Updraft

10. FORGOTTEN

Rough bone pressed against my palms, my face, my knees.

I was not falling. Not eaten. But I could not hear the wind.

My eyes were crusted shut. I rubbed the grit from them until they opened enough to reveal blurred shadows. I drew a breath full of filth and dried bone. When I coughed, a pale dust cloud rose cumulus beside my head, then settled, glittering, across my hand.

Tied around my wrist, a gray silk cord held three thick markers. They rattled together when I moved. Laws. New ones. Heavy ones.

I pushed hard against the floor with both hands, then raised my head and torso until the room spun and my heart beat a tattoo in my ears. When I could breathe again, when the pounding ebbed to a dull pulse, I eased onto my knees.

“Nat?”

My words echoed. No reply in the darkness.

My arms wouldn’t extend or lift from my sides. I touched left hand to right shoulder to find thick strands of spidersilk. The Singer’s net. I grasped it and lifted, intending to peel the sticky silk from my shoulders and back.

My hiss of pain echoed through the room as my skin stuck to the silk. Still, I did not pause. Skin, shards of battens, and wing fell away with the net, broken.

As the pile of discarded net and wing shifted with my movements, the floor rumbled and sighed. I had not caused that sound, but I knew what it was. Below me, the city spoke softly and then grew silent.

Once free of the net, I reached out and touched bone walls in every direction. My markers rattled. I tucked them under the cord to still them.

Now I could hear someone singing, faint notes rising and falling beyond the wall. But as my hands made a circuit of my prison, I discovered no doors, no openings. No way to reach the voice. No breeze here either. Only a rough wall that rose higher than I could stretch my fingers.

Then the darkness shifted. Broke. Far above my head, a small light guttered and held. Someone had set an oil lamp into the wall. The light struck the space in patches and, as my eyes steadied enough to trace it, the shadows of my prison acquired edge and gouge: carvings, everywhere.

On the walls, Singers fought gryphons in the carved clouds; they tore carved wings from a woman, they threw a flailing man from a carved tower.

I had no doubts now. I was trapped within the walls of the Spire.

The bone murals of the prison continued along the floor. I lifted my aching knee and studied a red imprint in my skin: a face carved mid-scream.

Above me in the growing glare of the lantern, a white arc appeared like a moon unfurling: crescent, then half, then full. A carved bone pail scraped against the wall as it was lowered on a rope. The pail dropped into my upstretched hands, and I felt the edges of words. More Laws. Bethalial, Trespass, Treason.

Nothing in this room was uncarved, unmarked, except me.

The pail slipped from my hands and clattered against the floor. It wobbled to a stop, and I crawled to it. Inside were a bladder sack and a dried bird’s gizzard. I unstoppered the sack and sipped. Water. It tasted like scourweed. I put the bird’s gizzard in my pocket.

I muttered my thanks. My voice was a rasp.

“You are welcome, Kirit Notower,” a voice said in response, startling me. Before I could respond, the bucket rose on its rope. The moonlight above my head shrank to a hairline crescent and then vanished.

I put my head on my knees, wrapped my arms around my shins, and wept until I ran dry.

Later, I took the gizzard from my pocket and looked at it. They were feeding me. If the Singers had wanted me dead, I would be.

When they lowered the bucket again, I tried to see beyond the light, to see the shapes of those above. I saw nothing, not even their hands. This time, the goosebladder held a weak broth; the bucket, a stone fruit.

“How long will you hold me here?” I shouted at the moon.

The voice responded slowly, “Until you hear. Until you understand.” Then the moon in the ceiling slid closed again. Once my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, I could see that it was not closed all the way.

They couldn’t leave me here forever. A corner of my pile of silk and netting already reeked of urine and foul. I’d pushed it as far from my bedding as I could.

I heard singing again. I heard The Rise echo down from above.

There was a way out. It was small and distant. And all I had to do to reach it was fly.

My broken wings mocked me silently from the floor.

I put my ear to a wall and heard the pulse of the Spire, the wind sweeping the walls, the bone thickening, the deeper sounds. Of the city beyond the Spire I could hear nothing.

What of Nat? Was he a prisoner within the Spire too? Or had he been thrown down? Worse? Was I truly alone?

I began shouting, hoping they would come to the moon-window again. “You can’t hold me here! My tower and my family—”

Would what? They had turned from me. Found me unlucky.

I tried once more. “My mother—”

Traded me away.

“You can’t hold me here! You cheated me of my wings, and you cannot hold me!”

I ached to see the horizon beyond the walls. To feel a breeze. See a sunrise. There was no way to tell how much time had passed except by the arrival of buckets.

The total enclosure made my heart pound against my ribs. To calm myself, I listed what I used to see from my quarters in Densira: clouds, birds on the wing, Mondarath, sometimes Viit if the weather was right. Banners. Green plants. Neighbors climbing ladders, crossing far-off bridges, carrying children nestled tight to their breasts as they flew short distances. Sky.

I had always been able to see the sky. There had always been a breeze laced with ice, or wet with rain, or hot with summer. There was no weather here. No sky.

The walls of my prison absorbed blows from my fists, cut my skin when I struck a sharp carving. I sank again to the floor. The walls surrounded me like an unforgiving second skin. When I woke, it was to the grinding sound of the panel above drawing back and another pail. This one contained another sackful of broth, with the gritty must of dirgeon. Those birds ate anything, and it showed in the taste of the meat. I was willing to eat like them at that moment.

The pail still rattled. A bone tool had been tucked beneath the sack, its sharp end wrapped in silk. A carving tool.

“What do you want?” I shouted to the hole above me, not expecting an answer. But then a shadowed head appeared in its halo.

“We keep the city safe,” said a voice. “We look for those who could do the same.”

My shoulders and legs ached. I turned my head from the light and stretched to see if I could touch both walls at once. Not quite.

“You don’t want me. I break Laws. Endanger my tower. My city.” I held up my wrist, shaking the markers to make them clatter and echo.

Now that my eyes had adjusted to the gloom, I could better read the markers: Bethalial, Trespass, Treason.

“You have indeed.” And the window closed entirely.

I was Kirit Notower. Lawsbreaker. Unlucky.

I had attacked the Spire. At Allmoons. I’d attracted a skymouth. My hand tightened around the carving tool, its silk wrapper. I had lost my friend.

In the dim light, I unwound the silk from the carver’s tip. In the towers, we wrote message on bone. Dye was too valuable. Ink unavailable. The Singers, it seemed, had both. My eyes strained to read the marks on the fabric: Some believe you are more than your crimes. Some believe you can Rise. Are you worth saving?

I thought about the wingtest. About the way I’d flown. I’d not heard of Singers lifting Lawsmarks, ever. I thought about Wik, his insistence at Densira that I could help the city. Singers could do anything for the good of the city.

They wanted something from me. Perhaps I could make a trade. Convince them to lift my punishments. If I could reach them.

The carvings. At points, deep enough to allow a fingertip to jam into a crevice. Perhaps a bare toe. I pulled my silk foot wrappings off. My toes were soft and pallid in the dim light. My fingers found a place on the wall where someone — another prisoner? — had carved a series of birds in flight, circling upwards. Had they been able to carve the birds all the way to the top? If so, climbing them was better than waiting for release.

The deepest carvings had sharp edges, but my fingers still found purchase and I pulled myself up against the wall. The effort of climbing made the pads on my fingers throb. My knuckles cracked. My toes ached. I stopped, rested, then tried again, pressing my body close to the wall, pushing with my feet and calves until my leg muscles burned painfully. After the first few minutes, my fingers and toes had grown so numb, I could not shake them awake. I fell back to the carved bone floor. It was hopeless. A trick. I was never meant to leave this place.

I did not intend to do so, but I fell asleep again. I did not dream. I woke to find I’d spilled from my silk nest, kicked it aside, slept on the floor. My cheek pressed hard against a carving of the city. I rolled over and muffled a shriek of pain. My fingers had swelled and blistered. I stuck two of them in my mouth and sucked, whimpering. The taste of blood and dust from the room made me ill.

The city was silent now, the Spire too. I tried to guess what day it was — we were past Allmoons, but how far past?

With only the buckets to tell me, I had no sense of when I was. Perhaps it was evening. Perhaps Elna was already cooking dinner. Perhaps Ezarit had returned from another trade. I imagined the conversations, held to them tightly. What would Nat have been doing? And I? I would have been doing nothing, not until I could pass a wingtest without breaking the quiet.

This was no comfort.

Before long, another pail descended. It contained a dirgeon wing, already broken, its marrow drying out, and, I thought, a smaller sack of water than before. The Singer at the top of this pit had set me a timer. The more time I spent here, the less I’d be fed. Soon, my food would run out and I would vanish. No more bad luck, no more Lawsbreaker.

I drank every drop of water and savored the lone wing.

Another bucket was sent down the next day, with less water and a piece of goose liver. I lay curled in the small pile of clean silk and netting. My fingers had recovered, but my feet, with their soft pads that never had to do much, were lacerated and painful. I could barely walk, even if there’d been room enough to do so. I leaned my forehead against a wall and listened to the city whisper and pulse. I imagined Nat was here too, listening with me to the secrets of the Spire. I whispered our Laws to him.

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

Delequerriat: The act of concealment, in plain sight, may only be used to turn wrong to right.

Trade: No trader lives with jealousy or greed.

War: We rise together or fall apart. With clouds below, our judge.

On the bone wall near where my foot rested, someone had carved a skymouth attacking. It gaped at me.

I took up the tool against it, scratched over it until it disappeared.

Then I found a tiny, uncarved space in the floor. I drew the lines of Nat’s profile as I remembered it.

The sharp edge of the carver peeled tiny curls of bone away in its passage. Nat’s face looked much younger on the floor. His face from our youth, from before Ezarit and I rose. It was a poor likeness, but when I finished, I had someone to talk to.

I told him everything, in a rush. That I wanted to live, any way I could. I told him why the Singers wanted me. What Wik forbade me to tell anyone. I told him what I could do. How I could help the city.

Nat did not respond. But the Spire did: it whispered secrets back to me, until I was ready to fly.

* * *

Covered in filth, my greasy braids matted against my head like a cap, I stripped all but the last layer of silk robes from my body and piled them below where I planned to climb.

I left my friend on the floor below me, with my broken wing. The Spire’s whispers pushed me higher.

I heard them as I balanced on the tips of my toes and slipped and fell. My back arched, and my head struck hard against the wall. I heard them when I woke again. Hopeful, fearful. Calling for me.

Nat would have wondered at me, I realized. Talking to the Spire. Starving to death, more like it. Get up, Nat would have whispered. Pull yourself up.

And so I did.

I found the carving tool and poked at a blister on my forefinger, let the sack of skin weep. It hurt. I howled with the pain as I did it again and again, until I was ready. Then I wrapped my fingers and toes in what was left of the cleaner spidersilk.

The wall was already warm and slick with grease from my hands. I ignored the pain in my fingers and concentrated on the lift I got from my legs. I pretended that my toes were part of the wall and that the Singer above had a rope around my waist and was hauling me up. I found I could inch my way up the wall, crack by crack. I pressed fingers and toes into the carved crevices: faces and wings and clouds and towers, the forgotten dreams of others who had been here before me. The spidersilk provided an extra stickiness that held my hands to the wall and let me stop and rest.

My legs and arms started to shake when I realized that the carvings were thinning. At the bottom, there was only a small uncarved space. Now that I was high — at least three tiers, I realized — there were many fewer handholds. The oubliette narrowed at the top, and if I could make it a few body lengths higher, I would be able to place a foot on the opposite wall. I could edge my way up. A big if. Not many more carvings here — a flock of birds, a faint trace of a flower, broken off.

Below me, the floor was dark. I knew now why the carvings below were so clear against the walls. They had been shaded with dried blood, where others had fallen, trying to rise.

Up high, the carvings were brighter: eggshell on bone.

I could see the edge of the crescent now. The buckets had stopped coming, but the window had been left open. A promise, if I could make it.

They waited for me there, the Singers who wanted me, though for what purpose and how long, I did not know. I did not care.

Anything to get out of this prison. I braced myself on a narrow foothold and dug into the wall with the carver. Dried bone curled away. Thin lines became deeper. I was not going for beauty or style. I would not leave a mark beyond a handhold. This was not my last message to my city, to the Spire. This was a way out, nothing more.

My fingers oozed blood when the carver finally splintered and shattered so badly I could not find a sturdy edge. I screamed with pain and frustration. My whole body was rigid.

Would what I’d done be enough? The Spire remained silent. I could not wait for it to speak again. I had to try on my own, a few more steps. I lifted a shaking arm and gripped the carving with my fingers, pulled. Lifted my foot and put it in the last bird on the wall. Placed my other foot on top of it. Grabbed for the new handhold I’d carved and pressed up. I nearly slipped. I scrambled for balance. The carver fell, and it took a long time before I heard it hit the floor.

With shaking legs, I moved my foot and stretched it to reach the other wall. My hipbone popped at the exertion. I had no idea how long I’d been climbing, but my body noted the time in aches.

I missed the voice of my city. The daily sounds from distant towers. The bustle and press of neighbors, the call of friends on the wing. I missed the voice of the Spire, the whispers.

I braced close to the ceiling and lifted my fingers from one handhold. Reached towards the crescent. I was short by fingerlengths.

I roared, pushed off my feet in frustration, and found myself lifting farther than I’d thought I could. My toes pointed hard, my pelvis rocked, my spine and shoulders and everything leaned towards that hole. My fingers seemed to grow, clawing for the crescent. Sinking my hands around the thick edge of bone that was the way out. I touched it with a fingertip on a wild swipe. That touch drove me forward again and up. I grabbed the edge with one hand, then the other. My feet slipped, and I hung for a moment, above the oil lamp, above the oubliette. My fingers slid. I had no strength left to hold on.

11. FOUND

A rush of air. A moment where I touched nothing, not the wall, not the ledge of the window. I flailed, hands cupping emptiness. Then one hand caught a muscled arm, reaching from the gap in the wall. Held tight.

“Easy. I’ve got you,” a familiar voice said. The brightness of the room threw his face into shadow, but I knew his profile. The way he clipped his words.

Wik leaned out of the opening above me. His fingers gripped my wrists tighter as he pulled me up. He turned his head away from me and spoke over his shoulder, almost grunting with the effort. “Tell Rumul she finally made it.”

I could not hear a response, but he turned his full attention back to me. My hands locked on to his arms, while his hands circled my biceps. I scrambled my feet against the bone wall and pushed as he pulled. From beyond him, a breeze brushed my cheek. Fresh air. I longed to bask in it.

He dragged me, still kicking, through the hole. The thick edge scraped the last spidersilk from my chest and bruised my ribs. I hit the floor hands first, then my knees connected with the hard surface.

Sunlight struck the bone floor, turning it and the walls bright white, shocking my shadow-trained eyes. All I could see in the dazzling room were gray foot wrappings and the edge of a dark robe.

“Rest,” Wik said. He held out a water sack, and I snatched it from his hands. This Singer. I swallowed my first sip, then took another. I spat that mouthful at his feet.

He laughed and stepped back. I was too weak to rise or to try again.

As my eyes grew used to the light, the lower half of the room took shape: a broad expanse with stools and a workbench, all carved from bone, near the wall where I sat. A threshold carved with chevrons and, beyond that, a passageway. Then more light and air. The passage bordered something like sky, though the light was strangely taut, like sunbeams strung on a bow.

I took another sip of the water. Built my strength to move, to rush for the passageway, to shout at Wik. To leave here.

With the sound of swishing robes, two more pairs of gray feet came into view. I struggled to sit straighter, my back and leg muscles protesting each shift in position.

“Kirit, you have broken such Laws.” The new voice belonged to another man. It was a smooth voice, the kind Ezarit had always told me to be careful about when trading. The kind of voice that lulled listeners before it struck them down.

This Singer listed my crimes. I could almost hear the songs that accompanied each broken Law: Bethalial. Trespass. Treason. War. I startled at the last. That had not been tied to my wrist.

“Did you think breaching the walls of the Spire was not War? You could be called a traitor to the city.” His voice was even, soft. Mellifluous. My skin crawled. Beneath the smooth tones, I heard darker notes.

I looked up, trying to meet his eyes. His face was shadowed. The light behind him hurt. “All I wanted…,” I began. My voice rattled.

“You wanted to fly the city. To be a trader, like your mother.”

Yes. He was so very right, but I wouldn’t let him win the point.

“Better than her.”

The Singer sat on a stool, his knees level with my eyes. Wik and the other gray-robed figure remained standing on either side of him.

“Ah, but you had bad luck, and then the wingtest went so poorly.”

“That was his doing,” I said, lifting a shaking arm to point at Wik.

Wik didn’t move. The Singer continued as if I hadn’t spoken. His hands, resting on his knees, were silvered with tattoos.

“All traders want to be important. They all look for an edge to make them faster, better than their competition. Your mother is no exception. She fought to gain her edge. How would you be better than her?”

I could not answer that.

He continued, his voice rising and falling. “The best traders help the city. There are songs in their honor. Your mother’s run, bringing together the medicines for the southeast? That is already sung in many towers.”

Already. I’d been trapped in the Spire’s walls for many days, then.

The Singer leaned forward so I could meet his eyes without tilting my head up. I could see the silver marks on his cheeks and forehead. His head was bald, and tattoos curved above his brow. Some symbols I recognized: knife, arrow, spear. Some I didn’t understand at all.

“The towers know her wings on sight. You want that. She flies everywhere without fear. You want that too.” He pressed his lips together: a dark line below his sharp nose. “But you are a Lawsbreaker. Your tower’s only use for you now is as an offering to the city. They will sing no songs for you.”

I shuddered. An offering. When I left Mondarath with Nat, I hadn’t thought beyond making the Singers give me my wingmark. Now everything was lost. I swallowed. “Is Nat here?”

The Singer looked me in the eyes, with more sorrow than I’d thought possible on a Singer’s stern face. “No.”

My heart dropped. His word turned my fear into truth. My oldest friend, fallen. His death as much my fault as his own. More so. He had not broken Fortify. I had. My mind went as empty as the sky beyond the city. It filled with a moaning that built as I remembered his screams and the skymouth attacking.

The feet to the Singer’s right stepped forward, and a hand shook my shoulder roughly. A young woman’s voice said, “Stop that. The sound hurts my ears.”

The Singer raised his hand. “Sellis, let her mourn her friend.” I was grateful to him, until his next words stifled my sobs to a hiccup.

“Wik is of the belief,” he said, “that you have suffered enough losses, Kirit.”

I looked up. Rumul smiled, slowly. Beside him, Wik shifted on his feet. “You love the city?”

The city’s towers. Its blue skies, the lights of Allmoons. The touch of the wind when I woke in the morning. The towers and the people in them. The songs of our past. I did love it.

“Yes.” The barest whisper.

“It needs you, Kirit. If you can grow beyond your anger and your losses, the city needs you.”

The girl, Sellis, pressed my shoulder again. “Listen to Rumul.”

The honey-voiced man’s name. Rumul. He stood up. Walked behind the workbench and took a seat there. Wik and Sellis remained near me.

“Why do you fight us in this?”

I shook my head. I could barely sit, much less fight.

Rumul lifted a thick skein of bone markers from the worktable and rubbed a chip between his fingers. For a moment I thought he held Naton’s chips, but these were new, uncarved. Their cord was red, not blue. “You were offered an opportunity to come to the Spire, which you resisted.”

I eyed Wik’s spit-marked foot. He had not said much since he’d pulled me from the oubliette.

“And yet you flew straight here on your own. Why?” He fingered another chip. The markers were thick. They were Lawsmarks like the ones on my wrist. “Because you knew we had something you wanted. And you thought you had something we wanted too.”

I swallowed and prepared to bargain. I did have something they wanted: me. My voice. I could help them with the skymouths. For my wings. For my life. I lifted my chin, took a determined breath.

Rumul raised his eyebrows. “You still think so?” I nodded, opening my mouth. Sellis jerked my arm and hushed me before I could argue.

“There is dissent in the Spire over letting you live. Wik has argued on your behalf. Has said you stopped a skymouth. Though you didn’t stop the one near the Spire.”

Wik stepped forward. “She had no time to do so.”

Sellis jumped in, saying, “She is headstrong, and she is a Lawsbreaker.” She raised my hand and shook my wrist so the marks clacked heavy.

A look from Rumul quieted her.

The room settled into silence, punctuated only by the clicking of the bone markers Rumul held.

“You are no longer a citizen, by Laws,” he finally said. “But I would like to make you a bargain.”

Sellis stifled a protest. I struggled to rise to my feet, succeeding only when Wik steadied me. A bargain.

“When a citizen challenges the Spire and fails,” Rumul said, his voice taking on a new depth, “they are thrown down. However, when a Singer, or a Singer-born, does so, they are allowed to live, if their injuries are not too great. Did you know this?”

I shook my head.

“What has Ezarit told you of your father, Kirit?”

A puzzling question. When I was slow to respond, Sellis elbowed me. I glared at her. “She’s told me nothing. He disappeared during a migration.”

