Rainbird (9 page)

Rainbird didn’t turn. She put her arms around her knees, closed her eyes, and listened.

The stars sang. To her. Calling.

The other came and stood beside her. Wings brushed against Rainbird’s shoulders, and the eiree bowed and lowered her eyes in graceful obeisance to the stars.

Rainbird sat and waited.

“Little worm,” said Diamada, voice thin and gentle and cold—oh so cold—as frost upon a window. “Why have you called for me?”

“Petrus needs your help.” Emotion—despair, guilt, panic—rose up blackly, swelling in Rainbird’s chest. “He’s dying. And I—I can’t help him.” She turned her face up to that bleakly beautiful one, for the first time in supplication.

“I see.” Diamada gazed out at the shattered filigree around them. “This place, this field. I brought Petrus up here once.”

Rainbird waited, but Diamada was not forthcoming. Instead, the eiree stepped lightly along the bones, feet sure and toes curling as they gripped. She ran her fingers on curls and knots of white. “Tell me, little worm. What do you hear?”

The stars, singing. In tones of fire, sopranos and altos. Darker bodies in basses and baritones, rumbling and grumbling. And the voice. That voice.

A flicker of attention from something great and vast and terrible.

NO!

“Nothing,” said Rainbird. “I hear nothing.”

Diamada stood poised, arms stretched out, fingers spread. She closed her eyes. “I hear the rumble of machinery a hundred and fifty markers down the spine. Two drills, an excavator. I hear men curse as they weld the bridge across the broken section. I hear the fear under their anger. I hear words in the spine—men talking about cards…another homesick for wife or lover…quarrels over…money, food…medicine…” Her eyelids twitched and her jaw muscles tightened. She ground out as if in pain, “I hear…noises, a jungle of noises, songs in disharmonies, discordance, a snatch of a game commentary, a woman crying as her lover batters her, a verse of song,
la la lo dum dum…
Marvin’s got the ball!... Come home, it’s late…In other news today, Parliament…
In sunshine, in moonshine, in darkshine…
” Her voice changed as she wound her way through the phrases. With a gasp, Diamada jerked, rose on her toes. Her features twisted in ways not human, grotesque, then smoothed. She dropped back to her heels, relaxing, looked at Rainbird. “Now do you understand?”

Rainbird stared at her, fascinated, repulsed, a little afraid. “The frequencies, the airwaves, the
noise
. They bother you.”

Diamada smiled thinly. “They play in our heads all the time, a background chatter we can never be rid of. You wonder why we crowd onto the Wing, live up so high? Because there is nowhere else to go to be free of the noise. Human noise. We cannot even fly away from it. Those who try lose direction, get tossed and buffeted by the noise, fall into the sea or crash onto land. Our senses are overwhelmed.”

“And that’s why you want the sunway cleared,” said Rainbird, slowly. “To get some space. Some silence.”

Diamada lifted a shoulder. Agreement? Diffidence?

“And so you won’t help Petrus.” Statement. Not question.

“Did I say that?”

“Then—” Rainbird saw the woman’s face, checked herself. “What do you want from me in return?”

“What do you have to give?” Diamada parried.

“Nothing.” The word was bitter on her tongue. “I have nothing.”

“No.” Diamada narrowed her eyes. “I wouldn’t say nothing. There is something you can return to me, little worm. My honor. My position.”

Which Diamada had lost when she’d borne a halfbreed. Rainbird swallowed away the bitterness that threatened to choke her. “How can I do that? Even if I threw myself off the Perch, I can’t make it so that I never happened.”

“You won’t have to do that. You only need give up all pretensions to being eiree. Accept who you are, little worm.” Diamada reached out, as if to touch Rainbird’s face, a strangely maternal gesture.

Rainbird swatted her hand away. “Why do you keep calling me that?” Her voice came out more irritable than she’d have liked. It was one thing to be mocked as halfbreed by everyone else, another to be treated as such by one who was responsible for her existence in the first place.

Diamada’s brows drew together in genuine astonishment. “Because that’s what you are. A baby of our kind, despite your age, one doomed to being a worm forever. You have not metamorphosed, and you will not do so, for you can not hear. You are not the only one, though. Many born of eiree parents do not have that which would make them eiree. They are worms, too, but none of them live as long as you have.”

“You kill them, you mean.”

