Updraft

1. DENSIRA

My mother selected her wings as early morning light reached through our balcony shutters. She moved between the shadows, calm and deliberate, while downtower neighbors slept behind their barricades. She pushed her arms into the woven harness. Turned her back to me so that I could cinch the straps tight against her shoulders.

When two bone horns sounded low and loud from Mondarath, the tower nearest ours, she stiffened. I paused as well, trying to see through the shutters’ holes. She urged me on while she trained her eyes on the sky.

“No time to hesitate, Kirit,” she said. She meant no time to be afraid.

On a morning like this, fear was a blue sky emptied of birds. It was the smell of cooking trapped in closed towers, of smoke looking for ways out. It was an ache in the back of the eyes from searching the distance, and a weight in the stomach as old as our city.

Today Ezarit Densira would fly into that empty sky — first to the east, then southwest.

I grabbed the buckle on her left shoulder, then put the full weight of my body into securing the strap. She grunted softly in approval.

“Turn a little, so I can see the buckles better,” I said. She took two steps sideways. I could see through the shutters while I worked.

Across a gap of sky, Mondarath’s guards braved the morning. Their wings edged with glass and locked for fighting, they leapt from the tower. One shouted and pointed.

A predator moved there, nearly invisible — a shimmer among exploding gardens. Nets momentarily wrapped two thick, sky-colored tentacles. The skymouth shook free and disappeared. Wails built in its wake. Mondarath was under attack.

The guards dove to meet it, the sun dazzling their wings. The air roiled and sheared. Pieces of brown rope netting and red banners fell to the clouds far below. The guards drew their bows and gave chase, trying to kill what they could not see.

“Oh, Mondarath,” Ezarit whispered. “They never mind the signs.”

The besieged tower rose almost as tall as ours, sun-bleached white against the blue morning. Since Lith fell, Mondarath marked the city’s northern edge. Beyond its tiers, sky stretched uninterrupted to the horizon.

A squall broke hard against the tower, threatening a loose shutter. Then the balcony’s planters toppled and the circling guards scattered. One guard, the slowest, jerked to a halt in the air and flew, impossibly, backwards. His leg yanked high, flipping his body as it went, until he hung upside down in the air. He flailed for his quiver, spilling arrows, as the sky opened below him, red and wet and filled with glass teeth. The air blurred as slick, invisible limbs tore away his brown silk wings, then lowered what the monster wanted into its mouth.

By the time his scream reached us, the guard had disappeared from the sky.

My own mouth went dry as dust.

How to help them? My first duty was to my tower, Densira. To the Laws. But what if we were under attack? My mother in peril? What if no one would help then? My heart hammered questions. What would it be like to open our shutters, leap into the sky, and join this fight? To go against Laws?

“Kirit! Turn away.” Ezarit yanked my hand from the shutters. She stood beside me and sang the Law, Fortify:

Tower by tower, secure yourselves,

Except in city’s dire need.

She had added the second half of the Law to remind me why she flew today. Dire need.

She’d fought for the right to help the city beyond her own tower, her own quadrant. Someday, I would do the same.

Until then, there was need here too. I could not turn away.

The guards circled Mondarath, less one man. The air cleared. The horns stopped for now, but the three nearest towers — Wirra, Densira, and Viit — kept their occupied tiers sealed.

Ezarit’s hand gripped the latch for our own shutters. “Come on,” she whispered. I hurried to tighten the straps at her right shoulder, though I knew she didn’t mean me. Her escort was delayed.

She would still fly today.

Six towers in the southeast stricken with a coughing illness needed medicines from the north and west. Ezarit had to trade for the last ingredients and make the delivery before Allmoons, or many more would die.

The buckling done, she reached for her panniers and handed them to me.

Elna, my mother’s friend from downtower, bustled in the kitchen, making tea. After the first migration warnings, Ezarit had asked her to come uptower, for safety’s sake — both Elna’s and mine, though I no longer needed minding.

Elna’s son, Nat, had surprised us by helping her climb the fiber ladders that stretched from the top of the tower to the last occupied tier. Elna was pale and huffing as she finally cleared the balcony. When she came inside, I saw why Nat had come. Elna’s left eye had a cloud in it — a skyblindness.

“We have better shutters,” Ezarit had said. “And are farther from the clouds. Staying higher will be safer for them.”

A mouth could appear anywhere, but she was right. Higher was safer, and on Densira, we were now highest of all.

At the far side of our quarters, Nat kept an eye on the open sky. He’d pulled his sleeping mat from behind a screen and knelt, peering between shutters, using my scope. When I finished helping my mother, I would take over that duty.

I began to strap Ezarit’s panniers around her hips. The baskets on their gimbaled supports would roll with her, no matter how the wind shifted.

“You don’t have to go,” I said as I knelt at her side. I knew what her reply would be. I said my part anyway. We had a ritual. Skymouths and klaxons or not.

“I will be well escorted.” Her voice was steady. “The west doesn’t care for the north’s troubles, or the south’s. They want their tea and their silks for Allmoons and will trade their honey to the highest bidder. I can’t stand by while the south suffers, not when I’ve worked so hard to negotiate the cure.”

It was more than that, I knew.

She tested the weight of a pannier. The silk rustled, and the smell of dried tea filled the room. She’d stripped the bags of their decorative beads. Her cloak and her dark braids hung unadorned. She lacked the sparkle that trader Ezarit Densira was known for.

Another horn sounded, past Wirra, to the west.

“See?” She turned to me. Took my hand, which was nearly the same size as hers. “The skymouths take the east. I fly west. I will return before Allmoons, in time for your wingtest.”

Elna, her face pale as a moon, crossed the room. She carried a bowl of steaming tea to my mother. “For your strength today, Risen,” she said, bowing carefully in the traditional greeting of lowtower to high.

My mother accepted the tea and the greeting with a smile. She’d raised her family to the top of Densira through her daring trades. She had earned the greeting. It wasn’t always so, when she and Elna were young downtower mothers. But now Ezarit was famous for her skills, both bartering and flying. She’d even petitioned the Spire successfully once. In return, we had the luxury of quarters to ourselves, but that only lasted as long as she kept the trade flowing.

As long as she could avoid the skymouths today.

Once I passed my wingtest, I could become her apprentice. I would fly by her side, and we’d fight the dangers of the city together. I would learn to negotiate as she did. I’d fly in times of dire need while others hid behind their shutters.

“The escort is coming,” Nat announced. He stood; he was much taller than me now. His black hair curled wildly around his head, and his brown eyes squinted through the scope once more.

Ezarit walked across the room, her silk-wrapped feet swishing over the solid bone floor. She put her hand on Nat’s shoulder and looked out. Over her shoulders, between the point of her furled wings and through the shutters, I saw a flight of guards circle Mondarath, searching out more predators. They yelled and blew handheld horns, trying to scare skymouths away with noise and their arrows. That rarely worked, but they had to try.

Closer to us, a green-winged guard soared between the towers, an arrow nocked, eyes searching the sky. The guards atop Densira called out a greeting to him as he landed on our balcony.

I retightened one of Ezarit’s straps, jostling her tea. She looked at me, eyebrows raised.

“Elna doesn’t need to watch me,” I finally said. “I’m fine by myself. I’ll check in with the aunts. Keep the balcony shuttered.”

She reached into her pannier and handed me a stone fruit. Her gold eyes softened with worry. “Soon.” The fruit felt cold in my hand. “I need to know you are all safe. I can’t fly without knowing. You’ll be free to choose your path soon enough.”

After the wingtest. Until then, I was a dependent, bound by her rules, not just tower strictures and city Laws.

“Let me come out to watch you go, then. I’ll use the scope. I won’t fly.”

She frowned, but we were bartering now. Her favorite type of conversation.

“Not outside. You can use the scope inside. When I return, we’ll fly some of my route around the city, as practice.” She saw my frustration. “Promise me you’ll keep inside? No visiting? No sending whipperlings? We cannot lose another bird.”

“For how long?” A mistake. My question broke at the end with the kind of whine that hadn’t slipped out in years. My advantage dissipated like smoke.

Nat, on Ezarit’s other side, pretended he wasn’t listening. He knew me too well. That made it worse.

“They will go when they go.” She winced as sounds of Mondarath’s mourning wafted through the shutters. Peering out again, she searched for the rest of her escort. “Listen for the horns. If Mondarath sounds again, or if Viit goes, stay away from the balconies.”

She looked over her shoulder at me until I nodded, and Nat too.

She smiled at him, then turned and wrapped her arms around me. “That’s my girl.”

I would have closed my eyes and rested my head against the warmth of her chest if I’d thought there was time. Ezarit was like a small bird, always rushing. I took a breath, and she pulled away, back to the sky. Another guard joined the first on the balcony, wearing faded yellow wings.

I checked Ezarit’s wings once more. The fine seams. The sturdy battens. They’d worn in well: no fraying, despite the hours she’d flown in them. She’d traded five bolts of raw silk from Naza tower to the Viit wingmaker for these, and another three for mine. Expensive but worth it. The wingmaker was the best in the north. Even Singers said so.

Furled, her wings were a tea-colored brown, but a stylized kestrel hid within the folds. The wingmaker had used tea and vegetable dyes — whatever he could get — to make the rippling sepia pattern.

My own new wings leaned against the central wall by our sleeping area, still wrapped. Waiting for the skies to clear. My fingers itched to pull the straps over my shoulders and unfurl the whorls of yellow and green.

Ezarit cloaked herself in tea-colored quilted silks to protect against the chill winds. They tied over her shoulders, around her trim waist and at her thighs and ankles. She spat on her lenses, her dearest treasure, and rubbed them clean. Then she let them hang around her neck. Her tawny cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright, and she looked, now that she was determined to go, younger and lighter than yesterday. She was beautiful when she was ready to fly.

“It won’t be long,” she said. “Last migration through the northwest quadrant lasted one day.”

Our quadrant had been spared for my seventeen years. Many in the city would say our luck had held far too long while others suffered. Still, my father had left to make a trade during a migration and did not return. Ezarit took his trade routes as soon as I was old enough to leave with Elna.

“How can you be sure?” I asked.

Elna patted my shoulder, and I jumped. “All will be well, Kirit. Your mother helps the city.”

“And,” Ezarit said, “if I am successful, we will have more good fortune to celebrate.”

I saw the gleam in her eye. She thought of the towers in the west, the wealthier quadrants. Densira had scorned us as unlucky after my father disappeared, family and neighbors both. The aunts scorned her no longer, as they enjoyed the benefits of her success. Even last night, neighbors had badgered Ezarit to carry trade parcels for them to the west. She’d agreed, showing respect for family and tower. Now she smiled. “Perhaps we won’t be Ezarit and Kirit Densira for long.”

A third guard clattered to a landing on the balcony, and Ezarit signaled she was ready. The tower marks on the guards’ wings were from Naza. Out of the migration path; known for good hunters with sharp eyes. No wonder Nat stared at them as if he would trade places in a heartbeat.

As Ezarit’s words sank in, he frowned. “What’s wrong with Densira?”

“Nothing’s wrong with Densira,” Elna said, reaching around Ezarit to ruffle Nat’s hair. She turned her eyes to the balcony, squinting. “Especially since Ezarit has made this blessed tower two tiers higher.”

Nat sniffed, loudly. “This tier’s pretty nice, even if it reeks of brand-new.”

My face grew warm. The tier did smell of newly grown bone. The central core was still damp to the touch.

Still, I held my chin high and moved to my mother’s side.

Not that long ago, Nat and I had been inseparable. Practically wing-siblings. Elna was my second mother. My mother, Nat’s hero. We’d taken first flights together. Practiced rolls and glides. Sung together, memorizing the towers, all the Laws. Since our move, I’d seen him practicing with other flightmates. Dojha with her superb dives. Sidra, who had the perfect voice for Laws and already wore glorious, brand-new wings. Whose father, the tower councilman, had called my mother a liar more than once after we moved uptower, above their tier.

I swallowed hard. Nat, Elna, and I would be together in my still-new home until Ezarit returned. Like old times, almost.

In the air beyond the balcony, a fourth figure appeared. He glided a waiting circle. Wings shimmered dove gray. Bands of blue at the tips. A Singer.

A moment of the old childhood fear struck me, and I saw Nat pale as well. Singers sometimes took young tower children to the Spire. It was a great honor. But the children who went didn’t return until they were grown. And when they came back, it was as gray-robed strangers, scarred and tattooed and sworn to protect the city.

The guards seemed to relax. The green-winged guard nudged his nearest companion, “Heard tell no Singer’s ever been attacked by a skymouth.” The other guards murmured agreement. One cracked his knuckles. Our Magister for flight and Laws had said the same thing. No one ever said whether those who flew with Singers had the same luck, but the guards seemed to think so.

I hoped it was true.

Ezarit signaled to the guards, who assembled in the air near the Singer. She smiled at Elna and hugged her. “Glad you are here.”

“Be careful, Ezarit,” Elna whispered back. “Speed to your wings.”

Ezarit winked at Nat, then looked out at the sky. She nodded to the Singer. Ready. She gave me a fierce hug and a kiss. “Stay safe, Kirit.”

Then she pushed the shutters wide, unfurled her wings, and leapt from the balcony into the circle of guards waiting for her with bows drawn.

The Singer broke from their formation first, dipping low behind Wirra. I watched from the threshold between our quarters and the balcony until the rest were motes against the otherwise empty sky. Their flight turned west and disappeared around Densira’s broad curve.

For the moment, even Mondarath was still.

* * *

Nat moved to pull the shutters closed, but I blocked the way. I wanted to keep watching the sky.

“Kirit, it’s Laws,” he said, yanking my sleeve. I jerked my arm from his fingers and stepped farther onto the balcony.

“You go inside,” I said to the sky. I heard the shutter slam behind me. I’d broken my promise and was going against Laws, but I felt certain that if I took my eyes off the sky, something would happen to Ezarit and her guards.

We’d seen signs of the skymouth migration two days ago. House birds had molted. Silk spiders hid their young. Densira prepared. Watchmen sent black-feathered kaviks to all the tiers. They cackled and shat on the balconies while families read the bone chips they carried.

Attempting to postpone her flight, Ezarit had sent a whipperling to her trading partners in the south and west. They’d replied quickly, “We are not in the migration path.” “We can sell our honey elsewhere.” There would be none left to mix with Mondarath’s herbs for the southeast’s medicines.

She made ready. Would not listen to arguments. Sent for Elna early, then helped me strip the balcony.

Mondarath, unlike its neighbors, paid little mind to preparations. The skymouth migration hadn’t passed our way for years, they’d said. They didn’t take their fruit in. They left their clotheslines and the red banners for Allmoons flapping.

Around me now, our garden was reduced to branches and leaves. Over the low bone outcrop that marked Aunt Bisset’s balcony, I saw a glimmer. A bored cousin with a scope, probably. The wind took my hair and tugged the loose tendrils. I leaned out to catch one more glimpse of Ezarit as she passed beyond the tower’s curve.

The noise from Mondarath had eased, and the balconies were empty on the towers all around us. I felt both entirely alone and as if the eyes of the city were on me.

I lifted my chin and smiled, letting everyone behind their shutters know I wasn’t afraid, when they were. I panned with our scope, searching the sky. A watchman. A guardian.

And I saw it. It tore at my aunt’s gnarled trees, then shook loose the ladder down to Nat’s. It came straight at me fast and sure: a red rip in the sky, sharp beak edges toothed with ridge upon ridge of glass teeth. Limbs flowed forward like thick tongues.

I dropped the scope.

The mouth opened wider, full of stench and blood.

I felt the rush of air and heard the beat of surging wings, and I screamed. It was a child’s scream, not a woman’s. I knew I would die in that moment, with tears staining my tunic and that scream soiling my mouth. I heard the bone horns of our tower’s watch sound the alarm: We were unlucky once more.

My scream expanded, tore at my throat, my teeth.

The skymouth stopped in its tracks. It hovered there, red and gaping. I saw the glittering teeth and, for a moment, its eyes, large and side-set to let its mouth open even wider. Its breath huffed thick and foul across my face, but it didn’t cross the last distance between us. My heart had stopped with fear, but the scream kept on. It spilled from me, softening. As the scream died, the skymouth seemed to move again.

So I hauled in a deep breath through my nose, like we were taught to sing for Allmoons, and I kept screaming.

The skymouth backed up. It closed its jaws. It disappeared into the sky, and soon I saw a distant ripple, headed away from the city.

I tried to laugh, but the sound stuck in my chest and strangled me. Then my eyes betrayed me. Darkness overtook the edges of my vision, and white, wavy lines cut across everything I saw. The hard slats of the shutters counted the bones of my spine as I slid down and came to rest on the balcony floor.

My breathing was too loud in my ears. It roared.

Clouds. I’d shouted down a skymouth and would still die blue-lipped outside my own home? I did not want to die.

Behind me, Nat battered at the shutters. He couldn’t open them, I realized groggily, because my body blocked the door.

Cold crept up on me. My fingers prickled, then numbed. I fought my eyelids, but they won, falling closed against the blur that my vision had become.

I thought for a moment I was flying with my mother, far beyond the city. Everything was so blue.

Hands slid under my back and legs. Someone lifted me. The shutters squealed open.

Dishes swept from our table hit the floor and rolled. Lips pressed warm against mine, catching my frozen breath. The rhythm of in and out came back. I heard my name.

When I opened my eyes, I saw the Singer’s gray robes first, then the silver lines of his tattoos. His green eyes. The dark hairs in his hawk nose. Behind him, Elna wept and whispered, “On your wings, Singer. Mercy on your wings.”

He straightened and turned from me. I heard his voice for the first time, stern and deep, telling Elna, “This is a Singer concern. You will not interfere.”

2. SENT DOWN

The Singer came and went from my side. He checked my breathing. His fingers tapped my wrist.

Elna and Nat swirled around the table like clouds. I heard Elna whisper angrily.

When I found I could hold my eyes open without growing dizzy, Nat had disappeared. The Singer sat at my mother’s worktable. His draped robes puddled on the floor and obscured her stool. As the sun passed below the clouds, he sat there fingering a skein tied with blank message chips.

In the dark, his knife scraped against one bone chip, then another.

The room felt tight-strung, an instrument waiting to be played.

With the sunrise, Densira neighbors began clattering onto our balcony. They brought a basket of fruit, a string of beads.

“The tower is talking,” Elna said. “About the miracle. That it’s a skyblessing.”

The Singer waved away our visitors. He positioned a tower guard on the balcony.

Occasionally, the guard peered through the shutters and shook his head, like kaviks did when they were molting. “Lawsbreaker,” he muttered. He told any who would listen how stupid I’d been.

I caught pieces of his words on the wind.

“It came right for her. The fledge stood out on the balcony with the lens of that scope glinting in the sun. Should have gobbled her up. Would have shot her myself, attracting a mouth to the tower like that.” He waved our neighbors away. “Don’t waste your goods on her. She’s not skyblessed. She’s bad luck. Should tie enough Laws on her that she’ll rattle when she moves.”

The people of Densira did not listen. Elna scrambled to find places for everything they brought.

She took the guard a cup of tea. “Luck was with her, Risen. The tower has luck now, because of Kirit. The skymouth fled.”

The Singer cleared his throat loudly. Elna jostled the cup. Nearly spilled the tea. The Singer looked as if he wanted to have Elna swept from the tower and silenced.

I tried to say something helpful, but my voice rasped in my throat.

“Don’t try to speak, Kirit.” Elna returned to my side. The Singer glared again, then rose, muttering about needing a new sack of rainwater. He must have decided to keep me alive a little longer.

She propped me up. Around me, the bone lanterns’ glow cast halos and small stars against the pale walls. The rugs and cushions of the place I’d shared with my mother since the tower rose were swathed in shadow.

Elna wrapped me in a quilt, tucking the down-filled silk beneath me. Instead of warming, I shook harder. The Singer returned and held my wrist between his thumb and forefinger. He reached into his robe. Took out a small bag that smelled rich and dark. Metal glittered in the light.

A moment later, he handed me a tiny cup filled with sharp-smelling liquid. It burned my throat as it went down, then warmed my chest and belly. It took me a moment to realize I wasn’t drinking rainwater from my usual bone cup. He’d given me a brass cup so old the etching was nearly worn away. It warmed in my hands as the glow crept up my arms. Calm followed warmth until I was able to focus on the room, the smell of chicory brewing, the sound of voices.

