Ch 2

The Gannagen twins turned their backs on the rainforest and entered the dark, breezy tunnel under the mountain. Challis hurried behind her brother in silence for a quarter-mile, sliding back into his vision, and before long the tunnel ended at an overlook above the canyon city of Oedolos.

Naked stone skyways soared between the canyon's outcroppings and upcroppings of stone, stretching haphazardly over the city far and thin into the distance until they seemed to simply wisp about like oversized cobwebs.

Polescos district spread out from beneath overlapping terraces, threading ramps, and bare rust-colored earth that used to be shaded by trellises and curling balustrade trees. Only the canyon walls – unlike the outside rainforest – still put on a brave face and hung with windblown greenery, huge folds of the landscape tumbling down like cloth but fading into dry remnants at the base where the vegetation was scraped threadbare.

On this side of a bend in the canyon sat the stone building blocks of the city's more dirt-hardy occupants. Polescos hunched in pockets of quavering heat. From here the showgrounds were just visible, still crowded with people for the last few bells of the Pterosaur Exhibition. Challis tried not to think of the debris left behind by spectators and buyers and sellers from all parts of the city with no regard for those who had to clean it up. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad this time.

"Oh, no." Rasalas had pushed aside the vines covering the opening, but then he stopped. "Feel this, Chall."

He pulled her hand over to stretchy, shriveled vines off to the side that dropped their leaves at her touch. The deadening effect of the city's flux shortage was climbing the walls. There was still time, but not much.

He was watching her. It made Challis uncomfortable when he did that with her sharing his eyesight: she saw her own body move a little unnaturally and stare a little blankly, numbness washing over her brain as two different sets of sensory input shared space. She felt the vine tickle her fingers, and saw it through Rasalas' eyes in an odd disconnect of awareness.

He was watching her because of something they both knew. But in the face of the flux shortage, or rather the oversupply of flux in all the wrong places, they were only two worker ants in the vast colony that was Oedolos. Challis pressed back into her own head. She gave Rasalas a smile that implied everything, then pushed out past him. He blew out a breath, inferring nothing, and followed her down the canyon wall.

Vines crawled down from high above, a network of handholds and footholds that pillowed the climbers from the rock. They had to watch out for wire-caged turbines the size and shape of peccary pigs dotting the wall, but these were scattered and whirred loudly enough to warn anyone that got too close. Challis went by feel, kicking herself the whole time for going this way to the cave in the first place. She was one misstep away from unabashed terror and possibly death.

The dirt raining down on her head from Rasalas' boots was wonderful too, but eventually, he spidered off to the side and went on past her. Challis made no attempt to keep up. He reached the bottom in a minute, dropping onto a walkway to grin up at her.

"Shut up and close your eyes," Challis called down. He did, as she could tell by her vision wiping clear. It was still dimmed by the overlay of the backs of Rasalas' eyelids, but now Challis could focus well enough to abandon her slide-until-something-catches approach for a more decisive plan of attack. At last the vines thinned into skeletons that creaked and bent and sprang back into place when she jumped down next to Rasalas in triumph. She shook out her stinging hands, and… Polescos blurred bright as Rasalas' view overlapped her own, sliding over her eyes as he opened his.

Familiar dust hit them in the lungs when they reached the first buildings. The market was busy again after midday and at the end of the Exhibition, with clanking stacks of equipment for the street vendors packing the cobblestones. Red rock and exposed brick towered high and thin above them, draping them with shadow and forcing the market into a tangled web of avenues, dead ends, and double corners. Challis was treading on Rasalas' heels to avoid collisions. Activity flashed around her in twice as much flurry as he saw: the babble of caged macaws blending with the rich, musky smells of toasted nuts, bolts of cloth, and double the usual crowd stamping over their toes. Graffiti plastered the walls and seemed to shrink the elbow room by half. The noise, too, clattered between stalls until it was absorbed upward by rows upon rows of cloth hanging heavy on wires over the space, layered endlessly toward the sky, a domination of any available vertical space where the thrikes didn’t go.

A half dozen sleek, steel one-man crafts stood parked in an alley, lights blinking lazily. Challis and Rasalas slowed their pace to stare. No wheels. Unlike the rumbling box carts they were used to, these were shiny as glass and didn't seem to collect any dust.

"Visitors for the Exhibition." Challis had a hand hooked through Rasalas' belt as he maneuvered the foot traffic. She pulled him to a stop. "I don't suppose…"

"Makes sense," he said. "Sightseeing before they leave."

"What sights? Ooh, everyone's wearing circunets. Ooh, the air is especially dry today, what a treat."

"It's the Exhibition." He snorted. "Everything is in top condition during the Exhibition."

Someone bumped into him, moving quickly enough to knock himself spinning nearly into the parked skimmers. Rasalas caught him by the elbow. Metal rattled to the pavement. "Sorry, sir," Rasalas said, pulling the man upright. "Perdoni." The other was a wiry mustache with a jangle of armbands, but the eyes and mouth popped open as he shook himself free from the grip in haste.

