I toggle through the gears on my bike, trying to coax more speed from them, more power. Sweat streams down my face, stings my eyes. By the time I reach Kidlington, my palms are sliding on the handlebars.
There must be other nymphs, bodies that weren’t cremated. If not here then in other places, across the Channel, across the ocean for all I know, in India where they dumped the victims of JI2 into the water. And now what? If they catch her, it will be worse than if they had cremated her in the first place.
Shit, shit, shit.
I turn onto the gravel road into the cement works, leaning forward to force extra weight into my exhausted thighs. Then—snap! Something whips lightning-fast against my shin. The bike stutters and I’m somersaulting over the handlebars. I hit gravel, flaying my jeans and shredding the skin of my knees, then my shoulder. I touch the back of my neck and my hand comes away varnished in red. Numbness, no pain yet. Nothing but a hot ache in my muscles as I stagger to my feet. The bike is completely mangled.
You have about ten seconds before the pain catches up with you.
Right. I begin to run.
The chimney is ahead of me, no one else in sight. Good, good. The first flare of pain sets my nerve endings on fire. My leg buckles but I force myself up. A red handprint on a concrete block, my contribution. Now I’m rounding what’s left of the raw mixture plant and I can feel blood running down my back as well.
I crash into the metal door of the chimney but it doesn’t budge.
The padlock.
I kneel to dig around for the hiding place we made for the key. A whimper escapes my lips, as my muscles spasm painfully. It should be just there…god, I can’t find it. The key. Where is it?
Ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk! At first I think it’s my heart pounding. But the sound is dully metallic. Coming from inside the chimney.
Blood pulses in my temples. My vision swims, replaced by an image of tiny hands pounding on a door. “Open the door, Soff! I wanna come in!” And my voice, high with irritation: “Go away, Kiki!” I blink and it vanishes. The key is tucked into my palm.
The padlock comes off in a single, abrupt motion. Then I’m pushing the door, hearing the squeal of the rusted hinges. I pull it shut behind me and slump inside, blinded by darkness.
She hits me in the chest so hard my filleted legs give out.
Instinctively, I wrap my arms around her. Hold on, hold on!
In that brief moment of contact: the slanted shape of bones, the hard keel of her welded ribs, her skin bristling with thousands of tiny pins, a soft layer of flocculent down, new growth. She is trembling, and it’s as if she is growing larger, expanding toward me. It’s her wings, bursting through the thin membrane of her skin. Those masses on her shoulders, those hulking deformities moving beneath the surface—now stretching out, unfolding.
Her eyes are lustrous, golden. They dart from left to right rapidly, observing everything in an instant, processing it all with avian intelligence. “Kira,” I whisper. She stares at me, head cocked, her jaw a solid, expressionless shelf of bone. The gesture is recognizable, yet so alien it makes my chest hurt. She’s gathering energy, bursting with it.
Then she explodes into action, somersaulting crazily away from me, battering herself against the side of the tower like a moth trapped against a screen.
Ka-thunk!
The problem is her wings. No space to extend them properly. She can’t get enough lift, but she’s trying.
Kira crashes into the tarpaulin structure Bryan built to protect her, scattering fairy lights and old two-by-fours. Then she slams against the side of the tower again. Her wings beat at the air, pinions spread like fingers. She doesn’t know how to use them yet, not properly. She makes it halfway up the height of the chimney before they tangle. Newly grown feathers slice the air. It isn’t enough to keep her up and she falls into the dirt.
I take a step toward her, but she’s off again. This time she’s learned something because when she collides with the wall, her legs are ready for it. They’ve become flexible, pneumatized shafts of bone. How did I ever think of them as brittle? She ricochets away and pirouettes in mid-air, her spine unexpectedly tensile, so that as she passes the centre-point she is already facing the other side, legs braced like mainsprings. She’s adapting. A staccato, double beat of her wings keeps her hurtling higher. It’s not flying, not exactly. More like a crazy game of leapfrog.
