Chapter 38

  Kate

  “L-look over here,” whispered Kaitlyn Carter to herself, only it sounded like “look ovah heah” because she was imitating Steve Irwin’s Australian accent. “You c-can see a w-wild K-k-kaitlyn Carter stalking her prey!”

  Crouched low, hidden among the dense rubbery leaves, she placed each foot precisely in the mulch, step-by-step. Birds chirped and warbled nearby, bugs buzzed, a distant crowd murmured, all conspiring to disguise Kate’s soft breathing. Her target came into view through the glossy green leaves and brilliant orange blooms: a very beautiful young woman with beautiful golden hair and beautiful blue eyes and a beautiful singing voice that she never let anyone hear. (“Whadda beauty!” Steve would have said.) She was sitting beside a pile of winter clothes, which were all quite unnecessary here in Skywater, stripped down to a navy-blue tank top and matching shorts, and she was attempting to pet a nearby cat. The cat in question looked a bit like a blue lion cub, and it viewed Elizabeth with evident skepticism. Little did either of them know!

  Kate pounced as Liz materialized a jangly feathery stick. She lunged forward and wrapped Liz from behind in a hug so fierce that Liz squeaked in alarm and jolted forward. Something flung Kate back into the foliage with such force that her passing left a trail of broken stalks and snapped branches. She tumbled to a halt against a tree, the breath knocked clean from her lungs. She rolled from her side onto her back and gazed up with blank surprise at the swirling flower petals that drifted down from the bright spaces above, dislodged by her violent passage through the underbrush. “Ahh…” she said, half a groan, half an expression of amazement. “Crikey!”

  “Kate?” The sound of a large creature tramping through the brush came to Kate. (‘Now how’s this? Here comes another one! Let’s have a look.’)

  Kate sat up. She tried twisting her back. Nothing broken, but she’d have a bruise back there tomorrow. Liz approached through a twenty-foot path of ruined ferns. Lucky those had broken her momentum before she hit the tree! “W-w-wow!” she said.

  “Oh my god, Kate!” Liz charged through the last few ferns and dropped to her knees. “I…are you okay?” Liz dropped Kate’s glasses into her lap.

  Kate put on her glasses and adjusted them. She was okay, and surprisingly so considering the force required to fling her twenty feet through the brush. The curious thing about that force was that it had come all at once, distributed evenly over her whole body. She had neither whiplash nor bruise from that push, for it had pushed every inch of her simultaneously! Now that she thought about it, it had been a markedly fun sensation.

  She giggled in Liz’s concerned face. “That was c-cra-c-cool!”

  Liz’s expression morphed from concern to relief to happiness. She helped Kate to her feet and gave her a tight hug. “Good to see you again, Kate.”

  Kate hugged back. When the embrace was released, she floundered through the brush to find her guitar. “How d-did you do that, Liz?”

  “I…I don’t know.”

  Together, they stepped out of the shady undergrowth into the strange daylight of Skywater City. They spent a moment brushing off dirt and picking twigs out of each other’s hair. The blue cat was nowhere to be seen, but Elizabeth merely looked around for it and sighed.

  “D-did you c-co-come alone?” asked Kate.

  “Yes, except for Callie,” said Liz. “No one volunteered. I hadn’t even thought about it, really. Kyko would have come if I’d asked him.”

  “K-k-kyko?”

  Liz smiled. “He’s a cardinal.”

  Kate’s eyes widened. “I d-d-didn’t even know there we-were C-catholics here!” She cracked up at her Isaac-tier joke. “D-d-did you take a p-picture of him?!”

  Liz shook her head, then laughed. “Have you been taking a lot of pictures?”

  Kate nodded fervently. “F-f-for science!” She whipped out her phone and found the album of Theians she’d been compiling. She had taken many pictures of the markings and patterns on the wings of the Theians. She’d been using this album to memorize their names, compare them to Earthbound Lepidoptera, and possibly make some sense of how they might be categorized and how their genomes might work. No luck on that last part so far.

  She sat down beside Liz’s pile of winter clothes on the bench and flipped through the pictures, showing Liz all her new friends and stutteringly remarking on how beautiful they were. There was clever Mormo, here was kind and motherly Polyom, this was Mux the curious scientist who had been mystified by Kate’s layers of clothing (and asked her to take them off!), this was the stoic Quorth who kept watch for the storm worms…

  When she thought Liz might be getting bored, Kate removed a whistle from her lab coat and blew hard into it. She and Liz heard only a faint ringing in their ears, but within minutes the Theians appeared: Shlushluth, who hadn’t gone far because he saw it as his duty to protect Kate, and Thlytri with him, and Flitch with her. Jeno, the butterfly with clear wings, accompanied them.

