Airborn (16 page)

“I’m wondering if maybe your parents paid the pirates to sink our ship.”

To her credit, she laughed.

“I’m sorry. I talk too much—everyone says so. What about your parents? They must miss you, being away so much.”

“Well, I suppose my mother’s used to it. My father worked aboard airships too. He died three years ago.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that,” she said, looking stricken. “Your poor mother. She’s going to be frantic when she hears about the
Aurora.
”

“I know,” I said, feeling sick. “She’s a worrier. She never wanted me to take the position.”

“Weren’t you awfully young?”

“Twelve’s not so young to start as cabin boy. It was a good job. And we needed the money.”

“So you started right after your father died?”

I nodded. “The
Aurora
was my father’s ship too. I think Captain Walken must have felt sorry for us—but I’m not sure Mom ever forgave him for offering to take me on.”

“It’s what you wanted though, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.” I’d never been able to tell my mother how comforting it had been to work aboard Dad’s old ship. Everyone knew about my father, and they were all very kind to me, especially Captain Walken. Baz took me under his wing right away—the older brother I never had. I felt like I’d discovered another family aloft. And my father always felt nearby, visiting me often in my dreams. I kept this all to myself, though, for I couldn’t bear being disloyal to Mom and Isabel and Sylvia.

“Do you get home much?”

“We get shore leave regularly. I’ve got two sisters, almost as terrifying as you. I should go home more,” I said guiltily. “It’s hard now, with Dad gone.”

“He was the storyteller.”

I nodded, surprised she remembered.

“Took you everywhere in your head. Like my grandpa,” she said. “Oh, look, I meant to show you this.”

She shifted past me and climbed down to the ground. From a side pocket on her camera case she slid out an old photograph. Back in the tree, she showed it to me. It was a class photograph of schoolboys on the front steps. They all wore uniforms, shirts and blazers and shorts.

“Can you tell which one he is?” Kate asked.

“Your grandfather?”

“You met him.”

“He was a bit older by then!”

“Go on, look. It’s so obvious!”

I conjured up the image of the old man in the hospital bed, tried to take him back to his childhood.

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“Honestly.” She pointed to a boy. “He looks just like me.”

“He does?”

“You can’t see that?”

“Ah, yes, long auburn hair, pleated skirt…”

“Boys are so hopeless at this. Isn’t he adorable, though? Look at his ears, how they stick out. And did you notice he’s the most rumpled looking? All the other boys look fairly trim, but his uniform’s all crumpled as if he’d just rolled down a hill.”

“Already off having adventures,” I said.

She looked down at the picture. “Yes,” she said sadly.

“You have his eyes,” I told her.

She looked up at me, beaming.

“This is going to prove him right,” she said, nodding at the skeleton. “No one will think he was crazy after this, not even my mother.” She looked at her wristwatch. “We’re making good time. It’s just past ten o’clock.”

“We should start back in half an hour. I need to be on duty at noon.”

We carried on with our work, dismantling the skeleton bone by bone. I have to say, I felt odd doing it, like we were stealing. A carpetbag seemed no fit place for the bones of this creature. The last vertebrae from his tail went in. I clasped the bag, lifted it. The bag scarcely felt heavier than it had when I’d carried it empty. I looked at the naked branch. We were done.

“I do hope we can manage to reassemble it,” Kate said.

It made me smile the way she said “we,” for I would not be around for that. I was about to remind her of this when a terrible throttled shriek pierced the forest, alarmingly close.

The birds stopped singing, the bugs ceased their thrumming. Even the wind bottled its breath. Everyone and everything in the forest was listening. Kate and I looked at each other.

I heard the soft rustle of something pattering through leaves. It was in the tree next to us. I caught sight of it almost right away because it was so brightly colored: a parrot’s wing, not attached to a parrot, fluttering down through the branches. It disappeared into the ferns on the forest floor, and I could just see a flash of its color through the greenery.

I stared at it for a moment, my mind’s pistons firing at half speed.

Something had just eaten that parrot.

Something had swallowed it whole and spat out the wings.

There was the wing in the grass.

