“I’m sorry,” Ava said. “Shall I draw you a relaxing bath?”
“No,” I said. “I need ice cream. Lots of ice cream.”
I stormed into the kitchen, wishing I had bought a Kranix plung so I could forget about my day. Ava’s servitor prepared me a rich and creamy strawberry ice cream served in a large ceramic bowl. I ate it quickly until it gave me brain-freeze, then I ate it slowly. Afterwards, I slumped on my bed, staring at the ceiling, angry with myself. I’d let my feelings for my sister distract me at a crucial moment during my training. There was no chance of the Guild reinstating me, not after such a breach of the rules. If only my cousin had not dragged me into the market, making me think about her, I would have not messed up everything.
Paulo should not have bought the memory disk. Then I would not have been thinking about losing my sister.
I took out the disk and stomped over to the recycler, considering trashing it. But I didn’t. What if the disk contained something useful? I went back to my bed and strapped an interface band onto my head, which was a less intrusive neural connector than the skullcap. While a skullcap could read my thoughts, the band could only send them into my brain, replaying whatever memories were recorded. When I was lying comfortably, I activated the device.
Immediately, I plunged into a stranger’s mind, experiencing everything they had done as if it were happening now.
Blue sky and waterfalls. The scent of spices. Soft air on my silver-white skin. I’m spinning high above a huge, sprawling city, beating my wings to rise higher until I’m at the top of lush, green valley. I stop beating my wings and spread my arms to feel the suns on my almost-weightless body.
Gravity slows me down and I begin to fall. Looking down, I see my brothers and sisters dancing in the air in perfectly-coordinated, symmetrical patterns. I join them in a circle. We spin in a thermal, then spiral down, dancing. My wings beat once, twice, then I hurtle down and down towards a crowd of humans far below. The wind rushes. My heart quickens. The ground looms. Plunging down and down, faster and faster, I feel truly alive, knowing I’m only a few heartbeats away from death.
Only when I see individual faces staring up at me, only then, do I flick my wings and soar over the cheering crowd and–
I ripped off the band, jolting out of the trance like I had been electrocuted. I was stunned. I had just seen my sister in the crowd, watching as the airwalker swooped overhead. I’d seen only a glimpse of her in passing–the briefest, intangible flash of her among the sea of faces–but it had been enough to make me positive. My sister had definitely been watching at the beginning of the performance, but what had happened to her later?
It was my first clue to solving the mystery.
It took me a minute to recover from the shock, but then I returned to the memory, re-starting it seconds before I had seen my sister.
Once more, I was inside the airwalker’s mind, soaring high over the crowd...
Three hours later, I knew what had happened to Marila that day. I needed to share my discovery with someone, but I didn’t want it to be my parents, who had returned while I was experiencing the airwalker’s memory. They had already suffered enough. They didn’t need me dredging up the past. I acted like nothing was wrong when I left my room and encountered them in the kitchen. Ava was serving them dinner.
“Are you joining us?” my mother asked.
“I ate earlier,” I said. “I’ve got some research to do at the Central Archives. Bye.”
Outside, I contacted Paulo and asked him to meet me on the Bridge of Echoes, which hung over the Great Falls, connecting the upper city to the lower one. I arrived ten minutes before my cousin showed up in his parade uniform.
“I just sneaked out of a class,” he said. “This had better be important.”
I broke the news of my suspension, then, while Paulo absorbed that revelation, I told him something far more shocking. “I know what happened to Marila, thanks to reviewing the airwalker recording.”
“You’re serious?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me.”
“My sister was in the crowd at the beginning of the show. Later on, about an hour into the recording, she left the market to get a better view from this bridge. In the recording you can clearly see her leaning over the rail, watching the dancing from up here. She did that for another hour. She was right here, where we’re standing.” I looked down over the rail. Far below, I could see the turbulent river under the Great Falls. “My sister was alone and looked like she was enjoying herself–until 127 minutes into the recording, when something creepy happened.”
“What’s that?”
“Someone else appeared on the bridge. A stranger in a black suncloak. You can see them walking towards my sister. Unfortunately, the airwalker turned its head in another direction at that point, so the actual encounter isn’t recorded. The next time you see the bridge–at 132 minutes–my sister and the stranger are gone.”
“We’ve got to tell the police. This is new evidence.”
“No,” I said. “We’ll never find out the truth if we tell anyone. We have to investigate it ourselves.”
“How?”
“We need to find more recorded memories from that day. One could provide evidence of what happened next on the bridge, like which direction the kidnapper took Marila. We’ll have to go back to the market vendor to find the source of this recording.”
“It’s getting late. The gateway shuts down in another hour. The vendor’s probably gone home already. It’s probably too late.”
“We’d better hurry.”
The twin suns were low over the canyon when we returned to the market. Most traders had closed their stalls once they had sold out. Those that were still around were packing their goods. The Karrunian memory vendor had gone. We talked to the owner of the next stall, a local Screek who had seen the Karrunian leave only twenty minutes earlier in a transport bound for the subway train to the gateways.
“Maybe it hasn’t left the planet yet,” I said to Paulo. “We could beat the train if we hire a taxi.”
Within a minute, an orange-and-black taxi dropped out of the sky, landing beside us. We boarded and paid for the flight as the craft lifted off in a cloud of vapour and dust. We flew over the city at breathtaking speed, then accelerated over the canyon to fly low across the Thork Desert.
There was nothing but sun-baked rock and red sand to the hazy horizon. We were flying at a speed that blurred the ground. We had departed ten minutes after the train, but we were still accelerating and expected to arrive ahead of it.
Nervously, I stared out of the windows, looking for the Gate Rings.
They became visible after twenty minutes.
They stood in a circle on a dry plain like an ancient Earth monument, towering over the desert floor, sixteen huge and imposing portals to other worlds. I could see transports flying in and out of the rings like a swarm of bees, racing to their destinations before the gateways shut down, stranding travellers on the wrong side.
About a kilometre from the Gate Rings, the railway emerged from underground into a dome where passengers and cargo transferred to transports waiting on the platform. Luckily, the last train had not yet appeared, so we landed and waited for it to come out of the subway tunnel.
We didn’t wait long. The train emerged thirty seconds later. Servitors started unloading cargo as soon as it stopped. A large number of humans and aliens exited the carriages, making it far harder to spot a mirrored knight with four arms than you’d expect.
We located the transport heading for Karru and waited by it. I spotted a Karrunian in the crowd.