The air away from the bridge was bone-chillingly cold. Just like the air she had spent the whole afternoon in, but just a few moments running through the warmer air of the marketplace with its crush of people, and especially of the club packed with sweaty dancers, had been enough for her to acclimate to that more human temperature.
Now she was back out in the chill fog, and it sucked the breath out of her body. She gasped, drawing in a deep lungful. Her throat felt like it was frosting over, but the chill made its way to her brain, forcing her thoughts to run faster.
She needed that clarity badly. Her jump away from the bridge had taken her too far out into the nothingness but not enough forward towards the floating island, and the gust of air she had bet her life on wasn’t there.
Plus, her jacket was not behaving as a glider nearly as well as she had hoped. She was shooting out, away from bridge and island both. Who knew where she would stop, but nothing she did with her jacket was changing her trajectory at all.
At last, she let go of it entirely, letting it flutter behind her as she reached underneath it to one of the many pouches on her belt. In a flash, she had a little gun in her hand. Not the pistol that had come with the belt—that was long since lost—but a smaller instrument with a different purpose.
She rolled over mid fall, firing back up at the bridge above her. The gun gave a soft pop, and a metallic dart shot up to the bridge, dragging coils of a cable so thin it was all but invisible in the sky. She quickly lost sight of it, but that didn’t matter. She had just managed to fasten the other end of the cable to her belt before the dart struck home.
Her journey through the layers of clouds ended with a lurch and then she was swinging from the bottom of the bridge.
Back towards the gravity field.
At last, she had a chance to look around to spot her pursuers. The three who had been in the alley with her had dove out after her, but they had missed her sudden lurching stop. Scout tipped her head back as she swung to watch them spin their gliders around and circle back as they realized they had lost her.
She could see the other two at the edge of the bridge, looking over the balustrade. Then one of them pointed at her.
She didn’t have much time. She toyed with the idea of working her way along the cable to the bottom of the bridge, but the more time she took to get where she was going, the more likely it was that they would follow her there. For all sorts of reasons, that place had to stay a secret.
So instead she waited until her lazy arc reentered the gravity field. She dropped to the very end of the cable with another lurch, but she was prepared for that and quickly started swinging her body weight.
It was maddeningly slow at first, and although the clouds around the bridge were thickening, she could still catch glimpses of her pursuers in black. Which meant they could catch glimpses of her.
She swung harder, really picking up momentum. She whistled through the air, her jacket flaring out behind her. Then she arced out wide, beyond the range of the bridge’s gravity field, to hang motionless at the end of the rope for just a moment before zipping back the way she’d come. But not a straight line; a wide arc that carried her into the darkness between the bottom of the bridge and the very edge of the island. The glasses in front of her eyes quickly adjusted to the lower light, and she watched as the massive stone blocks of the bridge bottom drew ever closer. She was aiming for a point as close to the far side of the bridge as possible. If they lost sight of her, they might think she had swung clear around it, had leaped up and over the opposite balustrade.
At least, that was her plan.
She realized the moment she was free from the cable and was sailing through the last bit of open air, hands outstretched to catch the boulders of the island’s exposed bedrock, that she might have overestimated her momentum. She didn’t land on the ledge she had been aiming for. The gravity field was dragging her down too fast for that.
For a horrible moment, she thought she was going to miss the island entirely. Then her fingertips brushed rock, and she seized it, gritting her teeth as the weight of her body tried to drag her down from her handholds.
Once more she found herself dangling from her fingertips, but this time with her feet kicking over nothingness. Although she was at the island’s lowest point, the artificial gravity was still pulling her down. Or maybe pushing her down from above, where the mass of the island was? She wasn’t exactly sure how it worked.
With a great amount of effort, she managed to get first her left elbow and then everything up to her left shoulder over the lip of the boulder. But she couldn’t hang there forever, legs still dangling uselessly, no matter how exhausted she was. With another loud grunt she got her right arm up, and she leaned forward and pulled her chest and then her stomach over the cold, slick edge of the boulder.
Then she just collapsed, lying flat on the top of the boulder with the bulk of her legs still hanging over the edge, waiting for the muscles in her arms to stop twitching.
