Earth/Sky (Earth/Sky Trilogy)

by Macaulay C. Hunter

  “All you did was save a drowning girl,” I said.

  “And with that, I changed history. I gave her just a few short months extra of life, and then she died anyway to bring what had been woven as close as possible to what was being woven.” Drawing me away from the edge, he took my place there and casually stepped back. A pebble skipped over the side and fell. He removed his shirt and tossed it to the dirt circle. “Her name was Annabeth. She was twelve or thirteen. I wasn’t sure. But she looked so much like you, Jessa Bright. I looked into her eyes and I couldn’t look away. So I reached in that second time to save her and fashioned the world the way I wanted it to be, rather than how it was and should be. So I was cast out, and I fell.”

  He took another step back and fell over the side. I screamed and darted forward to catch him, even though I knew it was too late. But below he had wings, all of the golden pinpricks on each white feather catching the sunlight and transforming him into a blur of gold skimming over the treetops. I watched him fly far away from me, until his wings beat hard and pulled him up into the air. There he looped and shot higher until I could no longer see him in the sky. I shielded my eyes and searched for him, jumping when I heard his voice at my back. “So now you know what I have done.”

  I stared at the white and gold of his wings, which extended out from his shoulders and rose above his head. Then I reached out to touch one, to lose myself in that melting softness. Something this soft shouldn’t exist on earth, just like that music could not. His feather had turned common a few days after its separation from his wing, but these were glorious. They felt alive, and were as full of soul as his eyes.

  “They’re beautiful,” I said with a catch in my throat. It was such a paltry adjective to use for a sight and sensation as strong as these. “Can you . . . can you feel me touching here? Or is it like hair and you feel nothing?”

  “I feel it,” Adriel said. “Like you feel your arm or leg, and more so.”

  I couldn’t stop myself from burying my other hand in his wing, to have more of myself gathered into this softness. Smoothing the feathers, I brought my hands to his cheeks. “I wish you weren’t punished for that.”

  “You shielded a little.”

  I had done so because it was selfish. “But then I would not have met you.”

  “You shouldn’t want to have met me, a fallen angel. Your world is no longer your world, for what I did, for what all of my family has done.”

  “This is the world I know,” I said. “It hasn’t hurt me, and I don’t know that other world.”

  His hand slipped over mine, and he gathered my fingers into his. His wing brushed against my back as he stepped to the edge of the hill and pulled me with him. “Would you like to fly?”

  I smiled, too overcome to speak, and looked out to the horizon. Wind swayed the tops of the trees, which stretched out as far as I could see. Beyond them would be the ocean, the sea of green turning to a sea of blue and going out to infinity. When I looked down, I expected to see my feet still upon the ground. I hadn’t felt his wings move, and I was surprised to see that we were hovering high above the hill. The wings beat steadily and held me aloft, linked only to Adriel by my left hand. An invisible ground was under my feet to bear my weight, although I felt as light as helium.

  “I won’t let you fall,” Adriel said.

  “I’m not afraid,” I answered. The floor tipped beneath me gracefully and tilted us forward. We raced over the trees, the wind a caress across my face when it should have buffeted. My hair rippled out in lazy waves as I looked to the sun.

  At the periphery of my hearing, I heard the faintest strain of that celestial music. Somehow, it felt like a home, one I had never known, but one in which I belonged. I wanted to go faster to hear more of it. Adriel moved his other hand to mine and dropped the first to my waist. Drawn against his body, we picked up speed and the wind moved against me with slightly more force. The chords grew tantalizingly bright.

  Just as a hint of blue touched the horizon, we looped high into the air. His wings beat faster, the softness brushing along my shoulder every time the feathers curled and released for another pulse. We pushed through a low layer of clouds and the wetness of them did not touch me. Then the floor tilted and we were shooting down, through the clouds and to the trees, spiraling around and around without making me dizzy. The music played more loudly at this great speed and each chord lulled me. No earthly instruments could summon this music, which pulled me under and pushed me up in its impossible beauty.

