Faster Than Falling: The Skylighter Adventures

by Nathan Van Coops

  But she still couldn’t float.

  She fingered the chain around her hips and the stubborn lock she had so willingly applied. Would she ever get it off, or was she stuck plodding around like a Grounder forever? She attempted to illuminate herself and lift off the ground.

  Her hands flickered and flashed briefly. She concentrated as hard as she could, but it seemed the angrier she became, the less effectively she could glow. She wasn’t lighting up. She took deep, gulping breaths and could teeter on the tips of her toes, but she couldn’t achieve full buoyancy working against the chain.

  Someone rapped on the door of the cabin, then Sunburn poked his head in. He stared at Samra for only a second. She exhaled and dropped back onto her heels.

  “Captain needs you in the cockpit. We’re short-handed. Time to work.”

  Samra followed him toward the bow and entered the cockpit. The captain was at the controls, back in her pants and leather jacket. The whip was curled at her waist. She stood up as soon as the door opened.

  “About time someone else showed up. Thought I’d have to do it all my—” She paused when she noticed Samra’s clothes and war paint. “Back to the wilds, eh?” Samra simply stared at her. The captain turned to the first mate. “Start the engines and cast off the lines. Were you able to find any of the crew?”

  “Ylva is back aboard. The rest are unaccounted for. With the whole city on the move, I don’t know that they’ll make it in time.”

  “No sign of Landy?”

  “None.”

  She looked at Samra and pointed to the pilot’s seat. “Looks like you’re promoted. Take the controls.” Sunburn patted her on the shoulder and slipped out the door.

  Samra slid into the pilot seat and the captain sank into her chair in the center of the cockpit. Samra watched for some reassurance from the captain. Some mention of the events on the dock, but the captain stayed stoic. Samra felt the ship come loose from the dock as Sunburn and Ylva cast off the lines.

  “We’ll make for the Storm Gate,” the captain said. “Follow the Vega.” She pointed to Marlow’s ship that was entering the mountain passage, tailed closely by the Savage Stranger.

  She studied the hull of the ship, and that’s when she saw him. He was there again. The boy. Climbing along the outside of the ship, hanging on to the landing lines. She only spotted him for a moment as he climbed up the rear deck and slipped over the bulwark. Fascinated, Samra pressed the power levers forward, her eyes still on the Savage Stranger. The engines growled overhead and the ship responded. She spun the wheel to get the heading right and climbed after the Stranger.

  Samra glanced back a few times, waiting for other orders, but the captain’s attention was not outside. She seemed to be waging some internal battle. Her brow was furrowed and once again Samra saw the subtle resemblance to Marlow. Was that the look of guilt over letting a good man die? Samra narrowed her eyes and turned her attention back to her flight path.

  The opening to the Storm Gate was becoming crowded. Fleet ships had lined up behind the Vega and the city itself was breaking up. Airships jostled for position, some still trailing rope bridges or towing floating docks in their haste to depart. Everyone was eager to obey Marlow’s invitation and be present for the next stage of his plans.

  Samra looked out the small windows that faced aft to the rear decks and spotted Sunburn manning the winch, heaving the handle around in a wide circle, cranking the parallel envelopes closer together and narrowing the ship’s width.

  The massive rope-jump ship, Wind Devil, was nearing the opening of the gate. Samra spotted Ranginui standing on the foredeck. He was still holding a bottle of liquor in his hand and stood astride the prow as if to intimidate the ship’s way through the crowd. Samra turned the wheel and applied more power, squeezing the nimbler and speedier Restless Fury ahead of his position.

  “Well done,” the captain said from her chair. She was looking up now and following the movements of the other craft. “When we get to the open desert on the other side, we’ll catch the leaders.”

  Samra concentrated on the route through the Storm Gate. It wasn’t a straight shot through the mountain. The tunnel was a series of hard angles meant to divert the heavy winds and sand blowing in from the high desert. As Samra finished the first right turn, she approached the source of the sandfall. A huge dune was piled up against the interior cavern wall and leaking slowly through the porous floor down to the falls. This was being added to by a steadily moving river of sand. It slid downhill from the opening in the southern face of the mountain. As Samra rounded the final turn, overflying the sand river, the ship finally faced the desert.

