Rainbird (8 page)

“Well,” he said. “That sounded like a nasty threat.” He looked at Rainbird, in a distantly worried sort of way. “Bad luck about Petrus, your—?”

“Father,” returned Rainbird abruptly. She put her forehead on clenched fist.
Need to think!

“Well,” said Sanders again, at last, sounding lost. “I suppose I’ll see what that voice wants from me. Sounds like a Company man, at least. Can tell by that bureaucratic accent. They give them speech training, you know. We techs don’t get that. We aren’t allowed out much anyway, you know.” Babbling. Volunteering.

Darnit. He was volunteering to go to Turnworth. Rainbird ground her teeth, hating his nobility. He and Petrus. Two peas in a pod. Riding to the rescue of hapless—or not—damsels. She pulled her fists down, glared at him. “Of course you’re not going, dummy. They almost took out the sunway to get to you! Put goons at your shroom. No, we’re not going to them!”

“We don’t know he was responsible for any of that,” said Sanders reasonably. “Besides, he’s
Company
.”

“The same Company that doesn’t want you working on the alloy that’s going to strengthen the sunway and make the bonerot go away. The same Company that’s framing
you
for setting the bomb. The same Company that’s holding Petrus captive. Why would they do that? Why sabotage the sunway?” Rainbird struck her knees with each question. “Isn’t that the only reason the Company exists? Who would want to destroy the one thing that makes human life possible on this world?”

“Oh.” Sanders was silent for a moment. “Actually, the Day Sun may not be the
only
thing. The Cooperative’s been boasting they have an alternative to the sunway. ”

“How can you just have an alternative to the sunway? It’s the
sun
, for Glew’s sake! Besides, Petrus doesn’t think they have a viable solution.”

“Ah, well, they’ve gone away from biochemical reactions entirely. Their sun is powered by reactions at a sub-microscopic level, basically splitting apart dense atoms. They want to send it into orbit inside a framework of…” He launched into a highly technical discussion of the processes involved, of which Rainbird understood about every third word.

Someone wanted to replace the
sun
? That was…was…blasphemy, almost.

Now she knew how the eiree felt when the humans put the Day Sun on the track, replacing Glew, their own cold star, as the primary celestial body of their world.

“They’re putting everyone in danger by pushing this untried technology,” she said over Sanders’ explanation.

“Well, on paper—” he began.

“And they’re the only ones I know of who have a motive for destroying the sunway. Glew! Turnworth must be working for them.”
Now I know why the eiree are helping Turnworth and the Cooperative. They’d love to have the humans off the sunway so they could have it back to themselves.

“Rainbird?” Sanders eyed her warily. “What are you going to do?”

“Get Petrus back. And thanks to you, I know just how we’ll find him.” She gave him a hard-edged smile.

“Oh dear.” Sanders leaned his head back. “I think I’m getting dizzy again.”

“Here’s the deal.” Rainbird leaned back against warm bone and talked into a mouthpiece that smelled of sweat and onion. “I’m not going anywhere until I know Petrus is alive and safe. I want to talk to him first.”

Silence. Then Turnworth said, “I don’t think you want to waste too much of my time. Or his. He’s really not doing too well, you know. Lungsickness, you see.” He sounded sad, as if he had nothing to do with kidnapping Petrus and subjecting him to additional stress.

“I have Sanders and the knowledge in his brain. How much is that worth to you?” said Rainbird, bluntly. Across from her, Sanders’ mouth crooked into a self-mocking twist.

“Very well. I will call you back in—”

“No. One hour. And I’ll call
you
. Goodbye.” She cut the connection before Turnworth had the brilliant idea of tracing it back to this location.

After all, that was
her
brilliant idea.

“And now we wait,” she told Sanders. He nodded, still hunched over the machine he’d cobbled together from spare parts. They’d raided three inspection huts to find enough gear to create a device that could plug into the spinal cord, and send a tracking signal to Turnworth’s callbox. If she could keep Petrus and Turnworth on the line for long enough, Sanders would be able to pinpoint the location they were keeping Petrus at.

Rainbird had made sure that Turnworth would talk to her on his personal callbox, and she was fairly certain that he would go to Petrus, rather than moving him around.

She had a plan. It would work. She’d get Petrus back.