My head is jangling with thoughts, not all of them my own. Her confusion radiates out of her, but so does something else. Jubilation. How much she wants to be free.
“No! You can’t!” My voice echoes in the tower. I don’t know if she can understand me, but she continues to rise. She’s going to make it all the way to the top—and when she does, she’ll be gone.
She isn’t going to stop for anything. Not unless I can stop her.
On the outside of the chimney is a decrepit utility ladder zippering up the full height.
The first few metres or so look like a mangled train track. The rungs hang askew in their locks, and the side rails twist this way and that. My shoulder glows with pain as I haul myself up.
Grunting, I pull and pull, feet planted on the chimney wall. Every couple of hand spans I reach another rung lock: a big knuckle of metal that carves up the inside of my hands. Pretty soon my palms are a lacerated mess of skin flaps and deep, gory runnels. Close to the top, the ladder has torn away from the wall so I can’t quite get my feet against the side rail. I have to shimmy up like I’m on a rope, relying on the meagre strength in my arms alone while the ladder creaks ominously. The extra weight tears at my grip. I won’t make it, I won’t—and then I do.
One of my running shoes, the laces flapping wildly, slides off, and plummets to the ground. My gaze follows.
You could jump.
I recognize that wormy voice at the centre of me. Jump, it says again.
Nausea roils my stomach, but the fear is gone now. It has been replaced by an ecstatic whisper. Let go, Sophie. There’s a throbbing sensation in my palms, my groin, the arches of my feet. My body is bathed in a warm glow and my nipples have squeezed into hard pinpricks of sensation.
Come with me. A keening voice in my head.
I hear a thud from within the tower. Kira ramming her fledgling body from side to side, picking up momentum and speed. She’s coming toward me. I close my eyes. When I force them open again, I start climbing again. One foot, and then the other. One foot, and then the other. All other thoughts slip away from me. There is only one: Climb.
And somehow I do. The height is dizzying, and from here I can make out a whistling noise. I become aware of shapes moving around me, the heavy beating of wings, flashes of white in the darkness. That noise thrumming through me, deep and wordless, a straining symphony that seems to come from every direction at once. I’m not alone—and neither is she. They have been waiting for her, just above the cloud cover, waiting and calling.
I haul myself over the edge of the chimney, and stare downward. I can see her gaining height, rocketing toward me.
“Kira!” I call to her. “You can’t leave!”
Trace fragments of her memories muddle up with mine. Her fifth Christmas, tearing into presents before anyone was awake. Knowing she shouldn’t but doing it anyway, both terrified and delighted to be discovered. Standing on top of the toilet in the girl’s room on her first day of third grade, missing Mrs. Laplant’s roll call and then racing into the recess yard while no one was there. The space would be hers, all hers! She wouldn’t have to share it. She wiggles her butt at Mrs. Laplant through the window, daring her to look, but she doesn’t. No one in the classroom does. She is invisible. Totally free.
Then another. I’m staring down at her on the day she died. We are just within sight of the bridge to home. And I want her to go to it, away from the flooded Thames, but she knows, is utterly certain this is the wrong direction. But I won’t listen to her. She’s just a kid, she needs protecting.
Except she doesn’t. Her body is alive with meaning, with wanting. I can’t seem to understand it, but then sometimes it’s like that. Sometimes she feels something so strongly she expects everyone around her to feel it too: joy, sadness, disappointment. But they don’t—they’re wrapped in their own bubble of protection, and nothing of hers bleeds into them. She knows I’m wrong, but there’s no way to tell me, nothing I would believe. She loves me—I feel that—but she’s impatient with me too. She knows what she wants and what needs to happen. I will only slow her down. She pulls away from me.
Suddenly Kira is coming at me fast. A final upward vault, and her wings stretch to full length with the speed of a switchblade. They lock into a rigid length of feathers and muscles.
“Please, Kira!” I call out, reaching for her. “No!”
She isn’t mine to hold onto. They’re waiting for her and she wants this. I know she does.
I let her go.