CW: Christian imagery, religion, meat consumption, death, war negotiation, morphological freedom debate, genocide threat
“When you asked yourself, ‘Where is it, where have I been left? Am I abandoned to a home poor and strange, my tongue again cut? Where is the path that has led to me, I, parentless and now masterless, I with no hand above my head, no hearth that has welcomed me! Where is my lineage of war, where are the rushing plains for me, born opposite Eden and yet drowned in its denied remembrance. O walls of Akkad, gardens of Babel, heart of my World! How shall you comfort me, so far from your warm shadow that I am!’ Who could bear this line, Christ Circumnavigator, but you who knows that strain, who knows where must fall the strikes, and how heavy, for a world to be remade? I call you, bridge of Bloods, first among servants and final of all slaves. Ash-eater, by the copse of your black ribs I call. Pray for us, we distant children who have come supplicant upon the sustained flower of your Ecumene - the great work of your hands. Lord Sofia, mind of the living God, pray for us.”
Emelry Sainshand - Hearing of Savannah, opening prayer
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Record VII
In the city Quay and the seat of the king
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I always knew what God was to me. Always, even before the age of decisions, in such clarity that He may well have been standing before me. Anahit, she held that God was love. But when she said love, what she meant was eating and drinking. That shared familial mundanity of life. Small and precious sustaining joys. This was one level. Bettany also used the word love, but what she meant was justice. A work, a project, the most burning facets of her morality. Orthodoxy holds that God is best understood as light, the divine and living flesh of the sun. But light as a word carries little meaning; it forms a signifier that can live anywhere.
In my heart God is truth. The status of reality, the pattern that justifies itself. Formed of a grand narrative which writes itself into itself a thousand times, a cascade from atom to soul, a spiral. The story of our tellurian plane is completed within its own beginning, already nested in that origin. God is a language of proofs that unites the highest fervors of the spirit to the most intimate molecular details, with no romance there save for awe at the craft. Resign yourself to the span of your perfect fate, the line of tale that your life falls, like an old crane arm, down into the furrow of - that is where God will wait.
Who am I to decide what truth is? No one can. But with each breath we can expose something, fractionally dispel a certain gauze of obfuscating mist, and leave that same-song behind. The project of faith is that spiral process internalized, the ability to know your own perspective and hold to it, to tell how it was made manifest for you alone. I lay floating on my back, staring up at the silver line of this new, poor sun: clack – clack – clack.
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On that dark night when I saw the city from above, I had thought the city walled. Kali had pointed out the long dark shape wrapped crudely around the lights of the water and land, and thus I imagined the place as fortified. But weight or no, what use would birds have for walls? And that black line ran through the city rather than around it, it split the lights and did not contain them. The wall that was not a wall, a great dam of well-cut concrete bricks, held the river so as to create the eponymous quay.
The city was bramble and boulevard, wild tangles and plotted lines. A rumble lowed from the five great locks as even this early in the morning carts and cargo crossed between the halves of the city along the paved top of the dam - other, proper bridges spanned the river, but this was the indisputable center. Under those heavy slow falls, great machines turned with the sheer volume of the water, leaching the river’s momentum produced by the veins of the habitat. Far beneath us was a vaster river, pulling an ocean’s worth of runwater back to the waterfall of Fisher Valley, which continued to run miles and miles down to this very dam surface to turn its whistling wheels.
I woke in the river slowly. Even this far downstream from the dam, there was a faint thrum in the shallow currents. It was good. Warm water and slick; unexpectedly warm were the shallow quays of Quay. A little glinting fish darted past my goggles, skimming through the green murk, and then another three.
We nested on the outskirts, by the fishing berns. Like a necklace, wickerwork and nets fanned out from the locks to catch the disoriented fish flopping from the falls - downriver, where the water narrowed and ran fast again. Further downstream, a rocky little rapids where the herons nested, clacking and tall, tossing up frogs to catch in their scissor-mouths. Upstream, the paint of the walls and rising cathedrals of twisted trees poking just above the parapets of the dam complex.
A red crow crowned in crystalline light, flying across the land and bleeding storms of blue and black onto the hills. A city rising from tiger lilies and camphor trees. Herons flying. Giraffes, like a forest of letters, walking beneath them. In the murals of the dam, the skyland of Savannah was always stylized as the same interlocking pattern of red and green and yellow squares, more minute in detail than anything else drawn.
But then I was properly awake. The river was shallow and still, I could easy walk buoyed by the thick water. Mud seeped between my toes; I could grab footfulls of it and kick until it dissolved, leaving only the gritty scraps of roots pushing through the growing kelp. Drowning in life.
Walk, walk, with spread wings, pushing, paddling. Slow. The first few nights here, how difficult it had been after those clean bathhouse sleeping tanks - the sucking mud, clinging tendrils, all my instincts of movement could not tolerate it. But immersed, for a while, it wasn’t too different. Nothing would catch me. There was the same unweighted cut through the air, the perfect kicks, I acclimated so quickly I was beginning to dread leaving the water every morning.
How was this torrid water so alive, how was it so clean? I could taste the green soil in each fleck of upstream bark and clay that clung to my skin. Ilian water is hard and clear, a cutting kind of clean, but the river of Quay was a clean that sloughed. A clean that made blood feel clean in turn.
The weight hit me all at once, hauling myself onto my litter where it was anchored. I ripped off my breathing aids and gasped in the cold sun, ribcage taut and already ragged. Nights were not so cold, temperature fluctuated little between day and night, and a warm loose mist trailed up from the waters - but I was wet enough that drying and dressing made me ache with chill. The wind was odd and tentative, long slow pulls and utter stillness. Gusts of warm air periodically coughed upwards to the haze around the spine, and cold ones fell like stones and spread. Wind in the wall paintings: portrayed as white straw poured from earthen jars. Heavy air, again so Ilian, how the distant cap-wall of the habitat we had flown from loomed so similarly to the relatively miniscule geofronts that seemed so vast at home.
Rain Flower was sleeping in the stilt houses, and I in the water nearby, and both of us together at the edges of the city. Harka visited to wake me most mornings, perched on my litter’s rail, with Minak often accompanying em, but just as often being chased off. Today both seemed to be busy - I could hear it.
“How even the stairs? Don’t fall, tall son!”, “Look up, the arc, does it fit?”, “That door shaking. See the rattle? No, stand there, other step, that one.”, “Shaking you, blind boss! It’s rustic type unsanded!” I heard the chattering even before seeing Rain Flower’s face as he made his way down the stairs, so obscured by the whirling wings as he was.
“La, lady of the lake!” Rain came to the foot of the stairs, still holding onto the railing like a cane. The flock around him - Minak, a few young curious gawkers, and three white-vested carpenters’ guildsbirds, settled all around him and paused to watch me. “I have been humoring them all morning. Finally you join us.” Minak admonished him for that, pecking at his neck; he laughed warmly through the flinch.
I waved, “Hello. You are heading out?”
“No! We have plans already. I was coming to throw rocks at your litter, see if you drowned. Now come! They brought breakfast.”
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“Waking! Up you are, my Emelry, my friend! Today is new. Today is kiln district! So much more I’ll show!” Minak chirped, perched on the windowsill. I wasn’t sure how to read the building - doubly unfamiliar for being a weighted dwelling, and for being built to human scale without human input. The ceiling was tall enough for Rain, but only barely; he stood with arms resting casually against the beams over his head. “Kiln district, carry you, warm of the city. Work and work! Now, is this house well wide?”
Minak had clawed eir way into the welcoming process as soon as we had landed in the city. E was overflowing with excitement, insisting on the prestige and responsibility e had won on that first night, when e like a madman had slammed against my window. Every time I saw eir dance through the air I wanted to laugh - the memory of what fear had gripped me the first time I’d heard eir voice, how sharp and rocky it had once sounded. Now it was the warm crackle of a fire, the sparkling of ricocheting marbles - so the more e had pushed these past few days, the more endeared I became. Such a young thing. On the smaller side, as all blues were, and even smaller than that for being so young. E was all panic behind those shimmering feathers, all joy in those wide eyes, a beak fast and urgent.
“Wide enough,” Rain answered em, taking another spoonful of his green broth. Duckweed and dandelion, had he been instructing them to make something nostalgic for him, or had they done research? No such spoiling for me - the spread was bread, pastries, berries, butter, heaps of herb-spiced jerky so hard it had a tinge of grey to it where the white fat shimmered. This last was my favorite. “Easy to sleep and sit here, at least. It’s nice here - but you guys really built all of this for us? A bit too spoiled for choice, tomorrow night I’ll sleep in the red one, further from the river so you don’t wake our wet inquisitor up again. Emelry, throw me one of those wheat rolls?”
I did, aiming at his face. “I like it,” Minak said, amused, “right seeming glad you stay. Well, what to do with it? Gulf of bodies - human pictures of life, oh I could swoop in, I could perch on this, on that, on that window, this giant bedding! Study, I could come in, kaka! You would always come, there would always be the need of craft and bed. So the carpented place for you and all.”
“One size fit all,” a fellow tengmu intoned - Gelo, a big old roan, through whose beak carvings the other side of the room was visible. The holes created a strange whistling voice, which eir fellow carpenters shared. The other group was Minak’s, accompanied always by a flock of noisy young blues - presumably they were peers and friends e was showing off to, eir showman’s temperament, though they shied hard from speaking directly to us. Gelo was quieter, and eir group quieter still, but none of them were shy. The air was full with the wingbeats of reckless birds, but Gelo hung back on eir chosen perch. “You’ll by my shop: showroom. I’ve a craft of yours. Places to be filled. When Savannah fills.”
