Faster Than Falling: The Skylighter Adventures

by Nathan Van Coops

  “Has anyone checked with the Coleys?” Podmire asked. “We ought to find her parents. Perhaps they retrieved the girl themselves during the attack.”

  “The Coleys are not on the current list,” Thur replied, holding up a roll of leaf paper and squinting at it. Perhaps once they’ve finished registration in the commons . . .”

  “The other globes could be apart for months,” Kipling said. “Samra doesn’t have that long to wait for us. We have to go after her now! The other globes will be safe in the Heights. She’s the one in real danger. We could send the guardians. Even one or two could do it. Bronks is hurt, but maybe if you sent Auralee or Harlan, they could—”

  “Every guardian aboard is of urgent use to the patch,” Thur replied. His eyebrows dipped into a deep V over his eyes. “If we had a dozen more we’d still be underserved. The Grounders could attack us again at any moment. Depriving the patch of defense in this hour of peril would be foolhardy and shamelessly irresponsible.”

  “You would think your priority would be to your family,” Kaleb said. “Father and Mother are out there somewhere having just been attacked. You should show some concern for your own parents.”

  Kipling stared at his brother, dumbfounded. Of course he cared about his parents. But at least seven different people had assured him that his parents were safely aboard one of the other globes. True, the reports were a bit confused, but people saw them. No one had seen Samra. He tried to put words into a form that could get this across to his stupid brother, but nothing was coming out.

  “Especially since this girl we’re talking about already attacked me today,” Kaleb added. “She acts like some kind of animal.” He laid his bandaged arm conspicuously on the table.

  The sound that came out of Kipling’s mouth wasn’t a word at all. It was closer to a snarl. Kipling wished he could show his brother what a real injury was.

  “Unfortunate family history the girl has,” Councilor Thur said. “We have to consider that perhaps she did escape her globe but was unable to float to safety. Her mother was a faller, too, wasn’t she? Unable to ever pass her illumination tests.”

  “Tragic story,” Podmire nodded. “Issues with her breathing, if I recall. Always passing out in excitable situations.”

  “A person with that sort of medical issue might not have survived the shock of the attack,” Thur said, shaking his head. “Or if she did, she may have fallen to the surface in her efforts to escape.”

  “Sending guardians back would be a waste of effort in that case, wouldn’t it?” Kaleb asked.

  It took everything Kipling had to not leap over the table and pummel that smug look off Kaleb’s ugly face.

  “I know what the doctor said,” Kipling replied. “She told me. He said she might light up any day now. He said there’s at least a fifty percent chance—”

  “It’s too bad Doctor Kesh is no longer here to verify your claims,” Thur interrupted. “As it is, we only know that she cannot currently illuminate. Her condition makes her less likely to survive a serious fall.”

  “Then that’s more reason to go after her!”

  “Kipling,” Chairwoman Somlee’s voice was smooth and controlled. He wrenched his eyes from Thur to look at her. “What Councilors Thur and Podmire are no doubt hoping to express . . .” she cast a withering glare their direction. “ . . . is that we are all deeply concerned for Samra. She is an important part of our community and we will, of course, do all we can to ensure her safety. But we are dealing with a tremendous event right now and we need to think responsibly and act in the best interest of the whole patch. We must safeguard every citizen aboard.”

  Councilor Somlee stood up and moved to Kipling, resting a hand on his shoulder. “I think it’s time for you to be going. The council will take your concern and deal with it as best we can. I promise you that as soon as we know more about Miss Coley’s situation, you will be the first to know. For now, why don’t you go home? Get some rest. We will all need your help in the days to come.”

  “Thank you,” Kipling muttered, his years of manners training from his mother forcing the response from between his lips. He choked down the words he wanted to say to his brother and avoided looking at his miserable face as he turned to the door. He walked slowly and deliberately, not letting himself glow, though his anger was on the verge of lighting him up.

