by Rabia Gale
“You need knowledge of the sunway to know where to put the bombs!” Rainbird ground her teeth. An inspector would’ve known right away what she meant. “You need to know which supports are most important, where to place the bomb for maximum impact. Eiree aren’t engineers. They don’t work on the sunway. They wouldn’t have known where to place it just right.”
Miss Levine placed her elbows on her crossed knees, leaned forward with her chin cupped in her hands. “Unlike say, you.”
“Me and about several hundred inspectors and supervisors and engineers and techs,” Rainbird shot back. She was not going to meekly accept the role of token criminal halfbreed.
“And you say Turnworth has Petrus, hmm?” Miss Levine examined a fingernail with apparent unconcern. “Or is it just a smokescreen to distract me and waste the authorities’ time, so Petrus can get away?”
“Petrus isn’t getting away anywhere. He’s sick. He needs medicine. He needs help.”
“He’s a criminal.”
“No. I’m the criminal. Petrus didn’t kill anyone. I did.”
“He hid you. He was an accessory.”
“I told him that it was self-defense.” She heard the futility of her own words. She was a criminal—a murderer, a runaway slave, a subhuman creature. Already Miss Levine looked at Rainbird if she were some malevolent tool that had come to life, or an animal that had come to sentience.
Miss Levine’s nostrils flared. “Do you have any idea,” she said, “how much damage you did when you killed Marvelo?”
Rainbird stared at her. “I—No.” Marvelo was evil! Twisted! How could killing him have been bad?
“We could have taken down his whole network of suppliers and clients. We were waiting for the right opportunity to catch Marvelo and implicate his business partners, who, by the way, are bigger fish than Marvelo. You killed Marvelo, and they thought we were behind it. They melted away into the shadows. You undid years of work.” Her eyes were angry and flat.
Hopelessness bleached through Rainbird. Miss Levine believed in justice, not people. She cared for society, not individuals. It didn’t matter that Rainbird had been scared and helpless, only that she had broken the law and messed the trap the League had spent so much time preparing.
Rainbird looked at the dracine instead, caught and held its eyes for one long moment. Then she took a deep, ragged breath, shoring up against the spasming pain in her arms. “I was a criminal even when I was born. According to the eiree laws, I should’ve been exposed. I committed my crime against them before I ever broke the laws of men. Since they have prior claim, give me to them.”
Miss Levine’s eyebrows arched. “Bargaining to be handed over to your accomplices? You are a clever one.”
Not clever, desperate. She looked at Miss Levine, but her words were for the dracine. “The eiree aren’t known for their mercy. Wrongdoers have their wings ripped off and are thrown from the Perch.” Or so it was rumored. “But I submit myself to their justice.”
“I see. Perhaps I can find a use for you after all.” Miss Levine rose. “And I should check Turnworth’s side of the story, for thoroughness’ sake.” She left, and the dracine glided after her, a silent shadow.
Look back.
The dracine didn’t.
Find the eiree.
Would it? She didn’t know.
Rainbird hung her head, and stifled a sob.
Scrabbling in the dark. The light had burned out in a shower of sparks long ago. Rainbird half-stood, half-crouched. She had risen a while ago to ease the strain on her arms. Now her thigh muscles burned and her calves trembled. Her ears tingled with the presence of someone.
Not human. The movement was too light for a human. No, this was an eiree.
The little dracine had come through for her, after all.
“Who’s there?” she said, sharply, blinking rapidly, trying to make herself see.
“Worm.” She recognized the term, but not the voice. This was a male voice, but it was younger and angrier than that of the eiree upon the wire. There was no mistaking the contempt laced in it.
Rainbird straightened as much as she could. There. She could see the outlines of his bulk, here a leg, there the curve of wing. “Why are you here?”
“I have come for your surrender, worm.”
“Where’s D—?” She bit down on the name.
“Paying for you.” Now his tone was overtly hostile. Who was this eiree, and what was he to Diamada? A brother, a lover, a friend? Was Rainbird talking to a relative of hers?