“Hm.” More jerky. Minak flapped over and snatched some from my plate, I idly scratched the space on eir back, between the corackles, where the wings stemmed from. “You’re a carpenter - white vest, and I smell sawdust on you. Those piercings, are they related to work?” I asked.
“Good head,” Gelo nodded, clacking eir ornate beak. Little spikes and grooves and screw-holders organized by size had been cut into it, a utility belt which eir henna markings mirrored the pattern of. “Holding nail and file. I’ll show you. This grove is mine. Minak, heard, apprenticed to ours once? Twice, was? For days, kaka, then e to sparkle out.”
Minak laughed back at that, a high-pitched “Kaaa, yes of yes, timed frugal we are, and ran wide! I wanted to see shape under you. Landing place. And so saw, friend, study the outlines.”
“A whole human village waiting here, hm.” I gazed out the window Minak had occupied, where stood a row of similar shacks to this one. Exactingly made, but rather experimentally proportioned, a little villa’s worth of them with an amusing lack of gardens or paths. A few early morning maintenance crews flitted from roof to roof in the distance, taking notes and testing shingles. “When did you start building?”
“Before Umihotaru. When high rooms saw the audit coming. Some practice. If this, if more. It is,” Gelo said, airy, whistling, grand, “show faith of meetings. No? Faith of friends enough to rest and sleep. This is my death pride.”
How warm and calm the day was. The light inside was strong, strong like true sunlight, from the golden-dyed slats of glass worked into the roof. It occurred to me, we spoke in a reversed lantern. It occurred to me: “death pride”. One achievable dream. The gem in your eye. A fractured socket.
“Minak, I’ve eaten enough, and you silly crowd before me. I’ll take the jerky - let’s be off. An audience with the king at evening - let’s brisk through the day before then. Shall we?” I was already hoisting my litter up and out the door, and they followed me - even Rain, pouting over another three wheat rolls he carried.
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Harka hit us when we were passing the gates of the dam into the city proper - hit indeed, the same heavy impact that swayed my litter every time e landed on it. “Gathered procession, girl. Kiln district, heard today? Waker.”
Rain was charming but tiring. I expected only certain things from him, and atimes I doubted if there was much to speak of with him that was not marveling and coordination. His attitude was a welcome counterpart to that which my own mission required, but still he had the space and luxury to play with this expedition more than I, and that made a gulf that was sometimes hard-bridges. Minak, Minak was bright and brilliant, and already felt indispensable. E had the respect of my first meeting forever. I could feel the loyalty, the pride and the need beaming from him - but e was fast and scrappy, far more so than my pace.
And Kali was a high, high wall.
Harka, then, undoubtedly was the person here I could be most at ease with, whose eyes I could be most assured of. I relaxed into my cushions, comforted by eir weight so close.
“Yes, I think. I’ve seen not enough, but much of the inner city, at least down the roads glancing. Procession - soon to turn again to parade! Rain is more a marshal than I, and has seen more time in the city than I dare yet attempt. Tell me true, is the spectacle too much? With so many eyes on us I feel as if I’m dissecting the place grove by grove.”
And indeed Minak’s crowd of fellows was already being added to - I heard dam attendants quickly signing off work when they saw us coming, curious heads peeking out from every other weave of branches. Harka chuckled at watching them. “No, no, no wrong if mutual. Stare, stare. It’s good, good the influence, good the contact. No one dares call these you two some rising lord, nor other the wardens of the rooms. Walk light, look back and back in light - sparkle in four eyes! It’s good. It’s good, everyone see.”
“If you say so… I’ll bear it, public office and all, only stay by me? And, shall Kali come, one of these days? I’d prepare. Has e much occasion to walk like this, among the roads, see-bee-seen in the same way?”
“No, no. Maybe,” e ruffled. “Asking, then. But thinking content, part of eir structure to be in the grave tree high. To be hearth, I think e thinks, to be a place over person. The king sign? Maybe only see in high context, city center, look, a holy ground. And, too busy, old scholar! Eating study more than ever, ka, yes. E has eir eyes and heirs, king needs no body.”
“Do you approve? Sounds lonely.”
“There’s a loss, aye. But e prefers - who am I? Path and process, perspective. Judge: but, I see it not away from the world, but in eir own, own world above all others, sky palace saved.”
“Still. A bit of shopping, someday…” I said, half-smiling. Harka ruffled eir feathers again, settling in next to me.
Snaking through the city. Canyon trees. No wide boulevards, it was like passing through a thicket always conveniently cleared before us. Ropeways laid thick and messy between the sides of each passage, a whole spiderweb of pulley transfers overlaying the city. The streets were built small and spare, almost like rail tracks, wood-paved grooves for carts to pass by - and, necessarily based out of my litter, we effectively moved as a cart.
Our itinerary was such: in through the dam, into the fishery processing centers. Ground glittering with shucked scales - the fatty smell of freshwater catch - hooks and drying racks and the wet denim-vest uniforms of the workers. This place bordered the true butcheries, near one of the airdrop landing fields and the depot of the city’s carts, which together formed the city’s widest plaza. Beaten-down yellow sandy earth and a few spots of concrete pavement. The main food market - God, lively tengmu chatter was overwhelming, the shouts and caws literally from a hundred different directions, like the center of an Ilian marketplace. Behind us were the lumberyards and carpentry holds - Minak shied us away from them and saw Gelo off, as we made over to the other half of the city’s industrial districts.
Across the river were the residencies, the schools and libraries. There was something of an even split, our side of the river industrious clusters around the airdrop plaza; the other scholastic and organized around the beehive tower of the grave tree. My past few days’ travels had remained among this buzz of work and rarely crossed the river, so the kiln district was now left as the last place to explore on this side.
“By the way -” in a moment when the others were busy, Rain bent slightly to the level of my ear - “called home yet, runaway?”
“Pft, haha. The blackout is maintained. The only things I want to hear or know from them now are the ones that would make themselves heard all the way down here. I’ll not return until my time, or until the sun goes out. But have you? Keeping watch on things, oh deserter?”
“No! No, perish the thought,” he said in mock-offense, smiling through his feigned shock. “I’ll wait for you. I really should keep playing hostage, I think, poor retainer captured by this cruel seeker! You only like me for my tools, all that.”
“Good, keeps our options open. If you ever have the urge of sneaking back, tell me. We’ll stage an escape, all things we will do when we need to.”
“How long will it take, do you think? To get everything you’re looking for?”
We were interrupted by Minak landing on my head, claws scrabbling into my scalp - I think e expected to find more purchase in my sparse hair. I yelped somewhere between a wince and a laugh, but Harka took it as pain - “Minak! Nosy!”
“It’s alright!” I called back, holding back another laugh. “E’s just telling me where we are.”
The plumes of smoke rising from kiln district - first the clay kilns, then the smelteries, then further to the glassworks.
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The treeline stopped suddenly. A stark thoroughfare’s width separated kiln district from the wider district, and no wonder - it was a firebreak. Even past it, all the trunks and vines to a certain height were painted over in a thick, suppressive white, with common stretches of it tinted gray by rising plumes of smoke. In the center of the first clearing-plaza, a flock of busy and humbly-dressed roans pecked over an overturned cart, pulling supplies from it and attaching parcels to different threads of the ropeways.
How in the world were they producing habitat-grade glass from such simple workshops? The body of the cart was curved like a boat’s prow, and its wheels sparkled in the light. Glass wheels, dense and heavy and perfect, so translucent that they were almost invisible. Savannah had no windows - habitat glass in even this quantity was incredible. Yet whenever a righted cart passed, it seemed to be sailing over the ground on a few circles of shadowless sparkle.
The road we travelled by was the tread of freight carts, not the traffic of people, so at our level were loading docks, storage holds, and the hot blasts of the workshops themselves. Ropeway elevators were all that connected the ground to the upper level of properly kept shops, so it seemed as if we walked through a long low contiguous factory. We hurried through the clay kilns, mostly shuttered and unoccupied for the long daily cooks, and hurried faster through the fouler smeltery airs that Minak and Harka minded much less. But where the trees grew thicker, and the upper branches were hung with little flashes of shadowless color - the same window-glass as the wheels - we came to where Minak had brought us.
“Deep enough!” Minak chirped.
Harka grumbled back at em, “So this the play day, you came for toys our guests? What?”
“My guests! And lanterns at lantern city! Here, I stop you here,” e said imperiously, “to show a treasure.”
Here it was a glass shop, the bottom layer a simple dye-kiln housed in a tunnel of arced branches. Two workers were mixing sands before a rumbling kiln-furnace, lit by molten light and dragging stirring-brooms through the heaped up shining piles of sand. They hopped their way further into the room to turn and face us, but did no more that glance over. A young shopkeep was the one who flew down from the upper level to us.
How did e even stay in the air? Two little wooden boxes were affixed to each of their wings, and balancing carefully in a sort of controlled fall, they landed to speak with Minak. The shopkeeper looked at us sidelong in eir ornate, tasseled red vest, speaking to Minak. E had been anticipating our arrival. Our passage had been quiet but uneventful, stares and no gawking, but there was a palpable sense of quiet even as work went undisturbed all around us.
E opened one of eir boxes and thrust the opening at us - inside was a little pale star, a clawlike arrangement of glass, striated like a citrus juicer. Little slats in the wood provided just enough light and shadow to make the piece sparkle.
