Rainbird (12 page)

Would the hybrid come in here after them?

Rainbird put a hand against the heart to steady herself, then snatched it away as needles of electricity pricked through her arm.
She
couldn’t fight the hybrid, but maybe, just maybe, what remained of the dragon could.

Rainbird closed her eyes and dug her fingers into the old bloodless tissue, held together now by a colorless solution that wept into the chamber in thin trickles.
Help us.
She sought out the paths of electricity, the way they looped around and through and in the heart. A part of her could touch them, could redirect their flow.
If I coax this current here…

A powerful surge sent Rainbird spinning back into herself. Static sparked in the air. Her ears buzzed and her fingers and toes tingled. The heart shuddered and a cry pierced through the old blood-tinged air. The hybrid, beating on the outside, driven back in pain.

Was it enough? Rainbird pushed back into the electric flow. The heart shuddered again as she directed more energy to it.

Then it stopped, rhythm broken.

“Rainbird?” Petrus’ voice was thin, thread-like.

“It’s—it’s…” Rainbird waited, breathless. She couldn’t have
stopped
the organ, could she?

No
.

But the heart didn’t pump, though the moments ticked by. The hybrid, recovered, moved along the outside, trying to squeeze its massive body in after them.

Come on!
Rainbird dug her fingers into the muscle wall. She threw herself into what remained of the dragon’s subconscious, that dark space where shattered pieces of it still dwelt: reflexes, snippets of memory, flickers of thought. She went in deeper than she’d gone before.
Move, please. Beat. Breathe.
The heart—the energy it generated, the pulses it sent—was essential to the sunway. She couldn’t have broken it. That was almost as bad as destroying the Day Sun!

“Rainbird.” Petrus doubled over, coughing.

She couldn’t deal with him now, not until after she fixed what she had broken. She swam deeper in the sea of leftover desires, arrowing for some kind of control center. She reached something that was a quivering gelatinous mass of suppressed desire and sleep—and she kicked it as hard as she could.

Beat! Wake!

And the creature woke.

It woke with a soundless roar, a wordless cry that echoed through Rainbird’s skull and into the vastness of space itself. It woke into a waterfall rush of pain and fury. It woke to a stripped-bare body, a flayed self. The world shuddered, a jolt sent Rainbird tumbling onto her rump, connection broken.

Rainbird dragged Petrus out of the ventricle, just as the heart squeezed so tightly she thought her chest would burst in aching sympathy. They fell onto the platform and covered their ears as the heart let go with a hammer-boom. Tissue came alive, no longer black, but flooded bright. Rainbird and Petrus backed away from the heart and its wires and tubes, but the hybrid was not so lucky. It was too close to a thick muscle mass, which swelled and touched him just as the dragon’s madness and grief came flowing through in electric fury.

The blast knocked the hybrid off its feet and into the wall. Sheeting broke and crumbled. The heart thudded, faster and louder. Tubing wrenched out of the muscle, spilling clear fluid. Wires sizzled with a power they could not hold. A great rattling sound broke out, as if the entire Hub shook with the dragon’s awakening.

“What happened?” whispered Petrus. “What did you do?”

“I…” Rainbird had no words to explain.

The door burst open and a horde of binneys spilled into the chamber. Rainbird glimpsed Miss Levine’s purple in their midst, then heard her calm voice. “Take the unauthorized eiree/thyrine hybrid first. Turnworth says this whistle will bring him to heel.”

Rainbird took Petrus’ arm, pointed up towards the ceiling. Turnworth was caught, his plot foiled.

Time for us to make an exit.
She pushed Petrus up the scaffolding and into the vent she’d picked out from the schematics. Binneys’ voices echoed behind them, voices raised in consternation and dismay as another powerful contraction shook the sunway. They were coming faster together now, a panicked response from the beast that had woken to such a nightmare.

They did keep the brain alive, then. The fools.

Rainbird crawled through the short tunnel, slow going since she had to nudge Petrus on. When he stopped at a hatch, she reached around him, unlocked it, and pushed it open. Air sucked greedily around them. She caught the breath of fresh air from outside, saw an unbroken square of sky.

Diamada. Thank Glew, thank Dorak’s God of Small Things.

