Skybound heat rippled up to a long stone walkway. The covered bridge stretched from one side of the canyon to the other, with built-in wind turbines spinning in place of railings. Blurring rows of blades caught up activated particles in the air and funneled them into generators, energy currents even humming through the barrier mesh layer as if alive with bees. On top of the skyway, however, with a wanton disregard for barriers and bees, four thrikes and their riders perched high over the canyon city.
One thrike broke loose, yanking on its lead with a great see-saw motion of the beak in front and the crest in back. The handler, a young man who knew better, tugged on the strap of its headgear and staggered a few steps before regaining control. He casually flung up an arm to deflect a jab from the beak.
Someone laughed over to his left. "No harm in saddling early, Mic Gendracco."
Thax Tofflar grinned back at her, but he stepped warily back from the edge. At eight hundred feet, any slip promised enough of a fall to reflect on one's whole life story on the way down. If one cared to waste time doing that. Still, someone was being a ripe fool to depend on his own two feet at the moment. Thrikeback was obviously the safest place to be.
"As you will, my dear," he called back over the wind. "But this one can only tolerate me for so long. Am I right, Calietti?"
The thrike snorted and stamped its talons, the message clear.
A high-pitched horn tone sailed out over Polescos. It cut through the air mass filling the upper third of the canyon, brushed past Thax and his companions, fought the updrafts sweeping the walls, and skimmed down into the crevices between buildings and rocky pinnacles at the base.
About time, Thax thought, and squinted to the south. Somewhere beyond the bend in the canyon, another group of riders had hit the halfway point and were circling back for the final stretch. Thax counted forty ticks later – almost a full beat – before the far thrikes swung into view, a mere scatter of bugs from this distance. Thax thumped his helmet on and flipped down the goggles. He seized the saddle without warning Calietti and hiked a foot into the brace, clambering up over the thrike's tail to stand in nearly upright position. In flight, he would be lying prone, but at the moment it was all balance while he snapped the safety lines to his belt.
He shouted over to the farthest rider on the bridge. Gleeson's head turned, face half-hidden by his own visor, and he held a hand to his ear.
"Safety lines!" Thax bellowed again. "What's wrong with you?"
Gleeson gave a saucy salute – the one-finger salute, Thax noted – but snagged the lines to hook them onto his uniform.
Ready or not: the thrikes were approaching fast. The two over the west side of the canyon had an advantage, as slope-warmed air lifted them up and forward as if blown on the breath of a giant. The other two tackled the gravity slog nearer the cliffs. But after the exchange point, the broad plains of the pterosaur grounds were waiting to lift columns of heated air. If the flyers dared to navigate the skyscraping columns of stone and catwalks that also cluttered the neighborhood. That was why, as gendracco of the team, Thax had claimed this portion of the relay for himself.
"Move, move, move," he chanted as the team colors became visible on the thrike's frontpieces. Green for luck. Green was fallen behind the others, crush it. "Let's go!"
One after another, thrikes blew into range in torrents of wings. The four on the skyway took to the air, dropping just hindmost of their teammates in a breathless midair hover show to catch the rings as they were released. Lightweight steel rings wrapped in colored bands of cloth fell and snagged on the arm of the incoming teammate, who already had one, to total three rings apiece. The relay ended with four.
Team Orange missed the ring toss, instantly spinning into a dive to retrieve both as they tumbled down toward the city. Thax glanced behind to see him careening back on track. Show-off. Gleeson had done that on purpose. Skyway-hopping made for a fine relay match any day, but this time Polescos was jam-crammed with spectators for the annual Pterosaur Exhibition. Thousands of eyes followed the pterosaurs, or thrikes, in the air today. 'No screwing up' was Rib-eye's only rule during the two-day event, though a little more colorful in his Kelvidic dialect. Thax smirked. With this many people watching? The sky was his stage.
He pushed his boots into the braces, relaxed into that flexible tension for flying that used to leave him sore for days, and swerved into the most technically challenging part of the match.
Wind whistled at his eardrums – he should have buckled his helmet properly – with every lift and dive and flap-flip of double wings that drowned out his whoops. This was the life. The Vortesharken, as Rib-eye referred to his windworkers, had the most exhilarating job in the city, if the most dangerous. That made it the best.
Calietti whipped over a catwalk and a line of wind turbines. The saddle creaked where it curved over her pumping shoulder blades. She bypassed a towering column of red canyon rock as easily as Thax could sidestep a puddle. Her front wing could have effortlessly smashed a donkey-cart off the track spiraling around the column, but the raw power instead streamlined into a laser-fine cut between the piers of the outjutting stonework. Two more tucks and swerves, and at last the final exchange point slid into view.