  The last section of tunnel was heavily reinforced with thick wooden beams interlaced across the ceiling. The passage was being monitored by a contingent of Air Corps ships with harpoon guns, hovering near the ceiling. The aircrews wore ominous-looking masks with blackened lenses as protection from windborne sand. In the darkness, the eyes looked like bottomless voids.

  Samra spotted several workers sitting atop the ceiling beams looking down on the ships with eyes likewise masked by protective goggles. Some of the workers appeared to be her own age, their clothes covered in rock dust and grit. Samra raised a hand toward a group of young boys that were quite close, but none returned the gesture. They merely followed the movement of the ships with stoic faces.

  They were watching. The people in the cave. Atlas felt as though they could see right through him. Could they spot him, hidden behind the coils of landing lines? So far, the crew of the ship hadn’t detected him, but they didn’t have those black, bottomless eyes.

  But if the cavern guardians saw, they said nothing.

  The massive fabric envelope of the airship passed beneath the last of the cavern supports and into the open.

  The sister moons shed an eerie glow on the desert and illuminated jagged rock formations rising from the sand. Even from his hiding place, Atlas could tell that the path through the desert was treacherous. Spires of rock stabbed from the sand and wind-carved pillars leaned precariously over hollowed-out bowls in the surface. In the darkness it was hard to spot the dangers till they were close.

  But there were beacons.

  The line of airships followed a trail of fire headed south. The beacon lights flickered and danced, revealed to be small balloons on tethers, lit from within, like the ones he had seen in the mine. A solitary figure manned each post, keeping watch and stoking the fires, hidden behind a protective cage of wire.

  They were getting smaller.

  The airship was rising.

  “Climb,” the captain ordered. She pointed ahead to the front of the caravan. The Vega was ascending and the Savage Stranger was straining to keep up. “It’s time to overtake my brother,” the captain said. “Let him look at the Fury’s tail for a while.”

  Samra angled the tail fins and pitched for a climb, adding power and aiming to the right of the ships ahead of her. She pulled the Restless Fury abeam the Savage Stranger and her eyes swept over the deck. She couldn’t see him. Wherever the mysterious boy had gone, he was out of sight now. As the Fury pulled ahead, Eric’s ship disappeared into the darkness.

  The Vega was climbing steadily ahead of them. It was miles before Samra could make out why.

  It was another city. A towering helix made of light and plant life. It pulsed on the horizon, flickering internally and spiraling up into the clouds. It was enormous, beautiful, and terrifying.

  The raiders had created their own patch. It was part airship and part living thing. For every floating craft and lift pod vacating Port Savage to join the cause, it seemed there were already a dozen in place. Even so, the ships were the lesser element of the tower. The rest was comprised of vast catch nets filled with lifting pods: tree nodes, kelp bulbs, and globe sons. So many globe sons. Samra had never seen them in such numbers. They flickered and blinked like intermittent stars, trapped and immobilized in the web of netting. The entire mass of floating objects was tethered to the grou
nd in a long, tangled braid of lines that was tied off somewhere in the darkness of the desert floor.

  Samra had a feeling of dread in her stomach. The sight of the trapped globe sons straining against the nets made her nauseated. What would Kipling think if he saw this? She was no grower’s apprentice, but she knew the tower’s existence was heinous and unnatural. How much of the patch’s future had it consumed?

  The Vega was making for the top. Samra guided the Restless Fury after it, nearly on its tail. Other ships angled for lower berths on the gigantic tower. A few had already reached it. Deckhands aboard the column of pods stood by with harnesses to attach the ships. The harnesses had long cables that spidered into the heart of the lifting mass. The ship was now close enough for her to see the hole.

  The core of this gigantic tower was a bundle of cables. It stretched from the huge mass of pods deep into the ground. The desert at the surface had been pried open and shored up. A retaining wall of wooden beams and heavy stones held back the shifting sands. The circular opening was bored far beneath the surface. There were lights down there, and presumably a bottom to the pit somewhere, but it was far enough down that Samra couldn’t see it.

