Rainbird (7 page)

“Are you feeling all right?”

He slumped in the dark. Rainbird reached out to steady him. “I—tired. Dizzy. If only…tools…wireless.” Rainbird had to lean in to hear his words. They rustled like faint breezes. “Could…hook…to…muni…tions... tems…”

He wanted to tap into the cord itself, into the conduit that was even now transmitting signals—from Headside to Tailside, from egg to egg. Was the news of the bomb being relayed even now?

Great Glew! Did Petrus know? Rainbird sat up bolt upright.
I have to get back to him before he does something really crazy! Oh please, let him still be out cold!
She should’ve laced his soup with sleeping powder.

Rainbird pulled Sanders to his feet, draped one limp arm across her shoulders. “There are access tunnels all along here. It might be a bit of a hike, but we’ll get out of here, don’t you worry.”

Back out on the nightside. Rainbird’s spirits lifted, then an unnerving thought struck her.

Someone had planted a bomb on the sunway. Had the saboteurs wanted to attack the already bonerot-weakened section, or were they hoping for fatalities as well?

Had Sanders and Rainbid been unlucky, or had they been picked as victims?

Regulations stated that there had to be a full suit of outerwear and an emergency kit at every access tunnel. What Rainbird actually found were the odd pieces from three different suits, a radio that didn’t transmit and received only static, a flashlight with a dying battery, and a bar of some unidentifiable substance that had once been food. Dried beef, perhaps. Rainbird didn’t sniff it too closely and avoided touching it.

She bullied Sanders into taking off her coat and bundled him into the outerwear. The coat was too short at the hem and the pants too large—his legs looked as if they’d gone swimming. She jammed the gas mask over his head and face, after giving the inside a wipe with her sleeve. The fungus inside had had a party and invited all its friends—it was probably covered in spores. She hoped the wiz wouldn’t go into allergic shock; he seemed the type who would.

Rainbird breathed in lungfuls of clean frosty air when they once again stood on the nightside. Even old Glew, glowering down at her, was a welcome sight. She raised her arms, rose up on her toes, stretching out her muscles and the kinks in her back and legs, listening for that brush of music against her ears.

Sanders ripped off his gas mask, sank to one knee, wheezing. “Can’t…breathe.” He gestured to the mask.

She stared at him, dismayed. So close. He couldn’t die now!

“You need to cover up. Your face is too exposed.” She was already winding a musty woolen muffler around his neck and ears and head. “Here, hold it to your mouth.” Sanders’ hand shook so much that she had to guide the mask into it and bend his elbow so his nose and mouth were angled close to the fungus.

Sanders sucked in one gasping breath, then broke out coughing. “Where are we?”

“Marker 44.”

“My lab…not far…”

“Where is it?”

“46.” A two-marker walk was nothing to her, but to him, in his condition?

It’s closer than our egg, closer than Headquarters. It’ll be warm and he’ll have a radio.
Rainbird peered about, hoping to see a rescue vehicle, but the air was still. All the frenzied activity was on the sunside where they’d be bringing in bridging track. Already the Day Sun was gliding down to Headside to wait out the repairs. The Headside industrialists would be delighted. When not moving on the track, the Day Sun powered factories at either end of the sunway.

“Maybe we can transmit now that we’re in the open,” said Rainbird, hopefully. Sanders gave her a bleak look from behind his mask.

Rainbird knelt beside the radio and twisted its dials. Static whined at her, but there were words within its shrieking. Rainbird moved the knob slowly, delicately, and suddenly words jumped out. Loud and clear.

“All sunway personnel are advised to be on the lookout for Jediah Sanders, former alloy development specialist and known smuggler, and his accomplice, a halfbreed eiree named Rainbird. We have strong reason to believe they are involved in the plot to take out the sunway. All suspicious activity
must
be…” Rainbird rocked back on her heels in shock, not listening anymore. Sanders a smuggler? The Company thought she and Sanders had bombed the sunway? What the—?

Petrus.

“Come on, Sanders.” Rainbird pulled the wiz up. “On your feet. We’re going to your shroom.”

She got the wiz moving again, but by the time they got close to Marker 46, she was mostly just dragging him along. Rainbird touched the marker as she passed it. It was smooth and worn bright by hundreds of such touches over the years. One last bony spine stood in front of them and comparative safety—or a trap.