It doesn’t matter. They’re not my family. Petrus is.
How long would Sanders wait for her return before he gave up on her and her plan?
“Free me from here,” said Rainbird, “and give me two passes of the Day Sun, and I swear I will deliver myself to the Perch to do with me as they please.” Before she’d offered Diamada her wings and her eiree organs, now, she was offering her entire self, to be punished for all the eiree laws she’d broken.
Silence. Rainbird panicked, wishing she’d not said anything about the Day Sun, had not reminded the eiree of human encroachment on their home. She didn’t know how the eiree marked time, however. She hadn’t listened to Petrus when he’d tried to tutor her, hadn’t wanted to have anything to do with Diamada or her people.
“Why should the Perch trust your word, worm?”
“Because I swear it on my father, who I love more than anything else. Aside from that, you can’t. But I’m a wanted criminal in all of the human lands, on the sunway and downside, and also on the wings. There is no place I can run to. My only freedom is choosing my end.”
“You choose the Wings.”
“Yes.” Rainbird wished she could make out his face, see if she could read anything of his expression. She tried a quip. “At least my stay there will be a short one.” Ha ha. Not funny.
The eiree didn’t think so, either. He stood very still, not laughing. Rainbird got the impression that he was probing her with senses she didn’t have. She controlled the urge to sniff the air to see if she smelled of sweat and focused instead on keeping her breathing even and her heart from pounding like a runaway train. Was there a way she could inject trustworthiness and urgency into her scent?
“Very well.” The words came an eternity later, dropping like boulders.
“You’ll take my word?”
“You’re a worm,” was the offhand comment. “What good is your word? But I sense your desperation, and you’ve given us permission to hunt you should you run. As you say, your choices are with the humans or with us. Either way, justice of some sort will be done, and we will be rid of one who looks like us but cannot hear what we do.”
Hah. How’d you feel if I told you I could? But she would not seek acceptance from his kind. Rainbird gritted her teeth. “If you’re done holding forth on my inferiorities, perhaps you can let me out of here?”
For a moment, she thought he was going to do nothing, or do something magical. The eiree shifted his stance, lifted his hands, shook his wings into something streamlined, hard-edged, ready, in a way Rainbird had never been able to. He held the pose, gathering tension. Rainbird fancied she could almost see energy flowing through him.
She did not want to be on the receiving end of this. She shifted uneasily. “What are you—?”
The eiree flashed forward, like a falcon diving for its prey. Rainbird flinched back, but that was all she had time to do. His hands struck on either side of her body. She smelled the ozone scent of eiree.
Then her wrists fell out of the suddenly-opened restraints. Her shoulders screamed their agony and Rainbird caught her hands to her chest, cradling them.
The eiree kicked out at her ankles and the manacles around them fell loose and clanked to the ground. He stepped back from her.
“Don’t forget, worm. We’ll be watching.”
Rainbird felt a small current in the air. Then he was gone.
Rainbird closed her mouth, which had been hanging open. She jumped to h
er feet—or tried to. Firstly, her leg muscles protested against the ill use. And secondly, her wings were still pinned to the wall and she almost fell over.
Lovely. Could I be any less graceful? At least the snooty eiree wasn’t there to turn up his nose at her. Rainbird massaged her limbs, then worked her wings free from the wall.
If she could only do what the eiree had, they’d have been justified pinning them.
But she couldn’t, so Rainbird forced herself up and hobbled across the room. This was a disused warehouse, close to bone, and as expected, a maze of piping ran across the wall. Rainbird noted that one vent cover was open. Thanking the eiree, she slid in and started the long crawl up the rib bone and to the sunway.
She hoped Sanders was still waiting. She hoped the plan would still work, even without all the supplies.
She hoped there was still time.
Rainbird had never been this deep into the Hub before. Here, the bone was so heavily encased in metal scaffolding that it was barely visible. The sunway passed over this metal structure, and Rainbird had had little occasion to visit it. The Hub was ruled over by bureaucrats, techs and wizzes, a perfect place for Turnworth to hide Petrus in. This, and the Perch, were the two places on the sunway Rainbird was least eager to go to.
