To test, I let myself sip the spaceport’s data. Flier ships. I couldn’t wait to get in one and see the details.
The fliers at the front of our group pulled up, gaining height. Making room for us to go in and land by the ships? I glanced toward Marcus, hoping for a clue as to which ship, so I could make sure I had the right trajectory. He was too far away for me to see the expression on his face.
More fliers rose from the perch-trees. Ten, twenty, thirty.
They were beautiful, flying up into the late morning sun. They rose, and rose, and rose.
Our escort rose with them.
More fliers leapt off the perch-trees. Seven waves of ten or fifteen each.
Too many.
Marcus figured it out at the same time I did. Joseph! he screamed inside my mind. Get down. Land. Protect yourself.
Kayleen’s voice, No!
The fliers from the spaceport were heading toward us all, mixing with our vanguard already.
Get down! Marcus repeated.
Fliers weren’t supposed to use weapons.
Bryan and Ming were already surrounded. They still flew forward, and the other fliers hadn’t struck them or anything, but they flew very close to each other, and close to Bryan and Ming, closer than any of us would dare fly to each other. Among them, I spotted the blond woman with the blue dots on her wings, which made me snarl.
I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like a few of our fliers were circling outside the group that surrounded Bryan and Ming. It looked more like a ball of waving color in the sky, maybe a huge seething kite, than a bunch of winged ones surrounding a wingless.
What do they want? I needed to know.
To make you land, said Marcus.
So you want me to land?
If they make you fall, you’ll die.
Kayleen? What should we do?
She felt unusually calm, like the girl we’d pulled back from the nearly dead. I’m going to go tell Mom to land, then I’ll go down.
Smart. Luckily, Paloma was close ahead. Kayleen added length to her wing beats and left me behind. I looked for Chelo, found her on my right. I turned and flew toward her.
Stay separate! Marcus commanded. Make them work harder.
Groups of fliers converged on each other in front of me. Except for wings I recognized, like Daniel’s orange and Matriana’s silvery white and gold, I couldn’t tell who was on our side and who wasn’t. A large group headed toward me and Chelo. “Down!” I yelled.
She nodded and immediately began to slow and spiral toward the ground. Half the group of fliers heading toward us went down after her, the other kept chasing toward me.
None of us, not even Kayleen, could outfly a real flier.
I took another quick look around. Everyone else was too far ahead, already engulfed in the strange wings.
Marcus, loud, insistent, fear lacing his sending. Down. Down before you die. They’re trying to stop you. They won’t use weapons. Hold onto your balance.
Huh?
Then the wind of the other fliers surrounded me. A man with dark hair and angry brown eyes flew in my face, swooping past me, beating his wings hard; the wind lifted my right wing. Another blast of wind from an enemy I couldn’t see drove my left wing down.
Two more fliers did the same thing, and then two more, and I bobbled seriously, tilting sideways to the ground.
I couldn’t watch out for anyone anymore. I focused on my wings, on my posture, on swinging my feet down and starting the right downbeats to land, although I was way too high. Tsawo’s voice played in my head from an early lesson. “If you have to fall, sacrifice your feet. You can get new feet, no one can make you a new head.” Tsawo was like that, literal and dry.
Three fliers came so close to me I slowed lest I hit them. A near-stall. Fear gave me the power to go again, forward now, no ideas about landing yet, just getting away.
I didn’t know where to go. Everywhere I saw wings. Blue wings and black wings and bruised purple wings. Even a pair of white wings, white as summer clouds, trying to knock me out of the sky.
Frantic fear gave me power. I kicked one of them in the wing and he fell away fast. I couldn’t tell if he fell all the way down or caught himself. For a moment I gained space.
Data. That was my strength. Use it. Except from the air if I lost my sense of physical self at all I’d die. I was going to die anyway. I had to do something.
My breath burned.
Under me, I glimpsed the silver of ships wheeling. Pointed noses, hard sides, hot from the sun. Nothing to land on.
