The train slows, slows and stops, and I slither down through the hatch, flattening myself on my belly, listening to the chatter of the workers above me as staff board and depart the train. I’ve thought about doing this before, scouted it in case I ever wanted to split, but now that I’m eyeballing it, it looks tight.
Well, as Talamar says, gotta flap if you wanna fly.
And then there’s a grinding noise somewhere ahead of me, and with a hum, the train’s alive once more.
I really hope I got the measurements right.
The thing just about gives me a haircut on the way out, but thirty seconds later my mothers and the council are on their way to the palace, and I’m climbing to my feet, checking the platform, then clambering up onto it to make my way out.
I duck out the station gates and into an alleyway, squeezing past a pallet of old circuitry bound for recycling, keeping my head down. I need to get underground as quickly as I can—traveling this way is how I’ve avoided the ident cameras for the last few years. It’s why today was the first time my mothers realized I’ve been leaving the palace. This time they’ll be on the lookout, but I’m not trying to avoid them forever.
I have a point I want to make before they drag me back home and take away everything that matters to me. It’s my last throw of the dice, and I’m not going to give it up.
I have to risk the grand boulevard for a minute, and I snag a pair of sunglasses from a stall, jamming them on my face and dropping a credchip as I keep moving. The afternoon sun is a huge ruby suspended skyward at the end of the wide street, gleaming at me through gray clouds. The colors to either side of the street are just as vivid, displays dancing across the storefronts, bright lights making even brighter promises. The smell of a dumpling shop wafts past me, and the shouts of a headset vendor mingle with the sound effects of the game he’s got on demo.
I duck down a second alleyway and get away from the main strip. I need to head underground from a shabbier area, where there are fewer cams—that might stop them realizing where I’ve gone, once they think to trace me.
The capital doesn’t have the slums you see on the other islands, but the support staff have to live somewhere. Like the palace, their homes are ancient, built out of rock mined from Below before the Ascension. They’re a lot more solid than the buildings that have sprung up since, made of bamboo and repurposed steel, but they all have solar panels strapped to the roofs that slowly angle throughout the day to make the most of the sun. Just now they’re all pointed west, making the line of rooftops along the edge of the island seem like a serrated knife.
Ten minutes later I find a service lane running behind the strip of makeshift stalls, and thirty seconds after that, I find what I’m really looking for—a manhole. Dropping to my haunches, I pull a data cord from my pocket, plug one end into my chrono, then flip up the tiny hatch beside the manhole to find the maintenance socket for the other end of it.
A wall of figures springs up above my wrist, and I use my free hand to send them sliding around like I’m conducting music, coaxing the manhole into opening up with a soft clunk as the seal releases.
Below me are the hot, bustling depths of the sky-engines and the unmistakable greasy scent of the fog that wafts through them. To others, the engine tunnels look like the chaos of Below itself, and the thickness of the air there makes them uneasy. To me, the tunnels look like freedom.
The rhythmic thump that surrounds me as I climb down calms my thoughts and drowns out my worries as the light fades away and the air grows humid and heavy. Something about the combination of air, noise, and vibration from the engines gives this place an oddly ethereal atmosphere, and the hair on my arms begins to lift in response, as it always does. I pause to shake my wrist, and the light on my chrono kicks in, casting dancing shadows as my feet hit the ground.
I’m going to get to the Skysinger, and I’m going to show them once and for all what she can do. I’m going to make them see how much better her engine is than anything out there, so that they have to take this seriously. So that they understand this isn’t some stupid daydream. This is real, and I can do it.
If we don’t dream—if we don’t try to go Below, try to push out the borders of our tiny archipelago and see what else is out there—then what’s the point of all our tech? Are we supposed to just use it to make sleeker transports and smarter chronos—to make our lives lazier and easier?
Not me. I want to explore. There’s a way to solve any problem, and if we want to figure out how to survive Below so we can search it for answers, then we need to go there.
And even if I set aside my dreams of exploration, the engines might fail at some point in the future. If the sky-cities fail, everyone dies.
There are a thousand reasons this needs to fly.
So in I go.
Every island of Alciel has engines beneath it, built into the bedrock itself, but the capital’s are the largest by far—they stretch the length of the island, like a second city below the first. Once you get used to the heavy, metallic feel of the air and spend some time down here, you learn that the engines are full of neighborhoods too, each with its own personality—grinding machinery, or long walls of circuitry jostling for room, or endless close-packed intersections of dark corridors. Of course, their only residents are the engineers—and the occasional trespasser.
I pull up my long-ago stolen blueprints on my chrono and figure out where I am, then set off down a hallway lined with circuitry, thousands of small red and green lights playing across the walls on either side. Centuries ago, the code that drives them would’ve made sense to our engineers—now we’ve lost that technology. Our engineers are like doctors splinting broken bones, but if anything ever went wrong—seriously wrong—with the engines, we’d have no idea how to fix them. There are circuits with no apparent purpose, sections that seem to run on nothing more than air.
Which means we’d better hope for everyone’s sake that Damerio’s right, not Talamar—that the cities are not actually sinking.
Or we’d better start trying to rediscover what we’ve lost, if only we can stop arguing long enough.
It’s fascinated me as long as I can remember, that just as my own heart beats mysteriously within me, so too do the engines deep within the city. The strangeness in the air here gives some people the shakes, and for a few, even starts messing with their minds—but it never bothered me. When I was younger, I wanted to be an engineer. That was before I understood my path led only to council meetings and ceremony.
Today I tried to make something of those council meetings, to use the fact that I get into them at all to actually make a difference. But sometimes you need to stop talking and do.
Miri and Saelis are waiting in the hangar, which I found on one of my first trips down here. It was when I worked out that it used to be a launch bay that I had the idea for the Skysinger, and this is where she sits now, waiting to hit the skies.
The Skysinger is the only thing in the world that’s truly mine. Everything else I own is part of my office. It was made for me because I am a prince, or was used or worn by royals before me, and will be handed on to those who come after.
But my glider—it’s the one thing I can look at and think, My name is North. I built this with my own hands, and it’s mine.
It’s strong and sleek, but nothing flashy. I painted the Skysinger a simple black, with chrome fittings polished to perfection. So many of the other gliders are much brighter, adorned with stripes and symbols that denote their pilots’ successes in races and stunt competitions. The Skysinger is utilitarian, low-key.