Skyglass: Chapter 3

PHOENIX

When Zinn delivered a half-dead Moss home after band practice, I invited the bassist in for tea. He looked pleasantly surprised when I offered him a deep mug of aged tranquilis blossom–the very stuff he’d steeped for himself at the sky-high drinkup we’d visited together. I wasn’t usually so sensitive, but the promise of future sex made me quite the keen-eyed observer.

We tucked Moss into bed–he was so tired he barely put up a fight when I kissed him goodnight–and I poured Zinn his drink. I caught his gaze in mine as I passed over the mug. His eyes were green, yes, and prettily so–but there were bits and pieces of uncut amber in there, too. Like chipped honey. I resisted the urge to lick them right up.

He stared back at me, and asked, “Why are you here? Living with him.” I was nicely surprised to find he was heatproof–that he could withstand the fervor of my stare.

“Because my bed’s here,” I answered.

One of his eyebrows went up. “Because you put your bed here.” His laugh melted on my tongue. Then he said, “That’s not important. Let’s not talk about Moss. Let’s talk about you.”

Oh, yes please. I was far more interesting. Maybe only because I was such a good liar–but that didn’t matter. He wanted to know about me, which meant he was curious, which meant he’d already put one toe in my lusty trap.

“Why are you in Raith? You’re new to the city, aren’t you? What made you come here?”

I thought for a moment. I could tell him an outright lie, but that wasn’t nearly so sweet as my other option: confusion.

I had planned to go hunting that night, looking for vengeance on the sunslabs that floated above the cloud line over Raith. My murder-worthy father was a heat-fetishist–one of the few things I’d learned about him–and a sunslab was the only way he might catch some true solar action in these parts, so I figured I’d investigate. Obviously, I was hoping to have a carcass on my hands by the end of the night, but even the faintest rat-scrabble of a rumor would make me happy. Why not bring Zinn along while I stalked down clues, but not explain? Could be entertaining.

So I said, “How about you shadow me tonight as I go on a grand, mysterious adventure? Maybe you’ll answer your questions all by yourself.”

Zinn bathed his face thoughtfully in tea-steam, then nodded. “Okay.”

I grinned. Such a quick and easy reply! I liked that.

***

As we rode the vus up and out of the green sky, Zinn turned to me. “How’d you like our first show?”

I let my head loll back on the bench, staring through the clear bioplast of the vus. Still greenery and mist out there. No sunshine yet. I shivered in anticipation.

“To be true?” I replied. “It was a bit dry and crumbly. Still crunchable–you weren’t bad, but it was lacking in some places…” I trailed off, the sparking seed of an idea worming into my brain. I grinned. “Wait. Give me your com.”

“Why?”

“Just give it to me. Unless you keep the thing in your brain-meats, in which case I’ll just pluck it free”

He stared at me pensively, then brought out a polished, wooden cube. When I had it in hand, I continued.

“I know it was your first time playing, but the vast wasteland surrounding the stage made me sad nonetheless. However, I think I can solve your people problem.” I shook his com under his nose and grinned wider at the riptide of inspiration jarring inside me. “You see, I’m rather handy with the program Blowup–I’m no popup, but I’m not bad, either. If you let me play around on your com for an hour or so, I could make something so fructilicious even the poppers wouldn’t be able to resist you and your shiny Skyglass.”

Zinn wrinkled his nose. “A Blowup? For Skyglass?”

“Yup.”

He seemed to chew on that for a few seconds. Finally, he shrugged.

“You’d have to convince the others. And Sable sometimes stabs during negotiations.”

“Sounds fun.”

At that moment, our vus burst out of the green sky; shredded leaves puffed by the bioplast windows. We nosed upward, to a platform balanced at the end of a spindly beam that protruded from treetops: the sunslab dock. The doors slid open to let us out.

I turned and turned Zinn’s p-com in my hand as we trotted off the vus and purchased a pair of tickets for the sunslabs. Having a com at my disposal gave me a little buzz. I missed the connection.

We had a little time until lift-off, so we killed it in the waiting room on the top floor of the sunslab docks, where the ceiling and walls were all made of rain-streaked bioplast. Above us, the rumbling clouds looked a bit moody, with bulbous, bruised protrusions rippling in and out of their underbellies. I looked away from the clouds–and, more importantly, the currently hidden sun–and focused on the snaky tube that led from the ticket office to the edge of the docks, where the slab we’d be riding awaited its passengers.

It was made of two pieces merged together: a spindle-tower shaped like an inverted skyscraper, and a flat, square platform resting on top. The sunslab was parked so the mid-point of its spindle-tower was level with the dock’s tube, so most of the top platform was just a shadow overhead. I knew from my earth-research that the platform was exposed to the finicky elements with no protective architecture whatsoever, and just a shimmer of generated heat to keep off the cold. Its tabletop surface might be painted elaborately with scrollwork and vines, sometimes broken by trapdoors that led down into the inverted tower below–but otherwise, the slab was smooth as a butcher’s chop on top.