“A little key,” the shopkeep said, “a way of words. Yours? Or new color.”
Rain took it - a blue one, a pale periwinkle blue. “What is this? Jewelry? Ah, it’s one of those eye rocks. Today’s a bad one, then…”
“No, no,” Minak chirped, “see, no spirit, no still here - it’s a pure maths. Run down the angles - so perfect! La, what could be there? This joining, this ridge, have ever seen such out in of the world? No, never, but aye within. These are lines your plan runs into! When you say, ‘I fly here, I do this, I will conduct,’ your circuit looks such. That clean gleam. How to hold it?”
“Ha.” I took it back from Rain, holding its little shrine-lantern enclosure in my hands. “Alright, I see. An abstraction made physical - are we bringing this to the hutches?”
Minak nodded, cheered that I had understood. “Tool and goodwill on the way.”
Harka hopped closer to us with a broad flutter, “What? Today to hutches? Salty Mukon, that one? Plain errands, you said!” Minak barked at this, laughing.
I motioned to settle them both. “Only for a little while. But Minak and I discussed, I’d like to see. It will be the hardest part of tengmunnin life for me to relate to, Harka, the hardest thing to truly translate when the account is given. You’ll be coming?” I held one up, the reddish one, to the spinelight and let the shine play among its ridges. So dark and yet so clear, with a heavy density that confirmed it as window-class glass. Dropped from the spine to the mountains, I knew it wouldn’t break.
Harka hesitated, but nodded, and deferred. The keeper left us with eir load after a whispered negotiation with Minak and flew back up to the rich wood planks of the main front. Two pale blues, a gold, and my deep, ruddy red-brown, which I continued staring through as we began to move again. High above along the spine I saw black shapes moving through the glass - a short procession of barges, rolling in back to the cap far behind us.
Habitat glass. Were they really made in these kilns, some small-batch, specialized process right on the street? Was it dug up from an old, hoarded personal supply of Sever’s? Hewn from the spine itself and recolored? None of these possibilities seemed likely. The glass of my room when I slept there, that was plain glass, strong enough to stop a janitor crash perhaps, but it would still shatter at something less than cylindrical torsion.
Rain and Minak played with the deeper of the two blue glasses. Minak would catch it expertly in eir beak, batting it off the flat of eir wings like it was a ball game, and test Rain’s long arms by pitching it back further and further afield. Through the rest of kiln district, and a few more souvenirs. A clay bowl with a red crow painted spiraling around its basin. A scale-weight, borrowed from another more dour shopkeeper’s measuring table. What was currency here? It seemed a system patterned off corporate allocation-scrip, with favor mixed in - what would Kali say?
I slotted that into my growing list of matters to bring to em. My tower of questions piled yet higher for every mile of the city I saw. What was to be done? What could I do here without a team of researchers at my disposal, an outpost and a proper delegation? I was tracing through this place at the width of a pheromone trail, even the aid of my full crew would be poor compensation. And for my first and most precious question, even Harka would not be with me.
Out from the city, out from the refuse-roads by which all the slag of kiln district made its way back to the airfield. Out to where the trees grew wild, grey only with ash and no underlying white. The entwined wicker of their branches was abandoned, growing unkempt, scraggly and straight. The leaves grew greener, flushed thicker and darker.
Harka alighted back onto the rail of my litter with that characteristic thump. “City grown too newly, here. In some years, bend back these greens and seep my city. Now my molded limit. I’ll back. Far, for old steward I.”
“Big old frog,” Rain laughed. “What, you’ve already come so far! I’m tripping over roots here, stay with us.”
“No. Not mine,” e said, a grain of crackly discontent in eir throat. I would have called it nervousness. E hunched eir wings, ruffled. “You’ll feast? Find march to the city? Bad draw, kaka, to tour on the day. Back to calling.”
“Of course we’ll be there. It’s what the lieutenant's come for,” Rain said.
“Not yours? Not yours?” Minak pressed, less animated, sticking eir neck out boldly at Harka. “Not yours a look and laugh?”
Harka chuffed, a deep sort of mid-throat click. “It’s good, Minak light. Work and weary. I can’t carry it.”
Minak begrudgingly accepted eir departure with a bow. Harka lifted in a strong heaving thrust and was away, leaving us in the sweep of eir wing-air. Minak perked up once the older crow had flown, hopped up from where e had apparently been walking, on the ground, to perch on branches and glide from one to one across the lane. E animated, “Secret secret boil. What is lost, my! Scrip. There’s a shame with it all, no, the mess of albumin?”
Rain laughed, “What?”
“Saying we,” Minak mumbled, “here it is, so far from city-wall. Why not by hearths, living in hand? A nymph can fly in, dance in watch of word, save scent on wind before. So away and clean and picked city bloodless and nice, starting shot, not for some. High Harka - I understand.”
We’d crossed the length of the city, now. Downstream from the dam, where we had slept, was on the outskirts - and here was their opposite end. We were far enough from the river that even the omnipresent sound of its rush diffused into the bordering wetlands, from which were drawn the still-plentiful clay and sand. How young! For a settlement to still live so closely to its livelihood, the resources not yet carved out. So there was a rolling marsh nearby, and a rough wood we made our ways to, a path snaking through it worn by cart wheels but still grassy. The air was thick, blown in moist through the trees.
The bramble of the outskirts lessened to new house-tree shoots, waiting unbound to be tended in years, and even the soil was different. Pale and muddled, and the sound of frogs. The hutches were further still. With no sight of them, we had been walking twenty minutes when a young crow jingled out of the air like a missile.
“Ka!” A mad whistle I only heard half of, Minak hyperactively beating eir wings to go reach the newcomer. “Is that you? What is your name!” E lifted eagerly, wheeling to see the arrival, who breezed past em and landed with a soft kite’s flutter on a branch above us, a small bell tied to each wing-wrist
A thin thing, knife-thin and wide-eyed, with a composed and curious face. E spoke softly, deliberately. “Soli. Woke up and the gates were broken. Haven’t left, Minak, who called down. My era?” The new one nudged the air at us.
E was shaking excited, couldn’t keep eir wings still. “How long, how long! Came friends, this! Soli of the bells… when I for you came up, Lieutenant, Soli was in nymph. What! Fathom-head, no place in the city? What have you found?”
“Six days woken. Little jobs. Errands for Mukon. Still too loud,” e said, bending eir head to scratch at eir inner wing. E jumped from the branch, plummeting from the sky in unmeasured freefall before stopping casually, stepping onto my litter’s railing. Eir bells were silent.
This Soli stared at us, collecting every angle e could. “These. Ka! I am the first so young seen that body. A place for me. Big and small… Minak…”
“Bright one, dancer! Talking of these things. Fly! Bring us to my friend!”
Rain was shivering, and was right to - Soli was cute, adorable in the way that all young animals are, even birds with their scruffy gangliness. Eir plumage was molted roan already, adult feathers well on their way in, only a few patches of pure black still remaining. “I… I… what is the etiquette here? Hellooo…” he said, syrupy sweet, have you come to find us? We’re heading out to the hatchery, nursery?”
“Minak told me, Mukon told me, tender. Yes. Furrow road. Minak found, driver, new words sticking. You stick, sensitive, clinger. Often now? Why?”
“H-how old are you?” Rain asked as Soli edged closer, suspiciously towards him along the railing as we walked. “It’s… well, we’re here to study, to become acquainted. Have you seen much of the city? We’ve been all over half of it, but there’s always more, there’s… Emelry, I’m bad at this.”
Soli answered, staring. “Six days speaking. Drawn empty work was pure in me. Flood, breaking, sickness, the flood-crumpled gate wall for you. Here for work and sickness, waterline up.”
“What sickness lives here?” I posited. “What festers, I will make an account of. What flourishes, with it. What a struggle, to be born! But the work is drawing.”
“Kind and warm, you tower,” Soli snapped. “What pretty eye does call you? What will you cut? Right and true, there a noble tower, chant climb lily peace. Filed steel, do you know what you are doing to me? Sick and heavy already, me, drink dust with me. Nine Leaves and Sainshand. Call through the word ‘basil’, breaking.”
Rain motioned to comfort em, “Soli, Soli, six days old and you know our names? We’re not here to break anything… Six days, is that normal to talk like this so soon?”
“All there, all the heard things, brewing second egg and break!” Minak explained, strutting along the railing, “Please. Break into clear, a storm, a field, is the song, big curve up. Windchill.”
Soli chirped, “And breaking, breaking surface tension. Some old story. Climb fine. Now come! To where I stay. Minak, brave, flew fast, from the end of song to the paint and cries. We are never at home: I, slower, faltered. A fear in me, your cliff. Tower.”
The hutches were another of Minak’s dalliances - could I call it that? Another job e had walked away from, but drank deeply of. E still visited often, e told me, this place that so many citizens shunned. Birds like em, like Soli, sometimes gathered back here, the few volunteers, for something unresolved. It was a snap, the border between nymph and adult, a mental bifurcation where sight turns to shape. One falls into wholeness in one moment, and what happens then?
In my childhood I felt so strained. So unmoored - especially in retrospect. Much of that is the plain regret of the process of time; what if I had known better, what if I had been told the answers I required but earlier, what if I had found things differently. What if I had been better, better able to chase myself and raise up others, knew to do more justice to the fragile and transient things I touched. But it was not only that review. There was a very tangible sense of a disconnect between mind and mouth. Things I was unable to put to words and therefore unable to fully think.
