Updraft

20. FALL

I released my wing grips and let my arms hang at my sides. My feet touched the bone floor of the balcony, and I wavered at the edge until Wik pulled me by the robe, farther into the tier.

A visibly pregnant Singer brought me water in a brass cup. Cold in my hand and against my lips. I could not swallow it without great effort. The Singer took the cup back and put a bowl in my hands.

“Eat,” she said, her brown eyes trying to look deep into mine. “The Gyre’s exhausting. You’ll feel better soon.”

I stared at the bowl. Stone fruit in honey. The sweet smell made my stomach growl, but my fingers gripped the bowl’s rim and did not reach for the fruit.

A gray-haired Singer patted my shoulder and handed me a clean gray robe. Another brought a sack of herbs and salve for my scratches and cuts.

Wik removed my novice wings, negotiating the straps and harness over my deadweight arms. I stared at his cheeks, his markings. He’d flown the Gyre. Faced a challenger. Many challengers. How did he go on after?

I didn’t ask, and he didn’t meet my eyes.

Behind the Singers tending and congratulating me, a low bone table held more of the stone fruit and two additional brass cups. Yes, I remembered. Three of us would fly today.

Even now, Sellis looked over the council balcony, waiting to fly. Vess, a novitiate an Allmoons older than Sellis, paced in the passageway between the tier’s galleries and large alcoves. We were on the newest council tier. The highest. The outcroppings of bone here were lightly carved, with areas marked for new carving by novitiates.

The noise from the galleries shifted from a discussion’s rumble to anticipatory hush. Sellis waited to be called forward, standing on intertwined symbols carved in the floor: sacrifice and duty.

Rumul stood beside her, right hand light on her shoulder. He looked my way and gestured to a fourth Singer elder, then turned his attention back to his acolyte.

After Allmoons, Rumul had given me a chance to change my life. He’d told me the past Ezarit had kept hidden. He’d put a burden on me: become a Singer or face the consequences of attacking the Spire.

The Singer sent over by Rumul lifted my wrist, examining my Lawsbreaks. Trespass, Bethalial, Treason. Heavy markers, bound with silk cord. Then she took her bone knife and cut through the skein. The markers fell into her palm.

With my challenge won, I’d proven myself. My burden — my Lawsbreaks — gone.

I’d accepted that bargain. I’d flown the Gyre. My friend had fallen at my hand.

Who was I now? Kirit Densira would have demanded to know how Nat’s loss served the city. Kirit Spire could not find the words to ask. Sacrifice. Duty. Tradition. I clenched my teeth. If I’d let sound escape my mouth, it would have been a scream. At the Singers. At myself.

Wik took the still-full bowl from my hands and cleared his throat. “It is not always this hard, Kirit. But if it were easy, Singers would be no better than monsters. Or the worst of the city’s Lawsbreakers.”

I looked him full in the eyes and opened my mouth, but no sound would come out. I choked on Nat’s name.

The gallery cheered as Sellis leapt from the council balcony to defend the city and defeat her challenger.

I looked over the balcony’s edge and watched her dive like a silent predator towards her quarry. The challenger circled the far wall of the Gyre.

Sellis drew her first knife. I could watch no more. I turned away.

A novice appeared on the ladder to the tier, carrying a long parcel. The gray silk wrapping glowed in the late sunlight. The knots of the package fell away at a touch to reveal a pair of Singer wings. Mine. No more borrowed novice wings. I did not reach for them. The novice looked at me, curious.

“Kirit?” Lurai’s voice. I hadn’t recognized him. He was once tower too, though he could not remember. I took the wings and vowed to remember Densira. My family.

“You did it,” Moc whispered, appearing by my side. He smelled of flame and rot gas.

Moc. Briber of windbeaters. Stirrer of disagreements that endangered all he loved.

Impervious to my despair, he laughed. “I knew you could.”

Of course I could. I’d hunted down my life as Kirit Densira, killed it right off, and had become this person. For what? For a pair of new wings and a gray robe.

I shook my head. No. For the good of the city too.

The tiers roared with satisfaction.

Lurai looked over the edge. “She did that perfectly. Fast. Without breaking silence.” A quick glance at me. “Sorry. You also did well.”

“Come up, Sellis Spire.” Rumul’s voice boomed in the Gyre’s slowing winds.

Sellis’s fight had finished quickly. Flawlessly.

She rose now on a draft, her hair wild across her forehead. Her eyes glittered from the fight. Her left hand still gripped a bone knife wet with blood.

She soared above the balcony and then landed by curling her wings just so. With a shrug, she furled the novice wings and stepped out of them. She took the robe from Rumul’s hands and smiled at him as she put it on over her fighting shift.

She turned her head to me, then looked down over the drop. “We did it.”

I licked my dry lips. Rasped, “Who did you kill?”

She paused. “I don’t know.” Turned to the table of food and drink before I could ask if she knew what the challenge had been.

I didn’t know what Nat’s challenge had been. I would never know.

Lurai held out another pair of Singer wings to Sellis, drawing her back towards us. She smiled brighter still and took them, brushing her fingers across the silk. She touched my wings next.

“We are like sisters now,” she said.

I could not find the words to respond. She waited a beat, then looked away, towards Rumul.

He waved her to approach the council members. When she reached them, he marked her hand as he had marked mine.

Novices brought more bowls to the table, this time containing apples and stone fruit.

“Pull yourself together,” Wik whispered, giving my arm a shake. “Come on.”

I hung back long enough that Sellis left the celebratory group.

