Chapter 13

Touching The Sky

They plummeted at a speed that made the air hurt Ty's face, like being on his dad's speed boat but without the comfort of something more solid underneath them.

“You call this flying!?” Ty managed to scream out.

He heard laughter even over the wind, followed by, “Hold on!”

Ty wrapped his arms tight around the puppet's torso. Without warning, Gentry twisted in the air, their backs facing the ground. Gentry held his hands skyward, took aim at targets Ty couldn't see, and then shot.

At first, nothing happened—except for more falling—then there was a glorious millisecond where Gentry's strings went taunt, having found their mark and the means necessary to support their weight. Ty would have been more than happy if it ended there—ecstatic even—but it did not, and to his horror, they lurched into motion again, away from the ground, and even faster than they fell.

Ty wanted to scream and close his eyes but the wind kept his mouth closed and his eyelids held painfully open. He had no choice but to watch as Gentry took them higher, the strings reeling back inside of his body, pulling them along for the ride. From the corners of his eyes, Ty saw Gentry's cloak moving up and down, a motion that should have been impossible. Even more impossible was that it looked like it was helping, flapping like a pair of wings. Ty cemented the image in his mind.

Gentry's hands retreated from the perches they had been grasping, and back to their rightful place. The cloak spread out wider, flapping slower, but more deliberately.

“Get ready! This is the tricky part.”

This was? All Ty could see above them was a cloud, how could that be worse than jumping off a roof and being catapulted into the air on the back of a wooden toy?

He found out rather quickly.

Gentry's cloak dropped its wing act and closed around the both of them, like a cocoon. Before that thought even sunk in, they plunged into the cloud.

Once inside Ty felt immediate and intense pressure, squeezing all around him. The cloud had a very real—and violent—physical presence. The higher they went the more it compressed, now so strong Ty's arms were trapped against his sides. Seconds later and the cloud was at his chest, pressing his ribs close to the breaking point. It squeezed the breath from his lungs, pushing all forms of thought from his brain.

Just as he was about to blackout, Gentry split through the top of the cloud, the pressure evaporating, and air and thoughts all rushed back. The cloak released its grip on him, swirled off and around, back to its normal form. Without it holding him Ty realized he lost his grip on his friend at some point. He made one desperate grab for Gentry, missed, and went into freefall.

It took the puppet a moment to realize what happened. Ty watched as Gentry aimed one hand up and shot—at what, he didn't know—then pointed the other down and let it fly.

Ty held one of his own hands up to catch Gentry's, startled to find that it grabbed back. As creepy as that was, Ty couldn't afford to care—he was suspended in the sky, maybe not totally safe yet, but he came to a stop at last. He breathed in the air like it was going out of production. It occurred to him that at this height the air shouldn't have been as plentiful as it was; there was absolutely no difference than when they were on the ground.

Ty looked up at Gentry, higher above him. How was he doing that?

The strings reeled in, pulling Ty up at a much slower pace than he was used to—a welcome change. As he rose, he looked around at their surroundings. There wasn't much to see. The cloud was, in fact, a single entity, stretching over the entire town and obstructing all of it from view. All except for the two smokestacks, which were persistent about being the tallest things around.

There was a small click, and Ty looked up to see Gentry right there with him.

“Sorry for the rough ride, that cloud is a pain.”

Ty nodded in agreement. “What's it made out of?”

“No idea. But see? Whatever it is, it's made from there.”

Gentry pointed at the smokestacks. A strange substance billowed out of them, spilling over the sides and down into the cloud. The stuff was unnatural, like a mixture of fog, smoke, and Jell-o.

“All I know,” Gentry said as they watched, “is that it exists for one purpose: to hide what I'm about to show you.”

“And what would that be?”

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A sly smile crept across Gentry's face. “Wrong question. I've been wondering when you were going to ask what we're hanging onto.”

That slipped Ty's mind. He looked past Gentry to see his hand... holding nothing. He climbed up onto Gentry's head (much to the puppet's discomfort), using it as a boost to get a closer look. He hesitantly held his hand up and his fingers touched the sky. Literally.

“It's... solid,” Ty said in amazement.

Gentry nodded, almost throwing Ty off balance.

He touched a star, drawing his hand back to look at the tip of his finger. Paint. The star, the night's hue—everything—was painted on.

“Do you mean to tell me that...”

“Every bit of the sky is a ceiling? Yes! I've touched most of it.”

They were in a box. The very thought of it instantly brought on a feeling of claustrophobia. He wanted to tear through it, only the fear of what might (or might not) be outside stilled his hand.

“What's the point?” Ty asked.