"Do you –" Rasalas tried not to be offended. "Do you know who these skimmers belong to? Are they from Arrkagongol?"

The other just stared at him, then at Challis. She had picked up the metal object and was trying to retrieve her wrist from the two clamps that had snapped on like a crocodile's jaws. Almost annoyed, the man reached out and tugged it off. Then, with words that any flux cropper would say but nobody holding a Cormellican-tech swivelshot would say, he said, "Crickin' high class Arrk execs. Who else?" before trotting away.

"Helpful," Rasalas muttered after him. "But no time anyway."

"We'll look later," Challis promised, nudging him forward. Nobody else gave them more than a sneering glance at their stained croppers' garb.

Cool mist found them as they turned off the main roadway. Challis turned her face up toward the rusty pipes releasing vapor into the air. The water droplets scattered fresh flux to the sick city in tiny doses, but it was only putting a damp cloth to the forehead of a burning fever.

The street halted at a mighty slab of canyon wall. Two footpaths ran along it in mirror image to each other as they zigzagged back and forth up the face. The Gannagens threaded their way up, pausing near the top to take in the cleaner air and gaze from on high at the streets below and the donkey-carts the size of toys. A high-pitched trill sounded from a patrolman's whistle in the distance.

They ducked at a shuffle thump WHOOSH that burst over their heads.

A thrike went airborne, shoving off the top edge to swoop out over the drop. Its spiny silhouette seemed to hover there, unmoving, thrike and rider as one in a single shot of pure poise just long enough to stop your heart before the wings rose and pumped the winds to gain altitude.

Challis watched its course until it was just a dancing pinprick against the sky before it disappeared to the south. A sense of loss was all that was left behind, with only Challis there to collect it. She turned her back as if her own future had flown away without her.

The famous Polescos pterosaur grounds accounted for nearly a quarter of the acreage of the district. Open lots without so much as a weed ranged from one to three acres across, nesting against each other in cascading levels to form a sprawling multi-sectioned courtyard complex. The furthest one sat fifty feet higher than the lowest point of the grounds where the Gannagens stood. A double row of stables lined one side of each lot, and near these were the wide staircases and rampways that led from one platform to another.

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Usually the courtyards were scattered with equipment boards and saddle racks, but over the course of the Exhibition they had been kept clear for the displays and demonstrations of Polescos' finest. Now, dust puffed into the air as golden pterosaurs tramped about and flapped at their handlers. It was tricky to share space with a thrike, especially when dismounted: not only was it a predatory animal with a short temper at best, but the thrike was so top-heavy that it steadied itself forward on its wing joints as limbs, the wingtips sticking up on either side and waddling against a second set of smaller wings underneath. A human looked very tiny and insignificant standing under the thrike's head between the clumping joints, not too close to the clawed feet. The best way to mount its saddle was to trek around to the back and climb up directly over the tail (a rear-mount, they called it), holding the fully extended lead line and praying the thrike wouldn't crouch and catapult itself into the air with its powerful forelimbs before you were ready. The saddle was equipped with a loosely rolled rope ladder over the tail for such cases. The first lessons a windworker learned were how to slide and grab the ladder without dislocating a shoulder or elbow, then how to fall and land safely if a thrike simply tipped you off.

The closest thrike was a few paces away from the Gannagens when it gave a gargling shriek and knocked its wing into a saddle rack. The rack rolled smack into the twins, and a trayful of currying tools tumbled to the sand with small clouds of dust.

Rasalas and Challis shared a mutual sinking of the stomach as they met cold gazes from both thrike and windworker cadet.

"Teakle," Rasalas said. Wealthy schoolmate turned adult, Corvin Teakle still had the same dirt-red hair, now flattened from his helmet. He wore the strapping jacket of a Vortesharken and carbon eye black greased onto his cheekbones, which were so high they gave him a perpetual squint. His face always looked a twitch away from a ready smile, but the twins knew otherwise.

Challis crouched to scoop up the fallen tools and avoid looking at Corvin. But the avoidee was pointedly attuned to her movements, without making eye contact, until she straightened and had no choice but to face his scowl and swallow stupidly.

"Gannagens," he said. It sounded like an expletive.

"Thanks, Chall," Rasalas said, pushing aside the equipment rack. They stepped back as another gust of wind came from the thrike's wings. "Nugget, this one's wound up tight. Has it been fed, or will it turn on us?"

"Of course, he has." Corvin had the discretion not to scoff. "Headed out to patrol in a few beats."

Challis, her nerves back under control, lifted the eyebrows.

"Oh, sorry," she said. "We weren't talking about the thrike."

At his marvelous expression, Challis fought back a laugh. Rasalas was seized by a sudden coughing fit. Corvin darted a glance to either side.

"I've gotten worse. From better," he said snidely. "Word's gotten around about your hospital history. Turns out having your brain doused in flux so you can hold your brother captive isn't a ride on the breeze." He gave Challis a grim smile, squinting straight into her eyes as if she were some bizarre museum piece. "Maybe our neighborhood nutcase is just a waste of flux after all."