  Outside, the crowd of citizens on the vine bridge had thinned somewhat, but still clogged the path too much for his patience. He took a running leap from the balcony of the Gate of Thorns and flew through the air toward the steady glow of the Mother. He landed in the tangleweed and scaled the perimeter of the globe, making another leap from the far side and catching hold of the vine bridge to Jana Luna.

  The blossoms of the star lilies in the Starpark had not fared well in the ascent. The ones that hadn’t been trampled underfoot by frightened citizens were bowed in the wind on the ride up. Kip scrambled down the path to the hideout and let himself imagine that he was wrong. Maybe Samra hadn’t been taken. Maybe she was just hiding. Perhaps when he rounded the end of the globe he’d find her there, feet dangling over the edge of their fortress, safe and waiting for him.

  The hideout was dark and tough to make out in the leaves, but even from here he knew the truth. It was empty.

  Just to be sure, Kipling climbed into the doorway and scanned the interior. Just twisted roots. He ran his fingers over them, feeling more than seeing his way over the carvings. Symbols here told a story. The drawings and words etched into the roots were evidence of hours spent on adventures. The made-up runes and mystical spells that Samra had invented were meant to dispel the nightbeasts—or worse terrors from the depths of her imagination. Some were meant to summon the terrors.

  Kipling stared out at the far-off mountains. The Ridge Valley was drifting farther away in their wake. Where was Samra now? He wished there was a rune carving on these walls that could summon her back, or some spell he could speak to take command of the high council. He’d send the guardians after the Grounder ships right now and let them smite the raiders from the sky. They’d return Samra by sunrise.

  But there was no such thing as magic.

  The council would sit idly by and make the guardians stay. As if the guardians were mere defenders meant for patch security. Guardians were meant for action. Bold action. How could Kaleb aspire to be a councilor when all the council ever did was fret and worry? Bronks was injured, but even one injured guardian was worth more than the entire room full of councilors. Guardians got things done. They rescued people. When danger struck they didn’t wait for approval from a committee before acting. They just did what they were meant to do. What people needed.

  And just like that, he knew what he had to do.

  Samra was in danger. No one else was willing to do anything about it. They made him a glorified gardener and told him to tend the patch, but they couldn’t see what he was really meant for.

  He was meant to be a guardian.

  And he was going to save Samra.

  13

  RESTLESS FURY

  The night was full of strange sounds—foreign, horrible noises—and Samra couldn’t identify them.

  Her world was muffled and constricted.

  Pressed against the interior wall of her tendril pocket, the strands of her hammock were chafing her arms. She was vertical.

  Vertical, upside-down, and stuck.

  She’d squirmed for the first few minutes, shocked by the violent collapse of her most private space. She cried out when it happened, but quickly silenced herself as the world filled with strange mechanical clunks, breathy swooshing, ratcheting clicks, and rumbling bangs.

  Some of the noises were voices—gruff, loud voices. A few shouting, some cursing, and none of them friendly.

  Grounder voices.

  Her legs were pinned. Something was tied across them. She should have run when she had the chance—not let Bronks or anyone lay a hand on her. Now they were coming for her—angry villagers, irate that
she’d disrupted their festival. She found it odd that they would be up in the patch. What if it was the mayor? Was Councilwoman Roose with him, here to formally exile her from the patch? Why had they compressed her tendril pocket around her? Maybe they didn’t want to even give her the chance to apologize. Did they hate her that much?

  The memory of her parents’ disappointed glares on the festival stage pierced her again. Had they given up on her?

  Samra strained to work her fingers through the vines and tendrils that made up the wall of her room. They were tightly compressed and hard to move. Her arms barely had room to work the vines but she dug at them, ripping and clawing with her fingertips till she could make a tiny hole. If this was going to be the end, she wanted to see it coming. Would they jettison her into the ocean? Maybe they’d set her pod afire in some sort of Grounder ritual sacrifice. Whatever her fate, she would face it bravely. No one was going to say Samra Rose Coley died a coward.

  She tugged the last strands of fibers away and exposed the hole. Pressing her face against the vines, she strained to see what was going on.

  This wasn’t the patch.