“You aren’t having second thoughts now?” she asked. “You took your time, and you broke silence abominably, but you wiped your challenger out well at the end. Made me proud.”

I shook my head. Pull yourself together. Hid my bitterness behind a smile. If Rumul learned that I regretted my choice, I would be at risk again. Sacrifice. Duty. No second thoughts. My mind worked through the challenge again, slowly. The argument with Nat. It must have looked so different from above. Nat had been a strong fighter, and he got behind me. No one had yet mentioned what I said to him when we were far down the tiers, just before … I hoped the winds were such that they hadn’t heard my betrayal.

“You will feel better after tonight,” Sellis said, drawing me towards the assembled group. “When the city’s mysteries are opened to us.”

More mysteries. I smiled at her. She smiled back. Genuinely happy.

“You are no longer tower, Kirit,” Sellis said, embracing me. “You will find support in Singer traditions now.”

I hugged her back, but I was not comforted. I felt a long hollow drop where my heart should have been. I felt the voices of my mother and Elna crying out. Numb, I stepped forward to join the group on the balcony, looking over the edge.

The third challenge came to a draw. The council grumbled. The pregnant Singer said, “Both fighters fallen, both sets of wings broken. That is bad luck.”

Wik asked, “The novice, Vess, what to do with him?”

The group spoke in low tones. My Singer-sharpened ears picked up their words.

“Let him beat the winds,” said one gray-haired Singer.

“Return his wings to his tower,” said a council member.

A murmur of agreement. Wik cleared his throat. “Who will take the challengers’ wings to their towers?”

Rumul looked at the assembled Singers, young and old, arrayed around the balcony. His eyes lit on a man, already standing to accept the task. The third Singer from my quadrant’s wingtest.

I spoke first. “I will take the wings back to Densira.”

The gray-cloaked Singers around Rumul murmured and raised eyebrows. Sellis whispered, “That is not done.”

“I will do it,” I said firmly. To make amends. To try to explain.

“You can barely sing in tune,” Sellis whispered. “A few more months of practice.” Her smile had faded.

But Rumul looked long at me until I met his eyes. I did not blink.

“The families can never know whom their challengers faced,” he said, his voice hinting at permission.

“I can stay silent,” I said. I agreed to not say anything beyond the ritual phrases.

I could not believe they might let me go.

“You must take Sellis with you,” Rumul added. “You will return all of the wings and bless the new bridge as well. Two days after initiation.”

I nodded, happy to have his blessing before anyone could argue. Turning, I caught Wik looking at me, amused. Sellis’s face contorted in frustration.

“Do you know what you ask?” she said. “You are breaking tradition still, Kirit.” She paused, thinking of the task I had set for us. “We will have to sing for them. We might do it wrong. You will do it wrong. And the bridge? We are new Singers. How could you drag me into tower duties when we should be celebrating?”

I thought on it. When I spoke, my voice was loud enough for the room to hear. “Who better to sing for them?” Several Singers turned to watch me. “We know the words. We know the blessings. We know their last moments. We should sing.”

Rumul raised his brass cup. “Exactly. A fine Singer you make, Kirit.”

Now that the opportunity had presented itself, I resolved to connect with the towers as much as I could. Kirit Spire would do her duty for the city. The other Kirit would remember the towers and would speak for them when she was able.

Sellis continued to look at me warily. “You upset things, Kirit.” Then she swept away, as angry as she’d been when I first arrived. So much for sisterhood.

* * *

Within moments of Rumul’s decision, the slow drumbeat from below ceased. The windbeaters shut the vents, and the Gyre wind reversed. Slower this time.

When the winds had settled, singing from the lowest tiers reached my sensitive ears. I heard students’ young voices and the voices of the oldest Singers and teachers, all wafting up the everyday winds of the Spire.

Viridi approached our group, Sellis trailing behind. She spotted Moc jumping my shadow in the evening light of the Spire and shooed him away.

“You will come with me to meet the city, Sellis and Kirit Spire.” She took our hands in each of hers and drew us into one of the tier’s smaller alcoves, still in sight of the council balcony. “I keep the Spire’s records and maintain its history.”

Behind us, Rumul and several council Singers drew close in conversation. The rest of the tier cleared out as Singers returned to their duties.

I found I could make out Rumul’s low rumble if I concentrated. Viridi set candles and old carvings in a pattern on the floor. Sellis watched her, rapt. My eyes wandered on the carvings, all old city maps and numbers, while my ears traced the pattern of debate behind me. I heard bone chips click as they were passed among the council members.

“Five towers are crowded to capacity in the southwest, and three in the north cannot be managed much longer. The numbers are to hand,” one voice murmured. A long silence followed.

Another asked, “Not enough time for new tier growth?”

“It is too soon,” agreed Rumul.

“What about recruiting?” the first man asked. “We need novices in the Spire.”

Rumul muttered, “Too late for that. The growth is in the older groups.”

More muttering. Terrin’s name came up. Then the group walked away from where we sat, and their conversation faded.

Sellis elbowed me.

A response was required. Something to do with the tablets laid before me.

“Kirit, I ask you again, do you know what you see before you?”

I was able to answer honestly that I did not know all of what I saw. Viridi pointed again to the bone panels. “This is our history. The few survivors of the clouds. The loss of so much. And new knowledge.” Her fingers touched a panel showing a Singer scouring a tower-top to make it grow.

“Knowing how the city grows is a great Singer mystery. Protecting it from harm, our greatest challenge.” She put down the bone chips and pulled aside a silk hanging to reveal a small discoloration in the Spire’s wall.

