29
—“Intangible Gods,” Daphne Leander, Year Ten
I PACE ABOUT THE BIRD FOR A LONG WHILE, pressing my hands to the wall when it lurches. I’ve seen what the edge did to my brother, and I’ve just seen what it did to a little girl. Whatever it is that keeps us here, whether it’s a god or a ghost or something atmospheric, it doesn’t discriminate. What will it do to a metal bird that tries to leave? Will the bolts come loose? Will the floors splinter while the walls crumple in on us?
“How certain are you that we won’t die?” I ask.
Professor Leander is inspecting the window at his control panel; there’s nothing to see but dirt on the other side. “Remarkable stuff, this sort of glass. Nearly unbreakable. Several decades ago, long before our times, they tried to build a dome around this city. Thought it would discourage the jumpers. And this beautiful glass was made to withstand the wind pressure. To test it, pieces were flung from the edge, and they shot back into the city, unscratched.”
I heard about this, not in my history book, but from my father when I asked why more wasn’t being done to deter jumpers.
“But despite all the clever engineering of the dome and this glass, the sun’s glare through it would have caused us to burst into flame.”
“How did you come across it?” I ask. “The glass.”
“It was buried by my great-grandfather, one of the dome’s engineers. He willed the map of the burial site to my father, and my father to me. Now, after generations, it’s finally time to put it to use. So I can’t assure you, child, that we won’t die, but I can assure you that this bird has been building for longer than you or I have been alive. The time has come and there’s to be no backing down.”
This does little to reassure me. I feel that familiar wave of claustrophobia coming up in my stomach, and I force it down.
“When?” I ask.
“Maybe this evening,” he says. “Or tomorrow. We’ve already moved several hundred paces from the flower shop. I expect that soon we’ll have reached the swallows.”
My heart is in my ears. “The swallows?” I say. “Why would we want to be there?”
“The pressure of the sinking dirt will be enough force to get us to the bottom of the city. We’ll be thrust into the sky. Think of it as a birth.”
“What if we’re crushed?” I gasp. “What if we cause a gap in the bottom of the city and all the dirt leaks out to the sky, and—”
The professor is chuckling. “What if we stay here?” he says. I assume he’s being rhetorical, but he spins his chair around to face me and waits for an answer.
“We’d run out of food,” I say, feeling as scrutinized as when I’m caught daydreaming during one of Instructor Newlan’s lessons. “And now that we’ve moved, we would have difficulty tapping another water supply.”
“And without food and water, we would …” He holds his arm out toward me, a line on a page waiting for a sentence.
“Die,” I say.
“We would die,” he agrees, turning back to his controls. “That is a fact. So we can face a certain death, or I can try to make this girl fly.”
Well, it’s hard to argue with that.
“How is my granddaughter?” he asks. “I haven’t had time to check in on her. I hear she had a fit.”
“She’s resting,” I say. “But she’s better. She was talking for a bit earlier.”
He nods. “My granddaughters are always strong,” he says, and then he begins muttering to his controls. I take that as my cue to leave.
The lantern casts a dim glow on the metal hallway; there are windows in the ceiling, but they’re dark because of the earth on the other side of them. This tiny upper platform has been deemed the Nucleus: bird’s head, Judas told me. I like it here. The voices of the others are small and tinny, and it seems like a great place to think, if only my thoughts didn’t all turn a dark corner right now.
I find Pen and Basil in the kitchen, huddled over a rumpled piece of paper.
Basil looks up, forehead creasing when he sees my troubled face. “Amy’s not doing any better?”
“It isn’t that,” I say, shaking my head. I don’t want to tell him about my fear of being crushed. “Never mind. It’s been a long day. What are you doing?”
“Mapmaking,” Pen says. “We’re trying to guess where the bird is now. If we’re going around the lake and not under it, of course, then we’ve probably passed under our apartments by now.”
She’s working with a pen stone that’s been crudely sharpened, and her hands are ashy. Normally the pen stone would be cut and rolled into a wooden pencil, but down here she’s had to make due with raw materials. It’s easy enough to find pen stone in the dirt. The old piece of paper, she must have found lying around.
Basil pulls out a chair for me and I sit between them. Even though it’s a rough sketch, Pen has a talented hand. The lines are clean and carefully scaled, and the shaded squares of buildings are evenly spaced apart. For the lake, she even doodled some trout with
“So we started here,” she says, tracing her finger around the square labeled
“You knew about the swallows?” I say.
“I asked what his plan was,” she answers. “I like to know where I am and where I’m going at all times.”
“Does anyone else know you’ve been working on this?” I say. “It would be a big help to the professor, I’m sure.”
She smiles at the page. “You think?”
“It’s quite good,” Basil agrees.
She wrinkles her nose. “I just wish I had some proper colors,” she says. “Do you think they have decent coloring materials on the ground? They must, right?”
“Of course,” I say. “The people who run the scopes have reported that the buildings down there are all sorts of colors. They must like to decorate the way that we do.”
Pen seems satisfied with this. She blows on the tip of her pen stone and draws the princess falling from the clock tower.
Tentatively, I peer into my brother’s bunk room.
Alice has gone to the helm to try to help with the efforts, and Lex is sitting alone on the mattress, his fingers tracing the raised letters on a roll of paper from his transcriber.
His lips stop moving when he hears me.
“Are you through being angry with me?” I ask.
“Are you through making foolish decisions that could get you killed?” he says.
“We’re in a metal bird that’s set to be hurtling toward the ground soon.” There’s a laugh in my voice. “What could be more foolish than that?”
He makes a small tear in the page to mark his place, and then he rolls the paper and sets it down.
“I’m sorry if I scared you when I snuck off, Lex, truly.”
He grunts, but the raised corner of his mouth is more of a smile than he gives me on good days.
“I’ve brought you something,” I say. I sit next to him and begin tying the scrap of white cloth around his wrist. “I’m wearing one, too,” I say as I finish the knot.
He runs his fingers over the frayed edges of the fabric. “For Mom and Dad, then,” he says.
