVAL

  The mountains were teeth. Southfang was the most vicious, stabbing into the sky nearly twenty thousand feet, but for Samra, the whole Ridge Valley looked like a mouth opened to swallow the patch. Cutting loose from the weight of the rest of the patch was the only hope she had to save her globe. With knife poised over the tendril vine bridge, she waited for just the right moment, when the winds would be strong enough to lift her globe clear—up, up and away from the hungry gaping jaws—enough wind to send it soaring back to the Heights and the freedom of the open sky. The rest of the patch would crash into the vicious teeth of the mountains and get gnashed among the rocks. She would mourn them.

  “Samra Rose, what are you doing out there?” Her stepmother’s voice drifted from inside the globe tendrils. “These danion bulbs aren’t going to chop themselves, you know.”

  Samra studied the blade of her cooking knife and sighed, then stood up. The patch continued its slow descent into the valley.

  For the last few days everyone had been instructed to retain all of their water stores. They’d passed through a storm cloud overnight and the patch was now heavy with rainwater. With the added bulk of the globe sons that had not been released, the patch was losing altitude fast. Somewhere near the lead globes, the patch navigator would be giving orders to the ballast crews, reading the winds, adjusting altitudes accordingly, and keeping the patch headed for the valley.

  Loara was working hard to assemble their family dishes for the arrival feast. She bustled around the aerie at high speed, whipping summer syrup and root sugar in bowls and occasionally stopping to sprinkle vegetables into her sun pepper stew. Samra’s father had long ago finished his contribution to the feast, skewers of globe fruits with hearts of wind palms that she was pretty sure any patchling could have created, but she knew better than to suggest they were anything other than a complex delicacy.

  As a soon-to-be globe chief, her father was intent on practicing his acceptance-of-duty speech, pacing from one side of the aerie to the other and gesturing to an imaginary crowd of no-doubt enthralled listeners.

  “Why do we always serve the same food?” Samra asked. “Can’t we just give the Grounders some globe green pudding and be done with it?”

  Her stepmother whooshed past her to snatch up another mixing spoon from her arsenal. “Don’t be silly, Samra. This is a feast to represent our culture. And it’s an opportunity to demonstrate our good faith with the Grounders. You don’t show good faith with globe green pudding.”

  By afternoon, her father was dressed in his ceremonial tunic and headdress, complete with reeds, feathers, and sea glass beads. Loara had decorated his face with the painted symbols of a first year chief, and Samra’s cheeks and forehead now bore the painted lines of green and blue fit for a councilman’s daughter. Her legs and wrists were wrapped in aged skyweed bands, and her tunic was bound at the waist with plaited vine tendrils. Her hair had the requisite headband adorned with star lilies, but she had also added a few personal touches: a row of black feathers from a storm crow, three pricklefish spines, and a necklace made of shark’s teeth. She had attempted to attach a few poisonous eel skulls to the necklace but Loara vetoed the decision as soon as she was out of her tendril pocket.

  Samra wanted to be in the landing party. What if when they reached land, the Grounders had all been mutated by an underground fungus and had gone raving mad? Or what if they appeared normal on the outside but were secretly plotting the ruin of the Skylighter High Council? Who would be there to notice and warn them? The council would be too intent on showing good manners. The whole patch might fall right into their trap.

  Samra could only hope that Kipling would have his eyes open. She had made him promise to send up their war cry if he spotted anything suspicious. She didn’t have much in the way of weapons, but she had smuggled her knife under her tunic, sheathed in a rootwood sleeve and dangling from her neck by a string. It was important to be prepared.

  Her tunic also concealed the buoyancy belt. Though nowhere near as bulky as Rufus’s contraption, all of the Skylighters would be wearing buoyancy belts tonight to compensate for the pressure changes. If they stayed down long enough, the
ir bodies would acclimate to the lower altitude, but for now, every breath involved a struggle to keep from drifting to the ceiling. The belt took care of that. Tonight they would be servants of gravity, just like the Grounders.

