Horror washed over me. We had only seconds before the worm mechanic caught us, but in that lost moment the threat of the worm meant nothing to me. All I could think was that this was my lover, in a flying machine. A forbidden flying machine. A wicked flying machine, with a glimmer of silver dancing along the leading edge of its long white wing. Yaphet lay prone in a harness beneath that wing, his legs splayed around the engine, with two white baskets on either side of him that held supplies. Only a psychotic would tempt the silver in a flying machine. A suicidal player or a murderous one. I knew the stories. There were many, and all were centered on a wicked player, his doomed machine sparkling with silver as it passed far above the influence of an enclave’s defending kobolds, to descend among the houses, and ignite a silver storm.
This was my lover.
I knew then that there was no forgiveness for the sins and failures of our past lives.
I rocked the bike forward, sending it coasting down the slope, engaging the engine again as we rolled. Yaphet soared over us, his engine silent, the only sound an artificial wind passing over the white wing. “Jubilee! Stop. Look at me. You have to abandon the bike. The mechanic will have you if you stay on the ground, but it can’t follow you in the air.”
“No! Go away. I don’t know you. I don’t need you—”
But Jolly’s desperation was different from mine. He reached around me and switched off the bike’s engine. The wheels locked. The bike skidded and went down. Jolly jumped free, but I did not. My leg was caught beneath the bike and I slid with it down the graveled slope. I heard Jolly shouting at me to“Get up! Get up!” A shadow passed over the sun, and then Yaphet was beside me, heaving the bike off my leg. I scrambled to my feet.
That was when I felt the pain. I gasped as my knee gave out. But Yaphet was beside me. He caught me as I dropped. He took my weight, passing my arm around his shoulder—and as soon as I had my balance I punched him: hard in the chest and we went down together. For one full second he stared at nothing, a look of stunned disbelief on his face. Then I pushed him away. “I hate you!” The words rushed from my throat, an honest assessment in a desperate situation. I would have left him to the worm then, if I could. I tried to. I scrambled backward on three limbs. “Stay away from me!” I warned.
But his anger was the equal of mine, and he at least could walk. “The silver take you, Jubilee.”
“Better the silver than you!”
He tackled me. I screamed as my knee was further twisted and then somehow he had my arms locked behind my back, his mouth beside my ear. I hated him for it, because it was the same way Kaphiri had held me. But Yaphet’s words were different. “You will live through this day, Jubilee, I swear it.” And then he half carried me, half dragged me down the slope.
He had left his flying machine in the dry water course at the bottom of the little canyon. Jolly was already there, with Moki under one arm, and my savant under the other, climbing into one of the cargo baskets. “Jolly, don’t!”
“Do you want to kill us?” he shouted. “Do you want to kill yourself? The worm can only follow us if we’re on the ground. So get in. Get in! Our only chance is to fly.”
Yaphet left me no choice. “Your brother’s a lot smarter than you,” he said, and he shoved me into the basket opposite Jolly. My head struck one of the struts. A different kind of pain. The sharp, fresh scent of silver tinged the air.
I had landed on a folded sleeping bag, but something brittle crunched beneath it as I shoved myself up on my elbows. What I had taken for a harness between the two baskets was really a solid platform suspended by fixed struts. Yaphet clambered over the engine and dropped onto it. The size of the flyer was such that his face was only inches from mine. “Look back,” he ordered as the engine started up. I felt its vibration. I felt the wing begin to lift and I grabbed at the rim of the basket. “Look back!”
I did, and saw the worm. It darted up the slope behind us, following the track of my bike. The flying machine began to climb, lofting slowly into the air.
The worm reached my fallen bike. It turned immediately, tracking our path down to the canyon floor. We were twenty feet in the air, and twice that far away down the canyon when the worm reached the place where the flying machine had been. It stopped, its six-foot length sparkling in the sun like a stream of water that does not flow. Then it circled that place, around and around, faster with each circuit, like a mad thing. I felt the hair on my neck stand up. It never once looked up for us, as any living thing would do.
Then we soared around a bend in the canyon, and I couldn’t see it anymore. I turned, to look ahead of us.
“You could unbalance us,” Yaphet suggested, past the streaming wind. “You could shift your weight too suddenly, or jump out, and send us crashing to our deaths. If you want to.”
Jolly worried I might consider this a good idea. “Jubilee, he doesn’t mean it! Don’t do it. Please.”
I could not answer. A new clarity had come over me. If not for Yaphet, we would have fallen to the worm. If not for this wicked flying machine. “Why does the silver leave us alone?” I asked, without looking at him.
“Because we’re flying low. Not even twenty feet above the ground.”
We were lower than the canyon walls.
“And the sun protects us,” Yaphet added. “If silver begins to bloom along the wings, the sun will burn it and stop it from growing.”
“And if you go higher?” I remembered a day as bright as this one, when Udondi’s savant had risen into the sky above the highway to Xahiclan, higher and higher, until a tiny silver storm burst into existence around it.
Yaphet said, “I won’t go higher.”
I did not want to look at him. I was afraid to look. So I kept my gaze fixed on the canyon wall, and still he was all I saw. Our bodies speak their own language, and mine was waking to one it had heard only faintly that night outside the Temple of the Sisters.
What if I hate him? I’d asked Liam that question on the day I’d first heard Yaphet’s name, and Liam had answered honestly. It won’t matter.
It was Jolly who broke a silence of several minutes. “Yaphet, was it you who set those explosives?”
I had forgotten the explosives. So distracted was I, I had even forgotten the two convoys.
“No, it wasn’t me.”
“It brought down a landslide, didn’t it?”
“I couldn’t see what happened… but it sounded like a landslide. Are you thinking it was your uncle?”
Liam?I had forgotten him too. I looked north, but all I could see was the canyon wall. “We have to go back.”
Yaphet didn’t answer. Neither did Jolly, for of course it would be foolish to go back. They both knew it… and so did I. Liam and Udondi would be furious if we did not use this chance to escape—and still I could not just leave them… “Jolly!” He lay in the other basket, his arm around Moki. “You have my savant, don’t you? So call them.”
Yaphet said, “We’ll have to climb out of this canyon first.”
“Then let’s do it.” We’d gone fifteen miles to the southeast, maybe more. “Both convoys are far away now. They won’t see us.” Not if we were lucky.
As we climbed to the canyon rim I found myself watching the wing for the glimmer of silver, but none appeared, and then we were over the plain. We stayed low, only ten feet above the ground, but the land was very flat, so that if anyone was looking, we would certainly be seen. I studied the land to the north and east, but there was no dust anywhere, no sign of a truck moving. Jolly put through a call to Udondi’s savant, but there was no answer. “They could be in a canyon,” Yaphet said.