It was impossible to tell. She’d done her best, but her trajectory was out of her hands now. If she glided down onto the ice field, as smoothly as she’d first arrived, would she reproach herself for failing or would she rejoice that she’d been spared? Even with her brothers gone and her mind untainted, how could she want anything but to live?
Below her, the landscape kept changing, but the cycle of day and night seemed held in abeyance. She couldn’t quite be outracing the sunset, but as time stretched on the disk of Tvíburi remained fully lit. Rosalind closed her eyes and pictured herself suspended in the sunlight forever, perfectly balanced between every hope she’d held for herself, and every hope she’d held for her people. Never falling, never coming down.
She had not done everything. The runners were the heaviest parts of the glider, and they could only serve their purpose if she failed. She should never have brought them with her.
She opened her eyes and reached down with both hands, feeling for the clips that held the runners to the frame. There were four clips on each side; she loosened them all, then worked the runners free.
Before she could talk herself out of it, she summoned all her strength and flung the runners away, sending them back down toward Tvíburi. She watched them retreating, trying to guess their speed, hoping that the small impetus she’d given the glider would make a difference.
She was naked now; wherever she landed it would be unsurvivable. She was every bit as dead as her brothers had been the moment she’d pushed in the knife. The horror of it only grew stronger, refusing to fade away. But what had she expected? To be at peace?
The glider had begun to rotate slowly; she’d thrown more powerfully with one arm than the other. Tvíbura came into view, still far from the zenith. She looked away, up at the underside of the glider as the sunlight fell on the panels. On each one, she’d written the same words, repeated half a dozen times. She read and re-read the message, clinging to it as the glider turned, until she saw dusk begin to creep across the limb of Tvíburi. Her home world hadn’t let her escape; it was pulling her back to the east.
Rosalind reached up and gripped the handle bars, trying to stop herself from shaking so she could gather her thoughts and strengthen her resolve. She was not an inert piece of cargo; she still needed to do her best to keep the glider stable as she came into Tvíbura’s thin atmosphere, and to steer as close as she could toward a place where the wreckage would be found. The panels would be shredded and scattered across the ice field, but it was up to her to ensure that someone would eventually stumble upon the fragments.
Although we can’t grow the usual crops here, we are well-fed and safe. Do not be afraid to join us if you need to.
PART THREE
11
Petra lay harnessed to her sled, tense in the airless silence, stealing quick glances to either side to reassure herself that her mute companions hadn’t taken their eyes away from their telescopes. The catapult would only be released if Kirsi and Rada tugged on the two levers at exactly the same time, in a unanimous vote that was meant to spare them all the consequences of an ill-timed attempt. But if any kind of error was possible, that included a lack of consensus that would prevent her from being launched at all. Waiting six days for the next opportunity would be unbearable.
She was spared the anti-climax: the sled shot forward and she was in the void. She turned and looked back toward the tower, elated. The rope trailing behind her lay in an almost perfect straight line, but the tug of the harness on her shoulders was as gentle as she could have wished. Ingrid and Lena were working the crank so smoothly that the rope they unwound was neither slack nor tense, neither holding her back nor looping dangerously ahead of her.
She quickly returned her gaze to the view ahead, determined not to be taken by surprise. However accurate the predictions of the libration had become, the team’s ability to aim and calibrate the catapult remained the greatest source of uncertainty. The target might appear on her left or her right, outracing her or lagging behind. The only thing she was sure she could rule out was a head-on collision; they couldn’t have achieved that themselves if they’d tried, and their errors were hardly going to conspire to make it happen.
A star blinked, then another, and another. Petra registered the events but couldn’t yet extract any real sense of the occluding object’s position and motion. Kirsi had spent more than a hundred nights staring through her telescope before she’d managed to record a sufficient number of occultations to be sure that the old tower was even standing; until then, for all anyone knew it might have crumbled to the ground. Petra had been in awe of her then, but now that she was actually approaching the thing and still couldn’t interpret the fleeting evidence it offered for its existence, her admiration only increased. She would never have had that much patience.
Slowly, a dim gray thread emerged against the blackness, slightly to the left of the sled’s forward bearing. From this distance, it seemed as remote and unreal as it did through the telescopes: more like a flaw in the lens than a solid object. But now there was no lens to bear the flaw, and when Petra closed each of her eyes in turn, the blemish remained.
As she watched, the thread thickened slightly, but it was also moving away to the left. She needed to change her trajectory, but acting too soon or too late would ruin the encounter. She estimated the angular speed of the target, then waited and did it again. Waited again. Estimated.
She pushed the lever on her own small catapult and sent a rock flying into the void to her right, at the same time loosening the brake on her rope spool. The sled responded with a brief, satisfying jolt, and the extra rope began playing out beside her. When the spool was half unwound, she tightened the brake again, and the right-angle bend she’d created began to deform. There was a huge amount of rope laid out along her original trajectory, and the rock she’d ejected hadn’t possessed anything like the momentum needed to realign it all neatly behind her, but if she’d judged the timing correctly she’d have a good chance to make it to the tower before too much of the rope got the message that she’d changed direction.
The thread was a gray sliver now, slowly growing wider. Petra could discern a sharp boundary at one end—the “bottom,” by her parochial reckoning—but when she followed it “up” toward Tvíbura, it just narrowed and dimmed until it had no visible effect on the stars behind it.
The tower passed by on her left, but they weren’t done with each other yet. She looked back anxiously and watched the gray sliver cross over to her right. She’d overshot it twice now in different directions, but it was speeding up in the first direction, as it moved away from the closest point in the libration cycle, so it was only a matter of time before it overtook the rope she’d laid across its path—
The sled shuddered alarmingly, swung from side to side, then settled. When Petra looked back along the rope, the part she could see was pointing straight toward the tower. If everything had gone to plan, she was effectively tethered to her target now, with the tower’s own acceleration keeping the rope pressed taut against it. And so long as nothing slipped or broke, she would keep on circling it, drawn ever closer as the rope wound her in.