Sellis snorted. “Your mother is a liar.”

I bristled. Though I could not argue the words, Sellis had no right to say them.

Rumul watched me glare at Sellis for a moment. “She is correct. Your father is in the Spire.”

“A prisoner?” I pictured the walls of the oubliette I’d just climbed from and felt panic tighten my stomach.

“Not at all,” Wik said. His voice was low and clear. He kept his eyes on Rumul’s desk, so his bird-of-prey profile was all I saw. “He is injured, but he lives among the Singers.”

Rumul produced a roll of silk from his pocket, wrapped around something heavy and something that clattered. He passed it to Wik, who handed it to me. I unwrapped the silk and gasped. My mother’s lenses — I’d thought them lost.

A skein of message chips was tangled in the straps.

“The lenses were his once. Your father’s,” Rumul said. “We are pleased to have them back.”

The lenses heavy in my hand, I stumbled with Wik’s assistance to the workbench and spread the chips out across the flat top. My hands shook, though the message was not addressed to me. Nor to anyone.

But I knew the hand that had marked the chips as well as I knew my own.

* * *

You will live, they tell me, Ezarit had written.

For a moment, I thought she’d sent this message to me. Then I saw how faded the skein was. How dust-filled the marks. This was a message as old as Naton’s had been.

I brushed a shaking finger across the chips. Felt the marks she’d made. Kept reading.

I traded you and your lies for my life. Your secret will remain with me, and the Spire will make me a fine bargain for my silence. Good-bye, love.

The bone grew slick, and the dust trapped in the marks dimpled from the tears I realized ran down my own cheeks. I did not brush them away.

This was not meant for me. She did not mean me.

I tried to hold on to that thought.

Sellis cleared her throat. She shifted under Rumul’s fierce gaze, but made no further sound.

So many secrets. So many things Ezarit had kept from me. I knew she’d challenged the Spire, but to learn our tier was a bribe for her silence? That my father—

Rumul’s words suddenly hit home. “My father is here? He is a Singer?”

Rumul nodded. “He was Singer-born. He ventured out of the Spire before he took his wings and was marked a Singer.”

“And when he disappeared? When he left my mother alone?”

The room went still.

Wik bowed his head, his hand warm on my arm. “He was Spire-born. It is tradition to return. In the end, he paid a heavy price.”

I sputtered. He left us. No price was great enough. “Does he know of me?”

Quiet built in the room. Outside, in the passageway, a voice called out a muted greeting, and another voice responded. A bird flapped its wings and passed into the taut light.

“He knows now,” Rumul said. “Ezarit hid you from us. You were seen so much with another woman, Elna, and her son.”

Nat. Oh, Nat.

Rumul continued, “Singers cannot possibly know everything. When Ezarit moved you uptower with her, we realized our error.” His voice was soft, sorrowful. As if he himself had sustained a loss. “Some Singers feel that if you had been taught properly, you would not be in the situation you are now.”

I turned to Wik. “You weren’t at Densira to escort my mother through the migration.”

He shook his head and began to answer. Rumul held up a hand, leaving the bone chips on the table. “You were a surprise to the Spire. We were curious about you.”

“But what would you have done? I am grown.”

“True.” He frowned. “If Ezarit’s plan was to keep you from us, she did a nearly perfect job. But she had something of greater value than she knew.”

Me. Breaker of Laws. Skymouth shouter. “My voice.” That was my bargaining tool.

“Untrained, your voice is merely awful,” Wik said. “But trained, you could truly help the city.”

I blinked. My mind, once empty as the sky, was a mess of wind-tossed thoughts and feelings. My father, alive, a sharp, sudden sunbeam. My mother’s betrayals, dark clouds. A small thought, that she’d been trying to keep me from the Singers, fluttered back and forth between the two, like a whipperling on a message run.

“I want to see my father,” I said, my fingers tight around the lenses.

Rumul shook his head. “He is unable to come uptower, and only Singers may descend below the novices’ levels.”

“You cannot be serious,” Sellis cut in. “You are truly considering this?”

Rumul stood behind his workbench. His stool fell over and clattered to the floor as he turned to face her. “You are a member of council now?” Sellis ducked her head. “You are not yet a Singer, Sellis. You are here as my ears. Have a care.”

I tried to understand the layers of this room. What Rumul decided was paramount. Wik seemed to be on my side, in a strange Singer way. And this Sellis? My ribs throbbed from her sharp elbow. What did I need to say to tip the balance? I thought hard, tried to remember all my mother’s lessons about bargaining. The arguments I had practiced within the walls of the Spire had been based on one desire: I wanted to live.

Rumul was trying to show me how I could live and still be a part of the city. Thanks to a father I’d never known. A Singer.

How did I feel about that? No time to hesitate, Kirit. No time to be afraid.

I tried to consider what Rumul stood to gain from taking me in. How far he’d go.

“What are you offering?” I rasped.

He smiled. “A chance to change your life.” The words hung in the air, sweet and tempting. He continued. “You can train as a Singer. You can learn to control your voice, and, with it, help the city. If you prove to us that your behavior is due to your lack of education, then we will reconsider your sentence. Do well enough, and you will join us.”

Rumul’s tattooed face gave me chills. His voice — I knew better than to trust it. My mind reached for clouds and sky, found only carved walls. Any chance was better than the prison I’d emerged from. Even this chance. I could never go back to the towers, to the way things were. But now I had another chance to stay alive.

“How could she possibly—” Sellis started. She slammed her mouth closed without finishing the sentence, before Rumul reacted.

“It will not be easy, the transition. You know less than a child. But”—he turned to his right and smiled again—“Wik has offered to try to train you.”

This man, who had denied me my wings. To be my trainer. I tensed in his grasp. Bit back a no.

Rumul continued, inscrutable. “And Sellis will be your novice guide.”

Two shocked faces now, mine and Sellis’s. Her mouth twitched. Rumul stared her down, then returned his gaze to me.

As I considered my new future, the part of me who’d grown up in the towers shouted against it. “If I cannot do this?”

“If you do not succeed,” Rumul said, “your fate is out of our hands. Your Laws, and those of your mother, will—”

“You cannot hurt her. I will not do this if you hurt her.” The words were out of my mouth, fierce and angry, before I could think. Yes, I was angry at Ezarit. But that was my fight with her, not theirs. She was my mother.

Rumul put both hands on his workbench and leaned towards me. His scalp gleamed in the light, and his breath was tart with the scent of a recently eaten apple. My stomach growled, unbidden. His wind-chafed face and his tattoos marked his long experience at the top of the Spire. “I will not battle with you, Kirit. You must decide on this life.”

I held his gaze. Tried to stay standing by myself, even as my knees wobbled. His dark brown eyes hardened to black.

Behind me, Sellis whispered, “If she isn’t leaping at it, she does not deserve the choice.”

I turned, slowly, and looked at her for the first time. She was taller than me, with wind-chapped cheeks and lips. Her gray robe framed a face that was all edges: sharp chin, cheekbones, a point in her hairline made sharper by the tight pull of her dark braids. Her eyes a sky blue that was rare in the towers. She lifted her chin higher and held my gaze, silently.

Wik cleared his throat. “You cannot become the best of the Singers now. You are too old.” I dropped Sellis’s gaze and turned to face him. “But you can fly with us. Live the life you should have had, with proper training. You will see the city in a whole new way with us. You will help your people rise. And you will learn to manage your voice.”

“You did not tell me these things when you tried to take me from Densira.”

He blinked and tilted his head. “We cannot speak freely of this outside the Spire.”

I looked back to Rumul, who raised his eyebrows. Waiting.

Wik continued, “You may not have the training, Kirit, but you have something the Singers need. With us, you can become something more important than a trader.”

I pictured myself among the Singers, chasing skymouths from the sky. Helping bridge the towers and keep the city together. I imagined myself returning to Densira on gray wings. Behind me, Sellis sputtered, but Rumul’s gaze held her silent.

I closed my eyes. If I said no, I would be Kirit Lawsbreaker. Kirit Notower. What did I have left?

Nat, I thought, I will not forget you. Nor Elna. I will find your answers inside the Spire, somehow. I will see you again, Ezarit. I will make you proud despite yourself. I will make you miss me.

When I was ready, I opened my eyes. Rumul watched me closely. He’d straightened and now held both hands palms up over the workbench. Waiting in one hand was the red skein of blank Lawsmarkers. In the other, a larger bone tablet marked with the Spire’s symbol.

I extended my hand through the air between us and placed it over the tablet. Wik smiled a thin, wary smile. Sellis gathered her robes and swept from the room. I could hear her shout an order that echoed through the Spire.

When Rumul tucked the chips back into his robe and pulled out a sharp bone knife, I knew there was no changing my mind. I took the knife and carved my name mark on the tablet, a thin scratch that barely showed.

Sellis returned with a pile of fabric, holding up gray robes banded with bright blue to replace the remains of my ragged clothing. They looked too small for me, but also whole and warm. A younger Singer brought a washing bowl. Sellis handed me a small cake made of grains, honey, and bird fat. It tasted like sunshine might.

The three of them waited as I swallowed my meal. Then I lifted the bone knife again. I pierced my thumb and squeezed the wound hard. A drop of my blood fell on the tablet. It darkened my mark and the Spire’s symbol, making both visible.

I was theirs, and they were mine. I was reborn into the Spire.

12. ACOLYTE

Sellis exited Rumul’s alcove again without a word, dragging me behind her. She sped through the tier so quickly I gained only a blurred impression of the more ornate wall carvings, their edges shadowed by the sunlight pouring through the tower’s apex. We came to a ladder cut into the thick outer wall and spines of the Spire.

“You’d best keep up on your own,” she said as she turned to descend. “I won’t be slowed down. I challenge for Singers’ wings this year.”

My aching feet strained to support me as I stumbled after her. The treads had barely enough space for a foot. My blisters and cuts made each step painful; my strained muscles too. I drew breath and tried to look strong. Capable.

“I already passed my wingtest,” I reassured her, while attempting to smile over my shoulder.

She paused on the ladder and looked up at me, flipping her dark braids off her shoulders, digging her close-set gaze right into mine. “That means nothing here. Nothing.”

I began to respond, but she’d descended again, and my fingers had started to slip. I clutched the slim carved rungs and scrambled after her.

We passed tier after tier, until I whimpered through my teeth each time my feet touched a new rung. On each tier, I heard the swish of robes as people passed, the murmur of conversations, and the sound of wind swirling nearby. On one floor, several voices were raised in song: tenors and altos. Their melody echoed off the wall where we climbed.

On another, lower tier, a group of children scrubbed the floor near the ladder. Two whispered in the shadows, their brushes dripping beside them. As Sellis passed, she hissed at them to get back to work. They stared for a moment longer, steel-blue eyes peering from identical faces, their robes gray with one blue stripe like mine. Then they scrambled back to the group just as an older Singer rounded a curve.

Sellis’s gray silk robes had three stripes of blue at the hem. The lowest stripe’s edge, undone and fraying, dragged on the risers. I tripped on it twice, then caught myself. Judging by its color and fit, my new clothing must have been intended for a much younger novice. How would I earn my stripes? How would I begin to keep up with Sellis?

She stopped so suddenly on the next tier that I nearly put my foot on her head. Sellis hissed and grabbed my ankle, threatening to topple me. “You will pay attention!”

“I assure you I am trying.”

“You are worse than a fledge!”

I could not argue that. Everything within the Spire struck me as strange, as if a tower like Densira had been turned inside out. My eyes ached for sky with each tier we passed; my ears missed the comforting sounds of families arguing, neighbors haggling, babies crying. For a group named Singers, their home was almost as quiet as the sky. They walked it as if they were listening for messages on the wind.

Sellis let go of me, but the suddenness of my change in situation kept me pinned to the wall. No longer trapped in Rumul’s prison, but still inside the Spire. I’d given up the sky and the towers in exchange for a life enclosed on all sides by the Spire’s bone walls.

Nat might have known what to do; I did not.

“Breathe,” Sellis said, no tinge of mercy to her voice. “I won’t carry you if you faint.”

I inhaled. I would find a way to live in this new place.

We left the ladders and paced half the circumference of the tier. Other girls who seemed to be the same age as Sellis, or older, greeted her as she passed. They stared at me. I felt the pit’s grime on my skin, the dried blood on my hands. The way my arms and legs showed beneath the too-small novice robe. I watched my feet, trying not to trip and further set myself apart.

To our left, the passageway beyond the alcoves and classrooms ran to a sudden drop. The Spire’s center was a void. Wind whistled as it rose past each tier, up and down the hollow of the Spire.

“To fall into the Gyre,” Sellis said, watching me with a level of calm that made my skin crawl, “is to fall forever. You should be careful.”

I craned my neck to look past her and saw galleries spaced around the Gyre, carved into the tower’s spines. Places to sit while watching a challenge, perhaps. Sellis dragged me on.

She turned suddenly, into a small alcove barely big enough for one person to sleep in. “Here are my quarters.” I hoped mine were close by. I could barely stand.

She glared at me again. “You will sleep here.” She pointed to the floor in front of her alcove. “They’ve made you my charge. I name you my acolyte. I do this for Rumul, and so you will do this for me. What I need, you get. What I drop, you pick up. Understand?” Her voice was brisk, businesslike. She didn’t care how I answered.

“Rising above your tier again, Sellis?” A boy peered around the corner. “You can’t take an acolyte until you are a Singer.”

“Special case,” Sellis said. “She is just now committed to the Spire.”

The boy whistled low and came closer, looking at me. “You came from outside?”

I saw no use in pretending otherwise. “I did.”

“Lurai,” Sellis said, “you aren’t even supposed to be on this tier. Go away.”

Lurai. Lurai. The name was so familiar. Beliak’s lost brother, yes.

As I remembered, he turned to leave.

“Did you come from Viit? I think I flew wingtest with your brother,” I said, hoping I could keep him here another few moments. The last thing I wanted was to be left alone with Sellis.

Lurai’s brow furrowed, and he smiled, bemused. “I don’t know any brothers. I am Spire, since I was young.” And he started to turn away again, but stopped. “What are the towers like? What is your name?”

“Her name is Kirit Spire, and she is not going to fill your head with boring tower talk, Lurai. She has work to do here.” Sellis gave him a gentle shove and then, from somewhere within her alcove, handed me a bucket filled with stink. “Get rid of that, acolyte. Bring the bucket back, cleaned. In the morning, I will have mending for you to do.”

I waited for her to tell me where to take the bucket. To point me towards the pouring points that every tower in the city had. But she turned her back to me, lay down on her sleeping pad with a sigh, and appeared to fall asleep with no further trouble.

Lurai had disappeared. I stood alone in the darkening tier with a bucket and orders, but no way to fulfill them. I heard rustling around me and knew that other occupants of the tier were peering out of their alcoves to see what I would do.

I considered taking the bucket and dumping it on Sellis, but this would have been a bad way to start my new life.

“Pssst.”

The whisper came from near the edge of the Gyre. I shambled over, feet aching, cautious of traps.

“We’ll show you.” The whisper again, but no body to go with it. “Over here. By the edge.”

Now I saw them. The blue-eyed imps from several tiers up. Crouched in the gallery, watching.

“Won’t you get in trouble?”

They shook their heads. Twins. Rare enough in the city. I couldn’t imagine a parent giving both children to the Spire. They must have been orphans. The Singers took in orphans.

“I’m Moc,” one of the twins said. “She’s Ciel.”

“Kirit,” I said. “Kirit … Spire.” My voice trembled on the last word.

“We’re all Spire. Shouldn’t matter when you got here,” Ciel piped up with her high child’s voice. A lock of brass-colored hair hung over her eye. The rest was neatly braided.

“But we were born here,” Moc added. So much for my theory. “So was Sellis. She thinks it does matter. That’s why she thinks she’s so much better than you.”

I blinked. That was good to know.

Moc took my hand and led me to a double rope. “Pull on that.”

I did, for what seemed like ages. My hands throbbed as the rope rubbed them rawer still. Finally a large bin appeared, and I poured Sellis’s bucket into it. The smell made me gag. When I was done, Ciel helped me pull on the other side of the rope until there was resistance, then a tug.

“Where does it go?” I asked through a yawn.

“Down.” Ciel shrugged. “Don’t the towers?”

“Sort of. The towers are open. Trash and stink are thrown down.”

Ciel wrinkled her nose. “Must get bad down low.”

I frowned. It did.

Moc listened, rapt.

“We keep most things, though,” I added. “Guano, for the farms. And for seed finding. Rinds and gristle, to feed the worms that make the dirt.”

Moc’s eyes grew bigger than I’d thought possible. “We get most of our food from the towers.”

That was good to know too. If food came in, perhaps messages could go out.

The children tugged at my robe and showed me where the scourweed grew. I almost laughed. Outside the Spire, scourweed was reserved for making the towers grow. Marked as special. Inside the Spire, it wasn’t as hard to use it for cleaning filth.

Moc and Ciel kept up a happy chatter while I cleaned Sellis’s bucket. They showed no signs of leaving. Despite how tired I was, I loathed the thought of returning to the silence of Sellis’s alcove. Ciel and Moc’s curiosity about me woke my curiosity in turn.

We walked the tier right around, talking, and they pointed up and down the Spire to the classrooms, the communal kitchens, and the alcoves.

“The novice alcoves are here and on the lower floors, but the Singers”—Moc sighed—“they’re up at the top. With the council on the highest floors.”

“Moc, shhh,” Ciel said cautiously. “We should go now.”

We’d circled back to Sellis’s alcove. This one tier was much bigger than any on Densira, and the number of people it held stunned me. I pulled off my outer robe, piled it on the floor, and collapsed onto it.

As tired as I was, with the circle of the Spire’s apex brightening with moon, I still could not stop thinking. Did Ezarit already know? Had they given her my tablet? Would she tell Elna? Did they know what had happened to Nat?

Our night flight seemed like a dream, something that had happened to someone else.

Would I be allowed to leave the Spire ever again?

The questions rolled on. My mind gnawed at them, giving me no answers.

In what seemed like mere moments, Sellis nudged me awake with her foot. A new day had begun. I rose from my improvised bed, straightened my robes around me, and went to tend to her needs.

* * *

The smell of apples steamed in spices told me where the novices took their meals. My stomach growled, but my heart sank. Ezarit cooked those too.

“They are my favorite,” a voice said near the entrance. Wik. Several children seated nearby whispered and pointed. A Singer in the room must have been rare.

Sellis looked at him. “She cannot possibly keep up. She knows nothing about the city. Nothing about flying.”

He nodded. “And you and I will help her discover that.”

I opened my mouth to protest. I knew as much as anyone.

Wik handed me three smooth bone bowls from a woven basket. “Get us some food. Sellis and I must speak.”

When I returned, my stomach growling at the contents of the bowls, they’d claimed low stools. Their heads were bent together. I balked at joining them.

But Wik noticed my glance and waved a hand in welcome. “You have no reason to fear me, Kirit. In fact, we have much to talk about.”

I had yet to say anything, or to taste the apples, though sky knew I wanted them. He gestured to the bowl. Finally, he speared some on a fork and passed it to me. “Eat. You need your strength. Today will test you.”

For what?

Wik filled me in about “for what” very quickly while Sellis looked on with a sour expression. “You will begin your education. I am certain you will progress quickly and rise to the level of your peers before you know it.”

Sellis snorted.

What did that mean? I took the smallest bite of apple. Taste filled my mouth, the cinnamon rippling over my gums and making me want to eat the whole bowlful. I watched the Singer. Wondered what the battles were that had given him his marks.

He saw me looking. Pointed to his cheek. To a spiral inside a circle. “My first turn in the Gyre,” he said. “A young man challenged for tier. I was sent to fight him.”

I swallowed. This was how Wik took his Singer wings. My mother must have made a similar challenge and won. Not so, the young man Wik had fought.

“Is tier such a hard thing for the city to give?”

“You see?” Sellis threw up her hands in protest at my ignorance.

“Sometimes,” Wik said. He smiled, a contrast to Sellis’s glare. He didn’t elaborate.

Instead, he pointed again, to the pattern that wound around his left eye and over the breadth of his forehead. The mark, another Gyre fight won. “This one made me a member of the council. I fought an old Singer, Mariti, into retirement.” He saw my look. “It is our way. You must be willing to sacrifice everything for what you believe, Kirit.”

“Willing to kill for it?”

“Mariti did not die. He conceded. He still serves the city as a windbeater.”

Concession? I hadn’t known that was possible in the Spire.

“It is not a dishonor, among the Singers. Windbeater is a powerful role in the Spire.”

Powerful as compared to what? Trading? Perhaps.

Sellis smacked the edge of her bowl with her hand. “When Singers get old or hurt, they have a place to go. They don’t starve. They’re not left out to die. We’re not monsters.” Her expression finished the sentence: all these things happened in the towers.

Was it the truth? I saw in her face that she believed it was. She turned away quickly so I couldn’t read anything more into her expression. I stored that knowledge for later consideration as I squinted at a small pattern by Wik’s earlobe. A knife. I explored his face with my eyes. A patch near his chin had been left unmarked. A small stretch of skin with no scrawls.