  When the globe patch touched down in the valley, she was still maddeningly high up in her aerie. Cirra Sola was a globe of honor this season, so unfortunately she would be one of the last families to descend. Khloe Mintz and her family were finished with preparations and enjoying rustleberry wine on the vine bridge. The Stormblower family was there, too, and Khloe and Jerem were positively gloating about being allowed to drink the festival wine this year. They’d both passed their Ascendare tests last autumn and seemed keen to show off their new privileges. Khloe’s little brother, Willis, was racing up and down the bridge making a racket with the star lily root horn he’d attempted to make in school on the day of the Watcher prize. Samra was surprised he’d managed not to lose it yet, but wished he had. The horn didn’t emit a blast so much as a sputter, and produced as much spit as it did noise.

  The sight of Willis once again gave her that queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. It wasn’t the way he squawked up and down the bridge or even the bits of drool moistening the edges of his mouth. It was the fact that when the colony was drifting on its own for however many years, he would be the only other person close to her age besides Khloe and Jerem. The two of them were already paired up, so it didn’t take a big leap to figure out whom their parents hoped might one day contribute to the propagation of the colony.

  No one had said as much to her or Willis yet, but Samra was old enough to know how these things worked on the patch. Parents always whispered things and made arrangements when new colonies began. Getting the Stormblowers and Mintzs to agree to come aboard would have involved many such conversations. Looking at the way Jerem and Khloe were swooning over each other, it was easy to see why their parents agreed, but did her father really think so little of her that he would subject her to a life with Willis?

  She tried to shake off the thought. Years would pass till that was an immediate threat. There were plenty of catastrophes the globe might run into between now and then that might relieve her of that problem.

  Far below, music drifted up from the surface. The Grounders had a band—playing strange instruments made of heavy keys and tight metal strings. She did like the drums. The rhythmic pounding echoed up to her like a heartbeat that skipped and danced. It reverberated off the cliffs and made the globe tendrils vibrate. She wondered if the Globe Mother felt it and dreamed of dancing herself.

  The time finally came to descend for the welcome feast. Her family spiraled down the tendril bridges in a slow procession that made Samra’s head ache. She could have plummeted to the surface a hundred times and floated back up after each one in shorter time than the Stormblowers took to walk down.

  Mist clung to the edges of the valley despite the residual warmth of the late afternoon sun. As the sun set behind the high mountains, the valley was already mostly in shadow, even though the sky was still bright. The Grounders had lanterns and torches lit, party lights to dispel the very thought of nightbeasts.

  There were protections in place, to be sure. Samra eyed the Grounder warriors with suspicion, tall men and a few women dressed in sheepskin coats and armed with pikes and spears. A few of them carried the unusual air-powered harpoon guns. She’d seen some in action at a previous festival when one of the men demonstrated how he could fire into the air and bring down lingering skyweed. The harpoon guns that the Grounders carried today didn’t look like they were meant for plants.

  Despite the threat of nightbeasts, the welcome feast was set outdoors. Samra had to admit the Grounders had done a fair job with the lights. Once the globe patch began to glow for the night, the combination of its light and the lanterns would keep all but the bravest of the creatures away.

  A good contingent of guardians was on hand, too, but not all of them had been assigned to security. Harlan and Auralee were taking turns floating little Grounder children up in the air, eliciting shrieks of glee from their passengers. As Samra watched, Harlan lit himself up to a brilliant gold hue and hoisted a young girl of perhaps eight or nine into the air, drifting off the ground a few feet to a round of applause from the crowd.

  Auralee, being much smaller in size than Harlan, was primarily hoisting toddlers. They both looked tired already. Samra knew that such an activity, while entertaining for the Grounders, took a lot of energy, and they wouldn’t be able to keep it up long. It was said that Captain Bronks had once hoisted the town mayor into the air for the benefit of the crowd. Judging by the mayor’s sizable proportions, Samra hoped for Bronks’s sake that it had been in the Mayor’s younger and leaner years. There were limits on what a Skylighter could carry and still get airborne, even for someone with the lift capacity of the guardian captain.

  Enzo was there, too. He stood near The Sunshine Express, on display as part of the festival exhibition. She waved to him and was delighted when he immediately waved back, grinning his gapped smile and temporarily ignoring the line of curious patrons ogling his aircraft.