  “Aron and Jan have gone to explore the city,” said Shlushluth in his curiously forceful whisper. “They say they have seen a strange sight. Something about color. Yet this entire city is strange.”

  The female Theians crowded around Liz while he spoke. Their wings flexed in excitement. Their fluting voices overlapped:

  “You look just like K-kate!”

  “You must be ‘Lizzy.’”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “You have hair too!”

  Liz laughed behind her hand and stood to greet them. She raised a hand halfway for a handshake, hesitated with a glance at their tarsi, and then bowed with all dignity.

  Kate quieted the Theians and introduced them one-by-one. Each tried out the new ‘hug’ technique on Liz, with amusing results. Liz had to bite her lip not to laugh when tiny Flitch, whose head only came up to her thigh, fluttered into the air and hugged Liz by grappling onto her from the front.

  Liz was hungry (no surprise!), so they departed for a nearby café to take a light lunch-or-possibly-dinner before finding Eric and Isaac, who had both texted their presence in the city before either Kate or Liz had arrived. Kate had completely forgotten to bring money, and in fact did not even know what the currency was here.

  “White bronze,” said Liz as she showed Kate a handful of intricately carved pieces of metal. They were of varying sizes, shapes, and colors, and on top of that some had holes punched through the middle while others did not, and even the holes were in different shapes! Kate did some quick permutational math and realized that there must be DOZENS of different types of coins! Maybe hundreds, if there were more than what Liz held in her hand.

  “White iron,” Liz continued, “white brass, and I believe even white steel. They are the most expensive marks, or so I’ve heard. I only have a single mark of white bronze.” She pointed at a sharp white triangle half the size of a Dorito—though much thicker and heavier. “Then there are red and black and blue variations. Red bronze, red iron, etc. Value is denoted by a combination of shape and substance. A hole indicates that a coin has been ‘cleared,’ but I don’t know what that means. Apparently certain types of merchants or tradesman sometimes only accept certain metals. Maybe. Laska seemed a bit unclear on all this herself.”

  “So c-co-complicated!” Kate laughed. “B-but I’m glad you’re r-rich!”

  They laughed at this joke, but it turned out that Liz’s single triangular mark of white bronze, called a ‘white six,’ was enough to buy almost anything they and the Theians wanted at the nearest café. And it was a fancy café, or so it seemed to Kate. It was called the Silver Green, and it had a seafood theme. They were led by a cheerful almost-human waitress up two floors to a rooftop patio which allowed an excellent view of the surrounding city. Their waitress sat them at a corner table shaded by a lattice of blooming vines and a pink parasol, took their drinks for starters, and she didn’t miss a beat when Liz asked for cold milk, Kate for mango juice, and the Theians for fermenting sugary fruit juices.

  “Mango juice?” asked Liz.

  “It w-was a t-te-a test,” Kate said in a conspiratorial whisper, leaning close to Liz. “Also I think you should have b-been more s-spec-s-p-cifi- more particular about the milk.”

  The Theians, especially Flitch, had yet to overcome their excitement at meeting someone so similar to K-kate. Liz indulged them happily, chatting away and asking incisive questions about the Theians and their world.

  Shlushluth remained silent for the most part, though he listened closely. It was hard to tell with those compound eyes, but he seemed vigilant. He had ever since they came to Skywater. Was he being protective of Thlytri in this new and surprising place? The thought gave Kate a happy pang in her heart. That was so sweet! Kate spent a smiling moment envying Thlytri before she turned her attention to the city. She stood up and put her hands on the warm sculpted stone railing that enclosed the rooftop patio.

  Skywater City: vast, varied, colorful, ever-surprising. In many places, if you isolated a small section of the cityscape (which she did by shutting one eye and boxing sections in with her hands), it looked so close to being a city on Earth—maybe part of Rome, London, or in one direction perhaps more like an oriental city to which she had never been. But a closer look always revealed the cracks: the abnormal architecture, the wild coloration, the impossible floating bits, the stairways to nowhere, the docking airships, the bizarre wildlife.

  Other parts of the city played by their own rules, aesthetically speaking. In one spot, everything became tall and thin–much too thin, as though gravity were not a problem. One big neighborhood near the docks looked like it had experienced a tornado of paint that had left streaks of bright colors all over everything. In another place, so far at the edge of her vision that even with a mist-conjured spyglass she couldn’t see it clearly, the city seamlessly transitioned into a complex multi-level network of treehouses in amongst a forest of deciduous-looking flora that must have been hundreds of feet tall. She thought of this direction as north, she realized, due to the position of the small pale sun.