“So where are we going?” Zinn asked, as we continued our wait in the waiting room. “Any slab in particular?”

“Where?” I repeated. “Oh, just somewhere we can get a bite of sweet and steaming heart. A place where people find what they want or need most–the sun.” A broad and vague answer, ’cause the sunslabs were all about the sun, but I had no specific destination in mind, so I’d spoken true; my only plan was to wander the slabs until I found something promising.

Zinn looked at me strangely and placed a hand over his chest. “But I’ve got a sun right here,” he said, then touched his head. “And here, too. I’m all the plants will ever need to keep alive–the sun’s been rendered sadly obsolete.”

I opened my mouth to say something nasty, but Zinn’s com (still in my possession, of course) bleeped at us–time to board. We walked together through the winding tube that led to the dock’s edge, keeping us toasty and protected from the high altitude. The passage ended in thin air and a bridge made of colored, crystalline stepping stones. We crossed them, ignoring the tug and grope of the skeevy wind, until we stepped onto the slab’s spindle-tower entry deck: a hooded foyer with a checker-tiled floor and a shadowy hall ahead that led into the tower.

Other sun-seekers crowded on with us, most of them wearing sunglasses or full-face visors. I had my hood up, which made Zinn the only exposed person aboard. I ran my tongue along the edges of my teeth, enjoying his nakedness.

Inside, the tower was glittery and dark, like a black diamond–probably for seekers who got bored or exhausted from the rare sunlight. There were giant windows and decks carved into the outer walls, and a hundred-hundred rooms and tunnels wheedling in toward the center, like a fire-polished termite mound.

“Which way?” Zinn asked as we lingered in the vestibule, waiting for the heat-hungry crowd to disperse toward the top or one of the outer decks, so they could watch the sunslab make cloudbreak.

“Follow me,” I said, patting down the flutter of nerves beating against my chest. I hadn’t seen my mother since arriving in Raith–yet in just moments, I’d get a glimpse of her bright but distant self, a prospect that excited me in a restless, anxious sort of way. It had become so easy to pretend I was just another broken human, that I hadn’t once been something else. Something better.

I skirted the tower’s perimeter with Zinn at my side, watching the rush of shadowy cloud-wool sweep past the windowed passages, listening to the scratch of rain against their bioplast. There were clouds all around: no earth below us, no sky above. Just clotted vapor. I consulted Zinn’s p-com–we had an hour till cloudbreak, which was plenty of time to wend up through the tower and reach the top of the slab that had been dubbed “The Sunroom” by all the directional signs inside.

Oh, how clever of them! It was almost as clever as the name they’d given the bowels of the slab’s spindle-tower: The Sungeons. Nonetheless, I was glad to see all the cute little homages paid to the sun–they were just the sort of thing my fetishist father would slurp right up.

When I’d first started hunting him, I’d found out all sorts of useless, but exceptionally gross, tidbits about his heat-hunger. He loved anything that professed a profane and overt exoticism of sunshine: star-eyed PIs, furnace-throated glory holes, grave-robbed skin samples from long-dead victims of sun cancer. Nastiness, all of it, the kind that made me fume with slow, boiling anger–that kind that tricked frogs and kicked their buckets–but at least it made getting a trace on him easier.

Fifty-nine minutes later, after climbing stairs and taking lifts up through the slab’s many, many layers, we popped up and out of one of the trapdoors and stood on the wall-less square atop the spindle-tower–the open air Sunroom. The soul-painted ground–shiny as freshly polished amber–was all tingly-warm beneath my feet; I could feel it even though I was going about in strappy boots as tall and precarious as the spindle-tower below.

I gave Zinn a sidelong glance. He gazed overhead with his hands in his pockets, eyes on the thinning clouds above us. Always so distant–I wondered what sort of thoughts rippled behind those glimmering pickle eyes.

I looked away, stilling my musings–I had my own preoccupations to worry about. The rain was barely a drizzle now, driven about by the wind, and falling in a buttery haze; I couldn’t see the sun yet, but she was near.

We plunged into a final, bulky cloud. Light died momentarily as we reentered the cloudscape. Soon, soon. Just one more cloud. Jumpy anticipation kicked me in the gut as I neared the platform’s edge and empty air beyond. I pressed my fists into my stomach, trying to push away a rising sickness.

Twenty steps to the edge. The cloud was thinning, blanching, and then we surged forward through a dark wash of rain. We burst free, and for the first time in ages, I saw her. She crested the platform like she’d just woken up.

Sunrise.

Mother.

Her million slender arms blazed over the slab’s horizon first, spiky and golden, scalping the sky as her heavy body rose and rose in full, burning bloom.

I ran to her, sprinting for the slab’s end so I could be close close closer to her. I leapt from the slab, legs kicking, hands grasping at golden light that could never be gripped, throwing myself over the precipice and into the air. I left Zinn and safety and solid ground behind so I could be near everything I missed most.

I felt a lick, a momentary burst of my old fireself as Mother flared in my eyes…but then it was gone and gravity had me in its heavy clutches.