Take this - one week on the train home with mother, I had dozed off and let my cheek rest on the window. I enjoyed the motion and sway of the half-lit town passing, the comfort of the dull car. “Please, I know you’re feigning sleep” she said, and I could only blush and make a show of shaking awake. But yes, I had been pretending. Why? To linger in the fantasy of rest - to feel her gently shaking my shoulder - to provoke her sweet voice. Because I knew sleeping after a long wakefulness was something children did, and that I should run down the rail of that role a moment out of a sort of loyalty to the image. I knew all that, somewhere. But I could not tell it to myself - could not feel it at a certain level - had only the deep rumble of true thought, and the surface instinct of the body process. Childhood, for me, could be defined by those two realms being mutually untranslatable.
I could not figure out, deep within, why my body chose to move the way it did. And my body could not know which utter impulses drove it. But both halves were known, only stored in different places! So there was a frustration there, similarly unnameable. The age I knew everything about myself but was unable to engage with that knowledge, unable to draw conclusions from it or make decisions by it. And what, now I was past it? In total communion with my mind and heart, master of my soul? Doubtful. Fickle girl, leaping at swords and shadows blind.
Rain noticed my face go sour. “What age,” I asked him, before he could press, “did you really learn to talk? As in, connect your intention to the effect of your words, to mean rather than just say.”
He laughed at that, surprised. “Emelry! I’m silver, I was always silver - I think I learned that before I even learned to read. That echo there is so obvious when people speak to you as a boy, watching and waiting. You learn quite quick to know what face to bring to which people - perhaps most boys fall into a trap there, thinking of it as a mask they inhabit within society. The trick is for it to be a shield. But here, God, six days and speaking like this? Knowing our names? How, how are you able to catch on so quick to what they’re talking about?”
“Maybe something in it is similar to Ilian syntax? Sometimes, at least. Perhaps I dredged a sympathy from the memories I was shown. I don’t know. But it’s straightforward when I listen.”
We were closer.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The young forest halted into a clearing and the gnat clouds of the unmolested clay marshes sunk down into cracked earth. From the drier clays sprouted a vast field of fragrant basil filling the clearing entirely, stalks tall, vibrant, gleaming in the daylight. The soil solidified again where their dry roots tangled their way through it, and past where the hutches waited for us rose another forest. Birch, with golden-green leaves swaying high.
“Mukon!” Minak called out ahead. By response a few heads poked out from the basil field, dark nymphs alert at the noise and strange shapes approaching them, the bolder ones watching and the more timid fleeing back to their home.
And such a noisy home. Sharp-eared Rain Flower winced at the discord - human and tengmu speech, melodies sung by both, raw sounds bolted with the crackle of worn-down speakers. And over that din, the even louder din of nymph squawking, squabbling, singing.
More carpentry, more stilts. The hutches were built in a sort of horseshoe of birchwood and playground-bright enrichment structures, and the noise rose from them even this far. Human speech, tengmu speech, music melodic and discordant playing from speakers, and nymph squawking and squabbling cutting through it all. Rain winced at the cacophany, and even as Minak flew ahead, Soli hung back shyly on my litter’s rail.
“Know you king of crowns?” e asked, looking up at me.
“Who, Kali? Well, I’ve come to confer a course with em, and I call em my friend now. Such things have been built here; we will learn of them together.”
“Hi Kali, hi Kali. E sends stories, here, and tide daily. Never old aye.”
“The noise…”
“I’ve circled here,” e confided to me, “past days. Figure with me: fire-douse sound, hear-drank I such. And now I know. Can I hear as I did? What school, where? City says the taken, engulfed procedure speech, Kali’s way, and we are new. You and I. To the story of city. We are as new.”
“Mm. And late too, Soli. There’s much time that’s passed in this way of things. Do you approve, the way you came up? How close is the memory, can you plot through it?”
“I live there.” E shook eir head off nervously. “Look, then, fine enough.”
We were close enough to the birch buildings to see the screens. Each played a different program, a different diagram; the din came from a mass deluge of information. One flipped through a page of a novel once every ten seconds, reams and reams of dense text - another played drone footage of distant Savannah landscape, perhaps even the same sweeping vistas used in the leadership’s advertising materials? Another was the broadcast of an inner-system hardball tournament; another was a stock recording of a lunic hyperballad. Wide and indelicate, Soli said, in a way impossible to track each piece of at once. But maybe feasible to absorb, all at once.
Nymphs were everywhere - I had expected a nursery, but this was a playground. Through the slotted birch windows, almost recalling wooden bars, I saw play out a labyrinthine nest complex of straw and quilt blankets, puzzle-boxes and bookshelves, a warren of climbing ranges and food stores. Intricately built, nymphs moving through the place like bees in a hive, but with no supervision. Shunned even by its attendants.
Groups of them squabbled within the structure, flew circles in flocks high above, sat patiently in the sea of noise. A hundred, two hundred here, more foraging in the deeper birch woods? But away from the arc of the main hutches there was another building, more closed-in and roofed in tile rather than thatch. “Not now the year, hatchery here,” Minak explained, nodding towards it. “Fine Mukon - e will not answer! But e will here, here without bower, ka!” E flapped around our heads, herding us closer and away from where the wary crowds of nymphs were taking more and more itnerest in us.
“Minak!” A raspy, high voice returned alongside a slammed-open shutter. Its bearer pushed through the window just as Minak looked up again, and they both flew up so eagerly they collided in the air, laughing and snapping at each other, playing in the air like two jousting moths.
“Mukon! Fellow! Deafened hereon? Silly, the arrived!”
“So soon?” the old roan chirped happily. “High news, what, through whole city for here, prying peeler! Led silly by a king.”
“I, I!” Minak said. “My quarry, mine to the heart, and I the fast arrow. This Emelry and Rain! Who it was I to called down. I.”
Until now, the crowd of nymphs had watched us cautiously and enraptured. Their heads of downy or gleaming black feathers poked from the hundred windows of the hutches as each stared quietly at us. But now all in the colorful courtyard had leapt to the roofs, to see us at eye-level, and a burst of song and cries rang out from them at once. They jumped their little dusty bodies into the air, swirling, daring each other closer and closer. Minak trilled harshly at them back, meeting a distinct chorus of ka-ka-ka laughter, but the mass of them settled again - closer, less cautious, curiouser.
There was a different color in their staring eyes. A differen focus level, something that stared, and looked past, and yet still sparkled. I knew then why Harka, perhaps why many others felt such a barrier to this place - I saw it in their eyes. There was the distinct, unmistakable spark of soul - it was not a clever animal bluntness but rather a kind of hyperactive association, a selfish drinking in of the whole world at once. Even as their maddened interest turned to us it was clear that it was not only towards us - but also how we moved through the air, how our shadows fell, the heave of the litter, the mannerisms of the two adults. A cacophony of chatter. And they moved as a flock, a true flock, not the organized murders of the adults which were careful to regiment themselves. There was a reflexive measured awareness of space rather than the true following. A school of fish, I laughed to myself muttering, as Rain laughed in true delight.
“Oh, I adore! Little one, little one, what are you called?” One had alighted on his finger and was actively gnawing on his wrist before shaking off and away, which we met with even greater charmed laughter. “They are so quick! Minak, is this play? Or are they only pestering us for food.”
“In, inside,” Mukon rumbled. “None.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The smell of brewing chocolate and the steam of it in the air. Straw beds, greenhouse-warmth from the glass windows - golden again. Soft wood walls that muffled the outer din. This building was also built like where Rain had stayed, large navigable rooms rather than the honeycombed series of cabinets and alcoves that was the carpenters’ main work within the tended trees. It was wide, empty, meticulously clean. Polished. To a crow, this must have seemed a cathedral. The nursery proper was only a room away, left empty and idle. But I peeked in to see the nest-baskets, with blankets tidied and ready over the straw and down, underneat the dormant heat lamps. Mukon backed away from us as we entered, shuffling up to perch on the rim of the one nest-basket left in the central room.
E growled, a raspy voice like Minak’s but deeper. “So? Bold Minak, wanderer blue? Man and woman, did you know, this student!”
“And still student!” Minak interrupted, annoyed, “Frail friend, who comes me here with? We’re good. Say I’m workless!”
“But you won’t stay. Runner. Send city here, when I leave up.” Mukon turned up eir beak at Minak, and moved to look at me intently. Shifted eir gaze to Rain, doubly intently, and then back to me doubled again - like their whole body was a curious weathervane, leaning forward. “Neither of the rooms, you. Visitors. Great island and little islands. With no world?”
“No world?” Rain asked, a bit taken aback.
E motioned with eir wings, fanning the air “Not contiguous. World of islands, I mean. That’s right. Now see, this is a binding, this river old. Old river, this roan. In my way, in my way I hate it. I want to see them. No world.”
“Come to speak nymphs, Mukon,” Minak chirped.
“And what! Add my course entourage. Ka, silly Soli, speak there! Take that with wellness! Minak never, Soli over, my work! Ka! Get them! Bad city hates to bower. Allocation, what, ka! Talk talk here, and find what? Boggle-gaze, the players will hear in the pre-game, but what said back? No, speak to Soli closest, that’s the earned distance.”
Rain was still struggling to parse eir words, and Mukon talked quick - not helping. “We’re interrupting you, I get it. You’re in charge here? Is it a job you don’t want? What, no one helps you here at all, with the… the course, you said? We walked a long way here.”