Anxiety jangled through her bones. “Stay here.” She pushed Sanders down into a hollow—he’d be all right—and crept up that last hill. She peered over the top. The shroom’s chimney stuck up from the edge of the sunway. Nothing looked amiss.

But tension bunched into her shoulder muscles.
They must have sent someone to keep an eye on Sanders’ shroom. Or maybe they didn’t expect us to come back to it.

But Sanders needed help. He wouldn’t survive otherwise.

Rainbird slid down the other side, walked over to the hatch. The door was shut, but a draft of warm air came from around the edges. Hatches were meant to be airtight, to keep in warmth and pressure. Somehow she didn’t think a metalworking wiz would have loose-fitting doors.

She looked at the bent lock on it, noted the scratches and dents on the door. Broken in?

Rainbird hurried back to Sanders. He pulled the mask from his face and looked at her in an exhausted way, as if to say, “Now what?”

She couldn’t blame him. In her company, he’d been bombed, nearly frozen, crawled through the insides of an ancient skeleton, accused of terrorist activities, and pushed to walk two brutal markers in the high altitude.

“Someone’s been in your lab. Might be still there. Unless you usually keep your door so battered?”

His mouth pinched even more. “My work.”

The alloy. Oh dear. “You have a lab downside, right?”

He shook his head. “Brought it all up here.” He grimaced as if just breathing hurt. “No one thought it’d work. No one cared. Just me.”

“Tell me you have copies of your research somewhere safe.”

For answer, he tapped his temple. Lovely. The fragile organ in a body now suffering from altitude sickness.

“Gondola,” he managed. “Outside my shroom. Powered.”

Rainbird brightened. Gondolas skimmed the surface of the sunway on magnetized skids. They weren’t common, but of course a wiz would have one. He’d build one if he didn’t.

“I’ll get it.” She squeezed his arm. “You stay right here.”

Rainbird crept back to the shroom and peered over the edge. It looked like a pustule growing out of the side of the sunway. Her estimation of Sanders’ courage went up a few notches. Or maybe he didn’t look out of his windows very often.

The wiz’s gondola was held clamped in two arms that extended from under the shroom. A short walkway jutted out from the shroom’s second hatch, but the extension that led all the way to the gondola was drawn up.

Right.

Handholds went down the side to the shroom’s roof. Rainbird drew in a deep breath. It was one thing to know she was limber and agile, quite another to prove it by climbing down the side of the sunway without a safety line.

Rainbird climbed down until the shroom’s roof was within reach. This close, it was made of some sort of poly stretched over a wire mesh frame. When Rainbird dipped a toe into the material, it gave slightly but held.

If anyone was inside, they’d be able to hear her walking on the roof.

She’d have to be quick.

Rainbird judged the length of the gap between the farthest edge of the domed roof and the gondola. She’d have to jump that whole length and drop into the gondola. She peered at the dark bulk of the engine, visualized where the starter was.

How long would it take for the engine to heat up? She should’ve asked Sanders.

Her fingers were numb from her tight grip on the holds. She couldn’t sit here all night. Sanders was waiting for her. The knowledge in his head was waiting for her.

Rainbird kissed her hand to Glew and the rest of the stars, but it was to the red wanderer that she spoke.
Watch me now. Watch me fly—or fall. This is as good a show you’ll ever get from me.

She braced herself against bone, then drove off, like a runner. She bounded across the shroom’s roof in one, two, three strides. Her heel clanged against a metal rim as she leaped. The walkway flashed below her, then the gap.

The big horrible gap.

She was falling straight for it.

Rainbird fixed her eyes on the gondola and
reached.
Her hands bit into its side and she clamped on tight as the rest of her body finished falling. Gravity dragged at her.

Lights snapped on from behind. Rainbird scuttled over the gondola’s edge and pooled into the bottom.

A shout. “Someone’s at the boat!”

Rainbird lunged for the controls, fumbled in the dark. The heel of her hand struck the starting lever. She pushed so hard, the metal left a dent in her skin.

The walkway shuddered with footsteps. The engine coughed into life, a weak whirring life.

“Oh, come on!” muttered Rainbird, eyeing the display. She pushed the throttle, but the gondola didn’t even budge. Engine was too darn cold still.

