Rainbird (11 page)

The noise at the door subsided.

Too much to hope that whoever it was had gone away for lunch.

Almost done.
The last screw trembled in place, held in by age and sheer tenacity.

A boom at the door, almost making it jump out of its frame. The pipe holding it shut bent. The screw jumped, too, and Rainbird moved her foot as it fell. There was no time to rest her protesting muscles; she pushed the thin blade of the screwdriver under the vent cover and pried at it. The ancient cover popped free just as the door gave up its fight.

Rainbird dropped the cover, not looking around. She backed up from the vent, till she was right at the edge of the machine she’d used as a platform.

Footfalls behind her, loud, making the metal floor shudder.
Many
feet. A n impersonal voice barked out, “Stop right there, Miss! Hands in the—”

Rainbird narrowed her eyes at the vent hole. She drove her heels into metal as she sprang, sprinting for the wall, willing her body to give her its all, to ignore the reality of wall looming large in front of her. Shots rang out, sharp and splintered, around her.

Don’t stop, don’t stop.

Rainbird leapt up the wall, achieving vertical running speed for a split second, fingers grabbing and clamping around the edge. Her momentum flipped her entire body into the duct and in another second she was enclosed in dusty metal tubing, plunged into darkness, inhaling dust and animal droppings, the skin of her hands and her wings catching on metal ridges. Her own breathing thundered in her ears, as did the noise of her inelegant scrambling through the ducts.

Objective number one: Get out of target range.

That achieved quickly, Rainbird stopped to contemplate the forking of the duct, closing her eyes to bring back the schematic Sanders had shown her. She had a good spatial memory, honed by her years of doing Petrus’ job.

Turn right here…crawl along until I get to the third turn…look for the next fork…Glew, hasn’t it been twice that long yet? Ah, there’s the—oh no.

Rainbird stopped. The map had shown the duct forking cleanly into left and right here. However, she was confronted by a three-dimensional intersection, a jumble of ducting spliced together.

Either the schematic was outdated, or it had never been accurate in the first place.

Rainbird swallowed, as if to push down the sinking feeling in her stomach.
Petrus is waiting on me. This way. I think.

She went on for many more twists and turns, trying to keep heading in the direction of the heart chamber, backtracking now and again. After several sweaty and stifling eternities coiling around in the dark, Rainbird had to admit it.

She was lost.

And very hot. Too hot.

Rainbird laid her palm against a metal side. It was warm. Something rumbled, machinery coming on, vibrations trembling through the duct. A draft blew, a hot breath that sent dust spiraling into Rainbird’s face.

They’d turned up the heating. What else could they send into these pipes? Steam? Poison gas? Rainbird drew in a sharp breath, full of choking grit, and forced herself to exhale.

Breathe, breathe. You can’t have a panic attack in this canister.
Metal was dead, inert, deaf. She couldn’t talk to it, couldn’t communicate with it, like she’d done with the tissues and spinal cord.

But.

Dare she?

The thought of drowning in the vast ocean of the dragon’s alien dreams (
Thoughts? Emotion? Biochemical convulsions?
) turned Rainbird’s spine to jelly, but she had to.

For Petrus’ sake.

Rainbird backtracked through the duct slowly, fingers probing at the seams, searching for weaknesses. These ducts were so old, there had to be gaps somewhere.

Ah. Blessed air. Cool air, and a gap wide enough to fit her hand through. Rainbird pushed her hand through the seam as far as she was able, then squinted through the gap. She was in the inner workings of the Hub, in the nether space between various machine rooms, where pipes and tubes and wires coiled like intestines. She wouldn’t have to worry about falling right down on someone’s head.

Rainbird pulled hammer and wrench out of the loops in her workpants. She hammered, banged, and pried at the gap in the duct, until the abused metal turned and twisted aside. It made such a racket, Rainbird was afraid someone would overhear and find her, still trapped in the heating system like a cornered rodent.

The thought only made her pound faster and harder.

Once the gap was big enough, Rainbird gingerly lowered herself through it, hung for a moment to check her landing spot, and dropped.

