Skyland (11 page)

"Maybe..."

"They are not. They are... an abomination."
No.
The words of his father were the only words that came to
his lips. He wished he had others. "I mean... they are not better
than the Sky Reverends. They are dangerous, to me to you. They
threatened me, Zara."
And you, too
, he didn't say.
She
will be looked after...
"They threatened me with charges if I
did not help. And they will do the same to others when they get to
Skyland. How can we trust people who threaten peaceful
farmers?"

"Peaceful?"

"I mean us. We have done nothing to them. We
are
leaving
Skyland. How can they think we are part of the
danger there?"

Zara leaned back against his neck and he
felt her nod. She was quiet for a moment Then,

"Is it really them you don't trust?"

"Yes."

"They are just–"

"They are pigs!" A drop of spit wet his
lower lip. He pressed the back of his hand against his mouth.
Stop.
He was starting to panic. He reached for Zara's hand
and tightened his own around it. His heart was starting to beat
like a trapped bird, and the only words that were coming to his
lips were the rote of the Sky Reverends.

Zara pulled back again and looked at him.
Her other hand brushed over his cheek.

"Harper..."

"What? They believe I am like him. They do
not know the difference between my father and the rest of Skyland.
Between my father and me."

"But there is a difference."

"I know."

"Do you? You sound like him sometimes."

"I am
not
like him," he said, even as
his father's sermons swirled in his head.
Abominations...
abominations!

"I know that. I know. I just wondered if you
did."

I don't know.
He sighed. "I do. It's
just these soldiers... they... they..."

"Are you afraid?"

"No. They are an... an... abomination,
detestable, but not fearsome. They are cowards threatening
farmers!"
Stop. Stoppit.
He ground his teeth against the
hateful words.

"Not of the soldiers. Of the Reverends. Of
your father. Are you afraid of him?"

Harper stood.

Zara's hand fell away from around his. She
stayed sitting on the bed. Harper stepped away.

"I am not. I am not afraid of him. It's
them.
They
are dangerous, they bring soldiers to
Skyland. But I am not afraid of them either." His chin rested on
one clenched fist.

"Don't..."

His eyebrows were knitted together, the
corners of his mouth pulled down, his teeth clenched together.

"Don't. You look like him."

Harper covered his face with his hands. "I
don't want to go."

"I know."

"I wish... I wish I didn't... But I have to.
I have to..."

"It will be okay. We will get to see our
home again, that is something to be glad for."

"Not we."
Oh, my Sky,
he thought,
not we...

"What?"

"No. They say you will continue on to
Den."

"No." She stood up now and pulled at his
hands, pulled them down away from his face and looked at him
straight in the eye. "No." She shook her head. "No. I will go with
you."

"You can't. You have to go on to Den."

"Why?"

"Because..."
Why, indeed?
"Because it
is safer."

"Really? Not just because the soldiers say
so?"

"They do. But also because it is safer."

"No. I-I don't want to. Tell them I will go
with you."

"No!" He closed his eyes for a moment and
shook his head. "I'm sorry," he said, looking her in the eye again
and making his voice softer. "No. Do you think Skyland will be safe
after Union soldiers arrive? After the Sky Reverends hear about
them? Will my father welcome them with open arms? And the rest of
the country folk, too? No. The safest place is far away from
home."

"Safe for me..."

"I will be fine. It will work out. Don't be
afraid."

"But you are."

He sighed and shook his head against the
truth. "I know."

"But I don't know why." Zara stroked his
cheek with one hand. Her eyes searched his. "Harper, are you afraid
because the soldiers
think
you were involved with the plots,
or are you afraid because you
were
involved with them?"

He just shook his head.
I don't know. I
don't know.

Chapter
Thirteen

in which there is
finally rest
...

The chair maker shivered.

The tea was warm this time, but it didn't
warm him. He drunk the little ships' reflections, black needles
flying in the brown water. The water in the cup shrank with each
sip and so did the reflections and so did the swarm of ships. The
swarm was darker now, almost impossible to see in the dim light.
The ships – or their reflections anyway – had disappeared some time
in the night when the sun had set and the fires turned to
smoldering ash. Then, he had only seen eerie lights flying back and
forth in the cup and listened to the ships flying invisibly
overhead. He wondered whose ships they were and where they had come
from. He drank some more tea. Some more ships disappeared. Another
sip and they were gone. He wondered when the real things would make
like the tea and shrink out of sight.

But his wonderings were not much of a
distraction.

He looked up. "Can't... can't I go back
now?"

The professor sat in the corner on the dirt
floor, his back cradled against the crook of the wall. His arms
were crossed over his chest and his head nodded down, bending
weakly on its long, thin neck. His head bobbed up for a second to
answer.

"No, gramps. It's not safe." He leaned back
against the wall. "Get some rest. It's almost morning."

"I'm... I'm not tired."

The chair maker was indeed sitting on a bed,
and had been since sometime in the middle of the night when their
hostess had been yawning, her eyes closing, and the professor had
suggested they all try and get some sleep. He'd settled himself in
the corner, their hostess had disappeared up a flight of stairs and
the chair maker had been given the bed he now sat on. It was one of
only two pieces of furniture in the room, and the only one made of
wood. The other was a metallic table, a miniscule construction, the
top no bigger than the pillow on the bed and resting on one
spindly, pipe-like leg. An upturned bucket beside it looked like a
makeshift stool.

Get some rest.

They had all been saying it since
nightfall.