  If that was north, then west and south lay the sea. To the west it was close enough for her to make out the tiny specks of gulls circling over the labyrinth of wharfs and piers and masts out on the deep blue bay. Southward, the blue horizon was farther, and it seemed that the city became dull and dirty in that direction; the broad straight streets devolved into an impossible calamity of alleys and canals before eventually scattering onto a broad expanse of sand or mud that met the far southern shore. She couldn’t see much in that direction thanks to the glare of the clouds off the waters.

  And finally, to the east lay something of particular note.

  “K-kate!” piped a high, almost-musical voice. A soft weight settled onto her head, and the shadows of moving wings passed up and down over her eyes. “What do you want to eat, K-kate? You need more than juice!”

  Kate turned and saw Liz listening attentively to the waitress as she listed popular food items. The waitress was tall and slender and quite pretty, with darkly tanned skin and big hazelnut eyes, but it was her hair that put the “almost” in “almost-human.” This hair was a deep garnet-red streaked with lines of sapphire-blue. It cascaded in a great rippling mane down her back, and apparently down inside her blouse as well, for it emerged from the short sleeves of her shirt and wrapped in intricate spirals around her forearms and even up around her hands and fingers. Although it obviously originated from her scalp, it didn’t look much like hair in texture. It looked silky, lustrous, but somehow wiry and stiff. Parts of it were clearly holding their shape in a way that hair never should. Kate surreptitiously leaned to one side to look around the table and saw that indeed the hair-or-hairlike-substance wound in spirals down the server’s bare calves as well. Not only that, but it made up the sandals that the lady was wearing! She was walking around on her own hair!

  “Kate!” said Liz, snapping Kate out of her awe. Everyone was staring at her, the waitress with a polite professional smile, her notepad ready for Kate’s order.

  “I’ll have the s-sp-special!” she announced, speaking confidently to cover her embarrassment.

  The waitress paused, her pen hovering over her notepad. “The special is quorthum gaash,” she said.

  “D-d-did I s-stutter?” Kate giggled. The waitress shrugged and glided back to the stairs.

  Kate hoped that the special was edible for humans. Well, she’d try it anyway! That’s what Rebecca Carter would do.

  “L-look at that, Liz,” said Kate. She pointed to the ‘east,’ which was in clear view as their corner of the roof angled north. She didn’t have to specify what she wanted Liz to look at. Skywater City rose in a series of irregular hills from the sea in the west to cliff-like heights in the distant east. Long before those cliffs, and not two miles from the café where they sat, rose a hill taller than all the rest, and the structure which capped the hill stood above all others in Skywater, both literally and figuratively. It resembled a fortress, its high white walls reflecting the cloud-light with an enchanting pearlescence. Half-seen phantom rainbows quivered and shifted over the tall ramparts. They could not clearly discern the exact shape of the structure from their vantage, but Kate could easily guess. It was a six-pointed star. From each point of the star rose a tall crystalline tower that gleamed with refracted light. Six more towers, even taller, rose from the inner area, where Kate guessed the points of the hexagon would be. Finally, in the center of these twelve towers rose a final masterpiece: a great column of the same pearlescent stone that made up the walls. It rose hundreds of feet above the walls of the fortress, which were already quite high above the rest of the city.

  “I noticed it,” Liz remarked with a cool voice and an arch of an eyebrow. So practiced and refined was her slight, wry smile that Kate giggled.

  Kate re-created her spyglass–now with even more power!–to scan the walls and towers of the magnificent edifice. Some figures moved atop the ramparts, but she could make out no further details.

  “It’s clearly important,” said Liz, which was stating the obvious. “Notice the airspace around it.”

  Kate lowered her glass for a wider view. While flying creatures and machines and hot air balloons and all sorts of other nonsense crowded the skies, especially near the docks, nothing whatsoever flew in a broad radius around the white fortress.

  Six, thought Kate. What were the chances that somewhere in there was a big platform with six symbols on it? Probably in the middle. Probably at the top. Maybe with six doors?

  “That’s where we will have to go, isn’t it?” said Liz, echoing Kate’s own thoughts. Kate realized she was fingering the cool white medallion on her chest.

  Their food arrived with surprising speed, borne aloft on silver trays by the waitress. The Theians got right to work on their tall tubes full of juice, but not before thanking Liz very politely for paying. They invited her to Theia so that they could respond in kind. Liz looked quite pleased with her meal, not that she was often otherwise with food, for it was a thick slab of fishy meat covered in orange sauce, with curious little green and blue balls in a white cream to one side. Liz gave Kate a sympathetic look regarding Kate’s own dish, but could not keep a small grin from creeping at the corners of her mouth.