“You have no understanding. They cannot live upon the Wing without being true eiree, and they cannot live below—who would take them? They suffer little, the poor worms.”

“Then I wonder that you let me live,” snapped Rainbird.

“I gave you a chance to make a life for yourself among your father’s people. Do you regret my choice?”

Would I rather not have been?
It was a question best pondered another day when she had time for the indulgence.

“And what does being a mother of a
worm
mean for you?” Rainbird crossed her arms. “If I weren’t here, complicating your life, what would you have done? Become?”

“I’ve borne a worm,” Diamada repeated, not looking at Rainbird. “I would’ve been a member of the Perch, if not for that. I was groomed for the position, but”—she gave a fatalistic sweep of arm and wing—“it was not to be.”

“You still want the job, though,” Rainbird guessed.

Diamada inclined her head. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

“So, how can I help you? Suicide? Sign away any pretensions to being an eiree in my own blood? ”

Diamada shook her head. “Little worm,” she said with a kind of odd sad fondness, “you think like a human. It isn’t
blood
that makes one eiree, it’s the wings”—she touched Rainbird’s shoulder blades—“and the
eirohan
and the
risohee
.” Diamada’s fingers were cool as they pressed lumps under Rainbird’s ears, trailed lines down her torso to her stomach, as if tracing a system of some kind. The words were new to Rainbird, but they felt mournfully familiar, as if they came from a dimly-remembered past.

These eiree organs had put her inside the circus ring, instead of outside on the hard wooden benches.

“Give these things up,” Diamada continued, “and my shame will be blotted out. The Perch will look upon you with disfavor no more. You will not succumb to an eiree knife in your insides some day, as repayment for your insolence to the stars.”

Give up my wings?
She’d cursed them often enough, but they were part of her. Part of Rainbird. Part of her identity. She’d come to terms with the great useless things; they were a tantalizing reminder that she belonged in the skies, that she came from a race of fliers. And what of those other parts that Diamada had named? Organs and glands that didn’t exist in human anatomy books? How would not having them change her?

“How dangerous is this surgery?”

“You are young and yet you are old. You will survive. A small sleep past, and you will awaken, eiree no more. You could rejoin the humans. Go downside with Petrus, live on the ground instead of crowded onto such little bone, like we are.” Diamada’s ice-water eyes glimmered oddly. “You could be normal.”

What if I don’t want to be normal?

Rainbird quashed the thought.
Think of Petrus.
She nodded, decisively. “I’ll do it. After we have Petrus.”

“Agreed.” Some expression flitted over Diamada’s face. Satisfaction? Rainbird couldn’t tell. “What do you wish me to do?”

“Unlock a door that only a flier can reach. I can take care of the rest.”

“Where are those cables?” Rainbird sprang up from the stool for the fifth time and peered through Kasir’s tiny porthole of a window. The glass was smudged and cloudy, but there were no cables snaking up the alley, with or without the boy Kasir had sent to fetch them.

Time was running out, inexorably. She had to get back up to the sunway with all the gear that a repair tech was supposed to have, not to mention the uniform and the forged credentials. The papers hadn’t taken long, since Rainbird had bartered a pouchful of sunmoss with a forger for it. She only hoped the Company had not changed their seal or legalese or the color of the paper recently, as was their wont to deter freeloaders.

“Come away, Rainbird.” Kasir looked up from a pile of old clothes on the counter. He looked, she thought, like a thyrine from the old stories, ensconced in his treasure-cavern. His face was gloomy above his mustache and beard. The Morality League had hit everyone’s business hard on Third Rib. “Staring out the window isn’t going to make the cables come any faster.”

“Petrus doesn’t have time,” Rainbird reminded him, but he looked so morose she didn’t push the issue. He was doing her the favor, after all, and she didn’t even have the sunmoss to pay him.

After I get Petrus back, I’ll find you double the amount of sunmoss, even if I have to crawl through every bubble and crevice in the sunway to do it.

At this rate, there’d be no one she knew that she wouldn’t be indebted to.

In the meantime, there was something more practical she could do to help. “Need a hand?” Rainbird plunked herself back down, and grabbed an armful of clothing. Soon she was busy sorting into sizes and neatly folding or putting on hangers.