Elna disappeared when the Singer glared at her a third time. He gave me a stern look. Waited for me to speak. I wished Ezarit sat beside me.

“They think you are skyblessed,” he said when I did not speak on his cue.

I blinked at the words and closed my eyes again. Skyblessed. Like the people in the songs, who escaped the clouds, or those who survived Lith.

The Singer’s tone made it clear that he thought me nothing of the sort.

“Your example will tempt people to risk themselves. We have Laws for a reason, Kirit. To keep the city safe.”

I found that hard to argue. I sat up straighter. My head pounded. I looked around the empty tier, at the lashed shutters, anywhere but at the Singer standing before me, his hands folded into his robe.

“You are old enough to understand duty to your tower. You know our history. Why we can never go back to disorder.”

I nodded. This was why we sang. To remember.

“Yet you are still part of a household. Your mother is still responsible for you. Even while she’s on a trading run.”

He was right. She wouldn’t learn what I’d done until she flew close enough to the north quadrant for the gossip to catch up with her. I imagined her sipping tea at a stopover tower. Varu, perhaps. And hearing. What her face would look like as she tallied the damage to her reputation. To mine. Bile rose in my throat, despite the calming effect of whatever was in that cup.

The Singer leaned close. “You know what you did.”

I’d broken Laws. I knew that. I’d attracted a skymouth with my actions. A punishable offense. Worse, I drew a Singer’s attention, which could affect Densira. Councilman Vant, Sidra’s father, would sanction me, and my mother too, for my deeds.

But that fell below the Singers’ jurisdiction. They only dealt with the big Laws. I sipped at the cup to conceal my confusion. Cut my losses. “I broke tower Laws.”

He lowered his voice. “Not only that, you lived to tell about it. How did you do that, Kirit Densira?” His eyes bored into mine, his breath rich with spices. He looked like a hawk, looming over me.

Elna was nowhere to be seen. I looked at my fingers, the soft pattern on the sleeve of my robe that Ezarit brought back from her last trip. Stall, my brain said. Someone would come.

I met the Singer’s gaze. Hard as stone, those eyes.

“I am waiting.” He spoke each word slowly, as if I wouldn’t understand otherwise.

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t know what?”

“Why I am still alive.”

“You’ve never been in skymouth migration before?”

I shook my head. Never. Wasn’t that hard to believe. Everyone knew the northwest quadrant had been lucky.

“What about the Spire? Never to a market there, nor for Allsuns?”

Shaking my head repeatedly made the room spin. A low throb gripped the base of my skull. My voice rasped. “She said we’d go when we were both traders.”

He frowned. Perhaps he thought I lied. “Don’t all citizens love to visit the Spire’s hanging markets at Allsuns, pick over the fine bone carvings, and watch the quadrant wingfights?

I shook my head. Not once. Ezarit never wanted to go, nor Elna. They avoided the Singers more than most. How could I convince him I told the truth?

“Do you know what you’ve done?”

I shook my head a third time, while pressure pounded my temples. I did not know, and I felt nauseated. I could see no way for me to get away from this Singer. Even seated, he loomed over me, tall and thin and sour-faced. Despite this, his hands were smooth, no deep lines marked his face beneath the tattoos; he might not have been much older than me.

“I don’t know what you want me to say. I went on the balcony. A skymouth came. I screamed, and it—”

I stopped speaking. I’d screamed. The skymouth had halted. Why? People who were close enough to a skymouth to scream died.

The Singer’s gaze bored into mine. His frown deepened. He turned away from me and looked at the balcony. Then back to me.

“There are those who can hear the city all the time. Not only when it roars. They learn to speak its language. You know that, right?”

I bowed my head. “They become Singers. They make sure we continue to rise, instead of falling like Lith.” Our Magister, Florian, had taught us this long ago. If tower children became Singers, their families were rewarded with higher tiers; their towers with bridges. But the Singers themselves were family no longer. Tower no longer. They severed themselves from city life; enforced Laws even on those they once loved. Nat’s father, for instance. Though I’d been too young to see it, I’d heard stories. I imagined now a Laws-weighted figure thrown to the clouds. Arms and legs churning in place of missing wings. Failing. Falling. Tears pricked my eyes.

This Singer took my arm and squeezed hard. I locked my teeth together to avoid crying out. His fingers pressed into my skin, dimpling pale rings around the pressure points. “Kirit Densira, daughter of Ezarit Densira, I place you under Spire fiat. If you reveal anything that I say now to anyone, you will be thrown down. If you fail to tell the truth, you will be thrown down. Do you understand?”

My head throbbed worse than ever, and I leaned hard against his grip. “Yes.” Anything to get free of this man.

“Some among the Singers can speak to monsters.”

“What do you mean?”

“There are five people in the city who can stop a skymouth with a shout. All Singers. Except one.”

He stared at me. He meant me. I was the fifth.

“Kirit.” He paused. “You are not skyblessed.”

I bowed my head. I hadn’t thought so.

He released a breath. Scent of garlic. “But you could be something more. Someone who helps to keep the city safe in its direst need.”

As my mother did. I raised my eyebrows. “How?”

“You must come into the Spire with me.”

The way he said it, I knew he didn’t mean for a visit. I jerked backwards. Neck and shoulder muscles tensed into a rejection of him. And yet he held me. Tried to shake me out of it. No.

I would not leave the towers. I would not go into the Spire. Not for anything.

Traders flew the quadrants freely, making elegant deals. They connected the city, helped weave it together. Better still, traders were not always tied to a single tower and its fate; they saw the whole city, especially if they were very good, like Ezarit. That was what I wanted. What I would choose when I was able.

I stalled. “I have already put my name in for the next wingtest.”

His turn to shake his head. “That hardly matters. Come with me. Your mother will be well honored for your sacrifice. Your tower too.”

Sacrifice? No. Not me. I would ply the winds and negotiate deals that let the towers help one another. I would be brave and smart and weave beads in my hair. I would not get locked in an obelisk of bone and secrets. I wouldn’t make small children cry, nor etch my face with silver tattoos.

I yanked my arm away. Scrambled off the table, my knees wobbly, toes tingling. Two steps, and I hit the floor. I tried to crawl to the balcony, to get to Aunt Bisset’s, to get back to Elna.

The Singer grabbed me up by the neck of my robe. His words were soft, his grip fierce. “You have broken the Laws of your tower. Endangered everyone here. Some think you’re skyblessed, but that will wear off. Others think you are a danger, unlucky.”

“I am no danger!”

“I will encourage these thoughts. What then? Soon the tower will grow past you. Your bad luck will sour your trades and your family’s status. You will be left behind. Or worse. You will be Densira’s pariah for every bad thing.”

I saw my future as he drew it. The tower turned against me, against my mother. Ezarit, living within a cage of shame.

“As a Singer, you will be respected and feared. Your mother and Elna and Nat will be forgiven your Lawsbreaks.”

The household. He would punish Elna and Nat too. And Ezarit. For my decisions. I needed to bargain with this man. How did I do that? How would Ezarit have done it? I groped for memories of her trading stories, for how she would have turned him away. She would have tried to trade, to haggle. If she’d nothing to trade, she’d bluff.

“I am too old to take.” I’d never heard of someone nearly at wingtest being taken by the Singers.

“You are still a dependent in the eyes of your tower.”

“In that case,” I said, resisting the urge to argue his point, “my mother would never permit this.” I was certain of that.

“Your mother is not here. Won’t be back until nearly Allmoons.”

“You can’t take me without her permission,” I said. “It says so in Laws.” And once I have my wingmark, Singer, I will be an apprentice. Able to decide my own path. Singers do not take apprentices from the city, except for egregious Lawsbreaks. I coughed to conceal my shudder at that possibility. Then I straightened. “Ezarit would bring down a storm on the Spire so great, you’d be begging the clouds to pull you back up.” I yanked my arm from his grip.

The Singer smiled, all but his eyes. My skin crawled. “Singers are more powerful than traders, Kirit. Even Ezarit. No matter what your mother thinks.”

I drew a deep breath. “I will not go with you.”

The Singer straightened. “Very well. You would be unteachable at this age if you did not desire to become a Singer anyway.”

I’d changed his mind. I couldn’t believe it. It felt too easy.

“You will stay in Densira until the wingtest. Then we will talk again.” He rose and reached back to release his wings. He was leaving. Then he paused. Frowned. The tattoos on his cheeks and chin creased and buckled.

“Of course,” he said, “you did break tower Law.” He drew a cord from his sleeve, tied with four bone chips. “The tower councilman has sent you, Elna, Nat, and your mother a message. Vant is of the opinion, which I have reinforced, that you are in no way skyblessed, no way lucky. That the guard must have driven away the skymouth with noise and arrows. That you must be censured severely to avoid future danger to the tower.”

I took the chips. Freshly carved. Approved by Councilman Vant. Two were thin, light: Nat’s and mine. We were assigned hard labor, cleaning four tiers downtower.

I gasped. That could take well past the wingtest to finish.

Heavier still were Elna’s and Ezarit’s chips. They felt thick. Not the thickest, I knew, but still true Laws chips. Permanent, unless Ezarit could bargain with Vant so that he let her untie them.

As promised, they were punished for my deeds. For both the Lawsbreak and for refusing the Singer. Nat and I could miss the wingtest. We would certainly miss the last flight classes, when the Magister did his most intensive review. I could lose my chance at becoming an apprentice this year. Perhaps forever.

My head ached, and I tried hard to swallow. I knew I could have been thrown down for endangering the tower. But censure was bad too. Everything was wrong now.

And not just for me. I held Elna’s, Nat’s, and my mother’s fates in my hand.

The Singer raised his eyebrows. Would I change my mind? Would I give in and go with him?

I stared back at him. Swallowed. Shook my head. Densira seemed to fall silent as we stared each other down.

“My name is Wik. Remember it,” he said. “I will find you at Allmoons, Kirit Densira. By then, you will want to come with me.”

Trapped behind walls. Gray wings and robes, silver tattoos. Lawsbreakers thrown down, arms flailing. No family. No tower but the Spire.

I would find a way to avoid that. I had to.

* * *

The sound of Elna and Nat returning startled the Singer. He swept from our quarters, unfurling his wings as he crossed to the balcony. Nat dodged left to avoid being struck.

I walked unsteadily to greet them, waving my hand to dissuade Elna from bowing in custom.

Shading my eyes against the sunset, I watched the Singer’s silhouette shrink as the breeze carried him away. He soared towards the city’s center, towards the Spire.

My shoulders dropped. I sank down to rest on my mother’s stool. Nat came to stand by me. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “For locking you out.”

I looked up at him. Wished I had words. But anything I said could reveal me, break the Singer’s fiat, and endanger Nat and Elna even more. They had enough trouble coming because of me.

I held out the markers, with their sentences on them.

Elna read hers and sucked in her breath. Then she read Nat’s and mine, saw they were blessedly temporary. Her eyes watered. “Serves you right,” she said. But she heaved the words at us with such relief, I knew she’d been afraid.

I did not want to think of Naton, Nat’s father, now. But I was sure Elna thought of the bone markers she’d held the day Naton was thrown down. A skein of Treason Laws, making him first chosen for Conclave, the ritual to appease the city.

Those chips were the heaviest the Singers dispensed.

Ours were much lighter. Tower Laws. Warnings. We would not have to wear them forever.

After he read his chip, Nat’s face was a puzzle. “Why do I get punished for what Kirit did?”

Because I would not sacrifice myself for you, Nat. Because I would not go with the Singer, you are punished. I opened my mouth to tell him. To say I was sorry.

But Elna turned on him. “Oh, you’re not innocent. You stood by and watched.” Her look stopped him cold. He glanced at me from under his lids instead. She huffed and began piling foods from the offerings into a basket. “Might as well get packed up, then. The council will be up.”

“Packed?” I couldn’t fathom why.

“They’ll want you two as low as they can send you,” Elna said. “Closer to your duties, but also much more shameful, isn’t it? So they’ll move you down, to my tier.”

I walked towards the back of our quarters to retrieve my sleeping mat and to get away from Nat’s glare. My new wings leaned against the inner wall, dark beside the slick bone column. Vant had nicked “no flight” on our punishment chips. Fine.

I would find a way to finish the cleaning in time. I would fly the wingtest. I promised myself this as I fed the silk spiders and the whipperling. Watered the kavik. They’d survive on their own until Ezarit returned. I hoped she would be quick.

My hands went through the motions while my mind whirred. I saw the skymouth’s teeth flash once again. Felt the heat of its breath.

Nat shook me by the shoulders. “Stop it!”

“What?”

“You were keening. It sounded horrible. Hurt my ears. Worse than your singing.”

I touched my face. My cheeks were wet. How had that happened? I hadn’t cried in front of someone since my first flight group, when I was very young.

Back then, the meanest among them, Sidra, had pretended Nat didn’t exist at all. “He’s nothing. His father broke Laws. Singers said so.” But she’d rounded on me. Teased me for my tuneless renderings of the first Laws we learned. “Your father must have fed himself to a skymouth to keep from being there to hear you cry.” The flight group, young as chicks, collapsed into laughter until the Magisters came with their nets to take us into the sky for our first flight. Then everyone’s voice froze tight in fear.

We’d only flown for a few minutes that day, tumbling into the tightly woven nets as we learned the winds around Densira. I’d rushed home and, in answer to Ezarit’s “how was it?” my nose and eyes had run like rainspouts.

“Sidra’s father talks too much, up at the top of Densira,” she’d said bitterly. “Your father didn’t return from a trade run. He could have been taken by a skymouth, but no one knows for certain. It wasn’t your doing.” And that was all she ever said.

She’d walked away from me, shoulders hunched, while I buried my face in my sleeping mat. She’d left early the next morning for the Spire, stopping to kiss my head. “Don’t let them tell you who you are, Kirit. Don’t let them see you cry.” I’d pretended to be asleep. But I heard her.

She’d petitioned the Singers that day, though she would not say for what. But her trade routes got better, and, when the tower grew, we were allowed to move to the new tier. Above Vant and his family. A great honor.

Now she was on a trade, and I’d wept again. For whom? For what? Nat still shook me, gently. “I’m all right,” I sniffled. He let go.

“What did the Singer say?” he asked.

My mouth went dry. I shook my head.

“Fine, Kirit.”

“It’s not that, Nat. I can’t say what he said.”

He opened his mouth to press me for more, but a clatter at the balcony signaled Councilman Vant’s arrival, along with the tower guard from this morning. They held a net basket between them.

“I’m not getting in that thing,” Nat said.

“No.” The councilman shook his head. His jowls jiggled. “You’re not. Kirit is.”

My jaw dropped. To be sent downtower was one thing. To be sent by basket like an invalid or a cloudbound offering was entirely another. I began to protest, but the councilman held up a finger. “Singer’s orders.” He smiled with pleasure.

The councilman’s enjoyment of my mistake made my stomach clench. Perhaps he hoped this was the first of many small falls.

My mother was not here to ease the way with kind words or gifts. I must do what he said, without making things worse.

I looked around once more before climbing in the basket. Our wide quarters were so recently grown atop the tower that the inner walls hadn’t yet begun to thicken. The space was comfortable, for all its newness. We had cushions from Amrath tower, and woven storage baskets in elegant patterns from Bissel. Chimes made from reclaimed metal so old they’d worn smooth of their past hung from the ceiling in the center of the room.

I realized too late that I didn’t want to leave this height for downtower’s stink and worry. Councilman Vant’s family had likely felt the same, as the tower grew past them. They’d been accustomed to being at the top. But towers rose according to need. Densira hadn’t risen for years, until Singers arrived with their rough scourweed and chants. Until they’d coaxed the bone tower into growing a new level. But Densira kept groaning. Once, while I’d lived downtower, Nat and I had skipped flight to cruise over the expanse of new-grown bone, and I had spotted the beginnings of a second tier, a natural one, emerging atop the one the Singers had called in the traditional way. After two seasons where the walls creaked and the wind cut ghost patterns around the emerging core, the tier thickened and steadied enough to be occupied.

My find was a tiding, my mother said to anyone who’d listen. She conferred with the Singers and they named our family the occupants, though we waited another season to move. No one had wanted to interfere with the tower’s rise. Then we’d climbed, all of us, past Vant’s tier, while quite a few other families filled in our former quarters below. Nat had been right to tease yesterday that we were only newly risen, our tier as well. It still stung.

Even now, as I prepared to leave, the central wall creaked and settled. It whispered tower dreams to us and to its cousins all across the city. I wished that the city would speak at this moment. Then the Singers would focus on its message, and not on me.

Elna and Nat descended the rope ladder and left me in my home. Two days ago, I would have given anything to leave it. Now I wished I could stay.

The guard cleared his throat. I heaved my things into the basket, and the councilman helped me in.

“Kirit Lawsbreaker, you’re a poor example to your tower. Let your penance make you humble. Let it be of service to Densira,” he said. I waited for him to say more. Instead, he and the councilman swung me over the edge of the balcony, making the basket spin. I twisted in the air, wingless, like an infant, as I sank below the floor where my family lived.

Above, the guard played the rope across the cleats cut into our balcony. As the basket jerked down and down again, people emerged on Mondarath’s and Densira’s gardens to watch. My skin prickled with the attention, but there was nothing I could do. The fiber net held me tight against the wind, which pushed it dizzyingly against the edge of the balcony. The ropes groaned as they bore my weight.

My eyes raked the sky for another mouth or more teeth, found none.

The basket stopped and then started moving again precipitately. Perhaps the guard and councilman had argued about whether to let the rope go, whether to drop me over the edge. They’d be free of the luck, good or bad, that now plagued their peaceful and well-ordered tower. As sometimes happened with invalids.

The net creaked. I laced my fingers around two of the larger knots and held tight.

Below, the tower disappeared with its neighbors into the depths, growing indistinct long before the cloudtop obscured everything. Farther down, the songs said, the tiers grew together, even some of the towers, as the bone cores expanded out, filling the hollows of old quarters. Even farther down, well below the clouds, lay legend. The oldest songs sang of a bone forest, and the people who climbed it and lived because they kept going higher. And so we still climbed.

Except me. I sank lower, at least for now.

After a lifetime of swinging in my cage, edging lower, then swinging again, I reached Elna’s tier. She hooked the net basket with a bone crook, the one she used for bringing in market baskets. Perhaps this very basket. It reeked of onions. Elna and Nat pulled on the crook together and drew the basket onto her small balcony. I climbed out and sat on the ground for a moment, catching my breath.

Elna tugged on the rope twice, and the councilman and his guard yanked up the empty basket.

Far below, the clouds glowed pink with sunset. With Allmoons so near, we were flush with the kind of light that faded quickly. The kind that sank to cinder only a few hours after it kindled. Elna’s quarters were ruddy with the declining sun.

I looked around my prison. The same walls and tapestries of my earliest memories, but smaller as the inner wall thickened. One day, the tier would be filled with bone, and no one would live here. For now, Elna hummed Remembrance — sung at Allmoons and Allsuns — in the kitchen. And Nat. He looked at me now as if I’d made the skymouth with my bare hands on purpose. “You’re bad luck,” he grumbled. But I saw worry behind the anger. He needed to pass his wingtest too.

I wanted to snap back at him, but fighting with him would make things worse. I pressed my lips together.

Elna emerged from the kitchen to shake her head at both of us.

“Serves you both right.” She handed me a piece of lentil flatbread.

“I don’t see why I’m punished,” Nat said. “I’ll miss training. I’m not the numbhead who went out.”

She swatted him. “You didn’t stop her. And you closed the shutters. What do you think?”

He looked down. I saw myself through his eyes for a moment. Not Kirit the sometimes-sister, wing-friend of his childhood; now just the spoiled high-tower person who took his mother’s attention and got him censured.

“I wish I could change it all,” I said. I wanted him to remember what we’d been. Who I was before I moved uptower. To know that I was still the same person, still his friend. His almost-sister.

I tried hard not to care where I was, or about the wingtest and whether we’d miss it. Tried hard not to think of my mother, who’d left me behind. Elna was angry, sure. But with Elna, that didn’t matter. She held me close and I breathed in the scent of her skin, the onions she’d cooked. I relaxed, until she murmured, “Our Kirit, skyblessed.”

I groaned. So did Nat.

“You two.”

“You heard the Singer. I’m not skyblessed.”