  The sunlight blurred the golden points of his wings so that the green and blue of our surroundings vanished to gold. Trusting he wouldn’t crash us into the trees, I closed my eyes to hear the music without distraction. It thrummed, the chords sinking through my skin to my bones, and my bones thrummed in reply. I would not be able to hold onto the memory once I was no longer flying. Then everything would be the palest shadow and I would be in mourning. Cadmon wept for this and I would weep, too. But caught up in it now, I could only be within it, and captivated.

  When we landed back upon the viewpoint, my heart stopped in grief for what was gone. And then Adriel kissed me softly upon my cheek, and my heart had something new to spur it on.

  ****

  I slept in the car on the way back. It was evening. When the car came to a stop and I opened my eyes, I expected to see campus and not Grandpa Jack’s house. Adriel was already out of the car and knocking on the front door. I got out unsteadily, Grandpa Jack saying, “Hey there, Adriel!”

  “Hi, Mr. Bright,” Adriel said. “Jessa and I went hiking in the hills this afternoon and she looked too tired as we were coming back to drive. I can drive you to the school so you can get the mail truck, would that be all right?”

  As I came up the walkway, Grandpa Jack said in concern, “Are you doing okay, Jessa?”

  Sheepishly, I replied, “It was totally my fault, Grandpa Jack. I overdid it. I’m okay to drive my mail truck.”

  “You shouldn’t drive when you’re that tired, and you fell asleep the second you sat in the car,” Adriel said. “Maybe it’s being overcautious-”

  “No, no, that’s smart,” Grandpa Jack said firmly. “Go on in and rest, I’ll get the truck. Last thing we need is another accident.”

  Once inside, I lay down on the love seat and closed my eyes. The music was bleeding away from me and I stretched after it to no avail. The phone rang, a jarring sound, and I rolled over intent on ignoring it. I knew it was either Nash needing my attention, or Savannah wanting to know what Adriel and I had done all afternoon.

  We had flown.

  The twenty minutes it took Grandpa Jack to come back with the mail truck felt like seconds to me. When he came in, he said, “Feeling better?”

  “Yes, much better. Spooner has some lovely scenery,” I said. “I didn’t realize you knew Adriel.”

  Grandpa Jack gave me a funny look. “I’m the mailman. I know pretty much everybody. They’re a nice family, the Graystones. Shame about the younger boy, he’s got something real tweaked in his noggin. They’re patient with him, all of his running wild.” Going into the kitchen, he harrumphed. “Well, let’s see about adding some vegetables to that dinner I was making.” A bag of veggie chips rustled.

  “Eat a green one, Grandpa Jack,” I prompted. A chip crunched after a grumble. Dragging over my backpack, I peered into my compact. Although I felt exhausted, more emotionally than physically, I looked utterly serene.

  Dinner, homework, even my home in Bellangame seemed very distant. I ate since a plate was put in front of me and diddled about with my assignments in front of the television. In my head, I rushed up into the sky and plunged down to the earth in a sweep of green and blue and gold. Putting my work away without completing it, I struggled to bring the music back.

  My parents called. The connection was poor, and all I could get out of the broken conversation was that they were doing great. They also reminded me to start looking into colleges. State applications were due at the end o
f November.

  College. My cheek burned where Adriel had kissed me. I didn’t want to think about leaving the area, not now. What was college to flying with a fallen angel? Bad dorm food, weird roommates, expensive books, picking majors . . . it didn’t hold a candle to that music, the softness of his wings, him. If he went to the junior college next year like Kishi, I’d go there, too.

  I drifted upstairs at nightfall. My fingers paused on the light switch in my room. Something was glinting on my pillow. I turned on the lights and stared at the feather from his wings. The gold pinpoints were dazzling in the sudden light. My eyes went quickly to the window, and I remembered opening it this morning since my room smelled musty. I’d closed it but not done the latch before I left for school. He’d been in and out of this rickety old house without me hearing so much as a squeak downstairs.