  A square black plate squatted on the table in front of Kate, about 30 centimeters to a side. It was flat but for the raised edges, and it was covered with a thick layer of dark gray paste that looked like frosting. Ten cylindrical objects almost exactly like sticks of sidewalk chalk were planted in the paste, forming a circle in the middle of the plate like a little pastel Stonehenge. Each was a different color. That was it, except for some tiny blue plant-like tendrils at the corners that flexed slowly and were probably just garnish.

  “You can have some of mine if you want,” said Liz around a mouthful of fish. “It is very good, though a bit too spicy for me.”

  Kate began to giggle, and this evolved into a full bout of laughter that caused her to lean forward and get some of her hair into the gray paste. “L-l-liz!” she said through her mirth. “This is am-m-am-amazing!” She drummed her heels and wrapped her arms around herself, causing Liz and the Theians and several nearby patrons to stare.

  What kind of creature, Kate wondered as she wiped away a tear, could this food possibly be meant for? But wait! Surely it wouldn’t be the special if it wasn’t something that most or any patrons would be capable of eating! And most of the patrons, as she could see, were somewhat humanoid. Therefore…

  What would Nicholas Carter do?

  Kate seized the purple stick of chalk, stirred it a bit to get a nice clump of the gray stuff at the end, and brought it to her mouth. She could tell from holding it that it was not chalk. It had a rubbery, fibrous vegetable consistency. Nevertheless, she bit down slowly for fear of cracking her teeth. The end of the purple stick snapped off in her mouth like a carrot. She chewed it together with the dull paste.

  She kept chewing.

  She blinked a few times.

  She remembered to breathe. (Important!)

  “…Well?” asked Liz, who had stopped to watch.

  Kate swallowed. “Uh…”

  It tasted purple. Violet. It tasted like starlight and cinnamon, like amethyst. And the gray stuff–it was sweet but not too sweet, bitter but not too bitter, rich and substantial in some sense that transcended taste and texture. It was like eating the idea of something good. “Um…”

  She took another bite, this time of the purple cylinder only. It tasted like sight and spiders’ silk. It crunched in her mouth like a crumbly vegetable, and it filled her head with almost-ideas, the frustrating kind she was so close to grasping, to remembering. They were strange ideas. Fascinating ideas. Mirrors.

  “Kate?” Liz looked concerned now. Kate smiled at her, and laughed when Liz recoiled at the sight of her teeth, which were probably all purple.

  “T-t-try one, Lizzy!” Kate shoved her plate toward Liz and accidentally shoved it so hard that it slid at record speed across the table and would have smashed into Liz’s own plate if it had not mysteriously stopped, abruptly and all at once, barely an inch from Liz’s plate.

  Liz appeared hesitant, but also curious. With a slight shrug, she reached for the green chalk-stick and nibbled on the end that had not been in the paste. After a moment, she took a larger bite. Her eyes widened. “I…woah,” she said.

  “T-t-try the gray s-stuff, it’s d-delicious!” Kate proclaimed in her best imitation of a French accent. She heeded her own words by finishing off the purple stick with another glob. It really did taste like starlight! Like starlight and crystals. Oh no! She should have left some of that one for Liz.

  Liz forgot her partly eaten plate of fish, and they proceeded to sample all the different colors. Liz took only a small bite of each; Kate finished them off. Each had a different abstract flavor, each flavor was enhanced by the gray paste, and with each new expansion to Kate’s conceptual palate, she felt more lighthearted and free. The yellow chalk sizzled with electricity that danced on her tongue; the blue one tasted like cold, not that it was actually cold, and tasted like the idea of ice, not to be confused with normal boring-flavored ice. The gray one gave her the experience of metal! She had never eaten metal before! The only one she didn’t like was the black one, which of course tasted like darkness, emptiness, nothing–an interesting but unpleasant taste that squirmed and shifted in her mouth.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Kate noticed that she and Liz, who had scooted their chairs together, were laughing and giggling and making a bit of a fuss on the rooftop patio, but she didn’t particularly care. She was still hungry after they had cleaned the plate together, but she also wasn’t. Liz had forgotten all about her fish dish. Fish dish!