If she were lucky, she’d visit both of them today.
Rainbird took a lift down into the Hub, staring out of the glass as the small cage was swallowed into darkness, as sky and supports and track and chains gave way to a boxy blackness. Rainbird caught her breath, then remembered to let it out again. She braced against the lurch as the lift came to a stop, then swept out with the rest of the passengers.
She didn’t dare stop, didn’t dare look confused, or uncertain, or lost. She was a repair tech, she’d been here a hundred times already, she knew the way to the boiler rooms. Rainbird changed her grip on the handle of the toolbox, blinked as she took in the vast high-ceilinged lobby, echoing with machinery and footsteps, and strode forward. Sanders’ instructions played in her head.
Left at the coffee shop—if one can call it that, it serves a poor brew—then into the service corridor to your left, right next to the advertisement for Sigurd’s Cigars and the shoeshine station that’s always empty. No one should be there to bother you.
Ah, but there was someone there—a sweeper with a bucket of soapy water and a mop which he ran in half-hearted circles on the thin layer of stone that covered the metal struts as a floor.
She nodded at him as she passed, then stumbled as a muscle in her left leg cramped. He stared at her, and prickles ran up and down her back. A sentry, watching out for her? Had he relayed to his supervisors that she was on her way? Was she walking into a trap?
No. Even if she were, she had to try this. Had to get Petrus out, see him safe.
Her life was already over, regardless.
Now she was in the back ways of the Hub where bare metal grill rang with every step and high walkways crisscrossed in vast spaces. Sanders’ instructions were precise, and she soon made her way down more steps and into a short corridor blocked by a man at a desk.
“You called for a boiler repair tech?” Rainbird slapped a badly-typed repair order on the desk. Sanders had typed it up on another pilfered device, hunched over in a nook in the spinal column from whence he masterminded the opening of doors and the sending of messages and the breakdown of machines by directing too much steam into them.
Maybe after this incident the Company would replace its mishmash of typewriters and plethora of redundant forms with a more streamlined, standardized system. For now, it worked that one could expect repair orders with missing e's and off-center m's.
The man at the desk gave the order a cursory look. “Early today, ain’t you. Wasn’t expecting one of you techs for a goodly while yet.”
Rainbird shrugged and managed not to wince from the flash of pain in her shoulders. “Got a new manager. Very uptight he is. Very insistent on timely repairs.” She and the desk manager exchanged glances, one weary veteran to another. He’ll learn, their look said.
“I ain’t got time to shepherd you around, young’un. Got some urgent paperwork here. It just came through.” Rainbird nodded in understanding. That had been her idea, sending down the payroll forms in triplicate with a “Return ASAP” stamped on them. The Company was known for mysterious paperwork, and any low-level employee ignored such forms at their peril—or the withholding of their pay.
“I’ll see myself in.” Rainbird swung open the half-door beside the desk and squeezed past the desk man, who was already back at his forms, writing out his 16-digit employee number. She scanned the tattered map on one wall of the corridor, as if re-familiarizing herself with the place, then went briskly to Boiler Room Eight.
Rainbird wedged a piece of piping through the latch of the boiler room door, locking it behind her. It wouldn’t do to be interrupted. She slipped off her coat, then jumped on top of some ancient equipment to get to the duct above it. The metal was cold and hard against her body, and left her hands smeared and gritty with rust.
Sanders had turned the boiler off hours ago. Crawling through heating ducts with boilers going at full steam would not have been pleasant.
Rainbird unscrewed the vent cover above the machine whose technical name she’d already forgotten. She had to balance on her toes to do it, the top screws nearly out of her reach. They were rusted tight and a shower of reddish flakes dusted her face.
Dying iron on her lips, as she worked inside the bone of a dying beast. Rainbird shivered at the thought. A loose screw clanked next to her foot and rolled away out of sight behind the machine.