  He wasn’t on the branch or in the sky when I checked, racing away for home or a flight through darkness. It was pity that pulled Annabeth from the water, and perhaps pity that caught me from the plunge off the cliff. But it wasn’t pity that took me flying this afternoon or kissed my cheek. This was going to be a memory I cherished forever, the very limited forever of a mortal life. I wondered if it would be one he even remembered in a thousand years, in ten thousand years, in a million years. When the last humans were gone and he finally lay down to die . . . what in all of those years would come into his mind as his last thoughts? I hoped it was something as beautiful as the memory he’d given me today.

  I slept with my hand on the feather, and dreamed of flying with him over the ocean. The tapestry was being woven around us in the air, so that I could see the individual threads in infinite colors. The anchor threads were brighter than all of the rest, each glowing in silver or gold. I did not look to Adriel, though his fingers were entwined with mine. We soared from high to low, where a master and slave of ancient Egypt became down their generations a boy and girl who sat beside each other in a Connecticut schoolroom and were friends. Further down the generations, two women sat at different tables in the same coffee shop, taking no notice of one another as they worked on laptops. And further down still was an old man in a park . . . no, it was a hologram of a park for we were far in the future, and the squeal of laughter from a child on a Ferris wheel came to his ears. He looked up and smiled to see a boy in thrill while his rocking seat swooped down to the ground. Thousands of generations had come and gone from ancient Egypt to this city not even built within a country that did not yet exist. Still these threads touched and parted, touched and parted once more. Neither the old man nor the happy child knew of the distant relationship between them, nor would they ever, but I could see it spread out before me and it was beautiful.

  “More,” I said, the plea coming not from my throat but my soul for Adriel to read.

  We came to my own thread. It was a deep rose in color, and we circled it. Here around me was everyone I knew, and we floated up the tapestry to see an intersection of my father’s thread and the one belonging to Savannah’s mother. It was the briefest passing in an airport twenty years ago, where they walked past one another to reach different flights. Laughing at the coincidence, I sank down to watch the later generations. Savannah’s thread split into her two children and carried on. Far below one of her descendants would encounter one of London’s, and one of Downy’s, too. They wouldn’t know of any significance, nor was there any in truth. There was only meaning to me.

  “I wish I could see it all,” I said in delight.

  “You would go blind,” Adriel said. “It’s too much for mortal eyes, and too much for lower angelic like mine truthfully.”

  I spotted Zakia’s thread, a dull gray that was wound around mine. The other threads were so gaily colored, and they made his stand out strangely for its plainness. I followed it up yet it did not stop. Now Zakia’s thread was contemporary with my father’s thread and then my grandfather’s, and it stretched onward still. I couldn’t follow any further, since Adriel restrained me from flying up higher. I craned my neck and was just able to make out the dull gray thread’s end. It led to a gap in the tapestry, and above the gap, a cobalt blue thread hung down into the nothingness. The gray was rooted to no other threads, coming from nowhere to continue on through the generations. Both the dull gray and the lovely blue belonged to Zakia somehow, as did the empty space between them.

  “It’s time to go,” Adriel said. We flew through the tapestry the way we had come in order to leave. I spotted occasional gaps in other places, bright threads going down to nothing, and picking up as duller threads.

  Adriel paused at a thread of deep rose that was very short. That was Annabeth’s, and for a split second I looked down into the icy water at my own face. The girl’s eyes were wide open, frantic and fearful, and a hand reached in. A white cord tinged with gold began below the termination of the deep rose. This was Adriel’s birth as a fallen angel.

  I woke up with the feather still soft under my fingers. Wishing it would not grow dull and coarse with time, I set it in my pencil holder. All of the urgency I hadn’t felt for my schoolwork the evening before struck me, and I scribbled out answers furiously between going about the tasks to get ready for school.