  Liz was trying to get the names of the Theians right, but she kept slurring her words. “Thelyree. Fly-three. Damn.” She giggled, then pointed at the small neon orange and green butterfly. “Fritch. Easy.” She shifted her finger to the big moth, as white as the clouds with vibrant constellations of purple spots. “Shushushlushshsh,” said Liz. She collapsed into a fit of giggles, her pretty golden hair sprawled all over the table.

  “No no no,” said Kate. She patted Liz on the head, missed, and patted her on the back of the neck instead. “It’s shulushuthulsuhshul.” She cackled and leaned in close to Lizzy. “He and thrytree are in love, Liz! Isn’t that cute?!” She sighed dramatically and fell on top of Liz, almost knocking them both out of their chairs. “Alas!” She smacked herself in the face with the back of her own hand. “Ow. Alas! Shall I ever be thus loved?”

  Liz responded with appropriate theatrical flair. “A princess such as yourself? Certainly.” Then she actually did slide right out of her chair, leaving Kate sprawled laterally across both of their seats.

  “Croikey!” said Kate, switching to Steve Irwin. Ah, Steve! A wave of sorrow washed over Kate. Alas! But his son…

  “Liz,” Kate announced, “I have a such a crush on Robert Irwin, you have no idea.” Kate materialized a floppy broad-brimmed hat such as what the great Crocodile Hunter Himself might have worn. She slapped it onto her head. But it didn’t feel quite right. She took it off to look at it and saw that it was actually a stuffed crocodile. She giggled and hugged it while Lizzy climbed to her feet.

  Their waitress returned about when Lizzy had regained her upright position on her chair. “Are you…doing well?” she asked. Her voice was pretty, and she was pretty, even if she did have that crazy hair. Kate was sure that she, the waitress, also deserved a knight in shining armor–a category which as far as Kate was concerned encompassed such diverse individuals as Steve Irwin, Albert Einstein, and Sherlock Holmes.

  “Whadda beauty,” Kate observed. She moved the crocodile when she spoke so that the waitress would think that it was the crocodile that had said it, not Kate.

  The waitress raised an eyebrow, and a small smile appeared on her face. “I fear the special may have been…too much. I wondered.”

  “What is your name?” asked Lizzy. She made sure to say each word very clearly and separately.

  “Ada,” said the waitress as she collected the plastic tubes from the Theians. “Are you finished with your fish?”

  “Why is it called the Silver Green, Ada?” asked Lizzy, her forehead creased with concentration.

  “A green is a type of fish around here,” Ada explained. She cleaned up Lizzy’s plate.

  Kate’s eyes widened. “Are they green or silver?” Then she changed her voice, making it gruff and speaking with the crocodile. “I will eat them up!”

  “They are normally green. As you might guess. They are very rarely silver. It’s good luck to catch a silver green.” Kate watched as Ada the Waitress reached for the now-empty black square plate. With the Theians’ juice tubes in one hand, she had too many dishes to hold all at once, but part of the deep-maroon hair around her wrist detached and seized the plate for her, pinching it securely. Kate gasped, and the crocodile faded into mist. She was suddenly hugging nothing but cool, damp air. Her arms closed around nothing. This struck her as unbearably sad. Her dad had been gone just like that! What if Lizzy was next?!

  “Aaaah!” Lizzy cried out as Kate tackled her with a tight hug.

  Kate sobbed on Liz’s shoulder. “Don’t leave me, Lizzy!”

  “I will not.” Liz spoke as though announcing a profound ultimatum.

  Kate realized that Ada the Waitress was still watching them. “What’s that?” Ada asked. A coil of blue-streaked hair around her left forearm detached and pointed at Kate’s black and green electric bass.

  Kate meant to answer, but instead she was overtaken by an irresistible fit of giggling.

  Shlushluth answered instead. “It is an instrument.”

  Ada shifted the plates to a position of easier carry. “I can see that,” she said. “What’s it called?”

  “A base,” said the moth.

  “A b-b-bass,” Flitch corrected. The other Theians nodded in affirmation.

  “She plays it well,” Shlushluth said.

  “Under normal circumstances,” Thlytri added.

  “We encourage our customers to play music,” said Ada. She looked down at Kate and Liz, again with an almost-hidden smile. “If they can.” She turned in a graceful pirouette and glided away with their dishes.

  Kate sat upright and scooted over to her guitar. She was momentarily diverted from putting it on by the fresh realization of just how fuzzy Shlushluth really was. After a quick hug that left parts of her arms powdery like confectioner’s sugar, she soon had the bass around her neck.

  Something was odd about the bass. The strings weren’t quite where she’d left them. She flicked a few, and could not tell whether they were in tune. But they still worked, even here, even without electricity or an amplifier. The notes thrummed out through the air, inducing a brief lull in the conversations of the other dozen people here on the rooftop terrace.