I opened, slowed down my thinking, accepted the data of the spaceport again, deeper than the first time. The mandala of the spaceport. The harmony that Kayleen had shown me.
The disharmony of the fight screamed across the data, like mismatched colors in a painting designed to shatter perception. Now I knew who was on what side. Not why, but I didn’t care. We had to survive, and at least now I could see my attackers’ movements from afar, tell who was flying in close to me next. I braced for a woman dive-bombing from above, for a pair of nearly matched male fliers with clay-red wings coming up from below. I flapped between two other men who’d been coming head-on, brushing one of their wings.
It became a dance. Me and the data against the quick, sharp movements of the attacking fliers. I drove them down, and down, and down, until I was near enough to the ground I had to back-wing into a landing. I slid on my knees, one wing breaking off above the handhold.
It would be nice to quit breaking wings.
Fliers fluttered over my head, so close I felt their wind, not near enough to touch. I hurled the broken bit of wing into them, grunting with satisfaction when it knocked a orange-winged flier ten feet backward and drew a nasty word from him.
I stripped my other wing off, and threw it, too. It didn’t hit any of them.
Others had made it down. I spotted Chelo, Kayleen, and Paloma. The fliers seemed content to circle above us, feeling hostile. But then, why would they land? We’d beat them in a ground contest. I raced toward the others.
We stood together on the ground, searching the sky for the rest. Eight fliers surrounded Marcus, driving him away from us.
Jenna and Tiala were engaged in similar struggles. I watched Jenna kick a flier out of position, pinwheeling back over hindquarters, a full two somersaults. The kick disturbed her balance, and she started to fall, then adjusted wings and feet and forced herself stable. I cheered. Even Chelo cheered.
The flier plummeted to the ground, too far away for us to tell if he or she had died of the impact. It had been hard enough I was willing to bet they’d at least be wingless.
Why attack us? What did they get out of it?
“Look in the data,” Kayleen said. “Come back.”
I’d dropped the threads when I landed.
I kept my eyes open, watching, letting the most local data flows mix in with what I saw. They didn’t want us near the spaceport.
So we should go there.
I took Kayleen’s hand, and Paloma’s. Chelo took Paloma’s other side. I spoke out loud for Chelo and Paloma’s sake. “There’s nothing we can do for the ones still up, but hope. We need to keep going, get in among the ships. They’ll have to spend more energy trying to stop us.”
We jogged forward, watching above and behind.
The local data felt out of balance with the fight, disturbed so it almost whined. The sharpest danger was near Marcus. Daniel and Matriana fluttered around the group that had him.
He fell, wings clasped close together, plummeting toward the ground.
Kayleen saw it and screamed, even though the data signaled he meant the movement by feeling hopeful. It was like listening to the score for a fight.
Marcus snapped his wings down and out, arching his back, slowing himself. A powerful beat sent him straight, free of the others. Matriana and Daniel rode above him, shielding him.
Four fliers dived down toward them.
“Bryan!” Chelo screamed.
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I followed her pointing finger. He was falling out of the sky. Fast.
Chelo took off, racing toward where he might fall. I followed her, and I heard the other two following me.
Data told me Marcus was still all right. I didn’t send him anything, I didn’t want to distract him.
Bryan slammed into the ground in front of us, a cloud of fliers hovering above him.
Ming’s attackers had momentarily forgotten her as they watched Bryan fall. She positioned herself to land. The blonde with the blue dots dove and spread herself in Ming’s way, and Ming kicked her in the chest, pushing her aside.
I gave Ming a thumbs-up.
Chelo reached Bryan’s inert form.
Ming landed, racing toward Bryan, ungainly in her wings.
I came up behind them both.
One leg had crumpled under Bryan, bone shoved through the thigh, the knee shattered and bloody. The other seemed disconnected from the hip, bent sideways, like he was trying to do the splits. One arm had clearly pulled away from the socket. One wing had stabbed him in the back, and blood leaked out from under him, staining the grass.
