The Wind Merchant by Ryan Dunlap Read Free Book Online

two-month silent treatment.
    He never dared to voice the thought again.
    For whatever reason, she had fewer headaches in the basement, which she preferred to refer to as her library since the walls were lined with shelves upon shelves of books.
    She slid into the well-worn desk chair and pulled the paper from her typewriter, placing it on a stack of pages. “I was just finishing the first couple chapters of a story I’d like you to read.” She took the pages and straightened them with a few thumps on her desk. “If you have time, I could really use a friend’s honest opinion.”
    A friend. That’s all Ras had ever been. And her number one fan.
    “Don’t go easy on me. If it’s bad, it’s bad, and better I hear it from you—”
    “I’ll be honest, I promise,” Ras said. “Where did you get the paper?”
    “I saved up,” she said proudly. “Well, I had to use the gifts I got for University too, but look at it. Isn’t it so clean?”
    Ras admired the fresh, white paper, and suddenly felt that no amount of hand washing would make him worthy to handle such a pure thing. There was no place on Verdant that made it, and most paper in Atmo was recycled to a mottled grayish blue hue. Mr. Tourbillon used to sneak her typo’d scraps from the capitol building until she began writing stories about the people on the front of the government documents. “Where’s it from?”
    “ Derailleur ,” she said. She smiled widely and offered him the stack, then withdrew it. “We should probably bind these so pages don’t go flying away when you’re waiting on the next big haul,” she said with no hint of sarcasm.
    “What’s it about?” Ras asked.
    “The white train,” she said simply.
    “You’re finally writing it?”
    Callie nodded. “How many times can I dream about it before it’s obvious I’m supposed to? Maybe writing it down will finally get it out of my head.”
    Over and over Ras heard the recounting of Callie’s dream of being on a railed vehicle she called a train. She would describe in detail things she saw along the trip that baffled Ras. Her father chalked it up to reading too many pre-Overload novels and an over-active imagination.
    “How’s the life of a wind merchant going, by the way?” she asked.
    He preferred to keep the conversation centered on her but she had the annoying habit of caring about what went on in his life. “Let’s just say I have plenty of time to read between collections.”
    “That a good or bad thing?” she asked. 
    Ras hesitated. If ever there was someone Ras knew that appreciated a good story, it was Callie, and he’d rather tell her what happened than have her hear it from second-hand sources, or worse yet, her father.
    “I fell beneath Atmo,” Ras blurted.
    Callie’s eyes shot open wide as she held her hands up to her mouth in shock, then dropped them and shot him a look of disbelief. “Shut up. No you didn’t.”
    Ras pointed to his head bandage. “Does this look like a face that would lie about crashing?”
    She eyed him warily, a smirk growing. “All right, what did you see?”
    “Green wavy stuff—”
    “Grass! You saw grass?” she asked, excitedly pacing the room. “Did you get to touch it?”
    “Laid in it. Really tall stuff. Soft,” Ras said, enjoying how each minute description sent her over the moon with excitement.
    “I knew it’d be soft!” she exclaimed. “Wait. Hold on.” Her eyes narrowed. “How are you not dead?”
    “Great question. I was probably ten meters from a Convergence.”
    “Erasmus Veir,” she said, enunciating every syllable, “now I know you’re lying.”
    “Callie, if ever there was one thing I need you to trust me about, this is it.”
    “Ever? As in forever and ever, ever?”
    “Forever and ever, ever,” he said, placing his hand to his heart.
    “You realize, by law, I get to never trust you again if you’re lying.”
    Ras knew there was no such law, but nodded anyway. It was as good as law to