  Liz was watching, absentmindedly twisting a sheaf of her hair into an odd lopsided braid. She nodded at Kate.

  So Kate played. She wasn’t sure what exactly she was playing. The chords and their progressions, normally so clean and bright and exact in her mind, had become all swoopy and funny. And she really couldn’t tell, but she thought her rhythm might be off. And she also couldn’t quite figure out whether she was playing a melody or an isolated bass line to some other song. Plus, she immediately lost track of how long she had been playing for. Minutes? Hours? FOREVER?!?!?

  Yet these thoughts were shuffling around in the back of her mind, while in the forefront danced a brazen confidence that whatever she was playing, it was awesome, and she intended to do it justice by playing her heart out! She was James Jamerson! To prove it, she added another line in counterpoint on top of the first.

  Her fingers flicked at the strings; they hopped and crawled over the bass. The music absorbed her like a bigger microorganism. She stared at the table without really seeing it, blocking off all other sights and sounds. She was just thinking that this was no good, a bass alone was no good, when Liz started singing. Not words, but just the occasional hum or soft vocalization to harmonize with the bass.

  Kate encouraged Liz with the music. It was easy, the simplest thing in the world to speak with the music, to say ‘hey Liz! It’s OK, you can sing louder!’ And Liz heard her, and she did sing louder. She sang back to Kate, saying without words, ‘I don’t understand what is happening right now, but this is amazing and I’m happy to be here with you.’

  And it felt good to play here in Skywater, out in the open air, beneath a strange but beautiful sky. Playing outside on Theia, beneath the ever-present storm and thunder, the sky fought against her and her music. But here it welcomed both. She didn’t want to change the sky, not right now. She only wanted to do groovy jams with Liz.

  But she could. If she wanted to, she could change the sky. And something else noticed this, something out there in the city. Kate could feel it noticing, wondering, reaching out, catching on her music like a sliding sheet catching on a splinter.

  The song ended eventually, and it left Kate in a state of dazed confusion. Had she ended it, or had Liz? Or maybe it had finished all by itself. She looked around as the Theians chattered their approval and several others on the rooftop applauded politely. Ada was back with a thick sheet of paper that she gave to Liz. Ada winked at Kate, who was so startled by this that she overcompensated by winking back with both her eyes at the same time.

  “…Kate,” said Liz, once again the epitome of determined concentration. “I think…something may have been…I think the special was…” She bit her lip.

  “Special?” asked Kate. “That was a joke, Liz.” She leaned over and poked Liz in the side with the headstock. “The special…is special. And you’re right. It tasted…” Kate scrunched up her face, trying hard to think of another word besides ‘special.’ She couldn’t, so she exploded her fists apart with a blowing-up noise.

  Ada finished her round about the rooftop. “Whenever you’re ready,” she said as she passed.

  Liz peered down at the paper in her hands. She tried to adjust her glasses, noticed she wasn’t wearing any, and groped about on her head and jacket looking for them before giving up. “I don’t know how much this is,” she whispered to herself.

  Kate had become fixated on the sky. She scooted around in her chair until the city below and the sky above filled her entire view. She had noticed before that shadows were strange here, but now she realized that that was one reason why the city looked so fairy-tale-like. So imaginary. The shadows were all wrong! They were still there, kind-of, but only in places shielded from view of the whole sky. The sun, a pale white blob so dim it left only the faintest afterimage in Kate’s vision when she looked at it, was almost touching the sea to the west! It was almost sunset! But you’d never tell by looking at the city.

  The shadows moved with the clouds above, and parts of the city in the distance were noticeably dimmer because of a local scarcity of clouds. If the city was a painting, the artist would flunk his class because of the shading! “Where,” she wondered out loud after a moment of observation, “is nighttime? Do they even have it?”

  watch

  “I am watching, Liz, what do you think I’ve been doing here for the last…amount of time?”

  “What?” said Liz. “What are you watching?”

  “The sky, Liz! That’s totally my thing! My domain, Isaac says. That and falling, I guess. I fall a lot. Like Jim! That’s fine, though. I’ve got these snowglobes for all our moons!”

  Something caught Kate’s eye, something that flew above the city. She couldn’t say what about it drew her attention at first, for there was a great variety of flying objects, many of them much larger and more interesting than this one particular thing. But there it was, on a line from the docks in the west to the white fortress in the east that would pass only a stone’s throw to the north of where they sat. Maybe it was how it flapped its great white wings, or perhaps it was in the way that everything, clouds and other fliers alike, cleared a broad path for it as it flew.