He’d saved his head.
I couldn’t stop the sudden, dizzy thought that it would have been kinder for him to land on it.
His face twisted with pain and his lips bled. Chelo stroked his cheek, moaning. She leaned down and kissed him on the forehead, murmuring something too soft for me to hear. Her voice cracked. Her tears splashed into the blood flowing down his chin.
Ming couldn’t quite bend down to him, even with her dancer’s grace. She stared down at him, croaking his name. I helped her get one wing off, and she knelt over her lover, the one wing she still wore shading his face so I couldn’t see what passed between them.
Chelo had sat back on her heels, tears flowing down her face, scanning the sky to give Ming her last moment with Bryan.
More fliers came in from all directions, most landing, a few staying aloft. I recognized one, then another. They were on our side.
The data song here saw the balance change, and stabilize, turning into a more joyful set of tones. It wasn’t really sound as much as balance, hard to describe, a sense unavailable to me anywhere else, but such a part of me I felt more all right, in spite of what was happening at my feet.
The fliers stayed, wings rustling, not one of them speaking even though they must have a million things to say to each other after the fight.
Chelo sobbed harder, and I knew Bryan had died. My brother. One of us six.
42
CHELO: THE SPACEPORT, CHARMED
When we were kids, Bryan was shorter than the rest of us, and more awkward. He used to follow us around, hopeful, waiting for an opportunity to use his extra strength to help us. My first kiss had been Bryan, when I was six and he was five. I had giggled, and a hurt look had crossed his face, so I’d kissed him again. Once, he held my hand so hard my fingers popped. He’d apologized for a week. I remembered his bruised face after other kids beat him up on Fremont, and later, in the bowels of Migrator, when all his physical hurts were healed, but he held my hand in his and looked as lost as a stray pup.
“I’m sorry, Chelo, we have to go.” My brother’s voice, coming from far away and just above my head all at once. His hand on my arm. “The fliers aren’t our only enemies.”
I blinked up at him. The fliers weren’t our enemies. Except the ones that killed Bryan. The next thing I knew, Joseph had pulled me up and folded me in his arms, and his shirt was soaked with my tears. Then Marcus stood beside us, his green eyes snapping with anger and betrayal. Dianne clutched Ming in her arms. Paloma stood over Bryan, looking down at him sadly and shaking her head. She leaned over and closed his eyes.
“Let’s go,” Marcus urged. More hands. Fliers. Matriana and Daniel. Our fliers. The white one with black spots. Jenna with her arms around me, pulling me toward the spaceport.
“We can’t just leave him here!” I protested.
“We’ll take care of him,” Daniel soothed.
Nobody would take care of him ever again. I would never take care of him again. He would never hold me in his arms again, never scratch me with his fingernails, never again lecture me to push myself to climb and run.
I shouldn’t have stayed for Juss’s fortune. Or I should have acted more on what I heard. I should have made this not happen. That was my job, to keep everyone safe. Damn the blue man. Damn Seeyan. Juss had said people would die. If I’d just stayed with Liam and the kids, maybe no one would have died.
I got my feet under me, and ran with them all. The fliers took off and flew just above us. Then we were swerving through the circle of perch-trees, ducking and weaving, the fliers flowing above. Out in the open again, we ran across the hard surface of the spaceport.
Joseph glanced longingly toward a ship that looked like the bigger, gleaming cousin of New Making, but Marcus drove us to a squat cargo ship instead. We streamed up a wide loading ramp similar to the one we’d streamed down when we first got here, the day I danced on the spaceport floor and thought the perch-trees were real and friendly.
Only now there was one less of us. I couldn’t think about that.
Where were my babies? I needed Jherrel and Caro. I needed them now.
The metal ramp echoed under my feet, under all our feet. It sounded good, even to me.
I’d never wanted to get on a ship again.