She landed on a small metal deck, the endpoint of a pointless metal causeway, a leftover from a prior design. Peering through the darkness, she traced the path of various systems: the heating ducts she’d just spent an eon in, metal piping for water and waste, an old message capsule delivery system, and the black rubber-insulated cables for electricity.

And nerve tissue.

Rainbird kicked off her boots, sent them spinning into the darkness below the deck. Then she clambered onto the railing and walked it, wings and arms spread out for balance. Just like a tightrope, only easier.

Rainbird tracked the loops of electric cable till one dipped down in a curve below her. Right under it was a solid-looking intersection of ducts. Rainbird climbed down the railing, hung from a bar below the walkway, kicked off towards a wall, missed her target and clamped onto a message capsule tube instead. It started to give under her weight and, heart pounding, she scrabbled until she found a foothold on a box of some sort attached to the wall.

Careful.
She wasn’t as strong and as sharp as she normally was. Rainbird took several breaths to steady herself, then leapt off from there onto her chosen spot. She landed clumsily. The ducts shuddered but didn’t collapse.

Good.

Rainbird grabbed the black cable—it gave slightly—and cut a slit into it with her knife. She peeled the rubber aside, careful not to touch the innards, and exposed braided tissue and metal wiring. Electricity hummed through the cord.

Rainbird paused, fingertips poised above the cord, as if she were a pianist getting ready to play. The nerve wouldn’t hurt her, but an accidental touch of the wire could send a massive shock through her already-abused body. A headache still sat, heavy and dragging, behind her eyes.

With delicate fingers, Rainbird pinched the thickest part of the nerve tissue between thumb and forefinger.

And flew apart into particles, spiraling out of control, speeding through organic highways. Her consciousness splintered, heading in a thousand different directions. Rainbird applied mental brakes, slowed down, forced the pieces of her self back to herself, coalesced.

Into Rainbird.

Petrus.
She conjured him up with every sense, from his thin frame to his smell of soup and shaving cream to the timbre of his voice.

And a greater consciousness, big and alien, responded.

Rainbird slid down the highway, faster, but still in one piece. A rhythmic booming turned to vast thunder and she spilled out into an odd-shaped cavern, a cage of bone and metal where something huge and muscular beat.

Rainbird ripped her hand away, before her fingers spasmed too close to live wire. Her knees were rubbery. The cable in her hand shook. It was some time before she could scrape the rubber coating back over the cut and gently drop the cable into place. Some conscientious part of her—one gotten from and trained by Petrus—wrapped the slit up with some sticky taping.

The dragon had shown her. She knew how to find Petrus.

The clench and release of the muscle was what guided her. It sent vibrations through metal and bone, and she attuned her feet and ears to its particular rhythm. By the end of her journey in the between-spaces, it had grown to a waterfall roar, pounding at her skull and spraying her with an energy that tingled over her whole skin, but concentrated under her ears, above her kidneys and even the dull-sensitive edges of her wings.

Eiree senses.

Rainbird faced a blank wall. No, not entirely blank, but the holes in it were too small for her to squeeze through, besides being otherwise occupied by pipes and wires. But her quarry thundered behind that wall. She just had to figure out a way to get through.

Rainbird narrowed her eyes at the muscle tissue creeping out from the chamber. Had the original makers been sloppy or deliberate in not encasing the whole organ?

Or had it
grown
over all these years?

She pushed the thought away and clambered up to where she could reach the tissue, pulsing with every beat. Like a tree root, it had pushed its way through cracks in the wall. It was not like flesh as she knew it. It wasn’t red with blood and spongy, but tough and braided, almost black, shot through with strands of silver. The wall it had plunged through was not metal, but some kind of sheeting. Rainbird pried at the wall around the tissue bundle, and the material crumbled in her fist. She ripped it away in pieces, scrabbling, and forced her way through the gap, squeezing past muscle.

It was firm and warm against her back, and the heartbeat throbbed through every fiber of her being. Her eiree senses flared to painful life—star music pierced through her eyeballs and into her brain—and once again
something’s
attention shifted.