The door to the boiler room rattled as someone tried the handle from the other side.
Rainbird bit her lip and adjusted her grip on the screwdriver, ignoring the ache in her arms, the tremble in her legs.
Banging on the door, followed by more frenzied attacks on the latch.
Ignore it, ignore it. Rainbird fought to keep her hand steady as the tip of the screwdriver found the head of the screw. She began to twist.
The noise at the door subsided.
Too much to hope that whoever it was had gone away for lunch.
Almost done. The last screw trembled in place, held in by age and sheer tenacity.
A boom at the door, almost making it jump out of its frame. The pipe holding it shut bent. The screw jumped, too, and Rainbird moved her foot as it fell. There was no time to rest her protesting muscles; she pushed the thin blade of the screwdriver under the vent cover and pried at it. The ancient cover popped free just as the door gave up its fight.
Rainbird dropped the cover, not looking around. She backed up from the vent, till she was right at the edge of the machine she’d used as a platform.
Footfalls behind her, loud, making the metal floor shudder. Many feet. A n impersonal voice barked out, “Stop right there, Miss! Hands in the—”
Rainbird narrowed her eyes at the vent hole. She drove her heels into metal as she sprang, sprinting for the wall, willing her body to give her its all, to ignore the reality of wall looming large in front of her. Shots rang out, sharp and splintered, around her.
Don’t stop, don’t stop.
Rainbird leapt up the wall, achieving vertical running speed for a split second, fingers grabbing and clamping around the edge. Her momentum flipped her entire body into the duct and in another second she was enclosed in dusty metal tubing, plunged into darkness, inhaling dust and animal droppings, the skin of her hands and her wings catching on metal ridges. Her own breathing thundered in her ears, as did the noise of her inelegant scrambling through the ducts.
Objective number one: Get out of target range.
That achieved quickly, Rainbird stopped to contemplate the forking of the duct, closing her eyes to bring back the schematic Sanders had shown her. She had a good spatial memory, honed by her years of doing Petrus’ job.
Turn right here…crawl along until I get to the third turn…look for the next fork…Glew
, hasn’t it been twice that long yet? Ah, there’s the—oh no.
Rainbird stopped. The map had shown the duct forking cleanly into left and right here. However, she was confronted by a three-dimensional intersection, a jumble of ducting spliced together.
Either the schematic was outdated, or it had never been accurate in the first place.
Rainbird swallowed, as if to push down the sinking feeling in her stomach. Petrus is waiting on me. This way. I think.
She went on for many more twists and turns, trying to keep heading in the direction of the heart chamber, backtracking now and again. After several sweaty and stifling eternities coiling around in the dark, Rainbird had to admit it.
She was lost.
And very hot. Too hot.
Rainbird laid her palm against a metal side. It was warm. Something rumbled, machinery coming on, vibrations trembling through the duct. A draft blew, a hot breath that sent dust spiraling into Rainbird’s face.
They’d turned up the heating. What else could they send into these pipes? Steam? Poison gas? Rainbird drew in a sharp breath, full of choking grit, and forced herself to exhale.
Breathe, breathe. You can’t have a panic attack in this canister. Metal was dead, inert, deaf. She couldn’t talk to it, couldn’t communicate with it, like she’d done with the tissues and spinal cord.
But.
Dare she?
The thought of drowning in the vast ocean of the dragon’s alien dreams (Thoughts? Emotion? Biochemical convulsions?) turned Rainbird’s spine to jelly, but she had to.
For Petrus’ sake.
Rainbird backtracked through the duct slowly, fingers probing at the seams, searching for weaknesses. These ducts were so old, there had to be gaps somewhere.
Ah. Blessed air. Cool air, and a gap wide enough to fit her hand through. Rainbird pushed her hand through the seam as far as she was able, then squinted through the gap. She was in the inner workings of the Hub, in the nether space between various machine rooms, where pipes and tubes and wires coiled like intestines. She wouldn’t have to worry about falling right down on someone’s head.