Running behind an invisible woman exercises the senses. Every once in a while, Induan’s mod reacted a beat too slowly and a smear of red petals appeared in a field of yellow flowers or a bit of forest showed at shoulder-height where there should only be sky. Her breathing was an audible tell to her location. Sometimes the salty tang of her sweat hung in the air.
Induan and I ran folded in fields of invisibility, forces that projected our surroundings onto a 360-degree image-bubble that encased us. They worked perfectly when we stood still, and well when we moved.
We passed Keepers harvesting apples and golden-berries, sweet nacks and potatoes. Twice we dodged wagons pulled by squat four-legged animals with thick necks.
Induan’s voice floated from ahead of me in a soft hiss. “Alicia!”
I slowed, reluctant. “Yes?”
“You need to eat.”
“Nag.” But this was her way of telling me she was hungry. We had been running for two hours with no break and needed fuel. I left my mod on. She did too, panting softly as she led me to a nearby bench. My thighs ached and the bottoms of my feet stung. The precisely monitored air temperature cooled my skin while the utter perfection of the gardens crawled up my spine like a thousand ants of irritation.
As soon as we sat down, Induan reminded me how well she could read my mind. “When will you stop running?”
“Are you tired yet?”
“Of course not,” she lied. I was tired, so she was tired. We’d been running for three days.
But it felt damned good, and I wasn’t sure I could stop.
A pile of nuts appeared on the bench between us as Induan laid them out and withdrew her hand. “Bryan is going to stay dead no matter how long you run.”
“And Joseph will still be on his way to join a war,” I finished for her. She was the practical one, the caretaker, the planner, the queen of politics and logistics. I was the risk-taker. These things were decided for us, built into our genetic makeup. Every emotion Induan felt, I felt harder. If she cursed under her breath, I did it so loudly people turned heads.
“Which you can’t stop,” she said in her reasonable voice.
I wasn’t ready to be calm and logical yet. “Maybe a day or two more.”
“We’ll run out of food.”
“We can always harvest a field.”
She snorted. “Don’t the Keepers of the Whatever and Everything on Lopali know where every damned apple is?”
“It might be fun to watch the Keepers search for invisible fairies plucking their riches.” I drank. My flask was half-empty. We’d need to find water as well as food soon. “They won’t care. We’re fucking heroes. They’ll let us have whatever we want.”
“I suspect they won’t forgive stealing. It’s not perfection.”
I reached for my share of the remaining nuts and sucked the salt from them. We could run a few more hours, but then we needed to rest and eat a whole meal. I pulled out my slate. “We can beat the sunset into Charmed for the night or get into SoBright with just half an hour of running in the dark.”
“Let’s go to Charmed.”
I finished the nuts. “I knew you’d say that.”
“We can visit Bryan’s grave. Maybe they finished his statue.”
I wanted to spend another night outside, curled up on a bench or underneath a tree, but my stomach had other ideas. Being a risk-taker was no excuse for complete stupidity. “Okay.”
Her hand found mine again, just a touch this time. She whispered, “Look at me now,” and left.
“I see you,” I whispered to her invisible back. A saying we shared.
A sudden rush of warmth crept through me. Not sexual—we’d never chosen to be lovers. Maybe something more than that, though. Better even than family. She had remained here with me when Joseph and Marcus and Chelo and the others flew off to go get killed in the stupid Maker’s War. “I’m glad you stayed.”
“If I hadn’t, you’d have run all the way around this damned moon.”
Good idea. “We could.”
I heard the slide of her foot on the path and noticed a slight ripple in the rows of ripening tomatoes behind her. “Catch me?” she called.
Running felt like joy. I’d run in many kinds of gravity, and Lopali’s was the one I liked the most—just far enough under normal to give my stride some bounce, but I still had weight to push off with. Practice had made us fast.
Possibly she let me catch her. We ran side by side past fields of lettuce and kale and neat golden-berry vines. We passed through an arbor of empty perch-trees with circles of neatly trimmed grass below them, the bottoms of their branches so low that a few brushed my hair.
We turned a corner and Induan stopped so suddenly I ran into her arm. Or maybe she was trying to stop me. “Amalo,” she hissed.
I blinked. Sure enough, the tall flier stood in the middle of the path ahead, arms crossed. He was taller than most humans, and thinner of course. All fliers were thin. His deep gray wings flapped slowly, poised.