Rainbird pushed forward, breaking physical contact with the organ, and landed on her hands and knees. The chamber was huge, dark, and warm, its vastness filled with the dead dragon’s living heart. The smell of age and damp filled her nostrils, the scent of metal and blood kissed her lips. Rainbird edged past piping and machinery and slid off a platform onto the floor. Tissue stretched across the walls and over her head. The heart glistened blackly, its surface rippling with every clench and release. The power of it thrummed through the floor, set the chamber constantly vibrating.

Rainbird wrenched her gaze away from it and scanned the floor—there! A dark figure huddled in a chair, head drooping to its chest.

“Papa!” Rainbird sprinted over to it. She threw her arms around Petrus. “Are you all right? What did they do to you? Papa? Talk to me!”

Petrus lifted his head up, slowly. He looked ghastly, face pale, eyes sunken in behind his spectacles. He blinked, and then his eyes widened. “Rainbird! What are you—? No, you must leave, now!”

“Not without you.” Rainbird ran her fingers across the ropes that bound Petrus to the chair and tugged at the knots. Too many of them, too tight. She reached for her knife.

“You don’t understand. They have a creature here. A thing that you can’t fight. Rainbird, get out of here.” He tried to shove at her, then collapsed, panting.

“We’ll get out of here together.” Rainbird sawed at the ropes, the minutes stretching taut.
Almost there.

Behind him, something moved. Ropes parted. Rainbird thrust her knife into Petrus’ hand and put herself between Petrus and danger, falling into a fighting stance.

She barely saw the thing move. Between one blink and the next, it was upon her. Hot breath in her face, heavy muscular body colliding with her own, knocking her down. Rainbird squirmed and managed to get out from under it. It recovered fast, too fast.

What was this creature? The way it moved, the way it crouched…not human, not eiree, too big to be a dracine or thyrine and…Rainbird scrambled back as it unfurled wings and sprang at her.

Wings. It had wings. Rainbird dropped to the ground on her belly, as it passed over her. She rolled and managed to hook a leg around it, throwing it to the ground. She jumped it, going for the dominant position, found herself staring into a snarling face—all teeth and fierce black eyes and obsidian skin. She punched—hard—the blow ringing through her bones, but the creature’s skull was like iron. Leathery bat-like wings and strong arms wrapped around her, squeezed, pulled her in.

Not good, not good!
What was this creature? Some strange hybrid of thyrine and eiree? And if it was, would it have the same weaknesses?

Rainbird’s flailing fingers found the hammer in the loops of her workpants. She smashed it against the creature’s face. It emitted a grunt of pain, wings and arms loosening slightly. Rainbird ducked out of the hold, grabbed an arm and a wing with both her hands and pulled, hyperextending both. Thyrine joints were rigid, inflexible, weak. The creature snarled and its sharp-nailed other hand flew at her. Rainbird let go, and felt for the flashlight tucked into her belt.

“Papa,” she yelled. “Out of the way.” For Petrus hovered at the edges of the fight, holding her knife, trying to find a way in. Armed with a small pocket knife against a brute of iron-hard muscle.

The creature lunged for her and she clicked on the light, aiming for its eyes. It growled in sudden squinting pain, but kept coming. Rainbird dodged it easily, but its vision would adjust soon. It had been too much to hope that it had the extremely light-sensitive eyes of a thyrine.

We’re not going to win this one
, thought Rainbird, grabbing Petrus’ arm. He stumbled as she pulled him, not towards the doors which were bound to be locked, but for the heart.

Held up by wires and tubes, the heart was a dark throbbing mass that looked both alien and eerily similar to the drawings Rainbird had seen in anatomy books. It was splayed open at the bottom, with tubing inserted into it, and it gleamed wetly in the dim light. Rainbird pulled Petrus up to the platform and ducked into its massive folds, surrounding herself in slimy organic material, which gave way as she went further in, to the reek of metal.

Behind them, the hybrid creature gave an angry bellowing cry.

Petrus’ voice was choked and strained. “Rainbird, I…” He fell to wheezing, but Rainbird knew what he meant to say. They were trapped in the organ. She couldn’t expect Petrus to crawl through the ventricles and try to squeeze through valves and what was left of the dragon’s arteries—wherever those might now lead. She stood on muscle and shivered as the heart squeezed again, slow but incredibly powerful. The floor buckled under them and they stumbled against its walls. Air whooshed around them, sucked into the chambers above.