Elna dipped her head in agreement. But over dinner and until she went to bed, I caught her looking at me with the same blend of reverence and horror that she’d given to the Singer.

Later, I wished she would wrap me up and tell me things would get better, as she had when I’d come in from flight with a bug in my eye or a scrape from the rough sinew nets.

I touched the Laws chip Councilman Vant tied to my wrist. One side was marked “Broke Fortify, endangered tower.” The other held my sentence, “Lowtower labor.” Nat’s bore the more general “Lawsbreaker.” We would wear them until the councilman cut them off.

Shivering, I pulled my quilt tight around me and curled up on my mat. It smelled of Ezarit’s spices and tea.

I was censured. I hoped for forgiveness. For a miracle.

3. LOWTOWER

In the morning, Nat banged thick baskets and buckets together to wake me. Woven vine rasped against age-dark bone. Elna gave us her cleaning rags. We tied everything on a hemp line and used ladders to descend eight tiers below Elna’s, into the no-man’s-zone of Densira. The smell of rot and refuse clung to my nostrils.

I kept my eyes on the empty tiers we passed, not on the sky with its tempting breezes and diving whipperlings.

“Whoo,” Nat said after a sniff at the stench. He jumped from the ladder onto the tier and stunt-rolled into the darkness beyond, howling like a banshee.

The clouds were so close here. They flowed and parted to reveal even more clouds, always waiting. An occasional dark flicker within them might have been a large bird, or something worse.

I disengaged from the ladder, feeling the sky tug at me. Stepped back from the edge, wingless and disgraced. The inner wall had grown much more down here. Barely enough room to sleep out of the weather and the fall of refuse from above. That, at least, was a blessing. Less space left to clean.

I didn’t watch where I walked. One foot landed in a pile of muck.

“Birdcrap!” I yelled. I heard Nat cackle. Then he yelped, backing up fast.

A creature swung out of the depths of the tier, dressed in rags. It charged at us, hooting. A thin hand clutched Nat’s robe. Greasy hair dangled, and exposed parts of its body sagged like old courier bags, stretching from arms and buttocks. I looked away.

“Begone. Not yours!” it yelled at us.

Elna descended the ladder, pale as always, though the downtower shadows were easier on her eyes. “Tobiat.” Her voice rang firm across the empty tier. “My son, Nat, and his friend, Kirit. They’re going to clean the low tiers as a punishment.”

Tobiat. Invalids like him, as well as the very skyblind and the mad, were sometimes left behind as the tiers rose. They lived far downtower, on the edges of old quarters, scrounging for scraps. Many fell or starved, especially if they had no family to care for them. Or if their family abandoned them for being bad luck.

Elna handed Tobiat a packet of dried fruit and graincakes. He released Nat’s cloak to clutch at it, nodding thanks. “Elna’s good people.”

“He’s chosen this tier to make his nest,” she said to us. “This will be a foul mess to start with.”

Nat looked from his mother to the hermit, then deep into the tier. His nose wrinkled, and I joined him to see what he saw. Piles of stinking rags, shreds of ladders, broken wings. Too many to count. Tobiat had gathered parts of the tower that no one else wanted. We’d never get it clean enough.

“Why does he keep these things?” I whispered. “He’d be much better off letting them fall away with the rest of the garbage.”

Nat shrugged. “Dunno. Not like I knew Ma was keeping him.”

Elna secured herself to the ladder again, her wings unclasped just in case. She gripped hard, and she began the climb. “Vant said the guard will check on your progress by afternoon.” Her words were as much a promise to us as a warning to Tobiat to make himself scarce.

Tobiat, his mouth full of dried apple, cackled and wandered away, trailing a frayed cloth that had once wrapped his body against the cold. I heard him mutter, “Cleaning, clean, cleaners.” He receded into the gloom.

Nat passed me a rag and a bucket. “I wish we could use scourweed.” The tough fibers were reserved for Singers, for raising towers.

“Not much grows on the lowtowers,” I said. “If we find some, I say we use it.”

“I’ll keep my eyes open,” Nat said. For now, we were a team again, trying to work as fast as possible.

Instead of scourweed, we found an old rain catcher, too broken to be worth lifting higher, and used it as a scoop. Then we started as far from Tobiat’s piles as we could, swiping at the mold and bird shit that had accumulated everywhere. I felt sick. Nat looked pretty green too.

“Tobiat,” he called, “we need to move your things.”

Tobiat had piled wing battens and bits of broken carvings around what was probably his bed. Kept them a safe distance from the small fire pit. He had nothing that looked like metal. If he’d found anything that valuable, it would have been sold or stolen before now. I caught myself looking anyway, like a glitter-smitten kavik.

Other piles had been pushed against the inner wall. One leaked dank vegetable liquid from the bottom.

I kicked at it. “All trash.”

With two fingers, I lifted a fetid pile of grayish cloth from the heap. The fabric was crusted with age-browned blood and gristle. I walked to the edge with it and had cranked back my arm to give it a good heave when Tobiat came out of nowhere, howling, “Mine, mine!” He grabbed, the fabric crackling at his touch, bits falling off. Stink rose, though whether from the cloth or Tobiat, I couldn’t tell.

“Disgusting,” I said and pulled, while trying to keep myself back from the edge. Tobiat shrieked and yanked at the fabric, leaning way out. The thought of him falling, at my hand, nearly choked me. The clouds were too close here. As were the shadows that prowled the clouds.

“Nat!” I yelled. Nothing. “Nat! Help!” and Nat came running, finally. He coaxed Tobiat off the edge of the balcony and calmed him with a piece of goose. When I released the rags, the hermit bundled them into a ball and held them close.

“We are never going to finish,” I said. We’d miss the wingtest. I’d lose my best opportunity to avoid another confrontation with Singer Wik. And even if we were to finish in time, we’d have no chance to study. One look at Nat’s creased brow showed he was worried too.

“What if we toss everything?” Nat raised an eyebrow. “It would be faster. He’s mad, right? He won’t miss any of it.”

I looked more closely at Tobiat. He wasn’t mad. His skull was dented on one side, as if he’d hit something at great speed and lived to forget the fall. His skin was frost-marked where he’d left it bare in the wind. Scars rippled across his face and back, and several bones looked to have been broken and rehealed as they lay. He was more crooked than straight. It must have been very painful. Still, he was aware of us. He’d covered himself a bit better with his rags than before. He gripped the cloth tightly. He was in there, somewhere. We couldn’t throw his things down like he wasn’t.

“Tobiat?” I said in my softest voice. “We have to clean four tiers, fast, or we’ll never be allowed to leave.”

He looked at me. “Leave?”

“Yes, we’ll leave when it’s clean.”

The hermit reached out a claw and hooked a finger around one of my cleaning rags. He lifted it gingerly and dipped it in the bucket we’d been using to hold rainwater. So he knew how to do it. Soon he was heaving trash over the edge of the balcony with us, yelling, “Good-bye, good-bye!”

The sun had dipped towards the clouds when the ladder clattered against the tier, finally. Tobiat disappeared. I looked around. The space was clean, but it had taken all day. Three more tiers to finish by the wingtest felt impossible.

A stone fruit pit bounced off my shoulder and rolled across the balcony. I chased it down before it could stick to the newly cleaned tier. Sidra and Dojha from uptower circled and swooped just out of my throwing range.

Once Ezarit and I moved uptower, Sidra had become coldly polite in flight class. She’d grown much warmer to Nat. Since Allsuns, he’d found himself at the center of a swirl of brightly colored wings. He looked amused to see them here.

“Does stink down here,” Sidra said. “You were right, Dojha. So far downtower, we’re bound to get hit with a bucket’s worth of foul if we stay too long.”

Dojha blushed. “We wanted to see if you two needed anything from flight.”

“Since you’re going to miss the last classes before the wingtest,” Sidra added.

Sidra’s wings shone with decorative thread. Between batten sections, panels had been dyed the color of flowers: red, blue, purple. Hard to miss. Sidra caught me sizing up her colors and grinned at me.

“My father says you got off easy.” She sounded like our Magister, strict. Scolding. “Lawsbreaking. Bringing shame on the tower just before Allmoons. The guard said you were playing with lenses on your balcony when it came. Did it run away because you sang to it?”

Sidra had the prettiest voice in flight. When she sang Laws, everyone remembered the words. I was not so lucky.

I pulled back into the shadow of the tier and held my mouth shut tight.

Dojha turned her head sideways as an updraft brushed her wingtips. “Let’s go, Sidra. Dinner.”

“Right,” Sidra said. “See you at wingtest, I hope.” She waved to Nat, and I bristled. Then they were gone.

Nat gathered our buckets and rags. The back of his neck was bright red.

I reached for the ladder, but Tobiat rushed up, nearly bumping me off the ledge. “Payment,” he said, and held out his hand.

“We can’t pay you. We don’t have anything,” Nat said, frustrated.

But Tobiat’s hand wasn’t empty.

“Look, Nat.”

Tobiat held a pile of bone chips, as filthy as his hands. Nat lifted one, and the rest came with it. They were strung together like a necklace.

“More Laws,” Nat said. His eyes went flat, and his voice with them. “Thanks for nothing, Tobiat.” But he stuffed the stinking thing in his robe so that Tobiat would let his arm go. Once he did, Tobiat bobbed his head and muttered to himself. He receded back into the gloom.

As we prepared to climb the ladder back to Elna’s, I heard Tobiat shout, “Leave!”

* * *

That night, I huddled in the sitting area. Elna had borrowed screens to make a guest space, but it was still breezy. The fire had gone out. Elna’s own sleeping screens, hand-me-downs from my mother, muffled her soft snores. Day after tomorrow was the wingtest. If there was the slightest chance we’d be allowed to take it, I would be ready. No time to sleep.

When two fliers are on the same plane and at risk of collision, the flier with more maneuverability must give way. Traditionally, this is the flier with the wind coming over their right wing.

Tradition. There was a rule for that too. Traditions meant everyone knew what to do, and did it. Laws were tradition, strengthened to avoid angering the city.

After a while, I’d recited everything I could remember from Magister Florian’s instruction, jealous that our flight group had two extra days to practice with him. That they knew they’d be able to wingtest. I’d never felt so angry at my tower in my whole life. Nor at myself.

“Kirit,” Nat whispered.

It took me a while to answer. “What?”

He scooted into my space, his hair sleep-tossed. He didn’t say anything for a moment, just looked at his hands. He toyed with old message chips, rubbing them together so they squealed.

“That’s a horrible sound,” I said. Then I pressed my lips together. We used to talk about everything. Then I rose and he pulled away, and now? I wanted to tell him everything, and now I couldn’t. The Singer’s fiat forbade me. I held my fears in my mouth. I swallowed what I would have once told him about how it felt to scream down a skymouth or argue with a Singer. I waited for him to speak.

“Tell me what it looked like, at least?”

“The skymouth?”

He nodded, eager to hear.

I could give him that. But where would it lead? To have the whole story pulled from me like a silk ribbon off a package, until I was emptied and Nat was tied up in it. No.

He cleared his throat and tried again. “All right. What if I go first?”

Hope rose, tickling the corners of my mouth, as I realized he wanted to fix things, a little.

“You have to see these,” he said. He wasn’t playing with any old message chips from a kavik. He’d been fingering the strand of chips Tobiat gave him. He’d cleaned them up, so that we could see the rope binding them was frayed blue silk. Much finer than the chips we tied to message birds. Or any Laws chips. The pieces of bone were thicker too. This strand was never intended to be sent by wing.

I looked at the scratches on the chips. The carving included tiny holes, careful etchings. Carvings within carvings. “What is this?”

“I’m not sure,” Nat said. “Look.” He wiped away a spot of mold on the back of a chip. The scratches took on shape and substance. “It’s like a tower map. Each chip is a tier. And there are symbols on the other side. I can’t make them out.”

“What do you mean? You can read chips as well as I can.”

“Look,” he said again. And he was right. The symbols weren’t made up of forms I knew. These were arabesque curls and sharp cuts. Odd angles. Tobiat had given us something very strange indeed.

I whispered without thinking, “Some of it looks like the marks on that Singer’s face.” Suddenly, I wanted to go back to worrying about the wingtest.

Nat watched me carefully. “Tell me about them?”

“I want to study.” I said it as casually as I could. If I’d had feathers like his whipperling, they’d have been raked around my collar.

“Why? This is so much better — secret Singer messages, diagrams. Besides, if we do finish cleaning and you get to wingtest, you’ll be great at Laws. You know them all.”

If my voice didn’t trip me up. If we could wingtest. Too many ifs.

I didn’t want to talk about ifs. I couldn’t talk about the skymouth. “You think the tower on those chips is Densira or Mondarath?” I asked, trying to think of anything that would swing Nat’s attention.

“It might be a tower far away.” Nat looked out into the dark. “Why?”

“Because if you get your wingmark,” I said, “you can fly the city until you find it. Without a Magister at your side.”

He paled. “If I don’t, I’ll be stuck here until next Allsuns. No wingmark, no flying past this quadrant. No apprenticeship or wingfights or anything.”

Nat loved his mysteries and his conspiracies, but he loved flying more. I’d caught him. Worse, if he didn’t pass with full marks, he wouldn’t get a good apprenticeship because of Naton’s Lawsbreaks. Nat and Elna would sink farther on the tower. And they didn’t have far to go.

He tried to play it off. “You worry too much,” he mumbled.

“We have three tiers to clean tomorrow,” I said. “That’s worry enough. I’m afraid we’re not going to finish in time, even if Tobiat’s was the worst by far.” A few days ago, my biggest worry about the wingtest had been to do well enough that my mother would beg to have me as her apprentice. Now I needed my wingmark to stay clear of the Singer’s clutches. And I’d started to fear the lengths the Singer was willing to go to in order to set me up to fail.

The last few days of flight training had focused on sweeps, rolls, and defensive gliding, and I needed work in that area. Magister Florian’s recitations and songs were filled with important angles and calculations. We’d missed plenty of last-minute secrets while we were downtower with our buckets.

I hoped Nat shared my worries. “We could study together?” But he’d already retreated to his mat.

So I curled back up on my own mat and tried to recite more right-of-way rules. I practiced the singsong Laws. Easy to sing, easy to remember. Less carving required to pass them on. The rhythms were memorable; the repetition made me drowsy.

My eyes snapped open at movement by my side. Elna was bent over me, furious.

“Where did you get this?”

I scrambled off my sleeping mat and stood, blearily, as she shook the blue silk cord with the strange bone chips at me. Nat was nowhere to be seen.

“Tobiat gave it to Nat!”

I’d never seen Elna this angry. “He did, did he? You’re an innocent bystander again?”

A chill ran up my back. Yesterday, Elna had thought I was a skytouched blessing. Now she sounded like she agreed with the councilman.

“You can’t leave well enough alone, can you, Kirit? Always have to make a mess.”

I reeled on my feet. Was I dreaming? Elna loved me. The bone chips dangled and rattled in her hand. That’s what had changed.

“I don’t even know what they mean,” I protested.

Elna ran her fingers along the age-smoothed bone chips. Her chin quivered. She threw the braided skein of chips on the floor and turned from me. “Leave those things be.” She pointed at Tobiat’s chips. Her voice broke like a wild whipperling’s tethered for the first time to a training line. She began singing Laws. Pointedly. The ones about trespass and betrayal.

I struggled to pull myself from my sleep fog and find the words that would loosen her anger. “Elna, no,” was all that came out. A child’s whisper. “Please.” I picked up the chips. “Tell me what they are?”

The chips turned to ice in my hand.

And I jerked awake screaming, sprawled on the warm bone floor beside my mat.

The real Elna was at my side moments later. Elna who loved me, who had always been there, her hand gentle on my back. She hushed me softly and began to hum a baby’s song about Allmoons and Nightwings, like I was a child again.

“Sing The Rise,” I murmured, my eyes drooping.

She shifted to the song of salvation. The story of how the city nearly died in the clouds and how the people saved it. In my mother’s quarters, Elna’s voice had been tight and formal. Here, she sang from the belly.

The Rise began as a children’s song, with verses added as we learned to read carvings and to listen to the city sing at Allsuns and Allmoons. She began it low and soft: “Far down below the clouds, oh, the city did rise.…” She grew surer of herself, even as she kept her voice quiet. She let the notes wash over her. The towers of the city grew in my imagination, in time with the music. Elna glowed when she sang. She repeated the chorus again: “The clouds fell away, and the people were saved. Oh, the city did rise,” and I could see her as she might have been, before Nat’s father died. Before she gave up teaching. Before Ezarit paid her to watch me and to be my mother too.

My body relaxed as the song wove the air. Elna loved me. The thought was a balm. Then another thought, as I fell into sleep, weighed me down. The next line of The Rise praised the Singers for saving the city.

The wingtest would decide my fate, if I could get there. In two days’ time, I would be taken to the Spire by the guardians of the city or I would fly free on my own wings.

* * *

In the morning, a shadow drifted past the open balcony doors. I sipped chicory, and Nat worked over a bowl of dried berries. The bone chips sat on the table between us.

Elna passed us on her way to the midtower market. She’d tied a satchel of finished mending to her side. I stuffed the skein of chips into my sleeve before she saw it.

“Tobiat didn’t get in your way yesterday?” she asked, gripping the ladder tight with both hands.

Nat shook his head. “He helped a bit.”

She smiled. “I’ve found him more helpful when I’ve treated him with respect.”

She began her climb. We watched until her feet disappeared.

Nat took mash to his whipperling. He returned quickly. “Maalik’s not here.” He grumbled that if someone wanted to send messages using his bird, they needed to ask him first. Then he began rummaging in Elna’s storage baskets for more rags.

“Kirit, look.” Nat had unstacked several baskets by the inside wall. As with everyone’s quarters, the center wall supported the tower. It grew first on each tier and thickened with each year until, on the lowest parts of the tower we could reach, only a few meters of space remained in what were once huge rooms. Barely enough space to land on, if you listened to the scavengers.

The baskets contained things Elna wasn’t ready to toss. Nat held a scrap of robe, creased like it had been balled up for a decade or more. I spread it out — two handspans of blue silk striped with dove gray, very faded. A piece of a Magister’s cloak. “Elna’s?”

“Yes.”

“Why did she stop?”

“I think they wouldn’t let her teach, after. She never talks about it.” He spun on his heel and headed back into the dark. I heard him rummaging. In my hand, the skein of knotted silk cord and bone chips rattled. Some of the chips were shaped like tears and teeth, all were nearly white, flat, and practically soft to the touch. They’d been handled often. The marks and symbols seemed to have been made using traditional tools: bone scrapers, bone needles, and bone chisels. Only the small holes drilled all the way through had crisp edges, perhaps made with one of the few metal drills that remained in the city. Those were the province of the bridge builders, the artifexes. Like Naton had been.

The discarded robe in the rag bag and the bone chips in my hand made me wonder. I fought the urge. Couldn’t risk thinking too hard about the Singers.

But Nat lifted the chips and hefted them. “My father could have made these,” he whispered, although everyone had gone up to the market. The tower was wrapped with ladders and ropes as people hauled their extra from gardens to the tower council’s farm stores.

“Don’t you think the chips are too old for that?” I shifted from the guest area into the deeper recesses of their quarters. I lifted a lid on a basket, poked a finger through the handwork that Elna took in. Searching for a way to switch the subject.

“The holes in the chips. The shadow of an older carving, not fully ground away. Something’s been erased, and replaced.” He jumped as Elna dropped onto the balcony. As she entered, Nat pushed the skein back into my hand and stuffed the scrap of cloak into a basket. I slipped the bone markers into a pocket and prayed they wouldn’t clatter too much. Elna had very sharp ears.

“Forgot my sewing kit. You two had better get going,” she scolded. “Three more tiers to clean.”

Ugh. We’d done the worst one yesterday. The next three likely had occupants too, but anything would be more sanitary than Tobiat’s. We got moving.

My feet were barely off the ladder when we met an occupant of the day’s first tier. A woman rushed from the shadows, her clothes ragged, but less so than Tobiat’s. She was so weighed down by the Laws tied to her wrists, they clattered when she moved. I couldn’t read them before she ran forward and grabbed Nat’s bucket. Pulled. Nat leaned back, trying to keep it from her. The two of them spun closer to the edge.

I tried to push them towards the tower’s core, towards safety, by placing both hands on Nat’s back and shoving. All of us were wingless. None would survive a fall here.

