Chapter 71:

Mayah walked onward and upward. Above her the sky loomed, broad and heavy. Now and then, she tried to glance up at it, but it was hard. When it rained heavily for the first time, she almost cried. “Holy Sarana,” she gasped, her arms up and out, the torrent pouring onto her head, unbroken by anything between her and the sky. “Holy Sarana, holy Sarana, oh, Sarana!”

In the downpour, it took some time for Mayah to find a boulder large enough to tuck her tent against. When she was finally inside, she began changing, grateful for the extra set of clothes inside Lainla’s knapsack. Then she stopped, half-undressed. What was that sound?

Hiss. Hiss. Hiss. Ping! Hiss. Hiss. Ping!

Slowly it dawned on her. There was a comet that every year passed by Chudami. It was always followed by a meteor shower. Hunt’s Rain, that was it, that was what the Cursed called it. Hunt’s Rain.

Mesmerized, Mayah sat in the darkness listening to the iron alloys hissing through the air. Hiss. Hiss. Hiss. Ping!

A piece hit the outside of her tent. Grateful once again to Lainla for her shelter, Mayah finished dressing then crawled inside her sleeping skin. Once she was settled in, she stretched her arms up and out, slowly, so as not to dislodge her breathflower mask. Finally, she let her body relax. I wonder when it is, she thought sleepily. I wish I had Sukren’s daysclock to check. But he gave it to that one hunter for berries a long time ago. Well, I can still count how long it’s been. The sun went down, then it came up again, then it went down again just now, so it must be first nightsleep.

Closing her eyes, Mayah listened to the metal rainstorm outside. Hiss. Hiss. Hiss. Ping! Hiss. Hiss. Ping! Over and over the sounds repeated themselves, lulling her to sleep. Hiss. Hiss. Hiss. Ping!

When she eventually woke up, it was easily and gently. Yawning, she peeled herself out of her sleeping skin. She needed to relieve herself, but she was still trapped –

Mayah paused. Silence filled her ears. The meteor shower had ceased.

A tiny smile touched her lips. She reached out to tug the pull-rope to the tent door. A semi-circular line bordered by rubber, mammole skin and gold grew wider and wider until it was an opening. Slipping on her boots, Mayah stepped out and crunched onto what felt like a bed of glass. All around her the ground was covered in sharp metal shards. At first Mayah thought the metal was green and gold, but then she looked up, and realized the shards were reflecting the light of the aurora kaikilas as it swept across the black sky.

The black sky, stretching far and wide, without the bio-dome’s hexagonal gaps to frame and contain it, without anything at all to hold it back...

“Oh Sarana,” she whispered.

A patter of rain on her head was the response.

Smiling a little, Mayah turned to fold up the tent. Sunrise, she told herself, as she pictured the map in her mind. I should get to the top by sunrise, as long as nothing bad happens between now and then.

For once nothing bad did happen; dawn found Mayah sweating under her layers of skygold and rubber. The higher she went, the larger the boulders became. Her fingers grew tired of gripping stone, and her back ached from its load. At last she clambered over the final shelf onto a plateau. There were still a few boulders scattered about, but the land here was much flatter. Flatter, that was, until it disappeared, plunging down an escarpment.

Breathing heavily, Mayah leaned against a boulder overlooking the precipice. She could see the sun rising through a curtain of rain above the massifs to the east. Their scale took her breath away. Mayah had thought the mountains surrounding the bio-dome’s valley were large, but they were nothing compared to the range that stretched across the land’s southeast as far as her eye could see.

Mayah didn’t know what the Cursed called the massifs. The Saranai had always referred to them as the New Hindu Kush. That was what their ancestors had called them, in memory of some place on Earth.

To Mayah’s left lay the bio-dome inside its valley. She could see the rivers rushing down the New Hindu Kush through the southern and eastern mountains all the way to the valley floor. Behind her, to the west, the mountains sloped down into a swamp. And was that thin green-blue line running along the edge of the swamp the sea?

As for the precipice to her right, it opened up into the gorge Mayah had seen on the map. From its depths rose sulfurous smoke. If Mayah looked across the smoke to the south, she could see the mountains that made up the other side of the gorge. They were smaller, low enough for her to see that beyond them grew the spiraling branches of a wild hollow-tree forest.

A few paces ahead of her, along the edge of the precipice, was a boulder cleaved in two. Mayah recognized it from a sketch in the journal. It marked the beginning of the pass down to the Lake Tower.

The rain was light now, as light as the air. It fell in a fine mist onto Mayah’s clothes and hands. The wind picked up and swept away the stink and smoke of the sulfur. Then it paused, and silence reigned. No animals grunted; no birds twittered; no insects hummed. Nothing but mammoles and volcanoes, Lainla had told her, and Mayah could see it was the truth. What had Sukren told her? Chudami’s a young planet. The oxygen levels here are too low to give rise to multicellular lifeforms. Maybe in a couple million years something will happen, but for now, every animal on this planet can trace its ancestry back to a frozen embryo from Earth.

Mayah looked out on the empty world. She took a deep breath, then another, then another, then burst into tears.

***

She wept for a long time. She didn’t even know what it was that made her cry, but she couldn’t stop. Maybe it was the sky above her? The utter vastness of it, the awe and the wonder of it? Or maybe it was the whole of Chudami at her feet, and she the only living creature out there for as far as she could see?

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“Oh Sarana, oh Sarana, oh Sarana!” she cried.

Too late Mayah remembered she probably wasn’t supposed to call on Sarana anymore, that a Free Serf wouldn’t, but the only other name she could think of at the moment, there at the top of the world, was Sukren’s.