  Enzo was a celebrity to the Skylighters, not only because of his flying machine, but also his ingenious inventions that brought pressurized air up from underground to be stored in little metal bottles. His family had delved deep into the mountainside and discovered caverns where the constantly falling water trapped the air in various pockets and kept it under pressure. His machine siphoned the compressed air up to the surface to be used for all manner of clever tools. Samra and Kipling had once gotten to see some of his machines, but that had been years ago, and only with a group of other school patchlings.

  Samra admired Enzo because he wasn’t like the other Grounders, or even like her dad. He never appeared to care about being famous. He seemed just as likely to climb into the Express and wander off into the sky as he was to stay. Samra would much rather have been spending the evening with him, but she plodded along behind her parents toward the feast nonetheless.

  “Keep your back straight,” her stepmother whispered, pressing a hand to her shoulder. “We want to make a good impression for your father.”

  Samra dutifully handed her food offering to the waiting Grounder attendant and followed her parents toward the raised platform that had been erected for the occasion. The platform faced the tables where the older Skylighters and Grounders were carefully arranged in places to socialize with one another. Kip was there, too, seated at the front table with his parents and the portly, smiling mayor of the village. Kip nodded to her. At least one friendly face in the crowd, although Kip didn’t look especially happy to be there either.

  Kaleb was on stage, along with a Grounder girl Samra suspected might be a relative of the mayor. She shared his same jovial, rounded proportions. Kaleb beamed out at the crowd and continued his speech about Skylighter and Grounder unity, and how he felt it was important for the younger generation to build relationships with one another to preserve tradition. In addition to the usual contingent of Khloe’s friends that were hovering around the stage, a number of Grounder girls were also listening to Kaleb with rapt attention and seemed eager to discuss Skylighter-Grounder relations with him.

  As Samra’s group reached the side of the platform, they were met by a group of festival assistants including a cluster of Khloe’s friends. The parents congregated near the steps while Samra was left alone with her peers.

  “You look so good, Khloe,” Dasha Cormunger said. “You and Jerem make the best-looking couple.”

  Khloe waved off the compliment but looked pleased.

  “You do look amazing,” Jerem added, staring Khloe in the eyes. “As radiant as a sun bloom.”

  Samra emitted a gagging noise from the back of her throat.

  “Oh, they let the bloodstain come, too.” Dasha stared down at Samra. “And here I thought we were trying to make the patch look good.”

  “Ha ha! Bloodstain!” Willis sputtered from next to his sister. “Ca
use she gets so red when she tries to glow.” His finger stabbed toward Samra’s face.

  “Shut up, Willis,” Samra hissed. She strained to keep from reacting, but could already feel her face starting to warm.

  “You can’t talk to Willis like that,” Jerem said, resting a protective hand on Willis’s shoulder. His other arm was firmly around Khloe—his hand lingering low on her hip. “Just because your father will be globe chief when we depart, don’t think that means you’ll be bossing Willis around. You’d better treat him with some respect.”

  “Yeah,” Willis added, elated to have the approval of Jerem. He stuck his tongue out at her but retracted it immediately as Samra hissed at him again.

  Jerem’s father, Mr. Stormblower, appeared suddenly and shooed them toward the stage. “Time to line up.”

  Samra found her way behind her parents and was grateful that her family at least provided a narrow buffer between her and Khloe’s crowd.

  Her stepmother dabbed at her face. “Why is your paint already running?” Loara frowned, quickly reapplying some of Samra’s markings with a stick of paint from her bag. She then stuffed it into Samra’s tunic pocket. “You’d better keep that. I have a feeling we’ll need it again tonight. I thought you were going to stay calm.”

  “I am calm,” Samra muttered through gritted teeth. She pulled her eyes off Jerem and Khloe and found Kip in the crowd instead. Rufus had crept up from his table in the rear of the feast and was lingering next to Kip to watch her presentation. Rufus waved. Samra felt her skin begin to cool and gave a quick wave back. Rufus beamed.

  “ . . . and it’s an honor to introduce our next globe colonists . . .” Kaleb continued. A few other members of the globe council joined him, and they stood ready to bestow the duty symbols on her father: a carved heartwood globe, a stone knife, and a goose-quill pen. “The Stormblowers will be tasked with the education of the young . . .” Jerem’s parents stepped forward to receive their symbols.