“I wished to mark an excursion there,” he said. “But I took my wings instead.”

My lips parted. “An excursion?”

“Some leave the Spire,” Sellis growled, turning back towards us, “for the towers. I can’t believe you don’t know this. Tower folk are so—”

Wik cut her off with a look. He flexed his hand on his knee. Took a breath. Sellis’s dissent seemed to be getting to him too.

Between bites, I tried to figure out what made excursion so special. Singers left the Spire all the time. The words escaped before I even realized I’d spoken.

Wik laughed. “Before they take their wings, before they are marked with tattoos, some Singers are allowed a special type of excursion. Especially the Spire-born. So we can understand the towers. Just as only a few are given to enclosure — the deep communication with the city that lets us know its needs.” He said this as if the words should make sense to me.

At my confusion, Sellis gave an exaggerated sigh. “We should enroll her in the nests. With the infants.” She faced me. “You need years of training to become a proper Singer. Years. You can’t glide in here and—”

Around us, other novices watched. The room had fallen very quiet.

At a look from Wik, Sellis cleared her throat and held the dirty bowls towards me. She tilted her head and gestured with her chin. Move, acolyte. I found scourweed piled in a corner and scrubbed the bowls until they were no longer sticky and my hands were cut and bleeding again.

When I finished, I rejoined them.

Wik stood. “Let’s walk.” He folded his hands behind his back and paced away. Sellis and I hurried to catch him.

“Tell me about excursion and enclosure.” If I was to learn, I’d need to get started somewhere.

Sellis said, “Enclosure is for those who can listen to the sounds of the city.”

“When it roars?” I shuddered, thinking about those days. And what happened after.

She stared like I’d said the most dense thing possible. “The city speaks all the time. And we speak to it. The Singers who are enclosed tell us what the city wants. What it dreams for itself.”

I realized that the pocket of bone where I’d been trapped until yesterday was not only my prison. The carvings were too beautiful. Too reverential. That was an enclosure.

“Are there many who do this?”

Sellis shivered. “Yes. But not forever. They take shifts.”

“And excursion?”

Wik blushed, confusing me. “Before we take a seat on the council, most Singers are permitted some time abroad. To ensure we do not become too disconnected with our cousins in the rest of the city.”

I raised my eyebrows. “To live among the citizens. In the towers.”

He nodded.

“In secret?”

Wik stilled, like a hunting bird. He watched me as his lips parted in the briefest possible, most silent response, a breath of a word. “Sometimes.”

The thought of Singers prowling invisibly among us made me shiver. I did not know why. It felt safer to think of Singers as gray-robed guardians.

I stayed silent while Wik fidgeted with fuzz on his robe. He wanted to tell me more — this controlled, powerful young man who’d ruined my life wanted to say things to me, I could feel it. But what? And why?

I remembered Ezarit talking about conversations as ways to trade—“They want to share with you. You need to find the right question that gets them to share more than they intend.”

Fine. I mulled the questions I had. I thought about what Wik had already told me. I looked at him and waited until the right question rose to the surface of my mind.

Before it had a chance to do so, Sellis spoke. Her voice was scornful. “Your father nearly didn’t return from his excursion. Imagine. Falling for the towers.”

“It happens, Sellis.” Wik cut her off.

That was interesting. “When can I meet him?”

Sellis snorted. “You would need your wings.”

The look in Wik’s eyes said I must ask no more. I considered shifting the discussion to Naton instead. At least I could finish Nat’s journey for him. But Wik had a question for me instead.

“Do you know why we need you, Kirit?”

I shook my head. “But if I must enclose myself to listen to the city, I am certain I will lose my mind. That isn’t it, is it?”

For once, Sellis was silent. Her face betrayed her: this was something she did not know. She looked to Wik, hoping to learn too.

Wik continued to pace the tier, the two of us hustling to keep up with him. “Several shouters are already too old to fly. We need your voice,” he began.

Sellis snorted again.

“You need training, a great deal of it. This is a skill that you can learn quickly, I hope. Few enough have this ability, and many cannot learn it.”

That shut Sellis up.

She tilted her head suddenly, as if she’d heard something I could not. “Rumul requires me.”

Robes swishing behind her, she was gone without another word.

Wik remained. He slowed his pace.

“She does not like me,” I said.

Wik nodded in agreement.

“You and Sellis are not friends either,” I ventured again. He didn’t react. “Were you born in the Spire too?”

He chuckled. “I was. My mother serves on the council.”

“And Rumul?”

“He respects my opinion, and my mother’s. She saw you fly at wingtest. She argued your case.”

“The woman with the silver patch of hair?”

Wik gave me a look, but didn’t continue. I tried a different line of questioning. “What happened to my father?”

Wik cleared his throat, but kept quiet. His discipline, especially with what he said and did not say, was clearly well practiced. But without his saying another word, I knew. I knew everything and still nothing at all.

“He didn’t want to give up Ezarit.”

“It nearly cost him everything to return to the Spire. He was enclosed until he could hear the city again. Then he had to fight a challenger in the Gyre, and he was gravely wounded.” Wik increased his pace, until he walked ahead of me.

Could a Singer fall in love? That was not the right question to ask, not now. I caught up to him.

“Why didn’t they throw him down?” Suddenly I wanted to know everything.

“Why? Because his challenger spared him. And he is useful. Much like you.”

“He was spared and is a windbeater? He’s like the Singer you challenged? Mariti?”

Wik answered slowly. “I cannot discuss it further.” Some sound I could not hear caught his ears. “Time for your class.” He was obviously relieved.

Wik was a puzzle. We walked the novice tier, drawing the attention and whispers of younger students. What to make of him?

“Singers and their secrets and machinations, Wik. How do you bear it?”

He stopped and looked at me. “We.”

I was suddenly aware of my arms and legs sticking far beyond the sleeves and hem of my robe. My skin went goose pimpled. “We. How do we bear it?”

He pointed to a large alcove. We’d walked halfway around the tier. “It is our sacrifice for the city. We will talk later,” he added before he turned and headed towards the ladders.

A Magister standing inside the alcove watched me, her eyebrows raised. I looked past her to the youngest of the novices, all wearing robes like mine. They stared back at me. One near the back squelched a giggle: Ciel.

* * *

I ducked into the alcove, where the tallest student’s head was level with my waist. The room was dim compared to those above, but still ornately carved. Silk cushions lined the floor, and bone benches banked the outer wall.

The Magister spoke slowly, as if I might not comprehend. “Our new novice. You will sit and learn the songs as best you can at your…” She paused and looked down her nose at me. “Age.”

She seemed only a few years older than me. Her skin did not show the wind wear that Rumul’s did.

“I know the songs, Magister.” I spoke quietly, hoping to gain a stay, or a quick escape.

“Silence,” she said, and her words sounded like a thunderclap in the hush of the Spire.

I thought of my success with Laws and City at the wingtest and sputtered. I knew everything the city had required of me. Wik must have lied to the Spire as well, in order to ruin my test. I would show them. I jutted my chin higher and waited, standing, while the rest of the class found seats on bone benches and on the floor.

The Magister frowned. “Very well. Sing for us. Show us what you know.”

Fine. I would. I thought of what to sing. A song to show I knew Laws? A history?

The only thing that came to mind was The Rise. A children’s song. I could not sing that here. I beat the idea back and clutched at Laws. At anything. No words came.

Eventually, as children stared and whispered, I gave up and began The Rise.

“The clouds paled as we wound up and up,” I sang, ignoring the gasps. Good, let them know me and my terrible voice.

“The city rises on wings of Singer

and Trader and Crafter,

Rises to sun and wind, all together,

Never looking down.”

As I began the second verse, the Magister waved at me. “Stop. You are worse than I thought. And with our most treasured song.”

The class of children had collapsed around me in fits of silent laughter. My face flushed red. What had I done wrong? My voice. They were laughing at my voice. I was fierce when I began; now I was only ashamed.

“Moc.” The Magister crooked her finger. From behind a taller boy, Moc peered out with an apologetic look at me. “Lead your flightmates, please.”

Moc’s voice was a tremulous quaver, but his friends joined in, and the sound of young voices filled the room. Theirs was a boisterous retelling of The Rise — but not a version I’d ever heard before. This Rise told of danger, of dying, and of tower fighting tower. This Rise was not beautiful. It put music and memory to fear bred of long privations. It was a warning, wrapped in familiar notes.

In the Spire, even the songs were different.

Nat would have loved to know about this. As for me, I realized Sellis was right: I was worse than a fledge. If I was to get my wings back, I would need to learn fast.

By the time we broke for the evening meal, I had committed several verses to memory. My stomach growled as we walked to the common dining hall. Moc and Ciel took long strides on each side of me.

“We’ll help you remember,” Ciel said. “We’ll practice with you.”

“Don’t you sleep?”

Moc shook his head and grinned. “We learn a lot when everyone’s sleeping.”

And they did help me — on that day, and on many days after.

In the dining alcove, the twins seemed to know everyone. They filled their bowls with the day’s meal — peas, or potatoes, or spiced bird — and began chattering with other novices before they’d set their meals down on the long bone tables. I was swept up in their conversations and barely needed to speak myself. Often, I found that we sat near Sellis, who was surly but not outwardly rude.

The children of the Spire swirled around us, eating, talking with both hands and mouths full. They were much like children of any tower. And yet they knew things the rest of the city did not. I wished for the first time that I could have grown up here, that I’d been taught what had really happened, instead of a merely a pretty song filled with lies about the city I loved. There was power in the knowing.

* * *

The moon waned and filled, then waned again. I mended Sellis’s robes, badly at first, then better. Cleaned buckets and her cell.

My throat went raw from singing with the children.

Many evenings, Wik came to test my shouts and to instruct me further.

“There aren’t many of us,” he said.

I caught his meaning. “You are a skymouth shouter, too.”

“Yes, but not naturally. I had to train, and I’m still never certain—” He swallowed before continuing. “Whether it is enough to stop the next one. It has been, so far. I am lucky.”

He taught me to aim my voice, by standing across the Gyre until I could shout at him in any wind. He made me do breathing exercises to strengthen my diaphragm and lengthen my shouts. “So you don’t black out again,” he said.

He frustrated me with his criticisms. “You are not trying hard enough. Your voice doesn’t have the right timbre, as it did at Densira. You must try harder.”

The harder I tried, the more I was unable to recall what shouting at the skymouth had sounded like, or felt like, and the more I was convinced that I was unable to manage it on demand. What good was I to the Singers if I could not control my voice?

“It’s no good, Wik.” My voice rasped from the exercises.

“We will find another way,” he said. “I must ask the council for permission.” He refused to elaborate.

Meantime, we walked the Spire and practiced. Wik and Sellis and I. For Sellis lurked these lessons, and sometimes tried to accomplish the same types of shouts that Wik and I were practicing. Her frustration built when Wik shook his head at her attempts, but she kept trying.

“Most Singers can’t, Sellis,” he said. “It’s all right to not be perfect at something.”

“There are many things I haven’t perfected — yet,” she said, frowning.

The lower tiers we walked through were as richly carved with city and Singer history as the oubliette had been carved with fears and monsters. As we walked, I noticed that at least one place — sometimes less than two hands wide — on each Spire tier had been left bare. We passed Singers paused by those walls, hands laid gently against those uncarved stretches of bone. Their eyes closed as if listening. I wished to understand what they heard, but when I reached out to a wall, Sellis swatted at my hand. “You may not. Not yet.”

On the other side of the passage, beyond the steep drop, Singers and older novices flew the Gyre’s swirling winds.

I wanted to regain my wings so that I might fly with them.

Sellis saw me watching. “Not yet.” She found me more carvings to study. “Soon,” Sellis encouraged me as she rousted me from the floor to clean her bucket and her bowl. “Soon,” the Magister said as I scrubbed the carvings on the upper tiers clean of grime. “Soon,” Wik promised, before asking me to shout for three minutes; my voice turned to gravel.

But I flew the Gyre in my dreams, before the galleries, up to the council balcony, and out through the apex into the blue sky.

And I learned to listen to the Spire in other ways, and through the Spire, the city.

I heard the city’s voice in the bone floors, through my feet as I walked, my knees as I scrubbed. I heard its rumbles and creaks, its sighs. I learned to speak to it in secret.

As I slowly learned, I was punished for nearly everything. For getting words wrong. For annoying Sellis. For being in the wrong place when a Singer wanted me somewhere else. I could not say how many infractions, but the punishment was always the same: not bone chips to weigh me down, but more cleaning and carving. My nose was filled with bone dust, and I grew tired beyond measure of being handed the carving tools. My hands thickened with calluses and scars from tracing patterns charcoaled on the walls for me by Sellis, the Magisters, Wik, and seemingly anyone else passing by.

And yet, I learned. Despite everything. Moc and Ciel knelt by me and sang with me while I gouged at the walls or scrubbed the floor. I watched Singers come and go on powerful wings and listened to the songs they sang to each other, citing challenges won long ago in order to support arguments today.

I pricked my ears for any mention of the windbeaters.

When the full moon showed through the top of the tower, the entire Spire stopped to sing The Rise. Sound swept me up in the history. The bravery. The real Rise. I mouthed the words I knew now, still hesitant to sing with them.

I memorized facts about the towers: how high they were, how many had troubled their neighbors. I listened as Magisters discussed balance in the city and how to keep towers from cracking, like Lith. An artifex came to show our class how bridges helped strengthen the towers. With the young ones, I counted the toll of the skymouth attacks.

We had our own songs in the Spire: legends, epics, and heroes the towers could never know about. “Corwitt Takes the Nest of Thieves,” “The Plunge of the Singer,” “The First Appeasement.” Through them, I began to understand more of the bone towers on which we lived.

I had not seen Rumul since my release from the oubliette.

The Spire remained quiet, save for the songs and the city’s everyday sounds.

And then the day came when I stood before the classes and sang The Rise again, and they sang it back. The Magisters questioned me about the populations of Grigrit, Varu, and others, and I knew the answers without thinking. I knew them all. The sun passed beyond the tower, and the oil lamps came out. My examination continued. Did I know the load-bearing weight of new bone? What was the angle at which a Singer must glide when carrying a child? An adult?

I had memorized the songs, understood the reasons for the answers. I knew so much more now.

The Magister presented me with a gray robe bearing two blue stripes. A robe that fit me.

Sellis brought me a pair of wings. Worn ones, certainly, and not the glorious Singer wings I’d admired, but something to practice in.

My voice, too, had strengthened. Wik seemed pleased.

When I returned to Sellis’s tier one night, a small, perfect apple rested atop the folded bedding outside the alcove. I munched the whole thing, sour core and all.

The next morning, Sellis woke me early, saying, “Now I will show you how to fly.”

“I know how to fly,” I protested.

“You still don’t know everything,” she said. But she smiled behind her stern words.

She cleared her own bucket that morning. We tightened each other’s wingstraps; ate bowls of boiled buckwheat sweetened with honey together in the dining alcove. Then she showed me how little I knew.

As we exited the alcove and walked the passage outside, still chewing our last mouthfuls, she grabbed fistfuls of my new robe and pushed me over the balcony, headfirst.

In my panic, my kicking legs flipped me right side up. My hands reached out, grasped air, then silk.

In the confines of the Gyre, I took command of my wings and let them unfurl, praying that I would have time to jam my fingers in the grips. A gust caught and spun me. I tried to hold down my breakfast. My fingers locked around the grips, and I struggled to turn before I hit the opposite wall and dashed myself to pieces.

But I did not turn. And I did not hit the wall.

A drumbeat from deep down in the Spire began as my wings filled with a strong gust from below. My plunge ceased abruptly. An updraft carried me, though a moment before, the Gyre had held only the most meager of breezes.

“What is this?” I whispered.

Sellis appeared beside me, smiling. “It is the Gyre, Kirit. Learn to fly here, and you will own the city.”

Sellis pointed. I ducked my head to look and saw the windbeaters at work far below. At first I thought they were using sheets of silk, similar to those sometimes used in wingfights, that caught and bent the wind. But their tools were complicated by frames, sleeves, and battens. I gasped. The windbeaters wore giant wings over their arms. They worked in rhythm to the drums, channeling the wind through the tunnel so that it lifted and planed.

“Singers who can no longer fly,” Sellis explained as we flew tip to tip, “are still a part of the Spire.”

The wind coming up through the center of the Spire smelled of must and bone and something thick and caustic. Wik had said my father was a windbeater. Perhaps he worked the Gyre below me now. Did he know I flew above? I had my wings now. Perhaps now I would be allowed to go below and speak to him.

More windbeaters gathered, using their misshapen wings to channel the air. A grinding sound floated up to us.

“They are opening the gates,” Sellis said. “To build a stronger vortex — to welcome you.”

The gates. Like the one I had opened in the walls so many days ago.

I cringed, even as the breeze quickened. The gates’ opening made me worry about skymouths. I tucked my legs in my footsling and wished for my lenses.

“Relax,” Sellis said, not understanding my fear. “Singers have been doing this forever.”

“It’s true,” Ciel said, leaning out from a gallery. She grinned, her tiny face framed by a circle of sky and sun, far above. Faces peered over the balconies, amused. She laughed at my surprise. “This is nothing. Wait until your first fight. If it’s not exciting enough, the windbeaters have rot gas and fire to speed things up.”

“Ciel!” Sellis said. “Let her learn for herself.”

I glided the Gyre in a circle and watched the windbeaters. Their oversized wings swept and dipped. The winds rose, and I could feel the pressure change in my ears.

Sellis modeled a turn, then a slow dive. I followed her, wobbling. The new wings and my time away from the wind had cost me skill and confidence.

Gyre winds mimicked the best gusts of the open sky, made more complex by the shape of the tower and its galleries. I discovered I could tack quicker, and that the breezes became muddled near the walkways.

Sellis called sharp instructions to tighten the curve of my wings, to stretch the footsling with my ankles, to look up, not down.

“You’ll need to learn to fly with locked wings,” she said. “For the challenges. Can’t hold a knife and grips both.”

“Have there never been skymouths in the Gyre?” I finally asked, as I felt more comfortable in my glides.

My companion did not answer. The drumbeats slowed and we sank to our tier and furled our wings. Ciel ran to a ladder, late for class downtower. I sighed and looked out into the Gyre. “That was amazing.”

Sellis tucked her wings away. “Flying the Gyre is for training. We shouldn’t enjoy it.”

I composed myself, but Sellis’s face broke into a glowing smile. The first I’d seen from her. “But I love it anyway.” She reached to help me furl the complex angles of my training wings. “Singer wings have more detail. You need to care for them, or they’ll wear wrong. Become dangerous.”

“I will.”

“When I first became an acolyte, learning to fight in the Gyre was my reward for being quick. I had excellent sparring partners—” she began, then stopped. Smiled shyly, her head tilted, listening. I heard nothing. “I am summoned away.”

I had so many questions, but exhaustion took me before she returned.

In the morning I woke to find Sellis still not back, and Singers rushing past our alcove. A bone horn sounded. First Moc, then Ciel ran past. “Quickly!” they said, pulling me upright.

I was barely on my feet when the city roared loud enough to knock me back down.

13. SACRIFICE

The Spire shook with sound. What had begun as a low moan far off built quickly, like a fast-moving squall, into a blistering roar, and did not lessen. Soon, the storm of sound battered my skin with its force, emanating from the Spire’s very walls.

The birds roosting on the ledges beyond our alcove all rose and scattered into the Gyre and out through the apex with a clapping of wings that shook dust loose everywhere. The Spire’s enclosure amplified the city’s roar. Everyone within, at least who I could see, was affected by the sound. Students rushed by with their hands over their ears. A Singer fell to his knees.

As suddenly as it began, the sound moved up and out past the top of the Spire and faded away.

When they could stand again, the Singers whispered to one another in worried tones.

A bone horn sounded atop the Spire, and I heard distant klaxons sound in the city.

“Moc,” I whispered, “what just happened?”

Already on his way to the ladders, Moc spun on his soft foot wraps. “We’ve got to get up top to watch!”

I must have looked confused, because he grabbed my arm and began to pull. “This is a big one. The Singers will tell the Magisters and the city leaders what the city wants at Conclave. It’s going to be crowded up there.”

All the air went from my lungs. Conclave. Elna had said that when the Singers took Naton, it was for a Conclave. It had been a long time since the last roar of this magnitude. Usually there were only rumbles and rumors of rumbles.

I could still feel lingering vibrations in my bones. Neither rumble nor rumor: the city had made a sound as if the world was ending.

From down the passage, someone yelled Moc’s name, and my slight companion skittered off again.

I was left alone in a swirl of activity. Everyone knew where they needed to be. Except for Kirit Spire. Conclave hadn’t been covered in the novitiates’ class. Sellis and Wik hadn’t instructed me on where to go, what to do. Once again, I did not belong. I was the sole still body in a whirl of motion.