I spotted his partner, Marti, just to the left, tucked into the trees to hide her bright red plumage. I should have seen her.
Stupid me.
Amalo was rare—a flier modded to see infrared. Induan and I were as visible as anyone else to him.
Induan and I both turned our mods off, springing into apparent being in a single second as the invisibility fields collapsed around us.
Marti let out a small gasp as she stepped over to the path behind us, effectively blocking retreat.
Amalo’s expression made me feel small and petty.
I swallowed and crossed my arms, imitating his stance. “Hello Amalo, Marti. I’m pleased to see you.”
“Are you?” he asked.
I had begged him for wings. When he’d finally said yes, I’d walked away, frightened. It had been a snap decision to turn my back on a thing I’d begged for.
Even risk-takers get nervous of really big risks.
Since the battle that had taken Bryan’s life had happened moments after I’d walked away from his offer, I’d hoped he hadn’t noticed. I tried to look as proud as I could, as steady, as calm. “I’m ready. I had to get over Bryan first.”
He raised an eyebrow.
Induan poked me in the side, telling me to stop talking.
I didn’t listen. “I did. I ran. I won’t be able to run anymore, not when I have wings. I needed to run out my pain.”
His face softened, although only a little. “You should be rested and well fed before you begin.”
I swallowed.
Induan glared at me.
Marti watched with what looked a little bit like amusement.
A sharp fear of saying the wrong thing settled over me, finally, a sort of awareness of the cusp I stood on. I settled for simple facts. “We are on our way to Charmed.”
“Someone will meet you there. At sunset. Run fast and enjoy your last run.”
I swallowed, panic knocking my heart. No decision in my life had been this big, or this muddy. But I managed to nod slowly. “We’ll see you there.”
He and Marti crouched, took a few small steps, and with massive beats of their wings that blew my hair sideways and stole the sweat from my skin, they rose into the air.
Marti’s wings were compact, vibrant, beautiful, as if whoever had designed them had been reaching for a work of art. Amalo looked plain beside her, but his larger wings carried him high more quickly than Marti could follow, and he looped in a lazy circle until she caught up. Once again paired, she took two wingbeats to every one of his. She looked like a butterfly while he looked like a raptor.
I shivered, watching them. Longing? Love? Admiration? Abject fear? Were they all one?
Induan turned toward me. “Wings are a horrible idea. They will limit you.”
“Because?”
“For one thing, you’ll be trapped here. You hate this planet.”
“Moon.”
“This place. You hate it.”
“Have you seen the statue of the first flier on Silver’s Home?”
“Probably.”
Could she have seen it and not been moved to tears? “I saw her the year before we came here, a few weeks after we landed on Silver’s Home. She stood in a park, poised for flight. I saw both pain and beauty carved into her face, and I knew deep inside that she was magnificent both in spite of and because of her pain. She looked so alive. I knew then that I needed wings. When Marcus brought us here—here of all the places on the Five Worlds—I knew I would get them.”
She looked puzzled.
“Don’t you see? That’s why I didn’t go with Joseph.”
She frowned, and for a moment she made me feel the same way Amalo had. “Are you sure you didn’t stay because Joseph was too busy saving the world to spend time with you?”
The sting of her words only struck me silent for a moment. “That, too. See? I can be honest. But no, I needed to stay. For wings.” I glanced up to emphasize my point. Amalo and Marti had been reduced to small dots of gray and red against a pale blue sky.
She crossed her arms almost like Amalo had, her smaller body blocking me from moving forward.
I could go around, piss her off, but I needed her to understand. “I can change the world here; I know it. I’m already important here, already famous.”
“As part of the family that changed everything. Not as yourself.”
Induan often said hard things, and I approved. But I did not want to hear this, so I said nothing.
“And that’s an end in itself?” she prodded. “Fame?”
Damn her. “I’m tired of being a shadow.”
“You’ve never been anyone’s shadow.”
“But I haven’t ever been anyone by myself, either.” She was beautiful, standing there, my mirror, blonde to my dark, her calm a deliberate balance to my love of danger. “Now it’s just me.” I hesitated. “And you. Now I won’t be in Joseph’s shadow, and Chelo won’t tell me what to do. So I’m going to fly. To fly.”