I looked closely. The outer layer of bone had been cut away from the wall. It revealed a deep yellow marrow that seemed to throb.

“You cannot do this on a tower, because the outer layer of the tower’s core is much thicker than our wall,” she explained. “Even on the Spire’s lower levels, the walls are too thick to reach the city’s heart any longer. Here, though, we can show new Singers what they fight to preserve.”

The marrow was darker than the lymph that sometimes oozed from new grown bone. Viridi gestured us close. The air smelled richer here, a little like my father’s lenses.

Viridi took Sellis’s hand and held it above the marrow. “Swear, Sellis Spire, that you will guard the city before all else, even yourself.”

Sellis did not hesitate. “I so swear.” She closed her eyes and held her hand cupped in her other hand.

The voices returned behind us. I twisted my head slowly, looking for Rumul’s group. I wondered what they were planning. I could not see them, so I turned my attention back to Viridi and Sellis. Viridi gestured for my hand.

Sellis glared at me from beneath her eyelids as Viridi pulled me closer and held my hand before the city. I startled at the sensation: heat pulsed from the bonecut. The metal smell was stronger.

“Swear, Kirit Spire, that you will guard the city before all else, even yourself.”

I thought of the oaths I’d already sworn, the promises I’d made so far in order to keep living. Pull yourself together. I considered what I’d learned in the Spire. That there was good here. And sacrifice. Important work, not all of it pleasant. I thought of the city’s beauty, as only Singers know it. I pictured myself flying in Singer gray, helping maintain city order and peace. Helping the city. I wanted that. Still. Always.

I imagined flying the Gyre again and standing watch at Conclave, or, worse, escorting a cloudbound Lawsbreaker to his or her release. My hand froze in Viridi’s grip.

“Kirit!” Sellis said, teeth clenched. “Singers do not hesitate.”

We did not, it was true. “I so swear,” I said, emphasizing each word.

Finally, Viridi rose and bowed as Rumul and Wik joined us. She made no mention of my hesitation.

Sellis and I climbed to our feet. She stood first before Rumul so he could make the next mark: the oath tattoo on her left cheek. She looked unflinching into his eyes and waited for him to mark her Singer for all the towers to see. Tradition. We saw the evidence all around us. But Rumul held nothing in his hands. No ink. No brush.

“I advise you to sleep well,” he said. “You will be Nightwings. You have one final rite of initiation.”

Initiation.

At mention of it, Wik turned away, but not before I could see his grim smile.

We bowed to the Singers. Then we lifted our wrapped wings and carried them with us back to our alcoves.

On the way, Sellis tucked her wings under one arm and grabbed the tender spot on my elbow with fingers shaped like pincers. “I thought you were true, Kirit.”

I stared at her.

By my hand, my friend fell this day.

She screwed up her face and stepped forward, until her nose was less than a hand span from my own. “This day was supposed to be perfect, my birthright. I was pleased to share it with you.” Her words came from deep in her throat, thick and angry. “But you break traditions. You sat with the city bared before you, your greatest charge, and you barely listened. You had no respect.”

“I was listening.”

“And trying to overhear the council’s discussion too. You may have fooled Rumul and the others. You once fooled me. And now you think you are free to do as you like, but I will watch you, Kirit, every move. Until you reveal yourself a traitor again.”

She pushed me towards the ladders, gave me time to think while I descended. She followed me all the way to my tier, her eyes boring into the back of my neck. When I could tolerate it no longer, I turned on my heel and faced her.

“You saw what I did. That challenger was my oldest friend,” I said. “How could I hope to prove my loyalty beyond that?”

Her smile stretched thinner and wider as she thought over my words. “How indeed, if your loyalty is worth so little in the first place? You could not even keep silent.”

Her words were so loud that it felt as if the very Spire stopped and listened.

In the sudden quiet, she bowed her head. “I love the city, Kirit. And the Spire. All true Singers do. We respect it. I will sing with you tomorrow and honor the dead. But I will be watching too.”

I pulled my robes tighter around me. She turned to climb the ladder back to her tier, to await the next part of the ceremony.

“And your voice is still hideous,” she whispered over her shoulder as she climbed.

* * *

The sleeping alcove was heavy with the city’s heat. In my mind, Nat fell again, and I could not reach him; then I did reach him; I was sucked through the vent with him; a skymouth opened like a red flower in the air and pulled us towards its maw; Wik shook his head at my stubbornness; Sellis glared at me for lying to her, for letting her think I was something I was not. Not her sister. Not a real Singer. Thoughts swirled and fought, keeping my battle-weary body awake. Drenching me with sweat.

Beyond my alcove, the Spire whispered to me until I could no longer fight to keep my eyes open.

In the midst of my troubled sleep, a dark-cloaked Singer came for me. The Singer bundled my quilts, binding my arms and legs, then leapt into the Gyre at a run, with me in her arms.

My scream was stifled by a rough silk stuffed in my mouth. My face was crushed to the chest of the Singer who held me. We fell, the rush of air battering against us both. She fell too fast to have her wings extended.

At the last moment, she opened her wings and we jerked from the fall, into a slow, downward glide.

I smelled the foul scent of skymouth. I could barely keep from retching.

My bearer whispered to me. Her voice was soft. Her heartbeat didn’t break its careful rhythm. She hummed to the pen’s occupants and opened a small gate. I could hear what was around us, though I could not see it. Soft tentacles brushed my feet. We were above the pens.

“A Nightwing Singer is born twice,” my bearer whispered. “Your past will never return. Only the Singer will return. Make no sounds, no movements.” The skymouths stirred at her whispers, and she began her hum again.