A whoop and a cry made the woman let go of the bucket. Her wind-scarred eyes widened as Tobiat charged in, waving his hands and bellowing. She dodged his hands, then slunk away.

“Looks like we’ve made an ally,” I said, catching my breath. Tobiat looked marginally better than the day before. And I remembered what Elna said about respect. “Thank you for your help.”

Tobiat made a face. “Cleaning.”

“Yes, and we have to do it fast,” Nat said. No time to battle scavengers.

Tobiat glared in every direction, a crooked, unwinged guard. The woman had disappeared into the shadows.

Tobiat stepped to the balcony’s edge, then jumped.

I screamed and ran for the edge, expecting to see his weathered form plummeting to the clouds. Instead, I saw he’d managed to land on the lower balcony and roll. “Cloudtouched,” I whispered to Nat. “He’s gone.”

“Could have used him,” Nat grumbled. We gathered our rags, wary of every shadow and skitter.

The tier had less junk on it by far than Tobiat’s. I dipped my rag in the damp bottom of the bucket and squeezed the cloth nearly dry. Nat did the same. We knelt side by side on the bone floor, scrubbing at crusted spots and stains. When I moved to scrub the central wall, which had pushed far out into the tier, my fingertips and knuckles scraped against the rough bone more than once. I didn’t stop scrubbing.

No more scavengers or undertower folk troubled us.

The sun had barely moved by the time we climbed to the next tier. I began to hope we’d make the wingtest after all.

The Singers offered the test to all the quadrants, in four-tower groups, twice each year. Anyone who’d flown at least twelve seasons, as most who’d passed seventeen Allsuns had, could wingtest. Most who attempted the test passed within three tries, and many attempted it. Without the wingmark, no one would take a young flier as an apprentice, no matter who they were related to. If you couldn’t fly beyond your home quadrant without a Magister, who would want you?

I tried not to think about who wanted me.

“Kirit, look.” Nat had reached the tier before me. He pointed at the small bit of scourweed stuck in a gap between bone plates on a bone spur.

“Yes!” I grabbed the tough nettle and tore it carefully in half. Handed one section to Nat.

After an hour’s work on the next tier, a shadow passed once, then twice as a flier circled the tower. We hid the scourweed in a crevice and switched back to rags. I expected Sidra again, and braced for more ridicule. Instead, Magister Florian landed on the balcony. He left his wings set. Not here for a social call, then. He skipped the hellos too.

“You two should consider taking the wingtest next Allsuns.” A half-year away.

Nat straightened. “Why?”

I swiped at a dark, sticky spot with my rag.

“You’re close, but Kirit needs more practice on her turns and on group flight. That last run was not your best, Kirit.” He took a breath, giving me plenty of time to remember how I’d fallen out of the turn and nearly lost my bearings. “And now you’ve spent two days cleaning. You’ll be tired, even if you do finish. I don’t want to see too many from Densira fail.”

I scrubbed harder at the spot. Perhaps it would disappear.

“Magister, with respect—” Nat began.

The Magister held up his hand. “It’s up to you. You’ll be flying from downtower, already at a disadvantage. Your ability to take the lead in Group is important, and you can’t do that well when you’re tired. You can do your best, but it might be better to wait until conditions are optimal. Next Allsuns. For Kirit, especially.”

I didn’t stop scrubbing. I pictured the trades I’d make as an apprentice. My skill at bargaining. Ezarit’s appreciation when I finessed a particularly tricky detail. “I will see you tomorrow, Magister.”

He didn’t smile. But Nat did. “We will both see you tomorrow, Magister.”

Florian turned and jumped, wings spread. He caught an updraft and rose almost effortlessly. I hoped I’d be so lucky tomorrow.

“Nice work!” Nat punched my arm lightly.

“What do you mean?”

“He was trying to get you to give up, and you wouldn’t let him. I’m sure he doesn’t want to lose face before the other Magisters.” He paused, thinking. “Now you have to pass the test for sure.”

The weight of his words settled on my shoulders, and deep in my stomach.

* * *

By midday, we still had a long way to go on the tier, but we kept encountering curiously clean corners. The scourweed had helped too. And we needed to eat. As I unpacked the dried dirgeon Elna had sent down in a small basket, I saw Tobiat peeking around a corner. I held out a piece of the dirgeon to him. He darted out, then munched loudly.

“He’s going to follow us home if you feed him,” Nat said.

“He’s helping. Keeping the scavengers away,” I said. Maybe the scourweed too. I was surprised Nat hadn’t seen it. Besides, I was curious. “What else does he do all day?”

Tobiat reached into my pocket and drew out the blue-corded bone markers. “Mine.”

“You gave them to us. For helping, remember?”

He looked at me sharply and handed them back, to Nat. On a whim, I pointed to the faded bridge that Nat had found on the chips. Tobiat squinted, and he sat back on his heels, elbows on knees. His fingers, slicked with bird grease, combed his skeined hair. “Naton’s,” he said, pointing at the bridge shadow. “Naton’s,” he said again, pointing at Nat.

Nat dropped his lunch. Tobiat scooted in to retrieve it and gobbled the piece of roasted bird instead of handing it back to Nat.

“It was his.”

Tobiat grinned, but didn’t say anything more.

Nat held up the skein. “They’re not message chips. They’re a plan for something?” he asked, raising both in his hands. His fingers curled around the bone chips, as if Tobiat might snatch them away too.

“Cages,” Tobiat said before he doubled over with wheezing and hacking. We both backed away. Coughing was dangerous. You didn’t want to stop breathing, not for a minute. Tobiat got hold of himself and whispered, “Cages. Delequerriat.” The strange word rolled off his tongue like water. Then he sat back on his heels and cleared his throat. After a lot of rattling noise, he raised a gob of phlegm and spat it on the floor.

“Ugh,” Nat said.

I swiped at the thing with my rag. It was flecked with blood. When I looked up again, Tobiat had skittered out of sight.

We returned to cleaning, too wrapped up in our own thoughts to talk.

* * *

By the time the sun came level with our tier, making everything too bright, we still had one more tier to go. The wingtest was tomorrow. The mystery of the chips could wait.

“Hurry, Nat.” I scrubbed the scourweed across every surface and tossed garbage.

Somewhere, right then, Ezarit was saving people. Bringing them medicine or making more trades. By now, towers were making a song of it.

To serve the city. Dire need. There was no higher privilege, no rarer service. My mother’s bravery was known throughout the city. I pictured myself with my new wings, bringing food to starving towers or fuel to citizens with no heat; I imagined hearing Ezarit’s voice, soft and proud, as the city sang my name. I scrubbed even harder. I would do this.

We could barely drag ourselves up the ladder to the last tier. “This will take all night,” Nat said, going first.

He was right. Even if we managed to finish by dawn, we’d be dead on our wings tomorrow for the test. Still, I followed him up. Heard him gasp as he pulled himself over the ledge.

In the sunset light, the tier sparkled. Clean. Elna stood close to the central wall with Councilman Vant, who looked annoyed. Elna was in a chipper mood.

“Didn’t think you two would start with this tier and work down,” she said.

“We didn’t—” Nat began, but I dug an elbow hard into his ribs.

“We didn’t think the order mattered,” I finished.

Vant made a harrumph noise while he looked around. Finally, his face brightened. “Haven’t had the lower levels cleaned in some time,” he said. “Good for the health of the tower.” His voice was jolly, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. He couldn’t figure out how we’d done it.

Neither could I.

“I’ll be seeing you and your mother soon,” he said with a sour smile as he reached for my hand. He cut the punishment chip from my wrist with a small knife, well worn. Then did the same for Nat.

We were dismissed.

Vant unfurled his wings and leapt from the tier. A strong late-afternoon gust lifted him in a rising circle around the tower.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Elna place a wrapped parcel by the wall. She climbed the ladder, and Nat followed. I lingered, hoping to see who she’d thanked with the thick bundle. No one peeked out from the shadows to claim it. Before I climbed the ladder, I took one of my light quilts from my satchel and left it atop Elna’s parcel. I hoped it would keep him warm.

4. OLD WINGS

Elna had filled her table with rich things she couldn’t possibly have bought herself. Was Ezarit near? She would know what had happened.

I looked behind Nat’s and Elna’s screens. Nat’s whipperling squatted on its perch, several tail feathers dusty and askew.

“Ezarit sent a courier to the tower, with a package for Vant and the goose for us,” Elna acknowledged. Maalik pecked at his mash, hungry.

“You sent her a message,” I said. It was not a question.

Elna raised her eyebrows. “She needed to know. And you need your strength for tomorrow. Though I couldn’t tell her everything.” The Singer’s warning. You will not interfere. If I knew Elna, she’d hinted anyway.

We ate greedily. Nat’s fingers dove for the goose fat, and mine scooped up a thick, roasted leg. I saw his frown. He’d wanted that too.

Elna’s plate was empty. “Go on, eat.” She made a shooing gesture with her hands. “You worked hard. You’re testing tomorrow.” I pushed the goose leg to her plate and picked up a wing instead. She tried to say she wasn’t hungry. When I ignored her, she tore into the leg.

“When I’m apprenticed,” Nat said through a mouthful of goose, “we’ll eat like this every night.”

Elna chuckled. “And you’ll need new wings each Allsuns, like Councilman Vant.”

“Won’t. Ever.” Nat reached for the water sack and helped himself. He filled Elna’s cup, then splashed water in mine. “I’ll be the fastest hunter in the sky. Bring down everything I see.”

“Let’s hope you don’t bring down a friend, then.” Elna ruffled his hair. She cracked the leg bone and sucked the marrow out. Nat did the same with a thigh. I set my wing down. Never crack a wing, not even if you might starve.

We were the opposite of starving. We sat at the table near the balcony and watched the lights go down in the highertowers. The stars grew bright in the sky, and the moon bellied above the clouds, full enough to turn the city silver.

“Clear sky,” Elna noted. “Good for tomorrow.” She stepped away from the table and pulled two bundles from behind the sleeping screen. Our wings.

Nat whooped and spread his out on the floor, then went in the back for a mending kit to shore up a worn seam.

Elna looked sad as she handed me my wings. “Your mother’s delayed in the south quadrant,” she said. “The tower council brought these down when they delivered the goose.”

I shrugged off my disappointment and tore into the bundle, thinking of the green and gold swirls. My new wings. But when the bundle came undone, I found my old wings, newly mended. Elna laid a skein of message chips on top. From my mother. She patted my hand and left me with it.

Kirit, the chips read, I should be back in time for Allmoons. Southwest is complicated. Meantime, do your best. I won’t have you test on new wings after all that happened. You will use your old ones. Liras Viit has mended them well. Be brilliant. You will rise like the sun.

Nothing more. Old wings, a mother away, and a wingtest for which I was ill-prepared. I should be flying from the towertop on gold and green to meet the test, with Ezarit cheering me on.

Alone. I would do this alone. Ezarit hadn’t returned. The southwest was more important and demanded much, I knew.

A thought took my breath away. Would she return before the Singer came back? Perhaps she didn’t want me as apprentice after all. Staying away was an easy way to say so.

My dusky wings with their patches and stains felt far heavier in my hands than they used to. How could I rise if both my tower and my mother were determined to weigh me down?

With that, I snapped back to reality. Chin up, shoulders back, Kirit. I would fly the wingtest well enough to keep Wik at bay and take top marks, so that Ezarit would see I was the best apprentice she could choose. And then I could choose to go with her or make my own way.

“Beautiful stitching,” said Elna, running her fingers over Liras Viit’s patchwork. She patted Nat’s shoulder, then mine. “You could work on your mending skills. Never know when you’ll need them.”

Nat wrinkled his nose, but continued to shore up his wings. I barely hid my expression; I hated mending. I’d trade for my garments, like Ezarit did. After tomorrow.

Tomorrow, we’d be questioned on city Laws and history. There would be a solo flight, then a group flight with students from other towers and citizen volunteers. Group was the most important test: flying among strangers without killing anyone. I had to do well on it all. I could not falter, could not let Vant or Wik or anyone keep me from passing my wingtest.

We’d spent years preparing. Our Magister had drilled us on each element. And tried to dissuade Nat and me from showing up because we’d spent the final days before the test cleaning downtower.

Worse, I had yet to go into open sky since the migration. The thought, even though the Singers had declared the skymouths gone for now and the skies safe, made my dinner feel like a pannier full of guano.

Elna gave me a knowing smile. She remembered what it was like. “Stakes are high. Passage on the first try will make you seem lucky. It will balance the tower’s censure.” She was trying to make us feel better. “Even on the second try, there are plenty of professions that will still want a strong flier.”

But no one wanted you if you were unlucky, or if you happened to attract skymouths to your tower.

“Sidra said some of the group volunteers are hunters,” Nat added. He was a fine shot. Good with a knife, too.

“If not the hunters, the guards,” he told me while he double-stitched a seam with silk thread. “Sidra said she’d talk to her father if I wanted to be a guard. I would line my wings with glass and patrol the skies.”

I barely heard him. As I’d scrubbed the tower, I’d let myself daydream too. My life as a trader. I knew he’d done the same. All that stood between me and that future was one test. Now, holding my old wings, I imagined the roar of air around me as I plummeted and failed. It would be worse than being sent downtower in a basket, because everyone who could spare the time would be watching the wingtest, with lenses. If I fell out of my turn, they would see me.

Everyone but Ezarit.

Allmoons was in two days, which wasn’t long. But that would be too late. At least she wouldn’t see me fall.

If I could just practice my rolls and climbs once more. If my voice was prettier.

Too dark to fly now. Wingtest started after dawn. Instead, I practiced in the main room. I unfurled my wings, slipped my arms into the straps, stretched my fingers to the harnesses that controlled curvature and, to some extent, lift. The woven harness that held my feet when I flew dragged on the floor with a soft ruck-ruck-ruck. I began twisting this way and that, angling my hands to curve the wings’ tethers, ducking my head to let the air curl around me.

“You look like you’re dancing,” Nat said. I jumped. He’d been behind the screen, reading.

“Practicing. You don’t?”

He shook his head. “Magister said I’m a natural.”

The lanterns grew dim as the oil in them ran out. Elna came in from the balcony and kissed the tops of our heads. She whispered, “Don’t stay up too late,” and went to bed. Outside, the full moon finally cleared the clouds again, flooding the balcony and the outermost rooms with pearl-gray light. Dark wings chased bugs between distant towers, and the closest towers sparkled under the star-glimmered sky. It was a soft night. Almost as beautiful as an Allmoon.

Someone in the tower had picked up their dolin and was plucking at the strings. The chords drifted down like raindrops.

“Come on, Kirit. We know everything we need to know already. We finished the punishment. Watch the stars come out.”

I growled quietly. Nat wasn’t nervous anymore. Me, I had everything riding on this test. If I did well, the Spire would have no claim on me. Ezarit would know my worth to her. My luck would be restored. Tomorrow I could begin training to become a trader like my mother. Or I could disappear.

Nat was right; he was a natural. I’d always had to work at it.

I knew I’d pass the first part, Laws. I’d memorized all the songs. The test focused on accuracy, so the fact that my voice sounded like scourweed on bone couldn’t hurt me. I hoped. I worried most about Group. Anything could happen then. Sometimes everything did.

I closed my eyes and spun, feeling my old wings fill with the slight breeze. The battens supported two layers of silk that spread and furled like bats’ wings. The wingframe could lock in position to free the hands, or a skilled flier could use the grips woven into each wing to rake and angle the wingfoils during a glide. I felt the grips with my fingers, the leads of the silkspun ropes that ran to eyebolts drilled at the tips of the wingframe. Singers’ wings used tendon instead of silk. For us, silk had to do.

I imagined myself diving and turning in a clear blue sky. I imagined leading a group. I had to do well. I had to focus. But instead of the rules for upwind group flight, or the different traditions of various towers in the city, I saw the strange patterns on the bone chips Tobiat gave us. My arms dropped to my sides. My concentration had failed me. No more flying tonight.

When I opened the shutters, I found Nat sitting on the balcony, looking at the moon through a hole in one of the age-worn bone chips — Naton’s plans. I hesitated, one foot on the threshold, then stepped out.

Nat turned and peered at me one-eyed through the carved chip.

“What are they, do you think?” he said.

The chip made Nat’s brown eye seem flat and enormous, with extra sclera. Like a skymouth’s. I pushed that thought out of my mind. The sky had been clear for days.

I steadied my voice. “No idea.” Tried to think of things a bridge artifex like Naton would want to make. Something woven or knotted. “Probably not a telescope.”

He lowered the skein. “Not a good one anyway.”

I stood well back from the edge of the balcony, my wings furled. The night air was cold. A large bat dove from one of the towers, chasing something. Stinging bugs, hopefully, or a jumping rat. Those were a menace.

Nat followed the bat with his eyes. “Good hunter, that one.”

The pause in conversation stretched out. He waited for me to say something. I scrambled for a topic that didn’t include Singers or skymouths.

“Do you want to stay near Densira, Nat? After Allmoons, I mean.”

He nodded. “I want to make sure Ma’s taken care of. Besides, the best hunters in the north are Densira. What about you?”

I swallowed. Few knew that my mother was thinking of other towers. That would be a betrayal of Densira. And no one could know of the Singer’s threat. Or how I might escape it.

“I want to fly with Ezarit. The best trader in the city.”

He looked at me sideways. “She’s not trying to apprentice you to another tower?”

“We’re a team,” I said. He wasn’t wrong. Everyone understood that it was sometimes necessary for the city to shift apprentices between towers; but not everyone wanted to be the one to go. I wasn’t tied to Densira any more than my mother was, so I shrugged.

A week ago, I’d dreamed of seeing the rest of the city. Of living on a tower with bridges connected to a close ring of neighbors. I bet it was a lot more interesting than out here, where everyone knew everything about you before you were even born. I knew it had to be better than living behind the Spire’s wall.

I tried to push the Spire and its Singers from my mind, only to return to worrying about the wingtest. “Want to practice Laws?”

He was sighting with his bow, out across the night sky. Aiming for bats, which was bad luck. The skein was back in his pocket.

“Nat!”

“What’s it like, do you think, for animals up here?” he mused. “There’s a whole lot of eat or be eaten. And they have to do a lot of work. Just like us.”

“What’s the alternative?”

“We do what the tower council tells us, and the guilds. And especially the Singers. No one asks why anymore.”

“No one wants to go back to what life was like in the clouds, before the Singers.”

“Who says we would? I have a theory…”

Nat always had theories. That way lay danger. “What would you do if no one told you what you had to do?”

“I’d hunt! And wingfight. When I’ve got my wingmark, I’ll fight for Densira. With a new set of wings.”

Before I’d moved uptower, Nat had talked about training more whipperlings and expanding to kaviks. The wingfighting was new. Sidra’s influence again.

“Do you care about anything but trading, Kirit?”

I couldn’t think of one thing I wanted more. If not the power of trading itself, the feeling of connecting towers, knowing I was helping people. Knowing I made it happen. Besides, trading didn’t require much singing. Not even socially. Perfect all around.

There were other things I enjoyed at Densira. Watching the wingfights. And carving, though I hadn’t done much of that since I was young. Even minding our silk spiders. But trading — finding something of value and exchanging it for something people I knew needed? That was fun. Ezarit loved it. Even when she wasn’t flying through a skymouth migration, she’d said it was a good way to rise higher in the city.

Perhaps someday I’d leave Densira and become a trader for a more central tower. Perhaps I’d return and place a bet on Nat’s wingfighting team. All I had to do was pass wingtest with full marks.

At the back of my mind, a new thought rose. I cared about one thing more than flying the city: escaping the net the Singer had set for me.

I hummed a Law, trying to get Nat to test me. He finally responded. “That’s Kamik. No going against the decision of the Singers, the council, and your tower.” He was right. “Fine. What about this one?” He sang a soft, low tune, almost a whisper.

“Nat, that’s awful.” He’d sung the dirge for someone lost to a skymouth. He’d sung me my father’s death. And almost my own as well. I didn’t have to stay out here for that. I grabbed fistfuls of my robe and prepared to sweep dramatically back into Elna’s quarters and bed.

“I’m sorry.” He ducked his head. His voice grew deeper when he was nervous. “That wasn’t funny.” He grabbed one of my sleeves and tugged at it, as he’d done when we were children. His hand caught my arm and squeezed. “Really. Sorry.”