The heart jittered again, and the vent pitched steeply. Rainbird pushed at Petrus until they were at the hatch. The balloon bobbed right next to it, its basket swinging wildly in the sunway quake.

That had been Diamada’s idea. After all, it had worked once.

Rainbird helped Petrus into the basket and forced a mask onto his face.

“The sunway,” he gasped.

“It’s okay, Papa.” Rainbird checked all the connectors.

“No! The weakened section…the Day Sun…it…”

Another tremor almost pitched her into the basket with him.

“I’ll take care of it, Papa.” Petrus’ face was all pale around the ill-fitting mask, and his eyes were wide and wild behind the crazily-tilted spectacles.

“Rainbird.”

“Go, Papa. I’ll take care of it.” She cut the rope. The balloon jerked away from the sunway, straightened, then started to drop. A gentle descent, Sanders had promised, as he rigged the automatic landing system.

“Goodbye, Papa.” Rainbird put her fingers to her lips in a last kiss neither given nor taken. Her cheeks, she noticed with dull surprise, were damp.

Rainbird crawled back down the hatchway and dropped into the heart chamber. She stood, watching the scene of chaos. Six binneys trussed up the hybrid in markers of rope while a circle of eight more ringed around them, stingsticks at the ready. Inspectors and techs scurried all over the room, poking at tubes, clamping wires, tripping over each other. Miss Levine stood in the center, ordering everyone else about. Turnworth slumped sulkily between two binneys, his hands cuffed.

Sanders was also there, hunched over a console, fingers flicking buttons and switches. As Rainbird’s gaze brushed over him, he twisted around.

“Rainbird!” His frown cleared and he strode over. “There you are! It’s all right, I talked to Miss Levine, you…” He stopped, peered over her shoulder. Rainbird quelled the desire to turn around. “You sent him down.” It was not a question.

Rainbird’s face felt like a clay mask, stiff and suffocating, yet fragile, too. She must not crack it. She gave a slight nod, and stepped away from Sanders. “You talked to Miss Levine?” She slid away from the subject of Petrus.

“Yes, I—” The floor lifted, then slammed down. Metal groaned and twisted. Wires sprang loose and a pipe smacked into the floor, gushing fluid.

“Ah, Sanders, there you are.” Miss Levine was beside them. She gave Rainbird a regal nod. “And it appears you were right about Turnworth after all, Rainbird. Though the conspiracy must go up to the top of the Company, as well, for I wonder how else Turnworth got the use of this chamber or smuggled the hybrid onto the sunway.” She turned slightly, pitching her voice so Turnworth could hear.

He looked up from the contemplation of his shoes and scowled at the three of them. “Oh, I’ll sing, all right. If I go down, then so will everyone else involved. I know more than they think.”

“You will have ample opportunity to spill your secrets, Turnworth.” Miss Levine turned away from him. “Sanders, do you think this situation is salvageable?” Her raised brows indicated the cracking walls, the falling equipment, the harried personnel who were, as far as Rainbird could tell, running about like headless chickens. And above it all, the great heart, now a maroon color, beat and with every beat the sunway shuddered, as if trying to throw off all the humans that crawled over it.

Sanders shook his head. “We need to evacuate, ma’am,” he said quietly.

Miss Levine nodded, as if she’d expected that. She raised a hand, and alarms began to shrill, blaring in patterns that no one had ever heard except in drills. The remaining lights flashed emergency red.

Sanders said, with a low, bitter laugh quite unlike him, “So that’s it for the sunway then. That twerp Turnworth may have been caught, but he’s done his damage. That radioactive sun of the Cooperative’s might be our best chance after all, though the government will take over that, I bet.”

Miss Levine said briskly, “Rainbird, in spite of what you and I talked about earlier, there is space for you in the lifeboats, should you choose. I do not promise acquittal for you, but I believe I can alleviate the sentence somewhat.”

“No, ma’am,” said Rainbird, woodenly. “I’ve made other promises.”

“Well, then.” Miss Levine looked at Sanders. “Do not linger long. I expect you in my boat, young man. You have to give evidence.” She stalked off without waiting for an answer, out of the chamber with the binneys, Turnworth and the hybrid in her wake. The rest of the sunway personnel scurried out after her.