She tied me to a bone hook with thick, woven straps. Lowered me into the pen. Left me dangling among the skymouths.

I heard another voice saying the same words and knew that Sellis hung here with me.

My mouth was still crammed with silk, so I could not scream. A tentacle brushed my arm. Something soft bumped me from behind.

I tried pushing the fabric with my tongue, but that made me gag. The skymouths in the pen reached out and touched my arms with their invisible limbs.

A thrashing sound nearby drew their attention.

Sellis.

She could send them into a frenzy. She could kill us both.

I could not scream, or shout, but I thought I could hum through my nose. I closed my eyes and tilted my head back and managed a muffled, nasal, hum.

The creatures slowed. I kept it up, though I struggled to breathe. After a moment, I heard Sellis join her hum to mine.

As the sound we made echoed in the small space of the pen, mouths closed with slick sounds. Shapes of soft bodies smaller than my wings became apparent with my echoes. I stifled a laugh. The Singers had hung us in a nursery pen. I swung on my hook as the smaller skymouths nudged at me like baby birds. Their curious arms bumped and touched and turned me about.

They made not one sound.

Time came to a stop. I had nothing beyond now; I had been nothing before now.

Then I heard a skymouth call from above. I knew those tones. Wik’s voice. The tentacles retreated. The young skymouths sank to the far reaches of the pens, pressing against one another.

The gate at the top of the pen opened, and Sellis and I, still on our hooks, were hoisted uptower.

Hands touched my back and sides; a Singer lifted me off the hook, took the cloth from my mouth. I could not stop shaking. My blanket bindings surrounded me, kept me from flying apart.

I heard Sellis gag, then start to cry.

The dark-cloaked Singer took my face in one hand and held me still. She kissed my cheeks.

“Welcome, Singer,” she said. Viridi’s voice. Her cloak slipped, and I saw the silver streak in her hair, all tied back in braids. She did not release my face. “You bring new ways of thinking to our service. I value this.”

With her free hand, Viridi raised a brush and drew a circle on my cheekbone. I winced as the ink burned, and tried not to wriggle away; Viridi held my face tightly.

She gave me a drink in a brass cup, and I took it without question. Muzz. It would let me sleep again.

In the dark, I heard Rumul’s whispers as he marked Sellis and welcomed her too. I heard what sounded like a kiss in the dark.

My vision faded.

When I woke in the morning, I was back in my alcove, on my sleeping mat. I rubbed my hair clean with ash and tied my gray robes as I’d seen Wik do. I passed by Sellis’s empty room on the way to the Singer’s dining alcove. Morning shadows had grown short on the Spire’s walls.

The dining alcove was empty, save for Sellis. Her fresh tattoo looked red around its silver edges: a spiral in a circle, like the marks on our hands. I wondered what mine looked like.

I opened my dry mouth to speak, but Sellis beat me to it.

“Do you remember?” Her voice was kinder than it had been the night before. After the first ritual, before the initiation. Perhaps we were sisters again. That was safer for me, certainly. I doubted the peace would last past my next mistake, my next disruption of what Sellis thought her future would be like. But now I knew Viridi valued my presence. Perhaps Sellis would soften in time. Perhaps starting now.

I waited her out, cautious. I remembered too much. She waited too. She was better at it than I.

“The pens?”

Her voice a mix of fear and wonder, she said, “They brought a skymouth into the Spire. For us.”

My face must have given me away. She hadn’t seen anything last night. She’d been too frightened.

“You’ve known? How could you know?” She thought for a moment. “You’ve been sneaking around the Spire. Going where you were forbidden.”

“I haven’t.” This was partially true.

A few days ago, I might have told her about meeting my father, about the windbeaters and the vents below. We would have talked about what had happened the night before. I might have broken the silence and told her more. Now we stared at each other in silence. Not truly sisters after all.

“Why would Rumul not tell you?” I asked, finally.

She flinched. Looking down, she spooned grain mash into her mouth and chewed deliberately. My stomach growled. She swallowed. “I have decided not to go with you to return the wings. Rumul can send someone else besides us.”

This, after everything. After what we’d both been through. After what I’d done to help her survive last night. She would have panicked until they pulled her up.

“You dare, Sellis? When you have been sneaking behind the council’s back with Rumul for how long? What would Viridi think? Wik? The others?”

Her cheeks darkened. A lucky guess, now confirmed. “You wouldn’t dare.”

“Nor you. I am as dedicated to the city”—I put a heavy emphasis on the last word—“as you are. We will return those wings to the tower. Honor and tradition.”

Now we each held the other’s secrets. It was a wary peace.

Wik found us in the dining alcove, chewing in silence. When we had finished, we climbed to the Spire’s roof and knelt before the council.

Viridi took my hands in hers. She smiled, encouraging. Proud.

I sang the words, the ones that had echoed up the Spire each morning from the first day I was freed from the walls. “I give myself to the city, to its rise, to ensure against its fall.”

My voice’s burr had been accented by my training. My hearing had grown sharper too. The combination was unsettling. I heard the tone I was supposed to sing, the one every Singer knew. I heard it underscored and slightly soured by a second tone, as if I spoke with more than one voice. That undertone was what the singers wanted. My skymouth voice. They would tolerate a voice that broke Silences, a voice that challenged and would not quiet, if it meant they would get what was needed. When I finished singing, Viridi smiled, then moved to stand before Sellis.

She sang clear and proud, her eyes on Rumul.

Then we stood, turning to face the council. We rehearsed once with them the song for those lost in defense of the city. I sang it true this time.