But the chair maker's head couldn't stay on
the pillow. Instead he sat and looked out the window and looked
into the tea he drank and looked at the bed frame that could have
used a new coat of polish, and looked at the spindly table that
looked like anything more than a light breeze would knock it over
(if there were anything other than a light breeze on Skyland) and
looked at the professor who slept crunched up in the corner. The
chair maker looked around at the home that wasn't his and thought
about the home that was.

He had sat like this all night.

As the dim room around him began to grow
less dim, he sat.

There were others in the house, he could
hear them in the creaking of the floorboards above his head and the
soft footsteps on the dirt floor behind him, but he did not look
towards the sounds. He looked down into the tea and out the window
onto the lightening landscape and at the furniture, and
occasionally at the professor urging him to sleep.

The professor had taken off his broken
glasses and his eyes just looked baggy now. Dark circles hung under
them and the skin around was puffed slightly. The rising sun shone
yellow on one side of his face. The skin on the other side was like
a pale moon in the still-shadowed corner.

The hot night was turning to scorched
day.

The chair maker looked out the window again.
The landscape was new. He hadn't really seen where they were
before. Not last night. Last night he had only stared blankly out
the window, eyes, mind frozen. Now he looked.

Buildings rose in the distance, but
immediately on the outside of the window and for half a mile at
least, everywhere he looked, there was nothing. Powdery dirt,
sterile and dusty, packed on the ground or floating on the breeze,
glowed yellow-brown in the morning light. The bridge rose white
over the ravine in the distance, between them and the city. In the
chair maker's mind, the trickling river – too faint to hear from
this distance – ran under it.

This was the country.

More accurately, they were on the outskirts
of the city. And if the chair maker had looked out another window
he would have seen one or two buildings, a house or maybe a tall
brick structure, one of the maintenance towers for the city. But
the chair maker had spent his long life in the old neighborhoods in
the city and this was as far out as he had ever been. To him, it
might as well have been the other side of the planet.

"More tea?"

The woman whose name he still did not know
patted his shoulder. She looked sad, her eyes heavy, puffy with
little sleep, but she smiled with her lips. Her downcast eyes were
reflective with a sheen of tears, unshed under the puffy lids. She
was pretty despite them.

"Yes, please."

He didn't really want any more tea but he
didn't want to be rude.
He held out his cup and
the woman poured water over the soggy leaves.

Crash!

The chair maker threw himself off the bed
onto the ground, arms over his head. For the third time, shards dug
into his hands. He drew his knees in and covered his head, lay
fetal on his side, broken shards cutting into the calluses on his
hands. The house seemed to rattle around him.

But it was not an explosion.

There was no heat, no fire. Not in the
house, not outside. No glow in the air, save for the sunlight
beating in the window. No smell of melting plastic, no crackling of
charring wood. The chair maker looked up. The door hung off his
hinges, but it wasn't flames devouring the house.

It was men.

Something stuck in his neck, a splinter or
needle or a shard of the broken teapot or something... he raised a
hand to feel it, to pull it out.

Then he slept.

Chapter
Fourteen

in which there are
chains (of some sort)
...

The links in the chair were plastic. Or
rubber. Or something else that wasn't metal. But they still felt
like chains.
Chair
was probably not even the right word.
Harness
perhaps was closer.
Swing
maybe
.
The
seat was like a bag. A hanging bag of plastic links. Straps in the
shape of an X fastened over the shoulders and held the passenger in
place like a seatbelt.

They felt more like shackles.

Harper shifted yet again in the
uncomfortable seat as it swung ever so slightly, mirroring the
ship's vibrations through space.

He shivered.

Space... space... infinite space...

He could
feel
the space around the
ship. This one moved differently. He felt every movement as it
tunneled through the empty, empty space. On the giant ship of
Skyland, the gentle humming of the floors and the wall had been
unsettling. But this was terrifying. He could
feel
every
movement. The ship of the Union troops was as long as the Skyland
ship, but thin as a needle. Every movement went right through
it.

Space...

Harper looked out the window. He couldn't
not
look. If he closed his eyes, there was nothing to
distract him from the movement. Barreling through empty, empty
space, every shiver, every jolt of the metal thing around him was a
siren in his head, wailing over everything, every tiny vibration of
the nothingness echoing through his body.

It made him sick.

So he looked.

It wasn't much of a window to look at. But
it didn't matter. Space continued forever. Even a pinhole would
look out on infinity. There was no observation deck here, no
sweeping bay window that opened up like a giant mouth to the
blackness around it. This window was barely the size of his head.
And, still, it looked out on forever.

Immediately after arriving on the ship of
the Union troops, Harper had been brought here. To this bag-chair
and this harness and this little window in this bland obsidian
room. The only thing absent in
this
obsidian room was the
cold.

He breathed, mouth wide open, but no clouds
of mist rose from his breath this time.

So it is the cold.

The angry man who had first interrogated him
was nowhere to be seen. The young soldier, the stringy one who'd
waited outside his and Zara's room, guarded the door. At least,
Harper thought, he was
supposed
to be guarding the door. He
was sitting at a table near the door, alternately picking at a
stack of little brown crackers and trying to flatten wrinkles in
his dirt brown uniform. Every once in a while he looked up from the
wrinkled sleeves and the crackers and stared around the room, as if
looking for something more interesting to do. There were no other
soldiers in sight.

Harper suspected they'd come to the same
conclusion he had: he was well trapped. He had no weapon, or even
anything resembling a weapon (everything in
this
ship was
fixed hard in place), and no means of escape. With no place to go
even if he did escape, he might as well be in a cell.

A ship full of soldiers... Nowhere to
go.