THEY LEFT YISH trussed in one of the storage gourds that seemed to pass for closets here, unconscious thanks to a bit of contact poison Gray claimed would wear off in an hour and leave the young gold-furred Pasquaran with no aftereffects worse than a hangover. Zanj locked the gourd, and waved them downstairs toward a vine bridge.
As they crossed, hundreds of meters above the invisible ground, Viv asked her, whispering in case the birds could hear: “What the hell are you doing?”
“That’s not me,” Zanj said with a nod to the glass tower that bore her shape, invisible now through the trees.
“It looks like you.”
“It’s not,” she snarled. “Whoever the hell that is, she’s turned my people into the Empress’s bodyguards. Look at these trees, so managed, so even. One branch every five meters, regular as clocks.”
“So?”
Zanj whirled on her. “These are mandalons! They should grow so dense even you could climb them! There should be bugs the length of your arm. There should be karshvines and zombie ants and hungry flowers, and instead there’s this mess, with all its edges rounded down.”
“You were gone a long time, Zanj. And they’ve been stuck here all that while. They might have changed things.”
“The trees? The sky? You saw that bird, Viv. You saw it looking at us. Who was that, behind its eyes?”
Zanj fell silent. The bridge creaked beneath them, and wind rustled leaves against leaves. Hong and Xiara breathed. Gray didn’t, not that he ever did unless he had a particular point to make. But aside from the whir of distant machinery, speeder lifts and who knew what other nonsense, the woosh of landing ships and passing speeders, the trees stood songless and quiet. They might have been petrified a thousand years ago, turned to stone, then painted by artists with dead, steady hands and slender brushes to mimic life. A good painter could make you think their canvases were moving.
Utter irrational fear trickled down Viv’s neck and down the hollows that flanked her spine. She did not know why at first. She turned from Zanj to the forest and back in search of anything out of place, and found nothing. Her fear grew. “You might be wrong. We just got here. They could help us.”
“Oh, I’m sure they would.” One corner of Zanj’s lip curled up, completely without humor. “Haven’t you been paying attention, Viv? They’d be oh so happy to bring us in. To wrap themselves around us. They’d strangle us to death before we realized it wasn’t a hug. I don’t know what sickness got this place while I was gone, but it’s not me.” Only at the end did she sound desperate. The rest sagged with the weight of truth.
“She’s right,” Xiara said. “I can feel the station. There are so many people here, all their minds woven through the Cloud. And they’re being managed. I don’t think even they know. It guides what they can see, it binds what they can know. And it’s looking for us.”
“Do you believe her, at least?” Zanj asked.
Viv didn’t want to. That was the truth. She wanted to believe they had come through the wall to safety, that Zanj’s people waited here to receive and help them, that whoever ruled them would understand the danger the Empress posed, and turn against her for once and all. That this, at least, would be easy.
Couldn’t they have landed, for once, on a non-shitty planet?
Hong set his hand on her arm. “Viv,” he said. His voice sounded even, and cautious. “The birds.”
Of course, she almost snapped back, of course we can’t hear the birds, Zanj said that already, but Hong was not the kind of person to repeat the obvious. And he was staring out and up, off the bridge, into the trees.
She had seen nothing out of place in the forest before, nothing that did not belong. But birds belonged in a forest. Small, bright-colored birds a passing glance might take at first for flowers. Immense black scaly-eyed unblinking birds with carrion beaks, flaking bark off the great trees as they shifted weight. Tiny almost-hummingbirds, sculling wings invisible. Sleek owl-like birds with heads turned at odd angles, their great dark front-facing saucer eyes fixed on the bridge.
On Viv, and on her friends.
If she had a flashlight she could have swept it through them and watched the jewel glints flick on and off as the birds blinked away the brilliance. If they did blink. But she realized with a chill that the birds would not have blinked, that they and the mind that guided them would match the light glare for glare—would have stared into the sun, not the fake sparksun in the station’s sky but the real fierce sun of Viv’s lost Earth, until they boiled. The will that led them was that strong.
“Okay.” Viv had to swallow to loosen her clenched throat before she could say anything more. “You have a point.”
As one, the birds fluffed and spread their wings.
“What now?”
“Now,” Zanj said, “we fight our way to whoever’s done this.”
“And then?”
She shrugged, as if there were no simpler question in the world. “Then we hit them until they stop.”
Before Viv could think of a response, the birds attacked.