I needed my babies. And Liam. Dear sweet Liam. I barreled up the top part of the ramp, head down. And then, I smelled him. Sweat and worry and fresh air, the children and the ship. As I looked up, Liam swept me into his arms, swinging me around, lifting my feet. “Oh honey. Chelo, Chelo. I saw. I’m sorry. I should never have let you go.”
I looked up into his welcoming, wonderful, steady brown eyes. “You’re here. How did you get here? Where are the children?”
He pointed. Paloma was buried in her grandchildren. Jherrel had one leg and Caro the other, and Paloma was mussing both their hair, a smile on her tear-streaked face.
“I brought them for you.” The voice, familiar and soft, came from behind.
I turned to find Mohami, his head bowed. As always, he was flanked by Kala and Samuel. “It is the last part of my duty,” he said. “I will always remember being able to serve you.” He looked sadder than I had ever seen him, and conflicted. He had never looked conflicted in my presence.
I used a long breath to pull myself together enough to remember who Mohami was. The Keeper of the Ways of the Fliers of Lopali. “Thank you for bringing the children. Thank you for taking care of them, and us.”
He nodded.
“I’m sorry for your troubles today. I’m sorry that our coming here caused a fight between your people.” He was not part of the group that had killed Bryan. He couldn’t be. I couldn’t be angry with this small, old man. “You helped me understand the heart of the world.”
He smiled softly. “It is not your fault you brought change. We needed change. But I am sorry for your loss.”
Kala and Samuel moved closer to him, protective.
He stepped away from them, putting them a half-step behind him.
Maybe it was the pain of my loss that drove me, maybe instinct. I knelt down at his feet, and I looked up at him. “Come with us. Stay with us.”
His eyes widened, his look the closest thing to startlement I’d ever seen on his placid face. He raised an eyebrow.
“Please? I need you.” I looked at the children, at Paloma. “They need you.”
Kala and Samuel blinked at me and looked at Mohami and then back at me. They said nothing, except Samuel chewed on his upper lip.
Silence fell. Liam stood behind me, supporting. I kept my eye on Mohami, willing him to say yes.
Mohami looked at me, and all the vastness of the morning ceremony seemed to float in his eyes. I could fly a space ship into his pupil and have as many planets to explore as I did here and now. As outside, so inside. He’d told me that once in a private meditation session and now I
understood what it looked like. I shivered at the power I saw in him in that moment. Then his eyes softened, and his gaze became the same peaceful, warm one I was used to. He spoke softly, “Very well.”
Kala and Samuel looked at him, faces slack and patient. I wondered what was going on behind their placid eyes.
Caro laughed and other conversations started back up, so I almost missed Mohami’s words to them. “Kala, you must stay with me. Samuel, you will go back and help Niall, who will take my place.”
Samuel nodded, looking proud.
Kala had turned white-faced. “Will we be coming back soon?”
All three of them looked to me, their patience heavy. So, did I want to come back? Not if I could help it. If this was the soul of the Five Worlds, I was going far away and finding a different soul. Maybe after the sting of Bryan’s death went away. Maybe in ten or twenty or thirty years. In a world where people didn’t age, I shouldn’t say never. So I just said, “Perhaps.”
Kala nodded, and leaned over to hug Samuel, the warmest touch I’d seen between them, in spite of the love that always seemed to be there. “I’ll be back some day,” she whispered to him.
Maybe after this war. But there would be another one after this one. Still, I was bred to be hopeful. I glanced at Tiala, who had come up to ask Paloma something. “Tiala? Will you find a place for Mohami and Kala?”
She didn’t miss a beat. “Of course.”
“Thank you.”
The two Keepers turned away from me and followed her. I watched their back for a moment. It felt right. I didn’t know why, but I had done the right thing.
I cried again, for Bryan but also because Mohami and Kala and Samuel were grace in a world that pretended to more grace than it really had. They were golden people, full of love and serenity.
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