She waited, patient. Sometimes she had an impishness to her, a love of pranking others with her invisibility mod, but right now she just stared at me, calm as hell.
“I’m going to matter here. I don’t know how yet, though. How could I?”
She snorted. “That’s a matter of politics, not wings. Not your strong suit.”
Damn her. I shifted the subject. “Maybe we’ll get news of the fleets today.”
“We chose to skip the war.” Induan shook her head. “We’d best get running, and you’d better love every step.”
So she wasn’t going to try and stop me. “Is that why you think I’m running?”
She nodded. “I think you know wings are not the answer to anything you need.” She turned away from me, clearly not expecting an answer.
I looked up as we stepped out from under the trees. Fliers swooped and rolled through the air a field away from us. Not Tsawo—all of these wings were brightly colored like butterflies—two yellows, a pale blue, a set of orange wings with brown spots near the end, and a bright green pair.
Induan’s voice whispered warm near my ear. “Turn on your mod.”
I did, and its small spark ran along my skin. I started immediately, each stride just a little longer than the last one until I grew hot with speed. In my imagination, I outran the loss of my family, the loss of Bryan, the pain I had caused Joseph when I didn’t show up on whatever ship they flew away from here. I hadn’t seen that pain, but I felt guilt for it anyway.
I shouldn’t. I should revel in the fact that Joseph was surely happy to be flying away from me, locked up inside a silver ship and enveloped in its data streams. He had left me long before. He took on responsibilities which closed me out, but I never stopped loving him. Once, he had loved me as much as I loved him.
I tried to forget the shape of his face as I ran.
Bryan, my friend. My protector. Bryan who fell from the sky and was buried in Charmed.
I could not give Bryan life any more than I could give Joseph unconditional love. I could not obey Chelo, or help Kayleen. Liam considered me an idiot, or maybe a victim—two things I wasn’t.
I was better off without them.
I focused on my stride. Lopali’s even surfaces fell behind me and the neat fields blurred.
As we raced into Charmed, sweating and hot, we dodged a group of Keepers as they headed for the fields, walking and chattering amongst themselves. I saw no sign of Amalo or Marti.
We slowed and stopped. “I’m starved,” Induan said.
“Me too.” We had nothing to buy food with. I stepped behind a building and turned off my mod. So did Induan. We looked like two young women who could have been seekers.
The streets we walked through had been planned to the last detail. The edges of each garden were clipped, the houses clean and painted, the roofs perfectly maintained. Boring. Pretending perfection. I loved and hated Charmed and Lopali at the same time. It left me off-balance. Nothing was so simply good as Lopali pretended to be.
We passed Keepers in flowing uniforms, seekers and pilgrims and tradespeople in a multitude of clothes and body styles. Restaurants filled the air with scents of vegetable soups and mint tea and baking bread.
Fliers glided down from the sunset sky, landing near bars and restaurants and houses.
I expected Amalo and Marti any moment.
Induan had less pride than me, or perhaps she was hungrier. She stopped a Keeper and a flier walking side by side down a street, the flier bent slightly forward to prevent the low sweep of his wings from dragging the ground. “Excuse me?”
The flier turned bright green eyes that matched his wings toward us.
Induan asked, “Please, can you tell us where to find Amalo and Marti?”
I added, “Or Tsawo and Angeline?” They had been there when Amalo had promised me my wings.
“Tsawo shows up when and where he wants.” It didn’t seem like he approved.
Induan refused to give up. “If you were looking for Amalo, where would you start?”
He shrugged.
“Is there anywhere we can get food now?” Induan asked.
“Anywhere you like. Amalo said you two should be taken care of.”
He could have said that to begin with.
Our noses led us to a small cafe with baked nut crackers and fruit salads. The owner greeted us by name as if she had been waiting for us. We gorged ourselves. After that, we walked, watching. None of the primary fliers were anywhere. I recognized a few faces and asked, but no one knew where they were. Eventually, I spotted Chance, the doctor who had helped Joseph and Marcus change the fliers’ biology so they could bear children. I walked up behind him and touched his shoulder.
When he turned, he looked stiff, but then he often looked a little stiff. He was a man with almost no sense of humor, a bland man, mousy and unremarkable in every way. A slight but friendly smile touched his lips. “Amalo asked me to watch for you.”
I managed to return his smile and say, “Then it’s good we found you.”
