The Children of the Sky

None of them understood Samnorsk, but when she put her hands on the gate and began to push it shut, they seemed to get the message. All but Dirty Henrik quickly slipped inside. Henrik remained half in and half out, his nose twitching as he smelled the night air. His pack had been a lumberjack; maybe he could do all right in the outside. Dirty Henrik wobbled back and forth, then realized the gate was still closing on him. He gave a little squeak and retreated within.

Jo had to force the gate upwards to overcome the bent hinge, and then it was shut. She left the lock bar on the ground. Hell, if he wanted to badly enough, Henrik could probably push his way out.

And now … Johanna stood in silence for a moment, trying to make sense of what had happened and decide how she should feel about it. Finally she shook her head and started up the steps that led to the admin building. She had some phone calls to make.

•  •  •

The other Children called the events of that night “Jo’s great jailbreak.” Some of them thought it was all very funny. The consequences? Maybe they were as bad as Johanna had imagined, though not quite so obvious and visible. For the next year or so, the back alleys and garbage dumps of villages all around had a surplus of singletons and duos, aimless beggars who importuned and incompetently burgled and robbed. A few came back to the Fragmentarium. A very few found refuge in the new Tropical “embassy,” though the Tropicals seemed much less happy to have recruits than they were to raise hell with the local singletons.

The majority of the runaways simply disappeared into the awesome wilderness. Pilgrim thought that more than a few of the disappeared had survived and made packs of themselves. “I can tell you from personal experience,” he told Jo some tendays later, when he caught her crying, “when times get really tough, you’ll patch up with parts you could never imagine sharing even a single thought with. Hei, look at me.” That turned her sobs into a hiccupping laugh; she knew what he meant better than most humans. Nevertheless, she was sure that the wide, deep silence of the northern forests had swallowed the lives of most of the runaways.

And consequences for Johanna Olsndot herself? Leave aside her most idiot classmates who thought it was all a joke. Her little brother seemed to regard the incident with uneasy awe. She was the sister who corrected his foolishness. In his view, this situation upset the natural order.

Woodcarver actually stopped talking to Jo for a time. Her Majesty knew the odds against singletons in the wild. She had allowed the Fragmentarium from the same good will that she extended to her war veterans—and Harmony’s plans had been an attempt to make room for those healthy singletons to remain in safety. More, she knew that the escape was a slap not just at Harmony Redjackets but at Woodcarver herself.

Maybe it was because of good words from Pilgrim to Woodcarver, but the Fragmentarium remained open. Indeed, one happy consequence was exactly as Johanna had imagined: now there was plenty of room in the institution. Woodcarver did not move to boot the old members out of the place. Mr. Stonemason and the others had a place for their elderly parts, even doomed as they were. That crowding problem was postponed for a while—and Harmony looked like the ineffectual, pompous assholes that he was!

Any time in the first days after the Breakout, Johanna could easily have proclaimed her innocence. After all, the evidence against her was circumstantial, with Harmony the loudest proclaimer of her guilt. The only eyewitnesses were very confused singletons, and some of them apparently thought she had been the one to throw the gate open. She almost told Pilgrim the truth—except that she soon guessed that he already knew. Johanna came even closer to telling Ravna Bergsndot. It hurt to think that Ravna saw her as just a stupid little teenager; the poor lady had to deal with too many of those already. But the days passed, and Johanna’s reputation grew and solidified. Yeah, she was very glad she hadn’t done what people thought she had. But hell, it had happened—and in the future, maybe people like Harmony would think twice before they crossed the Mad Bad Girl of Starship Hill.

Ten years after the Battle on Starship Hill

Chapter 04

Remasritlfeer had been working for the Great Tycoon for more than two years. This was a constant source of surprise to Remasritlfeer, who had never taken kindly to fools, even ones as rich as Tycoon. The two years had been one crackbrained mission after another, some more dangerous and exciting than the explorer in Remasritlfeer would have ever dreamed. And maybe that was why he continued to work for the madpack.

This latest piece of insanity might finally bring an end to their relationship. Exploring the Tropics! The assignment was more dangerous, more insane—literally insane—than anything Tycoon had demanded before. But truthfully, the first few days had been magnificent: Remasritlfeer had totally survived and in two ways he’d matched or exceeded the triumph of any explorer in the history of the world.

Unfortunately, that was four tendays ago. Tycoon just didn’t know when to give up. Glory had degenerated into deadly tedium, tenday after tenday of failures.

“There has to come an end to it, you know.” The words expressed Remasritlfeer’s heartfelt opinion, but they were spoken by his passenger on this flight. This final trip, if there was any mercy in the world. Chitiratifor was a well-dressed sixsome who barely fit in the balloon’s passenger platform. The Sea Breeze’s gondola was a cramped place where every pound had to be accounted for. The insulation round the passenger platform was so thin that Chitiratifor’s anxiety was painfully loud. Remasritlfeer could see claws and jaws here and there through the partition. His passenger was gouging the frame of the gondola with all his strength. There were retching sounds, some of his members barfing into the muddy water below.

Remasritlfeer waggled a semaphore at Tycoon’s sailing fleet below. They paid out the tether a bit faster, let the sea breeze blow the Sea Breeze steadily toward the swampy inland. This had been the routine twice a tenday since the beginning of this horrid exercise. All through the predawn, Tycoon’s support vessels would puff away, mixing iron filings with various corrosive poisons, filling the gas bag of the Sea Breeze or its alternate. Then, as the morning wind picked up, Remasritlfeer would lift off, sailing through the air like no one in history, like no one in the world (if you didn’t count the Sky Maggots).

“We’ll be over land in a matter of minutes now, sir,” he said cheerfully to Chitiratifor.

Chitiratifor made some more mouth noise. Then he said, “This has to look good, you know. My master says that Tycoon is still claiming the Tropics will make him rich beyond the dreams of all packs past. If we are not convincing today, he’ll be sailing around down here forever, pissing away our treasure.”

Our treasure? Chitiratifor and his master Vendacious were a presumptuous pair. They had some reason. They had provided critical fixes that made Tycoon’s inventions—including these balloons— workable. Remasritlfeer could sense their contempt. They figured they could use Tycoon; it seriously upset them when the Boss could not be swayed.

It was too bad that in this particular case Chitiratifor and Vendacious were absolutely right. Remasritlfeer looked inland. The weather had been perfect so far, but there were high clouds ranked to the north. If those clouds marched south, this afternoon could get exciting. At the moment, they simply blocked the far view, the jungle basin that fed the River Fell. Even on the clearest days, one pack’s eyes could not see the all of that. The Fell stretched northward to beyond the horizon. Its fringes were a vast network of great rivers descending from smaller and smaller ones, ultimately from mountain streams at the edge of arctic cold. Those lands had their own mysteries and threats. They were the scene of endless deadly stories and many of Remasritlfeer’s own explorations—but they could not compare to the Lower Fell, to the mystery and the threat of the ground below him now. Their balloon wasn’t more than a thousand feet up. Details were lost in the humid mist—except when he looked almost straight down. There was the muddy water, the occasional swamp grass. It was hard to tell just where the outflow of the Fell ended. Normal ships ran aground on barely submerged mudflats that extended more than a hundred miles out. The color of the shallows and their smell had given the Fell its name before any pack set eyes on the river mouth itself. You needed rafts or special-built ships to get as close as Tycoon’s fleet. And I am even closer yet! thought Remasritlfeer. It was a rare privilege, one that he would treasure—after he was far away