The scars on the back of Challis' head tingled. A hot ball of defiance rose in her throat, but before it could form itself into words Challis forced her mouth into a baleful frown. "Look at you, making deductions," she said quietly. "Ras, stop coughing and help the poor man before he hurts himself."

Something snapped in Corvin's manner, and he let the tension drop like a bomb. It exploded into a shout. "What the hell is wrong with you? We flopped the most important checkpoint in the race because you disappeared, and Gendracco Tofflar damn near got killed doing both runs solo when I didn't have any of my blasted gear!"

The thrike released a bone-jarring screech that made them all duck back and slap their hands to their ears. Corvin spun to snatch the harness, hunching his shoulders, arms up to protect his head from the thrike's wildly swinging beak. Rasalas moved sideways so Challis was behind him. Both were on the balls of their feet, ready to move, but held their ground as the thrike jerked savagely toward them.

"Ground it, right now," Rasalas said in a low, harsh tone. "Teakle!"

Challis' face flushed hot. Floxogelene particles, or flux, loose in the air and triggered to life by the thrike's activity, buzzed maddeningly in popping shimmers until Corvin forced the thrike to a standstill. He gripped it around the lower jaw, half-gloved fingers digging in between the wicked teeth. Even as his voice soothed, a tremor still carried his words – which was to be expected. Working with thrikes didn't make you invincible.

The flux washed over them in a tingling rush, driving Challis to move, to keep it going, to let her emotions fly up and off the scale. She knew that if she gave in, flux would both feed her actions and result from them and the vicious cycle would increase momentum until voices rose, hate boiled up, and any hope of human civility would devolve into survival of the fittest. You could kill or be killed over a trifle in Oedolos, and all you had to do was lose perspective for a few ticks. Flux, as everyone learned from a young age in a windy canyon, was as dangerous as it was life-giving. Control or be controlled.

With each of them bracing hard against the flux, the twins finally felt the air settle as Corvin's words turned on them. "If you step out of line again, I'll let him at you." He kept a tight hold on the thrike, not looking at them. "You have no place anywhere near the races to begin with. If Rib-eye had a lick of sense, he'd assign you to the mud barns with the bucks. Filth enough for you back there."

Before Rasalas could respond, Challis gave his shoulder a gentle push to the side and stepped forward.

"Listen, Corvin," she said, extending a hand toward him. "I'm sorry. Alright? It's my fault you didn't get your equipment. I'll make sure Rib-eye doesn't take anything out on you for what happened."

"He'd better not," Corvin said, but the fire dwindled out of his tone. There was only the stung pride of one of Polescos' best racers for missing out on his performance. He took her hand and gave it a firm shake. "Also the front panels of my saddle need stripping."

"Gannagens!"

Rasalas shaded his eyes toward the shout from the far side of the courtyard, where someone was signaling them to come. Corvin grinned.

"Not a waste of flux after all." Then he pulled his thrike away, snorting to himself.

"Idiot," Rasalas muttered after him.

Forge was busy looking through a pile of heptocard sheets, poised on the balls of his feet as if snatching a moment with his charts before bustling off. He didn't look up as the Gannagens approached. One hand, however, strayed to the buffalo lash at his belt. It was a knotted flail of leather strips that could pierce and burn like a spray of sparks.

"There you are. The state of this place," he said simply. Jogghert Forge, or Rib-eye as he was known to his employees, was scar-streaked and the deep mottled pink of fresh steak from his years as stablemaster, which kept him as limber as a man in his thirties. Rumor had it that he was well past ninety. Surrounded by the whirling flux fields activated by the pterosaurs, Rib-eye lived in a state of constant recharging and had so far refused to sink into the stillness and slowness of age. Such was the world in which you stopped moving to stop living.

The Gannagens straightened, hands clasped behind their backs. He finally looked at them, and kept looking at them while he guzzled long and slow from a large canteen. Challis licked her lips.

Rib-eye popped the lid back on and cleared his throat. "The problem with this trauflen city," he said. "It's too long and skinny. Two different worlds in the north and south ends. Shows in the people, too."

His eyes remained on Challis, narrowing as if suspicious, as if she had anything to do with what he was talking about. She swallowed.

"Sir?"

Forge shook his head briefly. "Enough standing around. Mud barns. Buck's at a standstill on his way out. Once that's done, I want all show stalls clean and shiny by twelfth bell. Then you'll meet Scat at the showgrounds and get to work. In the meantime, think on this," he said, stepping a bit closer. He stood at matched height with Rasalas, if double-barreled from his neck down to his steel-toed boots. "You put some of my Vortesharken in, as you Oledrocca put it, 'in a pickle' today. During the Exhibition." He clicked his tongue. "Shame. But we'll talk later."

He started to swagger past but stopped at a low mutter from Rasalas.

"Problem?" he asked quietly.

The other met his eyes, trying to hide a smile. "No, sir. Just… glad it's almost over."

The twins did not like the look on Rib-eye's face, or the way he nodded slowly, glancing between them.

"I bet you are."