The latch rattled, the door swung open. Kasir looked up, relief on his face, and Rainbird turned around, smiling, “Oh good, you’re…”

Miss Levine ducked her head as she stepped into the store. Her heels clicked. Binneys squeezed in behind her.

Rainbird tensed, lies springing to her lips.

Miss Levine said to the binneys, “Get her.”

Rainbird’s gaze darted to Kasir’s, whose expression was commingled guilt and relief. Shock sent a frisson through her.

He set me up!

Rainbird kicked at a coat rack as she leapt off the stool, entangling the binneys in shabby old coats. She grabbed the stool by the seat, held it in front of her, and backed deeper into the store.

“Rainbird.” Miss Levine sounded exasperated, like a schoolteacher with an exceptionally dull student. “Put that down. There’s nowhere to go.”

One of the binneys lunged at Rainbird; she fended him off with the stool, then had to disengage as another one sneaked around to her side. Her back pressed against a shelf full of hats and other accessories.

Rainbird’s fingers curled around a bowl of belt buckles and brooches. She threw it at the binneys, who ducked. Rainbird dropped the stool and kicked over several racks to cover her retreat, and dived to the back of the store, to the window. She was strong, she was small, she could probably squeeze out…

Something hard fell across her shoulders. A current shot through Rainbird. She jerked to a stop, muscles stretched for one agonized moment. Waves of hurt rippled through her body, edges of black ate away at her vision.

Rainbird shook off the dizziness, but hands had already gripped her shoulders, hoisted her up. Her trembling legs couldn’t hold her, and the binneys dragged her along. Her heart pounded. Kasir’s shop narrowed and spiraled around her, coats floating up through the air, rushing to envelop her.

Kasir stood in her peripheral vision. His stingstick dangled from his hand. His head was bowed, and he wouldn’t meet her eyes.

Rainbird rolled her head, so she could look at him. Her tongue was thick but she made it work. “Why?”

Kasir shuddered. “Business.” His face was ghastly. “Couldn’t go to jail…no money…supply contract…you must understand, Rainbird!”

Miss Levine. “That will be all. Spare us all your paroxysms of guilt.”

Kasir. “My contract?”

“Right here, all nice and legal.”

Darkness rushed back in. Rainbird tried to keep her eyes open, tried to will herself to alertness, action.

Petrus. Petrus is waiting. I must get to Petrus!

“Petrus!” Rainbird came to consciousness with a jerk. “Ow!” Her head thunked back against something hard and tears sprang into her eyes. Then she noticed the strain in her muscles—her arms were spread-eagled from her body, her wrists clamped into restraints set too high into the wall behind her. A dull ache burrowed deep inside her, her hands felt tingly and tender.

They’d even pinned her wings to the wall, somehow.

What, did they think they were magic or something?

Rainbird sagged against the wall, on her heels, but couldn’t quite sit down. She hissed at the movement. Her shoulders were on fire.

Through the pain, it came back to her. The spinal nerves and Sanders. The bad dreams. A cold voice and a coughing paroxysm. Kasir, shoulders slumped, stingstick in his hand. The binneys…
Petrus!

Rainbird forced her head up and blinked at the bare bulb, threaded into an electric cord, hanging from the ceiling. Then her gaze traveled down to the faint splash of light on the floor.

Miss Levine sat on a chair beyond the edge of the light, watching her.

Rainbird looked over the woman’s shoulder, made out the glitter of her dracine’s eyes.

She looked back at Miss Levine. Her tongue was thick and her skull buzzed, but she managed a whisper. “Please. Turnworth has Petrus. He’s going to destroy the sunway and kill Petrus. I have to—we have to—stop him.”

Miss Levine cocked her head to her side. “Turnworth is to destroy the sunway? My dear—what a story!”

“He is. He’s part of this conspiracy—Well, you heard about the bomb, didn’t you? He’s part of that group.”

“The eiree were likely behind the attack.” Miss Levine had that look on her face, the one that said,
Nothing behind door two! Try again.

“Oh, yeah?” The bitter taste of her frustration was better than the acid tang of her pain in her mouth. “Where’d they get the explosives from? It’s not like they have factories up on the Perch.”
Unless they grow exploding moss. Do they?

“We all know that the Up-High Market on Third Rib is notoriously lax about what they sell and who they sell to. It would not be surprising to me if the eiree had acquired all these substances illicitly there.”