The book of poetry is the last item in the bag. I pull it out, smoothing the cover with my hands. It opens effortlessly to the most read page.
Remember to be strong.
The trees do their duty—
Tho’ bound to the earth
They are nothing without light,
Invisible gasps, the weeping sky.
Dad never meant for me to see this poem. But I don’t care. I’ll own it anyway. For Dyl’s sake, I’ll forget how he made my weakness into a living thing, so much larger than I was. I’ll be strong for her.
“Take it. I should have given it to you before.” I hand the tome to Ana, who flattens it against her chest, eyes closed. I hug her tightly, book and all, and she stifles a cry.
Cy’s old climbing shoes lay dark and tangled in the corner. I pull off my soft boots and start to lace them on tightly. He won’t be happy once he realizes his climbing lesson helped deliver me to Aureus.
I jump onto the bed, piling up the cushions on a chair, and lift myself through the middle window. My muscles are still sore from my climbing session. It takes a lot of maneuvering not to jostle the vials under my shirt. Ana holds Dyl’s purse with its precious cargo. Once I’m halfway out, I find a finger hold above my room where the thin metal slats run horizontally. Luckily, the agriplane shields Neia from difficult weather, so the wind is mild.
It’s surprisingly easy to get out. The flat surface of my climbing shoes rests on the window’s bottom edge and I grip the slat with one hand, bending down to thrust the other hand through the window. Ana passes me Dyl’s purse, and I sling it over my head and shoulder. She puts her hand on my toe and squeezes it.
“Come back to us. To Cy.” Her other hand protectively goes to her chest.
I feel a parallel softness touch my own chest. For the first time in my life, I feel like I’m leaving a real home. The realization twists at my throat. What am I doing? What have I already done? Ana blinks at my indecision, waiting. But I can’t go back. Dyl needs me.
“Good-bye, Ana.” I blink away tears and swallow down the fear rising quickly in my throat. I can’t let myself go there, not now. Maybe not ever again.
One thousand feet above the actual earth is not a good place to lose it.
I have to climb about thirty feet before the agriplane and the underside of endless framework begins. I call Micah on my holo, but he doesn’t answer. I hope that doesn’t mean they’re backing out of the plan. I lick my salty hands, making them sticky enough to grip the dusty metal struts of the building. I don’t look down. I don’t look anywhere except up for my next handhold. There is no room for worry when your foothold is a few inches deep.
Every few feet another metal strut encircles the building. I try to use my legs to push upward instead of relying on my chicken arms, like Cy had taught me. My thighs start to burn with lactic acid buildup because I’m not breathing enough, so I step up the rate and depth of my inhalations. By the time my muscles are screaming from the climb, I’m only one more strut from the agriplane.
Focusing on the climbing alone, I feel strong and capable. I swing my leg up to a thin metal bar running under the agriplane. The nearest supporting building is about a quarter mile away. I’ll have to shimmy over, holding on to a pole above me and balancing on the one below. Once I’m out of range of the tower, I’ll call Micah and try to figure out how to get down.
I take a mincing step on the metal bar, stretch to make it a whole twelve inches. My hands slide along the pole above me, and I ignore the blisters already forming on my fingers.
Twelve inches, done. One foot. Several breaths. Only 1,319 more to go. And I have two hours to do it.
Shit.
After I’m halfway there, I’m horrified that I’ve only got one hour to go. My blisters have popped and started to bleed. Dark red smears my hands and wrists. Everything is slippery and sticky, and my arms ache so badly, they threaten to fall off in rebellion. I can’t even use Cy’s brew to fix my hands, because it takes two hands to unstopper the bottle.
I watch one drop of blood lay a trail down my palm and sway, shimmering like a ruby in time to the pulse in my wrist. It falls off into the gentle wind. Down, down it goes, through that watery darkness and onto the building three hundred feet below me.
One excruciating hour later, I am there, but barely. The building looms almost next to me, a deep, brown monstrosity with weird brassy metal pyramids studding the entire façade. There are no metal struts, or handholds, or tail-holds, or anything. There’s no going back, but right now it seems there’s no going down either.
What time is it? Midnight looks the same as six in the morning or evening in Neia. I detach one sticky, painfully sore hand to turn my holo on.
“Time,” I command. For the first time in a long time, the green screen comes on without any static. The display shows 11:57 p.m.
So close.
“Micah,” I call. “Are you there? I’m outside the top of a building, the one with the pyramids on it.” I wait, my biceps and triceps on fire, my hands throbbing with pain, my knees jittery with weakness.
The green screen remains blank.
“Oh, god,” I utter. It’s too late. After all that, my escape plan is half-assed and I’ve lost my chance. And I’m stuck up here, one last muscle cramp away from failing once and for all.
What am I going to do? After a few minutes, I realize I don’t have an answer. I need to go back. But the idea of crossing back on the scaffolding with my torn-up hands is overwhelming.
A scraping sound rattles the silence. It grows louder and louder, from the building only feet away. One of the decorative brass pyramids trembles as if it’s undergoing a small, self-contained earthquake. A puff of metal dust spews from the corner of the pyramid base, and the entire thing retreats into the building’s innards.
A gaping square of darkness remains, like a metal tooth knocked out of the socket. A hand slides out of the black depths, covered in hard, green-brown bumps, followed by a face with the same lichen-over-bark surface. Tegg’s two glittering black eyes take me in. I am summarized in his glance: All this trouble for you? Not worth it.
“It’s about time,” he says. Not meanly, but it’s so matter-of-fact. Spoken by someone who’s won a game before he even picked up the dice. “We don’t have all night. They’re waiting.”
He offers me a rough hand, which hurts more than I want to admit. It squeezes mine painfully as I put a shaky foot inside the hole of the building. The second I’m on the solid floor, he takes his hand back and points to a transport. He’s as big as Hex, but without the kind spirit I’m suddenly homesick for.
Glancing at my ragamuffin appearance, he almost says something—cruel, insulting, who knows—but doesn’t. Maybe I look too pathetic to insult, or maybe somewhere inside that shell is actually a conscience.
“Let’s go.” He walks ahead of me, not fast, but too fast for me. My legs still feel like jelly. We end up downstairs in a dim corridor that ends abruptly with an iron door. Tegg shoves it open with a grunt.
A fancy char, even nicer than the Porsche, is silently purring in wait. The silver color gleams in the gloomy night and a tiny metallic jaguar decorates the very front. We must be in the back of the building, because there’s no lobby here, only a few refuse chute openings.
The back door to the char opens as I walk forward.
“You’re late.” I recognize Caliga’s high-pitched voice.
I duck my head and enter the backseat. Caliga moves over to make room, but not enough. The right side of my face and thigh tingle, and my tongue already feels heavy. My stomach roils in response. She really is like a bad pill, complete with awful side effects.