“Simplicity is the key. San made this place with what he needed it for firmly in mind: keeping you. If this world was too big, there would be more questions for you to ask, more chances for you to run away, and more places for you to hide. This 'box' keeps things focused and easy to manage.”

Disgusting, thought Ty. This whole place was built to control and cage him, to limit what he saw and believed. San—no, no one—had any right to do that.

“What do we do? Can we stop him?” Ty wanted nothing more than to get back at San for keeping him in this prison for so long.

“Sort of, You can beat him.” He grinned. “All we have to do is get you to the door.”

Ty raised an eyebrow.

“Outside the factory is a door. If we can get you to it, you will have won.”

“It’s that easy? What’s through the door?” Ty stared down at the clouds, imagining the door down there, waiting. He probably was right beside it when he escaped the factory. But didn’t see it from being preoccupied with those hungry plush creatures.

“I can’t say for sure. But that’s our goal. But it won’t be easy. San will not let you leave without a fight. He never does.”

With a newfound sense of purpose, Ty looked down at Gentry and said, “Let's get to that door,” or, at least, that's what he was about to say when the sky opened, spilling the words right out of mind.

Ty jerked his hands away a bit too fast and lost his balance, tipping dangerously over Gentry's head as he rotated his arms to regain his footing. Gentry grabbed the back of his shirt and pulled him off his head and away from the sky. Now dangling in the air again, Ty watched as a section of the sky continued to slide open, like an automatic door at the local department store. And it wasn't just the one section, but tons of them all over the surface of the ceiling.

The area that Gentry had a grip on slid away, forcing the puppet to release and secure his hand elsewhere. Ty stared at the holes, seeing nothing but darkness at first, beginning to fear that the nothingness he imagined outside was true. But then something moved and lowered down out of the depths.

It was... well, he didn't know to be honest. It looked like an oversized bucket, turned upside down and attached to a mechanical holder to keep it in place. Ty looked around, confirming that every other hole in the sky had one of these strange devices.

They were motionless for a few seconds, just sticking out of the ceiling and looking rather pointless. Then, all at once, they moved back and forth in perfect sync. A loud roar came from them as the machines groaned to life, pouring white flakes as they shook slowly.

Not just white flakes. Snowflakes.

They were snow machines.

The snow built up around them in a matter of seconds. Ty looked down, watching the first of the flakes drop into the cloud and out of view.

“For some reason, the snow flakes are unaffected by the cloud. They pass right through it with no resistance, continuing on to the—WAIT!”

As the puppet was talking, Ty opened his mouth, hoping to catch a flake or two on his tongue. By the time Gentry saw and issued his warning, it was too late—three or four snowflakes landed in his mouth. He did not explode, as he feared from Gentry's exclamation, but was greeted with a different unpleasant surprise. They neither felt nor tasted like an actual snowflake. Ty spat the impostors out at once and snapped his mouth closed.

“Tried to stop you—those aren't real snowflakes, I'm afraid.”

“Then...” Ty closed his mouth, unsure if he wanted to risk another fake flake landing on his tongue. He risked it anyway and finished with, “What the heck are they?”

Gentry looked down at him, his eyes seeming to dim a bit. He didn't meet his eyes, instead looking beyond him and the city below, lost in thought about something. Debating on whether to tell him or not, no doubt. Whatever the answer, Ty could tell it wasn't going to be pretty.

Finally, the puppet's eyes met his own, his mind made up, and said, “I don't know for certain—I don't have firm proof—but... chances are good that they are made from plush creature's stuffing. Deceased ones.”

Ty's stomach twisted in a knot, his imagination rushed to fill in a horrible picture of dead bodies on a conveyor belt, passing through a machine that sucked their stuffing away, leaving a pile of empty fabric shells behind.

“You all right?” Gentry noticed that the color had gone out of Ty's cheeks from shock and disgust. “Like I said, I could have it all wrong...”

“No,” Ty swallowed, forcing himself to speak. “I doubt you do. It fits San well, don't you think?”

Gentry said nothing, which might as well have been agreement.

“They don't have easy lives, the plush creatures.”

“What do you mean?” Ty asked. “They looked healthy and happy to me, those two that were chasing me were in good shape for sure.”

“The guards are kept in prime condition, yes. But the workers? Not nearly as much. They are given just enough food to survive—very little else.”

A cold and sick feeling pumped through Ty's veins as what Gentry told him clicked into place. The frog that tried to eat him... he’d been starving. And what happened to him? He was chained to a wall and his insides torn out.

And Ty just sat there, watching.

“Gentry... I want to go back.”