  When it passed overhead, Kate saw that it was a creature with several sets of wings. Its body was as large as a human, but she could not see more than that because two pairs of wings covered its face and its body, leaving only one set of wings, the largest, to fly with. The wings were white and feathery, and they heaved in great slow arcs to keep the creature aloft. A faint strain of ethereal music drifted on the wind as the winged creature passed.

  Kate created a spyglass to keep watch as the creature approached the gleaming pearlescent fortress. She had a lot of trouble finding it through the magnified view, but she caught it just as it swept up with a slow majesty to the height of the tallest tower. Kate watched, her view through the spyglass swaying unsteadily, as the winged figure settled there. The mysterious Metal Moon hung in the sky above it. The figure stretched out its great white wings, which caught the light, then the wings folded in around the creature. It turned, and for a long moment gazed out over the city, motionless. Kate began to wonder whether it would just stay there like a feathery white gargoyle. She nearly took her eyes off it to speak to Liz, but then the winged figure shifted.

  It reached out a wing and swept it aside as though brushing away cobwebs. Then it did the same with the other. The clouds in the sky–the masses of water vapor that gleamed as though reflecting sunlight, though the ‘sun’ even now sank below the sea–moved. They rippled like soap scum on water being swept aside, though on a slow and grand scale. The parting of the clouds in response to the winged figure took seconds to become apparent, and minutes to become efficacious. While the clouds dispersed, twilight crept into the city. Again a nebulous hint of music trickled through the skies, accompanying the motions of the winged being.

  Kate gaped out at the spectacle. The light-giving clouds split apart in a seam, and darkness by slow degrees formed consequently in a line that cut the city from fortress to sea. It was a line of shadows, shadows turned in both directions, away from the twin retreating cloudbanks. As the clouds moved above Kaitlyn Carter, scuttling south to the sea, the sky above grew darker, shifting through the phases of the horizon at twilight. Yet this happened not at the horizons, but in an arc that split the dome of the sky overhead, intersecting the three visible moons. A broadening band of that sky darkened, bleeding its shade outward toward the brighter edges. Stars appeared in greater numbers within the deepening rift, while the clouds in the distance colored the horizons red and gold like a low fire, their light filtered now through an ocean of air. The three moons above were all in different phases, dimly lit by the light of the weak sun that had already set. The Metal Moon was strange, for the light of that sun reflected in a chaotic jumble of thin lines that glinted and sparkled as the strange parts of the moon slowly turned. The city below began to manifest as a sea of colorful lights.

  Kate mouthed the word “beautiful.” A thrill of sheer glee ran through her at the sight, and she laughed, bouncing up and down, unable to contain herself.

  She raised the spyglass once more and swung her gaze to the peak of the white fortress. The fortress, now in strengthening shadows, seemed less affected by the fall of night than everything else in the city. Its pale, nacreous surface shone, reflecting the lights of the towers that gleamed in the night. Light played inside those towers like caged auroras, and that illumination tickled the stone of the fortress like sunlight on the ocean floor, seen through rippling waves.

  The winged figure was gone.

  Kate finally tore her eyes away to look at Liz, who had come up beside her. Liz’s eyes were wide, her right hand splayed delicately upon her chest as though in shock. Kate took her hand and squeezed it.

  After minutes of watching night fall, Kate turned unsteadily back to the table. Ada was there, placing Liz’s change in a neat stack. It didn’t look like much. “Keep it!” said Kate. “If you can tell us what that bird-thing was.”

  Already lamps had been lit around the twilit rooftop. A comfortable, buttery glow suffused the air around their table. “It’s obvious you’re new here,” said Ada as the coins she had been placing mysteriously disappeared in a whirl of wiry red hair, “but how can you not know about Lady Wings?”

  “We are very new here,” said Liz. Then she frowned. “‘Very’ is bad. It bespeaks a limited vocabulary.” She scrunched up her eyebrows. “So does ‘bad!’ So…we are…damn it, why can’t I think? What the hell was in that special?”

  Kate giggled. Sugar and spice and everything nice. Snakes and snails and puppy-dog tails! She laughed so hard that she fell against Shlushluth, which was too bad because he had been trying to enjoy a romantic moment with Thlytri as they gazed at the spectacle of nightfall. Kate patted his fuzzy-yet-curiously-hard body knowingly, gave him a wink that he may or may not have seen (hard to tell with those eyes), and pushed herself back upright.