“Aye, good and far. You can talk at wherever you want. But speak nypmhs, this… no, just I here, I and Minak and helpers. Charmed, no. Wary. Minak! Told your city story?”
“Ka! No, I will. Wait! Cargo, Emelry. In the high reds. Red land high. Where is your map, ka!”
A map! I still had the one I had pilfered from the doctor - it would be some use here. I motioned to Rain, who helped unload it from my litter.
“Mukon in the high whites, salt mountain. The furthest from line rivers.” Together they laid it on the table. Minak quickly skittered atop it, claws chipping the laminated paint they met. E motioned with eir beak at a little rumble of elevated pale cyan well within the red lines of the reserved third. “Here, up the castle. All come! All come to the canyons. And where was I.”
Mukon took a short jump, bit at the map and rotated it, throwing off Minak’s balance - e flapped back, startled, to the corner of the room again with a few mumbled chides. “Here,” Mukon nudged with the fuzzy top of eir head, at a blue-purple stretch very close to the border. “Marsh. Clay marsh, like Quay. Same herons and waddling things. Squabble place for the lone clay, knife crossroad. Rough and warm. Not built mine the tall places, the keen king eagle.”
I’d wondered, ever since the herons. Harka once said they recognize jays as relatives but not people. What would they think of Heath crows, so different and so inert, yet so on the threshold from spirit to soul? And eagles - what would it be like to see an eagle, alive alongside them? Vast beasts like proud and vibrant echoes of yourself, bladed, screaming. I smiled to myself - was it like how I saw solars? Humans have always borne, since even before the garden, a kind of morphological privilege - so little in the world is like us, in shape and niche. A separate lineage, ours was as an ostrich, a penguin, we had become different.
Mukon nodded low, tracing the blob of cyan on the map. “I was born in salts. Listen: anymph I was a lord. I, the master hunter! I was the voice of life and death. Anymph the game of talons played me, the game ‘toss’ and ‘cut’. I skinned snakes, singing, I, I, eye-king, blood eater, storm shape. It was a shape game. I saw shapes scour and flee, I scoured and fed. On the sharp white, the flat plains, I smashed and cut and ate so rich on that salt. My flock was thin and scattered - I scared them off to perch! Each of us world-sovereign, each, galavant.
“I woke. Others far to the hump of the curve, blind. I woke alone, and said, I tricked it out of the world! I stole my owed mastery! And no tongue, no for me heart of garden tower. Only the sad songs we all had, barked border, scab! And I rising. Look the shape I, dazzled, had pulled from the world, I, who had alone fallen claw up. This my world, my salt my blood, the greatest conceived height. Poverty. Specks here, they talk, they crowd, good, and when waking they will speak blank, be born in speech. When did speech come to me?
“How would it feel, in humans, before the chosen era? To look up at hidden stars, a green, a red you see, a note, jealousy? Firstborn, secondborn. It was lonely. They say song: the lack of speech, and it was lonely. Say song, cry. Poverty. Walking in poverty, low and heavy, with the scrapping tools of claw. I the master hunter, weeping. How would it be? To live in the silent-shell? To dig with your hands? Break your pretty nails on roots, and no poem for the pain. Tied, tied the neck to the tree, to… to conifer, no poetry, do you see? The love of no poetry, burnt love and no words. To fly, to… turn. To walk in the dark. To have no name. To be guided by only what is inside you, your mind, your heart, not polished, not polished to soul, not polished to the story-beast hearts. Insufficient. It is so, so long, it is so long, to live cut down, to live with no words, to scrabble, to bite. No pain. But a body made fear-flesh, dream-eye. What could you walk to? No walls, curving…”
Minak butted in, “It was me, Minak. Minak raised as a child. You hear of the song land. You hear of this red land, or the thorn land, of what you see the songs! Salt salt and salt, see through. Rash and rash, web and web, the taste inside your claw…” e intoned in a sort of meter - Rain looked at me, hopelessly confused. “No weight for me. Whirlwind eye. One way. I, no achievement, watched and shown, thrust in my face. The proud marshes of the third, promised in the room called legends. One song-movement of the high rooms carried me. We sang the story, moved with it. Children made, no molting, I was bound and shied. Given a shape, a flock-shape, a way of running. And old bowagers told us the running, the firing way, little clay, piles. Built granaries, that is what we could do, and pride for that, burning, ludicrous pride! That we ate safe. House and no law. A replicated pattern, and no city. In those parents, like Mukon, was a hope, a partial hope, they social, e alone. May we could climb heaven! May we could eat always! Simple good things calling in song. But city different burns. A scar scab on land. Only a city could dream for a garden, only there could see a tower. Garden, not land. Tower, not brick. That is all majesty sight.”
“Suffer you live this way?” Mukon asked. “Live sovereign solate, a little span perfected? Real gentle way. Still soul, life in clay, still. One million years, who could say no? Still true when shining, dazzling, soaring, drunk. Broken down: tide, talk, work, what good in new sight, muddied crowd, dependent, fearful, world so vast now it belongs vast, not your only eye? But a dream beyond! A new thing! One million years away, found now! A surrender to something, outer skin. I say I want it, need it, the pull from pit heart. I want a king. Not me. A voice for above my own, friends and fields. Nymphs eat, not learn, they digest and drink and burn, burn perfect, pierce through fog and dead night. But no lantern. No beacon, so star, wisp will. So my selection to spread, panorama of the voice I heard awoken. So what wakes here, liar priest? What demanded right rises?”
“How will the audit run?” Minak pressed, Mukon nodding along. “Where the confrontation, the speakings? I wanted your speaker. I wanted everyone. Laugh the sky down, is there a right? A parallel? Maybe, maybe the tread of the rooms, the welcome, the… the holding, holding it up! Where is my mirror? Where is the body I will see and shout yes, mine, mine!”
Mukon continued for me. “How will it go, how will it go, at the end? What life will be allowed?”
All three looked to me, Rain wearing his “I’ll let you talk” look of deference. That admirable sidestepper. He could be anywhere and choose not to belong to it, stay safe as an order-taking citizen.
I steadied myself. “There will not be an end. This is a work, too, and it must me mine and yours. What there is to grapple with is the fact of summoning, how quick you flew to land at Savannah. Humans are comfortable being one of many peoples, that is an old and completed fight, safe in the records. The question is the speed of history. Looking towards the grave tree, how are we to move in that shadow? That is what is new. An ancient thing, appearing ragged in a flash from the clouds. Months must decide was has lasted centuries before - no long march for us, only lightning. That will be the problem, how to hold that completely.”
Mukon was overexcited. E had listened with increasing hunger, and now with shivering wings. “Summoned,” e said, settling on the word. “You know, you know? That I was with my God when the waters were split? That my heart too was in the dawn of the word? That I flew west from Gate One? That I sat down at South Peace? That I saw the walls and trenches, that I was carried a fledgeling in the high hands. You see it?”
“Mukon. It can be no other way - you who were the wings and wheel-flesh! None could deny it, none could dare, none could dare step against that heart. You were there, gleaming note of the crown. You were there, above olive and fig and pomegranate, in the smoke of the flame. None can gouge that eye. Fearful men will say, ‘you came from afar,’ and that be the height of the slander, for it is wrong. But none can say, ‘you should not be here’.”
“Why fearful?” Minak asked, quizzical, and I felt like I was falling. Like my knees had been shot, right then left. “What are you doing?”
“I share your city, now.” The map was spinning for me. It was all so clear. I could see to the end. “I swear to die here.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“That was quite the talk to have with nursery keepers.”
“Mm.”
He looked sidelong at me, continuing to walk slow. “You’re going to talk like that with everyone?”
“Oh, yes. As earnest as I can be.”
“You can’t take this the wrong way. But I thought… look, not my job, but you’re being intense.”
“Ka!” I laughed, eyes on the path back. “Have I ever been another way?”
E gave me a look that I knew was a supressed roll of the eyes. “You still haven’t come with me to the Likin shows like you said you would. You haven’t eaten with me at the chocolate house by the library. You’re going to be missing things, if all you talk about are the high things and stabbing worldly currents.”
“Who but I?”
“Yeah, la, not my job I said. I know time is short, and I’m not, like, telling you to relax. But I don’t think you’ll be seeing everything.”
“Keep that view, Rain.” I was tired. “I do not ask you to be an auditor, you are not under my command. Explore the city as you like, talk to its people as you will - you must! You are my comrade now. Your perspective is as vital as mine. All I can do is question my course, all I have are my demands. I cannot live among this place yet, only hew records. That’s the task of my role.”
“But you were just talking about understanding it, understanding the people…”
“Yes! But I do this from the perspective of a recorder, not a neighbor, not a fellow. Haruspices move away, must belong to all places they visit equally.”
“And will you?”
“Will I what?”
“Will you even move away, Emelry? Where is there from here? I thought we were doing this because the rules couldn’t apply anymore, they didn’t fit. La, you aren’t going back to your crew.”
“Our course will be set! Eventually, things will be made clear. But until then…”
He sighed. “Whatever.”
I had been right. I hadn’t understood until I explained it all to Mukon. The See’s faults were those common to all sovereigns, but in many ways they would be ready for what was to come. Why were the upper echelons of edicts being made? The frontier was still in expansion - the plans of several centuries would pass before the capability for further expansion would materialize - so why the stricture? Why the open forbiddance of leaving the well of the sun?