Sound returned to my ears. My gaze slowly lifted, climbing the tree beside us. High up, something moved fast. Like a slender wisp of fog it seeped through the branches and disappeared behind the veil of vines and leaves. My heart clattered.

“I see it,” Kate whispered.

It jumped.

It was so quick it was hard to focus. It was long and lean and had sleek cloud-colored fur. As it soared through the air between trees, its wings flared open for just a second and suddenly it was huge, a completely different creature. And just as quickly the wings pulled in and it was mist again and vanished among the branches.

I could hear the rasp of my own breathing. When I spoke it sounded as if someone had a good grip round my windpipe.

“It’s in our tree.”

We had our heads tilted back, and hands shielding our eyes, trying to spot it, but the sun was too bright. I had to keep blinking and looking off to one side. All I caught were vanishing wispy bits of the creature through all the greenery. My whole body was filled with liquid lead.

High up, I saw a fringe of cloudy white fur against the thick dark trunk and realized it was clinging to the far side, almost completely hidden. Then it showed itself. Sinewy as a snake, it came slyly creeping around, its whole body flattened upside down against the trunk.

I felt Kate’s hot hand close around my arm.

It was a pale panther. It was a bat. It was a bird of prey. With its wings pulled in, it was sleek, almost scrawny. It had jutting shoulders and a humped back, but then I realized these were its massive wings, bundled tight. From head to tail it was no more than four or five feet. Its face was a cat face, only longer, with a lower forehead, the nostrils more pronounced and dark against the pale fur. It was a panther’s face but altogether more streamlined, designed to cut through wind. Its large eyes danced with intelligence and sunlight. It was exquisite. It was terrifying.

“I need my camera,” Kate whispered. Her face was pale and she was trembling.

“Stay still,” I hissed.

But Kate started slowly to stand. I grabbed her arm to hold her back, but she pulled away. I saw the creature tense above us. I did not know whether it was merely startled or was about to leap at us. The camera still hung by its strap from an overhead branch. Kate took it in her hands and tilted it upward. She pressed the plunger and the camera gave a blinding flash.

The creature screeched and pounced onto a higher branch, sprang once more to its tip, then soared out of the tree.

“Come on!” Kate said, scrambling down. I jumped after her. I didn’t know how wise it was to follow this creature, but Kate was already off. For a moment it seemed we’d lost it, and I couldn’t help feeling a bit of relief, but then Kate jabbed up her finger, and I caught the quick cloudy flash of it as it pounced into another tree.

It definitely had its own course set, for it was traveling in a straight line now, pouncing, barely touching down before springing again. The branches did not shudder as they took its weight. Sometimes the creature, when crossing between trees, opened its magnificent wings a little, the sun flashing on the white fur.

And I understood now how we could’ve missed them, all of us sky sailors over the years. Against the green of the trees they were easy enough to spot, but against a cloudy sky they blended in almost completely. Even in a blue sky your mind would’ve told you it was just a little wisp of cloud; the same with water: just a bit of foam on a wave’s crest. Maybe I’d even seen them before, but simply never realized it.

We ran after it, heads tilted, trying to track it as it soared through the forest. But it was faster than us, and I knew that it would soon leave us far behind.

The trees thinned and then disappeared abruptly, and we saw the creature launch itself into the air, wings spread, and drop out of sight. I gasped. We moved as close as we dared to the edge of the high bluff. Below us we could see it as it pounced down the cliff, wings flaring as it jumped from scraggly treetop to treetop. As the ground leveled out, it continued to leap across the forest canopy.

“It doesn’t know,” Kate said. “It doesn’t know how to fly.”

“Its left wing,” I said. “Look.”

Every time it flared its wings, the right shot out to its full length, but the left never quite made it. Perhaps it had been injured, or maybe its left wing was unnaturally stunted, making it incapable of flight. Maybe it had just never learned. Any creature capable of flight would not be leaping from tree to tree; it would be soaring high above them. We watched as the silvery creature got farther and farther away and then dropped out of sight altogether in the distant foliage.

“I bet that’s where it lives,” Kate said. “I bet that’s its nest! Can we get down there?”

“We’ve got to get back.”