Tower children were schooled in a version of what happened when the city roared. That information was all I had to guide me now. Singers had recorded the codex of sounds the city had made over generations, ever since we rose through the clouds. When the city roared, the Singers weighed a new chip, from a piece of tower knocked loose by the sound. The bigger the roar, the bigger the piece. If none had been disturbed, they cut one from the lowest tier themselves, sized carefully to chronicle the sound for the future. They bound these in the codex.

Then they balanced the roar through Conclave.

Once, Florian, our Magister at Densira, had told us how the city had roared twice in his own childhood. He’d turned sallow as he described the second Conclave, the desperation of the adults around him.

“Weren’t you grateful for the Lawsbreakers, Florian?” Sidra had asked. Sidra’s father had lectured us about Lawsbreakers a few days before. We’d learned that even those who defied the tower had their purpose in the city.

Florian had coughed. “We were grateful. Their duty meant that the city was appeased and didn’t roar again for many years.” But his face was still sallow, still drawn. He’d lost someone; he was still afraid.

I remembered now that he’d toyed with a thin bone marker at his wrist: a Lawsbreak of his own, though a small one.

When he’d gathered himself, Florian explained what came after a roar, doing his job as our Magister. He spoke of how those who lived at the margins, those who broke Laws, would be called into service to the city. That the Singers would come, weigh their crimes by the bone chips they carried, and take the ones they needed away.

As I remembered, I felt as shaken as Florian had been. I’d broken Laws. I broke Bethalial and Trespass. Worse. I still wore those markers on my wrist. I was sure no one had forgotten.

If the need was great, would they come for me too?

No, I thought, they needed me in other ways. They’d said so. Still, I couldn’t help the fear rising in my gut. Elna said Naton hadn’t been given Lawsmarkers at first. She’d said that until the Singer handed them to her once Naton was gone, she’d had no knowledge of his crimes.

If the need was great enough. That had been an enormous roar. I looked around, desperate for ways to make myself useful. No one said a word to me. They moved around me as if I was in the way.

That was the last thing I wanted to be. I did not want one of the Singers who disagreed with my training to find a reason to add to the appeasement.

The novitiates’ tier emptied. The birds scattered by the noise had not returned.

A tug at my sleeve. Ciel stood close.

“I’ll show you where to watch.”

I could have said no. I could have hunkered down in the shadows and waited for Conclave to end. But I choose to follow Ciel to the Spire’s apex and watch, like a Singer.

* * *

Atop the Spire, the city’s councilors gathered. The craft and trade representatives arrived as Ciel dragged me up the last rope ladder, for there were no risers carved into the top of the Spire. You had to fly up, or scramble.

Ciel tucked herself behind a spur of bone near the ledge, her wings unfurled for safety. I tried not to cling to her hand: I had not been wearing my wings when the roar began. The wind whipped the robes of the assembled, and those on the ledges below, looking up through the Spire, watching.

Two Singers rode a gust of wind up and out of the Spire, carrying something between them. Metal gleamed in the sunlight. Those watching whispered; a brief sound, louder than the wind.

“The scales.” Ciel pointed at the gleam. I leaned to get a better look. The Singers flew a small circuit of the Spire’s ledge and landed carefully. They anchored the base of what they carried to the ledge: a brass plate, very old, wrapped with spidersilk, tied to nearby bone cleats. Magister Florian hadn’t said the scales were so big. Or made of metal.

A spike of bone stuck up from the plate, bound there by a metal hasp. From where I crouched, it was hard to see the mechanism. A metal basket wobbled on each side of the spike. The baskets teetered and swung until the councilors, crafters, traders, and Singers gathered around to shield the scales from the wind.

A Singer drew a bone chip from a carry sack the size of a baby. Bigger. He raised it high, so that everyone might see, then placed it in the basket closest to the edge of the tower. The scale dipped. City representatives muttered among themselves. They turned to the horizons of the city.

I looked too. At first, all I saw was sky. The wide-open blue made my heart leap. The sky was a drink of cold water. The warm sun, a balm. I had missed both so.

Then I saw them.

All around the Spire, gray-winged Singers approached, bearing nets.

The two Singers who’d carried the scale stood. One was Rumul. The other was the woman with hair as brass-colored as Ciel’s.

The arriving Singers dropped their nets on the ledge but did not untie them. Inside, I saw hands and feet, a curled back. No wings. I could hear someone weeping. The bodies were robed in white. Many lay still.

The net closest to us wriggled as its occupant turned, dark curls falling away from a face. I sucked in my breath. Those looked like Nat’s curls. Nat, alive?

Not Nat. Please no, I whispered to the city.

Brown eyes peered from the net, sun-spotted olive skin below the dark curls. Not Nat. Someone older. My relief was short-lived. That was someone’s Nat, I knew.

Beyond the Spire, a man circled wildly, shouting as he flew near two Singers carrying a net with an older woman in it. I couldn’t hear what he said from where I stood, but amazingly, Ciel heard. “He wants to challenge for his wife,” the girl whispered, wide-eyed.

I looked across the gap, past the couple, and saw the edges of the nearby towers rippling with what looked like motes of dust from here: belongings being thrown from nearby towers. Citizens were jettisoning anything that might skirt the limits of Singer patience if another appeasement was required.

My fear for Nat transformed. Rumul’s threat against my mother seized my throat. Surely she wouldn’t be one of the citizens caught up so? Not after I had signed myself over?

Ezarit’s voice whispered in my mind. You gave them what they wanted. What do you hold in trade now? I shook my head to clear the sound. Rumul wouldn’t. They needed me. Wik had said so. I held myself in trade still.

And if I was not good enough to be a Singer? What then?

If I was still at risk, so was Ezarit.

The Singers approached, carrying fistfuls of bone chips towards the scales. They surrounded the brass baskets, one Singer for each of the towers. The ledge filled precariously with people.

“What are they doing?” I turned to Ciel, but she’d disappeared. I watched alone as more Singers appeared from every direction, their flying nets filled with men and women. All were dressed in white, most clinging to the nets disinterestedly.

Drugged, of course.

“Where have you been?” Sellis whispered to me as she hurried past, Wik close on her heels. “We searched for you. Come with us!” She grabbed my robe and pulled me from my hiding place. “Rumul’s orders.”

She didn’t let go of my robes when I began to scramble after her. I picked up my pace, lest she drag me right over the edge.

The Spire’s silence grew heavier as more Singers landed, none making a sound. We reached the gathering around the scales in time to watch them place the first of the chips in the empty bin.

“Wirra,” said the Singer as he placed a chip. Bone hit metal. A high sound, a sour sound. The only sound.

The scale barely moved. Another Singer came forward, and another, adding chips from each tower to the basket until it began to drop against the weight of the bone chunk on the other side. More Singers stood by, their hands cradling the chips of the Lawsbreakers. Waiting to see whether those crimes against the city would be added to the weight.

The Singers worked silently, and the citizens who stood with them kept silent too. The man shouting for his wife had been bound and struggled beside her now.

Standing close to the Singers, I heard soft clicks and whispers. Now and then one crouched, putting an ear to the ledge. Something they heard caused them to hurry, gesture more Singers to action. Almost all the nets had been stripped of their Lawsmarkers now.

Sellis pulled me forward.

By now, more than a hundred Singers had gathered atop the Spire. More soared around it. The councilors and the craft and trade representatives, plus the citizens in the nets made over two hundred souls standing on the Spire. The wind whipped robes. The captives shivered in the cold air.

“Densira.”

I saw a ragged robe and recognized the face of the woman who had charged at Nat and me in the lowtower.

But no Ezarit. I despised my own relief.

Rumul sang the verses allowed during Silence. This part of Conclave I understood.

You have each broken Laws.

Your crimes weigh on the city.

You have heard it roar.

You and your towers

have brought the city to anger.

As he sang, he turned to me. His eyes bored a hole through me, and I froze. How close I’d come to sharing the fate of the cloudbound. For that was what they were. What I could have been.

Rumul’s companion sang then. The Singer with the silver streak in her hair. Her voice was a contralto, a contrast to Rumul’s deep tones. “With your sacrifice, the city will be once more at peace.”

My breath caught as I counted the number of Lawsmarks balancing the scales. The men and women bound atop the Spire. With the size of the roar, the scales didn’t sit even until almost all of their chips had been added: thirty out of thirty-five. I’d known the process of Conclave from Magister Florian, if not the reality. Not since the city rose through the clouds had so many been thrown down at once.

A Singer with a hand on the Spire’s roof whistled. His face contorted with worry. The woman sped up her song, rushing the words. Everyone atop the tower leaned forward, urging her to greater speed. Finally, she finished. “We do what is best for the city, though it causes us pain,” she sang. And she walked to where the first cloudbound was held, unfurling her wings as she reached the edge. She freed a thin man from the net, clasped him by the shoulders, and fell with him into the sky. A moment passed, and we saw them gliding out towards the edge of the city.

The man’s feet kicked in the air, but he made no sound. Nothing from him, no shriek, or cry. He was carried away in silence.

Rumul nodded. “He goes well.” The head Singer looked to the other cloudbound. More Lawsbreakers had been prodded to their feet and stripped of their nets. Many shivered, their eyes on the horizon. Others stared at us. I forced myself to look back, though I wanted to scream.

Nat, oh, Nat. Your father. This happened to him.

Sellis searched my face, saw my miserable expression, but did not scold me or yank at my arm.

Thirty. So many. Even one was too many. Too much of a weight to bear. I took a step forward. Sellis gripped my wrist and held me in place. Did not let go.

Rumul looked to the gathered Singers and held out his hands. One at a time, Singers in dark gray robes stepped behind one of the cloudbound, set their wings, and flew to the city’s edges, where they would let go of their burdens. One at a time, the cloudbound were taken away, all silent save the second to last, a young man who pleaded for his life. “My father,” he said, “has money and goods. All you could need. It has saved us before, why not now?”

“Not enough muzz,” someone whispered behind me.

“Or he’s bargained for his life before,” I whispered back, before I locked my mouth against the Silence.

Sellis glared at me and twisted my littlest finger until I wanted to shriek against the pain. “Silence.”

This cloudbound man looked familiar too. He’d been at the wingfight, among the traders. He kept begging, even as the Singers frowned and drew closer. They bound his mouth with silk, so he wouldn’t disturb the city further in his fall. They lifted him away, to the south.

Some towers gave more than others. Mondarath for debauchery. Wirra for fighting. Many more from the southlands for debts and trespasses. But no one I knew among them. Not Ezarit, not Elna. I wiped my leaking eyes with a corner of my sleeve. Small mercies.

Singers returned and took their posts around the rim of the Spire, ready to go out again to the towers if the city was not appeased. They stood still as carvings, resolute. Wrapped in their duty, though their eyes glistened with tears and wind.

With a shock, I realized that they hated what they did. And yet they did it. Wik stood among them, eyes red.

They waited.

We waited with them.

We stood until night fell, until the gray shapes outlined against the lingering dusk blocked out the stars in the sky.

The crafters and councilors waited. I saw Councilman Vant standing near a ladder, but he did not see me. He scratched his nose and blinked in the cold wind.

Sellis’s stomach growled.

This was another part of Conclave I had not known. We marked the emptiness left by the cloudbound with the pain in our stomachs.

Around the Spire, the towers kept silent too.

By dawn, the Singers who had pressed hands and ears to the Spire throughout the night stood. The city’s rumbles had ceased.

By noon, we were weak from standing in the wind and our stomach pangs had turned to birds’ claws, scraping against our ribs. Moc and Ciel were ashen shadows of themselves. They leaned against the woman who’d sung the Conclave.

Someone passed around a water sack. We each took a single sip. The water tasted sour.

By evening, the city had not roared again. A Singer ascended from below. “The Enclosed are satisfied. The city is appeased.”

Rumul and his companion sang the final notes of Conclave wordlessly, marking the passing of the cloudbound, the release of their trespasses from their towers.

As he sang, we looked up to mark their passage, rather than down, to mark their fall.

Then Sellis nudged me with her elbow and jerked her chin towards the ladder. Other Singers had already begun the climb. We were allowed to descend.

* * *

Sellis moved quickly down the rope ladder, then to the carved steps of the lower tiers. She was eager for food and bed. I ducked into an alcove, still shivering from the fast and the cold of Conclave, and with more than that.

Rumul entered the alcove at last and saw me waiting for him.

“You are out of place, Kirit.”

Always, Rumul. And yet? “I have questions.” I spoke softly, with respect. Tried to still my shaking from the cold, from the ritual.

“You should ask Sellis. Or Wik, when his duties allow.”

“I would ask you.” Slowly, Kirit. I had watched Wik avoid challenging Rumul’s authority. Now I tried to do the same. Sellis and Wik had not prepared me for Conclave. There was more I needed to know now, rather than soon.

A novitiate brought a shallow basin of rainwater and handed it to Rumul. The young man waited while Rumul dipped his fingers and rubbed at his face. Then the Singer dismissed him with a wave.

I was allowed to stay.

Rumul raised his eyebrows and made a reeling gesture with his hand. I saw his challenge tattoo, faded now, but still visible. A symbol I’d recently learned to carve. A knife.

“Who gives the Singers the right to murder people?” The words had come faster than I’d intended.

He sighed. “How do you not number yourself among the murderers today, Kirit?” His voice was not smooth, not sweet. It was tired and rough.

“What?”

“You attended the Conclave. I saw you.”

I waited, not understanding. I’d thrown no one down.

“Did you try to stop it? Did you offer yourself in place of the old man from Viit?”

I had not. My first thought had been to stay as far from the edge as possible.

Rumul continued. “We’re all guilty of wanting to stay alive. To do so, we must at times appease the city. The city would destroy us all without it.”

“You say so, but I didn’t see the city throw those people down.”

He reddened. “Your decision, then, is to join them?”

It was not. “I want to know why.”

He wiped his dripping face with his robe. “Kirit, there is no more sacred duty than that of a Singer. We keep the city whole. We make sure its traditions are not forgotten. That its people do not throw everything to the clouds. To do so, we listen to the city, appease it, and enforce its rules. Do you understand?”

I felt hunger stretch its wings in my stomach. Thought of how Singers taught the Magisters, who then taught us histories, Laws. “If you maintain traditions, why are songs different inside the Spire?”

“You have seen how people revile us, fear us? Even as they respect us?”

“Yes.” Remembered long pauses after the word Singer came up in tower conversation.

“Can you guess why we might change the words of our history?”

His eyes glittered in the lamplight. I was being tested. How much of my Singer training had sunk in?

Continue arguing, his eyes seemed to say. Or prove you deserve the opportunity you’ve been given. I cleared my throat. “The songs Singers learn are more frightening. The towers don’t suffer as much of our past because they have forgotten. So they don’t fear each other.”

He inclined his head. “Such as?”

“The clouds. What the time before the Rise was really like.”

“War. Horror. The things citizens did to their towermates, to their neighbors, Kirit. The city needed to heal, to come together again, once we rose out of it.”

In my mind’s eye, I saw the scenes I had learned to sing. Tower by tower, the horrors. “We learn different verses so that we may keep it from happening, without making the rest of the city eager for revenge.”

I realized this for truth as I spoke it. The Singers had done this. They had saved the city in more ways than one.

And Conclave — when I lived in the towers, it was used to frighten stubborn children to action. As we grew, we learned that it was a way for the city to release the burden of broken Laws. A way to redeem the offenders.

Now that I had seen what actually happened, I could not hold my tongue. “What kind of people do this to one another?”

He bristled. I’d pushed too far. I saw anger in his eyes. Then he blinked and took a breath. His voice grew softer.

“The city demands much of us in return for shelter. Long ago, we learned to tend it in ways that you already consider barbaric. Very well.” Rumul looked at me, both hands held out, palms up. “It is the trial of the Singers to do this. If we ignore the city, we fall. If citizens begin to fight, if we lose our traditions, we fall. The towers crack. Would you go back through the clouds? So many died, coming up. The city may rise with or without us, Kirit. The tiers will fill in with bone and push us out. To live, we must rise too. To rise, we must appease our home when it grows angry with us.”

“Haven’t you tried to appease it any other way?” I thought of Nat, growing up without Naton.

“Yes.” The way he said it, I knew he believed it. But he continued. “We’ve lost four towers, all on the outer edge. Broken. Lith was only the most recent to fall. So many people have died, Kirit. Thousands, all at once.”

My mouth formed an O, but no sound came out.

Rumul looked up at the ceiling of his alcove, which was carved with stars. “That is the sacred trust of the Singers.”

I shook my head slowly. “And what do we get in return?”

“Life.” He spread his hands like wings.

I thought of what I now knew. I thought of Wik’s eyes at Conclave.

“And what of people like Nat’s father? Naton?”

I could see he recognized the name, was trying to remember why. I saw the memory rise behind his eyes. His mouth hardened to a line. “He broke Laws, Kirit.”

“No one who knew him thinks he would do that. What Laws?”

“Laws within the Spire. He had a great trust from us, and he betrayed it.”

“What trust? What did he do?” I could not stop myself, though Rumul’s look grew more inscrutable. “I want to know the truth!”

Rumul came to my side and gripped my arm. “Then I will tell you,” he said, his voice softer than it was before. The honeyed voice. “Naton was a friend. A brilliant bridge artifex. He knew more about the Spire than most citizens ever will. Naton…” He paused. His voice was very sad now. Sad and soft. “Colluded with a disgraced Singer to bring information out of the Spire. It began innocently enough. He saw something during the course of his work; he was curious. But in the end, this curiosity became dangerous. He had learned things that others in the city would pay well for. Knowledge that would have allowed others huge advantages over the rest of the city.”

Knowing Nat’s own curiosity, I could believe his father had been curious too. But selling out the Singers? I didn’t believe it. What was Rumul telling me?

“To whom did he betray you? What was it?”

Rumul turned to look at me.

“Nothing more glorious than being on wing at Allsuns, is there? And Allmoons.”

I began to nod. Then I realized the latter for a trap. He had turned his attention back to me. I closed my mouth tight.

He chuckled. “You’re learning.”

“No one is allowed to fly on Allmoons.”

He raised a finger. “No citizens fly at Allmoons.” He said it as if he held a greater secret behind his lips. I wanted to draw it out, and I didn’t want to know.

“The Singers fly at night?” I pictured myself and Nat at Allmoons. We’d felt we alone owned the sky. We hadn’t known. Nat would have loved knowing. And then I realized.

“This is what Naton found out.”

Rumul paused and smiled. Then he took a breath and continued. “Some Singers fly at night. An important skill, especially for those who can control the skymouths.”

“How is that possible? Nat and I—” I cut myself off, to avoid thinking about Nat. “How do you see the wind? The towers? How do you not collide and fall?” I stopped and thought. “The skymouths?”

He held up a finger. Patience. “It is a skill you have yet to learn.”

I was distracted. Now that I knew Naton’s treason against the city, that he’d found out the Singers fly at night, I wanted to know more about how they flew. But for Nat’s memory, I chased the last shreds of the secret down. The bone chips Tobiat had given to us had notes etched on the backs, in what I now knew to be Singer notations. Maybe they held the secret to night flying. And we’d had them in our hands the whole time.

“Who was Naton going to tell?”

Rumul shrugged. “We learned he had betrayed us shortly before the last Conclave. He hadn’t yet shared what he knew with his contact, but it was a trader.”

“But he never told?”

“He was caught before he could pass the information on. We caught his colluder afterwards, but the notes he’d made were lost in the confusion of Conclave.”

“How did you learn about the betrayal?”

Rumul grew still again. Then sighed. “My first acolyte, on his excursion. He discovered the treason.” He paced the length of his room, to the hammock, and returned to his workbench. Sat down with a reluctant frown.

Treason.

“The acolyte had taken up with a young, ambitious trader. Naton had told her already that he had information he wanted to sell. She was gathering the markers to pay him. Our Singer kept her from making the mistake of meeting him and turned Naton in.” He looked at me significantly.

I drew the truth together in my head, saw it as a whole. The trader, young and ambitious — and who wouldn’t be faster at trading if they could fly at night when no one else could?

Ezarit. Naton had intended to give what he knew to Ezarit.

Oh, Ezarit.… Kept from breaking Laws by her … lover. Rumul’s acolyte. My father. My father had betrayed Naton, and kept Ezarit safe, and helped the Singers keep their secrets. No.

Rumul read my conclusions in my expression. “You see it now.”

I did — and if my stomach hadn’t been emptier than the sky before a migration, I might have been sick with it. But the memory of the secret Naton died for tugged at me.

They flew at night. Singers flew at night. And Ezarit had wanted to know how.

Two questions fought in my mind. They raced from my mouth.

“What happened to my father? And how do you do it? Flying in the dark, when you cannot see?”

Rumul smiled. His voice smoothed even more. “You will learn, if you choose. Sellis is training.”

He was silent, waiting on my answer. I knew danger still lingered. Rumul’s hold on the Spire was stronger than any councilman’s. And I suspected Sellis would not be overjoyed to have me along on her training. But this — what a thing to know. And what power to have.

“I wish to learn this,” I finally said. “I am ready to learn it.”

“You think so? You can understand why it is necessary to keep the Singers’ secrets? You understand why our duties, and the ones you saw at Conclave, are necessary?”