Singers came forward to check our wings for us. Strong fingers tightened straps. My wings tugged at my shoulders as someone adjusted a batten in its sleeve. We had a long flight ahead.

Rumul faced us. “You will fly southeast to Narath tower and present the second challenger’s wings to her relatives. Then to Ginth, to present windbeater Vess’s wings. By day’s end, you will reach Viit and the new bridge that connects that tower to Densira. You will bless the bridge. You will not linger.”

A bridge for Densira. They had rewarded my tower for my sacrifice. I was glad to hear it.

“Once the bridge is blessed, you will cross to Densira,” he continued. To Elna. To Ezarit.

A council member came forward, carrying Vess’s wings, along with those of the Narath challenger. Beneath them lay a spare set of wings, the battens broken beyond repair. The silk torn.

Rumul explained, “Because we cannot return the Densira challenger’s wings, you will take these.”

So Elna would have a pair of wings that no one could ever use.

The council spoke all around us. “Singer’s duty.”

Sellis and I repeated the words. I felt them echo in my stomach.

It was time to fly. We lifted our burdens and strapped them to our chests.

Atop the Spire, the sun rose over our brethren. We unfurled our wings and engaged the fingertip grips, then soared for the first time as Singers among the towers, to show the city what we had become in its name.

21. RETURN

Narath tower was the height of the southeast. From our approach, we could see Narath had at least two tiers on its closest neighbors, and its gardens bloomed green and lush. Alerted by kavik messenger, residents had gathered on the top of the tower, many families’ worth. Sellis’s challenger had been popular.

Though I carried the challenger’s wings, I realized that I did not know her name.

“Who was she?” I asked Sellis again as we prepared to land.

“A challenger,” Sellis responded in clipped tones. “They will name her.”

Unsettled, I stepped from my footsling and cut my glide, dropping to the tower with practiced Singer’s grace. Sellis landed beside me at the same time. The Narath residents whispered. Bowed to us, but not too deeply.

The tower’s councilman stepped forward. His robes were embroidered at the shoulders with green and purple chevrons.

“Our daughter Dita Narath dared challenge the city,” the man said, giving me a name to work with. My breathing eased.

“Dita fought well,” I answered. “She has honored your tower by elevating a Singer.”

“She would fight well,” the councilman said. “She was of Narath.”

The crowd murmured again, a soft, pleased sound. They were not shamed here by Dita’s challenge. Within the murmur, my ears caught a sob and someone being hushed.

I passed Dita Narath’s wings to the man who had greeted us, and Sellis handed them a silk banner to be dyed for Remembrances.

“Would you sing with us?” the tower councilman asked formally.

We would.

Sellis’s voice was thinner than usual, but I carried us both. The voices of the tower flowed around the rough edges of my voice, until we all sang together. The sound was beautiful.

“We will return to sing her honors,” I promised. Beside me, Sellis nodded. The tower’s gathered crowd stepped back from us. Turned inward to pass the wings to the center, where the sob had come from. We were no longer part of their grief.

Sellis took off first, and I followed. It had felt too easy, that.

When we landed on Ginth, our shoulders ached from the distance. This was how my mother flew. This was how traders moved, from east to west and then up around the gusts of the city.

On Ginth, only one person greeted us. Vess’s older brother, by his age and looks. The tower’s gardens were spare, and the brother’s chest was not broad like the men of Narath. Instead, shoulders rounded, his cheeks sunken, he stood bowed around the emptiness of his stomach. To my knowledge, Vess had never spoken of Ginth.

“I barely remember Vess,” he said sadly. “Though we are grateful to the Singers for taking him. Two others starved in our tier that year.”

Sellis spoke of her friend without hesitation. “He has a beautiful voice. And has added much to the life of novices in the Spire.” She drew a breath. “But he was not strong enough to defend the city. He will continue to serve the Spire, but you will not see him again.”

Vess’s brother sadly accepted the broken wings. We did not sing with him: Vess was not dead.

“On your wings, Singers,” he said. He watched us depart. I ducked my head below my wings to look back at him growing smaller on the tower’s roof.

* * *

By the time we landed on Viit, the sun had crossed the top quadrants of the sky, and my shoulders were numb. Sellis didn’t complain, but I winced as I furled my wings. I carried only one extra pair of wings now, strapped to my chest, but the flights had been long.

Viit had prepared a meal of goose meat and apples for us, left out in large bone bowl, but no one waited to greet us on this rooftop. A bridge blessing required that they await us below, and on Densira. We ate in exhausted silence.

Flying the city was so different from what I’d thought it would be. It was lonely and quiet in the sky, with too many thoughts tugging at my attention. And attention was required to stay aloft on the city’s drafts and gusts. We’d flown above the city’s day-to-day traffic, and I’d watched the colorful wings weave in familiar patterns below, wanting to join them once more.

The bridge blessing was a simple ritual. When we had eaten, Sellis flew across to Densira without a word to me, and I descended to the Viit balcony where the sinew and rope spans had been anchored by one of Viit’s Spire-trained artifexes.

Bone hooks and eyes had been carved carefully around this tier and incorporated into the cable system to help distribute the load of the main cables. The cables wrapped the tower’s bone core, secured with a complex series of braids and tethers. Pulleys brought from Wirra allowed the bridge’s artifexes to tend it during wind shifts and periodic rebalancing. More support cables ran to tiers above and below.

Near the core, a surprised whisper. “Kirit! You live!” I looked up to find familiar eyes: Ceetcee. She wore the tools of a novice artifex on cords around her neck: bone hooks and cutters, a thick awl for splicing ropes.