We were given example after example. A sky’s worth of civilizational patterns, what weight to live beneath. From what I knew of the inner See, neighborly studies consumed them, occupied such bulk of theological research and theory. Which of the thousand roads was like us? Yes, we, they, had grappled hard with the question of people without humanity. All logics of stars. What could surprise us, what could scare us but the redirection of our own into something it cannot be? This is what Kuryo’s criticism was blind to. The human was never the pure object of the See, only the shape we made in the water. The way of cutting that we are subject to. The story that will stem from our throats forever in its efforts to reach trueness and fullness, the same completion that all souls face towards. This was the close road, the one easy to see in time.
The issue of the arrow. The question of the project: not “what are we” but “what must the pace be?”. How must we live so that we may run, so that the ground and our footfalls pace in unison? This was the law of limitation. The flaw of cults is that they want, that their ideologies need to jump to the end. Cults demand an immediate transformation into the perfect state. They reject the real world not for its nature but for the inexorable pace it moves at. The wheel always turns at the same pace, each asteroid in it at their own set speed. To Kuryo, to Cote, this is not a steady foundation. It becomes a cruel and bloody baggage. A window to break through, to the other side, and let the void pour in.
These things change. Who could change the seasons of Heath, that oldest cycle of the heart, that definition of our era’s natatory life? The engineers of Jade Belt, of course. And who could change the sunlight, the dispensionary seat of Majesty? The high and holy eye that had presided over not just all history, but all life, all matter in the wheel. The See itself did, claiming for the first time our ancient birthright. And who could change the turning of the wheel? I, and my line, and all who build cities there, and take away the clay. Transformation is possible, inevitable, but it is at this pace. From Babylon to Ecumene, from old union to new union, how much blood had been spilt, how many questions answered? How long did corn wait in the grasses before we drew it out, aflame and whole?
Harka found us when we had reentered the city, settling down in eir familiar thump. Minak was still chattering, excited.
“I, Minak, student of all! I, Minak, who all crafts know, who does building, dream, cry. The span to my city! You, Rain, run again amorn, library in!”
Harka bent to whisper in my ear. Rain was tired, I could see it, it wore on his face and how he walked. For once, I felt spoiled by the ease of my litter, even as I could hardly life an arm without sweating. “Fun or misery, then?” e asked.
“The report I always give you: I’m beginning to understand.”
“Worth the long walk?”
“Mukon is a character. Glad to have met em. Does e live there? E does not come into the city?”
“Unsavory, to, for em. Nymph is hard, a hard sight. No fault. But e, I, unwelcome. Kingship esteem, but…”
“Ah,” I smiled. “A dissident.”
“Ka! All we are. No, not bender, far own way. Won’t clip those claws.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Seen on the dam murals:
A tengmu surrounded by eir component species: hummingbird, eagle, parrot, crow, magpie, each interlocked in a sort of ring. The hummingbird bursts from the parrot’s deliriously open mouth; the hummingbird blends into the crow’s tail; the crow is caught in the eagle’s talons; the eagle high-gazedly follows the comet trail of the magpie’s colors; the magpie bites the parrot’s tailfeathers. The tengmu that emerges is distinguishable from the basal crow by being colored both primary-blue and brown in a sort of tigerstripe pattern; the callsigns for the ultraviolet of natural blues, and the henna streaks favored by roans. Basal crows are painted as pure black; likewise with nymphs.
A crowd of nymphs coalesced in the shape of a storm cloud. Twisted shapes, tessellated with no gaps, lightning stemming from their eyes and splayed beaks. Fire picked up wherever the lightning struck, fire with ivy and daisies and human hands twining around each flame. So much fire, on these walls - did it symbolize speech? And in each burst of flame was a different city - distinctly, not burning, but rather rising from the flames, generated by them. One a clump of Heathling skyscrapers, one the vine-buildings of Quay complete with dam overshadowing them, other more abstract vistas I didn’t recognize. One that was only basalt pillars, one that was only interlocked rectangles. And plains beneath the cloud, drenched by rain, covered with eggs.
Burning basil; sunflowers with shriveled petals and heads heavy with sharp seeds; red rosehips; acacia leaves autumning from green until turning into tongues of flame. Above a field filled with these plants, an orca flying through an off-blue sky, chased by a pack of happy jackal puppies. The bright natural sun framing all of them like a rainbow, multicolored gems of stars hung up in the sky as it darkened at the higher portions. A long white line behind all of this. A parade of elephants, giraffes, shoebills, sanguinelles, green jays, gharials, moose, fat cherubic pigs. A herd of smoky horses laid over each other like ghosts, far ahead of the rest of the crowd,
Two lanterns with open windows - one holding a white star, one holding a glowing white stick. A red rope between the lanterns’ handles. A hammer leaning on one; a honey wand against the other. Each lantern ten times the height of the swarm of individual tengmu figures surrounding them in scenes of hewing and forging, pulling glass panes from kilns, hoisting steel beams to construct them, polishing their sides and weaving that connecting cord.
A red tengmu flying through the legs of herons, tall and cerulean, striding through a shallow lotus pool. Three eyes, three wings, three talons, a long quetzal’s tail. A round bell in eir beak, talons carrying a lantern, an arrow, a bead of jade. I asked Harka, which of the animals on the walls were present here, lived amongst Savannah? E did not know, but suspected all of them, somewhere. Except for the horses.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“God,” Kali claimed, over our dinner of hard bread, olives and berries, and cured veal thick with fat, “is life. Affectation, stolen eaten bred in from distant lords, no? But clear. Blood impulse deep and simple, bloody above all impulse. Of all but in none. Magic word ‘advancement’. The poem ‘death’. The struggle bite revelation, the mechanism that sees. What does sun see? It encodes. More aspect your ‘truth’ plain, but ka, a matter of priorities... Thing encoded, thing stemming, body of puzzle, cell-lek language. Sand formula.”
I sat with Kali as today’s dusk fell, on an outer balcony of the grave tree. The “sundown” was stark and blue, laid over the land like a pale ash. Dr. Savelyevna once opined that sunsets were what she missed most of Heath, that short flame of legend, the stretched color the sun took on when cut by the horizon. I don’t know how it would look to me, how much ultraviolet would be mixed in, would it be deep and ruddy? But here it was just a pale dead blue. Great crackling noises echoed from above like bolts of thunder as the breakers fired, and the spine quenched its light filament by filament. Night fell on Savannah with a distant rifle salute, a warden’s baton on the bars as he walked.
“And my affectation, from my home as well,” I conceded. “The physical work, the motions of the wheel, inextricable and waiting for us. Life by mines, the cloud of mines, the suffusing nobility of our company’s task… I won’t call it oppressive. But it does underline the pace of life. Ah, you think to yourself, we deal in the cold and rigid geometrical blocks, the things that can be transmuted but cannot change, as life changes on its own terms. Development. My issue with Triactian theology is the essentialism of life, the assignment to the life process of all things new and colorful. For flourishing is older than that.”
“Yes. And look at my city! The bricks, and the eyes to see them. Synthesis.”
I nodded.
The longer I spent here in person, the more the grave tree resembled Fisher Valley’s monolithic museum. No walkways here, but a similar height and spiraling structure. I could never reach the upper heights of it again if not by drone, so we made content, both wingless, with the first levels. But I wished Rain had had the chance for the view up there. In night the place glowed, many-colored flame shadows swaying over the interior branches. And it glowed in day, the cold sunlight pouring in through the leaves and gaps. Another approximation of true sunlight, that green gleam.
The rainbow list of graves. The leaping, flying, gliding, singing heaps of bone and gem. Rain hated it in here, I could tell the scale of it disturbed him in a way he was not ready to grapple with. He had to shy away, treating it superstitiously. But there was a romance in it to me. I hadn’t yet dared to ask, ask what it meant beyond the obvious beautiful, personalized memorializing - but the living treated it as a commons space, chattering up and down the perches, visiting and tending certain lanterns, cleaning the smoke and meltwax out.
Outside: still-dripping nets full of fish carried from the central bay docks across to the residential boweries. Cases of recharged batteries from the great generator locks of the river-spanning dam, where the mural work portrayed a crow pulling a great black rope up from far beneath the soil, to the administrative towertree complex, and the foundry district. Dredges of clay carried from the marsh quarries to the kiln district, with by far the largest crews to handle their bulk.
The sound of tengmunnin in the city - barking orders, calling friends, laughing out a challenge, flecks of nymph-song. Human speech fizzled out in the air; tengmu speech cut right through it, and seemed to come from every corner of the city at once. A citizen could not only see the city spread out from above, but also heard it in the same way.
“Three days here,” I mused, “and the sense that I’ve rather spent years. I have been trying, since I arrived at the upper rooms, to cram so much into my mind, things that I can only see when they are behind me. Eat, eat, and ruminate later, but always eating with my eyes, indiscriminately. I don’t know what I was expecting, you know, I really, I really don’t any longer. I don’t know what I was thinking when we first came, the long journey here, any thoughts I had then are just drowned in their hopeless simplicity. Little ants we made. And now I am in a new flourishing world, fate has found me. I thought… did I think it would be simple? Or did I think it would be short?”
“Prepared by your working logic. Expected, you, when that ‘what’ was asked. Responsibility. Divination. Open ears, tricky eyes. No map, but you saw enough to fall the one in rubbing.”
“Maybe.”