My thoughts returned to the Conclave’s horrors. I recoiled against the expected answer. There must be other ways. Things untried. Then I remembered Lith’s dark, cracked form. I considered how to make myself more secure, so that I did not become an offering myself.

I would silence my questions about Conclave. This was what Rumul asked of me. To keep Singer secrets, to help the city.

“Yes.” I was determined.

“No going back, Kirit. Accepting this skill means accepting all of what the Singers do. Going deeper into our secrets. Including what you saw during Conclave. When the time comes, you will fight all comers to protect the secrets of the Spire.”

“I will never throw down Elna or Ezarit.”

He agreed. “As long as you hew to Singer law, we will not need to hurt Ezarit.” He paused. “Or Elna.”

There it was. My trade. Not what I had planned at all when Nat and I flew through the night. I’d come then to take what was already mine. Now I agreed not just to serve the Spire, but to become it.

He brought out a bone pot of caustic ink and marked my left hand himself, right there. A small spiral, a coil. Like wind in the Gyre. His fingers gripped my hand. The touch of his brush burned, and I bit my lip hard.

No further ceremony signaled my passage. With one mark, I became even more Singer-bound.

“When you are ready, you will challenge in the Gyre,” said Rumul. Just then, Sellis entered the alcove. She stopped and stared at us both, as if she’d caught us in an unwelcome secret.

Rumul smiled at her. “Kirit will learn how to fight in the Gyre. To fly at night. To better guide skymouths. Then you will both be ready to challenge.”

Sellis’s entire expression changed. “We will be ready.”

I swallowed. They spoke in circles.

Rumul turned back to me. “Wik says you are doing well, but you must do this last thing quickly. Before Allsuns. The need is great. It will not be easy. And you must learn to fly as we do.”

His eyes met mine, and I sensed he was daring me to succeed in my father’s place. Or to fail on my own. For him, I was an experiment. No risk to him, only to myself. The higher I went, the further I could fall.

14. SENSE

Sellis watched me closely, silent questions hovering behind her eyes. She complimented my quick rise to third-stripe and compared her hand mark with mine. They were identical.

“Each council member has their own style,” she said, touching hers.

“What is that ink they use? It burns.”

She did not take her eyes off her mark. “A Singer secret. They mix it with something from the skymouths. That’s what stings and what makes the marks turn silver.”

I winced at the thought of gaining tattoos around my eyes like Wik had.

I didn’t see him that day. I did not know when he learned of my rise. Instead, I climbed down to the novices’ tier and watched the class. They practiced towers, much as I’d learned them at Densira for the wingtest.

When the Magister dismissed them, the novices broke left and right around me. Only Moc and Ciel greeted me.

“Why do they do that?” Around Sellis, the novices gathered and chittered happily, telling her about everything that happened in the Spire. She had the benefit of many eyes. I had two extra pairs only, both trained on me.

“You’re unpredictable,” Moc said. “You do unusual things. You couldn’t keep the Silence.”

“You’re tall.”

“Your voice is still strange.”

I raised a hand. “Enough, thanks.” I saw things more clearly. Even after showing them how quickly I could learn to be like them, the young Singers-to-be were still uncomfortable. I was different. The Spire didn’t like different. “You and Ciel aren’t bothered?”

Ciel tilted her head and laughed. “You’re new. Everything in the Spire is old and always happens up down up down. You came in sideways.”

They liked me for precisely the reasons the others didn’t. The twins were tiny and strange, but they were the eyes and ears I had in the Spire. I needed them.

But they’d begun disappearing for days, even before the Conclave. When they returned, their temples bruised, their eyes bloodshot, I asked what had happened, and they tried to explain.

“Training,” they had said. “We train to hear better.”

The day after my meeting with Rumul, I found out what they meant.

* * *

Wik sent a whipperling to the twins and me. The message chips it carried listed a tier and an alcove. Two levels down.

When we arrived, breathing hard from rushing, I caught a glimmer of metal. Wik held an ancient tool in his hand. Its base was the same shape as the bruises that sometimes appeared at Ciel’s temples: a deep purple blotch overlaying her soft, honey-colored skin.

My fingertips brushed the cold lenses that hung from my neck. Wik frowned at me. “You have a disadvantage, Kirit. You do not know how to listen.”

This was unfair. I tried very hard to listen. I had already heard the city whisper and roar.

Noting my frown, he shook his head. “When they are very young, Singers begin training in a different kind of listening. Some use what they learn to better hear the city. Others, to keep track of signals when we fly and fight. Still others use what they hear to see better.”

The last pulled me out of my study of Ciel’s hair, her complex braids.

Seeing better with hearing?

“Close your eyes,” he said, coming to stand very close behind me. I twisted to look at him, and he raised his eyebrows and waited.

I closed my eyes.

Wik pressed one end of the metal tool against my temple.

In the darkness, I felt the pulse of his breath against my cheek. He didn’t speak.

A cool strip of silk was placed over my closed eyes and tightened. I tried to pull away, but Wik held me firm. “Don’t move.”

Then a sound of metal hitting metal. So much metal, I thought as the tool began to vibrate against my head.

“Listen,” whispered Wik.

I strained to do what he asked. I heard nothing beyond a muffled giggle on the other side of the room.

“Listen with your skin, your bones,” Wik said as he struck the metal rod again. This time, a hum echoed deep within my skull.

“Now we will change something,” he said. “See what the echoes do.”

I heard robes swish and Ciel tell Moc, “No, that way!” Then silence again. Then that sound vibration as Wik hit the rod pressing into my head. Echoes and vibration surrounded me. They had a slightly different shape, flatter, faster than before, but I couldn’t figure out why.

I described it to Wik. “Good!” He removed the tool from my head, the blindfold from my eyes.

In front of me, Ciel stood holding a broad piece of bone. She lowered it and rubbed her arms.

“You see?” she asked.

I didn’t, not really. “I see the panel you’re holding.”

“But what did you hear, before? Think.”

I heard vibrations. Waves of sound colliding behind my blindfolded eyes. They hurt. “The vibrations were different when you stood in front of me?”

Ciel grinned. Her eyes glowed as if I’d performed a wonderful trick.

Wik smiled too. “Good.” They blindfolded me again, but without the metal rod. “Now try to mimic the vibration the rod made: tilt your head back slightly, open your mouth — yes, just like that — and click your tongue against the roof of your mouth very quickly.”

That sounded ridiculous. I lifted the edge of my blindfold with a finger and looked at them. They were surely making fun of me.

“Just do it!” Wik was growing exasperated. He wanted discipline, not questions.

Blindfold dropped, the dark complete, I tried to do what he asked. My mouth gaped open, and I pressed the tip of my tongue against my mouth to make a clicking sound, as I’d heard Sellis do sometimes in flight.

“Faster!” Ciel whispered.

I heard the clicks in my head, but still they meant nothing.

Until their shape changed. Instead of sound leaving me, some of it returned, faintly, as if the noises I made had bounced off something. Echoing. I tried to lift the blindfold again. Wik stopped my hand. “No. Tell me what you heard.”

“The sound changed. Like Ciel was holding the chip up in front of me again.”

Wik took my hand from the silk blindfold and guided it away from me, until my fingers connected with the hard slab of the bone chip, an arm’s span from my face.

“You heard it there.”

“So?” I couldn’t see how this was important.

Wik sighed at my tone. Even blindfolded, I could guess the face he made. Frustrated. Full of frowns.

“So. Try it again.”

I heard robes swish, then silence. Something had changed, and they wanted me to guess it by making that ridiculous face while clicking my tongue. Fine. Though I could not imagine the dignified Singers doing something like this, I tilted my head back and clicked again, faster this time.

I strained to hear the echoes. “The chip is farther away?”

“How do you know?”

“The echoes are fainter?”

“Echoes? Plural? Listen to what your body is telling you.”

And I got it. “Plural echoes. Two objects, farther away.”

“Reach out.”

I swept my arm in a half circle. Stretched my fingers as far as they would go. Touched nothing. I attempted again to lift the blindfold, but Wik stopped me once more.

“Walk forward two steps, then reach out again.”

When I did, my sweeping hand brushed one bone chip to my left, then Moc or Ciel’s small fingers, then air, then a silk panel held taut by more small fingers.

“That’s very useful, Wik. I can find small children holding objects in an empty room with my eyes closed.” I felt ridiculous. Like they were setting me up for a prank.

I heard the smile in his voice. “You learned that very fast, Kirit. Good. You will need to learn much more, even faster.”

I waited.

“This is your room now, Kirit. No more sleeping outside Sellis’s alcove.”

I sighed with relief. That was a very good change.

“But,” Wik added, “you will live here blindfolded. If you remove the blindfold, you will fail the training.” His voice didn’t waver. He was serious.

Fail. How much? I wondered. Could I fail just this portion of being a Singer, like with the wingtest? Or would I fail the whole thing? I resolved to not fail any of it.

He continued, “When you are ready, you may meet us in the dining alcove for something to eat. But you may not remove the blindfold.”

That didn’t sound like such a bad task. When I said so, I heard Ciel laugh. Something grated, bone on bone. A lid, being rolled away from the floor. Ciel took my hand and walked me forward five steps. I heard the sucking sound of a windbeaters’ tunnel, low, near the floor.

My new alcove was seemingly part of the vent system. If I made a mistake and got too close to it, I could be sucked out of the Spire. Worse, whenever I left the alcove, I would know the Gyre’s edge was nearby.

“You wouldn’t risk me falling. You need me.” My voice was almost pleading.

“We need someone who can fly as we do, not someone who stands on ledges and shouts at the sky.” Wik’s voice was firm. He meant every word.

They bound the blindfold and covered it with another layer of silk. If I broke the second layer, it would be obvious for all to see.

“I don’t know how to do this.” All I’d been shown was some sort of mouth trick, a stunt with echoes.

“Use your ears, Kirit. Use the feeling in your bones,” Wik said from farther away. He pressed the metal rod into my hands. “Few animals fly at night. You must become a bat.”

And they said no more. I reached out with my hands, but they were gone. All was silent. And dark.

At first, all I could hear was my own heartbeat. Then the sounds of the city, the passage of robed Singers above and below me, the bones all around me, began to whisper.

With the blindfold tight around my eyes, I was caught within a wall of darkness. My own enclosure. I felt panic stir.

To quiet the noise, I tried standing still where Ciel had left me. I tilted my head back and clicked, my tongue soft against my palate. I experimented with different speeds. The alcove’s dimensions were small, though not as small as the pocket where I was first held in the Spire. And this room’s exit was an obvious arch. No echoes at all. But I refused to walk out yet, into the jumble of the Spire, and towards the edge of the Gyre. I needed to practice, a lot. And fast.

I explored the alcove with my hands and with the echoes I could make. I tried using the rod and humming. I sensed that the ceiling was low.

A different set of echoes, lower and less sharp, told me something about what was arranged along the far wall. I slid my foot forward and skirted the vent to reach the sleeping pad and the necessaries. Then I curled into a ball and slept.

When I woke, it was dark. My hands went to my face, and I realized it would always be dark until the blindfold was taken away. I lay still and listened, trying to breathe slowly, so that I could hear other things besides my heart pounding.

The rhythm of the Spire had slowed. I heard robes sliding down the bone ladders and across the floors. I heard whispers from passing Singers, but not many. Then I heard a snap of silk and battens, the sound of someone leaping into the Gyre nearby. This was glorious: the sharp sounds wings made against wind, the song a body made when it cut through the air.

I sat up. Others had learned to hear. I could too. I touched my tongue to the roof of my mouth again. It felt fuzzy, like I’d been doing this too much. I clicked my tongue fast, and I found the shape of the space I occupied. When I knew that, I could walk it.

I thunked my shins hard against a bone bench. My own yelp was the loudest sound I’d heard in hours.

Giving up seemed so easy. I had to find my wings by touch.

Still, I pulled them over my shoulders without removing the blindfold. I heard the drag of the straps across my robe. The city whispered blandishments from the walls. A class let out two tiers above me, and I heard the almost-whispers of the youngest novices as if they were much closer.

Focus. I needed to focus.

I shuffled back to the center of the room and made a slow turn. My echoes bounced off the bench differently than the wall. My sleeping mat muffled sound, while the alcove’s archway pulled it out into the passage beyond.

I practiced until I could sense the room. My stomach growled, then gave up. My mouth felt thick with thirst. I echoed my way across the room to a hook, where something sounded solid and soft at the same time. I reached out and touched a lukewarm bladder of water. Carefully, I lifted it from its hook. I drank and laughed at what I’d done, coughing as my first success went down my windpipe, rather than my throat.

When I thought I was ready, I stepped out of the alcove.

Sounds washed over me from everywhere. People moved past, close and far, and their sounds battered at my senses. Behind the blindfold, I could perceive shapes rushing at me and away, but the noise was confusing. I stepped back into the alcove and lay down. I could not do this. Moc and Ciel couldn’t do this yet, and they’d been practicing for longer than I.

“You can do it,” a voice said, from close by.

I sat up. Sellis’s voice.

“I did it. You can do it. Let me give you some hints.”

She told me how to hold my head straight, how to avoid being distracted by a sound, turning, and losing my way. She told me about the path around this tier, how far away the dining alcove was, and the shapes I might encounter.

“Why are you helping me?”

“Because Rumul won’t let me night fly without you.” She said it simply, with regret, so I knew she told the truth. “Even if you don’t make it, they won’t start a night flight without partnered pairs, and no one else is training now. So you need to learn fast.”

“Singers fly blindfolded?”

A pause. “Absolutely not. But when you do fly in the dark, you can use your ears to help navigate. Once you learn to hear, you can see where most people in the city can’t. It’s an augmentation, not a replacement, Kirit.”

I opened my mouth to argue, but when I reached out to touch her shoulder, I grasped air. I sounded the room and discovered she’d already gone. Echoes surrounded me instead.

When the Singers began The Rise that night, the sound bloomed in my mind. I started to cover my ears, but then I opened my mouth and sang instead. Singing with them lessened the discordant sounds that I felt through my bones.

My rough voice matched the deep group voice word for word.

Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow I’d make my way blind around the Spire. I would not fall.

And then the Singers would let me fly the city again.

* * *

The Spire’s morning noises woke me. In darkness, I heard whispered orders, the shuffling of feet. Pulleys rattled, and buckets clattered. A whipperling launched from a nearby tier and flutter-screeched away.

I touched my blindfold, then dropped my hand to the mat where I’d put my father’s lenses. Ran my fingers over the age-pitted metal, the cool glass.

When I stepped from the alcove this time, I could echo and build an image of the simple room I’d left behind: an empty water bladder hung from a wall, a neatly folded sleeping mat, and, atop the mat, a pair of lenses.

The passage beyond my room felt vast and featureless to my ears. I echoed until I could hear the difference between the ledge and the drop beside the ledge. I unfurled my wings, just in case. My fingers tempted the edge of the blindfold. Stopped. If Wik had lookouts nearby watching me, even Moc or Ciel, they would know. They would tell.

I slid one foot forward across the bone floor, then the next. My tongue touched the roof of my mouth, light and fast. Turning my head from side to side let me sweep the space before me. I made my way across the passage in spurts, avoiding alcoves and bone spurs, to stand with both hands pressed against the outer wall of the Spire.

Thud. My heart pounded. My ears boomed. My hands felt the echoes of the city. I’d made it.

I spun quickly, reversing direction — I hoped — and echoed again. A large shape blocked the open space. It moved before I could sense more than breadth and height. Not Moc or Ciel, that was certain.

“Who is there?”

No answer. I hadn’t thought there would be.

With a deep breath, I turned to the wall and felt my way along the carved surface until I reached the ladder. I echoed up and sensed the way was clear for several tiers. When I stepped onto the rungs, I thought of Elna, climbing near-blind up Densira. How knowledge like this could have made her way easier. Safer.

What Nat wouldn’t have given to know this. The thought didn’t make me sad this time. Instead, I felt a rush of strength. In this, I was stronger than anyone in the towers. I knew now why Singers stood so quiet, so confident.

Distracted, I missed a rung with my foot and grabbed hard with both hands to keep from tumbling. Below me, I heard nothing. No intake of breath, no faint grunt as arms and legs braced to catch my fall. I echoed over my shoulder, and the ladder was clear of climbers. I was on my own.

For the rest of my blind climb, I moved carefully, staying focused. I would think of the towers later, when I had time. When I was safe.

The novice dining alcove was four tiers up from my alcove. I counted the tiers as I passed them, hearing the sounds of footfalls and robes change tone and clarity as I climbed. Where Sellis slept, few seemed to be about. The entire tier sounded empty as I paused to rest on the ladder. An echo-sweep across the passageway caught someone in the act of climbing over the ledge of the Gyre, using the pulley ropes.

As the person straightened, I heard wings being furled. Battens clacked together, and silk rustled and folded. My echoes bounced off broad shoulders again.

“I can see you, Wik.” I would not fail in his presence again. “Even with the blindfold on.”

He chuckled. “You are quite good at this. Not everyone is. Sellis couldn’t sound her way out of her alcove without help for a year.”

“And Ciel and Moc?” I stepped onto the tier.

“Their ears are as sharp as yours, but they’re distractible.” His voice was closer now. I could hear him breathing. “Your focus is good.”

I didn’t need to echo to know where he was now. My fingers stretched out and tapped his lower arm. I traced the muscle down to the veins on his hand with my fingertips. He froze. I kept my hand on his arm. Tightened my grip, trapping him there.

“Why did you have me failed at wingtest, Wik?”

He stayed silent for a moment. His lips parted, audibly, as if he’d pressed them together before deciding to speak. “The council felt you would be more motivated to consider our offer. And Macal showed you too much with that dive.”

The young Magister. I couldn’t remember his face very well. It seemed so long ago. But the dive. I remembered that dive. I smiled. “A Singer’s dive.”

Wik’s robes rustled. He pulled his hand away. “Macal is talented, but unpredictable, and young. My brother doesn’t hold with all the traditions.”

“Your brother?”

“Yes,” Wik said. “And a good Magister. He cares about the towers very much. He is trying to convince our mother and the council that he could serve the city better as a teacher.”

As I absorbed this, Wik touched my shoulder. I startled.

“You need to keep going, Kirit. You’re almost there.” He stepped around me and clambered up the ladder. “See if you can smell your way to breakfast,” he whispered.

I stood still for another moment, the floor cool beneath my feet. Then I climbed after him, sightless, but not blind.

The noise of the dining alcove on the next tier sounded like a storm: conversations built and lulled. Pairs and clusters of novices passed me, hushing each other when they spotted my blindfold.

Embarrassed, I lowered my outstretched hands and tried to echo as unobtrusively as possible. The moment I did that, my sense of surrounding space began to fade. I stumbled and stopped. Then, taking a deep breath, I tilted my head back and echoed the way that worked best for me. I heard shapes that must have been tables and benches. A jumble of motions around me could have been novices, seated, standing, and walking. I found a table shape near the entrance of the dining alcove where two figures were seated: one broad and larger than most novice shapes, the other slim and sitting ramrod straight.

I sat down at this table, next to the second figure, hoping I’d got it right. I smelled pungent spices.

Fingers tugged at the knots of my blindfold. When it dropped, the daylight in the room made me blink until my eyes watered.

“You did it,” Sellis said. “First try.” She smiled guardedly. I thought I saw a jealous twinge, but then she brightened. “You understand now,” she said.

“With your help,” I said. I meant it too.

Wik pushed a bowl of potatoes and peppers towards me. “With enough practice, we’ll make you a Singer yet, Kirit Spire.”

“What’s next?” Breakfast’s spices prickled my tongue, and I blew out to cool my mouth. All around me, the sounds of the meal and the room added to what I could see. I wanted to learn more, to know everything now.

“Rest,” Wik said. “With no moon tonight, we must rest today.” I couldn’t imagine why. Not when there was so much to hear.

By the time I returned to my tier, closing my eyes now and then to see if echoing still worked, I was ready to curl up without unfolding my mat. Exhaustion and giddy success netted me and pulled me into sleep.

15. LIFT

Sellis woke me in the dark.

Many Singers were already awake, readying themselves to fly.

In the towers, night was for sleeping. For storing up energy for the next day.

But Singers flew the night. Now that I was learning how they did it, I sensed the power of the skill, the advantages. Nightwings. Like the children’s song, but better. They might see the invisible and travel through the city unobserved.

Sellis took me to the top of the Spire, where Wik waited for us. I breathed the fresh air. I wanted to throw myself to it; it felt so different from the trapped stuff that cycled through the Spire.

No moon. The stars were dim. I could not guess how long until sunrise. But I could see the nearest towers. The few lights within. The city slept, though we did not.

“Can you hear?” Wik growled in my ear. He pressed the metal prong to my temple again. “Echo. You will hear.”

Suddenly, I could hear too much. I could hear Wik’s breath and Sellis’s teeth chattering. I tried echoing faster. Sellis and Wik joined me. Faintly, I could hear something beyond them, in the distance, resonating.