She clasped my fingers in hers: the first time a non-Singer had touched me in half a year. I did not want to let go of her chapped hands, though she smelled of dried skymouth sinew and rope.

“Well met, Artifex Viit,” I greeted her formally, after a moment. Sellis waited on the other tower. I could not linger, no matter how much I wished to do so.

Ceetcee loosened her grip and stepped back too, then bowed. “Well met, Singer.”

Two more Viit artifexes stepped forward and bowed. I saw Beliak peeking around a spine in the tier. Of course. As a ropemaker, he would be here.

“You are welcome, Artifexes,” I replied, reminding everyone that the bridges were Singer-gifts to the towers. I added, “And gladly met.”

The artifexes showed me their work. It was a great honor to tie a bridge. It was also nerve-racking. If the bridge was tethered wrong, or if Singers and artifexes had miscalculated the balance of the towers, a tower’s core could be weakened. Its growth could be slowed.

Every tower resident learned bridge songs as fledges, whether they had a bridge or not. During my Spire training, I’d learned even more. I knew tension and binding songs. I’d seen how long-lived bridges were maintained and supported with new material, until a tower’s core became too wide to accommodate the bindings, and then the sinew fell or was cut away. I’d examined remnants and drawings of failed bridges, and those of bridges that had survived almost down to the clouds.

I hoped this bridge between Viit and Densira would last that long.

Singers whose focus was on bridge building and working with artifexes had attended and assisted the work on Viit and Densira. Our blessing was a formality. An honor for any young Singer, yes, and not just because of tradition. The first Singers to cross would test the bridge for all and take on the burden of risk. Our sacrifice for the good of the city.

The skies above the bridge were clear. I wondered if Singers waited beyond the towers, watching. I wondered if they would intervene if a bridge ever failed during a crossing. I suspected they would not. Tradition. Sacrifice.

The ties looked secure. The braiding, careful. The secondary cables taut but not straining.

Ceetcee and her superiors watched me carefully. Confident in their work.

Beneath the ties, the bone core felt cool to my touch. So different than the heartbone. I was supposed to look for discoloration or signs of strain. There were none. The release points that would allow the artifexes to widen the wrapping’s girth as the core expanded looked much like my wingstraps, but thicker and heavier. Viit’s and Densira’s artifexes had a lifetime of bridge tending ahead of them.

When I completed my inspection, Ceetcee helped me remove my wings. Her eyes were wide, but her hands held steady as she placed the silk and battens in my arms. We would hold our wings, showing respect for the work of the artifexes.

Across the span, at Densira, I knew Sellis had gone through the same steps. It was ritual.

“Singers risk everything for the city,” I sang, knowing Sellis had done this also. I saw her gray shape appear at the top of her end of the bridge. We mirrored each other, from across the towers, so that our feet would touch the knotwork and sinew of the bridge at the same time. Tradition.

I felt the towers watching as I began my slow walk down the bridge’s curve. The careful pattern of ties and woven fiber kneaded my feet in their soft gray wrappings. I did not use the handrails. My hands were full.

“Be well, Singer,” someone — I thought perhaps Beliak — whispered behind me.

The gap between Viit and Densira was wide. The two towers were hung with washing, with blackberry vines on Densira and small apple trees growing in buckets of guano and silage on Viit. When the bridge was opened, Elna would be able to cross almost unassisted, to see friends and take work in Viit, and even to cross from there to Wirra on a lower bridge if she wished. The bridge meant greater freedom for all of Densira, and new connections for Viit, as well.

The span creaked beneath my feet. The sound of new cables. As time passed, it would become more pliant, until the artifexes tightened it. Neither Sellis nor I sang as we crossed the new span. We were supposed to ponder the span and its broader purpose.

The bridges served a second purpose: the connections they made strengthened the towers. One of the Singers’ bridge building songs carried a dark reminder of what could happen if those towers did begin to grow apart: they could list, develop cracks, and worse. Bridges were occasionally awarded on the basis of those calculations, often conveniently timed for a novitiate’s rise to Singer. It wasn’t necessary for all towers to have bridges. After all, Densira had been growing fine without a bridge for a long time. A generation, I now realized. Naton and Ezarit. Their punishment.

A punishment I’d erased with my sacrifice.

Sellis had stopped to examine a series of knots on one of the vertical cables that kept the bridge from flipping or twisting in the wind. I waited for her, unable to move until she did. She took her time, knowing I could not continue to Densira until she let me.

My mind wandered. If traders were able to see some of the patterns of power and connection as they flew the city, had my mother seen where bridges were constructed and known that Densira’s lack of one was her punishment? Her tower’s reprimand? Would she answer me honestly, if I were ever able to ask her my questions?

At last, Sellis began walking again. We both echoed now, as we descended out of the tower’s hearing, searching for weak points in the pattern the bridge cast on the wind, the shadow it threw below it. I heard only the sounds of the towers, strong and true.

When Sellis and I passed in the middle of the bridge, we turned back to the artifexes waiting on Viit and Densira. We sang, pitching our voices, “This bridge will keep the city strong.”

The artifexes cheered. A distant Ceetcee kissed a distant Beliak in celebration.

The corners of my eyes crinkled painfully close to my new tattoos. Their joining made me happy.

Sellis and I walked backwards for the second half of the crossing, eyes on each other, and on the way the bridge moved beneath the other’s feet. Sellis moved achingly slow now. Densira. I was so close. The artifexes of Densira had woven this half of the bridge plinth. I wonder who had apprenticed as artifex there, and who had trained them. Naton had been Densira’s previous artifex.