Then Thax swore.
They had made it this far, almost to the identical flat footbridges shishkebabing a row of buildings, but only three thrikes waited with their riders.
Each had his own bridge obscured from the others' sight by the enormous spires surging up from the canyon floor. This was the hardest exchange. The narrowest flight path in the relay meant tight, precise maneuvering, with no room for error. Fumbling any of the four rings in the air would cost precious time and energy, if not the match itself.
Thax could hardly see the last green ring sitting on the wooden handrail, placed there for his team zoomer – who was nowhere to be seen. For the final dash, too, Thax grated. Each team had to finish with four rings or it didn't matter who was fastest. He should have arranged for a backup zoomer in case something screwed up, as something obviously had. He would have to wrap up this thing himself. Rib-eye would chew him to pieces.
He kicked out of his foot brace and pulled forward with a heave, but stopped. His arm wasn't long enough to reach it from thrikeback in passing, even if Calietti shaved her belly on the railing. A barrel roll was impossible too, even if he managed to snag the ring upside down, and there was absolutely no way he was going to waste time landing and taking off again. They would never win like that.
Thax grabbed the pommel and set his jaw. In halting movements, he unsnapped both safety lines and tucked up onto his knees. Wind tore at him, wobbling him, until he planted one foot out in front.
"Steady, Cal!" he yelped, white-knuckling the edge of the saddle to save his balance. He had to keep his cool, now more than ever, or risk the thrike absorbing his fear and bucking him off into open air.
The last five ticks dragged on for an eternity as nerves almost shook his hand loose from the reins. A fizzing sound was coming from his uniform, an almost intolerable distraction. Flux clung thick to the stripping on his gendracco jacket and Calietti's saddle, glowing flame-orange where the rushing air sent showers of flux particles into triple-banded punchcord sewn into the lining. Thax prayed that energy up into his limbs. With the enhancement of the wildly activated flux, this just might work.
He hoisted up onto both feet, pain popping in his knees. Not a junior schooler anymore, he grimaced. But still dumb between the ears. He cranked the knees into a deeper bend and prepared to jump.
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Thrikes shrieked and erupted into ring-toss tactics on both sides of him, but Thax stuck his full attention to one single, all-or-nothing move that was as reckless as a Tofflar.
He flung himself forward, one foot shoving down on the thrike's neck both to give himself thrust and to tilt her into a swooping arc under the bridge. Calietti went under, and the reins fell away as Thax went over. His boots sprang across the railings. The ring caught on his arm, a mere side effect as Thax launched his forward momentum into a desperate vault off the other side.
A split-tick terror of freefall that did nothing good for his heart, then he reunited with Calietti with all the seamless agility of wet seaweed to the floor. Shplat. Thax almost wished he had hit ground instead. Then at least everything would be still, and finished.
But the Dumb Between The Ears guild wouldn't have it. He almost skidded off the back of the saddle before his instincts could catch up, fighting for grip as his legs flailed in the air, bones rattling inside the protective gear that was supposed to keep him in one piece. Every muscle he owned was screaming at him, cursing his ancestry and struggling to contain what internal organs he had left. Cracks in his visor shattered across his vision and he gasped in fits for a breath.
Calietti flapped in fury, driven on by the combatants at her flanks. Adrenaline roared in Thax's ears long before the clamoring cheers of the crowd hit him. The stone arch came closer, blurring at every blink, closer…
* * *
To see the world through another's eyes is, for most people, impossible. To see what he sees is to tap into what he thinks and, over time, how he thinks. How anyone thinks is by nature an untappable trait, very personal and very private. But privacy had never – rather, always – been an issue between these two.
Challis Gannagen was the overbearing one. She argued the other way around. After all, though she didn't know it, Rasalas was the one who first decided to never let her out of his sight.
She lay on her back, her legs bent over the edge of the cliff. The little grotto was not much more than a bite taken out of the rock face. Challis drummed her heels while staring irritably up at the roof, whose crumbly underside accounted for the powdery grinding under her shoulder blades whenever she moved. That meant it was getting in her hair, too. She'd untied her headkerchief and decorated the ground around her ears with sweaty brown strands.
Honey-wax eyes, unsuited for staring, were even more unsuitable for staring at, filmy and shifty and a mite unsettling. The rest of her face was decent enough. There was sufficient eyebrow and healthy color there to blend in with the ten-a-penny flux croppers in north Polescos.