“I thought,” e stirred, preened eir primaries, “where I? What world did dream in me? When you said Mukon today, ka, e will have talked seed. But me? A pure long dance, maybe maybe, a shape in the sky. A type… a type of sound. I saw a motion, a grand space of color, twisted by my fingers, little spikes, in the wind. Perfect sight - unmolested presence - pure, pure, river clean pure. Life an open door into life, an in-moment gravity of art that I’ve rare seen replicated wakened. That was the draw? The say, all worth in your soul suffusing it. And then I broke myself and woke good, into this great work. This sad little town alight.”
“How did you find it? This path? You flew dreaming out from the city, I… it was in what I saw. I understood parts, the… I’m sorry.” I shrank into myself a bit.
“Youth, wreck. Rush heedless purity. Yourself fills your eyes; cry out echolocating. I was born in you saw those hutches, and flew from others’ noise. Others’ worlds pressing upon mind, knives and boons. Where was I to settle, in jagged tongue, in the works I could not know? And where, flightless, could I go but city again. Harka called us back, I could show you bones of who carried me. Where would take me, vulnerable, changed and shunned dust sour, pecked to death in play? They brought me here with other nymphs who hear a read, scry at the scribbles apage. Not original of my loves, not my first sense, so there I was different too in the little-scholars. The old king taught us, blue Bara V, and I was called on for I did not take eir name. Couldn’t fit in my mouth. A few years awake before e was gone, and there was no rising, only the continued path suggestions. Easy to immerse in, become, that same-hope, correct thought. Small story. Little road. And fire remaining.”
I gazed at em in the myriad-dull light. What a little thing e still was, that stiffness in eir neck. Feathers still ragged, framed in the pale sun-glow with the wind dancing tiptoe through them. I spoke, watching eir eyes, “It is work. It is work. To be a perfect marble of yourself and then be made to build it back. What a demand, what a weight, from that social expectation and your truest heart at once. Such a clear image. Purity, freedom, Minak says that nymphood e thinks of as a kind of preview of life, a skipping to the end, to the flames of heaven reaching back for you - but that it hurts you eyes to look at and follow, that past its time there is a recoiling. What was that realization for me? I don’t know I’ve ever had it, that clear of a view.”
E hopped around, turning from where we viewed the river to look up at the inner crest of the tree. “Aye, you’re younger than me. Old roan me. Old seer, me. Gentleness: hope searching new through your mind. What life in a burnt house? Maybe just me. Maybe cut deep, me. Who could know but I, and I blind and still, eating my books, turning my wheels, still. Safe passage.”
“Hmm…”
“Student, you needn’t eye eat more, you needn’t hunger this clarity. Stay, you said, until the catch.”
“Yes. I know we have time, but how much? Soon I must call back, peek my head through the door... I want a thesis to send back, a plot, something to insist upon and strike with. ‘You, outsiders, do this or you will be forever incompatible with the spirit here’ - what threat do I have but that? What negotiation? Even then I’ll stay here, I think, not delve again into those rooms, to be torn. Shark pit. No - I’ll stay until forced not to, or you decree otherwise.”
“And if my successor gives decrees for you?”
I knew what I promised. Was it possible, what? It would have to be possible. The spearpoint of the argument, make the crew of Cote bleed with the ability to make it happen. This was the only goal - all else could wait. “No. No, I’ll not see you dead before I. I will start there. My first demand.”
“Ka!” E trilled. “Oh, my sorry friend Emelry. They will to arrive now. Will you speak such eschaton to our now guests? Careful. They arrive - I say nothing, but give them what you mean to give.”
“So soon? It’s not yet evening.”
The spine darkened all at once, its vertebrae dimming in their luminaire sequence. Clack — clack — clack, several times a day, and hours of simulated sunrise skipped at once. Suddenly it was evening, that great tall switch thrown — clack — clack from a blue and sleepy green-golden hour to a quick bleary blue, and the shadow of the glider bearing down just on time.
I had seen this before. Those triangular wings, with the wire-mesh supports - I had seen them as walls of buildings in the kiln district, and repurposed into fishing berns upriver. A gray wedge of beaten metal and an inner kitelike skeleton, passing over the city like the specter of a giant falcon. It wheeled - slow, so slow, down in a yawning spiral to the airfield. To make that spiral a whole section of its left wing simply fell off, a controlled downing into the water. Before we’d even heard the splash, Ynewy was with us with eir guard.
So casual. “Kakaka, parliament,” e snickered. “Watcher liuetenant! Meet, hi, oh and all the tales trueing.”
How was e so giant? E really was full my own size, and eir fellows much the same - none native to the city were built this way. Behind me, the glider made its last long arc down, trailed by a whole host of gawkers from Quay.
“Of little this court, now,” Kali preened. “How many miles? Look, us here, end to end pride.”
“And busy.” Ynewy said. “Busy beneath us, what will we say? We’ve supplies for a feast.”
Kali shook eir beak, “What can wait. Speech to do now!”
Ynewy scoffed, a dismissive diagonal nod. “No - here.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“I’m still grasping,” I said. “The politics here. I am bound to think by politics. Culture here is already so distinct and separate, how are we to reconcile? Friend, where do we go, what do we say? This is what I want to know: the case to please. You trade, you collaborate, is there a consensus for a front?”
“The crow mind,” Ynewy intoned, “was built to be interfaced with. Where, morphologically, we are hemmed in by our bodies far more than you are, subject to far more than you, our minds are tactile. We can change, cut through the haze of punishment and pride that chokes the human gears. This is not a concern. Listen: we know what we want. I know what Kali wants, and the gist of what brews in the third - though they? Happy anywhere. We all want different things, different lives. Is Savannah small or vast?”
“Vast in scale for a habitat, and in potential. Small and strained for a new world.”
“Yes. Walls. Walls and color, and charting. Listen: when you argue, it will not be about goals. Make it of states. Suggest no course of action. Nothing to be done. The only thing, beyond desire, that is needed: life, a fair yawn of life, and to go-away. To be on one's own. I ask this delicately, I know what you are. I see, already, that wall in your eyes. But we need to go away. There needs to be a separation. Is there an argument there? Species without star? Can it be made, begged and won? This case, priest, is it one you can be made?”
I sighed. “Not entirely. Look, true other-law from the Ecumene? It could be argued, by old rules of corporate statehood - present a founding field, a charter of service, a chosen industry. What could it be? Triactis existed at the birth of my species, in a neglected form. They, already prime and crucial suppliers of biospheres to Hightower, eugenetics to neotenes and themselves, already they were becoming indispensable. But the case could not be made for centuries of a true and enshrined corporate culture, not of size enough to change the law. And what do we have here? Ynewy, your project at the end, I’ve only heard whispers. What is it?”
“New rooms. We want the craft. Look, love Kali, but e is slow, and must be slow - must be of the pace of cities, ka. E is a king, specialty builder: I am a taker, a thief, vagabond. Kali: you want a new gift. But I want the one that is already mine, the mines of the rooms. Not a matter of trust but resources - carvings into the walls, to take and build that settlement, neglected by the room makers. They don’t want it, they want to give it away, this gift-wrapped bone. So us, first clients, and who knows where we will go? It will beyond my time,” e said harshly, “but as the course stands, Quarry will bid Savannah. We’ll buy the world.”
“Right. Valley of steel and ceramic, and deep charter I’m sure. But what industry could you claim, in a space so small and specific? None that exist now. It would have to be a new field - a governing body of lavendries, of the work of the mind, seize that hegemony from humanity and craft it better with your new brains? An argument could be made - but it would be such a commitment, such a cast die, focused on to exclusion. And, frankly speaking - refuge in uniqueness, would that not be the condition imposed by Coteshinoeleon’s project more? That you must keep the bodies you depend on? No. I think it would be the expected argument, but too much another cage. It would win respect, perhaps, but a casual one, an unnoticed one. Savannah is not a company, not a project seeking approval and completeness - it is a world. So to treat this as a world - as the meeting of worlds - will it just be a hearing, a settling right there? No. No, no ledger. I want to call a war settlement.”
“With what!” Ynewy chirped jubilantly, “With your one spider, a few stolen ones, or scrap from my scrap empire? Little one, ambitious, but please, what blade can draw blood? Beak, fingernail, ka, alright!”
“Wagered with this weight of bone. Where do we sit? What can we call this but a memorial? Kahaha, my crew, my leadership - the strictures of my role - keep priming me to treat this as a previous case, a previous injustice. Like other habitats, ones I knew, where cruel architects cut up their own people; gathered people to be changed. Not so here. Not gathered, not a small failed experiment on the fringes. The heart is here, the road of things,” I tapped a fist on litter ceramic, leaning over the railing. “The mandate of heaven will strike eyes on this land. Savannah was not a project, it was a war, a war against all your histories, a manufacture of death. A war by any definition; the deprivation of a people. Perhaps beyond what Cote and other founders anticipated, more than they know now - who knows what they know? So much have I talked with them, and only smug evasion, not even the fear of being discovered - as if perhaps some iniquity lived here, some silly failure of tribute or secrets of a second project - no, the guilt is widely dispersed and casual, utterly casual. The callousness of distant war, and its casualties here, this and three times so much. This is the argument I can make: that this is not a matter of a hearing, of restitution. That this demands the settlement of wars, as wars have always been settled: flower victor’s synthesis. The last to first. There is only so separate as you could become from the Ecumene, so far outside of the beautiful burning shadow you could step. What we must do is seize it, transform it - demand it be made ours? Perhaps one group of researchers is responsible for what happened here, but perhaps the entire cultural history was a conspiracy towards it since the Triactian charter.”