  She took her eyes off the chasm and concentrated on the climb.

  Sunburn stepped to the bow of the ship and prepared for docking. They rose past the catch nets of globe sons, and past the highest clusters of lifting pods to the very top of the tower. The Vega was mooring to one T-shaped arm extending off a circular dock at the peak. The dock, like other sections of the tower, was stabilized by guy wires that stretched far into the distance. There were three other docking arms extending from the central circle, forming a sort of hollow-centered cross, and the captain instructed Samra to take the arm opposite Marlow’s ship.

  Sunburn and Ylva tied off the lines, and the captain opened the hatch to the bow deck. Samra reluctantly released her grip on the Fury’s wheel and followed the captain topside, not sure what else was going to be required of her. She joined Sunburn and Ylva on the deck.

  The dock the ship was moored to was connected to a circular wooden platform at the center of the tower via a long floating gangplank. On the opposite arm of the dock, Marlow and a contingent of his men were moving toward the center circle. Captain Savage gestured for the crew to follow her and set off down the gangplank to meet them. Two more airships were angling toward the remaining berths. One ship belonged to Admiral Orloff and the other was the Savage Stranger.

  Samra trailed the rest of the crew, but their group met Marlow Savage and his men near the core of the tower. As the crews exchanged greetings, Samra peered over the edge of the dock. The circular opening at the center of the structure revealed the core—a shifting cylindrical cage periodically ribbed by other docks below. It was thousands of feet down from here. The bundles of lift pods bobbed and swayed and the entire tower moved with them. The weight of the chain around her waist kept Samra cautious, and she backed away from the edge, careful to keep her footing.

  “I thought recovering this treasure involved digging,” the captain said as she approached her father. “Yet you bring us to the highest point of your entire project.”

  “It has always been my job to ensure our family remains on top,” Marlow Savage replied. “And these people need a hierarchy. Consistency helps them to rest securely in the knowledge of where they fit in the order of things.”

  “And when someone else decides they’d like to be on top?” She eyed the Savage Stranger pulling into its dock.

  “Let them try,” Marlow said. His men were fanned out behind him and Samra had the impression that they’d faced plenty of opposition before. All looked like seasoned fighters. Lantern light glistened off the handles of their cutlasses and harpoons.

  A shout went up from the deck of the Savage Stranger and all heads turned that direction. Dockhands had only just tied down the airship when a figure rushed from the shadows of the rear deck and jumped onto the bulwark. He teetered once, then, gauging the distance, leapt to the dock. He stumbled slightly on the landing, but was upright after just a moment and sprinting along the long portion of the dock.

  “Stop him!” The shout came from Eric Savage. He rushed to the bulwark of the ship and pointed at the fleeing boy.

  It was him. It was the boy. She recalled his shouted name echoing up the cavern of the sandfall. Atlas.

  Samra stepped around Sunburn and the captain to get a better look at him. He had almost reached the center circle of the connecting docks when Marlow’s men stepped forward and blocked the path. The boy skidded to a stop. His eyes were wide and he had one hand clutched to his chest, gripping something dangling around his neck.

  “He has the key!” Eric shouted. His men lowered the boarding ramp and he stormed down it, cutlass drawn and red in the face.

  Something about the boy had seemed familiar when she spotted him in the cave, and now she once again recognized his resemblance to Enzo. The jacket. The grass-stained boots. Even his wild hair looked like Enzo’s without the gray.

  The boy spotted her looking at him and his mouth dropped open in surprise. “You’re a Skylighter? Are you Samra?”

  Samra frowned. She had told him her name once in the cave. Did he not remember her? She glanced down at her clothing. She did look different now in her Skylighter clothes and with none of Ylva’s face powders making her up to be a boy.

  “We came to rescue you,” Atlas said. “Me and Kip.”

  “Kip?” Samra’s heart leapt. Her eyes scanned the ship. She should have known Kip would come. “Where is he?” She rushed forward but couldn’t get close because Marlow’s men were blocking the dock.

  “Looks like you’re the only one in need of a rescue,” Marlow said. He took a step toward the boy. Atlas backed up, but he couldn’t go far. Eric was advancing from the other side, his cutlass still drawn and guarding any escape toward the ship.