“He told me you plan to try for wings.” He didn’t sound happy about it.
I felt my smile grow larger. “I want blue wings.”
“You’d better want to live. If you manage that, then you can pick the color of your wings.”
Induan looked as serious as usual. “What do we need to know about it?”
He kept his gaze on me. “The change is not like any pain you’ve ever felt. People die of it.”
I swallowed, stunned. “People die of pain alone?”
“They do. Or they die of the change. They die from the hollowing out of their bones, or from the lengthening of their legs. Sometimes their organs fail as the changes wrench their insides into new shapes.” He seemed to be enjoying himself. “Or they just go stark raving crazy.”
“I won’t go crazy and I won’t die.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Have you seen it?” Induan asked. “I mean, seen it happen?”
He nodded. “I am the current Architect of the Change of Form.”
Of course he was something with a silly name. “Really? I thought you hated the idea.” I remembered that from some previous conversation in the gold guest house outside of SoBright, not long after we first came to Lopali.
“I hate the way it is forced on children. You are making your own choice. I don’t have much sympathy for you.” He didn’t sound sympathetic, either. Maybe amused. Maybe exasperated.
Well.
Induan turned the conversation. “Will there be Makers helping? Like the work Joseph and Marcus did to help the fliers have babies?”
“No. Makers helped create the template, but they don’t assist with each change.” He cleared his throat and looked up for a moment, then back at us. “Marti asked me to take you to Oshai. They were summoned early, so they couldn’t wait for you.” He looked at me hard, as if hoping I would back out. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
“As sure as I want to breathe.”
Induan sighed. “When will we go?”
“Now. We’ll fly.”
One last trip on stupid fake wings built for humans. “Let’s go.”
It was nearly dusk when we landed at Fliers’ Field outside of Oshai. I felt like some ungainly half-broken bird wearing the clumsy wings with my shoulder blades screaming and my lower back spasming. I almost fell. Induan made a better show of it, landing elegantly with no bounce.
In the dusky light, the observation perches ringing the field looked like parts of a broken fence. By the time we’d finished racking our wings and cleaning up, the outside lights had transformed the field into brighter greens.
My stomach screamed at me. Flying used as much energy as running, and I’d done both for three hours each today on only one meal. Chance understood. After we hung our wings in the equipment hangar and before we left the field for Oshai, he pulled three seed bars out of a cabinet and handed one to each of us. I inhaled mine so fast I didn’t taste it.
We followed Chance to a white one-story building covered in flowering vines. It looked small and unassuming, probably so that the vast pilgrim population didn’t mistake it for a place they should visit. He rang a doorbell that hung under a small sign which said, “Center for the Winged Transformation of the Soul.”
The name made me wince.
The door swung open. A man in Keeper’s clothes gestured for us to follow him down a corridor that opened up into a room so tall a flier would have room to exercise.
Fragrant flowers hung from wooden walls, the red and gold faces of their blooms turned up toward dark skylights. Six fliers crowded on a wooden platform suspended from the ceiling on chains. On the far left, Tsawo’s black wings alternately glittered and faded to even darker as he fluffed them, making room for his sister, Angeline. Her pale white wings contrasted with Tsawo’s black ones.
Seeing Tsawo brought up a host of conflicting memories. He had kissed me, far more—certain? confident?—than Joseph. Tsawo’s kiss was a man’s kiss. Before that, he had been distant when he’d taught me to fly in human wings. He had betrayed my family when he’d stopped the fliers from committing to the war. But foremost, the kiss. I looked away.
On Angeline’s other side, Matriana stood with her silver, white, and gold wings. Beside her, Daniel stood a full head taller, his pale orange wings glowing in the light. Even though we’d met Daniel and Matriana the first day we’d arrived on Lopali, I still didn’t know if they were brother and sister, lovers, co-rulers, or all of the above.
Next to Daniel, red-winged Marti. Amalo wore grey that matched his wings, much like Tsawo wore black to match his.
I had expected just Tsawo, or just Amalo. I hadn’t been sure which. Not … everyone.
Marti saw us first. She straightened, startled, and then her face shifted to show pride before she schooled it back into calm. Proud of me? I thought so, and it felt good. She was the only flier in the room who had gained her wings as an adult.
They flowed to the forward edge of the platform, about fifteen feet above us, close enough their wings touched. Flowering vines that hung off the sides of the platform scented the air with a cloying sweetness.