  “It’s the Godsday special. The number ten.” Ada smirked as though expecting them to catch on to a small joke. “Most folks can handle it. Though from what I’ve seen today, I think Vezzón must have given it some extra kick this morning.” She punctuated ‘kick’ with a flick of her hair; it moved all by itself. Kate saw that the blue streaks in it shimmered faintly with bioluminescence in the twilight.

  “Lady Wings?” asked Liz, not appearing to trust herself with saying anything more.

  “One of the Ladies. You know, Lady Fires, Lady Chains, the rest. I’m partial to Lady Paths, myself. She’s been here, you know. Eaten at this very establishment!” She swelled with professional pride. “I didn’t serve her, but I was on duty. I cleaned up all her dust.”

  “Why is she called Lady Wings?” asked Kate.

  “You know,” said Ada, tapping her cheek, “I’ve never been able to figure it out. Maybe it’s her eyes? Maybe…her hair?” She spoke the last word with a flourish of her own hair, which flurried about her in a quick, elegant dance, the blue-glowing streaks swirling in the dim illumination.

  Liz began to stand, sat down, then gripped the table and tried again. This time, she succeeded. “And they…are at that place?” She pointed in a direction that wasn’t really anywhere close to the fortress, but she quickly corrected herself.

  “Skywater Citadel? Of course. The Lords and Ladies rule Skywater from there. Where are you from?”

  “Hey!” said Kate as she suddenly realized that Ada had been sarcastic to her.

  “Sphisisysus,” said Liz. “Damn. And Theia. Come on, Kate.” Liz began an arduous journey toward the stairs. “We’d better get…going.”

  “Sisyphus?” said Ada. “Theia? How…strange.” A cord of her hair reached out and steadied Liz as she struggled past.

  “Thank you, Ada,” said Kate. She slipped out of her chair and followed Liz. “You are beautiful and your hair is beautiful. Heh heh. That sounded like Jim. Just…flirting with everybody but not knowing it. Heh.”

  The Theians appeared by their sides to help Liz and Kate down through the café and out onto the street. Everything looked different now, and it was still getting darker. The colorful stars jostled each other overhead, and lanterns in many shades filled the street below as if in imitation.

  Liz and Kate threw their arms around each other for support and reeled up the street, guided by the Theians. Shlushluth and Thlytri talked about the city, pointed things out to each other and occasionally guided the pair of humans. Flitch darted about, an orange and green blur that flittered around everything they passed. Jeno seemed more interested in Liz and Kate than in the city, so she stayed close to listen. Liz, at one point, tried to chase down a cat so she could pet it. It was, of course, much too quick.

  “…and that’s how I met Absolem,” said Kate after they’d been making headway for a few minutes.

  Skywater Citadel was looming near ahead when something caught Kate’s attention. One of the buildings they lurched past looked constructed of organ pipes, and it rang in a delightful, mysterious harmony as countless wind chimes around its eaves stirred in the warm night breeze. It looked vaguely like a church or a cathedral, apart from appearing to be composed entirely of metal tubes, and a golden glow issued from within the yawning entrance to this peculiar structure.

  A figure emerged from amid the tubes and made straight for the two of them. The figure looked hunched, and it shuffled forward in a slow gait, but it still reared to a formidable two meters in height. It was entirely wrapped in a dark gold-trimmed mantle of loosely overlapping metal scales. These scales rang together with every step the imposing figure took. Like the eerie chiming of the building beyond, the music thus produced created an aura of mystery and dread as the cloaked figure approached. The combination of mystery, music, and the imposing stature of this individual worked powerfully on the foggy minds of Kate and Liz.

  It stopped before them, and for a long moment there was neither movement nor sound from either party–only the gentle, eerie chiming from the strange building. Then it spoke. Its voice was a hoarse, piercing whisper. “What brings you, Heroes, to the temple of the Thunder God?”

  Kate opened her mouth to speak, but found that she didn’t know any words. Liz’s arm tightened around her shoulder.

  The Theians fluttered down around them, and Shlushluth at last spoke. “The Thunder God?”

  “The Great One. The Stormwalker. The Resolute. The Immovable.” With each title, the mysterious figure twitched the metal cloak enshrouding it to produce a ringing chord that reinforced her words.

  “We…” said Liz, and her fingers dug into Kate’s shoulder almost hard enough to hurt. “We’re…going to the…the citadel.”

  The figure nodded. “Of course,” it rasped. “I will take you there.”

  “That…that’s not…necessary,” said Liz, her voice shrinking to a tiny squeak at the end.

  “It is,” replied the figure. “For I am Lady Chimes, and I must be present at the Council.”

  Kate suddenly started giggling, although really it didn’t seem very funny.