As they walked down toward the seaward path, Kate stayed close beside her, her honey hair lit with the cool sunlight that streamed through the morning wood.
Laysia had thought her a silent child until now, when she began to ask questions.
“Do you have to be almost grown to learn to do things?” she asked. “I mean, Nell can do them. Do you think I’ll be able to?”
Laysia had no answer to that. She doubted it, but she didn’t like to disappoint the child. And after all, what was doubt anymore, when she’d seen such wonders?
“What’s that? Look at it! It flashes!”
They had emerged from the break in the trees that signaled the last clearing of the high land. Far off, a great blaze of light flared up.
“The crystal cliff,” she told the girl. She looked toward the wave of glass that jutted from the mountain range to the south. The morning sun sparked on its facets and ridges to dazzle the southern sky.
“Is that natural?” asked Susan. “It just grew that way?”
“No, it was made during the last upheaval, as the scholars fled.”
They stood and stared at it awhile, that glass wave like a flame, frozen in its leap toward the sky. And yet the water, still alive, flowed beneath that lucent crust. Laysia wondered if that was what the world on the other side of the window was like, beneath its rigid armor. Perhaps it was alive and warm, like these children.
The wood smelled of moss and dirt and wild mint, and in it, the slight noise of that terrible cloud Kate was learning to hear made walking heavy. Or maybe it was that she herself had grown heavy, Kate thought. She considered that she must weigh at least a thousand pounds this morning. Max had told her once that if she ever took a walk on Jupiter, she’d weigh as much as a young gorilla. Maybe here she weighed as much as an old one. She was very tired after last night’s fighting, and each step through that fuzz of noise made her heavier, heavier than Jupiter, maybe, and two or three grown-up gorillas. So she was surprised when they broke through the line of trees and the tang of the far-off sea washed the weight away.
Kate looked out toward the water. In the distance, the glass cliff sparked pink and white, a wave frozen as it crested. Below, she could see the blurred line of the beach and the blue haze of the moving sea.
Susan threw her head back and breathed deep. Kate glanced her way and was relieved to see that her face finally seemed clear of trouble and distraction.
Laysia, too, stood a little while looking out at the sea. Then she left them standing there and went around the edge of the wood, collecting sticks. She handed one to each of them and sat, cross-legged, in the clover. Kate took a seat next to her, her back to the wood. Though they were well away from the place where the clover petered into bare dirt and the rock of the mountain ended in open air, she felt better keeping an eye on it.
The others sat, too, and waited for Laysia to say something, but she only stared at the stick she’d set on the ground in front of her. After a second, it drifted into the air and began to rise and fall in a pattern that mimicked the distant waves.
Jean laughed, startled. Laysia smiled, and Kate watched the woman’s stick flip over, seem to bow, then settle slowly to earth with the motion of fluttering leaves.
“Now you,” she said to them. “You try.”
Kate’s chest tightened. She was afraid to ask how to do it. Maybe she was supposed to know how. Nell and Susan didn’t ask. Instead, Nell folded her arms carefully behind her back and fixed her eye on her own stick.
“You don’t move the stick, right?” she asked. “You move the air.”
Susan seemed to understand this strange statement, but the look on Jean’s face told Kate that she didn’t get it, either. Move the air? What did that mean?
Laysia said nothing, but Nell narrowed her eyes, no longer seeming to look at the stick at all.
In a moment, Nell’s stick jumped, then floated up over her head, bouncing as if on an invisible current. Not to be outdone, Susan put her hands on her knees, gave the twig in the grass a sharp look, and hunched forward, her shoulders hovering over her folded legs. Her stick shot past her face as if it had been blown from the ground by a sudden geyser.
“How did you do that?” Kate asked her, astonished.
Susan was looking skyward. Her stick fell into her waiting hands.
“I pushed the air,” she said. “And it lifted the stick.”
This made no more sense to Kate than when Nell had said it, but Nell startled her by explaining.
“Think,” she said. “You can’t see the air, but it’s there. You can feel it. You feel wind, don’t you? It’s all made up of tiny pieces of air — molecules, they’re called. And they move together, and that’s air. If you can see that, and if you push them together — lots of them — that’s wind. And if you push wind underneath the stick, the stick flies. See?”
Laysia was nodding. For the first time in a long time, Nell seemed happy, letting her stick leap over invisible waves and dip to surf past her eyebrows. Kate tried to see.
She thought of air, and wood, and the line between them. She tried to see the tiny, invisible pieces Nell talked about. But she thought, too, of the clover and the birds gossiping in the trees, and the dazzle of the sun reflecting off the crystal cliff. Eventually the twig did flip and lurch, but it didn’t rise.
She glanced at Jean. Jean’s