I pictured the city before me, the outlines of the towers I knew from my studies. I imagined what could be out there that I could hear but not see.

The forms sounded faint, but very large. They surrounded the Spire.

Oh.

The sounds that my ears strained to hear were the true shapes of the city.

I drew a breath and whispered, “I can hear.”

“You will get better at it,” Wik said, almost too loud. I realized he wasn’t shouting.

My heart leapt. If I could hear the city, I could fly it. Even if I could not see it.

More citizens could learn this, too. If we could hear what we could not see, the towers could help seek out skymouth nests and free the city from their terror.

Sellis must have interpreted the excited look in my eyes. She shook her head.

“The city entrusts us with this knowledge, Kirit. This is not for the towers.”

“Why not?”

“Tradition. Since the Rise.”

“Singers say ‘tradition’ when they don’t want to explain.”

“It’s more than that.” Wik shook his head, struggling for patience. “It’s about our history. About how people work. Traditions hold the city together, like the bridges do the towers. Once, we had no traditions. Only fear and loss.”

There had been no traditions in the clouds. Where skymouths and worse roamed free. Where towers had gone to war, attacking each other in fear and desperation. I’d studied. I had sung The real Rise. The Singers’ traditions had lifted the city from that darkness.

Now I shivered, chilled.

Sellis, impatient with old history, pulled the conversation back to the night’s lesson. “Echoing is a matter of learning to listen even more,” she said. “You can hear in directions, see in sounds.”

“But it takes practice,” said Wik. “Do not assume that you can hear everything straightaway.”

But I was surely much better at this than they thought. Perhaps it was like my voice, the shouts I could make that no one else on this blessed Spire could. At least sometimes. When I was lucky. But maybe I could hear differently too.

Then Wik took the prong away, Sellis fell silent, and the city went dark. I could no longer hear the towers spread around me like a flower. No. I was silenced and grounded again. Wik had cut off a newly grown limb. I wanted it back.

I reached for the prong.

Wik tucked it away in his upper robe. “You must learn to make your own echoes out here, as you did inside.”

Sellis took my hand and pulled me to the edge of the tower. She nudged me to sit, with my feet hanging over. I balked. I was unwinged, having left my training pair in my alcove.

“We will fly tonight,” she said. Her voice sounded more hesitant than I’d ever heard it.

“How many Singers are night fliers?” I asked.

“Most. Everyone has to train to do it, but some don’t like it. Many think this one step closer to falling.”

“But this lets you see! And hunt skymouths! It’s an honor to keep the city safe.”

Sellis winced. “This is a charge, not an honor. And you will notice your hearing gets more sensitive for all things. There is a tradeoff. You will be marred.”

I looked at my hand and its silver mark. “How?”

“You will hear too much. All the time. Singing will be painful, but you must continue to do it. You will overhear what you shouldn’t. You will find crowds abhorrent. It sets you apart.”

I already was set apart.

Being separate from the rest of the city was not unusual for Singers. I realized Sellis’s cautions held a note of pride. Her concerns were Spire concerns: traditions, skills, Rumul. How much power she had and could gain. How high on the tower you lived didn’t matter here. Influence within the Spire and marks did.

Wik had many marks. Rumul had many more. Sellis and I each had just the one, on our hands. Plus the pathways the echoes had begun carving in our brains — those were marks too.

“When do we begin?” I whispered.

“Now,” Wik said. He pulled me to my feet and covered my eyes with a silk scarf. Blind. I stood atop the Spire, blind.

“Wait!” I couldn’t see where the edge of the tower was, though I felt the solid bone beneath my soft footwraps. The air whistled around me, but I froze in place, afraid to step the wrong way. Nets or no, I did not want to fall.

Wik took my hand and guided me a few steps backwards. Then he let go and spun me around.

Sellis whispered, “Not so fast!” Her voice was loud in my ears. I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth, fast, like I’d done in the Spire. My eyes rolled beneath the scarf, searching for sound.

Wik said, “Listen.”

And I could, faintly. I heard the wind against the towers and how it wrapped them with soft sweeps of breeze. I could hear gusts too.

We had so many ways to describe different types of wind. Lifts. Crosses. Constants. Gaps. I might one day hear them all.

Something low and large echoed ahead of me. The closest tower? Varu. The wind swept over the shape, slowly, then ripped around the higher towers beside it, whistling. Far beyond, Lith lurked, broken and forlorn. I knew it was there, though I couldn’t hear it, because nothing else sounded so empty in the entire city.

I knew then that we stood at the apex of the Spire, on the western side, with Varu on my left. That was my compass. The other towers close in sounded whole and twisting. The wind moved among the tiers, and I heard soft laughter and muffled sounds of families gathered together for warmth and comfort. All very faint.

Echoes bounced off the crystals Sellis wore in her hair like shards of sound in a soft cushion. Sound marked where her body was next to mine and, in front of me, defined a broader, taller form. Wik. I reached out my hand. My palm brushed his silk robes.

“Well done, Kirit,” he said, removing my blindfold. He lifted two sets of wings from the roof, gesturing to Sellis and me.

The wing frames were covered with deep gray silk. In the dark, they were practically black. Nightwings. Invisible against the sky.

Nat, I thought, the stories were true.

I took one set of wings and slipped the straps over my shoulders.

“Already?” Sellis said, hesitating and pale. She looked at me and caught herself. “Kirit’s barely ready.” But I realized as she spoke that she’d never flown the dark either. I wasn’t so far behind her any longer.

My cheeks flushed, but I felt no fear. I knew I could die out there, but it would be among the towers, outside. In the wind. Not forgotten behind walls of bone.

“Frightened?” Sellis said to me.

“No,” I said, hoping this would continue to be true.

“You should be,” Wik said. “Many things live in the dark. Not just towers and skymouths.”

Skymouths. That did scare me. I looked over the edge of the Spire and saw the vast towers widening below us. The dark all around them, swirling to the clouds. Woozy, I had to catch myself before I fell. Sellis and Wik were too busy adjusting their wings. They did not notice.

My hand stung from Rumul’s mark as I flexed it to check the buckles on my nightwings. The straps were worn in, but the wings were beautifully made. Nothing like this kind of wing in the whole city. I could almost hear them sing. The wind cut around them with a chuckle, and it tickled my ears.

“Hurry,” said Wik. “Sunrise in a few hours.”

“Why can’t we test sounds at dawn?” Sellis asked.

“Because your eyes tell you what to see then. You need to train your ears.”

With that, Wik beckoned me to go first. I leapt from the Spire into the darkness.

As I leaned into my glide away from the Spire, waiting for Wik and Sellis to catch up, one of the worn buckles on my night-dark wings slipped.

The strap screeched. As the bone loop of the buckle continued to give, I could hear the fabric tearing. Before my training, I wouldn’t have heard a thing.

My wings pulled taut in the wind. All around me was pitch-black. If the strap broke, I would fall and no one would see me go. I scrambled to set my right wing’s elbow hook and reached as far as I could to hold the left strap together with my hand. The movement threw me off balance.

I began to spiral dizzyingly.

“What are you doing?” Wik shouted. When he realized what I held, he ordered, “Turn back now.”

I was already trying to turn back. Didn’t need to be told twice. I had dipped too low to regain the top of the Spire. I couldn’t maneuver, only glide and hope.

I heard the wind curve around something below me before I saw its shadowy outline, barely tinted against the darker forms of depth and clouds. A bridge.

Don’t overshoot it. You have one chance.

I could barely see it to time my landing.

I tried hearing the bridge, forcing my tongue against the dry — too dry — roof of my mouth repeatedly, until I made a loud, stuttering sound.

For a moment, my ears shaped the sweep of the sinew bridge. It stretched from Varu to Hirinat tower.

The bridge echo disappeared. I was not yet skilled enough.

I tried to hold the shape I’d heard in my mind. If I could drop low enough to catch the span with something — my hook, a knife, anything, I might stop my glide without falling.

Above, I heard the others glide past me. Wik dove below what must be the bridge. Catching me on this spiral would be risky, even for an accomplished Singer. But he was there to make the last-ditch attempt if I missed.

The strap slipped farther. The bone clasp cracked. And I heard Sellis beside me. She pushed me slightly off course with her backdraft.

“Shift, Sellis!” I shouted. How could she not hear me?

I could sense every change in the wind caused by the bridge and the looming wall of the Spire. If I didn’t course-correct soon, one would smash me flat, the other would cut me down.

“Sellis, break windward,” Wik yelled.

She finally heard and turned to clear the air. Her turn pulled me back onto a good landing angle for where I thought the bridge was. I kicked my feet out of their strap in time to hook the space where I pictured the railing should be.

I hoped I was right. I needed to be right.

One foot caught, then the other. I landed, sort of, hanging upside down by my ankles. The underbridge breeze swung me back and forth precariously.

The bridge wobbled as Wik landed and hauled me onto the span.

I brushed off his attempts to help inspect my wingstraps.

By feel, I could tell that both straps had been stressed with something sharp. Someone wanted me to fall far enough that I never came back.

Sellis’s eyes were wide in the sere predawn light. “I couldn’t turn,” she gasped, shaking. When Wik held out his hand, she shucked out of her own wings and they checked those wingstraps. They were stressed too, though not as badly. The grips had been weakened as well.

“Where did our new training wings come from?” she asked.

Wik was ashen; his tattoos, almost phosphorescent. The clip he gave to his words chilled me further. “The windbeaters sent new pairs up for the night fliers.”

“Windbeaters?” Sellis looked shocked. “But why would they ever — Rumul will — How dare…” She fell silent, shivering and looking, in the dim light, much younger and more afraid than I’d ever seen her. She caught me watching, but did not glare or flinch.

Finally, Wik spoke again. “Windbeaters. The Spire is in conflict.”

Sellis looked at Wik, then at me. “Please. We must return quickly. Tell the council. Before more Singers fall.”

16. GYRE

Wik had produced a sewing kit from a hidden pocket in his sleeve. He dampened a translucent cord with spit, then threaded it through the eye of a thick bone needle. He patched the break with sinew. When he finished, I tested the strap. It felt solid enough for a short flight.

Sellis paced, eager to fly once her wings were patched. Her need to make sure Rumul knew what had happened, and why, was palpable in the darkness.

“We will pursue what happened,” Wik promised, when I asked him to elaborate on the windbeaters’ actions. “Not now. We must do things carefully.”

Not now. Tradition. Carefully. Wik’s discipline took patience. I had little to spare.

We flew the short span of night to the Spire. Sellis and I clung to wall hooks outside while Wik worked the gate. We were at a higher tier than the one Nat and I had tried to break into at Allmoons.

A predawn gust cut around the Spire cold and loud. The gate ground open just as sunlight tinged the horizon’s dark clouds. We crawled through and emerged on a windbeater tier.

Wik pointed for us to climb back to our tiers, but I planted my feet. I wanted to stay, to confront the windbeaters. To find my father.

He shook his head emphatically. “Too dangerous,” he whispered. “In case they’re targeting someone.”

“Why would they do that?” I was still chilled by the near catastrophe.

Sellis looked like she was too, her usual haughtiness banished. She hesitated beside me, desperate to know more about the windbeaters’ intent before reporting to Rumul.

“They can’t fly anymore, but they can still meddle,” she whispered.

I sat down on the tier floor, stubborn. I refused to move.

Wik’s face turned stony. He was unused to being questioned by his charges.

Sellis shifted from one foot to the other, then sat down beside me.

I returned Wik’s gaze. “If we may not talk to them because we are not yet Singers, then you must ask them why.”

Wik groaned. When we still refused to move, he went to wake and interrogate a windbeater, one he said he could trust.

As he walked away, Sellis stared at me, her eyes wide. “Novices don’t question Singers.” She didn’t look at all comfortable with what we’d done. But she wasn’t scolding me.

“We’ll get an answer, at least.” I hoped I was right.

“It wasn’t personal,” Wik whispered when he returned. “They couldn’t know who would fly those wings.”

“Rumul needs to know.” Sellis rose, picked up her nightwings, and hurried to the ladders.

Wik watched her go, but I kept my eyes on him. “Why?”

“A few windbeaters have become open to trading favors, though it is not often done,” Wik said. “In return for gossip from uptower. Your father, for one.”

“And trying to murder Singers?”

“Rarely. They are trying to influence something.” He seemed unfazed, which made me want to shake him. I balled my fists and focused on breathing while he continued, “I can’t tell who is behind this. I will find out.”

Influence. Meddling. That was what Singers called someone almost dying. I was not comforted, but I let Wik nudge me back uptower while I continued to ponder.

My father traded in gossip.

I could find a way to use that.

The next afternoon, the dining alcove rumbled with gossip, but not the kind that my father would need. A windbeater had fallen, tragically, into the Gyre.

“Who?” I asked Sellis.

“An old crone who thought she’d outsmart the council,” she replied. Her chin was up; her confidence had returned. Her hands were folded neatly on the table. She’d downed her meal with relish.

A crone. Not my father. Still, retribution came fast in the Spire. I vowed silently that this would not be my fate.

In the days after, as we continued to train, we saw windbeaters below, practicing wind shifts, as usual. The situation seemed to have settled. But I could not convince Sellis to let me go downtower again. She went so far as to post Lurai by my alcove. It was an honor, she said. An acolyte.

My refusal to obey Wik had alarmed someone, and Sellis was making sure I didn’t venture anywhere on my own. I waited for any chance to go back down to the windbeaters’ tier, but I was never alone.

We worked on Singer skills, checking our wings well each time. We studied advanced echoing. Sellis and I flew blindfolded. Wik and I practiced skymouth calls atop the tower and on the wing.

We fought more now, testing the younger novices or being tested ourselves against older, just-turned Singers. Bone-knife cuts and bruises from the walls of the Gyre laced my arms, legs, and face like Singer tattoos. Sellis was equally marked.

Some days, the wind patterns were too strong, too complex for us. I bent a batten when I crashed into a gallery. Skidded onto the tier. Sellis fell so far that she had to climb back up on the ladders outside the Gyre.

She was skittish when she finally made it back to our tier.

“I almost fell beyond the windbeaters. That’s forbidden. They caught me with a hook.”

“What did you see?” I asked.

“They are preparing rot gas below.” At my confusion, she added, “The windbeaters throw flaming balls of it into the Gyre during a challenge if it’s going too slow.”

We began to hear new rumors in the dining alcove, murmurs of arguments in council, of Rumul yelling at someone in his alcove.

Even Moc didn’t know what was happening. “Something big,” he said, peering over the edge of the Gyre.

Windbeaters gathered by the vents below, practicing new patterns with their huge silk wings.

The Spire’s quiet passages clotted with groups of gray-robed Singers who talked almost silently and scattered when approached. I tried to find Wik, or Rumul, but they spent their days on the council tier. By the next morning, Sellis did not appear at breakfast.

“Ciel”—I caught the girl as she sped along the passage—“what has happened now?”

She wordlessly pointed to the Gyre, just as the gusts within rose to a howl. There was so much wind, pushed and funneled through the Spire’s abyss so fast, that things not tied down near the balconies began to be pulled into the funnel. A few pieces of silk flew out through the apex. Singers and novices alike ran to grab precious objects and secrete them away.

Rumul appeared on the council gallery, and everyone stopped and turned to look. He spoke, and the wind carried his voice throughout the Spire.

“There has been a challenge. Singer Terrin wishes to address the city. The council has disagreed. He has issued the challenge.”

“Singer’s burden,” the groupings of gray-winged Singers said.

“He will fight for this right, and by fighting, earn his voice, or lose his wings, or forfeit his life.”

“Singer’s right,” the Spire responded. The deep tones of the group’s unified voice echoed across the tiers, through the galleries.

Sellis descended a ladder, eyes gleaming. She shouted, “Come on!” to me as she moved fast to find a good view in the galleries.

I followed in her wake, feeling rising excitement overcome the dread that had gripped the Spire for days. This was how Rumul had earned his tattoos. So many fights, like scars crossing his face. This was what my mother had done. And how my father became a windbeater. This was how, someday, I might earn my Singer wings. By fighting in the Gyre.

With everyone else, I turned and let the Gyre wind whip at my face.

* * *

The challenger had traded his gray robes for white. His wings were Singer’s wings, a lustrous gray. From where we sat, we could see Terrin had belted his straps double tight. He held a bone knife high in salute to his fellow Singers.

“In defense of the city,” Rumul shouted, “I will fight him.”

Beside me, Sellis gasped. Far above, Terrin looked paler than before. The rumble from the top tier grew so loud it sounded like the start of a city roar from the wrong direction.

Before anyone could move to stop him, Rumul dropped from the balcony, wings spread. He drew a worn, though still deadly sharp, bone knife from an arm sheath. He tossed it in the air from one hand to the other as he swept around the Gyre.

Terrin checked his straps and leapt, his wings spread full.

The two circled each other, sensing which gusts were powerful enough to lift them up and around. They worked the wind, full of pointed determination.

“I will speak,” Terrin shouted. Then he dove, only to shoot up another gust and tear at Rumul’s foot, as Rumul passed by.

“Terrin will try to drop Rumul at first opportunity,” Sellis said. She paused, swallowed hard, and added, “It’ll be his only opportunity.”

To me, the challenge seemed much like wingfights at Densira. The fight was smaller: only two men struggled to knock each other out of the Spire, dead or alive. But here, the stakes were higher: the winner spoke for the city, the loser was forever silenced.

“One may win without killing an opponent,” Sellis whispered. Her eyes were lamp-bright, and she leaned side to side as Rumul turned. She knew his battle glides, apparently, very well. “He trained me,” she explained. “As Wik and I have trained you.”

I nodded, still not sure enough of the situation to speak. Asking a muzz-dumb question at this point — when Sellis had just begun to confide in me instead of reminding me how little I truly knew — seemed unwise. I let her continue talking, as it seemed to ease her nerves.

Rumul’s glides grew shorter and shorter as he narrowed the horizontal and vertical gaps between him and Terrin. Then he shot forward on a fortunate gust. The smoke of the windbeaters’ rot gas preparations had tinted a breeze just enough for him to see it.

Below, the windbeaters drums and the pulse of their wings punctuated the battle at increasing speeds.

“What is it,” Lurai asked, coming to stand beside us, “that Terrin wants to say?”

Sellis shushed him. “The Gyre will prove whether it’s worth hearing over council’s advice.” She shook her head. “Terrin was Rumul’s friend.”

I wondered if there was a song for fighting a friend in a challenge, but I kept my mouth shut.

Sellis kneaded her robes with her hands. She saw me notice and pressed her palms to her lap. “Rumul won’t let him live. But he won’t let Terrin fall while still alive either; at this point, that would be shameful. For both of them.”

Back at Densira, wingfighters fought together in a tangle of jewel-colored wings and glass-spiked feet, of bone and fists and blood and netting. But that was child’s play compared to the Gyre. This was the maelstrom.

Terrin tired. His arms shook in his wings; sweat poured down his face.

Rumul was lucky with the gusts, for sure. One caught and lifted him towards Terrin. He took a wide swipe with his knife and almost tore one of Terrin’s wings. Terrin turned just in time.

They whipped by our tier, rising, mouths grim, knives sharp. Light spilled over them as the sun broached the Spire’s apex. Rumul blinked, dazzled for a moment. Long enough for Terrin to take advantage and get above the head Singer.

Sellis stuffed her hand between her teeth. I leaned forward, watching.

Terrin dove for Rumul, lips parted to shape a high-pitched shriek.

Singers in nearby galleries covered their ears, wincing in pain. I winced too, but could not turn away. Rumul growled and flipped an impossible turn in the tight space, timed to catch a windbeater’s gust perfectly. He grabbed Terrin’s wing.

With a jerk, he tried to tear the wing from Terrin’s back. This angled his own wings against the wind, and he plummeted, dragging Terrin with him.

In a moment, the two men were one body, falling together. Terrin landed a lucky strike with his knife, and blood bloomed on Rumul’s robe near his shoulder. Singers were on their feet, mouths open, soundlessly watching. Sellis among them.

Then Terrin’s second wingstrap gave way and his left arm pulled, dislocated, from the wing. Rumul rose, four wings bellying with wind, two at his back, two in his hands.

Shrilling with pain, Terrin grappled for a balcony. His fingers scraped the tier as he passed us. The gallery leaned forward as if they too were falling.

A grinding sound. A new gust pulled at us. A gate had opened at the base of the Spire’s occupied tiers. Terrin was sucked out still shrieking into the bright city sky.

The gate slammed as Terrin’s voice faded into nothingness.

The Spire held its breath as Rumul gathered his strength and rode the remaining Gyre winds upwards to the top of the Spire.

On the upper balconies, two council members reached out to pull Rumul onto the tier. They addressed the galleries. “It is decided.”

The galleries replied, “It is decided.”

Robes rustled as Singers turned back to their alcoves, order restored.

The council members led Rumul away from the top balcony to tend his wounds. The windbeaters dropped their oversized wings to the floor with a clatter.

In the moment after the beaters stopped channeling the winds, an ear-popping reversal swung the Gyre currents. The force pulled at my cheeks and my robes. Older Singers leaned away from the Gyre to brace themselves.