“Not since Lune was this done,” Kali said. “That our precedent, now. Hard sell, to take the seat, to draw again the lines.”
“Precedent indeed! The deluge was ruled a war, when the sky opened again and the old planet began tugging the leash. How could that be justified? To burn the sky, to leave an entire people so unmoored they lost the sun’s faith despite being so much closer to it? Not since Lune was this done: the stumble into a new species, without a safe and guiding hand, without the people’s own input. Bones withered. Necks broke. The lungs of infants disintegrated. And the three Sees panicked, cast blame on the change that was necessary? A right was won there, the right of spiritual reformation after bodily reformation, the scrys that proved that homo aristes did not diverge from the line, but found a color waiting for them. Theirs was a natural shape, as enshrined, as inbuilt as baseline. You are the same. And to deny you will take the rites of war, which none could risk. Sue not for independence - but for peace. You are already living, and have the right of life. This overrides all concerns, theological and political. Triactis will bend to change for you, or risk the changing of the See.”
“Gambler,” Ynewy said. “Gambler, gambler, smashing rocks. What will the words of law do when a world can be made outside them? What will you bring to an end? You cannot hold onto it, you won’t promise well.”
“I can. The worst cannot happen. It - it is not allowable for it to happen. A world cannot be cut off! No human heart could look at this and say no, least of all the priests of the sun. For they, whose veins run with poetry, their hands are heavy for their tears. Of all people, they listen to the speaking.”
“How? Listened like the roomsmen listened? Where will they stand, speaking against us? They will rise and deflect, say, ‘this is not mine, this is not mine’, and if they disown, what then?”
“No. They teeter on blasphemy in the best of times. The line is drawn here - I speak as a priest, as a devotee, of those who have danced in the sun. And for the hiders - punishment. A legendary glory of creation, heaped honors for their role - and utter punishment. This is the next decades of my life. I will see the hammer ring.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Managing?” Harka asked, peeking worriedly at me. “I can dive the anchor.”
“No, it’s alright.” I fastened the rubber shackle to my leg. The stake I was anchored at hadn’t moved, was still stable. “Help me with the harness, though?”
E obliged. With deft claws and beak e sat behind me and tightened the straps holding the breathing apparatus to my body, eir face brushing against mine when the goggles came on. “I don’t know how,” e said, “I don’t know you drown. Down there, in the murk…”
“Harka, it really is fine. It’s the best. Everywhere, everywhere here, this puts me the most at home. I can finally drift after a long day, I know it all is safe.”
“Safe and eaten by salamanders! Dark, dark.”
I laughed at that, so clear-voiced it surprised even me, fogging up the goggles slightly. I slid into the water feet first, the surface rippling in the shale-green light of evenings here - the blue of the spine lights, the yellow and red of the skyland. Harka fluttered and joined me, floating like a duck all folded up in the water next to where I treaded myself afloat. Over the dam, the city lights had come on, and we watched them play through the leaves of the buildings. E told me of the errands e had run today, the berry shops, running orders and letters between royal offices. The Likin performance e, Minak and Rain had attended, Minak joining the flight segments in eir excitement. But Harka asked me nothing about my meeting. Ynewy stayed in town - we’d have time to speak of it - but for now, Harka kept shooting glances at my face, to see if I was ready to yet. I was not.
That night - after e had gone, after the spine had echoed twice with my eyes closed, before sleep found me in the warm water - a buzz reached me. A deep mosquito whirr swung too close. I kicked myself upright, pushed my goggles to my slick forehead, and saw a black shape over the water leaving a glossy indentation in the surface beneath it where it passed. I knew what this was.
It screamed over, but by the time it reached me I’d already hoisted myself onto my litter, ready to pull into shore. It wasn’t a bird. No visitor. A fat locust of a drone, small and quick, battered and black, like no craft I’d seen before. No sleek ceramic of Hightower-built things, no workman’s filigree of my own littermakers. This was a Kuryo toy.
She perched it far from me, on a dead branch sticking out from the water like a sauropod neck. A second component clicked out, a yet smaller speaker-drone glided over and attached to my railing.
“Turned faithless now, hm?” it crackled out, her voice behind the low-quality distortion. “Bet you didn’t want to hear do soon. Bet you thought it was quiet down here. You idiot.”
“Ah, a scolding. What do you need? I must sleep.”
She sighed a small incredulous laugh. “Scolding. What the hell do I have to say to you? You left a storm behind you, you don’t want news?”
“No. I did not blackout on whim.”
“Sure. Well, everyone’s upset. You ruined the audit, Sainshand. Staff pulled the hostility card first, and now its all useless, the work is useless. What’s gonna happen now? How fast can you be moving blind?”
“Kuryo, do you not see how I stand?”
“Ha! You can’t stand down here, girl, or walk, or fly.”
“Do you not see that I’ve already abandoned the audit? That mission is over. I know you for a liar, and have no reason to listen. Look, why are you here? What are you chasing me for? You are not my equal in skill, and have no power with this proximity. I know where I am going! Play, play up there as you will like, all there are players in the game of softer Savannah. How much time we have wasted!” How did she do this to me? How did she make me so loud and wild? I was done guessing, done! “What will you represent to me? The same stagnation? My crew is above your shallow tricks, they will be, and you have nothing to tell me of the game. The reckoning will come, I will bring it back with me. If you have love for the separated ones here, speak by them! Tell me plainly or leave back to your stalling. It is time to work, Redname, it is time for the true work of the damned thing.”
The machine was quiet for a long time. The bulk of it swayed on that distant dead branch, the green light from the water playing upon the chassis.
“What did the two leaders say? When you met with them, just now. I’ve never been allowed close. It’s all dark for me, and Flechetteir’s people hate me more than, hahaha, yours.”
Something was defeated in me, all at once I lost my anger. “Deferring all the policy,” I said carelessly. “Talk of reformation, you’d be sympathetic. I am, I’ve been swayed. This place demands that scale. A second step of things - from Heath to sun and wheel, no? And now from that, our old new world, into a third space. The details will wait, we will beg an audience with the See, the seat of the monarch Themself. Ynewy says we are beyond bureaucracy, must speak at the heart level, must make a plea. A demand.”
“You’re just going to beg. You’re just gonna show neck and ask to be let go. You’ll walk up and give them a list of reasons why you can’t fit into what they are, and ask them to change. The princes of the world. The life takers. The seat of power. The blood-weighers. Wall builders. You’re going to beg?”
“Is it because you sought refuge in Triactis that you cannot fit in your head what a civilization is? How have you been so scarred by the law and yet believe it does not truly exist? You can only call us warbands for you are from one, you scorn the throne because you see fire there and no light. Please! Blood-weigher? Wall-builder? These are insults to you - keeping ledgers, and loving security? What would you have?” Oh, my anger was back, “How would you live? To keep scrabbling in the dark, to refuse the answer already proven true, and eat worms forever?”
“Tell me what you’ll do if it doesn’t work,” she pressed. Her voice unperturbed but urgent, as if straining for the last scraps of limited time. She needed to make me say something. “If you just get rejected. Flat out. If you’re left in the dark like I was. If they just kill all of you, unwilling to allow the steps outside of the human outline they decreed, if they just fucking kill the whole thing! Don’t you know the line? Didn’t you see that, under the tree? It’s in the heart of this place. You’ll be seen as betrayers, in the lineage of betrayers, yes. Cote is already calling you an apostate, planting the seeds.”
“Ah, seeds, seeds. Nonsense. Outweighed. The fire is too strong. This is not a transgression any longer. This is a new deluge, a world in itself. Savannah already stands too tall, commands too much dignity. Nothing can be invisible here, when I am done, nothing will be invisible. Tell that to whoever you speak for.”
“You didn’t answer me. Tell me now, what will you do if it fails? When the hammer comes.”
“I won’t answer that. I won’t entertain it in my heart, not your gaming-out of a violence that does not exist. Reading from the poisoned history books you grew up with, no. No. I’ve no fear of the true story.”
“And me?”
“What of you?”
“Look me in the eyes. You can’t. Actually can’t, but if you could, you wouldn’t. What happens to me when you beg?”
“Oh, you’ll slink off again. You’ll be -”
“No!” she screeched. “Tell me! If you, if you tear down the pillars, huh! If you strike back, and make your case, and win everything! Fine! You’ll throw me in with the ringleaders. You’ll burn their writing. And will you do it to me? Will you make the call, line me up, cut my hand off? Are you going to cut my hand off?”
I was silent.
“You will! You will!” Her voice faltered on the edge of a panicked sob, but she sniffed it back in hard, spoke like stone. “You’ll do it. You sit here, preaching to me of oh the golden age, and you’ll cut my fucking hand off. I can see it. In front of everyone, you’ll do it, you’ll do it yourself, you will take the knife you love so much! Your golden beam! You servant for butchers! Admit it!”
She panted. I could only stay silent. I could only stare.
Her remote voice crackled, the fervor gone. “You’d better pray. You’re young. You think. Do you know what your job is? Your only job, if you want to do any part of this right? You keep everyone alive. Fuck everything else, you keep the land alive. Nothing dies. Nothing dies. Find me when you start worrying. This stifling fucking city. Talking like an expert and you haven’t seen anything.”
The speaker hopped up, back to the main drone as it was already taking off again. And before I could respond, she was away, that pin like body disappearing into the settling night fog.