Skyland by Aelius Blythe Read Free Book Online Page B

space,
Harper was still here. Still breathing.
    What now?
    There was no answer. There was just an empty
expanse inside his mind that mirrored the blackness outside. The
silence of his body clock yawned in the void.
    He shivered.
    But there is nothing for it... nothing to
do...
    He looked back into Zara's eyes and smiled.
There was at least something familiar out here in the void
of space. She smiled back at him, and the edges of his fear
softened, just a bit more. Then he did what he always did after a
long day of hopeless labor. He stood up, wrapped his arms around
her waist and rested his chin on top of her silky hair.
    Then he drew her away from the emptiness
outside, into the windowless innards of the ship.
    Behind them, the news continued.
     

 
     
    Chapter
Eight
    in which there is a
space of Infinite Space ...
     
    Harper wandered.
    Zara wandered beside him, but she had been
mostly silent their second day on the ship, letting him come to
terms with their temporary home in his own time. He was grateful
both for the presence and for the space.
    One foot stepped in front of the other, and
then the other moved in front of it. And the process repeated until
he was somewhere else, and then somewhere else and then somewhere
else. His eyes drifted over the black floors and windowless
corridors.
    The ship was vast.
    He knew it, but every time he looked up from
his absently shuffling feet and realized that he was somewhere
else, he couldn't help marveling at just how much somewhere
else there always was inside the ship. He wondered (though he
tried not to) how much damage his rustic weapon would have done. He
tried to think that it would have done no harm. But he well knew
that a century of perfecting and compressing the formula of the
villagers was an achievement no less than the building of these
giant flying fortresses.
    And he wandered.
    He missed the blue fields of his Sky that
were now far behind.
    Or that were never there in the first
place.
    His mind was clearer after the... night's...
rest. He still had difficulty with the notion that there was night
and day up here. But his body still demanded its cycles. Waking up
this... morning... he'd felt like he did every morning when he woke
up. Until he felt the cold floor beneath his feet.
    He'd passed one or two windows but drew away
quickly before he could look too far out.
    Back home, the Sky changed; this was not
unknown to him. She was dark, She was light. Sometimes, She was
stained with the white splotches of clouds. In the past, so the
stories said, She would grey over entirely before a rain storm. But
She was always there.
    Out here in space, she wasn't.
    Is She invisible or absent?
    His feet walked.
    The solid metal under his feet asserted
itself the way the ground of Skyland never had. The walls and floor
hummed around him, quivering with the well-insulated thrum of the
engines. Harper did not like it. Unlike the Sky, the ground beneath
his feet had always been virtually invisible. It was horrid,
unfeeling, unyielding, the enemy of the farmer. It did not give
what was needed except when the Sky so decreed to rain upon it. The
Sky was kind and blue and beautiful. The dirt was an angry, ugly
thing.
    Harpers eyes had always looked up, not
down.
    Now he looked down.
    He looked down as he walked. One foot
stepped down upon the metal floor of the corridor; then the other
followed; then the first again.
    I can see ground. But no Sky. Where? Where
is She?
    The "ground" beneath him was metal and it
was human-made and it was humming quietly and unpleasantly. But it
was there. Unlike the Sky.
    Where is she?
    So he walked, and so he thought, and did not
know how far his walking had taken him, and Zara silently by his
side, from their beds through the humming corridors. And
then...
    The ship was not the only thing that was
humming.
    Harper realized that there were other sounds
beneath the ships melody. Another hum cooing beneath the thrum of
the floors and the walls of this