King wasn’t easily amazed. Yet inside that one conversation, after the boy’s armor had laid flat and he stared at the message itself, he discovered that people weren’t as simple as he had envisioned, and the Archon was the best among them—a subtle creature wielding an array of talents that his young son had still not begun to understand.
That was why King was at his desk, conscientiously reading his daily lessons.
It was morning in the world, and he was hard at his studies, just like every other morning and through most of every day too. Eventually King would take charge of the world. His name and nature had settled that matter long ago. But first, before that great day, he had to learn quite a lot about these red-meat creatures, their honest eyes and their fluid, fickle affections.
King preferred to stand while studying, and his tutor stood nearby, about to ask one of her nagging questions. This morning’s book was ancient—a government text about the weights of ordinary objects—and she would want her pupil’s interpretation about the language or the hand that wrote the words, or maybe she would use the document as evidence that jooton nuts were exactly the same size now as they were five hundred generations ago, only they were called ooloo nuts by the dead souls that ate them for breakfast.
King felt ready for any question.
But when she finally cleared her throat and spoke, he didn’t hear her voice. He didn’t hear any words or the hint of meaning wrapped around this exceptionally dull lesson.
A low sound had washed into the room.
His buried ears heard the intrusion, and he felt the vibrations with his bones, and some part of his rapid, ill-mapped mind recognized what he was hearing. Yet he had never experienced any sound so enormous or deep in the register. This happened on occasion—the unexpected would arrive along with a potent sense of the familiar. Ancient memories teased him while he spread one hand across the time-worn page, both thumbs extended. She spoke and the moments passed, and he ignored everything but the distant rumbling, trying to decipher distance, trying to guess a direction. But the vibration ended too soon, forcing him to wait, holding his breath and focus against the pressure of an old woman’s words.
Then another deep rumbling arrived, followed by several more woven over one another. Suddenly five recitations had passed with the same spent breath inside him, and the tutor was watching her singular student with a guarded expression. What was happening? Was the monster angry, and if so, was she going to suffer now? King’s talents were gradually improving when it came to reading faces, and he remembered one very good lesson:
The proper noise could make any human happy.
King abandoned his desk, intentionally towering over her. “I don’t mean to be rude, Master. But something awful is happening in the Corona District.”
The woman was relieved first and then startled, that wrinkled, spent face believing him. But she insisted on asking, “How would you know?”
There was no time for responses, polite or crude. Alarms were already sounding inside a distant room, and people were running in the hallways outside, familiar voices saying something about test and false reports, begging that this was nothing but a security trial, please.
King broke into a hard, breathless sprint.
Father’s favorite office was at the end of a long hall. The room was no larger than any other, but it offered wide windows looking across the District. There were no canopies in bloodwood country. Trees grew towards the morning’s brilliance, branches covering the trunks from their broad foundations almost to the pointed tips. Branches never reached far into the air. The sun was welcomed, able to rise up to the highest portions of this forest, which was only one reason why this District was the ruler of the others—the reliable fire from below washed away shadow and the other species of darkness, letting a multitude of crops grow and grow.
The boy found his father standing before a long table. Ornate receivers were clasped in both hands, and more receivers were on the tables behind him, pulled from their cradles. Dozens of voices were shouting from the outlying districts, each voice sputtering, distorted by the long reaches of wire. King heard the words and understood what they were describing, but what did more than impress him—what shook his unbreakable mind—was the utter terror filling the only face that he had ever loved.
“Hold tight you shits. Hold tight.”
The walkway dangled from the blimp like an exhausted arm. Boards and rope and assorted bodies were being dragged backwards through the roaring air. Big hands and long toes clung to the webbing. Diamond’s tiny hands fought to keep their grip. The blimp was dropping every drip of ballast water and two emergency slugs of black iron, and the twin engines pressed past full-throttle, threatening to explode as the aircraft fought for speed, for altitude, for any unlikely blessing.
The holes inside Diamond’s chest were healing, and he was breathing again, the new heart pushing pristine blood. The boy made himself look up the walkway. Seldom and Elata were stretched out on their bellies before him, side by side, faces hidden. Brown uniforms and blowing hair carpeted the walkway all the way to the blimp’s opened nose. Three police officers were standing inside the nose. One man was desperately trying to grab the nearest boy, cursing him when he wouldn’t reach out. Another man did nothing but point empty eyes at the tree in front of him, at Marduk. The third officer was flushed in the face, cheeks ballooned outward to create an odd expression, and a moment later he tipped forward, leaning with poise, even grace, as he threw up a breakfast of berries and curdled milk.
With every breath, the sun grew more brilliant.
Buried inside the screech of engines, Diamond was certain he heard people wailing. But only people in the distance and only behind him. Nobody trapped on the walkway wasted their strength making noise.
Good was squatting beside his boy, four hands locked in place, and he tilted the long head sideways, broad black eyes unblinking and amazed.
Diamond shoved his left arm under and then over the tight webbing, as if his short limb was a needle and he was sewing with it. Forcing his arm into a position at once painful and secure, he grabbed the webbing with his left hand and let go with his right and both clumsy boots, allowing his weight to hang from the shoulder.
That was how he spun around, eyes pointing at what the monkey could see.
Marduk was plunging, straight and fast.
Home was on the far side of the tree. But even knowing this, Diamond couldn’t stop hunting for what the mind knew best. A relentless, machine-like agent inside him paid strict attention to the walkways and each distinctive landing and the curtains of hundreds of strange homes. No detail seemed familiar enough. For a breath or two, he was convinced that this wasn’t Marduk at all and the blimp had been flung somewhere else. But that was a crazy, desperate idea, and he was ashamed to think it. The canopy was clear of the forest. The colossal brown trunk was roaring downwards. Diamond’s father was working at the Ivory Station, which was on Hanner and Hanner hadn’t fallen, had it? What was important was to remember that Father was safe. And Mother had gone shopping, which left so many ways to be spared. But the piece of Diamond that insisted on finding hope was also relentlessly searching for the big new landing of his home, and the painted corona on the door curtain, and in particular the wide window that would let him peer into his room, at the soldiers and Mister Mister and the rest of a left-behind life.
But the window was lost. Those familiar rooms were already below him, gone. In that tangle of endless detail, he saw people jumping. Some wore drop-suits, many did not. Figures ran and flung themselves off the walkways and the ends of landings, fighting for distance as the stubborn, hard-swirling air grabbed them. But often some larger structure would rush down from above. The proud landings of the richest neighbors swatted at everyone below. The tree refused to set them free. Marduk continued to accelerate, and other strangers did nothing but stand where they happened to have their feet, a thousand people holding tight to railings and each other as they watched a small black blimp pull away.