“Snack?” Rainbird offered to Sanders, rummaging in her pack for a sunway mix of nuts, raisins and bits of dried beef. He shook his head, his face pale and intent in the soft glow of the light they’d hooked up to cables twisted around the spinal cord.

“It’s good. Fresh. You should eat. Keep up your strength.” Rainbird popped a handful into her mouth. Full-bred eiree subsisted on moss and Glew-light, it seemed like, but her body burned a lot of fuel. Human metabolism trying to power eiree systems.

She was also talking too much. Sanders seemed quite at home in this bizarre closed place, this macabre amalgamation of tissue and bone and current and cable, but she didn’t like seeing that parts of the dragon were still alive. Bone was good and dead, but it made her skin crawl, keeping nerves and tissues going this long.

Rainbird leaned her head back, tiredness settling over her like a soft down comforter. The clicking of Sanders’ device as he tinkered with it, the hum of electric current, the dim light and the warmth all combined to make her aware that she hadn’t slept in a long time.

Speeding through vast spaces…light pinpricking darkness…music growing louder as gaseous spheres turned…hurtling straight towards a star that turned, thin-slitted, to LOOK at her.
I am coming for you.

An alarm beeped, loud and insistent. Rainbird jerked awake, heart beating, ear-tips tingling. A fine film of sweat covered her skin.

“It’s time.” Sanders handed her the ear and mouth pieces.

Did he notice her hands trembling as she took the set?
Don’t be silly. It’s only a dream and the dragon is dead.
Still, she couldn’t help but cast a baleful eye at the thick twisted cord that ran down the middle of the bony tube. She flexed the fingers of her right hand to shake some feeling back into them.
Just do it.

She punched the numbers and listened to the background buzzing, the sounds of millions of excited electrified cells as the current passed through…

A click and Turnworth’s voice, cold and crisp, came through, as though he were standing right next to her. “Turnworth.” Rainbird’s stomach fluttered with nerves.

“Is he there?” Her voice came out a rasp. She hoped it didn’t betray her anxiety.

“Here.” Crackling sounds as Turnworth juggled the set. Then Petrus’ voice, ragged and worn, filled her world.

“Rainbird?”

“Papa! Are you all right? Have they hurt you?” The words tumbled out of Rainbird, rushing like a river in a rainstorm. “Do they—?”

“Listen to me, Rainbird. I forbid you to come. Don’t listen to—” Petrus’ words ended in a grunt, a forced expulsion of air, as if he’d been socked in the gut.

“Papa!” shouted Rainbird, then winced at the
clunk!
as if the mouthpiece on the other end had dropped. Shuffling noises and muffled cries came to her ears. Turnworth again. “You’ve heard him. Now bring us the wiz.”

Petrus, in the distance, “No, Rainbird! They have a—” His words dissolved into a coughing fit that made Rainbird’s chest constrict with fear.

“He needs medicine,” she told Turnworth, fighting back the tears. “You have to get him some or you’ll be left with a corpse.” Was he listening to her? She forced herself to be calm. “There won’t be an exchange if he isn’t alive, do you hear?”

“Bring the medicine yourself, along with Sanders. Marker 55 in an hour.”

“It’s almost morning,” Rainbird argued. “Thanks to you,
everyone’s
looking for us. I need until nightfall.”

“Very well. You’ll meet us an hour after Deep Night then.”

“Wait!” Rainbird glanced at Sanders, who was frantically shaking his head, fingers flying over his controls.

“There is nothing else to say, Miss Gallavant.” A final click.

Rainbird dropped the headset. “Did you locate him?”

Sanders groaned. “Headside somewhere, beyond Marker 10. More specific than that…” He spread his hands out.

“I’ll call back.”

“I’d have to trace the call all over again. It doesn’t work that—”

“Do it!” she snarled. “Or I’ll spike you to the marker tonight myself.”

Sanders pressed his lips closed and hunched over the board. Rainbird hit the numbers again. No response. Again.

Nothing. Not even a ringing.

Bastard must’ve unplugged his callbox from the socket.

“Damnit!” Rainbird followed it up with a few more choice curses, picked up from Marvelo’s thugs. She lunged to her feet, stalked over to the spinal cord. Considered kicking Sanders’ useless machinery, but the mulish set of his chin and his protective hunch over it deterred her. Instead, she reached through the mesh of wiring and touched the nerve.