I didn’t pull away; he didn’t let go. Like old times again. His hand was cool as the night air. He stood a full shoulder taller than me now, and his arms had become thickly muscled. Mine had gone the other way, wire and sinew. It was the way we flew. I focused on speed, and he tried to work with the bow. To shoot from the wing, he had to hook his straps from the elbow and glide, then aim and shoot. He’d been practicing.

Stars speckled the darkening sky. One raced across the night, fire-backed. “Look up,” I whispered. Too late. It winked out of sight. I touched my eyelid, then pointed skyward. Even a falling star deserved respect. We saw where its spirit went, not its body.

Nat released my arm and we sat apart together in the shadow of Elna’s blackberry vines. The leaves smelled sharp in the cool. He eyed me.

“You’re still worried.”

That was an understatement. I was terrified. “It’s those old wings. Liras Viit did a good job mending them, but they’re not as wide as the new ones. And I’ve grown some.” I steered away from additional what-ifs, other, more secret, worries.

Most of our class had broken in their new wings in the past few weeks. Wings that were built to carry adults, strung tight enough to execute complex turns. The past few days of Florian’s class had likely been filled with wild turns, as new wings reacted slightly differently to students’ old habits.

I didn’t want to admit that Ezarit was right, at least about the new wings. I’d fly more confidently on the old ones, because I hadn’t practiced with the new. I hoped so, at least.

I wished I’d never gone out on that balcony during the migration. Wished I could undo that morning the way Elna unraveled a ripped cloth to mend it again.

“You won’t be the only one on well-worn wings, Kirit.” Nat used adult wings already. He hadn’t said anything, but I knew they were a pair that had belonged to his father, long ago.

“How many times have you flown on those?”

“A lot. Not far, not breaking any Laws. But I’ve been flying with them for moons.”

I’d been too wrapped up in my own concerns about Ezarit’s trade run, the new quarters. I tried to picture what his wings looked like in the air and couldn’t.

“Look on the bright side,” Nat added. “You won’t have to patch your new wings up after the test. Or worry about them getting ripped during Group flight. That’s lucky.” He flicked rotten blackberries off the balcony. “I heard Viit’s sons are flying tomorrow. That will be exciting.”

“Did Dojha or Sidra say who else would Magister the tests?” Our own Magister Florian, of course. But teachers were not allowed to judge the merits of anyone from their own tower.

Nat shrugged. “The usual, plus one new Magister for Mondarath. And Dix from Wirra. Since Magister Granth is still sick.”

I tensed. Dix. Ezarit’s former rival. Or Father’s old friend. I was never sure, and Ezarit wouldn’t discuss it.

“I should study some more. I need to get everything right if Magister Dix is testing.”

“She can’t be as bad as your mother makes it sound.” Nat turned the bone chips over in his hands again, distracted.

“I’m not willing to risk it. I have to do well. Dix can’t stand my mother, or me.” Before the migration, before she’d flown, Ezarit had lit a small banner for Magister Granth’s health, hoping that his coughing disease would pass and I wouldn’t be in Dix’s path. “She holds a grudge.”

“You can’t think she’d pull anything in front of the Singers?”

I swallowed. I didn’t know. Dix. Old wings. My rough singing voice. And Singer Wik.

“It will be all right, Kirit.” Nat sat down beside me. “We’ll figure it out. And these too.” He fingered the chips. “Whatever they’re for.”

“Why are you so interested in those, when you should be as worried as me?”

“They were my dad’s.” Nat rattled the blue skein. “What if they’re connected to why he was thrown down? Or with something else about the city? Why Lith fell?”

I listened as his excitement grew. Nat had asked questions and spouted theories since we were little. Why there were skymouths. How the Singers stayed fed when they didn’t grow anything. Why the city roared. What had happened to Naton.

“I’ll take a closer look at them with you, after the wingtest. We can talk to Tobiat again too.”

“If these are Singers’ things, the Spire will want them back. Maybe Tobiat stole them from Naton, and that’s why my dad was thrown down.” I tensed at the mention of Singers, but Nat didn’t notice. He turned the chips over once more, then put them back into a fold of his robe, musing. “Maybe we can trade the skein to the Singers for answers.” He tied the chips securely in his robe, then looked at me. His brow furrowed in concern. “You’re still worried. I’ll help you study, if you want.”

We sang softly through the short night and the early predawn, first Laws, then calculations and strategies for flying in a group of strangers. The hardest part of going beyond your own towers without a Magister in the lead was gliding from tower to tower without getting tangled, or worse, with strangers who were moving from place to place. We dozed on the balcony, wings by our sides, and woke to find that the moon had fallen again.

We had barely rested and were stiff from sitting on the bare floor.

“Nat, we’re goners,” I said. “We’ll fail for sure.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t at least. Then I’ll put in a good word for you next year.”

His bravado now and his temper the night before suddenly seemed much clearer to me. He was as afraid as I was. Tired of being the lowest on the tower. He wanted his future as much as I wanted mine. For the first time in a long time, I stepped outside myself and saw him, saw how much he’d changed.

I leaned into his shoulder, and he leaned back. “We’ll both rise.”

The sun had edged over the clouds and Elna had only just emerged from behind the sleeping screens when we came back in.

“I hope you didn’t sleep on the balcony,” she grumbled.

“Not at all,” Nat lied. “Just checking the wind for today.”

5. WINGTEST

Four bone horns sounded short, bright notes across the morning: one each from Densira, Viit, Wirra, and Mondarath.

First warning. If our feet weren’t on the testing plinth by the fifth warning, we would not wingtest until Allsuns.

I fumbled with my straps, my fingers thick and clumsy. Elna finished securing Nat’s straps and hurried over, tutting. “Your mother wishes she were here to do this for you.”

I wished it too.

Elna’s hands were strong. She pulled the bindings too tight at first. She was used to Nat’s broader shoulders.

We wrapped ourselves warm and tied our quilted silks close. Nat pulled his hair back from his eyes with a strand of silk. I didn’t have time to braid mine properly. It was a mess of tangles.

“Here.” Elna pressed something soft and thick into my hands. A knitted cap, made of thick spun spidersilk and hemp. The cap’s chevron pattern was tight enough to bind my hair against the wind. She grinned.

“You made this?”

She smiled, proud. I hesitated. I’d need something to keep the cap on.

I unfolded the cap from what it concealed. A glint of aged gray-yellow metal, a shimmer of well-polished glass. My mother’s lenses. She’d paid a courier to bring them, but could not come herself.

No matter. Part of her would fly with me today. The lenses had survived for who knew how long, handed up, the straps replaced, dents carefully pounded from the frames. She considered them her good-luck charm.

Hope twisted the corners of my frown. I put cap and lenses on. Tightened the straps myself, until the padded rims pressed against my eye sockets. The lenses guarded my tired eyes from everything I saw: they framed and contained the sky.

A second warning sounded from the four towers.

The Magisters and their council assistants would have secured the testing plinth between the towers and raised the second wingtest flag by now: a blue banner edged in gray. We had to hurry.

Nat and I unfurled our wings and moved to the edge of the balcony. Elna whispered, “Go higher,” behind us.

A strong gust swept round the tower. Densira’s Allmoons banners kicked red arabesques on balconies above us. They streamed up and towards the plinth. A rising gust. A good sign indeed. We leapt together and caught the wind.

As we rose on the gust, two sets of brown wings emerged from Wirra and another three, gray, green, and brown, from Viit. We were halfway to the plinth when the air grew sloppy. An eddy spilling from the lee of Mondarath soiled the gust. I dipped, then Nat wobbled. We had to shift to another updraft, quickly. My mother’s lenses slipped down my nose as I turned my head left and right.

Then I spotted a strong breeze marked by a line of coasting whipperlings. Whistling to Nat, I rolled for the new vent. He followed.

By the time we climbed above the towers, on approach to the plinth, we were drenched in sweat.

“We could have called for a ladder,” Nat yelled, his wing’s left pinion close to mine.

I shook my head. No ladder. Not for me. No matter how tired I was. I cupped my wings to slow my approach to the testing plinth. Checked to make sure the path was clear. The tests might not have started, but the Magisters and councilors already watched, and judged.

The bone horns sounded. Three warnings.

My arms ached, and the back of my neck. I hoped we would have time to rest between challenges.

My feet touched the woven plinth. The warp and weft of it gave slightly when I landed as close to Densira’s Magister, Florian, as possible. He dipped his head to me, his face carefully blank.

Nat circled once more and, instead of sinking, executed a flip that cut his wind and dropped him square between the two Singers at the center of the plinth. They pretended not to notice. Nat grinned ear-to-ear.

I adjusted my lenses so they wouldn’t slip again. Not during the tests.

The Singers faced away from me. I couldn’t tell if the taller one was Wik, the Singer who had rescued and then threatened me. Their bodies were gray turrets in the colorful swirl of wings and nervousness. I would learn soon enough whether he’d come today.

Around us, students rested and stretched. They recited tower names to themselves. More than a few looked worried.

The four Magisters stood at the plinth’s four corners, symbolizing the four quadrants of the city. Florian for Densira. Viit’s able instructor, Magister Calli. A young Magister from Mondarath, so recently arrived no one knew his name. And Dix as Magister for Wirra. She grinned at me, showing as many teeth as she could manage.

A net stretched below the plinth, strung between the four towers and tied by sinew. A brown-robed member of the traders’ guild landed beside the Singers at the center of the plinth. The Singers dipped their heads, but did not bow. Finally, a crafter landed, her embroidered wings glittering in the morning light. The city and its towers were now represented. The plinth creaked and swung in the wind. The bone horns sounded a fourth time.

Two more students skidded to landings and found their towers, mumbling apologies. The Singers split from the central group. They carried four silk bags to the Magisters at the corners: one Singer walked south and west; the other, north and east. As the Singer carrying Densira’s and Mondarath’s bags approached, my breath caught again. Wik.

His profile in the sunlight threw me off guard; I was mesmerized by the silver tattoos. They made him look sharper, more imposing. They accented his cheekbones and his chin.

He smiled at Florian and the group. “I wish you all luck in your knowledge and in the sky.” He did not look at me, but the corner of his lip twitched.

My throat tightened. What could the Singer do to me, here under open sky?

He could do anything he thought would help the city, I realized. Anything at all. My exhaustion heightened my panic. At a loss, I hummed Elna’s song from two nights ago to myself. It worked surprisingly well. I calmed enough to thank the Singer with a clear voice. He paused to look at me, sending a shiver down my spine. Then he continued his slow circuit of the plinth.

“Don’t worry about the test, or Dix,” Nat whispered. “The guild is watching. The Singers are watching. The Magisters look out for their towers. You’ll be fine.”

I bristled because Nat didn’t understand, before I remembered that he couldn’t understand. I hadn’t told him anything.

Florian pulled a bone marker from the bag, but did not look at it.

The observing guilds and Magisters ensured the Singer could not fail me overtly. But the Spire had ways of meddling with outcomes. Ezarit had always been especially careful in her dealings with them. I fretted the possibilities, then realized that was exactly what they wanted me to do.

The temporary plinth and the net beneath swayed in the wind. Bone cleats that had been carved into the tower tops of Mondarath and Viit anchored the thick ropes that held the plinth firmly in the sky. Secondary ties looped through moorings cut in Densira’s balconies and Wirra’s. The lines were temporary, made of fiber and the strongest silks, not spliced with sinew. They would hold for our needs and be used again for the wingfights. The plinth was not permanent, not like a bridge. Only Singers could provide the skymouth sinew necessary for a bridge. With it, they bound the city together.

The towers below us twisted slightly at each tier, each level a little wider than the one above it, lower levels darkening with age and garbage.

I looked around, praying the skies would keep clear. Several other students did the same. I saw my cousin, the talkative Dikarit, who’d failed Laws and Solo last year. He gestured to me to stand with him, but I waved back, choosing to stay by Nat.

Seven students had arrived so far from Densira. Six from Viit. Only two from Mondarath, and both looked nervous. Nine from Wirra.

At a melodic laugh high above us, everyone looked up. Sidra descended, glorious in her wings, visible from any of the towers. Dojha, following her, looked less sure of her own new wings. The fifth warning sounded just as Dojha’s feet touched the plinth. She shook her head at Sidra’s back, but didn’t say anything.

Florian cleared his throat and addressed his Densira class for the last time. “Welcome, flight,” he said formally. He smiled at Dikarit, but not at me. The cold dawn air ruffled the thinning hair on top of his head. “You are well prepared. Make Densira proud.”

Three other flight groups gathered on the platform, tight knots around their Magisters. I imagined those teachers giving similar encouragement to their students.

The Singers hummed a low, slow song: a variant on The Rise. Then the older Singer reminded us of the rules: no talking beyond what the test required, no leaving the plinth, no quarreling with the results. When they finished, the Magisters bowed to us and stepped away, looking for the first time at the chips they’d drawn.

Each bone chip contained one of four tower symbols. If a Magister drew his or her own, he would hand it back.

I hoped the Magister from Viit, Calli, would be our Laws tester. Ezarit knew her. She was a daughter of Liras Viit, the wingmaker. The Magister from Mondarath was so new even his students were strangers to him.

“The old Mondarath Magister was taken by the skymouth,” Sidra whispered. No one shushed her.

Magister Calli joined the two students from Mondarath. Her task this round would be short.

Our Magister went to Wirra.

And Magister Dix from Wirra went to Viit. I released a little air from my lungs. One hurdle passed.

Mondarath’s Magister walked to our group. He seemed very young. Below us, no one on the towers would know yet, but when they learned of it, they would think us unlucky from the start. So many students, with such a young tester.

When I looked at him more closely, I realized he was barely older than my cousin.

“I am Magister Macal,” he said. “And you are my first flight test.”

Sidra groaned, so softly that only the flight group could hear her, not the Magister.

“Enough, Sid!” Dojha whispered.

Macal began the test of Laws without any further discussion.

He pointed at me, then drew a bone chip from the silk pouch and said, “Trade.”

I was very lucky, then. I began to sing the first Law I’d learned, from my mother.

Fair trade requires freedom, honesty, and speed.

No goods will spoil when a tower is in need.

I heard Sidra stifle a laugh when my voice soured, but I kept going.

No trader lives with jealousy or greed.

Or keeps tithes from Spire or Tower.

When I finished, Macal nodded.

Nat got Safe Passage, which he stumbled on.

Sidra took Spire neatly. That was the easiest, and shortest, law.

None enter the Spire, night or day, unless Singer-sworn, or Singer-born, all in gray.

She held the note and ended with a flourish.

Four more Laws passed. Then it was back to me. When the Magister pulled the chip, his brow wrinkled. He stumbled on the word. “Bethalial.” An archaic Law. Birdcrap.

My mind searched for the opening phrase. I knew this. They observed it more in the south, and in the city center.

In the Allmoons time of quiet, let no tower be disturbed.

Let no things thrown down in sacrifice be salvaged or perturbed.

A strange one. No one sacrificed things that weren’t broken anymore, even symbolically. Magister Florian had said once that some Laws were traditions from the past, but we must learn them still.

Nat got War, which was dead simple.

No tower will sabotage or war

With neighbors near or far.

We rise together or fall apart

With clouds below, our judge.

Only one tower had tested that Law since we came out of the clouds. The Singers hadn’t let them rise for generations. Ezarit said the towers to the west sometimes raided, but that was nothing overt.

The Magister circled Densira’s flight group. Voices stammered and stalled, and some sang confidently too. At the plinth’s other corners, Laws filled the air and were carried away on the wind.

Sidra received another frown from the Magister as his hand fumbled in the Laws bag. We could tell he’d never done this before. Most testers, Florian said once, could feel the Lawsmarks with their fingers and choose those we were required to know. Like Right-of-Way and Tithing. So far, we hadn’t had much luck.

“Delequerriat,” Macal said after two false starts. Sidra’s mouth moved strangely. “Dele—” she began to say, but cut off before she started a song she could not finish. That was how my cousin had failed last year. I could see Sidra thinking. I didn’t know this one either, though it sounded familiar. Sidra was left gaping openmouthed, like a baby bird. The time for her answer passed, and Magister Macal turned from her to the group. “Delequerriat: The act of concealment, in plain sight, may only be used to turn wrong to right.”

Macal moved on as Sidra’s face turned purple, matching her wings. Dojha took Sidra’s hand and squeezed. This couldn’t get much worse.

It didn’t. The Magister pulled Tithing from his pouch, and Dojha passed it. We’d made it through Laws.

Singer Wik handed a blue-dyed marker to each tester who’d passed. He gave Sidra a half marker, breaking it in front of her. He passed before me and gripped my marker with both hands. My eyes widened. I’d passed well. He wouldn’t dare. He handed it to me, and I quickly tied the thin chip to my wing.

Wik and Macal passed on the plinth. The two exchanged a look I could not fathom. A greeting, it seemed, but fiercer. Macal grimaced and turned away.

The craft representative unfurled a dyed silk and set it in the center of the plinth, anchoring it with thick madder-dyed chips against the wind. The City test. We all turned our backs. One by one, we were beckoned forward and given bone chips to place on each of the city’s fifty-eight towers, naming them and speaking of their qualities as we did.

I heard Nat take deep breaths beside me, nervous.

The towers rose in my mind, shaped by late-night conversations with my mother. Her tales of what she’d traded and where gave me a window on my city that few had.

When my turn came, I placed the marker for Grigrit in the southwest. They made honey. My mother traded tea and silks to them to help the sick in the southeast quadrant. My cheeks colored as I thought of her. I placed the markers for the six towers she helped. Heard my voice forming the correct words, but my mind went elsewhere, wondering whether Ezarit was on her way home.

One chip remained in my hand. I looked across the map, checking each in turn. Then I placed the final chip at the center of the city and completed the test with “The Spire is home of the Singers, who protect the city and hold it together for us.” Two Singers signaled approval, the woman with the silver streak in her hair and an older man, both covered with silver tattoos. On the other side of the map, Wik frowned. The Craft representative gave me a full marker dyed madder-red for City.

When I returned to Densira’s corner, I secured that chip to my left wing, next to the Laws marker. Two tests down; two to go. The markers made a soft clatter at my shoulder as they swung on their ties.

* * *

Before the flight rounds began, Macal motioned to me. “You have offended someone?” he asked quickly, looking around to make sure he was not overheard.

I raised my eyebrows but did not speak. My heart hammered in my chest.

Macal continued. “A Singer has indicated he doesn’t think you are skilled enough to pass the flight tests. To a Magister who was upset by his words.”

I knew it. The Singer was trying to sway the Magisters, to make me fail. He thought I would have no place to turn but the Spire. Densira would turn away from my bad luck. Even my mother.

“Who was upset?”

“Me.”

Macal was only a few years older, but his eyes were sure and clear. He didn’t like being played for a pawn.

“Anyone else?”

“I don’t know. When I refused to listen, the Singer said he had other prospects. Be careful.”

If the Singer had any knowledge of my mother’s past, I knew exactly who else he’d try to sway. Magister Dix.

The Magisters gathered to draw tower marks for Solo Flight. At that moment, my fear returned. Open sky. Vast and filled with teeth.

If I wished to fly by my mother’s side, or to fly independent of her, I would be in this sky every day. I found the fear in my heart and grabbed it tight. Ripped it out and threw it down to the clouds. My mother could fly through a migration without wavering. I would do so as well.

* * *

The Laws and City tests gave me a chance to catch my breath atop the plinth and to soothe my shoulders from the ascent.

Magister Macal returned to our corner. He’d drawn us again. Sidra groaned louder this time. Dojha didn’t shush her. This time, she took a half step away from her friend, while casting a glance at the Singers.

Macal beckoned to Nat. He would test us in tower order, from lowest to highest. Fine with me. Nat looked like this was fine with him too.

“See you all after Group,” he said, and jumped from the plinth to meet the Magister in the sky. He rose moments later on a good gust, and I watched his wings and the many-hued wings of the others carve the sky above the city. The sun caught the edges of their silks and made halos of color in my lenses.

We leaned into the wind, watching the first testers return. One by one, they landed, Nat last of all, his face lit with triumph.

My turn came. Despite my resolve, I felt ice-cold, my muscles suddenly tight. My fingers flexed on my wing grips. I tried to remember Florian’s words, his admonitions that I tuck tighter, reach farther. I had to be best at this, with the quadrant watching. I would not let them down again.