Strange how empty and quiet it seemed, even with the sirens shrilling and a distant recorded voice emphasizing,
Evacuate! All personnel to evacuate the sunway immediately!

Sanders said, “She’s right, you know. You wouldn’t be worse off downside than up here. Things are changing. There’s a movement to give equal rights to halfbreeds and other races. It won’t be perfect, but you’ll have friends. I know it. Come with us, Rainbird.”

“I can’t.” A lump formed in Rainbird’s throat. “There’s nothing for me downside, except…” She swallowed. “Papa.”

Sanders squeezed her hand. “I wired ahead. They’re waiting for him downside, to take him to the hospital. You could go see him in a day or two.”

She smiled at him. He was still trying to change her mind. “And the other thing. With everyone evacuating, can you shut down all the messages going through the spinal cord? Dampen all the communication going on all the waves? Make it quiet?”

Sanders’ mouth twisted. “Once everyone is off, it won’t need me to make it quiet. I’ll see what I can do.”

Rainbird squeezed his hand back once, released it. “You should go.”

“Take my gondola, then,” said Sanders. “I won’t need it.” He made no move to go, just stood there looking at her, waiting for her to change her mind.

Perhaps he’d wait forever. She couldn’t let him do that, so she turned away first.

“Good-bye,” she said, not looking. “Thanks for everything.” And left.

The gondola was skittish, like a nervous horse. The sunway bucked, its electromagnetic field in flux. Lights flickered on and off all over it. Dark shapes detached from it: boats and balloons dropping down to the ground.

At least the Day Sun was down at one end. Rainbird shuddered to think what would’ve happened if that brilliant ball of heat and light had fallen. But the way the sunway shook, falling bone might be hazard enough.

In trying to save the sunway, had she destroyed it?

She’d woken the dragon.

Don’t attract the attention of the stars.
Those rogue wandering bodies that threaded the sky, cosmic dragons that shone their doubled glare into the universe. One that had fallen in fire and pain and heat and friction, slamming into the planet, throwing up debris and folding the land into mountains. And had, unbelievably, lived. Survived the impact, survived the centuries of decay, survived being picked clean and drilled into by humans.

Something prickled at the edge of Rainbird’s hearing.

Singing. The eiree were singing.

The sunway stopped trying to twist itself right over, quieted a bit, still trembling like a scared horse.

Rainbird listened, the wordless music threaded deep into her muscles and bones and eerie senses. Singing, like the stars, but different. Just a little different.

And then she knew what to do.

She had to atone.

The Wing stretched up, a web of bone, a frozen tracery, unbroken and beautiful. Rainbird stared at her feet. Under her soles, bone vibrated. The beast’s raw emotion carried through what was left of its nervous system, its pain momentarily dulled by the eiree singing. High, with a touch of sweet.

One step. One step and I’m on eiree land, subject to their law.
A shudder rippled down her back, and she took that step before she had time to lose her courage.

As she climbed, eiree fell back from her, dropping to the other side, or gliding away. She didn’t look at them, bent as she was on climbing. Finally two warriors stopped her with spears above her kidney and under her ears—going for those eiree senses. That’s right. Loss of identity was worse than loss of life to them.

“You may not go further.”

“Justice awaits at the top. You care that this is done right? Then step aside.” Rainbird reached out to touch him, and he started back. “Ah, yes. Your purity will be compromised, won’t it?” Another eiree rule, another thing that she could not—would not—understand. No, she’d never find a home among them after all this was over. Not that she expected an afterward.

She pushed the spear tips aside gently, and met no resistance. No one bothered her again as she went up, further, closer to the aerial choir that sung upon the Perch, the highest point of the sunway.

Up here the air was so cold and clear that it pierced through her halfbreed skin and slipped into her thin blood and sought to crack her weak bones. But the view—of the stars above and the bone of the sunway and the vast ripple and fall of cloak-land below—joined the air and altitude in taking her breath away.

Here also the star music was clearer than it ever had been before, and the eiree hummed along, almost in tune, swaying, wingtip-to-wingtip. Diamada was inside the circle, by herself, chanting, eyes closed, arms and wings uplifted. The other eiree followed her, almost a note behind, watching intently.

As if she sung music only she could hear, Rainbird realized.

Is the gift of hearing star-music so rare?