She heard a murmur of voices, and she lifted just her head to look past her feet and out from under the bridge to where her five pursuers were describing lazy circles through the sky on both sides of the bridge. Clearly a search pattern.
Scout pulled her legs up, got her knees under her, and scrambled back from the edge of the boulder as far as she could. Then she climbed over the next boulder, crawling deeper into the impenetrable darkness between the slope of the island’s exposed bedrock and the bottom of the stone bridge.
She didn’t know if the lenses she could see under their hoods were like her glasses or not. Probably best to assume they were. The darkness wasn’t going to protect her. And their search pattern was drawing closer.
She found handholds and began the steady climb across the mountain of boulders to the very center under the bridge. The bridge hadn’t gotten any smaller, and the climb was exhausting, but she didn’t dare take breaks.
At last, she reached her goal: a deep fissure between two of the largest boulders. She turned sideways, pushing one shoulder into the narrow gap, then paused to get a visual on each of her pursuers. She had to be sure they weren’t looking her way.
They were all under the bridge now, three on one side and two on the other, slowly making their way from under the balustrades to the center. None of them saw her, but that was going to change quickly if she didn’t get out of sight.
Scout sucked in her breath, then squeezed between the rocky protuberance that dug into the front of her neck just above her collarbones and the other that dug into the small of her back. It was like being choked and stabbed in the kidneys at the same time. Not pleasant, but she’d done this before. She knew exactly how to contort her body to slip through into the larger space beyond.
It was completely dark on the far side, her own body largely blocking the little light that made its way in through the fissure from the less-than-total darkness under the bridge. But darkness was no problem for her glasses, and even without them, she had come this way so many times her feet knew exactly where to step.
The fissure ran for only a few meters, took a sudden turn to the left and another back to the right, and then ceased to resemble a natural formation in the rock, if indeed it even was. Scout had her doubts.
Now she was in a long hallway lit with little red lights, not enough to penetrate the darkness at the cave mouth, but enough for even those without glasses like hers to see enough to make their way to whichever of the endless rows of doors they called home.
None of the doors were marked, and they were all locked. Scout had occasionally seen one of her neighbors moving through this hallway but had never made eye contact with any of them. They were all teens like her and Daisy, living here in the sublevel of the largest of the floating islands, down beneath even the level of the sewage treatment facilities. They all had reasons for living in hiding and no interest in sharing those reasons with each other.
It had been the perfect place for Daisy to bring Scout after selling the ship they had arrived on. Scout didn’t know how Daisy had even known about it, and Daisy wouldn’t talk about the things she had done those first days in Galactic Central, just like she didn’t talk about what she did all day now.
Travel through hyperspace on that superfast ship had been bad for Scout. She had been so very sick, not just during the journey but for a long, long time after. When the ship had arrived at Galactic Central, Scout had been too sick to move; she knew that much.
She knew she had talked to Bo, but only because Daisy had told her so. She couldn’t even summon a mental picture that felt real, and not like a daydream in which she inserted everything Daisy said Bo had told her.
Her memories were little more than flashes of images, snapshots that she didn’t think her mind even had in chronological order. But someone had helped Daisy bring Scout down here to the largest of the islands, to bring her all the way down to the sublevels deep within the bedrock, to one of these little rooms that must once have been intended for storage but had long since been forgotten by those who lived in the city above.
But the teens knew they were here. And one of them had told Daisy. And now it was home.
Scout stopped at the fifteenth door on her left and took a moment to push back her still-wet hair, adjust her twisted clothing, and take a deep breath before typing the code into the pad on the wall next to the door.
The lock gave a little click that was all but lost in the sound of enthusiastic barking from the room behind. The more persistent was a high-pitched bark only a degree or two away from being a yip. The other, more considered bark was deeper, almost frightening, even when it was clearly a bark of welcome.
Scout’s face broke out into a broad smile even before she opened the door just enough to slip inside without letting anything get out past her.
It was a damp, dark, miserable place to live, far from fresh air or light or warmth. But her dogs were in it.
And that made it home.