Steal the Sky by Megan E. O'Keefe Read Free Book Online Page A

along the way she’d gotten wrinkles. Common enough in the desert, where the air was dry and one was prone to spend most of one's days squinting under the sun, but she’d missed the transition. Too long spent beneath other people’s faces. She was beginning to forget herself.
    She dipped her fingers into a jar and spread beeswax ointment around the corners of her eyes, the creased side of her lips. Fat lot of good it would do her now, but at least it was something. Replacing the lid, she glanced down and realized her hands were still smooth – too smooth. With a sigh she attuned her mind to the fine second skin of selium over them and peeled it away. Once freed of her shaping, the substance lost its warm skin tone and shifted back to the strange, multifaceted pearlescence that was its natural state. She gathered up the modicum of it, forming a ball, and danced it through the air before her eyes.
    Child’s play, such a simple shaping, but it had always amused her. Had. With an unneeded wave of her hand she guided the hovering ball toward a vellum sack sewn within the mattress of her bed. She knelt beside it and concentrated for a moment, making sure all the selium already within would stay put, then whisked the mouth open and bundled the little sphere in with the rest. Pelkaia sat back on her heels, letting wrinkled hands rest over her kneecaps.
    She was running out of time for play.
    She made quick work of checking the weights hidden in the hollows of her bedposts – it wouldn’t do her any good to have the thing floating off – and then stood and gathered her hair into a matronly bun. Slipping her fingers into her pocket she touched the little note card that warned her that the Watch would soon knock on her door. It paid to be known as the lady who handed out sweets to the young scoundrels of the neighborhood. Never a strange occurrence passed her by, never an odd event was missed. The coming visit wasn’t a direct inquiry, of course, just a general checking-up on those sel-sensitives who claimed aged or injured retirement.
    The very thought still tied her stomach in knots.
    If the knock had come a day ago, she would have gladly turned herself in. Pelkaia held no illusions that her crimes would remain undetected much longer, that she would be able to escape the net tightening around her. She had done what she meant to do, and then sat back and waited for the axemen to catch up. Now… Now she realized her work was not yet done. And she had found a way out. A hole in the net.
    She smiled when she recalled spying the Honding lad in the Blasted Rock Inn, savored every whisper she’d ever heard about his strange abilities. His simple presence had reminded her that she was not alone. That the Scorched was not comprised of only those who could find and move selium, and those who couldn’t. There were others like her – many, perhaps – whose abilities deviated from what Valathea accepted. Others, maybe, who might rally to her cause. If only she could find them.
    When she’d had him taken to the station house, she’d intended only to needle him to discover what he knew about the state Aransa was in, to see if she could push him into assisting her crusade against the empire in some way or another. When he’d mentioned stealing Thratia’s ship, well, it had been all she could do to keep from squealing with delight. She shivered as she recalled how close she’d come to blowing the whole thing when he’d asked who Ripka would support as warden. How the thought of failing then had turned her stomach to ice.
    Funny, that, how quickly one’s mind can change.
    She felt the watch captain’s presence moments before the knock sounded, one-two, firm and insistent. It was nice to know that the coat she’d traded for Ripka’s original had gone unremarked. It’d taken her ages to sew tiny bladders of selium into the hems of it so that she could feel