It was covered in a whitish sheath and felt slightly slippery and warm. Within the sheath, currents hummed as they ran through tissue and metal. Her fingers tingled.

Please.
Rainbird willed her thoughts into her blood and down to her fingers, along with memory and longing.
Where’s Petrus? Tell me where to find him.

And then she was no longer surrounded by bone, sharing cramped quarters with Sanders, his machine poking into her calf, but stretched out and shooting through nerves, buffeted and pricked by zooming particles. She’d have gasped at the speed, but she had no lungs to breathe with—they’d been left behind with the rest of her body. Already she felt herself spreading thin and disintegrating, no longer held in by her skin, bombarded by sound and sensation.

“…play Jacks tonight…”
sizzle tingle
“…nagging woman downside…”
pierce-pain flash-star
–glimpse of loading dock, empty and cavernous—“…track’s set, but the bone…” hot hot hot—if she could only shed her clothes, her skin…giant muscles clenched and relaxed, in slow tempo…
longing longing for the stars to stretch wings and fly
…

Rainbird hurtled headfirst towards something electric and alive that
beat beat beat
and beyond that, the lightning-flickers of dreams in a vast sleep. Just before she clenched her eyes shut she caught a glimpse of something.

Someone.

Pain flared all over her, and she screamed but no one could hear she couldn’t hear because she had no throat to scream with no ears to hear with…

“Rainbird. Rainbird!”

Reek of burning flesh. Rainbird’s stomach churned. She sat up hastily.

“What the—?” Her hands hurt. A lot. She looked down. They were slathered in emergency-kit cream, clumsily wrapped in bandages. The skin that showed through was an angry splotchy red.

“You put your hands right in the nerves, among all the wiring! Right through the sheathing!” Sanders’ anger almost masked the lines of exhaustion etched into his face and the residual fear lurking in his eyes. “That was a downright stupid thing to do. Do you even know how much voltage goes through there? You were lucky I pulled you off!”

She noticed the hooked poly stick on the ground. “How long did I—?”

“You touched it for a couple of seconds at most. But you were out for several minutes.” Sanders shook his head. “Don’t ever do that again.”

Then she remembered. “It was worth it.” She pushed herself up to her feet. “I found Petrus.”

“You found—?” He gaped at her. “How?”

I don’t know.
Rainbird’s stomach tightened, thinking of the beast and how alive it had felt. “I just fell into the current and it took me to”—she swallowed, thinking again of that vast bloody beating thing— “a heart. Sanders. Does the—Is the Company keeping the heart alive still?”

He blinked, too fast. His gaze flickered away from hers. She could see it on his face—him almost deciding to lie. Then, “Yes. The heart’s kept alive, because it powers the movement of the Day Sun on its track. But you can’t tell anyone that, Rainbird! Think of the panic.”

He sounded just like Turnworth, but he was right. The public could accept living under the arch of the dragon’s spine, accept its eye glaring down at them as it traveled the sunway, accept the bundle of nerves that sped messages and power across the spine, but the creature’s great heart? Still alive, after all this time?

“At least it isn’t the brain,” said Rainbird. “It’s—Sanders, they’re not keeping its brain alive, are they?” Horror filled her as she recalled the vast darkness beyond the heart, roiling with unknown dark things.
Imagine being trapped in tissue, long after your organs have been severed, long after your skin has peeled off and your flesh eaten.

Would you go mad? Would you still be you? Or just longing and pain forever?

Sanders looked at her. “I don’t know,” he answered, at last.

Rainbird sat on the dragon’s ruined wing bones and waited. The air was piercingly cold at this height, the sunway a wide white ribbon underneath. This abandoned wing had mostly collapsed, its tracery of bone and cartilage long snapped. Even the eiree couldn’t reclaim it—they’d been forced onto the opposite wing, leaving this one deserted.

Not even the Company wanted anything to do with it. It was too fragile for most structures, too meager to supply bone and parts, too small to grow commercially viable high-altitude moss and fungi.

Petrus’ duties kept Rainbird much too busy to come here often. But as she perched upon a knob of bone, she thought how beautiful this place was, with its quiet as deep as a well, its aloneness as high as a cathedral ceiling. Seen from here, the stars looked almost reachable.

She didn’t hear the other arrive on silent wings, but felt the vibration in the thin stretched bones, rippling like harp strings.