  “He’s just a kid, Eric,” Captain Savage said. “Let him be.”

  “He’s a thief,” Eric said. He glowered at Atlas. “Give me the key, and your friend here won’t have to watch you get hurt.”

  Samra watched Atlas turn side to side on the floating dock. There was no escape. It was thousands of feet down in either direction. His hand went to his shirt again, fingering a stone on a cord around his neck. It wasn’t the only thing he had there though. He had another key. A metal key. The key to the lock around her waist.

  “I’m not a thief,” he declared. “It’s mine. My family’s. And you can’t have it.”

  “Boy, you’re in no position to argue with your betters,” Marlow said. “This is my town. And in my town, I keep the keys.” He patted his chest where the dozens of other relic keys hung around his neck. “Who was the old man? Your family? Your grandfather? What was his name?”

  “His name was Enzo Mooreside, and I saw what you did. You killed him!”

  Marlow studied the boy with interest. “Mooreside, eh? One of the mountain names. You learned to fly way up there on your own? What other secrets did he unlock? What did his relic tell you?”

  “My grandpa taught me plenty. Taught me about people like you.”

  Marlow smiled at him. “We have your town relic now, boy. And in a matter of hours, I’m going to uncover the greatest trove of knowledge this world has ever seen.” He took a few more steps. “Whatever skills you’ve learned in your mountain shacks, I’m going to know them, too, soon enough.”

  The boy was frozen in place, listening. His hands were wrapped tightly around the necklace.

  “I’ve worked a long time to gather up those relics,” Marlow said. “They were put into the wrong hands, and I’ve made it my mission to get them back. Too dangerous for just anyone to have them. It’s sad that your granddaddy went and taught your people so much. That’s going to make things more difficult for me . . . and for them.” Marlow took another step. Eric was closing in on the boy from the other side. They had him backed up against the edge of the narrow dock.

  Samra edged
passed Sunburn and Captain Savage to get a better view of what was happening, but she was blocked once again by Marlow’s men.

  “I’ll let you in on a little secret,” Marlow said. “It doesn’t matter how tightly you hold on to that key, I’ll get it anyway. You know why?”

  The boy didn’t respond.

  “Because it’s a rock. And you know what rocks are good at?”

  Atlas shook his head.

  Marlow grinned. “Falling.” He stretched out one hand, till his palm was pressing against the boy’s forehead.

  Atlas’s eyes went wide. He unclasped one hand from the necklace and reached for the man’s clothes, seeking vainly for something to hold on to. His hand scrabbled at the stones around the big man’s neck. Marlow only pressed harder.

  “Leave him alone!” Samra attempted to elbow through the quartet of men in her way. She was shoved roughly back by a gruff man who smelled of garlic and sweat. She hurled herself forward again, but was caught off guard by a vicious backhand. She was sent sprawling onto her backside. She could only make out the action in the gaps between the legs of Marlow’s men.

  Atlas’s toes were barely hanging onto the edge of the dock. His flailing fingers had caught hold of Marlow’s wrist. Marlow snatched at the stone necklace around Atlas’s neck again, grasping the cord above the boy’s clenched fist, and for a moment, the tension on the cord steadied him. “You know what’s not so good at falling?” Marlow hissed. “Little boys!”

  Marlow shoved hard and Atlas flew off the dock, his eyes wide and his one hand suspended in the air, stretching for something to hold on to.

  Samra felt the scream on her lips as Marlow shoved. It erupted from her throat as the boy was launched away from the dock.

  Then Atlas fell.

  35

  THE FALL

  He was still staring in surprise as it happened, eyes fixed on the man’s face. The angry man with the bushy black beard, and the thick collar of relic keys. The man had ripped the leather cord from his neck, but Atlas’s family relic was still in his hand. The severed leather cords flapped feebly in the wind, still tangled between his fingers, and then he saw only the sky. Twin moons, some fading stars. The smallest tinge of a blue dawn on the horizon. And he fell. His arms flew wide and his fingers stretched instinctively, searching for something to hold on to. But there was nothing. Just a long way down.