Stepping off the edge of the plinth, I looked up and out, as we had been taught to do since our first flight. My wings were set to full. I caught a good gust. Macal flew beside me on the steady breeze. I suspected many eyes were turned on me from the towers and the plinth. The uptower students from Viit, Wirra, and Mondarath had already gone. I was one of the last to solo.

The strange young Magister began his twists and turns, and I silently followed his pattern. I caught the rhythm of it and soon found myself lost in the dance that was flying the mottled gusts and drafts of the city. We lit on a balcony, once. We dove and climbed. Then he made a combination roll and dive, as one would do to avoid a crash in the sky. I swallowed and uttered a short prayer to the city, then tucked my head tight and forced myself forward and down.

Wind roared in my ears. My stomach flipped, and I almost let go of my wings. I held on.

Moments later, I was right side up and gasping. I nearly shouted in triumph. Macal smiled, then tucked his wings to half breadth and plummeted.

I followed quickly, because I had to. The dive wind sheared at my lenses, plowed my cheeks back. So far down. The clouds roared towards us, hard and gray. How could he dive so fast? My wings began to shudder. What if they couldn’t take the strain? How would we rise back up? I wanted to shout, to protest.

Was the Magister in league with the Singer? Nothing else made sense. No one dove this fast, not ever, not even in a wingfight. Terror built in my head, pressed against my teeth.

And then Macal curved his wingtips enough to whip himself into a turn with almost as much exiting force. Though we’d studied it once, it was something I’d only heard of Singers doing, and only when they chased a skymouth. They attacked it from below. Now Macal was doing this, in a wingtest. He expected me to mimic him. Without warning.

I tried to quash my anger and fear. If I was being set up to fail, then I would fail spectacularly.

I pictured the wing seams and patches Liras Viit had only recently stitched bursting under the strain. Me tumbling past the towers. Don’t look down. If I was lucky, they would fish me from the air before I disappeared into the unknown horror of the clouds. I gritted my teeth and spread all ten fingers wide. The wingtips stretched as tiny battens reacted to the pressure. Then I forced my palm into the curve, fingertips pressing up and back in a painful arc. My body mimicked my hands. I didn’t have time to say a prayer or even whimper.

The curve turned my wing into a foil, a rudder in the air. I was spun around and up.

My heart pounded in my ears. My lenses fogged at their edges with the speed. As I leveled off, I couldn’t help it, I whooped loudly. We were well out of range of the plinth. Macal joined me in a short whoop as well.

Above us, Florian soared past with a student from Wirra. He gave me what seemed like an encouraging nod.

The last part of the test, climbing, was slow going from our depth. My shoulders ached once more, but I fought for each gust, seeking out Allmoons flags and winddrift to set my path.

Then I was once again level with my mother’s tier in Densira. With its empty balcony. I had forgotten to look for Elna on my way back up.

As we returned to the plinth, Macal smiled. “They cheer for you.”

At first, I couldn’t hear anything but the wind. Macal had sharp ears.

Finally, I heard the strange sound. Students nearest the edge of the plinth clapped and pointed at me. We must have looked like flecks against the clouds, we’d been down so far. How could they have known?

I had little time to wonder who this Magister was and how he knew to fly that way when I landed. My flightmates whooped and slapped me on the back.

“You came up so far, so fast!” Dikarit clapped me on the shoulder. Dix, overhearing, shushed him, shushed everyone.

Singer Wik crossed the plinth and loomed over Dikarit. “You will keep to the tradition of silence and decorum,” he said. Then he handed Macal the green Solo markers to distribute, and shot him an extra-searing glance. He turned on his heel, the battens of his furled wings rattling, and strode away without a look at me.

I’d passed. Something else had happened as well out there in the sky. Macal’s stunt had set me apart from others who’d been trying only to pass. I had exceeded the test. I looked at Macal as he paced the length of the plinth. He winked. He’d known what he was doing all along.

The city’s sounds were distant up here, but I imagined I could hear Elna clapping as I tied my Flight marker to my wings. My fingers trembled with exhilaration. What would Ezarit say about that level of flying? The best in the class?

Four students sat on the plinth now. They had failed Solo, or partial-marked several sections, and were not allowed to continue.

The students who remained prepared for the final part of the wingtest, Group. A flight with strangers, without a Magister in the lead.

Guards and hunters alighted on the plinth to join our towers. Nat noticed, of course. He puffed out his chest ever so slightly, ready to impress them.

6. FALL

The Singers placed each tower’s student markers in a silk bag. They drew groups for us, and I was grateful for the blind selection. It made the process difficult for even them to meddle with. My chip was drawn for the south corner. I walked across the plinth, still breathing hard from my flight, and looked around at my cohort. Four students, one from each tower, and three volunteers.

They looked back at me, taking note of my patched wings and hand-me-down flying gear. I wondered if they’d heard about me. Kirit Lawsbreaker and the skymouth. I kept my chin up.

After a long silence, one boy said his name softly. “Beliak Viit.” The silence rose again, and Beliak fought it off. “After Allmoons, I will train as a ropemaker. What of the rest of you?”

Not a big flying trade, ropework, but Beliak would likely shift towers to apprentice. He needed to get full marks. Viit didn’t keep many of its own unless they specialized in wings, dyes, and clothing, or mechanicals like Elna’s bone hook. It traded for the rest of what it needed.

The girl from Wirra smiled shyly. “Ceetcee. I work in the gardens, but I wish to train as a bridge artifex, like my father.”

Wirra’s specialty was woven structures, like the wingtest plinth and bridges. Ceetcee could apprentice at home, as I hoped to do.

Ceetcee fingered her wing traces nervously. Perhaps she needed to impress someone as much as I did.

A girl much smaller than the rest of us said, “Aliati Mondarath.” She didn’t mention a profession. Mondarath traded herbs and beverages. Including what the Singer used to revive me after I shouted down the skymouth.

“I am sorry for your tower’s troubles, Aliati,” Beliak said.

“And I yours,” Aliati returned to him.

We were all very formal. Very cautious.

“Kirit Densira,” I said. “I will be a trader.”

My group looked at their footwraps. Especially the volunteers. Yes, they’d heard of me. Then Beliak met my eyes and smiled. “Welcome.” Aliati and Ceetcee followed suit.

The Magisters gathered to draw groups. The whispers on the plinth fell silent. Dix pulled her hand from the silk bag, looked at what she held, then turned to grin at us, at me.

My luck disappeared like a lost breeze.

Behind our group, another knot of students and volunteers erupted in laughter. Nat’s group. A third group was silent until someone screeched. Sidra.

“You can’t be serious! I won’t.”

I turned my head enough to see what she was protesting, without attracting attention from the Singers or Dix. Sidra pointed at Macal. “Not one more time.”

I expected to see the Magisters stifle her protests. Magister Florian often did so when Sidra kicked up a fuss in flight. Instead, they regrouped and conferred. Macal said something that made everyone nod except Dix. Sidra swished her wings.

In other years, someone would have been flown home, someone might have fallen by now. Sure, a few testers had washed out. But no one protested a group assignment.

The Magisters separated. Dix stalked towards Sidra, took her by the arm, and led her to another group. Nat’s.

Where we stood, I could not hear their words. Nat’s hand gestures and how he tilted his head gave him away. He wasn’t pleased with the addition to his test group, but didn’t want to offend Sidra. He bowed ever so slightly to Dix. The other students began to speak as well. Something shifted. Dix stayed with the group while Magister Viit left it and walked towards us. Somehow, Nat and Macal had turned Sidra’s outburst into a way to spare me Dix’s attention. If true, either would make a fine trader. And I would owe them both enormous favors.

At a signal from one of the Singers, Magister Calli led our group to the edge of the plinth. We looked south. We would need to beat a zigzag against the wind, retrieve a flag set on a distant tower this morning, and return. Other groups conferred, picked a first leader, and set out, going west, east, and towards the city center.

You can do this, I reminded myself. Now that I had passed my solo flight, I felt a bit better. Still, anything could happen during Group. Crosswinds, a flock of whipperlings. A wingbreak. Skymouths. Especially with student fliers stressed from wingtesting.

Nat’s group launched, with Sidra straining to get out in front. Group was all about flying with others in a tight scrum, and in close quarters. Important skills for heavily trafficked towers, and especially for traders, who sometimes need to carry heavier objects as teams.

The group had likely already decided on leader order, but Sidra’s arrival had changed that too. She was positioning herself to lead the flight. I held my breath, waiting for Dix to discipline her, but she didn’t. They disappeared, headed east.

I looked at my group. Who would take the lead among us? The city was watching.

Groups worked best when leaders alternated; that I knew from both Florian and Ezarit. Sidra’s performance notwithstanding. Perhaps that was why everyone was hanging back. Beliak smiled, awkward. Ceetcee rocked on her heels. We’d be here all day.

I stepped forward. “I’ll take first lead.” Would they follow me?

Their response was a stretch of quiet. I’d botched it already. I scrambled to fix it. “And then Beliak?”

Beliak nodded. “Then Ceetcee and then Aliati?” Both agreed. The volunteers readied themselves. Beliak and I exchanged nervous smiles.

I called the first formation, based on the direction we were headed and the prevailing wind: “Chevron.” Magister Calli smiled. I’d made a good decision. We launched, wing to wing, coordinating and signaling wind shifts with whistles and shouts.

We were a noisy crowd, all working together to find the fastest breezes on which to glide.

We were also a fast group. By cooperating, we flew high. We soon overtook Sidra and Nat’s group, which was off course and struggling to keep up with her set path.

I signaled Beliak to take lead after we’d made half the distance. He shifted our formation to dove — a raked arrow — since the wind had grown more variable. I fell back to his left point and took a moment to look around.

Ezarit’s lenses were a blessing, especially since I’d adjusted them properly. I could see far with them, was less troubled by sun glare than my companions, and my eyes weren’t tearing from the wind.

Below, small flights of patchwork wings followed us for a few towers and then turned back. I’d done the same as a younger flier. Without wingmarks, they could not follow us for long.

We passed the farthest towers I’d been to, out of the northwest quadrant. I quieted as I realized the names of the towers I’d studied all my life went with shapes, twists of bone rising from the clouds just as Densira did.

Here and there, bridges spanned the gaps between towers. As we flew closer to the Spire, more towers were connected by the long spans of sinew. Everywhere, ladders grappled tiers. On balconies and tower tops, families stood and waved. Densira families were doing the same for children of distant towers, welcoming them to the rest of the city.

From my position next to Beliak, I spotted our banner on Varu’s top tier and signaled. Beliak acknowledged me with a whistle and signaled for us to land atop the tower before the final leg of the test.

* * *

Varu was lower than Densira by at least three tiers. The tower was so crowded that hammocks and sacks had to hang anchored from balconies. They’d broken War long ago, though Magister Florian said once that they hadn’t done more than plot and make a few raids on neighbors’ water and food. In return, Singers took Varu’s council, along with their families, to the Spire. They refused Varu any opportunity to rise.

Our landing made a racket, silk wings flapping against wind curls that crossed the tower top. The bone roof was smooth and white, showing no new growth. Cleats and pulleys carved around its edge supported the nets below.

Varu had put out a dried-vine basket for the wingtesters. It held figs and a sour-tasting juice. The new tastes reminded us how far we’d come from home.

I removed my lenses to clean them and looked out from Varu to its neighbors. I saw the Spire clearly for the first time, rising from the city center. I’d studied it for the wingtest, but had never been so close.

Taller than the rest of the city’s towers, the Spire differed in other ways as well. Where our tiers rose supported by a central core, a solid wall of white bone wrapped the Spire. Ezarit told me once that the Spire’s center was a wind-filled abyss. The Spire’s market-bridges, designed by artifexes like Nat’s father, hung suspended on pulleys in a ring around its wall. Behind the wall, the Spire held the Singers’ secrets close.

From Varu’s roof, I spotted gray-robed Singers perched atop the Spire, on a flat expanse of bone that could hold hundreds. More Singers emerged from within, like smoke taken to wing.

Beliak watched them too, as he chewed a fig. “One of my brothers was taken to the Spire, five years ago.” He frowned. “His name was Lurai.” He saw my look and hurried to clarify. “As a novice. Maybe he’s up there, watching us.”

I swallowed, realizing Ezarit might speak this way about me if the Singer got what he wanted.

Beliak opened his mouth to speak again, but Magister Calli signaled us to ready for the return flight. I offered Varu’s group banner to Beliak and Ceetcee, but they shook their heads. So I tied the banner into my robes. We flew before the wind this time; this was easier and more direct, but harder to spot turbulence. Ceetcee looked nervous.

“We’ll work together,” Beliak said. “Try bee formation.” Ceetcee nodded. Magister Calli took note. I offered to serve as the tail of the bee, in charge of watching for shifts before they hit us. And for large birds of prey or skymouths.

I’d discovered while cleaning Ezarit’s lenses that they had a special hasp with a bit of reflective glass inside. I flipped it back and forth, realizing it allowed a view of what was behind me, without my turning my head.

As I showed my group how the hasp worked, Ceetcee smiled. “You are lucky, then, and will bring us the same.” She used the traditional way of accepting a favor. I would fly at the tail.

I hoped she was right.

We launched again, lighter for having reached the halfway mark of our final trial.

The wind carried us around Varu, past the Spire, and back towards the northern quadrants.

Ceetcee’s path had taken us too low for the crowded towers near the Spire. It was a mistake easily made by someone who’d grown up on the outer edges. A strong downdraft from the towers overlapped our gust and fouled our path. Beliak and I whistled a warning at the same time, but Ceetcee didn’t alter course soon enough. Our group’s progress slowed as she struggled to find a clear path.

Ceetcee passed control to Aliati, flying nearby. Aliati had seemed quiet on the plinth, and at Varu too. But in the lead, her voice was confident and clear. She pushed us to a tighter formation, then sleeked us around several towers, climbing with each gust. Soon we soared at the towers’ peaks, chattering and whistling soft appreciation in the sunlight.

Even the volunteers seemed well pleased with the turn of events. They flew at the center of our formation: two hunters and a guard.

I kept one eye on the mirror and focused as best I could on keeping my wingtips pointed. The Magister fell back in formation, so she was just downwind of me.

She was grinning. “Well traveled,” she shouted. I saw the testing plinth ahead and grinned too.

We returned triumphant, my three new friends and I. We were flushed from the flight and windburned. Ceetcee had something in her eye, possibly one of her own long eyelashes. Aliati glowed with her success. Magister Calli walked towards the trade and craft guild leaders and relayed our trip with broad gestures. The tradesman turned my way and bowed. My heart lifted. I’d passed, and very well.

Another group landed, with Magister Macal. They were missing a student. Grim news, but not a disaster. “Left him at the turnaround tower,” he announced. “Broke formation without signaling. Nearly took the group out.”

We quieted our celebration.

* * *

Nat’s group appeared in the distance, beating their way back against the wind. They, too, had all their number. An occasional speck broke the deep blue horizon line. Birds. Sidra still held lead, and the following wind drove her hoarse voice ahead of the formation.

They were just a few towers away from the plinth when a crosswind hit. I squinted and could almost see it. A squall of air and a rising cloud, a small one. At first I was glad. The gardens needed rain.

But the squall destabilized Sidra’s formation. One of the hunters fought for balance in the gust. He was blown sideways, towards Nat.

Nat missed a shouted warning from Dix. The hunter knocked him off course. He tumbled right into the squall, one of his wings broken.

I cried out as he careened away from the city.

The wind spun him round, the one wing acting as a blade, his body a rotor. Nat’s legs kicked out, but he fell like a leaf from a garden, twisting down below the plinth.

Magisters and Singers leapt from the plinth, flying fast, kicking out with their tailskirts, gliding the drafts to get to him. The latter set their wings, pulled from their finger harnesses, and reached arms lined with silver tattoos towards him like prayers.

I knelt at the plinth’s edge, Beliak and Aliati on either side. We peered over. “Please no,” I whispered. Not Nat.

The Singers outpaced the Magisters. Even Macal could not keep up. Singer Wik reached Nat first and caught him by the winghooks. Nat’s spin dragged them both down. Beliak made a choking sound, and I grabbed Aliati’s arm with numb fingers. Then the Singer’s broad wings stopped their fall. When they rose, Nat dangled limply, out cold from the spin. The Singer’s left arm bulged with the strain of lifting him, until he removed a rope harness from his waist with his right hand, then double-glided Nat back to us, suspended like a child.

The other Singer rescued another student from the group, and Magister Dix struggled to right the rest of the flight. The group limped back to the plinth and made tangled, exhausted landings.

Singer Wik dumped Nat in a puddle on the plinth’s woven surface.

“This one didn’t watch the others,” Dix said, as if she wasn’t certain anyone should have rescued him. “Naton’s boy.”

There was a hush from the Magisters. Finally, Florian, our Magister, bent to Nat and shook him awake.

Nat retched and grabbed at the air, his face flushed and angry.

“You’re all right,” Florian said roughly. “You were rescued like a fledge, but you’re fine now.”

Nat retched again. He’d failed Group. He wouldn’t pass the wingtest this year. But he climbed to his feet. The plinth bounced as he took a step. One wing hung crooked from its strap. The other, battens split, silk torn, drooped against his shoulder.

But he had lived. He had not fallen through the clouds. I reached for his hand, and he jumped at my touch, then held tight.

The volunteer who had careened into Nat, the hunter from Mondarath, had plummeted fast and hard. The Singer who had gone after him returned empty-handed. He landed, ashen faced, then pointed up and intoned, “Jador Mondarath fell in service to the city. Look up to watch his soul pass above. We do not look down in mourning.”

More loss for that tower.

The blessing ended, and students and Magisters gathered into tower groups one last time. Dikarit stood off to the side, having passed without trouble. Sidra stood, panting, her face ashen. Dojha and I juggled relief and joy with sorrow. Nat, still gripping my hand, turned away from us, eyes on his feet.

A brass-haired Singer intoned a benediction. The last words from The Rise: We all fly together. Even in death. “Go in service to the city,” she said.

Singer Wik spoke after her. “Wingmarks will be distributed at tomorrow’s wingfights, before Allmoons.”

Magisters and students raised confused questions. This broke tradition. Wingmarks were exchanged for the four test marks now, not tomorrow.

The Singers did not explain. They repeated the change. The guild members murmured “Singer’s right.” As if that explained things.

“Must be because of the fall,” Aliati said. Her face was marked with tears. Her tower, her hunter.

“I encourage you who receive wingmarks tomorrow to respect the city’s Laws, and those of you who have not passed to try again,” the older Singer said, then turned and jumped from the plinth without waiting for a response. Her dove-gray wings momentarily blocked the sun as she soared back to the Spire.

Singer Wik and the third Singer followed without a word to anyone.

Our flight groups lingered on the plinth, confused. The test didn’t feel over. I began to worry that the Singers would declare no one had passed, but then I thought about my flight and grew calmer. I’d passed. I knew it. Traditions had been broken, all formality lost, but I’d passed. I caught Beliak’s eye, then Ceetcee’s. Waved to them as their groups headed back to Wirra and Viit.

When I realized that Nat had dropped my hand and walked to the plinth’s southern edge, my heart sank. So caught up in my own worries. Shame on me. I joined him as he peered over the edge, then at the Spire in the distance.

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“Bad luck,” his voice rasped. He unbuckled his left wing, broken beyond repair, and slid the strap from his shoulder. He hung it over the edge of the plinth and dropped it.

My heart ached for him. “Next Allsuns, Nat. You will pass.”

Florian waved us back to the plinth’s northern side, and I pulled Nat after me. We would fly back to the tower of our youth together.

Using winghooks, Florian carried Nat. Nat cringed with shame. His remaining wing was secured to the Magister’s chest.

They glided away from the test plinth. Sidra sulked behind them, muttering to Dojha. My cousin and I followed, trying to read the changes on the horizon.

I would take my old wings to Viit and trade whatever else I could find to have them make Nat a new wing. I smiled sadly. That would help. But Nat wouldn’t have wings for this year’s Allmoons. He wouldn’t be able to fly in the wingfights or join a hunt.

Meantime, Singer Wik would return to talk with me. But I would have my wingmark by then. I hoped that would be enough to carry me far from the Singers’ reach.

Ahead of me, Sidra grew more strident and incensed. Not my fault, I heard. Dix will regret this.

I felt a twinge of empathy for her, and even worse for Nat. They’d have to repeat the wingtest. Sidra’s family would be embarrassed, though they wouldn’t have as many difficulties as Nat and Elna would. Sidra would have to live by her father’s rules for longer. Knowing Councilman Vant, that could be why she was raging now.