  Samra was staring at an upside-down world. Her feet pointed toward a sky bright with stars. She faced a rectangular deck of sorts. Worn wooden slats made up the top of the deck, and nets stretched up between two sturdy-looking metal supports. It was holding up . . . what? A silvery cylinder of some kind. Samra lacked the range of vision to see it completely. The netting beneath the strange silver shape permitted a view of shrouded mountain ridges beyond.

  “Get that cargo stowed and secured, Hodges! No time to waste. All hands keep a wary eye out. Those flying devils might be back.” The man speaking was a towering, fire-haired individual balancing himself at the middle of the rectangular deck next to a winch. Levers and other handles sprouted at various angles around him, and he had one hand resting on the handle of the winch. Other Grounders were scrambling about the rope netting, tying off lines or releasing them, and tethering green spheres into cargo holds.

  The globe sons.

  Samra recognized the smaller globes belonging to the Globe Mother’s lower seedpods. What were they doing with them?

  “Standby to diminish. Coming in tight.” The muscular man at the center of the deck spun the crank and the surface Samra was attached to jolted. As he continued cranking, she progressed laterally toward a cylindrical shape opposite her.

  She was aboard an airship.

  Samra hadn’t ever seen one this big, but she was sure of it now. The cylindrical shape growing closer to her was long and tapered toward the rear, and as she pressed her face forward and looked aft, two big silvery tails were pushing air back and forth—the source of the swooshing sound. Huge vertical rudders and sections of the tail kicked from side to side, shimmering in the starlight, and the whole craft swam through the air like two parallel sharks. She seemed to be affixed to the left-side shark in a bundle of netting and vines.

  “Man those ballast tanks and get set to pump,” the man ordered. “We’re riding too high from this new lot and need to get back to equilibrium.”

  Samra could now make out more of the ship. The wooden deck hung between the two lifting bodies of the twin sharks. The deck was streamlined at the bow and glass windows revealed a front cockpit at the nose. The empty space between the various parts of the ship was rapidly shrinking as the man cranked.

  “Do we need to take on more ballast?” a woman shouted from the opposite rigging.

  “Shift it forward. We’re almost there,” the man with the crank replied. “You sorry lot nearly took on a balanced load for once in your lives.”

  Something was crawling in the vines and netting near Samra and suddenly a body was blocking her view. Thin, hairy-faced, and sparsely attired, the man was cinching something near her when he happened to look directly into the hole she was peering through.

  “Agh!” The man flailed backward, caught his balance, and leapt into the netting below, rolling inward and sprawling on the deck. He scrambled to his feet and pointed to the vines. “Oi! That pod just looked at me!”

  The man at the crank frowned and followed the skinny man’s finger upward. “What are you on about?”

  “It’s got an eyeball! It’s alive!”

  The man at the crank appraised his comrade skeptically, but looked back to the cargo area where Samra was suspended. “What kind of eye?”

  “I don’t know. Big. Angry looking.”

  “Hold this.” The muscled man grabbed his companion’s arm and pushed the winch handle into his chest. The skinny man wavered under the weight of it but held onto the handle carefully.

  The big man leapt into the rigging with surprising agility, clambering up the ropes to the hole where Samra was now trapped. She squirmed harder in her leafy prison but could make no more progress than before.

  The big man’s face filled her view. His hair was wild, and a shade of red she’d never seen before. His face was heavily freckled and ruddy in the parts not covered by his thick beard. He stared into the hole she was peering out of and drew a long knife from his belt. He studied the area around her for just a moment, then plunged his knife into the vines.

  Samra screamed.

  She didn’t stop screaming until a hand reached through the new opening in the vines and grasped the front of her shirt. The hand pulled her forward till she was nose to nose with the red-haired man.

  “I’m not killing you, lass. I’m getting you out.”