“You know what it is,” she said.

“Yes. I know.”

“It’s the one Grandpa saw,” she said. “It’s the one that fell.”

We couldn’t stop talking, our words piling up one atop another. Talking about the creature, about what we should do next. Kate wanted to keep going, to see if we could find its nest, but the terrain was too steep here, and we were out of time. We had to start back. I was going to be late as it was. As we walked, our words spilled out to fill the humid air.

“He fell and survived somehow,” she said.

“It’s incredible. That the fall didn’t kill him. That he could slow himself down enough to land.”

“But he never learned to fly.”

“I think one of his wings might be deformed,” I said.

“But would that stop him from flying?”

“Or maybe after the fall he just never had the confidence,” I said.

“They never came looking for him.”

“They just left him. The mother abandoned her own baby.”

“Nothing she could have done,” Kate said. “She couldn’t carry him.”

“They can lift big fish out of the water, your grandfather said as much.”

“Maybe they just assumed he’d be dead, or that he was so unfit there was no point of rescuing him—he couldn’t survive if he couldn’t fly.”

“Seems a bit harsh,” I said. “Maybe it just needed some extra time. To heal or to learn. Then it would’ve been a fine flier.”

“They’re animals,” she said. “They don’t think like us. It’s all survival of the fittest with them.”

“Even animals feel love for their offspring,” I objected.

“True,” she said. “I’ve seen chimps much friendlier than my parents.”

We laughed and then walked on in silence for a bit, our minds churning.

Kate spoke slowly, her brow furrowed, thinking things through. “He fell down and landed in a tree or somewhere soft. He had no mother to nurse him. Somehow he stayed alive eating birds and bugs and all sorts of little things here. Berries, fruit. It’s an incredible tale of survival.”

“There was nothing here to hunt him,” I pointed out, wanting to be clever and methodical too. “There was luck thrown into it as well.”

“Yes,” Kate agreed. “But he’s adapted to his environment so well—the way he leaps from tree to tree. Did you see his legs, the way they pushed off from the branches? Very strong. They’d have no need to be that strong in the air. He’s gotten stronger in different ways here, so he can survive.”

“He doesn’t fit in though. His fur, it’s the wrong color for here. He stands out. He’d be easy to catch if there were predators.” I sighed. “He should be flying, not leapfrogging around the forest. He was built to fly.”

“But he wasn’t, not this one. Maybe he has a deformity, like you said. Maybe his wings don’t really work. This is all he’s got.”

I felt sorry for him, landlocked. At least he had never known flight. He had nothing to miss, nothing to yearn for. I wondered if he remembered the terrifying plunge that started his life.

We reached the tree and Kate repacked her camera in its case. I picked up the carpetbag filled with bones.

Kate stopped and looked back. “What if I never see him again?” she said miserably. “We’ll probably be leaving today or tomorrow. The photograph I took won’t come out. I wasn’t even aiming properly. And it moved so quickly. At best it will just be a blur. I need to get closer.”

“You’ve got the bones,” I reminded her. “And the pictures of the skeleton.”

She snorted.

“But you said they’d be enough!” I said. “You said the bones would be conclusive!”

“Oh, the bones are fine,” she said dismissively, “but there’s a living one, right here! If I could get some shots of him up close…” She trailed off, distracted. “Isn’t it funny how we both started calling it
him.
”

“I didn’t even think about it.”

“We have no way of knowing whether it’s a he or a she. But of course we just call it him. Just another big important male of the species.”

She looked at me angrily, as if this were all my fault somehow.

“Let’s call it
she
, then,” I suggested.

Her frown disappeared. “All right. Good. She.”

“Did she look the way you imagined?” I asked.

“No. Yes. I’m not sure. She was beautiful, wasn’t she?”

“She was.”

“Beautiful creatures, just like Grandpa said. Oh, Matt, I want to see her again.”

“I do too.”

She looked at me and smiled.

“But we’ve got to leave,” I said. “Maybe it’s just as well. It might be dangerous, trying to get close to her.”

“You think she’d attack?” The thought seemed completely new to her. “They didn’t attack Grandpa.”