Taking a deep breath, Mayah closed her eyes. She thought of the Dome Ring, of the sketch of the Dome Ring in the journal, and how while looking at it it had occurred to her to consider, for the first time in a while, how strange and different her life was from literally everybody else’s. Once or twice, back in Lost Technology, she had wondered why. But such thoughts were dangerous; they could lead to disappearance; Mayah quickly learned to shut them down. Even after she’d left the castle with Vek, she still hadn’t been able to shake the habit of not really noticing how strange her life was. Seeing the Dome Ring in the journal, though, that had triggered something.

For what was it that Vek had said? The Free Serfs don’t have the Dome Ring. You do.

That was right. Vek, the Free Serf agent, had let her hold onto the Dome Ring. And he’d done so without hesitating. Even more strangely, Sukren hadn’t taken it away from her either. Mayah still had the flaring thing inside the little pouch attached to her belt.

“Oh Sukren,” she whispered. “Is it possible – could it be true – that there’s another reason for everything – that it’s not because I’m just a little Rajas?”

Because there had to be a reason both he and Vek had let her, a nobody, hold onto the Dome Ring. Maybe it was because she wasn’t a nobody. Maybe it was because…

Oh, I don’t know! It’s been over five diurnals since I found this journal and I still have no idea about anything. All I know is that if there’s a chance, even a tiny one, that there’s some other reason why Sukren didn’t tell me anything, well, by Sarana – by the rock-god – by Hunt and Gather – I’m going to find it out.

Maybe he doesn’t see me as a little Rajas maybe there’s another reason maybe maybe maybe oh rock-god I’m crying again I’m crying why am I crying again?!

A key, it’s a key to the Lake Tower…

Mayah didn’t dare remove her facemask to wipe away her tears, so it was with a sticky and uncomfortable face that she got up and walked to the split boulder. The space between the rock’s two parts was too narrow for both her and her pack, so Mayah left her pack on the ground, then slid on through.

On the other side of the boulder, her eyes widened. Before her, carved into the rock, was a narrow staircase winding its way down the face of the gorge. Mayah traced it with her eyes: it went east, then doubled back west, then went east again, back and forth as it descended across the rock face. Erosion had smoothed the steps, however, to the point that some portions of the pass looked more like a slide than a staircase, a slide broken up by gaps like a smile with missing teeth. Between the gaps billowed up sulfuric clouds, red and orange like fire.

The first gap was only a few paces away from the start of the staircase. It was narrow, and Mayah was able to jump over it, but only just. She slipped a little on the claying feldspar beneath her feet; with a gasp, she clung to the rock wall on her left.

All at once she became aware of her trembling legs and the sores on her back where the knapsack had chafed her skin. She swallowed. The air stank. It was hard to breathe. She took another step forward, feeling her way carefully along the rock face. A welcome gust of wind blew away the sulfur nearby, revealing another gap in front of her. It was much larger than the first gap she’d just crossed. Could she jump it?

Mayah thought not. Then again, she was also almost at the first bend of the staircase. If she could get over the gap in front of her, the staircase would end, and start again in a westward direction. She crept to the edge of the gap and peered through. Sure enough, the staircase ran directly beneath her. So maybe Mayah didn’t need to jump the gap. Maybe she could lower herself down to the staircase below…

But how? If she were Sukren, she could do it. The distance from Mayah’s ledge to the staircase below was a little over his height. But Mayah was small, and besides, she didn’t have the arm strength to lower herself down. Mayah imagined dangling over the edge and letting go. If she landed not on the staircase but to the side of the staircase, it would be a long fall down to the gorge floor.

Not sure what to do next, Mayah stared into the billowing orange clouds over the lake. When another breath of wind parted the sulfuric vapor, for just a moment, before the fire-like clouds closed in once more, Mayah thought she saw a shining metal tower rising up out of the lake waters.

It looked like a giant serf prod.

Mayah turned and ran back up the staircase. She didn’t stop until she was once more on the plateau with her pack. Bending over, she gasped for breath. For once Mayah was glad to be so high up. There was more oxygen in the air here than down in the valley because the oxygen made by the hollow-trees was less heavy than the carbon dioxide that settled in the valley. It made it easier to breathe up on this mountaintop – it made it lighter –

Mayah closed her eyes against a rush of tears. All her hope that there was another reason for Sukren’s silence disappeared under a familiar flood of bitterness. It’s because of Sukren that I left the castle. It’s because of Sukren that the Eenta soldiers caught me and Vek. If I hadn’t wanted him, if I hadn’t needed him, if I hadn’t been so weak, that wouldn’t have happened to me, none of this would have happened to me, none of it, none of it!

Then Mayah stood up, her back straight. No, I don’t have to go down that path, I don’t have to, I don’t have to! If Sukren has another reason for not telling me about himself, if it’s not because I’m a little Rajas, then it’s okay, it’s okay to want him then, it’s not okay to want him only if he doesn’t care about me, if all I am to him is some weak-willed needy little princess. All I have to do to find out if that’s who I am is to get down there, I’m going to get down there if it kills me, I will, I will, I swear by the rock-god, I will, I will!

But the gap, the gap, how am I going to get over the gap?

She looked out over the land around her, hoping to find something with which to bridge the gap, when something in the valley below caught her eye. She frowned. Hovering in the air above the southwestern edge of the bio-dome was a dark haze. It looked almost like smoke, smoke from a cookfire.

But for Mayah to be able to see it from so high up…

Had someone set the bio-dome on fire?