Ciel, standing too close to the edge of the gallery, tripped and fell forward, over the edge and into the chasm. Her tiny training wings fluttered half open and useless.

She screeched, breaking the post-challenge silence of the Spire. Lurai and I rushed back to the galleries and looked down. A half tier below, Ciel clung to the wall, looking up with wide eyes.

Sellis shook her head slowly. She looked exhausted. “Clumsy.” The word echoed around the Spire like a death rattle. There were few worse names to be called in the city. One thing the Spire had in common with the towers. Moc ran to my side and looked down.

“Singers can’t fall in the Gyre,” he whimpered.

I didn’t think. “Help me,” I said as I stepped to the edge. Sellis and Moc followed. Lurai hesitated, then joined us.

“Hold my feet.” I loosed my wingstraps enough to loop one end around a bone post.

If I fell, if Lurai or Sellis let go my feet, I would fall past Ciel, knock her off her perch, and we would keep falling inside the Spire until the end of the world. “Tighter!”

The commotion I made attracted more attention than the fallen child. Behind me, the sound of running feet; above me, whispered words like tradition from the higher tiers; across the Spire, louder murmurs. But I was upside down now, my robes gathered around my waist and my under linens showing pale and undyed as I reached.

“Farther out!” I yelled, and Sellis and Lurai edged closer. I felt Sellis adjust her grip on my ankle and tensed, but she wrapped both hands more firmly, and I stopped dropping. My fingertips grazed Ciel’s hair.

“Reach up, Ciel,” I said as calmly as possible.

The fierce little girl whimpered. Her fingers clamped tighter around the wall of the perch. She looked up at me.

“You can,” I said, sounding more sure than I felt. “Just one hand.”

She shook her head again, but I could see her thinking about it. She knew she must.

Behind and above us, an older voice said, “Let her go. Singers do not fall in the Gyre,” but Moc was whispering, “Please,” softly, not wanting to frighten Ciel or me. I was aware by now that no Singer had jumped into the Gyre and glided over to help. If a novice did not learn to fly the Gyre like a Singer, it seemed they let you fall.

At least in the towers we had tethers for the unsure. Magisters who caught our friends and pulled them back from the clouds. Here, Ciel only had me.

“I won’t let you fall, Ciel.” I whispered it, but she heard.

First one finger, then more peeled away from the wall. They were rubbed with soot, the pads dented from her tight grip. The fingers hovered against the wall as Ciel checked her balance on her other hand, the place where she’d found to plant her feet.

Sturdy for the moment. Her hand shot up and grabbed mine, then slipped, and I clasped it tightly. Her foot slipped farther. She whimpered again. I tightened my grip and gritted my teeth hard.

Ciel swung from my hand, a tiny, winged pendulum. I dangled from the tier. Lurai and Sellis began hauling us both back up.

“If you were Singer-raised,” Sellis muttered. She stopped. “You and your tower-fed bones.”

If I’d been Singer-raised, I’d have been slighter, for certain. But I also wouldn’t have leapt to save a clumsy child.

They pulled, and I held fast to Ciel, and soon I was back on the flat landing of the tier, my ribs and stomach scraped where they’d struck the edge. Ciel grabbed the ledge and pulled herself up and over, then lay next to me, gasping.

“Clumsy,” Sellis said, and stalked away.

Ciel took my hand, and we both looked over the edge of the Gyre, into the dark depths.

Lurai leaned back against a wall, catching his breath. Moc knelt next to his twin. Took her other hand.

The galleries began to clear in earnest.

“Don’t tell,” Ciel said, her voice rough. “I forgot windbeaters sometimes pull the wind, after. I was distracted.”

Moc emphasized every word: “They never did it like that before. That was too much.”

More sabotage from below? “Who shouldn’t hear of this?”

The twins looked at me as if I was cloudtouched. Many Singers had witnessed the fall. Except the council.

“Sellis has already gone to tell Rumul everything.”

Moc grumbled as Ciel watched us. “At least Rumul will play it down. Aunt Viridi would not.”

Ciel shook her head emphatically. “Please don’t tell her. I was clumsy, that’s all. Singers aren’t clumsy. Not in the Gyre.” Her voice did not quaver. She was determined to sound as tough as any Singer. As tough as Wik.

Realization dawned. Aunt Viridi, the older Singer with the silver-streaked hair who had attended my wingtest. A councilwoman. Wik’s mother. The twins and Wik were family.

And yet their larger family, the Spire family, had returned to daily tasks, as if nothing had happened. As if, with everything decided, order and balance had been restored.

I squeezed Ciel’s hand tighter. Saw Moc’s eyes narrow. “What is it?”

“I am not sure yet,” Moc said. He lifted a torn scrap of Ciel’s robe from where it had caught on the ledge. Balled it up in his fist. “But I will find out.”

“We,” I said. “We will find out.”

17. WINDWARD

In the emptied gallery, I got to my knees, then my feet. Ciel clung to my hand.

“Who has charge of the vents? The windbeaters?”

When she didn’t answer, I looked for Moc. He was already disappearing down a ladder. I chased him. I heard Wik call out behind me, but I did not stop. Ciel ran with me, but halted at the landing.

“You’ll be fine,” I said.

She stared down the ladder. Wik appeared behind her, put a hand on her shoulder and dipped his head to me. She let him lift her up and rested her head on his shoulder. Safe.

If I lingered, I would lose track of Moc entirely. I turned and hurried down the ladder.

I caught up to Moc on the next level. Grabbed his robe and held him by it. “Tell me now — what is happening?”

He pawed the air with his fists. “I am trying to find out!” His voice cracked. “Someone is sabotaging the Spire — your wings, the vents! Other things too. It is not over. It is not decided.”

He swung so hard that I dropped him to the floor. He got to his feet and began descending the next ladder.

“Why is no one else asking questions?”

“They don’t see everything Ciel and I do. Some don’t trust us because our aunt is on the council. So they don’t listen to us either.”

I heard truth in his voice. Followed him down into the depths of the Spire. Someone had sabotaged my wings. Someone had tried to hurt Ciel. If I found out why, I might gain better leverage with Rumul. Perhaps I would then have gossip for my father.

We reached the lowest levels, where the windbeaters lived. Bolts of dove-colored silk lined the halls, and silk spiders’ nests clung to corners and to the ceiling. I spotted a loom in an alcove. The walls were covered in carvings. Some bone spurs had been carved so deeply and intricately, they resembled lace and lattice more than walls.

Ahead of me, Moc stepped into the shadows, out of the dimming light.

“They keep busy down here.”

“They make a bunch of things. Wings, nets. The plinths for wingtests. Trade them for goods from the other towers,” he whispered.

Two aged windbeaters leaned out over the Gyre, large wings spread on the floor behind them. They did not turn as we passed.

“What are they doing?” I looked back. One windbeater’s eyes were white, like the skyblind. He was tethered to the floor with bone cleats and long sinew ropes.

“Listening to the wind. Learning to shape it.” Moc didn’t spare them a glance. “Even the injured can do that, if they’re good enough. And if they still have use of their arms and shoulders.”

Moc kept walking until he reached an alcove carved into the thickening outer wall. Strange carvings surrounded the room like pipes. Long stretches of hollowed-out bone rose to the ceiling. Some had pulley ropes run through them, or hinged lids. They looked like a group of rainspouts.

A bent form was working the pipes — a man, judging by the breadth of his shoulders, though his robes hung strangely. He moved as if each gesture brought pain.

The pipe covers snapped open and clicked shut, sounding like Laws chips. The alcove smelled like old bone mixed with fresh air. The man’s fingers stilled. He seemed to be waiting for something.

I heard a soft clicking. Like echoing.

“Civik Spire,” Moc said. The figure did not move. Moc cleared his voice and prepared to shout, before shaking his head instead and touching the figure’s sleeve. The man spun halfway towards him. Singer marks scarred the skin around his ruined eyes. The left side of his face had been flattened: a broken cheekbone. Something sharp had taken his right eye.

Sound came sudden to my lips. “Oh.”

The figure turned to me fully now, as if he could hear me easier than he could hear Moc.

A rasp, like a gate opening. “Skymouth speaker.” He said it slowly, as if he rarely spoke. “I’d wondered when they’d find a new one.” His laugh was bitter and ended in a cough.

“You almost killed her last night, you broken old man,” Moc said, though his voice was softer now. He turned to me, murmured, “Civik’s deaf in the left ear. Once you get his attention, it’s all right.”

I looked at them both, suddenly aware of how much Moc knew about the tower’s comings and goings. He hadn’t spotted the resemblance between me and the ruined man before me, though. This was one thing he did not know.

But I knew. I saw it in Civik’s hands, his long fingers, so similar to my own. I recognized the rasp in Civik’s voice as a worn echo of my terrible singing voice.

Civik knew me only by the tones behind my voice. Knew me as a skymouth shouter. But I knew him for much more.

I held my tongue, for now.

Civik pushed on the walls and grabbed handholds to move away from the pipes. I heard bone grind against bone. Civik’s robe shifted with the motion. For a moment, I saw that his body was bound with spidersilk to a bone pedestal. Where Civik’s legs should have been, his under-robes ended in a knot. Carved bone rollers at the pedestal’s base allowed him to move.

I gasped again.

“Young person who has arrived with the impertinent Moc,” Civik rasped, “is shocked at my appearance. It hasn’t been that long, has it, since my last battle?”

“Twelve years, Civik,” Moc said. He gestured uselessly to me. “But this novice arrived a few months ago. And you almost killed her with faulty nightwing straps. And just now, you nearly killed Ciel, too, with your backdraft.”

I bit my tongue so that Civik would not realize anything more about me, and let Moc rage on.

“Could you get something right, Civik? You didn’t distract the council from deciding against Terrin. You didn’t even stall them. You’re dangerous. I should find a new windbeater to bribe.”

Civik grumbled. “I am trying, young Moc.”

“What is going on?” I said.

They both answered at once.

Civik said, “Moc owes me tools and gossip.” While Moc said, “Civik’s useless — I won’t give you any more gossip, Civik, until you help us.”

“You were trying to help Terrin by sabotaging the Nightwings?” I asked.

The windbeater shrugged. “Terrin’s argument was his. He flew too early. We could have postponed it. We had our own goals.”

“But you weren’t supposed to target novices,” Moc said quickly. “Wik was out there.”

Civik waved a hand. “If the night fliers have a setback, that delays Rumul. Long enough for Terrin to seek more support. And many other things.”

Swaying from foot to foot as he thought, Moc looked very young. I held myself still, listening to what was being said and what was not being said. How many layers of allegiance and independence existed in the Spire? In the city, loyalty was to tower and family first, then friends and allies after. A tightly woven fabric — except when there was a flaw. I thought of how Densira and my aunts had almost abandoned my unlucky mother. In the Spire, loyalty was different, focused on power: on gaining it, on keeping it. Much was dedicated to duty. Still more to the city itself. Then, to other Singers, as long as they were skilled enough and did not break tradition. Singers with Spire family had another layer as well. It reminded me of the Gyre’s wind gusts, spun together to form a powerful current that lifted a flier’s wings. Or made them fall.

I did not understand all of it, by far. And, from what I’d seen, some Singers valued certain layers over others. If I didn’t figure out the connections, those forces would work against me, pull me down.

Worse, I stood in a room with my father, and I could not bring myself to greet him. He was weak and ruined. He’d almost killed Nightwings last night and Ciel today, to aid his own plans. I didn’t know him. How could I want him as a relative, much less an ally?

I thought back to Civik’s attempts to delay Rumul. To Moc’s words. “Why did Terrin need support?”

Moc blew air through his lips in exasperation. “You still don’t understand, Kirit.”

At my name, Civik’s head turned farther. His blind eyes looked like kavik eggs. I shivered. “Kirit?” he whispered and leaned towards me. His cart rolled forward, his fingers reaching out, and I stepped back, involuntarily.

“What happened?” I asked.

At my words, Civik leaned back, and his cart retreated towards the wall.

Moc answered. “He fell, during his last fight. Lost his legs. Destroyed his shoulder. Before that, he broke his hip, but he still fought in the Gyre.”

“When did you go blind?” I whispered, circling to stand nearer to Moc. Civik’s white gaze followed the sound of my voice now.

“His first fight. A challenger. She devastated him, but let him live. He became a windbeater, but he emerged twice to challenge again.” Moc sounded sad and proud at the same time.

“You fought blind?”

Moc laughed. “Singers fight until they can’t. Of course he fought blind. You could too, if you got better at echoing.”

Of course — as a skymouth shouter, Civik would have also trained as a Nightwing.

“And he can’t stop fighting. Civik thinks he’s the conscience of the Spire, don’t you?” Moc stepped close and tapped Civik on the shoulder. The two were nearly the same height.

“Kirit is a name I haven’t heard in a long time,” Civik finally said. Then his shoulders slumped. “What tower are you from?”

But I had my own questions. “Years ago, you betrayed Naton Densira, didn’t you? Why?”

Civik bent farther with more hacking sounds. Finally he caught enough breath to speak. “Is that what you think? Who told you that?”

I was about to answer when Moc looked up, head tilted. “Someone’s coming.”

Wik emerged from a ladder well.

“Moc. Kirit. Why am I not surprised? You’ve caused quite an uproar.” His voice sounded stern. His eyes, though. They looked grateful.

He saw Civik, bent down to clasp the man’s gnarled hand.

Moc pointed. “Old man’s been trying to sabotage things all the wrong ways. First the wings, then the Gyre blowback. If Ciel had fallen…” His voice tightened on the last words.

Wik raised his eyebrows. Civik interjected before Wik, too, could grow angry.

“Moc didn’t tell me how to stir things up, just that folks wanted them stirred. Hasn’t paid me either.”

Moc. The Nightwings. No.

“Fine,” Moc said, ignoring my shocked face. “This is your gossip: Rumul has accepted the oath of an adult novice to take your place as a shouter. Kirit. He won’t need you anymore once she’s trained.” His voice was angry and mean.

Wik frowned but didn’t contradict him. I knelt next to Wik and Civik.

I put a hand out and touched the windbeater’s fingertips. “Not replace. Moc is angry.” Civik’s fingers were dry and callused. He startled at my touch, then wrapped his hand around mine. For a moment, I imagined that we had always been this way. Then I squeezed his hand hard, and he yelped.

“Why did you leave Densira? Why did you betray Naton?” I would not let go until he told me.

Wik put a hand on my shoulder. “You have it backwards, Kirit. Civik has been trying to help.”

“I made a mistake,” Civik whispered. “A lot of mistakes. But I am fighting now.” His eyes rolled, searching for light he’d never find.

“When he returned to the Spire and lost his first challenge,” Wik said, “he was allowed to concede. And then he didn’t stop challenging. His injuries didn’t matter. He kept flying. When Rumul finally beat him, he broke Civik’s collarbone. Civik was no longer able to fly beyond the Spire without help. He couldn’t return to Densira.”

I turned on Wik. “And who are you? Rumul’s man? Like Sellis?”

Wik shook his head. “I see the good the Singers do, and I defend the city. But Rumul’s decisions have consequences for everyone. I supported Terrin and wanted the city to know what he had to say. I was one of a few who wanted this. There are others.”

“What was it that Terrin wanted to say?”

“It has to do with the skymouths,” Wik said slowly. “But it has been decided.”

Civik coughed, ignoring Wik. “Ezarit? Does she live?” So he did remember. He’d drawn into himself, his arms wrapped around his chest.

“She does,” I said. “Though she seems to be at the end of her ability to negotiate with the Singers.”

I heard Moc gasp.

Civik hung his head. “That is my fault too.”

“What does that mean?”

He answered me. “If I’d lost properly, or had told her everything, she would have had more to bargain with.”

Then the timing clicked. Civik’s initial downfall. My mother’s challenge. Her voice telling me the story, after the wingtest. I was ruthless, Kirit. She’d fought Civik. To gain her security in the towers.

I looked around Civik’s alcove. The pipes, the smell of fresh air and old bone. His sunken, gray cheeks. The darkness. “Are you in pain?”

He shook his head. Then nodded. “Always, a little. Enough.”

“You were a Singer and a skymouth shouter. Why are you down here?”

Wik answered instead. “He challenged Rumul. Who could have killed him.” I frowned, though I understood. Wik continued. “But shouters’ voices? They’re valuable. Civik could no longer fly, but Rumul went to great lengths to keep him alive.”

Civik’s voice. The rasp of it. Stilling with one shout a skymouth, all teeth and maw and grasping tentacles. That was one power Rumul lacked, except when he could control it in others. I looked more closely at my father. His lips were chapped and cracked. His clothing very dirty. He was thinner than Wik, by far.

Rumul might have been keeping him alive, but it was a very near thing. And I couldn’t imagine Civik outside the Spire, being flown by another Singer, in the midst of a skymouth migration. There was something else that I was missing.

My hand went to my throat. “How does Rumul use Civik’s voice inside the Spire?”

There was a long pause. No one answered me.

“It has been decided,” Wik said, looking away.

Terrin’s challenge. “What did he want to tell the city?”

Civik’s laugh was a sour echo. “Secrets.”

Wik took my hand and tried to pull me out of the alcove. I refused to budge. Finally, he said, “Come. I will show you.”

He took a long loop of knotted rope from the wall near Civik’s alcove. The ladder wells had been filled in below this level. Going below the windbeaters, I remembered, was forbidden. We headed for the Gyre’s edge. Wik tied the rope to bone hooks carved in the wall and tossed the loop into the depths of the Spire.

18. DOWNTOWER

We climbed down the rope, far into the darkness below the occupied tiers, until we reached a thick set of nets. Multiple layers of them.

Wik touched my arm. Whispered, “Stay very quiet.” Then he walked slowly towards the center of the Gyre, across the nets.

An acrid smell grew stronger as I followed his path. The nets rose and fell with our motion, but also with an odd pressure from below our feet. I wobbled and fought hard to keep my balance. When I looked down, I could not see anything but shadowy ropes and more darkness.

Wik reached the center of the netting and pulled on a series of knots. An access gate opened to the space below. He lowered himself through the hole, tugging on my sleeve to guide me, then closed the gate behind us.

I relaxed my hands, which had tightened into fists. Tried to calm myself. I would not regret demanding to know. This was where I’d wanted to be.

It wasn’t where I wanted to be at all.

We stood in the center of the nets and Wik said, “Kirit, you must control your voice in here, as we’ve practiced. You must not make any mistakes.”

Something moved beyond the nets. Something big.

The hair on my arms rose.

“Do not shout. Do not speak. Just echo.” Wik’s lips touched my ear, his voice sounded almost inside my head.

My eyes adjusted, slowly. I could now see where Wik’s face was, his cheek a different shade of darkness than the shadowed walls around us. I saw the quick flashes of his teeth.

But that was all. Wik was right. This was not a time for using my eyes.

His voice was patient, and urgent. “You will understand soon. Just echo.”

I was still learning how to echo and hum; the combination was difficult. Now I hummed through my nose while clicking and tried to remember to breathe. The movement on the other side of the net stopped.

“We would have had to do this anyway, to complete your training,” Wik whispered.

The completion of my training was skymouth shouting. I stopped echoing. “Is a skymouth caught in the nets?”

I imagined a mouth opening beside me, tentacles reaching for me, with only ropework between us.

I tried to refocus, to corral in my thoughts. Breathe and echo.

I heard the shape of something beyond the nets. Something large, in motion. I turned and echoed again. More of the same shape, slightly smaller. I could not breathe.

“Not one skymouth,” Wik said, his voice close in my ear again. “Many.”

I stopped humming. Darkness surrounded me. Wik’s hand brushed my arm.

I bit back a scream.

“Many?” My voice rose, and there was a rasp on the other side of the net. Motion. Faster. The ropes bulged towards us.

Something tugged at my hair. My robe. Something that slid and grabbed and pulled. My entire body went gooseflesh. I could not breathe at all.

Wik hummed, and the sinister motion slowed. The tentacles receded. My breath returned, but my mouth was dry. It took time to rebuild my echo. For a moment, I was overwhelmed by the darkness, blinded with fear.

“We are safe here,” Wik said, stopping his echo once mine had started again. “The nets will hold.”

I kept echoing, hearing the coils and tentacles, the long bodies of the penned skymouths that my hum was defining around us. When they moved, the echo blurred into a confusion of roiled air. “Why?” The nets went dark again when I stopped echoing to ask the question. But even in the dark, I could see the pattern of the nets. I had seen it before, on Naton’s bone chips. This was what he had carved. The blueprint for these nets. A skymouth pen.

“Some of the skymouths here will be used for their sinew, for bridges. Some give us the ink that lines their glands,” Wik said, lifting my hand and putting his thumb on the mark Rumul had given me. Wik hummed again, and I joined him. The movement around us stilled.

After a moment, he tapped my hand and whispered, “They sleep. Your first test, passed.”

“Why keep so many, once you’ve caught them?”

Wik didn’t answer at first. Then, “Why, indeed. You should ask Rumul. The problem isn’t that we are keeping them. Singers have always kept one or two for training.”