Half this bridge may have been Viit’s work, but everyone watching our gray forms cross knew the bridge was Densira’s honor. Densira’s luck. A gift from the Spire.

The sinew creaked again and the base swayed beneath my feet. The pliant spans felt so different from the Spire’s hard edges. The careful knotting and studied connections, the expanse of cloud below: the opposite of the Gyre.

Above us, the sky sparkled, blue and simple. The sun hung lower than when we began. Our robes looked lustrous in the light.

Walking was much slower than flying. Especially when one walked with Sellis. She had stopped again, studying a knot intently.

Turning briefly, I saw a child’s face looking over the edge of the highest tier with a scope, watching from Densira. Growing up on a tower without a bridge meant many things. Isolation and privation. Risk, as Densira creaked alone in the stronger winds. The child above me would know less hardship and more connection to his neighbors. I envied him already.

For once, the sky between Viit and Densira was clear of flight classes and the brightly colored wings of the young. In a few days, there would be a market here, and the new honor would brighten the city. Children would fly crimson kites from the tiers and the bridge as Allsuns drew near. Nearly a half year had passed since my wingtest.

I’d had a kite, long ago. A bright bird on a string. Flown with my nearest wingmate, whose wings I now bore to his mother.

On the other side of the bridge, Sellis cleared her throat loudly. I’d paused in my walk, remembering, and she could not move until I continued my backwards approach to Densira. She waited on the bridge, bored with her game now. Eager to reach Viit and finish our tasks. My reflection, robed in gray.

My arms tired from holding my wings before me, and I suddenly longed to reach the other side as well, if only to be able to wear my wings again. Against my chest, the pair of wings that replaced Nat’s wings pressed and rubbed as I walked.

Families gathered quietly around Densira’s bridge tier, waiting to cross the bridge, to shake hands with their friends in Viit. Our passage had made it safe. Only a few more steps.

I could hear already some of the discussions from Densira’s upper tiers. I heard Sidra’s voice, I thought, saying the size of their tier had been reduced by the bridge ties.

Already frustrated by Sellis’s slow passage across the bridge, I was angered by this minor infraction. Complaining while Singers risked their lives.

But no, I heard another voice, this one more like Sidra’s, begging for silence. The first voice had sounded older. The younger voice spoke of honor, saying, “Mother, for once, be reasonable.” Silence fell again.

When I looked ahead, I saw Dojha, from my flight class, standing with one of my cousins at the end of the bridge. Next to two artifexes. By the tower marks tied in their hair, I suspected they were from the south.

Dojha looked nervous. She reached to greet me with a shaking hand. “You are welcome here, Singer,” she said. Sidra’s mother’s muttering continued in the shadows. They thought I could not hear her.

But I was a Singer now, for better or for worse. I was expected to show my old tower a Singer’s power.

“You do not keep silence here. You have no reverence for the city,” I said. “I will turn back.” The old Kirit Densira shouted at Kirit Spire, who’d just spoken. How could I turn back? This bridge would help Elna.

Someone in the crowd gasped. If a Singer turned back, the bridge would be taken down and strung elsewhere.

The sound of a slap echoed through the tier. My hand stretched as if I had struck the mutterer myself. No more sounds came from the back of the tier.

Sidra emerged from the shadows, her face flushed. I expected her to glare at me, but she smiled instead.

Dojha looked at me. “Do you wish this person given Lawsmarks, Singer?” Her eyes held mine. Afraid. For her bridge. For her friend’s family. Now that I had the power to tie weights, how would I distribute it?

How, indeed.

Sellis would already have pulled the markers from her robe. I hesitated. I’d exercised Singer power, and now I had to enforce the consequences. All our lessons said so. Tradition dictated.

I shook my head. “I was shown mercy, once. I entrust the artifex to assign a marker if needed. Densira can teach the noisy one another way.”

Dojha’s look of concern turned to relief. “We will ensure it.”

I made the final step from bridge to tower. Sellis and I put on our wings, on opposite tiers.

Dojha stepped aside to give me room, saying, “You honor us, Singer.” So formal.

I remembered her trying to help before the wingtest. I’d thought she and Sidra had been teasing. Perhaps I’d misread. They had concerns of their own. Sidra especially. And now we had all changed so much. The distance between me and my former tower suddenly felt overwhelming.

I fell back on tradition and Singer training, saying only, “Your bridge is sturdy and well built. Please make good use of it. You honor the city and the Spire when you do.”

Dojha and my cousin stepped out onto the bridge, and Densira began to celebrate.

I looked around me, at my old tower. Familiar faces looked back with unfamiliar reverence and fear. I did not see Elna. Nor Ezarit.

The bridge ceremony complete, I waited for Sellis to join me for our second duty. The awkward silence stretched out until Sellis landed on the tier.

I tried to clear my throat, find my voice. I could not.

Finally, Sellis said, “We have another duty to discharge, and the light is fading. Where is the mother of the young man who challenged the city?”

My burden pressed at my chest. Wings for Nat. Another silk banner.

Councilman Vant stepped forward to greet us. He bowed so low his furled wingtips nearly touched the ground. I accepted his greeting with a bow of my own, then continued searching for Elna in the waiting crowd.

“She is below, Singer,” Vant said, hurrying behind me. “She asks that you bring the wings there.”

Sorrow bloomed. I stopped walking. A near silent hiss from Sellis, and I was under control again.

“It is tradition, if the family wishes. We will go down to her,” Sellis said to the crowd. She and I secured our wings and bowed to the remaining citizens on the tier.