I plummeted, agony beating against my skull and belly, toward the flat, black ground of another sunslab gliding beneath the one I’d just jumped from. My eyes locked with Zinn’s wide green ones as he leaned over the edge and watched me fall. I opened a hand and waved at him. I was still waving when I slammed into the sunslab below.

A blip of darkness, and then I was awake again. Mother was a brilliant afterimage bleaching my sight despite that darkness; I stared into the sky until I found her again, and fixed my gaze on her round body for comfort.

I was broken all over–one leg twisted backward, my skull flattened into the ground, my spine in little itty bits–but I didn’t hurt. I shifted around until everything was situated properly, and waited for my body to return itself to normal. I sighed. Normal. Oh, sweetling. That body would never be normal. It was wrong, would always be wrong.

By the time he reached me (compliments of a zippy little aircar), Zinn had recaptured his calm, and my fire-blood had re-welded my bones. I was still lying where I’d fallen when he arrived, though. I held my breath and stilled my eyes, made them glaze over. Would he think me dead? I froze myself and waited to find out.

He knelt at my side, and spoke so softly the wind almost stole away his words.

“How strange to see you so still. So peaceful.” He raised his voice. “I don’t think you’re dead, Phoenix.”

I sat up with a pout. “Hmph. You’re no fun. How’d you know?”

He shrugged. “No blood? That cheerful little wave as you fell? You knew you’d live–so I knew, too.”

My knees cracked as I leapt to my feet. “Silly how that works, isn’t it?”

More shrugging. His face was a little paler than usual, but nothing else betrayed the panic I’d seen on his face only moments before.

“What I’d like to know is why you jumped,” he said. “I don’t see any hearts around here–just sun-seekers looking for a heart to fill their empty ribcages. Just like you.”

“Oh, I’m not looking for my heart,” I corrected him. “I know that particular bloody organ all too well: it’s hungry for men, and women–and you, though I suppose you’d fall into the man-category. I actually like girls better, but…” I stepped in close to him, spine squeaking into place, and put my thumb against his esophagus, thinking that if I nibbled at it, maybe his flesh would come away in my mouth like sweet raw fish.

“But men make me angry,” I went on, “and I like that even better than I like women.” I took my hand away.

Zinn looked like he was considering something–maybe reconsidering. Me? Sex? Who knew with this particular elf? And while part of me liked that, the rest of me thrilled with the frantic pulse of warning.

“You know,” Zinn said, “this crazed heart-hunt of yours reminds me…of me.” He shook his head, and looked toward my mother, a strange, broken grin finding purchase on his face. “But there are no hearts here–Phoenix, just empty hunger.” His fingers brushed my palm, briefly, then pulled away.

Empty hunger. Perhaps he was right. Vile as father number two was, inconceivable as his lust was, his hunger wasn’t hollow–it was oppressive and noxious. Sunslabs were for voyeurs, but the flitty kind who just wanted a kiss–my father was a voyeur who liked to get his hands dirty.

Zinn and I sat in one of the outer sundecks during the descent, spider-strings of mist wriggling by our window. Zinn was reclining on a couch, eyes closed, hands steepled on his chest. He’d pulled a tiny terrarium from his pocket and had it balanced perfectly on the bridge of his nose. A tiny silver thread ran from it, out to a tinier needle he’d poked under the skin of his forehead. Tendrils of green lightning crackled along the thread as he meditated, and the tips of his ears glowed brighter.

I smirked–the guy was an elf, a slave, and yet he seemed so at peace with his plant-feeding talent–and looked out the window. The sunslab had descended back below the clouds, and in the distance, I could see Raith looming closer. The slab was skimming over the wastes now, higher than the farthest reaches of the green sky, but far enough below the clouds that I could decipher the ashy rise and fall of the dead earth below–its naked rocky bones, the snaggled wooden teeth of dead trees.

My breath caught in my throat as I saw a glint of spiky yellow spear up from the dirt of the wastes. I staggered up and hit the window, fingers grasping at the bioplast, eyes straining to see–but we were already past, the sunslab speeding on toward Raith.

I’d only seen the fractured, half-buried ship for a second before it had blurred out of sight, but one single, sweet second was all I had needed. Even buried in the earth, even broken, even pulverized into a million-billion pieces, I would recognize it anywhere: my father’s satellite.

I stared hard at the waste blurring beneath us, memorizing the spectral lay of the surrounding geography so I could find the ship again. Once I was satisfied, I sat back in my chair.

Zinn was still peaceful, eyes shut, breath slow. He hadn’t moved. I kept my mouth shut.

Our little sunslab adventure had been nothing but a tasty, atmospheric game, but this, this–the corpse of father number two’s satellite, the ship I’d first woken on, so cold and alone and human–this was mine. Mine to find, and keep, and hack open. I would be back for that ship. And once I’d broken inside, I’d crack my jaws wide and suck down its sulfuric, yolky heart.

Continued in Chapter 4.

Discuss this chapter in the Sparkler Monthly Public Forums (or below).