Rainbird grabbed for one of the two arms. Cold metal stung her bare fingers but she wrestled the claw open. The gondola listed to one side.

Metal whined, board thudded. They were lowering the extension bridge. They were going to board her, those two hulking shadows rimmed with light.

Rainbird ran to the other arm, began unscrewing the claw. Once it was loose, that engine
had
to be ready. There’d be nothing else holding them up.

The bridge unfolded, slammed into the gondola’s side. The craft jolted. One man ran for the arm she’d already worked on to reclamp it. The other came straight for her.

A heavy screw dropped into Rainbird’s hands. Without thought, she threw it into the man’s face. He ducked, hands up.

The delay cost him. Rainbird flung the clamps off the gondola just as the man lunged for her. The gondola dropped like a rock, leaving him windmilling in the air. Rainbird watched as he teetered on the edge. For a moment, he seemed to get his balance.

Then he fell.

Rainbird acted without thinking. She leaned overboard, the edge of the gondola biting into her abdomen, hand outstretched.

She missed.

The man’s fingers didn’t even brush hers, but she felt the wind of his noiseless passage as he fell. As he turned to a speck in the darkness.

Inspector uniform, inspector
face.
She
knew
that man.

Rainbird threw herself at the controls again. Thrust the throttle. The engine whined, high-pitched, protesting. The gondola nosed up like a rearing horse, soared into the sky. Rainbird looked down, as the remaining man, the walkway, the shroom, dwindled into nothingness and the craft burst up over the softly-gleaming bone of the sunway.

“The alloy,” was all Sanders said when she picked him up. He huddled in layers of emergency blankets, beaming in a grandfatherly sort of way. “I refitted the whole craft with it. Made the engines come on quick, didn’t they?”

Rainbird remembered the drop. The gondola as it slipped away from the inspector’s clutching fingers, as it started to fall, several hundred pounds of deadweight headed for downside. The man who’d lost his balance and plummeted—unlucky, because he had not been refitted with a motor and a pair of wings. She saw his eyes, wide and blank with terror. Like Marvelo when she stabbed him, turned unthinking in his shock at what had happened to him. But she said, simply, “Yes.”

“You keep saving me.” Sanders, doped up from the anti-altitude sickness shot she’d given him and the brown ringsnake around his wrist, was remarkably chatty. “I keep forgetting how many times. But I remember the first time.”

“Yeah. That bomb was
today
, Sanders.” Even though this morning felt like it was an eternity ago.

“No. That first time, on the sunway, when I thought the cargo was going to take me over the edge. You saved me.”

“That was you.” She was too tired to summon up incredulity.

“Yes. I had to get equipment up to the lab. I couldn’t bring it on the elevators. The Company would know soon enough what I was working on and I’d already been told to focus on high-altitude bioluminescence up here. I arranged with a friend to send it up to me via balloon.”

“Remarkable,” said Rainbird, flatly.
And they thought you were smuggling bomb-making material.
Someone had trapped them
both
in their plot.

A pause. “Um, Rainbird? Where are we going now?”

Up. Past the wings, past the Perch. To Glew. Anywhere. Just away from here.
But Petrus. “Somewhere safe.” She didn’t know where that was, but she’d think of it. She was good at running away, good at hiding. Sanders was just like a…backpack. A talking, walking, breathing, eating, warmth-needing backpack.

The radio beeped, loud, warning.

Rainbird and Sanders stiffened, looked at each other. Said nothing.

Beep. And again and again.

A message coming in on the gondola’s private channel. From someone who knew that the gondola had been reclaimed.

Finally Rainbird reached out a hand—it felt like it belonged to someone else—and pressed the button.

Static cracked through the air. Rainbird covered her ears against the high-pitched buzz that wavered through the static. Sanders fiddled with the knob. The whine abruptly cut off, though the static remained.

A clipped voice spoke. “Rainbird. We have Petrus.” Turnworth, though the voice didn’t identify itself. “Bring yourself and Sanders to Marker 55 in six hours.” The voice lowered, lost a touch of its briskness. “Don’t make a foolish decision, Rainbird. You have no other protectors.” The voice cut out and the crackle of empty airwaves resumed. Sanders flipped off the radio.