Sidra caught me looking at her and glared back at me. Embarrassed, I distracted myself by thinking of more ways to help Nat get back in the air. Ways to avoid going near the Spire until I was a well-off trader in my own right. My barely formed plans shredded like clouds when I spotted a figure waving from our balcony.

Ezarit. Home. Her lenses pressed my cheeks as I smiled. Then they fogged as the seal broke with my skin when I frowned. She’d almost made it in time. Perhaps she had seen some of the group flight. Perhaps she saw Nat’s fall.

If Ezarit had been home in the morning, she would have seen my dive. She would have told me what it looked like. We could have shared impressions, like a team, like the group I’d just worked with. Like the people who’d helped her deliver the medicines to the southeast.

Instead, she’d flown one way, and I’d flown another. So much sky had opened up between us. The skymouth and the Singer, the wingtest and Nat’s fall filled the space.

I glided the distance to Densira, and Ezarit’s form grew clearer. She’d put her glass beads back in her hair. The top of the tower danced with light to welcome me home. But silence waited there too, taut like a net.

With a wave from Magister Florian, I broke from the group and went to her.

7. HORIZON

She met me on the balcony and caught me like a child come in from a first flight. Swung me round. She held me at arm’s length.

“You’ve grown. How is it that you are still growing?”

I hadn’t grown. It had only been a few days since she left. It had been forever.

Why was she greeting me as if nothing had happened? I grew stiff in her arms, fidgeted like a trapped bird.

Her eyes were soft and golden, fringed with long lashes. On her wind-chapped face, her cheekbones bloomed madder and rose.

She touched the chips I’d tied to my wings. Her face fell into worry. “No wingmark? They must be debating results.” Her lips moved as she counted four full chips: Laws, City, Solo, Group. “But you passed!”

I nodded. I had so much to say, my lips were sealed by the pressure of it all. And against speaking any of it. I smiled at her and let my eyes speak instead.

“I know how you feel,” she said. “When I passed the wingtest…” She looked into the distance, thinking. “I was so over the sun about it. Higher than anyone. My mother would have been so proud, then.” She returned to me, saw me. “Just as I am.”

She hadn’t seen Nat fall. She didn’t know.

I should have told her then, but I couldn’t put words to it. I opened my mouth and closed it again. Everything is all right, I thought as hard as I could, Tell me of our plans, describe our future like you did the trade run so many weeks ago, with eyes glowing and fingers shaping air into promise and power. I wished those words between us.

She waited as well, her head tilting to one side, eyebrows rising. Quiet buoyed us for a moment while we believed we understood each other. Then silence grew from quiet, expanding up and out, hardening. The silence began to push us further apart.

Ezarit tucked a tendril of hair behind her ear. The Laws chip tied to her wrist flashed white. “Household member broke Laws.”

My doing. A hero of the city weighted with Laws.

I wondered what Councilman Vant would ask in exchange for making the chip go away. As I opened my mouth to ask, she began to speak at the same time.

“I have some surprises.” She pulled me to the table, handed me a package. A cloud of silk wrapping, bound by complex knots, soft and light in my hands. “But tell me everything,” she said. I opened my mouth. Stopped. Pressed my lips together.

“Don’t keep me waiting, who was your Group tester?” She did not want to talk about the Laws chip either. She was distracting me with banter, another trader trick. This made me more tense, more worried. Still, I could answer her, and distract her too. “My tester was almost Dix.”

She leaned forward, her eyes searching mine. “But?”

“But Sidra protested being tested three times by Mondarath’s new Magister, and Nat and that Magister pushed for changes. Calli was switched for Dix. I got Magister Viit. We flew true.” I didn’t speak of Nat’s flight. Somewhere far below us, he was finding the words to tell Elna that his father’s wing was lost, that he’d fallen. But I could not tell Ezarit.

“I gather Sidra will be serenading her father with her woes.” My mother frowned and picked at my test marks. She sighed. “And for Solo?”

“Mondarath. The new Magister. He flew strangely, but I managed to keep up.” I did more than that, I thought.

“Strange, how?”

“Like a Singer.”

Ezarit’s eyes narrowed. “How many Singers have you seen flying?”

“We’ve watched them, haven’t we? At Allsuns? And Allmoons? And the one who came here to get you? And after—” I stopped. I’d come treacherously close to the things I could not allow myself to talk about.

She blanched. “After?”

I could not say. I could not tell her.

“Three Singers attended the wingtest.”

“Three always attend the wingtest.” She would not let go of my slipped words. “After what? Which Singer?”

“I’ve only seen three up close. They were all at the wingtest.” I was not lying. Not yet.

She relaxed, but the distance between us expanded. So many things we were not saying. The silence of our mutual homecoming deepened. I furled my wings properly to have something to do with my hands. Reached to pull the lenses from around my neck. They felt cold on my fingers. I held them out to my mother, who touched them fondly, but did not take the strap from my hand.

“You keep them.”

She was trying to mend things. “They’re yours. You need them to fly. Your good luck.” They weighed heavier now, burdened.

She smiled slowly, thinking I’d be thrilled. “I can fly without them too. I had very good luck out there.” Her smile grew, thinking of the adventure. “I want you to have them. When you’re a trader, they’ll come in handy.”

The moment she said “trader,” something tight in my chest released with a great whoosh of air. I could hear the tower’s sounds again, the flapping of Allmoons banners on the balconies.

She smiled again to see me relaxing. “Tell me more,” she said. I shrugged from my wings as she pulled me inside.

I looked around our quarters for things that had changed. A tower chip with Vant’s mark sat on the table. She owed him now. She followed my eye to the chip and cleared her throat. “We’ll discuss that later. Tell me about the wingtest.”

I told her as much as I could, about Solo and Group. About Nat, about his fall. Her hand went to her throat.

“I’ll make them down a basket.”

“It’s not something you can fix with goods,” I said more sharply than I meant to. I did not want to fight with her. I wanted her to help me figure out how to make things right.

But she waved her hand, nervous, and turned to her panniers. “It is what I can do. Poor Nat. Poor Elna.”

She fussed with her trade goods as if she wished to pull a new wing from one of the baskets. She opened and shut containers, sighing. Turned back to me, gesturing to the wrapped package I still held. She arched an eyebrow. “Open that while I think. More surprises later.”

I didn’t want surprises. I wanted flying panniers and quilts with deep traders’ pockets. A wing for my friend. I untied the complicated wrapping to find a new robe, the markings embroidered and dyes done in layers and shades of green. No pockets. I put it down on the table; I’d wear it for Remembrances, tomorrow, after the wingfights.

“I thought it was pretty,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“And with that a promise to take you to the Spire, once you’ve made your first trades.”

A chill crossed me, like a shadow. It must have shown on my face. Not the reaction she expected.

“Kirit, you’ve wanted to fly the city for so long. What has happened?” She frowned.

I pressed my lips shut, knowing that everything would tumble out, and she’d be furious at the Singer. She’d argue with them, be ruined.

Her frown deepened.

“The skymouth. Elna said the Singer returned. Saved you.”

I nodded.

“But then he stayed. I imagine he said something to you?”

I held my breath. If Elna had told her that much and she guessed the rest, whatever she guessed, it would be as if I’d told her. I wouldn’t have broken the fiat, but there’d be no way to prove that to a Singer, either. I let the breath out. “Only for a moment.”

“What did he say?”

“That I shouldn’t have lived. He spoke to Councilman Vant, told him to make an example of me. Of us.”

Her eyes narrowed again. “Are you sure it was the same Singer who escorted us past Mondarath?”

Singers looked so similar in their gray robes and tattoos, but I thought that was a safe area. I described the hawk nose, the green eyes. As I did, she relaxed. Strange.

“You thought it might be someone else?”

She sighed and looked away. She did. She knew Singers, of course. She’d petitioned them. They respected her. But the look in her eye had been more complex than that of someone expecting an old friend.

I cleared my throat, curious now. “Who?”

“I can’t discuss it.” She stalked to the back of our quarters to fold quilts. Ezarit was not the kind of parent who folded quilts.

Moments later, as if she’d signaled to them, the aunts burst in with congratulations and questions about the wingtest. Several asked about Nat and tutted uselessly. Dikarit looked exhausted, as I must have, but he eyed my mother’s panniers, knowing she’d returned with gifts for the family. I smelled what she had carried home, hints of dusky spices and honey. Only a few towers were successful with bees in the city near those who grew that particular group of spices, far to the southwest. She’d been on the wing for a long time.

The sweep and swirl of a trader’s homecoming, with shouts of excitement over small trinkets from distant towers, and the general bustle of preparations for Allmoons that began immediately after, kept us from any more discussions.

The relatives did not leave our home until nearly dawn. I woke where I’d pulled my mat to get away from them, back by the center wall, wrapped in my flying quilts. The soft rumbles of the city filled my ears.

Ezarit stood on the balcony, looking at the sun barely peeking over the horizon. I found a goosebladder of water from the night before. Carried it out to her.

“When you were very young,” she said when I joined her, “I flew to the Spire, determined to get a better life for both of us. I was crazed with losses. Loss of your father, of all that I’d planned for our future. I challenged the Spire.”

I dipped my head. I knew this.

She pulled the shoulder of her robe down. Showed me an old scar, long and deep, parallel with her collarbone. I had not known this. She had my attention.

“The Singer who flew against me did not want to fight me. He barely marked me. I was ruthless, Kirit. I won that challenge because I wanted our future back. And I got it.”

I held my breath, waiting for her to tell me more.

She took a sip of water. “Sometimes, even when you think the fight is over, you have to keep fighting.” Then she turned to look at me. Her golden eyes matched the clouds’ colors, far below. “You will get your wingmark today.”

“Yes.” And Nat would not. Nor Sidra.

“You will need to fight for your own future, Kirit. No matter what.”

I didn’t understand, but she rose and hugged me quickly.

A shout went up in the pink-tinted light of the city’s shortest day. Guards called their teams together for the wingfights.

Allmoons meant three days of wingfighting, festival markets, and ceremonies in each quadrant. I’d been looking forward to it.

Tonight, Densira would light its banners, to remember our lost. We would listen to Mondarath’s raw grief, and Viit’s, and we would say good-bye to those we’d lost to the clouds as well. My banner would have been among them, if the skymouth hadn’t turned. Nat’s also, if the Singer hadn’t caught him.

On the year’s shortest day, the towers lit the Allmoons banners when the moon reached its highest point. The city glowed, a fiery night flower. Each year, it surprised me with its beauty. After a short moment, a monument of light, the banners would fall to ash, and the flower that was the city, stripped of its colors, turned back to pale thorns rising from the clouds.

When we were small, Nat and I watched from our mothers’ backs, clinging between their furled wings as our neighbors crowded Densira’s roof. The night’s dark landscape pricked with one light, two, then all the towers together as the council members from each tower lit the banners. The moon rose above the clouds and hung there for the long night, until it seemed bright as day to our eyes. Our bellies rumbled, hungry for Allmoons morning spice rolls. We wondered what we’d find in the markets the next day. Honey sweets, sometimes, small bone toys. And kites, for the holiday.

Ezarit gave me a small silk bag. “For the markets.” She grinned, trying to lift our mood. “Make sure you bargain well.” I shook it and heard the clicking of many tower chips. There was enough in here to buy my own panniers and beaded ties for my hair. Or something for Nat, my wing-brother, to whom I owed a debt.

She handed me my new wings.

“Go watch the wingfight.” She nudged me. “Enjoy it. I have some things to finish up here before I come.”

I unwrapped my wings, and she helped me strap them on. Glorious whorls of gold and green. I was transformed. My mouth ached from smiling so suddenly.

She chuckled. “I like seeing you happy, Kirit.”

Our smiles faded at the same time.

“I’d like to take my old wings to Viit, to see if Liras can use parts to repair Nat’s,” I said.

“A good idea. But after Allmoons.”

I agreed. No one did any work at Allmoons. But I would have agreed to anything she asked. A good apprentice already. My wings rustled in the wind. Ready to fly.

Outside, tower citizens who wanted to be close to the wingfight, instead of watching with their scopes, had already started to glide towards Mondarath and Viit, to the balconies there that had been made into grandstands.

I tucked my purse into my robes, tightened my wingstraps, secured my new cap, and, with my mother’s shooshing hands to give me extra thrust, at least in my imagination, prepared to launch myself from the balcony and glide towards where my flightmates and family gathered to watch the wingfight.

To my surprise, I spotted Nat’s black curls below a patchwork pair of wings. He circled up on a gust and was overtaken several times by younger children. Still, my heart leapt a little as he waved at me and shouted, loud enough for everyone to hear, “You don’t live long in the towers if you can’t pull yourself back up when you tumble.”

I waited for him to get close before I took off from our balcony, then let my wings spill air as we flew tip to tip towards Mondarath.

He caught me at this and scowled. “Don’t, Kirit. Fly true.”

I nodded, banking away. I arrived at the wingfight well before he did and found space on the Mondarath balcony where the traders often gathered. Nat would catch up soon, I hoped.

Guards lowered the wingtest plinth and stretched it between the fifth tiers of Mondarath and Viit. The towers had draped the balconies facing the plinth with nets and woven platforms.

Atop the towers, guards, hunters, Magisters, and several younger residents readied themselves for the wingfight. They tied bands of glass shards to their wings and feet. They sharpened their short bone knives.

* * *

The horns sounded again, a bright cascade of notes, a summoning.

Skyfighters leapt from their towers two at a time. Their wings glittered in the pale sunlight. One of Mondarath’s youngest fighters roared. Her wings were familiar. Aliati!

I laughed, happy to see a flightmate in her first wingfight. I worried for her too. Neither joy nor worry was enough to distract me from what came after the wingfight, when the Singers arrived with our wingmarks, but it helped.

The other team marked Aliati quickly as a weak point in Mondarath’s formation and aimed for her. Fleet and lithe, she tucked her wings and rolled away from them, leading them into the path of two older Mondarath fighters, including Magister Macal. Aliati wasn’t as easy to knock into the nets as Viit had hoped, and Macal swooped around their assault like a born fighter.

The crowd in the balcony rumbled and jeered at Viit. A few adults clustered in a corner and subtly exchanged bets, raising the wingfight’s stakes. I heard Aliati’s name, but not whether they were betting for her or against.

A shout went up. Another Mondarath flier, his wing torn, tumbled into the net. A point for Viit already. The flier pounded the knotted fiber that kept him from plummeting through the towers. His Mondarath teammates reformed, one man down.

The Viit cheers grew louder. “A moon’s worth of grains!” someone shouted.

Viit attacked in a pincer formation, again going for the flier they considered weakest: Aliati. She dodged them again, and Macal almost trapped another Viit wingman in an attack from below. Mondarath’s strategy seemed to be to use Aliati as bait. From the looks of frustration on the Viit fliers’ faces, it would not work for long.

The crush of the crowd and the scent of too many bodies too close together wore me out. I hadn’t eaten much since yesterday. I stepped back into the tier, searching for a morsel of food or tea. I unbuttoned the pocket in my sleeve and pulled my bone cup out, then smiled as Ceetcee approached me with Beliak in tow.

She found a sack of water and poured me two sips, then offered me an apple the size of my fist.

I devoured it, core and all.

“You were hungry.” She laughed.

“That, and unwilling to toss anything down into the nets today,” Beliak said.

Ceetcee smiled at him. A wingtest friendship. There were songs about that. I left them to it and turned to see my mother join the betting corner. Nat landed on the balcony at the same time. The trader crowd shifted to avoid him, pressing closer around my mother.

Nat spied me through the crowd and waved. He didn’t smile. Was I supposed to have waited for him, after he told me to go? I couldn’t tell.

Sidra and Dojha landed and swept between us, laughing. They didn’t greet Nat at all.

“Are you all right?” I asked when I reached him. “Not too hurt?”

“Not too much. My pride, mostly.”

“What will you do now?”

He paused for long enough that I raised my eyebrows. I wanted to keep talking to him, to show him, and everyone on this balcony, that he was not alone. That we were still wing-siblings. But I couldn’t stand here all wingfight. I also wanted to get Ezarit’s attention. To meet the traders.

Finally, he said, “I’ve been thinking of Tobiat’s chips. Figuring them out.”

“How? You can’t fly the city looking for the tower that matches the drawings.” I bit back my next words: not without a wingmark.

“I bet they’ll let me if I’m escorted. You could fly with me.”

A quest that could take days, or weeks. It couldn’t happen if I were to apprentice with Ezarit.

“I have a plan,” he added, when I’d been silent too long.

The crowd shouted as two Mondarath fighters hit the nets. Aliati and an older guard. Viit was now winning.

“Tobiat was at Ma’s after the wingtest. He told me the design on the chips is a Spire secret.”

“And you believe him? He’s addled, Nat.”

“Ma said that too, but he knows more about the Spire than anyone I’ve talked to.” Nat lowered his voice. “He was born there, Kirit.”

Given what Nat had been through, I nodded. I looked around to see if my mother was still betting. She was.

Nat waved his hand in my eyes to get my attention. “Really. There’s something there. Tobiat was on about ‘Delequerriat’—remember from Laws? Something hidden in plain sight. I want to know what the secret is. Or trade the chips to the Singers for a chance to ask questions about Naton, at least.”

I kept my eyes on Ezarit and the traders while I mulled Nat’s mad plan. “You’d have to challenge the Spire to ask your question, Nat. Like Ezarit did. Can’t trade secrets.”

“Maybe not, unless the secret is big enough. Tobiat sure made it sound so, though he can’t remember everything.”

I shifted, suddenly uncomfortable. Had Tobiat drawn Nat into his madness? Nat had followed readily, filling the space where his pride had been.

“I want to go during Allmoons,” Nat added.

“Allmoons? Against Laws? What could possibly go wrong, then? You can’t mean to fly at night?” I asked and threw my arms in the air. Nat’s frown deepened at my tone, but I continued. “Why don’t you ask a Singer when they come to deliver the wingmarks?”

His face clouded darker.

He was talking about going to the Spire. Not for a market. Not to trade. To find a way to make the Singers give up a secret. Which the Singers were sworn not to do.

I shivered as I thought about Singer Wik’s fiat. No, they did not surrender their secrets lightly.

The hurt in Nat’s eyes took the fire out of me. He had a half year of waiting, of scrambling to get by, before he could make his path in the world. Because the Magisters had switched for Group and he’d been paired with Sidra and Dix.

“Come on, Kirit. It’ll be like old times.”

It could have been me with broken wings. But it wasn’t.

“I need to think about it, Nat,” I said. I didn’t meet his eyes. I looked across the balcony, to where Ezarit stood at the center of a crowd of bettors and traders. She turned to look for me too. Beckoned. I went to her.

* * *

Only five wingfighters remained aloft; the rest were in the nets. Macal flew for Mondarath against four Viit fliers. Viit observers were already counting the goods they’d take from Mondarath at the loss. Mondarath bettors shouted at the five men and women gliding in tight circles between the towers. The fliers were cut and bloodied, but still better off than their companions in the nets. Aliati among them, a sharp cut down her arm. She shouted encouragement to her sole teammate: Macal wasn’t giving up.

One Viit flier’s wing tore on the sharp edge of Magister Macal’s pinion.

Ezarit shouted at another bet won. She was in her element.

I pulled a marker from my new purse and held it aloft to see if I could catch a bettor’s eye. “One, on that Mondarath,” I said, imitating Ezarit. A bearded man took the chip from my fingers. Aliati’s team. Macal’s. The trader’s laugh boomed when a Viit flier knocked Macal hard, nearly into the net.

“You’ll learn,” he said. “You bet early, before they tire.” He clapped his hand against my furled wings, rattling the battens. I backed away. Moved closer to Ezarit. Watched Macal continuing to fight out of the corner of my eye.

When the match had only one Viit flier left aloft against Macal, she put a hand on my shoulder and pulled me into the group. “My daughter, Kirit,” she said, introducing me to the men and women with whom she’d been betting.

They wore their tower marks around their necks and in their hair. Not the fashion in our quadrant, where we kept them in purses in pockets. The one who’d taken my marker a moment ago extended his hand, “Doran Grigrit. My wife,” he gestured to the trader by his side, “Inaro.” She inclined her head, and I made a small bow to them. In my mind, I pictured the tower map I’d assembled earlier that day. Southwestern quadrant, where Ezarit went for honey. Far from here indeed.

