The winged dance went on for hours, until the sun, reddening, touched mountains in the west. Dark continued to watch, unable to look away, in awe of the flyers' aerial and sexual stamina. Yet she resented their extended play, as well; they had forgotten that an earthbound creature waited for them.
The several pairs of coupled flyers suddenly broke apart, as if on signal, and the whole group of them scattered. A moment later Dark sensed the approach of the humans' plane.
It was too high to hear, but she knew it was there. It circled slowly. Sitting still, not troubling now to conceal the radio-beacon in her spine, Dark perceived it spiraling in, with her as its focus. The plane descended; it was a point, then a silver shape reflecting scarlet sunset. It did not come too close; it did nothing immediately threatening. But it had driven the flyers out of Dark's sight. She hunkered down on the stone promontory, waiting.
* * *
Dark heard only the sudden rush of air against outstretched wings as Jay landed nearby. His approach had been completely silent, and intent as she was on the search plane, she had not seen him. She turned her attention from the sky to Jay, and took a few steps toward him. But then she stopped, shamed once more by her clumsiness compared to the way he moved. The flyers were not tall, and even for their height their legs were quite short. Perhaps they had been modified that way. Still, Jay did not lumber. He strode. As he neared her he furled his wings over his back, folding them one bit at a time, ruffling them to smooth the feathers, folding a bit more. He reminded her not so much of a bird, as of a spectacular butterfly perched in the wind, flicking his wings open and closed. When he stopped before her his wings stilled, each bright blue feather perfectly placed, framing him from behind. Unconcealed this time by the wings, his body was naked. Flyers wore no clothes: Dark was startled that they had nothing to conceal. Apparently they were as intricately engineered as her own people.
Jay did not speak for so long that Dark, growing uncomfortable, reared back and looked into the sky. The search plane still circled loudly.
"Are they allowed to do that?" she said.
"We have no quick way of stopping them. We can protest. No doubt someone already has."
"I could send them a message," she said grumpily. That, after all, was what the beacon was for, though the message would not contain the sort of information anyone had ever planned for her to send.
"We've finished our meeting," Jay said.
"Oh. Is that what you call it?"
Dark expected a smile or a joke, but Jay spoke quite seriously.
"That's how we confer, here."
"Confer-- !" She dropped back to the ground, her claws digging in. "You met without letting me speak? You told me to wait for you at sunset!"
"I spoke for you," Jay said softly.
"I came here to speak for myself. And I came here to speak for my kind. I trusted you-- "
"It was the only way," he said. "We only gather in the sky."
Dark held down an angry retort. "And what is the answer?"
Jay sat abruptly on the hard earth, as if he could no longer support the weight of his wings on his delicate legs. He drew his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around them.
"I'm sorry." The words burst out in a sigh, a moan.
"Call them," Dark said. "Fly after them, find them, make them come and speak to me. I will not be refused by people who won't even face me."
"It won't help," Jay said miserably. "I spoke for you as well as I could, but when I saw I would fail I tried to bring them here. I begged them. They wouldn't come."
"They wouldn't come..." She had risked her life only to have her life dismissed as nothing. "I don't understand," she whispered.
Jay reached out and touched her hand: it still could function as a hand, despite her armor and her claws. Jay's hand, too, was clawed, but it was delicate and fine-boned, and veins showed blue through the translucent skin. Dark pulled back the all too solid mass of her arm.
"Don't you, little one?" Jay said, sadly. "I was so different, before I was a flyer-- "
"So was I," Dark said.
"But you're strong, and you're ready. You could go tomorrow with no more changes and no more pain. I have another stage to go through. If I did it, and then they decided not to send us after all-- Dark, I would never be able to fly again. Not in this gravity. There are too many changes. They'd thicken my skin, and regress me again so my wings weren't feathered but scaled-- they'd shield my eyes and reconstruct my face for the filters."
"It isn't the flying that troubles you," Dark said.
"It is. The risk's too great."
"No. What troubles you is that when you were finished, you wouldn't be beautiful anymore. You'd be ugly, like me."
"That's unfair."
"Is it? Is that why all your people flock around me so willingly to hear what I have to say?"
Jay stood slowly and his wings unfolded above him: Dark thought he was going to sail away off the side of the mountain, leaving her to speak her insults to the clouds and the stones. But, instead, he spread his beautiful black-tipped blue wings, stretched them in the air, and curved them around over Dark so they brushed the ridge of her spine. She shivered.
"I'm sorry," he said. "We have grown used to being beautiful. Even I have. They shouldn't have decided to make us in stages, they should have done it all at once. But they didn't, and now it's hard for us, being reminded of how we were."
Dark stared at Jay, searching for the remnants of how he had been until he became a flyer, understanding, finally, the reasons he had decided to become something other than human. Before, she had only perceived his brilliant plumage, his luminous eyes, and the artificial delicacy of his bones. Now she saw his original proportions, the disguised coarseness of his features, and she saw what he must have looked like.
Perhaps he had not actually been deformed, as Dark had been. But he had never been handsome, or even so much as plain. She gazed at him closely. Neither of them blinked: that must be harder for him, Dark thought. Her eyes were shielded, his were only fringed with long, thick, dark eyelashes.
His eyes were too close together. That was something the virus-forming would not have been able to cure.
"I see," she said. "You can't help us, because we might succeed."
"Don't hate us," he said.
She turned away, her armor scraping on rock. "What do you care, if a creature as repellent as I hates you?"
"I care," Jay said very quietly.
Dark knew she was being unfair, to him if not to his kind, but she had no sympathy left. She wanted to hide herself somewhere and cry.
"When are the humans coming for me?"
"They come when they please," he said. "But I made the others promise one thing. They won't ask you to leave till morning. And if we can't find you, then-- there's time for you to get away, if you hurry."