“Are you all right?” Kate asked.
“Just a bit dizzy,” Rosalind replied.
“Take a long, deep breath,” Kate suggested.
Tower workers had been up here before them, carrying the supplies and preparing them for the drops, but since even the weather on Tvíburi might influence where each glider landed, it had been decided to dispatch both people and provisions as close together in time as possible. When her gaze fell on the exit, Rosalind felt naked without her glider at hand, but if everyone had done their job it would be waiting for her outside, already assembled.
People joked and embraced each other awkwardly in the weightlessness, exchanging their last words before Tvíburi. Anya went through the exit first; there was something comical about watching her carefully sealing in the air behind her, as if that mattered to any of them now. But it would only be a few days before the second expedition began their own ascent, so it would hardly be polite to deplete the pressure in the entire top level ahead of their arrival.
As the others followed Anya, Rosalind hung back. She’d spent most of her life preparing for this moment, and she believed that she and her friends had done everything possible to understand and lessen the risks. But if every jump she’d ever made might have killed her, none of them had induced the kind of dread she felt now. It clamped her hand around the rail beside her so tightly that she feared her injured finger would break again, while every other muscle in her body turned to mush. All this, even with her brothers comatose. You have no idea how lucky you are, she told them. If only she could have slept through the whole journey herself.
Sigrid entered the chamber; only Rosalind and Joanna remained in the hut.
“You first,” Joanna insisted.
“Why?” There was usually no one more impatient.
“I don’t know,” Joanna admitted. “I just like the idea of being alone here for a while. Saying goodbye to the tower on my own.”
“If you don’t come through, you know we’ll come and grab you,” Rosalind joked.
“Only if you can catch me. If I jump down the center of the tower—”
“If you jump down the center of the tower, you’ll fall so slowly that anyone crawling on the ladder could overtake you in no time. In fact, the ice-farmers probably miscalculated: I bet we’re past the midpoint, and you’d actually fall upward.”
Joanna smiled, and gestured at the exit. “Sigrid must be through by now.”
Rosalind pulled herself over to the door, got it open and dragged herself into the chamber. Contorting in the darkness to check each seal, she lost all sense of the direction in which her legs had originally been pointing, until she realized she could recover it by thinking about the doors’ hinges. When she finally emerged onto the balcony, she was the right way up—at least in Tvíburan terms.
She raised her eyes toward Tvíburi. She had never seen it clearly, unobstructed, from any other point on the tower, so all she had to judge this apparition against was the view from the ground. But if the swollen disk was duly magnified, it still did not look close enough to be welcoming. It was not at all like staring down at the ground, not even from her highest jump. It was just a circle of light in the void, and nothing in her instincts promised her that she wouldn’t simply veer off course and vanish into the endless blackness around it.
Joanna touched her shoulder. Rosalind turned and leaned toward her, then pressed her forehead against her friend’s. I can do this, she insisted to herself. What was the alternative? Crawling back down to the ground, mocking all the dead workers and starving farmers who’d given her the chance for a new life? Curling up in the void and drifting away to die?
Anya and Hildur had already started dispatching the supply gliders. Rosalind watched as the two of them maneuvered the next one onto the catapult. At some point, Joanna had argued that the members of the expedition would easily be strong enough to send themselves, and all the cargo they needed, plummeting into Tvíburi’s embrace by muscle power alone—and no doubt that was true, but the consensus had been that a more consistent force was needed if they were to have any hope of arriving within a day’s walk of each other, let alone the supplies.
The eight passenger gliders were tied to a rail at the far end of the balcony, and some of the other travelers were already making their inspections. Rosalind dragged herself over and joined them. She had no trouble identifying her glider; the style and materials were exactly the same as the one that had ended up in pieces on the ice field. She checked every rod and every seam, but whoever had put it together for her had done a good job. Matilda, probably. Rosalind would miss her, though hopefully not for long; Matilda had sworn she’d make the crossing herself at the first sign of greenery on Tvíburi.
Anya wound the catapult again, then she and Hildur fetched the last of the supply gliders. Each of the twelve crates being dropped contained a mixture of items, so that even if only one was recovered there would be no essential tools or provisions that were entirely absent. Rosalind did not believe for a moment that all twelve could be lost, unless they’d miscalculated some detail of the flight so badly that none of the more delicate, flesh-and-blood cargo would survive the journey either. But she still found herself hunting for a reason for her sense of apprehension. The air might be poisonous, the soil might be barren, the wildlife might be fierce and predatory… but those risks had been obvious from the first day Freya herself had suggested raising the tower. Rosalind was only afraid of the dangers no one had thought of before—and her chances of outguessing all her colleagues and predecessors at the last moment seemed slim. She had to reconcile herself to that, just as she’d accepted all the known risks. Just as she’d pictured her body a thousand times, torn apart as it skidded across the ice, she had to picture the eight of them, alive and healthy, gathered in their new village, wailing and screaming at each other that they’d been fools beyond measure for failing to prepare for, failing to bring, failing to imagine… the thing that she could not conceive of.
She closed her eyes. There, it’s done.
She opened them just in time to see the last supply glider slide along the catapult and disappear into the void.
Rosalind grabbed hold of her glider and started dragging it toward the machine. There was no order of departure that they’d all agreed on in advance, but as the flier who’d tested every new altitude from the tower, she did not believe anyone would contest her right to go first, one more time. And she could not hang back, she could not go last. She was strong enough to be the first to die, if that was the fate they were all about to share, but the idea of standing on the balcony alone filled her with an unbearable sense of desolation. Let Joanna take that role, if it was what she wanted.
After Anya finished winding the catapult she helped position the glider, then she and Hildur held it still as Rosalind climbed in beside it and strapped herself in place. They had all rehearsed the procedure a dozen times, almost weightless, in a closed room three levels below. The only difference was that this time there would be no cushioned barrier to bring her to a gentle halt.