One thing, if it was possible, drew attention away from the eyes: a complex tattoo of vitasnaps under her chin. They glowed in little pinpricks of orange, each snap pulsing brighter or dimmer with her breathing to form a dancing pattern the size of a coin on the side of her neck.
Nearby, a Rasalas-shaped silhouette stood looking out over the rainforest outside the canyon city. He waited there in silence, an occasional fidget, while Challis considered whether she had actually wanted him to come find her. Or to kick her awake.
"Any sign of rain?" she asked. The buzzing of the rainforest almost covered her words, and softened the regular whoosh-whoosh of wind turbines.
"Why don't you look for yourself," the silhouette muttered. It turned its head just slightly.
Challis sighed and clasped her hands behind her head. So, Rasalas wasn't happy with her either.
"Thought I'd be polite, instead of asking why you're here." She eyed his blurry profile. Then, she looked for herself.
When the swell of pressure in her head faded, she was blinking down at a sprawling spread of treetops in perfect focus. The topmost layer of canopy arched and dipped in billowing swells, a static current shaped by the land. Rich green had faded into yellowing husks over the years, but Rasalas' eyes could see every shift of straggling leaves, every flicker in the shrubbery, every jumping moss frog. A gray fox slipped in and out of shadow. They watched it all, Rasalas' thoughts melting into his sister's quietude even as his gaze flitted toward every movement. It was the psyche of a hunter. This gradually drew the landscape up to them until they were as much a part of it as the vines that tangled the trees.
Whoosh, whoosh. Six rotor blades, each as tall as a man and bent like a thrike's wing, caged the cave's opening in a large hemisphere right in front of them. The spin of the turbine was not close enough to hit Challis' feet but could have knocked Rasalas' fingers numb if he reached out far enough. The view spun around as he turned round to face his sister.
"So, do you want to talk about it?" he said, his voice carrying all the pent-up frustration Challis expected. "Yes or no."
Challis was in no mood for yes or no. With an effort she tugged her thoughts forward, her mind reeling until his outline appeared once more. Back in her own head, what Challis saw overlapped her brother's view of her on the ground as she looked through both sets of eyes at once.
Rasalas gave a sigh that deflated him enough to plop down beside her. His profile matched his sister's, if heavier in the brows and patched with stubble that spread unchecked down the front of his neck. It blended into the mottled shirt he wore, blackened by mud and worse. His hands, too, were creased with stains he could never wash off. He was rubbing them on his trousers now, a crosshatch set that was threadbare at the back, knees, thighs, even under the boots. The boots may or may not have been stolen from a pawnbroker who had swindled him one too many times: fool me once, fool me twice, fool me three times and I swipe your boots.
He watched the turbine, trying to ignore the headache that had pushed its way in. The same old headache always came every time his sister stole his eyesight.
"So," he said again, the tone a good deal softer this time. "Do we need to talk about it?"
That seemed the more lenient of approaches. But Challis didn't budge. "Talk about what? Was Raffar upset that I left?"
"You mucked up the last exchange point in the final relay match of the Exhibition," Rasalas said in blunt. "It's not safe to run off alone, even for you, and Rib-eye's going to break out all hell on you. And you're worried about your disagreement with Raffar?"
Challis kept talking to the floor. "Was he upset?"
Sigh. "Maybe not."
"That's nugget, Ras."
He huffed and looked away. "So don't ask. As if I could hide anything from you."
The dark vitasnaps of his patch became a mesh network of coal-orange threads whenever they began pulsing heavier than usual. He stifled an impatient sigh and lifted a hand to his neck so it covered the little tattoo, an impulse that had become more frequent since the hospital.
Challis was pulling on her boots, but paused. She turned back and spoke slowly, exaggerating her brother's concerned tone and concerned expression. "Do you… need to talk about it?"
Rasalas gave way to a lopsided grin, but he couldn't help it. He snorted and broke into a laugh that sent him rocking back. "That's not fair. I asked first."
Challis laced up a boot with an obliging nod. "And I made my answer clear enough. Obviously you think you're helping, and I appreciate the effort. Maybe you really are smarter than you look."
His eyebrows rose. "Well. Thanks. The lady is too kind."
"And any useful person would –"
"I'm stalling," Rasalas interrupted. He pushed himself to his feet, all lithe energy, and Challis blinked at the hand offered in front of her face.
"They need you. That thrike in the mud barns is about to deliver," Rasalas said with a forced smile. "Everyone knows you've got the best nerve for this, mic sachsa. Save your pouting for later."