“Come forward,” Matriana said.
I did.
Induan and Chance stayed behind me. The light tightened until I stood in a bright circle of it and squinted up at what I yearned to become.
“I understand you have requested the right to become a flier,” Matriana said.
“Yes.”
“Listen carefully as I read the promise to you. You must respond to each question.”
Her words fell onto me like welcome, hard rain. They were going to allow me to do this. I swallowed, the thrill of risk straightening my spine.
Matriana spoke slowly and clearly, almost as if she were addressing a child. “Do you agree to give up that which limits you to being merely human and to have your soul seared into the shape of a flier?”
“Yes.”
“Do you willingly give up all rights and abilities to have children?”
“Joseph and Marcus fixed that.”
Tsawo glared at me.
Matriana repeated. “Do you willingly give up all rights and abilities to have children?”
“Yes.”
“Knowing that the rights of fliers are different from the rights of other humans, do you agree to be bound by the contracts between fliers and their Makers?”
A bell of warning rang in my head, but I took a deep breath. Marti had talked to me about this. The change made you beholden to the affinity group that created fliers. I glanced at her. She had accepted it. She had survived. Whatever the bond did, I would accept it, too. “Yes.”
Matriana’s voice sounded like benediction and prayer, like permission and fair warning. “Do you willingly give up your right to be called a human and replace it with the reality of being a flier of Lopali?”
“I have never wanted anything more in my life.”
“Yes, or no?”
“Yes.”
“Do you agree to have your bones hollowed out until they are too fragile to run, too fragile to stand in the full gravity of Silver’s Home where you came from, and so fragile that they might break when you try your newly-grown wings?”
A slight frisson of panic made me want to flee and run for another three days, but I stilled my face. “Yes.” Finality and fear shivered up my neck and my fingers tingled.
“Do you promise to keep the work that leads you down this path secret, and to share it only with the people in this room?”
I should have expected that promise, but I hadn’t. “Including Induan? Can I share with her?”
“Yes. Induan has agreed to be your Keeper. She will keep your secrets close.”
I turned and looked at Induan. When had she done this?
A wide grin lit her face, a touch of triumph. She had kept a secret from me. It meant she could be with me, and in that moment I realized how much I wanted her there. I whispered, “Thank you.”
Matriana’s voice called my attention back to her. “Do you agree?”
“I can have Induan as my Keeper always?”
Matriana hesitated for the first time. “Keepers can be given new assignments.”
Her hesitation suggested an opening. “We are both from off-world. I request that Induan be always assigned to me.”
A short conversation ensued, the words hushed and impossible for me to hear. Matriana looked as beneficent as possible, given that I could also tell she was slightly irritated, the rhythm of her call and question routine slightly changed. “We will not bind her to you, but we will allow her to make that choice any time.”
“Thank you.”
“Do you want to become a flier with all of your being?”
“Yes.”
“To want it with anything less is to guarantee that you will die. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Will you honor the Ways of the Fliers of Lopali with all of your heart and to the best of your ability?”
“Yes.”
“Very well.” Matriana stared down at me, then looked over at Tsawo. “Do you swear to teach her to fly, to teach her to be a flier, and to teach her how to be here?”
He looked at me, met my eyes. Again, I could feel his kiss, and also his frustration.
I stood as tall as possible.
Moments passed before Tsawo said, “Yes.”
Matriana looked at Amalo. “And you will do the same?”
“Yes.” No hesitation.
Matriana turned back to me. “Repeat every word.”
I stood, waiting. I didn’t even breathe.
“I promise.”
“I promise.”
“To endure the change with grace.”
“To endure the change with grace.”
“To live or to die.”
“To live or to die.”
“In peace and in balance.”
“In peace and in balance.”
“To the best of my ability.”
“To the best of my ability.”
The six of them all stretched their wings as one. In a move as precise as the morning flight, they leapt from their high perch and landed near me so I was surrounded on all sides. They smelled of oils and spices and flowers, of sky and wind.
I trembled, joy and fear all mixed up together, both food for my very soul. A moment meant just for me, for the risk-taker that I was born to be. It was almost orgasmic.
One by one, they touched me, and I them, hand to hand while I turned in a circle to meet each of their eyes. In them, I saw pride, pity, and most of all, love.
The last made me blink back tears.