  The vines around her snapped and cracked as she was pulled loose from their grip. Her arms were now sticky with tangleweed sap and bits of goo trailed down her neck. Her shark’s tooth necklace was dangling in her eyes and she tried to bat it away unsuccessfully. Once the vines were cut back enough, the big man’s arm scooped her out of the hole he’d made in the foliage. No sooner was she seeing the world from the right side up than he proceeded to hoist her over his shoulder.

  “Let me go, Grounder!” She kicked at him and swung her fists at his back, but to no avail. She gasped as the man leapt into the air and dropped into the netting below. He didn’t pause there, but swung onto an angled support of the airship’s frame. He slid down it to the main body of the ship and landed on the top deck.

  Samra was dropped unceremoniously on her rump in the center of the ship.

  She bounced.

  She was on her feet again in a flash but didn’t get far. The big man caught her by the hair and held her down, calmly withstanding her flailing attempts to dislodge him and fly away. Unfortunately, his grip on the back of her head kept her from biting him. She tried unsuccessfully to remove his fingers from her hair but only managed to knock a few of her crow feathers loose.

  “She’s one of them sky devils, ain’t she?” More curious onlookers had joined the skinny man from the rigging. Most were gruff, rugged individuals, and a few were armed with swords or knives. Samra snarled at them, hoping they’d see she was no one to tangle with. Her skin was turning red in patches. She tried to blind them with her glow—the Skylighter’s natural defense—but once again the light failed to come. She hissed and shrieked but failed to evoke the fear she wanted from the red-haired man—though the others were keeping their distance.

  “Hodges, inform Captain Savage that we have a stowaway.”

  The man named Hodges flinched and wrenched his eyes from her. “Me? The Captain doesn’t like me to—”

  “Now!”

  “Yessir.” Hodges spun around and lifted the hatch in the floor of the deck before scrambling down the steps below.

  Samra stopped trying to get the man’s hand out of her hair and looked around for another way to escape. Something. Anything she could use against them. As her eyes fell on the bundle of vines and leaves high overhead, she had a sinking realization. They hadn’t just taken her tendril pocket. The entire globe of Cirra Sola was lashed to the side of one of the twin silver sharks. The globe was partly collapsed now, some of its internal gases deflated, but it still bulged from its
tethers, many of its interior cells still intact. The skin of the globe flickered in spurts like she did. It was torn and hemorrhaging internally, ruptured cells flaring to life then fizzling out rapidly. It was dying.

  She’d been silly.

  These were no villagers. Womble villagers wouldn’t have ripped a globe from The Mother. These people were something else. Something worse.

  “What did you do to them?” She whirled on her captor and attempted to kick him. She leapt, swinging at his face with her fists. “Where’s my family?”

  The red-haired man grasped the front of her shirt and caught her in midair. “Little thing. Stop. Moving.”

  Samra froze. She was used to that tone from adults in the patch, and usually it meant bad news. She would have kept fighting anyway but there was something in the man’s eyes. Something like concern. Perhaps he knew something she didn’t about what was coming. Wind was blowing hard across the deck now, swirling down the cliffs from a gap between the high rocks. The ship was drawing steadily closer to a cleft in the mountains, despite the variable winds.

  “You going to pitch her overboard? See if she can fly?” One of the other airship sailors had edged closer, her features shadowy in the darkness.

  “Heard these sky folk glow. She might light our way through the Rift.” A second sailor pulled a knife from a sheath on his hip. “Maybe we should let a little light out and show us the way.”

  A crack resonated across the deck as the knife went soaring out of the man’s hand. He hissed and recoiled, shaking his fingers. Samra craned her neck toward the rear of the ship and the person standing at the edge of the open hatch. The end of a striped whip glided back across the deck toward her feet, like a snake after a strike.

  “No one gave you permission to threaten captives, Wallace. Don’t forget whose ship you’re on.”

  The woman with the whip stared down her crew from the shadow of dark, windblown hair. The long strands were being kept in check by a loose scarf wrapped around her neck that trailed down the front of her fatigued leather jacket. Nothing else was in danger of being displaced by the wind. Her tight jacket blended into dark trousers and high-laced boots that permitted no argument from the unruly air.