The Ivory Station was on the far side of the gouge.
Her final eyes watched little else.
The battle was at its frenzied worst: rapid and vicious, and clumsy. Presumably both sides had intricate battle plans, but nobody seemed to remember them. Armored airships maneuvered clumsily beside the Ivory Station, and the wings slashed past, sometimes spinning their jets to hover long enough for two targets to fix every weapon on one another. Corona bladders and scales were extremely tough, weathering astonishing rains of gunfire. But even the strongest materials failed eventually. Airships turned to flame. Wings shattered and tumbled toward the demon floor. There was an instant when exhaustion would annihilate both armies, but then the final airships retreated into the forest, and as night rose, a flock of larger, slower wings arrived, delivering hundreds of papio soldiers to the wide landing at the bottom of the Ivory Station.
Night bloomed faster than normal. The papio launched flares as messages, and the tree-walkers launched flares to confuse their enemies. Small guns took over the fight. Eerily beautiful clusters of light were born from explosions. The Station burned in darkness. Hanner’s trunk and battered canopy burned. Spellbound, Quest never noticed the pair of wings coming up her side of the gouge, and then they slashed past, near enough that their jets warmed her flesh.
She dropped that flesh and fled.
An agile little wing pursued her through the forest’s highest reaches. Or it was hunting other quarry, and it just happened to fix its bright spotlights on her body. The glare made her flesh turn real, a small cowardly shadow lurking beneath. Burning precious fuel, the wing hovered. Quest was perched on a dead hard-willow branch. The pilot stared at her with a puzzled, halfway-irritated expression. “You are something and you are important,” the woman probably thought. “But you aren’t what I want tonight.”
Quest let the branch slip away.
The papio fired her guns in response, splintering rotted wood.
Quest made herself narrow, falling as fast as possible. Wilderness was beckoning, familiar and dense, unconquered by either human species. Then she pushed much of what remained into long leatherwings, and she flew, flat at first and then higher, deep into places that nobody but her had ever named, her final eyes drinking the available light.
She had never felt as tired as she did then.
For the first time in her life, closing her eyes and mind seemed possible.
But time moved, and she moved through time, and there always seemed to be another point where she was sicker and weaker than before. No creature could live long in this state, not even her. Each stroke of the wings found misery. Muscles born just that day were spent, poisoned by their exertions, and she had to summon enough will to keep her mouth from hunting. The wilderness was jammed with creatures fleeing lost places, out of their territories and easy to kill. But she wasn’t safe and maybe she never would be safe again. That grim possibility carried her high, up near the ceiling where the only sunlight came after the rain, and that’s where she found a nest of daylight leatherwings—great beasts driven mad by explosions and the stench of burnt life.
She killed several and ate the pregnant female first.
She grew a few eyes and many more ears before grabbing tight to a lingerblossom trunk, dangling, passing into a state that wasn’t sleep and never would be.
Her rest might have lasted a long while.
But words found her. These weren’t human words. Every species of monkey had its language, and Quest knew all of them. Sleepless, paranoid jasmine monkeys were talking about an airship. They didn’t name the vessel or any of the people onboard, but the animals counted the cables that moored the big dark gasbag in one place, and hungry enough to ache, the troop was plotting to walk across the cables, slipping inside that big open door at the bottom. There was food inside. They could smell feasts. But the main stink was unfamiliar and wrong, which was the only reason that they didn’t attack.
“What is that stinky shit?” monkeys asked monkeys.
Quest grew nostrils.
Dry dark night air rose into what passed for her face, and she drank huge amounts of air before catching the musky odor of coronas and their odd, alien blood.
Only a hunter-ship would carry that stink.
Only someone wanting to hide would bring an open-air vessel deep into this labyrinth of trees.
Diamond was a faint, half-born possibility, but Quest couldn’t dismiss this opportunity.
Should she rest or move?
Motion claimed her, fingers letting go of the bark, every fatigue and ache and tiny cancerous doubt left behind with the hiding place.
The galley was small and polished. Corona scales covered every tabletop, and the plates were bright white ovals cut from corona bone, and every utensil was quality steel decanted from the monsters’ blood. Breakfast was hot and it was cold, each kind of food filling its own platter set on the first table. But most of the crew had been called away for a critical meeting. Three children and the monkey shared that table. Karlan sat alone in the back. The cook remained on his feet. Orders had been delivered, and the man wasn’t shy about playing with the handgun in his apron pocket. The giant boy did some good yesterday, but he had a reputation for causing trouble. Stopping trouble was the cook’s responsibility, and for what seemed like a very long while, he had been nervously imagining the circumstances that would make him shoot the young fellow in a leg or the shoulder, or maybe through the heart.
Everybody was hungry, but only Good was eating. There were no windows in the galley, but they heard the rain beating against Bountiful and everybody felt the rising winds, the red breath of the day combing the tangled wilderness.
Elata sat at the end of the table. She was a thousand days older than yesterday. Diamond thought the girl looked like her mother, and he nearly said so. His mouth opened, and noticing his eyes, she asked, “What’s wrong?”
Seldom said, “Everything’s wrong.”
“I was talking to Diamond,” she said.
“I know,” Seldom said.
Seldom looked younger than yesterday. He looked smaller too, and he couldn’t stop crying.
“Stupid,” Elata said, picking up a bright fork.
“Who’s stupid?” Seldom asked, sniffing quietly.
“Me,” the girl said. “I keep thinking she’s waiting for me. My mother. She’s sitting at home, in her favorite chair, and she’s not happy.”
Nobody else talked.
“I didn’t come home. I must have run off. Or she’s angry about something else that I did or didn’t do. Somehow I’ve pissed her off, and that’s the only way that I can think about her. Cursing me.”
She paused, and Diamond stared at his plate.
“But there’s a weirder part,” she said. “Do you know what it is?”
The boys glanced at each other.
From across the room, Karlan said, “You want to go home and get yelled at.”
She nodded. “I do. But that’s not it.”
Diamond asked, “What’s weird?”
“My father is sitting there too,” she said. “And he’s been dead for most of my life, it seems.”
The rain spoke. Nothing else.
Then Elata sat up straighter, her features aging even more. She hadn’t cried this morning. Her face was dry and stiff as if carved from coral. Out from her clamped mouth came her tongue, wetting her fingertips, and then she picked up a jar full of sugar, pouring half of it onto the clean plate in front of her. With two fingers, Elata began pulling the glittery brown sugar into her mouth, three tastes managed before she said, “This got me in trouble, every time.”