“I have arranged,” my mother said, “a most fortuitous apprenticeship for you, Kirit.”

I heard her words, but there was something strange about them. That wasn’t how you announced your own apprentice. She seemed to be speaking through the long end of a bone horn, her words distant and warped. She kept going, but my mind had stopped listening.

Not partners, then. Not a team.

A roaring sound rose in my ears. One of my mother’s best trading skills was the bait and switch. And I realized too late that I might be the bait.

I forced myself to listen to the terms: “…’s daughter will apprentice with me, and you will work with the Grigrit fliers. You’ll learn much more than I could ever teach you.”

There was more roaring. She looked at me, held my gaze. She expected me to compose myself, to seem pleased. While she sent me away.

She’d made this arrangement while she was on her trading run. She hadn’t told me when we were alone. She hadn’t wanted an argument.

The horns blew for the end of the wingfight. Viit had won, but Macal had made it a close thing. Each tower bound the wounds of the opposing teams’ players, even as the winning tower began to plan how to transport the tithes it would take from the losers.

All around me, tower markers changed hands, bets were paid, and treasures pulled from robes. The tower was rich with trades. Something about Mondarath made people less cautious. My mother laughed, and the beads in her hair sparkled.

My new wings felt heavy on my shoulders. I tugged at the lenses around my neck, wishing I could take them off and hand them back. Instead, I smiled as she’d taught me. Don’t show disappointment; that gives the other trader an edge.

And behind my smile, locked tight, my voice keened silent and broken. Yoked to an apprenticeship I had no say in. Sent away without warning.

Doran continued talking, oblivious. “Just like fledges. Feed ’em, flip the nest when they’re prepared. Mine know they’re ready.”

“Kirit is a hard worker,” Ezarit said, proud of her trade. I wondered what she got in return besides Doran’s daughter, but I refused to let it show. I locked my smile and pretended to listen, though much of what I heard was the roaring in my ears. “She’s done very well in flight.”

He turned to me. “Good! We’ll teach you the rest.”

I already knew plenty. I’d been watching the best trader in the city. But this was not enough. I prepared my objections, but Doran turned his attention to the group again.

“Tower children don’t know half what they should until they apprentice. We’ll make sure she learns the right way to trade. And the traditions. My father’s still alive. His songs about when we came out of the clouds, and before, they’ll make your skin crawl.” Doran’s eyes lit up at the thought of it. And he was right; my skin was crawling already.

Ezarit still played dealmaker. “Doran has the best trade routes in the south.” She jutted her chin, and I saw his quilts were richly embroidered. He was very wealthy, then. “We will make them welcome at Densira tonight, and you will leave tomorrow.”

Tomorrow. I stared at her, and she rumpled my hair. “We’ll meet in the sky,” she said. “Traders are never far. And I know you’ll be safe with Doran.” For a moment, her face grew serious, and her eyes begged me to agree. Then she became lighthearted again. I did not know what to think.

Doran laughed and reached for a wineskin that was being passed around. He took a pull and pointed outside with his free hand. “Ah, Singers!”

I blanched, then remembered these Singers bore wingmarks. Smiled.

Too late, for Doran saw my look. “You’ll learn respect for Singers too, Kirit. I’ll have no Lawsbreaking in my tower. Singers saved us. They kept us from fighting to death in the clouds. They found the few left alive, taught them Laws. They learned how to raise the towers faster. On their wings, we rose.” Doran actually wiped a tear from his eye, and I nodded, even as I edged backwards.

For all my studies, I hadn’t realized how different the south was, how traditional. And Ezarit had traded me there, like a weight of tea wrapped in silk.

The Singers landed, with Councilman Vant right behind. I moved away from Doran and the bettors, towards the gathering wingtesters. One last look at Ezarit, her face relaxed now that she’d done her duty and found me an apprenticeship.

Doran laughed heartily and clapped her on the shoulder. She had the dignity to raise an eyebrow, and he pulled his hand away.

The sun was a pale slip on the cloudtop. The Singers’ wings were tinted red with the light. The day neared Bethalial by the old Laws.

“We congratulate Viit on its win,” the Singer with the silver streak in her hair said. “We will hurry to get you to your home towers before nightfall.”

Behind us, the bantering and the post-wingfight win recapping faded as everyone turned to listen to the Singers. The members of my flight clustered forward. Nat kept to the back, in the section of the tower already fallen into shadow.

The two Singers who bore the wingmarks were the woman with the silver streak in her hair and the older man. Wik was not with them. For that, I heaved a sigh of relief.

The female Singer held the bag of wingtest markers, a thick-spun silk dyed goldenrod. I could hear the markers click together from here.

Sidra joined the press towards the Singers. I kept myself back a little, soaking up the feeling of almostness. The moment before I could hold my future in my hands stretched out — the length of a breath, held.

The wingmark would open the city to me and would free me from the Singer’s plans.

A tattooed hand dipped into the bag, then handed gold markers out. First to Beliak, then Aliati. Six more fliers tied wingmarks to shoulder straps. Ceetcee, Dikarit.

Sidra shifted her feet, impatient. She couldn’t be serious. Not after recieving partial chips in Laws and Group.

Dojha took her mark. Someone cheered in the background. The bag was nearly empty.

The Singer paused. Her mouth formed a frown, as if she was about to say something distasteful. “The reason for the late awarding of wingmarks was our need to confer with the council. Two fliers performed well in many aspects of the test, but failed in other ways.”

My heart skipped a beat. Nat. Perhaps they would let him pass after all.

The Singer continued. “A strong argument has been made in the case of one of these fliers.”

Then Sidra held a wingmark in her hands. She turned to tie it to her shoulder strap, caught my eye, and smiled.

I was baffled. How could she earn her wingmark after the disastrous Group flight, not to mention failing Laws? And arguing.

Ezarit came to stand by my side. Her hand touched my shoulder. “We do not buy our wings,” she whispered. And I understood. I waited to hear what Nat’s fate would be, knowing that Elna would never bribe the council, even if she had the means.

Ezarit’s hand rested on my arm, and I remembered what she’d just done. Doran Grigrit. I shrugged her away. First I would get my wingmark, then I would try to negotiate my own apprenticeship, without her help. And then I would help Nat.

But the bag was empty. The Singers unfurled their wings and prepared to leave. Impossible. Where was mine?

I pulled the test chips from my wing as I hurried towards them, shouting, “Wait!” There in my hands were Laws and City, Solo and Group. I’d passed them all, whole and well. I held them out.

But the Singers shook their heads. The older Singer smiled. “You are Densira? You broke the Silence. In Solo. After breaking Fortify. Your lack of tradition and discipline failed you, set a bad example for others. Try again next year.”

All around me the bettors fell silent. No one had thought to put money on that outcome. I heard Doran call for his party. They were leaving. Ezarit scrambled to slow them, to renegotiate.

Many of us had broken the Silence. Sidra especially. But her father had tipped things in her favor. And the Singers, I realized, had tipped things in theirs.

I stood, stunned, at the balcony’s edge, as the Singers leapt into the wind. Doran and his wife followed, without a backwards glance.

Behind me, I saw my mother, wan and staring. She could not fathom what had happened, her plans gone to shards around her. My luck had tainted hers. She took a step back, then another.

I looked every direction, hoping for a place to hide and sort this out. Soon, Wik would come to speak to Ezarit, and perhaps she would give me up to them instead. I had to get away, if not to hide, then to rage. Where no one in the towers could see me.

Those from Densira who’d come for the wingfights pulled their faces into careful masks when they saw me. So unlucky. They whispered warnings against my dangerous behavior to each other.

Beyond them, in the shadows, Nat watched me. Then he turned and slipped from the shade-side of the balcony into the sky. In the commotion, no one else noticed.

I slid through a break in the crowd, between figures turned to watch the departing Singers, and edged towards the empty part of the balcony. My neighbors let me go. I was unlucky again, and beneath their notice.

In one quick motion, I opened my wings and flew after Nat. A cold gust pushed me out fast. The tower shrank behind me before I realized he was headed far from the city, into the open air.

8. CROSSWIND

“I’m coming with you,” I shouted across the sky, loud against Mondarath’s fading noise.

Nat let me catch up with him. “We’ll take the crosswind in,” he replied.

We were two Lawsbreakers, flying without wingmarks, at Bethalial. Allmoons’ time of quiet. If we were caught, we would be weighed down with even heavier markers than before. But what did that matter, when we were already so burdensome to our families, to our tower?

“Where are we going?”

Nat’s feet dangled at awkward, overgrown angles from his wings’ footsling. The wings supported him, but barely. “You’ll need to let me draft on your wings for the turn,” he said. That was not an answer.

We passed the broken tower, Lith, at the northern edge of the city. The winds here were plainer, less easy to read. They were also less prone to shifts and wind shadows. Few flew the edges of the city. I knew my mother did because the winds were also faster here. But I wondered at Nat. The crosswinds picked up farther south. To catch them on this angle, we’d need to fly a long way into the open sky.

“Turning where?” I asked. I didn’t care what his answer was. We were in the open, no tower to turn to, no place to land safely.

My eyes burned from staring hard at the blue, looking for ripples, air currents, skymouths, danger.

We could turn back. The city meant safety. Still, I wanted to keep flying until we disappeared into the distance, until they lit our banners and set us free.

“Into the center,” he said. “Soon.”

For now, all we had was sky ahead and cloud below. No towers, no colorful wings. No skymouths, I hoped.

Beyond the city, the air felt much colder. We closed on the point where a crosswind usually cut in. Ezarit had said once it was the fastest route to the center, but the most dangerous. In that moment, on that day, we didn’t care.

I spotted the cloud drift that marked the windstream first, and whistled to Nat. He turned his head to sight an angle off the receding towers, then whistled back. Time to turn. I took the lead, dipping my right wing low and spreading my fingers in their harnesses to stretch the upward curve of my left wing.

I turned, a blade of fury carving the sky. Behind me, I heard the crack and flap of Nat’s wings fighting to cut the same arc. He teetered, then pulled straight and steady. We aimed for the city.

I didn’t realize I was crying until my cheeks began to crackle with the cold of the crosswind. The lenses dangled around my neck, unwanted, but necessary. I tucked my arm from my wing and yanked them up over my nose. My cap slipped as the strap dragged on it, but didn’t fall.

The lenses. I bet Ezarit regretted wasting them now. She didn’t want me by her side. Doran Grigrit didn’t want me. Nor Densira. None would have the Lawsbreaker, the skymouth attractor. None would have Nat Brokenwings either. We were nearly castoffs. Unlucky. If we failed again, we could wind up skulking in the low tiers, scraping filth from trash to get by. Unless we flew our own way.

Singer Wik was behind this. The Singers had taken everything, even after I’d paid my debt to my tower. The Spire on the horizon caught my eye. In the fading light, the tower was pure and white, surrounded by the city’s waving banners.

I would run straight into its walls, like a bird. The tower would shake as I fell.

They would not come for me. I would go to the Spire to find the truth, I’d take them by surprise. They would give me my wings and my marker, or I would challenge like Ezarit had. At first light, I would demand my rights and have my questions answered. Nat too.

Nat flew behind me and back a bit. In my reflecting lens, I saw his clenched jaw, his narrowed eyes. He wanted answers too.

While the city marked its shortest day, grieved its losses, and moved on, we would mark the city. Carve a hole in it. Break tradition.

We would take what it refused to give.

I shifted my gaze, refocusing at the approaching view. As the towers began to light Allmoons banners, the central rooftops blossomed with fire along their edges. Dusk advanced; the city came alight, with the Spire pale and steady at its center.

We aimed our wings, flying direct and angry towards the city’s heart.

9. APPROACH

The current we rode carried us high. We looked down over the central towers as the flickering banners faded to ash.

We’d broken so many Laws tonight. I wondered at that. And then I did not even care. I wasn’t Ezarit’s obedient girl anymore. Where had that gotten me?

A scrim of high clouds and the gaining dark gave us some cover. We were shadows tonight, hidden by ritual. The city’s eyes were on its lost. We would be obscured until the moon had fully risen and the banners burned away.

We dove into Varu’s shadow, then around. No one peered from its balconies. All were on the tower’s highest levels, remembering.

To fly unseen was frightening. I was used to life lived in the open, where everyone watched. In the crush of neighbors at the Allmoons lightings, I’d never thought of what the rest of the city was like, dark below the canopy of banners lit and burning.

The Singers, too, were gone from the top of the Spire. Attending their duties around the city, chronicling the lost. I understood the need for the Bethalial now. No one but Singer-born or Singer-sworn may approach the Spire at Allmoons. Well. I was under a Singer fiat, wasn’t I? That was good enough for me.

The Spire looked as impenetrable as ever, but no gray wings were about to see us on our mad approach.

We both knew the Spire wasn’t empty. Not all Singers attended Allmoons on the towers. Some Singers, according to tower gossip, never left the Spire’s walls. They sequestered themselves in order to more closely listen to the city and discern its needs. They turned inwards for the good of the city. That was their sacrifice.

That was also our opening, Nat’s and mine. We glided close enough to the Spire that, if it had balconies, they would have seen us. The market nets were pulled up to the top of the Spire, their baskets bound as if for a storm.

“We are the Nightwings!” Nat crowed. Figures from a children’s song. “None see us!”

For the first time, I wondered if Singers stayed at the towers after Allmoons. No one flew at night, so they must. No one except Nat and me. We raced the dark now, two shadows in the gloaming light.

Nat took the lead again. “I know where we need to go. Tobiat said the chips were made for something about sixteen tiers down.”

We chased the dreams of an addled hermit and a dead man. As my anger ebbed, I grew afraid that we would soon join their ranks. Who was better off, Tobiat or Naton? Enough. I shook off those dark thoughts.

Ten tiers. My eardrums grew tight, then released. The clouds swirled too close, too dangerous. We were far enough down that, in any other tower, we’d be staring at filth-clotted walls. The Spire was different. The pristine exterior was decorated with carvings here and there, not filth. They didn’t throw their waste down the outside of the tower as the rest of us did. Either that, or they didn’t make any waste. Another Singer mystery.

I followed Nat, then flew by his side as we circled the sixteenth tier. No nets here, only grips and cleats where nets once were. He pointed to something rough-looking on our first circuit of the Spire. Not the sixteenth tier down. The fifteenth. A portion of the wall carved with several markings, made familiar by Naton’s bone chips.

“I told you!” he yelled.

And then we were past it. I’d barely had time to process what I saw. But we circled again. As we came back in range, Nat pulled his bow and nocked an arrow.

He’d tied a thin line of spidersilk and tendon tight above the arrow’s fletching. It dipped a thin shadow through the air, to his wingstraps. Nat had bound himself to the shaft.

I had no time to question the wisdom of this plan before he aimed and shot. Beautifully. Like a true hunter. The arrow threaded the eye of a bone cleat carved into the wall. Nat pulled on the rope, and the arrow flipped up. Locked tight to the eye. Then the rope pulled taut between Nat and the tower, and he was ripped from our forward flight. I looked under my wing and behind me to see him dangling from the fifteenth tier down on the Spire. That must have hurt.

When I’d left the wingfight and Mondarath, my ears had been full of roaring anger. I realized now how little thought I’d put to this, besides following Nat. That perhaps he’d planned for one, not two, to approach the Spire. Nat knew exactly how he would connect himself to the tower and had planned carefully. No such preparations were in place for me.

I needed to make the next circuit of the Spire on my own. I flew silent, eyes casting left, right, and down for a Singer, for a hint of skymouths or anything else. The cold winds whistled around me. Below, clouds and the towers began to glitter in the rising light of Allmoons. In a few moments, the glass beads I’d woven in my braids and along the edges of my wings would pick up the light and throw it like a beacon to anyone who happened to glance into the dark night sky.

This should have been a day of celebration and joy. Instead, rage cooled into sadness. I was alone in all the city, but for a single friend. Oldest friend. Wing-brother.

I completed the circuit and saw Nat clinging to the wall. He’d driven two pitons into the bone during my turn. He worked fast, for sure.

As I passed, he tossed me a line, and I missed it. Cursing, I found myself with a choice. I could circle a third time or turn and beat across the wind to the thrown rope.

The moon would be fully up before I flew around the Spire a third time. Too dangerous. I would turn. I would do this the hard way.

I dipped my left wing and banked a turn out of the breeze. The silk of my wings flapped noisily between the battens, then stilled. As I turned, I lost altitude. Now Nat was above me, and I neared the seventeenth tier downtower. There had been little enough rope before, and when he threw it again, I had to be higher. I strained to find a strong gust.

In the Spire’s wind shadow, there wasn’t enough unsullied air to lift me higher.

I pulled closer to the Spire, hoping for an updraft. That’s when I saw them. Another set of carvings similar to the ones Nat had found, but deeper. And a mark for a handgrip.

We’d been taught to fly to handgrips in emergencies or storms and had practiced clinging to Densira’s spurs, but I’d never done it without a net. Nor in the dark. I locked my wing harness with a thumb and withdrew my fingers from both sets of fine controls. My breathing came quicker, and my mouth felt dry as old bone. I crooked my arms in the winghooks and prepared to grab.

I was flying too fast when the grip came within reach. I crashed into the Spire and scrambled my hands along its sides, splintering shards from the wall into my palms as I clawed.

The wind lifted my wings and gave me a moment’s buoyancy. Then the gust strengthened and tried to tear me from the wall, just as my fingers sank through a hole with a deep grip in it. I grasped hard and hoped. Detached my other hand and grabbed double-handed, pulling my body parallel with the wall of the Spire. Clouds, it hurt. I splayed against the wall, powerless to do more.

Nat stifled a shout.

With my face pressed so close to the carvings, I could see holes within the symbols. Much like the chips had, but finger-sized. Slowly I peeled a few fingers from the grip and reached them to the holes.

Nat and Tobiat were right. The chips were a map. To what? To secret Spire gates? That would be worth plenty to the Singers. And to us, stranded on the side of the tower in the middle of the night.

“Can you climb up?” Nat called.

I shook my head. “Wait a minute, and I’ll either climb or peel off and try again.” I tried to slow my breathing as I peered into the darkness for clues about the quality of the wind this close to the Spire.

My foot began to slip, and I scrambled again for purchase. Mashed myself as close to the wall as I could, fingers still caught in the smaller holes. Something gave behind the pressure of my fingertips. I pressed again.

A grinding sound came from inside the wall. When I looked down, I could see a shadow growing on the pale tower; a distant panel of bone below me began to slide sideways.

As the gate opened, I heard other sounds, like water running down a wall.

Of course they had gates. Secret exits, for when flying from the top of the Spire wouldn’t do or they came under attack from a rogue tower.

“Nat!” He’d love this. Perhaps this was enough of a secret for him, for both of us. Then we could fly home. But to what kind of welcome?

There must be more such gates. If Naton’s chips marked them all, the Singers would be eager to have the skein back. Perhaps they would trade for it after all.

The grinding sound continued. I couldn’t see much, but I could feel movement in my fingers, and in the bone pressed against my chest. A rush of foul air brushed my cheek. My fingers tightened on the grip in the walls and in the holes.

Nat shouted again. He gestured wildly. His feet scrambled, his legs pumped and a wing jammed against the tower. He tried to climb back up the rope, panicking.

I hung on tight and looked around in time to catch the ripple and the tear in the sky that became a slick maw, blood-black, with teeth that glittered like stars, aimed right at me.

The monster pushed a pulse of raw wind before it. My wings filled with it and pinned me hard to the wall.

I could not breathe. I could not turn and scream — Nat was screaming enough for both of us.

From the corner of my eye, I saw motion in the darkness. Shadows swooped past. A net flew through the air and landed with a slick sound in front of me. The breath of the skymouth stopped pushing at me. I could breathe again.

Gray-winged Singers flew above and below me. One made a high-pitched noise and pulled the skymouth away by the net.

Another threw a second net at me. The ropes, made of sticky spidersilk, smelled of herbs and muzz. The silk tightened around me, cracking wing battens, pressing its cloying scent at my nose and mouth. I could not see Nat.

“Where are you?” I yelled to him as I was pulled from the wall.

The net’s embrace wrapped me tight. I was lifted higher, bound in sick-sweet ropes. The stars spun. The moon shrank to a pinhole. Alone, I rose up to it and disappeared.