  Once there, I sat in the mail truck since I still had fifteen minutes and raced through more. The work for fifth and sixth could wait for lunch in the library, but I had four classes’ worth of work to get through fast. If there was a pop quiz in any subject today, I was out of luck.

  Five minutes to the bell, I got out of the truck and rushed to my locker. The hallways were crowded, no one feeling obliged to go into a classroom until the warning bell rang. When I saw Savannah at her locker, I smiled and thought of her mother and my father at the airport. It was just a coincidence that they had both been there at the same time, and that Savannah and I were friends at the same school now. Yet I liked to know of our previous connection, even if it was just something my subconscious created in a dream.

  “So, are you with Adriel?” she called.

  “I’m not with him,” I answered, “but I’m not not with him either.”

  “Only a girl could make sense of that sentence,” Nash said behind me as Savannah nodded in total understanding.

  Walking up, London said, “Stop dogging her, Nash, how many ways can she tell you that she’s not interested?”

  “Is that true?” Nash demanded of me. “Adriel! Hey, Adriel!”

  Jogging in from the parking lot, Adriel called, “Hi, Nash.”

  “Are you with Jessa?” Nash asked.

  Adriel looked at me, reading my face and whatever it was he saw in my soul. Everyone stood there, eager for the answer. His lips lilted upwards on one side. “I’m not sure. We might be.”

  “Bunch of funny guys, you two,” Nash grumbled. The warning bell rang. Students split apart to the classrooms until it was only Adriel and I in the hallway.

  “I shouldn’t be with you, Jessa,” Adriel said.

  “You’re going on to infinity,” I said. “You shouldn’t have to do the whole length of it alone.”

  He hitched his backpack over his shoulder and offered his hand. “Would you walk with me?” My heart beat harder, since I knew he meant more than just to class. I took his warm hand into mine, and we walked to my first period where he had to let go.

  Chapter Nine: The Family

  A good week passed at school, everyone shocked that I was with Adriel. As he had turned down every request for a date until now, and Kishi hadn’t dated in all of her time at the school, this was an unprecedented event that was gossiped about from end to end of campus. In fifth period one day, Kitts stopped hunting and pecking to lean over and whisper, “Okay, you did the impossible with Adriel. Tell me your secret so I can land Zakia.”

  There wasn’t a secret, and I had no idea how one would go about winning a date with Zakia Cooper. He was going back and forth outside the window while we typed, and I wondered about his broken strand in the tapestry. That had been the most lucid dream of my lif
e and I felt the truth of it. Maybe it was due to sleeping with the feather under my hand. I had done the same on subsequent nights, the feather slowly turning dull and regular, but I never had a dream as vivid as that again. I didn’t mention my little experiment to Adriel, not wanting him to tell me that the first dream was meaningless when it had been so amazing.

  Now it was Saturday. The weekend was promising to be beautiful, the sun so bright that it managed to penetrate even shadowy Spooner. I lazed about through the morning, alone in the house since Grandpa Jack was covering for someone who fell sick at work. He often just walked over, the post office not even half a mile away, but today he took the mail truck since it was an emergency.

  I ate a leisurely breakfast and fought with the Internet for hours, having to pull the curtains behind the love seat since the sunlight was coming in so strongly through the window. The phone rang not a minute after I gave up on a music video in the early afternoon. I picked it up, hoping desperately that Nash had gotten the message. A thrill went through me to hear Adriel’s voice. “Hey, Jessa?”

  Sitting up straight, I said, “Hello!”

  “Would you like to come over for the afternoon?”

  My heart both dropped and soared at the exact same moment. “Yes, I would love to, but my grandfather has my mail truck.”

  “That’s not a problem. I’ll pick you up. Is half an hour okay?”

  “Make it an hour?” I asked, wanting to shower first. He agreed and I hung up. Then I charged up the stairs, setting off the disco fish and almost slipping in the bathroom. Once washed and dressed, I ran downstairs to write a note to my grandfather. Adriel pulled up just as I slapped the note to the refrigerator under a fish magnet.