“Lina has a vision! I see! I see!” I said, and stepped closer to where Lina lay, crouching down to her.
“Nothing that exciting.” Lina rubbed her eyes and stifled a yawn. “Just some lightening.”
“Lina need to be patient,” I said. “Just beginning now. It like that for I too. Before I was. Then I am.”
“I have no idea what you just said,” Lina mumbled.
“Not you, I.”
“Right.”
Arabel came over to touch her fingers to Lina’s forehead. “Still warm,” she said.
Lina grumbled and sat up. The three of them sat cross-legged in a cozy circle on the skimmer’s deck.
“I’s been telling me about this island and the other ones in the area. Says that the drones here used to sail great distances to trade.” Arabel placed her hand on Lina’s forearm. “Didn’t your mentor say that she traded baskets for an old drone’s lychee fruit?”
“Mentor…and I love her to pieces…Baby, we have to accept that she was quite likely losing her mind.”
Arabel lowered her gaze directly at Lina. “Did you forget what you saw in her final moments? Did that look like action of someone who had lost her mind? She was a great woman, and I’m sad that I never got to know her.”
Lina draped her arm around Arabel’s neck and pulled her close. The two sat, forehead to forehead for several moments.
“I’m sorry,” said Lina. “Oh, what is wrong with me?”
“I says the next island has a thriving colony, and they have medicines that can help you.” Arabel sat back upright and patted Lina’s thigh. “Two day’s journey.”
“I been there,” I said. “Very beautiful. Land of milk and honey.”
“Um, Arabel,” Lina said, “I know you’re like some kind of great cloud sailor now, but you do realize there has to be sun, or this thing…” Lina made a gesture with her hand that started out flat and then curved downward.
“I says it’s not a problem.”
“Come.” I sprang upright to standing in a flash. “I show you. Make sun in nighttime. Come.”
Lina stood up, wobbled a moment, and then reached out for the skimmer’s roof for balance. “Whoa,” she said.
Arabel and I were staring at Lina’s bare calves below the fabric of the coverall.
“What?” Lina said, tugging at the shoulders of the garment.
Arabel made a gesture with her thumb and finger starting pressed together, and then pulled apart as far as they would go. No words left her gaping mouth.
“Lina grow,” said I.
“Lina needs to pee,” said Lina with a yawn. “Then maybe another nap.”
After some confusion about who should help Lina, she finally dragged herself onto land and into the shrubbery without either of her eager helpers. “I’m not an invalid,” Lina insisted. “Just tired.”
Lina turned her head and promptly vomited.
“And sick,” she said.
Arabel and I helped her back into the skimmer and under the cover. After a good tucking in from Arabel, and an assurance from I that Them would not be back to pester her, Arabel and I left Lina alone to trot off together, past the shrubbery and into the densely wooded forest beyond.
And after grabbing the bucket just in time to purge herself of the remaining lychee, Lina settled down to sleep. It was a fitful sleep, full of lightning strikes, and a slow descent through the clouds, into the depths of the abyss.
Chapter 7: Into the Abyss
It came to pass that the ancestral memories of all queens who had come before, would instill in each colony’s queen a deep yearning to seek out the solace of others like her, and unite the people once again under the sheltering branches of the Great Tree. To this end, the queen’s crafts-workers learned to build ships that would sail upon the clouds. And the bravest among the queen’s people would mount these vessels and set out from the safety of the colony’s island home in hopes of finding her sisters.
—Selected passages from The Book of the Origin by Bella Aurelius Nobilis, Modern Language Translation
* * * *
“My child,” came a voice that was both near and distant, intimate and foreign—in a moment that Lina was both there, then here.
Lina thrashed upon the bedding where she lay, the fever burning her up inside at times, and at others, leaving her chilled to the bone.
“Mentor?” she croaked.
“Not exactly,” came the voice, this time softer and seeming to emanate from within Lina’s own head.
Lina opened her eyes, and promptly squeezed them shut again. The after-image on her retinas showed roiling clouds, the multicolored splendor of lightning strikes illuminating noble gasses—the same scene she had last witnessed while cloud sailing with her mentor—except this time it was all happening above her.
Lina shivered.
“Am I—?”
“Dead?” said the voice echoing her mind. “No. You’re still safely tucked away on board your little craft with your friends. You are sleeping, my child.”
“Where are you? Why can’t I see you?”
“Perhaps the more appropriate question would be, ‘why do you not wish to see me?’”
“I don’t understand.”
“You’re very brave to be sailing so far from home in such a tiny craft.” The voice in Lina’s head was soothing now, but at the same time quite sizable, causing her head to ache, as if there wasn’t quite enough space for both of them inside Lina’s skull.
Lina began to feel nauseous.
“Where are—?” Lina stopped short, turned her head, and vomited.
When Lina opened her eyes there was the face of a strange woman smiling down upon her. Lina squeezed her eyes shut and waited. She cautiously opened one eye, just a slit.
The woman was still there, but hazy.
She looked familiar, but yet unlike anyone Lina had ever seen. She was all at once beautiful and completely foreign, repulsive almost. Her skin young and taut one moment, and covered in deep wrinkles the next. The woman’s eyes were like tiny teardrops turned sideways, always bright. Her face round with cheeks high and rosy, her nose impossibly small. It was a wonder she could