I waited for him to continue. He remained silent.

We stood at the center of the Spire’s secrets. Nat would have loved this. “Wik. Tell me.”

“It has been decided.” His voice was firm. “We should go back up. Check on Ciel.” He tugged on my sleeve to draw me away, as if he regretted having revealed any of this.

I did not wish to be left alone at the center of a skymouth pen in the depths of the Spire, surrounded by teeth and tentacle, maw and want. But I planted my feet more firmly, refusing to move. “Tell me now.”

“Terrin lost his challenge. If he had won…” Wik’s voice drifted off. “We had hoped … But Rumul and the council demand silence, even among ourselves.” He tried to pull me towards the rope gate, to the exit at the pens’ net ceiling.

I still refused to budge. This was information I needed. “How can I finish my training without understanding this?”

He cleared his throat. Spoke in a hush. “Some skymouths are bred here, by Singers. And they have been, for a long time.”

New skymouths, on purpose. My skin crawled as if I were covered in writhing tentacles. My hands pushed at Wik’s chest, as if I could have driven what he’d just said back inside of him. “Why would anyone want to make more?”

“See for yourself,” Wik said. “Carefully. Few Singers realize they’ve gotten more than they bargained for.”

I turned and clicked softly, not wanting to wake the huge beasts. The sound vibrations translated to large shapes, caught in pens around the Gyre. So many. More than the city could ever use for bridges.

In a corner closest to us, I heard something different: a shape like a pile of worn cloth, but softer. Almost deflated. Those were skymouth shapes, no longer moving. Stacked neatly, ready to be turned into sinew and ink for the Singers.

There was an order to the cages. A purpose that was the darkest side of the Singers. And Naton had helped them make this.

I felt sick to my stomach. “You are farming them.” The realization took my breath away, and I stopped clicking. The nets went dark.

“The skins are as caustic as the ink. We can only use the undersides of tentacles and the bladders, and only very carefully at that. The rest gets thrown down. Or fed to the others.”

“Who does the work?”

Wik turned his head up towards the windbeaters’ tiers. His profile was lit by the dawn just coming into the Spire, elaborate tattoos across his cheeks thrown into relief. Like a fine carving. I looked away, back into shadows.

“Those windbeaters who are able see to most of it, led by a few Singers who can make sounds that the skymouths can hear and who wish to do the work. Terrin was one.”

The sick, crawling feeling built.

“But Terrin knew something he wanted to share with the city.” My voice was calm, but my mind raced. Skymouths. Nat wouldn’t have believed this if he’d seen it himself.

As my thoughts jumbled, the skymouths began to stir again. Another rope dropped from the darkness above. The nets bounced as feet marched across the skymouth pens, quickly enough that the beasts inside began to stir angrily.

Wik hummed to calm them as the gate opened. Then Rumul descended into the pens, crowding us amongst the nets.

“Our acolyte is a quick study,” Rumul said, his voice soft and shadowed. “Sellis told me you’d gone to the windbeaters. I’m not shocked Civik’s daughter would end up on the forbidden tiers. I wanted to see your reaction for myself.”

I remained silent. Afraid. Discovered on a forbidden tier. I could not fathom what he would do now.

Rumul turned and grabbed me, putting his face close to mine. “Do you know why we keep them?”

I shook my head, thinking fast. “Wik would not speak of it. I can only guess.”

Rumul relaxed. Let me go. “Tell me.” His breath smelled of honey.

“That you keep some alive for training. That you trade extra sinew with the towers for what the Spire needs.” It was not a bad answer.

Rumul smiled and turned to Wik. “Well, Singer? Do we have another skymouth shouter?” His voice was softer now. He did not seem angry any longer. Why?

Wik continued to echo, lulling the beasts around us to sleep. He nudged me, wanting me to answer for myself. My cheeks grew hot. “I am able to calm them, if that’s what you mean.”

“Good,” said Rumul. His relief was palpable in the dark. “It is what we had hoped. For that, and for your silence.”

Wik’s trust paired with Rumul’s approval should have steadied me, but I realized I was shaking. I did not like the head Singer. Nor these pens. Being trapped too close with both was worse than being trapped in the walls.

Rumul rose to his full height, his bald scalp brushing the rope ceiling of the pens. “You have done well these months, Kirit. You proved correct those Singers who believed in you. You were meant to be a Singer.”

“She’s still got much to learn, much to practice.” Wik was right. I was far from accomplished at the things I was learning.

Still, surrounded by the pens, I was driven to speak plainly.

“I do not want to live out my days down here.” In the dark. With skymouths.

“The council decides what best serves the city,” Wik said. “It is tradition.” He said it kindly, but I leaned forward in the enclosure, wanting to argue.

Rumul smiled. “The council has discussed Kirit’s case already. Your appeal to allow her down here started that. I’ve approved the request.” A dark look at Wik. “After the fact.”

Wik put a hand on my arm. Slowly, Kirit.

“She may be allowed to help us in the skies, for the good of the city.” Rumul’s voice began to soothe my worries.

I would have blue skies, not deep shadows. Tower guards who were glad to see me, not broken Singers. I would be a protector of the city, not a collector of bribes, gossip, and skymouth skins. Relief coursed through me. I could still escape the Spire’s bowels.

I opened my mouth to speak, but Wik’s hand tightened on my arm.

“In time,” he said again. “She’s not ready.”

Rumul ignored him and faced me. “Sellis tells me you are a strong Gyre fighter. That you have held her to a draw more than once.”

“Yes.” Recently, at least, though not always.

Wik yanked at my arm. I jerked it away, annoyed.

Rumul put a hand on my shoulder. The shadows obscured his face, but he tilted his head. He could have been smiling. “It is time, Kirit. You will challenge for your Singer wings. You will rise or fall to meet your fate.”

“What?” Wik said, too loudly.

I was as surprised as he.

But in that moment, I saw myself dressed in Singer gray, flying wherever I was needed, day or night. I looked at Wik, the tension of his jaw.

“I disagree,” Wik said. He tried to step between Rumul and me, but Rumul blocked him with a hand.

“A challenge has come from the towers. The council has determined that it is Kirit’s to defeat.” He looked directly at me. “Accept, and you will take the wings of your birthright. A true Singer.”

A last test, then. One I could pass. I was stronger and faster than any tower challenger. I had learned to fly the Gyre well and quickly. Still, Wik’s alarm made me hesitate. What was Rumul up to, overruling my assigned mentor? I hadn’t learned enough. I did not understand these twists and turns of Spire power.

“Kirit,” Wik said, louder than he’d spoken since we descended.

I straightened my spine, looked into the shadows of Rumul’s face. “I will challenge,” I said.

Wik made one last attempt. “Sellis should be the one to meet the tower challenger. She has been training longer.”

Rumul silenced him, holding up a single finger. “She and one more novitiate will challenge on the same day.”

In the quiet, I spoke again. This time with force behind each word. “I am ready.”

Challengers would receive several days to try to learn the Gyre, though no Singer would help them. I could practice, ask Wik and Sellis to help me.

Rumul smiled. “Then you will defend the city from this challenge. Succeed and you will become a Singer.” He did not need to say again what would happen if I failed.

Around us, an invisible weight shifted and rustled, waking.

Rumul took my arm and led me from the pens with Wik following.

As we emerged in the windbeaters’ tier, Rumul spoke again. “You will defend the city against your challenger today, Kirit Spire. Prepare yourself.”

19. NADIR

High on the council tier, as the sun brightened the Spire, Singers dressed me in a white robe. They tightened my wingstraps and whispered encouragements. They poured me chicory.

I had been allowed several hours’ rest. It had not been nearly enough.

“Be fast,” said the older, brass-haired woman. Viridi’s sister. “Don’t forget to look behind you. Above and below too.”

I wished I had my father’s lenses, with their reflective mirror. I couldn’t find them in the morning when I’d rushed back to my alcove, and couldn’t remember where I’d seen them last.

When they finished preparing me, Wik bent low and whispered in my ear, “Be careful.”

I turned, eyebrows raised. He doubted me still?

“This challenge comes sudden. That is not tradition. You should have much more training. And days to practice. Choose the weapon you know the best. Be careful.” He stepped away. Only for a moment did I feel his hand on mine, when he pulled it from me.

“The challenger has chosen the bow as his weapon,” said a young woman at my side. Her brown eyes were hemmed with silver tattoos against her olive skin.

She cleared her throat, pulling my focus to the workbench glittering with sharp edges. Glass knives with bone hilts. Bone blades. Spears. Hooks.

I pointed, making my decision.

The young woman had sun chancres across her dark face. She did not smile as she handed me my weapons of choice: knives. The worn bone hilts had comfortable grips wrapped in sticky raw spidersilk. The blades were new: each a glass tooth so sharp it nearly hummed.

Rumul watched from the edge of the council’s balcony, Wik beside him. Sellis was nowhere to be seen.

Moc pulled on my sleeve, suddenly beside me. “The windbeaters will help you. Look for strong gusts in the Gyre.”

I looked down at him while the Singer strapped the triple sheath to my arm. “What did you give them?”

He looked worried. “You need help, Kirit. You’re still learning. I had to give them your lenses. You haven’t been using them much.”

“My lenses! Moc—”

But the Singer securing my robes at the ankles hushed me. “The challenged should reflect in silence. It is tradition.”

She finished binding my robes, and I walked quickly to Rumul and Wik. I let my wings unfurl, shimmering in the daylight. My footsling dragged behind me, making a skittering sound on the tier floor. Other Singers gave me a wide berth.

Rumul held out a hand towards me, then gestured to the Gyre.

“Your birthright, Kirit. You’ve proven that.”

Rumul’s words shredded the doubt Wik’s worries had laid down. I could do this.

Below us, a white-robed challenger waited. I couldn’t see them on the downtower balconies, but I knew that they must be close, if not already in the Gyre.

“The challenger has demanded answers we cannot give. They have threatened to rouse the towers against the Spire. Worse”—Rumul paused and stared at me—“they’ve broken Laws in the past. You will stop them, for the city’s sake.”

Behind us, Singers stood together, a wall of gray. “You must not fail.”

Far below, the windbeaters readied their giant wings, their rot gas. The vents opened, and the Gyre gust swirled up until it reached me. I leapt into the maelstrom.

* * *

Singers watched from the galleries as I swept around the Gyre, seeking my prey. The challenger who had come so far and dared too much. The one who did not understand what Singers were willing to sacrifice.

I locked my wings in position and took a knife from its sheath on my arm. The wind kept pace with every move I made, lifting me as I circled. The galleries rustled with whispers as I glimpsed a flash of white from the corner of my eye. The challenger, behind me. They must have clung to the wall below the council balcony until I leapt, then followed me out.

Sneaky. Just as some claimed the Lawsbreaker would be. Just like the Lawsbreaker I had been. I could do a service for the Singers, ending this danger to the city. Prove myself. As soon as I got the challenger off my tail.

An arrow arced wide past me, then clattered against the Gyre wall. Their aim was off. The enclosed space and strange winds gave me an advantage. Still, I swallowed hard and tightened my grip. Hurry, Kirit.

The windbeaters’ drums quickened, and I heard the wind whistle through the galleries. There was a drop coming.

Another arrow seared far too close, the fletching scraping my ear. The bone point missed its mark, but I was windbit already from the Gyre’s howl. The brush of the weapon stung my skin.

By arching my back, I angled my wingtips and slowed my glide. The challenger hurtled over me, into my wind shadow. I angled away as the challenger dropped like garbage, spinning out of control.

As they fought to find a stronger gust, I moved in above. Looked for the best place to slash the challenger’s wings. To end this quickly. To succeed and gain my birthright.

I raised the knife. It glittered from the sun and spun as it split the air.

The challenger turned fast. Shadow and wing, strong arms bent hard to the elbow hooks. Fingers wrapped tight around a bow.

We nearly collided.

Dark curls. Angry eyes.

I spun away at the last minute. Knowing the Gyre helped keep me from dropping us both into the pits.

But it was far too late. I’d seen his face. Knew the shape of it from just one glance.

Black hair; those eyes. His earnest look turned gaunt and scarred.

Nat lived.

He had challenged the Singers? He’d threatened the city?

I searched for a gust to take me higher so I could think. Not him. Not this. I found none. The windbeaters stirred the gusts to drive us together again.

Wing against shadow. Arrow against knife. Untried Singer against her challenger. Me to my best friend. Kirit to Nat.

My fight dissolved, crippled by relief at seeing Nat alive. But he, righted now, and flying fast, nocked another arrow.

Perhaps he hadn’t realized who he fought. He wouldn’t shoot, would he?

I banked fast, trying to reach him. Sheathed my knife. The galleries groaned in protest.

Nat’s wings dipped and wobbled. He didn’t know how to fly the Gyre. He was tiring fast as well. But he held his bow horizontal. Drew back the arrow. He looked up to aim as we circled.

When his eyes met mine, his hand wavered. I saw his mouth start to form my name. Then he clamped his lips shut. His fingers tightened on the bow.

Ducking my head and bending my knees slightly, I dropped fast. The arrow hummed past me, disappearing into the Gyre’s shadows.

I took hold of the wing grips and twisted into a sharp turn. The windbeaters saw my maneuver and stirred up gusts to add more force. I rocketed past Nat and circled above him again, locking my wings in fighting position.

My fingers brushed the next knife hilt. How could I even consider it? Elna would have two fallen men.

One of those men was currently shooting at me. Trying to kill me to win a challenge.

The galleries erupted with stamping feet to match the windbeaters’ drums.

What did I want? To be a Singer, I had to defeat him. To be Kirit, I could not.

I took a deep breath and swerved to avoid him. Shouted as loud as I could over the roar of the Gyre.

“Nat! What are you doing?”

He drew another arrow from his sleeve quiver.

“I thought you were dead!” I could not stop myself.

“You might as well be,” he answered. “A Singer!” The way he said it warped across the wind. To me, the word sounded more like “murderer.”

He found a fast-moving gust and tried to rise above me.

I ducked beneath him and cut off his wind. When he wobbled and started to fall, I dodged out of the way. One last chance. We flew side by side for a moment, my right wing grazing the gallery wall.

“You don’t have to do this. I have so much to tell you.” If I could get him to drop his weapon and concede the challenge, then perhaps everything would be all right. The Singers would punish him, but he might live.

Though they would certainly punish me.

“I know enough. Your Singers lie, Kirit. They killed Naton for their lies!” He started to pull away, then leaned towards me instead, trying to drive me into the galleries and crush me.

“Your father stole secrets! He broke Laws!” I angled my wingtip until it slipped beneath his. White silk shuddering, battens shrieking. I held him there, then rolled hard, flipping his wing up in the process.

He tottered, dropping the arrow. I flew away straight.

“Maybe some Laws need breaking,” he shouted after me, righting himself. “What secrets did my father die for?” He pulled another arrow from his quiver. He only had a few left.

The Singers in the tiers around us rose to their feet, angrily gesturing. On my next turn, I saw Rumul far above, looking down. His face still as bone. The realization hit me. He’d planned this.

He wanted to test me, to see if I was a true Singer. As my father had been tested.

I wove and dipped so that Nat could not aim. My throat ached from the exertion of talking while flying the Gyre.

The windbeaters accelerated their beats. Somewhere below, my father was among them. Civik, who betrayed Naton. The gusts grew more fierce than I’d ever experienced in the Gyre. The wind yanked at my hair, tearing it free. Nat’s black curls formed a tangled nimbus around his head.

They’d promised him answers if he won. What could I promise? A quick death, without falling forever. Or I could lose. I could banish myself to the Spire’s depths by conceding. They would keep me alive, but I’d never see sky again.

If Nat won, they had to answer his questions, but he did not know the right questions to ask. I did. If he conceded, perhaps then I could ask more questions. Change things.

We flew opposing courses now, sweeping past each other in tighter spirals. He looked for advantage. I sought a way out.

My first friend. My best friend. Why are you doing this? My initial relief at seeing him alive had become anger.

“You don’t know the truth, Nat! You have to give this up.”

“No.” The word was a sob. “You can’t win. Singers can’t win.”

I am not a Singer, yet. But I cannot lose.

He whirled around, furious again. “I thought you were dead! But you’re not! You’re strong — we nearly starved these months, with the Laws they gave me. Where are yours?” He was crazed, yelling. I saw the chips hanging heavy on his wrists. His arms were pale past the wingstraps. His hands gripped the bow hard. He was tiring, too weak. But desperate. I didn’t have much time.

What could I do to shock him, make him concede? I could tell him the truth. I could sing it.

I cast my voice to carry on the drafts. I sang The Rise to Nat. The real Rise.

The city rises on Singers’ wings, remembering all, bearing all,

Rises to sun and wind on graywing, protecting, remembering.

Never looking down. Tower war is no more.

For a moment, the galleries fell silent. Then a shout of outrage broke through the windbeaters’ drums, the swirl of wind. Rumul’s voice. “Stop this!”

I continued to sing. Hoped Nat could hear me. Would listen.

A voice on a nearby tier joined me. Then another.

Always rising, never failing. The city forever.

Rising together. Rising as one.

Nat’s eyes grew wide as the words filled the Gyre and he heard the difference from what he’d always known as unassailable fact. This is why there are Singers, Nat. To protect tower from tower.

I didn’t stop singing until he shot at me again, wildly, his last arrow nicking my wing.

“Stop this! Kill me already,” he screamed. He threw the bow. It spun in the air, hit the wall, and plummeted into the Gyre. I heard a cheer from the galleries.

Nat’s straps bit white against his shoulders where his robes had slipped. His face flushed deep red. Buoyed by the song, I circled in long arcs, looking for a way to knock him into the nets above the pens, to cut his wings open. To win without killing him. In the galleries, Singers leaned forward to see better. The fight had gone too slow for the windbeaters.

I smelled the rot gas before I saw the balls of flame. Heard them rise last of all. With a whoosh, one hand-sized ball flew up the tower, then another.

“Monsters,” Nat shouted, as a gout flew close to his face and rose out the top of the Spire. I smelled singed hair.

I could push him right into a rot gas ball and his wings would burn, but Nat would fall, alive.

I tried not to think about how Rumul would judge me for sparing Nat. I doubted it would be well.

I twisted in the jumbled wind. “I’m not trying to kill you, Nat!”

“You’ll let me go, then send a skymouth to kill me,” he yelled. “Tobiat warned me about Singers!”

“No! Tobiat is damaged! He’s…” I spun lower, losing altitude, trying to think. Nat followed me down, battling the gust patterns, and something suddenly made sense. “Tobiat was a windbeater.”

“What does that mean?”

“He knew Naton. He watched Naton work in the Spire! He’s the traitor.”

“Shut up, Kirit!” Nat dove for me, hands outstretched, trying to grapple my wings and drag us both down. We plummeted past gallery walls carved with Singers falling, wound round with flames.

We were well down in the Gyre now, too close to the novices and windbeaters throwing flaming rot gas. I heard Moc shout for me.

I fought my way to an updraft, hoping Nat would follow me, that he was strong enough to follow me.

He did. Barely. His pale wings filled with wind.

“I will tell you what I know,” I said. “But you must give up then, you must concede. Promise?”

He whistled. Our long-ago flight signal. Agreement.

I was about to break the Spire’s rules, but perhaps it would work. Nat would be left alive. I pointed down. Spoke fast. “Your father built pens for the Spire, Nat. That’s what the chips mapped. He built pens that would hold—”

I never got to finish my sentence. Two windbeaters began a new pattern. The Gyre’s winds spun me round and knocked me into Nat. My knife dragged across his wing.

Over the roar of the wind, the galleries screamed. And then the wind pulled us apart. I heard a gate open and braced myself for more wind. The windbeaters angled their wings anew, and I was borne up on a massive gust.

A separate gust sucked Nat towards the open gate.

I reached for him, tried to hook his wings, but my fingers could not span the widening gap.

He spun limp, his wings folding as he lost control and was flung into the wide-open sky.

But my wings filled. I was lifted by an opposing current. I’d won. Or the windbeaters had.

The challenger was defeated.

The galleries began to sing. Tradition. A second time through The Rise, this time to welcome a new Singer. Their song, which until that moment had been my song too, lifted higher, and the wind swept me up. I was truly theirs now.

I was a killer. I knew no greater pain.

* * *

“Come up, Kirit Spire!” Rumul shouted from the balcony.

Wik had to reach out with a hook and pull me onto the council tier. He let me lean against him while the council argued in a corner. Had I succeeded? The battle had been won, but by whom? And the secrets I had shared. The traditions I had shattered.

To my wind-deafened ears, their debate was just more noise. Then they parted, walked towards me, the full council following Rumul’s lead.

“Welcome, Singer,” he said.

The caustic sting barely registered as Rumul marked my right cheek with a new symbol for winning the challenge: a knife. Honoring my murderous deed. I let it burn, unflinching. I heard Nat’s scream again, an echo inside my head as he disappeared.

Now I was a Singer, marked with the death of my challenger.

Now I was Spire, locked within its walls no matter where I flew.