This group would take one of those routes.
It didn’t matter which.
And that’s where she would take her break for freedom. The decision would be made with instinct, with her feet. She let herself imagine nothing but the running. If she grabbed a lead, then the only person fast enough to catch her was Diamond. But on the list of what was important, Diamond was a thousand slots higher than whoever happened to be second place, and these soldiers would almost certainly wrestle him down before he could confuse the situation.
Bodies were waiting inside the tunnel. The space was narrow and infinitely long, the only lights carried by hand, and the black air was always stale in the middle reaches. Rough, hurried tools had punched through the bloodwood, the rounded walls bristling with splinters that could shred fingers or entire hands.
She got into the line.
Everybody walked down the tunnel’s middle.
Nissim was ahead of Elata, his tall body hiding everyone else, and Seldom was directly behind her, long feet catching her heel once and then again.
“Sorry,” Seldom said.
From the front, the boss soldier said, “Quiet.”
Nobody could hear talking from inside the tree. But soldiers always wanted people to be quiet, if for no other reason than to keep their own heads clear.
The stale air got worse. Even good quiet soldiers coughed.
Diamond never coughed. That was one of those odd details in a boy who was built on oddities. Spending all of her days and nights with Diamond had made her understand just how strangely different he was.
Diamond was walking ahead of Nissim, she sensed.
Some kind of “good-bye” wanted to be said. But that would ruin everything. The perfect plan was to run away, buying distance and surrounding herself with strangers. And when nobody was paying attention to one girl, she would make the jump and be gone. The world could spend thousands of days hunting for her. Nobody could ever be sure what had happened, which was perfect. They would remember her with her purse. Maybe she had been carrying money. Maybe Elata was living somewhere close, or maybe she found some way home to the Corona District. The purse and the layers of mystery would help her friends imagine her living as an adult, wearing an assumed name and ten lives worth of happiness.
That’s what she liked best about her plan. Everybody would be spared, believing whatever they wanted.
Coming out of the tunnel, Elata blinked and wiped at her tears. Everyone was walking on a landing that pretended to be attached to a normal rich home. The palace was on the far side of the bloodwood. Middle-of-the-Middle was this tree’s name, which she never liked. What she liked for a name was Marduk, and just that name triggered an image of herself, grown up and prosperous. The war was finished, and in her daydream she was the person honored with the chance to plant a new blackwood at the top of the world, naming it whatever she wanted.
Marduk was the name floating in her wet, weak head.
“This way,” the talking soldier told them.
They weren’t taking any of the normal routes off the landing. This was better than she could hope. They were aiming for the landing’s tip. A small, heavily armored fletch was moored there, waiting. Elata was ready. She felt her legs relax, preparing to sprint, and her eyes turned to the right long enough to make certain that the closest gate wasn’t closely guarded. Ten good strides and she would be gone. She knew it. But then she made the blunder of looking ahead again, searching for the closely cut scalp of a boy who had almost stopped looking like a boy.
She didn’t see Diamond anywhere.
Surprise made her gait slow, and then a very warm hand took her from behind, grabbing her by the elbow.
“Are you all right?” Diamond asked.
She hadn’t been paying attention. Diamond was behind her all this time, probably watching her.
As much as anything, she hated living with his stares.
But now they were talking quietly. She assured him that she was fine fine fine, nervous but not too badly so.
Together, the two of them walked up the gangway into the fletch.
People noticed the two of them, and there were smiles.
Why did all this bother her so much?
FOUR
Mature bloodwoods were extraordinary in their length, reaching deeper into the Creation than any other tree, and even the youngest, most sun-starved among them were still giants. Each bloodwood was a spike of vibrant living wood. The wood was lightweight and indifferent to fire, and the brownish-red bark might be ten strides deep, while the branches resembled short burly trees growing horizontally, covered with dense tangles of blackish-green spines and needles that served as leaves. But no mere half-trees grew in the District’s middle. Only the greatest of the grand were allowed, each hanging alone with its army of stubby branches. Every morning’s light rose full and strong into the forest, feeding the overhead jungles and farms, and mouths and more mouths. This was abundance. Here the Creation had been mastered. Each mindless tree was endless and enormous, too old to count reliably, and even at a distance, too vast for eyes to hold.
From inside a quick fletch, the Middle-of-the-Middle seemed like a Creation in its own right, and Diamond almost believed that he could feel that mass of wood and brown bark and sap and people pulling at him.
And it was pulling.
The Master had explained: scientists manipulating wires and steel balls had proved that objects tugged at every other object, and these great pillars were cloaked with a power that revealed itself in the dance of every tiny sphere.
“Of course your bodies can feel none of this magic,” Nissim said. “These impulses are everywhere, but they’re minuscule. The demon floor is what we experience. The floor has its own relentless pull, and that’s what wrestles with us every moment, and every object obeys it, and there are reams of strong, hard-to-see evidence that it is the same for the coronas too.”
“They look up at the sun, not up at us,” Seldom had said, gladly guessing at the Master’s next words.
And grinning over her busy pencil, Elata had whispered to Diamond, “Which you knew all along, didn’t you?”
But the sun was under his feet, and he didn’t let himself think otherwise.
The ranking soldier had told Diamond to stand away from the window, letting him watch without being seen, and the boy thought about quite a lot while staring out at a rectangle of bark and landings and the critical government buildings that looked like toy houses pinned to the Creators’ wall. And then the fletch turned without warning, sprinting toward the adjacent tree.
This was not a long journey, but it seemed as if the roaring propellers weren’t covering space nearly quickly enough. Diamond stood between Elata and Seldom. None of them spoke. Nissim was making friends with soldiers and of the crew. Somehow the Master was able to say a few words that meant nothing, and watching faces until clues were given, it was easy for him to pick the one person onboard this airship who might answer his questions.
“They told us all about the corona,” Nissim said.
That wasn’t quite true, and it wasn’t a question. But there were slippery ways to steal what others knew.
Nissim smiled at his victim, saying, “It’s the same kind of giant that gave us the children, that boy there.”
The crewman glanced at Diamond.
“We heard the sirens,” Nissim said. “Of course we couldn’t see anything, buttoned up indoors like we were.”
“Oh, there was a battle,” the crewman volunteered.
He was younger than the various soldiers, probably in the fleet not more than a couple hundred days.