"Maybe it's a seasonal thing." Piero's voice sounded very small in the sudden quiet.
Leal shook her head. The icefalls had been increasing in frequency for days. Something was peeling away the great glacial sheets that built up above the rock line. Up there, the world's wall was black and smooth, a fine weave of carbon nanotubes that was only a meter or two thick. Thin as it was, it transmitted the chill of interstellar vacuum from the other side. Water--and even air--froze to it. The glaciers that resulted would normally split and fall away in their own time, but they were hurrying now, as if they sensed the presence of intruders coming from below.
The only door home from this strange and perilous world was past those glaciers, at the very top of the wall. Leal and her companions had no choice but to come this way if they were ever to see their countries and people again.
She eyed the silhouette of Eustace Loll, who had fallen back from the lead and was watching the skies fearfully. The politician had branded her a traitor, and though he'd promised to lift that accusation if they ever made it home, he couldn't be trusted. If she ever walked the copper streets of Sere again, she feared it would be as a paraded prisoner, in chains and spat upon by the countrymen she had tried so hard to save.
One foot ahead of the other. Just keep walking ... She ignored her pounding headache and the ever-present knot in her stomach. She had a job to do.
They'd gone about a mile when Piero held up his hand. "Wait," he said. They all stopped, and in the new silence Leal heard it: cracks and pops and splintering sounds, layered over one another in an almost continuous grumble. This was like the sound that presaged the fall of a glacier, but stretched out, as if not just one berg but an entire sky full of bergs was about to come down ...
Piero swore, and Loll stumped back to blink at them both. "What do we do?"
The little junk-doll suddenly grabbed her ear. "There!" It stood up, pointing past her eyebrow at something ...
Miles above, a little string of lights broke the total darkness. It was impossible for them to be there--Aethyr was an empty world, and nowhere was as desolate as this long treacherous slope--and yet there they were:
Windows.
* * *
THE SOUND OF children playing faded as Keir Chen took the down stairs three steps at a time. He didn't have much time; recess would be over in fifteen minutes.
The stairwell was pitch black, and he had no light; to guide him, Keir relied on the little cloud of buzzing dragonflies that accompanied him everywhere. They were his second set of eyes, and they did pretty well in low light. Now they showed him the knapsack he'd stowed here yesterday. It was heavy as he picked it up--stuffed with food, clothing, and other supplies. He'd carefully spent months accumulating it all, taking his time so the others wouldn't see the pattern.
He wanted to run, but even if the gravity was low here in the city of Brink, he couldn't risk a fall. Some of these stone stairwells plummeted for miles through the foundations of the city. It took too many seconds to pick his way down, so when he reached the bottom he began pelting at full speed through a succession of dark, empty corridors and chambers where his footsteps were the only sound. His dragonflies had been gamely trying to catch up, and when he reached one particular side chamber and finally stopped, they came to zizz around his head angrily.
This little room had two doors, one leading inside where he'd just come from, the other letting onto a balcony. There was a spot next to the entrance where he'd stood a few times; he went there now and put his back to the wall. Then he knelt and picked up a sharp rock that lay by the door. When he straightened with his back against the wall, he lifted his hand to scratch it behind his head.
Keir lowered the stone, his eyes fixed on the black-on-black doorway that led outside. "Don't worry about such things," Maerta had told him when he'd revealed his suspicion to her. "You're a kid, Keir. Why don't you just enjoy being a kid?"
He took one more deep breath, squared his shoulders as he'd seen some of the older men do, and stepped away from the wall. He turned around and, summoning his dragonflies, peered at the latest mark he'd made. There was at least a half-centimeter gap between it and the last one he'd made.
There was no doubt about it.
He was getting shorter.
He'd talked to the other kids, and he'd been watching them. They were all growing up; but he wasn't. They were learning new things every day, a fine layering of knowledge on knowledge that was taking them all to adulthood.
Keir knew that he knew less than he once had, not more.
He stepped out onto the balcony, and turned around to look up.
From this little balcony the city was visible only as black piled up on black, its cornered intricacies lost in permanent shadow--all save for that one ring of windows in one high tower. With the aid of his dragonflies' eyes, he could see the city's overall shape, and size. Their vision gave him a little courage, too, when the distant winds sighed like voices from the empty apartments, and when he fancied he saw movement in the blackest shadows of the stone gardens. They let him see and verify that, no, nothing ever spoke here, and nothing ever moved.
--Which was good. He couldn't afford for anyone to find what he'd been doing on this little parapet, half a mile from the inhabited halls.
He took a deep breath and stepped up to something that sat swaying slightly on the parapet, all folded angles and parchmentlike planes. "Are you ready?" he asked the ornithopter he'd been growing. "Tell me you're ready."
"Not ready," it said in its mindless monotone. "Feed me."
"You said you'd be ready!" he burst out. "You said you'd be ready to fly!"
"Yes. Can fly. Cannot carry."
"That's not what I--!" He punched its wing. It shuffled aside. Keir stepped back, clutching his knapsack and nearly in tears. He couldn't go through with his plan today, but Gallard was going to catch him for sure if he went back, and then he'd never get another chance. Or maybe he could be extra sneaky; maybe he could pretend to be a dutiful student for another few days. He could hide feedstock for the ornithopter, maybe make it down here one more time to feed it ...
With a curse at his own indecision, he stalked back into the tower. He hadn't brought anything to feed the aircraft, because stealing feedstock was risky and anyway, he'd thought it was ready. But there was another potential source of the stuff here ...
He waited for his dragonflies to catch up and when their eyesight supplemented his, he could see what he was after in one corner of the room. He hunkered down and shuffled toward it.
A tiny pinprick of light suddenly glowed there, then another, then a dozen. Little gleaming midges flew up from the experiment he'd begun here a week ago. A pipsqueak voice sounded in his head: "I am the mighty Brick! Tremble before me, mortal!"
"That's okay, it's okay," he said in a soothing tone as he reached slowly for the half-open bag of feedstock lying next to the brick. His fingers were almost touching it when the little midges dove at his hand. "Ow!"
The air was suddenly full of dragonflies, and little dogfight battles erupted all over the room, complete with the pittering sound of minuscule machine guns firing and tiny smoking death spirals. "Do not defy the mighty Brick!" cried the brick. Keir ducked under the aerial battle and snagged the bag of feedstock. Then he ran from the room before the brick was able to bring its little howitzers to bear on him.
He'd had some compelling reason for making a minitech AI think that it was the brick. It had been some sort of reminder to himself, he knew that. But the details ... they were gone, like so much of what he'd done and intended lately. All he had left was a terrible feeling of apprehension, a certainty that if he didn't get out of this place, and soon, something terrible was going to happen.