Chapter 9 — Raymond

The passage down from the Great Plateau was carved into the cliff face and it took you somewhere that gravity would rather you didn't go.

It was narrow enough that you had to turn sideways in the tight sections, with the rock face on one side and nothing on the other, just the drop, and below the drop, the rain clouds, which hid the ground and made the distance feel unfinished. The path wound in switchbacks, and at each switchback the wind came across the open face with purpose. It wasn't dangerous. It was just honest about what it was.

"Afraid?" Sam said.

"How about the collectors go first," Akio said. "There are more of them."

"Fair point," Mae said. "No rush."

Marcus went first. He didn't hesitate. He stepped onto the path and went, sliding down the tight sections, jumping from each switchback to the next, and was into the cloud cover before most of them had found their footing. His group went after him in the same rhythm, one by one, and the clouds swallowed them.

Akio stood at the top of the passage and looked down.

The rain clouds were a thick pale gray below him, moving slowly, and the wind came off them with a cold that had altitude in it. Below the clouds was the world. He knew this. He'd been below clouds before. He'd been plenty of places.

"Suit yourself," Mae said, walking past him to the passage head. "The things waiting down there eat E-36 for breakfast."

"Amateurs," he said. He cracked his knuckles and walked to the edge.

His legs stopped.

He stood there for a moment. The clouds below. The smell of rain coming up from them. The long drop.

"Ah," he said. "What a beautiful day." He did not move. "You go ahead, hunters. I'll stay up here a while, appreciate the view–"

"Face it," Sam said, already halfway to the passage.

He straightened. He looked at his group, eight of them waiting, their faces doing the thing faces do when they've already decided what you're capable of and are waiting for you to catch up. Nothing said. Just that expectation, held without effort.

"Alright," he said. "See you at the bottom."

He walked to the passage and stepped onto it and went down.

The white shape dropped from above him.

He broke through the cloud cover going upward.

The sky above the clouds was a different color than the sky below, sharper, emptier, the kind of blue that doesn't know about weather. The bird held him at the height of its arc and hovered on wingbeats that were enormous and that produced a wind he could feel in his teeth.

It looked at him.

It was, he thought, the most creature he had ever encountered. Not the most dangerous. He'd fought things far more dangerous. But the most creature. The most present and entirely itself.

It opened its claws.

He fell.

The cloud cover came up at him. He shouted — not from fear exactly, more the involuntary response of a body traveling downward at speed with opinions about it. He went through the cloud cover into the gray wet dark of it and came out the other side and the cliff face was below him and the ground was further below that—

The bird dove. Caught him. Pulled him back up.

He went through the clouds again, upward. The sharp blue sky. The hovering.

The claws opened.

Down. The clouds. The gray wet dark. The cliff face.

Caught.

This happened four more times. Exactly four. He counted. Each time the fall was slightly longer before the catch, and by the fourth time he had stopped shouting and was paying attention to the moment between the claws opening and the catching — that interval, the air moving past him, the distance to the ground visible briefly before the catch came.

On the sixth pass, the claws opened and the bird did not dive.

He fell through the clouds and kept falling and the ground below the cliff face was visible and getting larger and his hands found what they were looking for — the phterogs, teal-blue, spreading, catching the air with a sound like a sail filling — and he was no longer falling. He was ascending.

He came up through the cloud cover on his own.

The bird was above him. It hovered. He rose toward it.

They soared together for a moment, him navigating by instinct, the bird moving alongside him, slightly ahead, and when his angle drifted the bird moved its wing and the draft from the wing corrected his trajectory, gentle and precise, the way you correct something you're teaching without making the correction feel like correction.

"Amateurs!" he called down, to the people on the plateau who couldn't hear him.

He said it to himself. He was very pleased.

They came down to the plateau together. The phterogs dissolved, tiny dust-like particles moving back under his sleeves like they had somewhere to be. The bird landed beside him. Its feet made the ground register the fact of its weight.

Sam's chin was moving slightly. She stopped it.

"You scared me," she said. She bumped his fist.

"Rimfeosta," Chrys said. Something in his voice was not casual. "Extremely intelligent. Almost certainly the last. The original 33A." He looked at the bird — enormous, white, the eyes the color of the sky above the cloud cover. "It took a liking to you."

Akio patted the enormous head. It pressed back against his hand with the weight of something that had decided to trust you, which is a different weight.

"This is Ray," he said. "He's okay with Ray." He ran to the passage edge and jumped, phterogs spreading, disappearing into the clouds with his group following carefully behind him. Ray rose from the plateau, maneuvered once, and dove through the cloud cover after them. A sound like far-off thunder marked where he went through.

Sam sealed her lips around something she had decided not to say.

"We should go," Chrys said. He was still looking at the place in the clouds where Ray had gone. "Who would have thought," he said, quietly.

That was all.

The SKW camp was firelight and low voices when they arrived, and Leinder was at the doorway with a ladle someone else had been using.

He was unremarkable to look at. Chrys had learned to treat this as information.

He watched Leinder give the man called Chin a single jab in the nose — precise, without announcement — and watch Chin receive it with a guilty expression and produce a napkin and press it to his face and sniff.

"Anyways," Leinder said.

He watched Leinder's eyes while the camp talked around him. The green was young and warm when he talked to the cook. The green was something else when he thought no one was watching.

The child came from the bushes at full run and extended a small hand.

"Pleased to meet you, old friend." The smile went all the way to the ears.

"What are you doing here?" Leinder said. "We need–"

"Okay." Something in the child's voice made Leinder go still — not the words, the tone underneath them, as though the words were the surface of a much deeper body of water. "I have come to ask you something. Do you need your power back?"

The child's hand.

"You have my attention," Leinder said.

"Say your name. Mean it."

Nothing in Leinder's face moved. He said his name.

The pupils went black. Not gradually — all at once, as though the color had been a choice and he'd stopped making it. Smoke from the eyes, dense and dark, covering him from the head down, pulling inward, taking him with it, and for a moment there was nothing where he'd been.

Then he was there again. Taller. Almost Chin's height. The golden beard where there hadn't been one. The white jacket still fitting perfectly, still to the knees. Green light from both eyes, barely contained.

The child screamed something that wasn't language and ran into the trees at full speed and did not come back.

"Who are you," the cook said. His face was the color of old paper.

"The lost one." Leinder laughed, sudden and absolute, the laugh of someone who has just found something they'd been looking for for a long time. He clasped his hands. "Now, if you'll excuse me."

The grin was still widening when he turned away.

A strong wind from the west.

Aurora Henderson. Yellow eyes at maximum intensity.

"Denya dugen, children," she said. "Have you seen any irregularities near here?"

The boy smiled and closed his notebook.

"Diwag denya te den, Miss Henderson. Not to worry. Nothing unnoticed passes my sharp eyes."

"What a good boy." Her voice softened. She pressed an energy bar into his hand. "Thank you for your service." The wind caught her. She was gone.

The energy bar evaporated. Not dropped. Not eaten. Dissolved.

"The hag is slipping," the cook said, quietly.

"Now is our chance," Leinder replied.

He did not turn around.

The smile was still there.