And Kindred suddenly understood why this level was called Breach.
An argument, closer than before and frighteningly clear, brought Kindred back to her situation.
“Kindred! Hey, Kindred!” Cora’s voice echoed off the walls of the building and through the holes in the ceiling. Kindred could hear Barque’s grumbles along with Cora’s calls, and they were both close, on the stairs, she thought.
Kindred began moving again, gripping the strand—rope, she decided; it had become a rope now—and lowered herself, her left hand and arm exhausted from doing double duty. She wrapped her legs around the rope and tried to make use of her right arm by crooking her elbow and pinching the rope against her ribs.
Slowly at first and then a little faster, Kindred slipped and slid down the rope, careful not to cut herself on the rough grain of the grass.
She heard Cora shouting for her. Quixa too, had begun to lend her voice, low and soft and concerned now.
Kindred dropped as quickly as she could.
Barque’s voice joined the other two, a voice of authority and irritation, and she could hear footsteps now, their sounds describing the last few stairs being climbed. Quickly.
Kindred let herself slide faster, feeling the fast heat against her palm each time she let the rope slide.
Somewhere around the second level, a horrible thought struck her: she had never checked to make sure the rope made it to the ground. The sight of the breaches had distracted her, and then the voices from below, and she was moving.
Kindred looked below and saw the end of the rope twisting and flicking with her movements, entirely too close to where she was now and not touching the ground.
She would have to jump.
She would have to fall.
As she slid the last bit down to the end of the rope, losing the comforting feel of the grass locked between her knees, Kindred heard a familiar voice from above, and she looked up to see Long Quixa’s face, cocked to the side in confusion, eyes looking down at her.
Kindred’s legs swung free of the rope, the muscles in her arm and chest tensed, holding tight to the rope even as her body swayed freely in the air. Untethered to the world, Kindred flew.
She stared up at Quixa.
And Long Quixa nodded once, eyes crinkling just slightly, before turning around and speaking. The even tones of her voice were too quiet to hear, but Kindred understood all the same: Quixa was buying her time.
Kindred kicked out at the wall of Cruel House so she wouldn’t be dropping straight down.
And fell.
Her legs collapsed beneath her as she landed, and Kindred rolled forward onto her shoulder, every muscle in her body surging into action, trying to protect her burned hand. She managed it, but barely, and as she stood up, she felt the strain in her legs and hips and feet. One ankle twisted painfully beneath her as she put weight on it.
A frustrated shout from above her drove all thoughts of pain and strain from Kindred’s mind, though, and she looked up to see Barque staring down at her, teeth bared in a grimace, one of the buds jeweling his skin opening just a little, a spike of color just under his jaw.
Kindred ran, ignoring the pain singing up through her body, and instead felt the freedom of no longer waiting, no longer hoping.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Kindred became the vines coughed in through the breaches; she remade herself into the Sea recapturing the city. Instead of running along the main road to the staircase, she veered off between buildings, her footsteps rhizomatic, unseen and unknown, angling and lancing randomly. Like the plants occupying spaces meant and not meant to be occupied, Kindred went everywhere: on another road for a little bit, walking when she saw people, running when she didn’t; sliding between the wide and slim spaces between grass-woven houses; mingling in and around what seemed to be a small market, walking along and existing there for a few breaths before moving on. She became intensely aware of her dun-colored clothing amidst the brightly woven attire of the Once-City citizens she passed by.
But though she drew some attention, it was nothing more than a few curious looks and whispered conversations. Some Kindred passed on the streets had clothes like hers, and these she knew to be other sailors. Their faces bore the script only the prairie wind could write: lines and creases telling of days sailing the Sea and nights adoring the stars.
As she neared the staircase, she entered again the rampant growth that surrounded it, feeling her breath returning amidst the green. Somehow, in that chaos of plants and people, Kindred felt calm.
She emerged out of the tangle, having followed a thin footpath that wound about before depositing her at the staircase, and was happy to find the stairway host to several people—none of them Barque—about their own business, coming and going.
Kindred tried to look as though she belonged as she stepped onto the staircase and went down.
* * *
The Forest.
Kindred stared, unmoving, as citizens of the Once-City moved around her in the never-ending up and down of their lives.
She stared, forgetting for a moment the man chasing her.
She stared, not forgetting the Sea or her grandmother or her new place in this world but feeling them all the more powerfully.
She stared into a dark, dense wood.
The second level hugged the staircase, allowing only a small space to exit before huge trees standing shoulder to shoulder stopped any further movement.
The blue-green light from the staircase faded as it reached the trees, their leaves like shields, their trunks like sentinels arrayed in some formation that looked at once chaotic and purposeful.
A ghost wind, like the one she had heard coming through the Sea wall into her prison cell, spun secrets through the leaves as Kindred stood on the staircase, and she wondered if the first was the only level with breaches.
Kindred stepped from the stairs onto the soft loam of the Forest and approached the single path winding quiet through the trees.
“Not another step,” a voice said, and for a moment Kindred thought the trees had begun speaking to her, warding her off, as though they knew she had escaped from her guard, had become a disease running unchecked through the veins of the Once-City.
But it was a woman, short, muscled, mean. Instead of the cudgel carried by Barque, this woman carried two narrow-bladed swords, one on each hip. Tattoos covered most of her visible skin, reminding Kindred of Ragged Sarah. This woman walked out from where she had been leaning against one of the trees, blanketed in shadow. Another woman dressed and armed exactly like her, though taller and broader of shoulder, also emerged.
These were the pirates Kindred had heard of from bookmavens and council leaders, from men and women too far in their cups to bother holding back their thoughts anymore. These were the pirates Little Wing spoke of. Their every move was power, violence, hostility.