“On your wings, Singer,” said the guard who had once stood watch outside my tier, who had called me Lawsbreaker. He bowed to me now.

Sidra stepped to the ledge and pressed an apple into my hand. She didn’t look me in the eye. She wore apprentice Magister robes, blue-gray with a stripe of gray. So much like an acolyte’s robes, I was caught by the similarities.

Sidra’s respect, and that of the guard, was Singers’ due. Sellis didn’t blink at it. It was her birthright. It was part of what I’d wanted when I’d agreed to fly the challenge. But there, on my former tower, it felt hollow. I was grateful for the silence I was required to keep, for tradition’s sake. But I wondered at all the changes in Densira. In myself. At how open and unprotected the tower seemed to me now. At the strangeness of a center core in a tower, rather than a Gyre and walls.

Sidra bowed to Sellis as well. Macal stood behind Sidra and looked at her proudly. Their hands clasped when she finished her bow. Another new thing. So much change.

Sellis nudged me, then turned away from the crowd. Do not linger.

She opened her wings and left the tier’s edge, then circled, waiting for me to show her where to go. I looked at my former councilman, my former family and flightmates one last time, then unfurled my wings, stepped from the balcony, and rode a breeze down to Sellis.

* * *

The tier we sought was far below the bridge and speckled with the garbage of those above it. There, living quarters were pressed a little closer to the edge by the growing central core than they had been six months ago.

Elna stood at her cookpot, stirring. Did not hear us clatter onto her balcony. The scent of what she cooked was new to me. Something with a heady spice.

Finally, she turned. The light of the setting sun behind me etched her face in stark relief, her wrinkles and jowls. As she navigated towards me, her fingertips brushing the room’s spines and furnishings, I realized she could not see me in the glare. The skyblindness had grown much worse. A thin silk tether around her waist kept her from the edge of her balcony. Like a child. She kept one hand on it.

“Elna,” I whispered, and caught her hand as she passed near.

“Kirit,” she whispered back. Then, “You honor me, Singer.” Tears filled her near-sightless eyes.

This and her simple formality broke me nearly in two. I did not honor her. I was begging her forgiveness.

Sellis’s whispers grew louder as I held Elna’s hand. Cannot linger. Must return to the Spire before dark. “Kirit. Tradition,” she finally snapped. I let Elna’s hand go, gently.

From behind a screen, a voice sounded. “Is she here?” The tone was familiar, but had a sad edge.

Then Ezarit stepped around the screen. My mother, here.

She stared at me. Her eyes held worry, a little fear. I stared back, all my words gone from my mouth. She should be out trading. Not here. This was why Singers clung to tradition. To Laws. Surprises conflicted too much with duty.

Sellis seemed confused. She looked back and forth between the two women, trying to understand my alarm. In the time it took her to form the words “who’s this?” Ezarit had rushed forward and wrapped her arms around me, wings and all.

Now I understood: Elna had stayed below not because she couldn’t rise but because of my mother, because my mother wished to see me. I stiffened, but Ezarit did not let go.

“I am so sorry,” she whispered.

“Kirit,” Sellis finally managed.

I ignored Sellis. My arms came up from my sides on their own, and my palms brushed Ezarit’s shoulder blades. I thought of the scar that ran across her collarbone. From her fight with Civik.

“I met him,” I said into her ear. “You let him live.” I couldn’t follow your example. My shoulders jerked with a single sob. I locked my arms against it.

She whispered, so quietly I could barely hear, “I should have told you everything. I thought I was protecting you.”

“Tradition!” Sellis pulled hard on my wingstrap. “You will bring shame on us. Rumul will have you enclosed when he hears you cannot keep silent. Cannot act properly.”

I didn’t care. I let Sellis yank me away from the embrace, but I took my mother’s hand. Then Elna’s.

I stood between them, taller and robed in gray. I felt their blood pulse behind the soft envelopes of skin that separated us. My mother’s words echoed in my ears. I thought I was protecting you.

Sellis cleared her throat and glared. I thought of my vows, of the city. I released the two women I loved best in this world. I untied my terrible parcel and prepared for them to turn away from me as well. They would see the truth in my eyes.

With shaking hands, I held out the wings.

Sellis stepped beside me and spoke, because I could not. “Your son has done a service for the Singers,” she said. “His sacrifice elevated a new Singer to protect the city.” It was the third time we’d spoken the ritual of the honored fallen today. Now it sounded so hollow, so empty.

I watched Elna’s face collapse.

My resolve broke, and I began to shake. To reach out to her. Sellis gripped my arm and pushed it forward, but my mother was the one who took the wings from me. She passed them to Elna as Sellis and I waited for them to bow to us, to release us, as the other families had done.

“Did he suffer?” Elna asked.

I shook my head but did not look at her. Sellis squeezed my arm hard, reminding me of how much tradition I broke here.

I could not breathe. By my hand. He didn’t burn to death. He wasn’t eaten by a skymouth. He fell whole and true, a failed challenger, a hero of the city. The song wound its way through my mind. I had asked for this. I’d made it happen.

I looked Elna in the eyes. The light that filtered down to her tier through the tower’s shadows made her cloud-covered irises shine strangely. She might not have seen the guilt in my face. But my mother saw.

“He did not suffer,” I promised them. Elna’s tears fell freely, and I rushed to give her what more I knew, hoping my words would help. “He was thrown out a vent.”

The ceremony had gone completely awry. Sellis, in her anger, would tell Rumul about my actions the moment we returned to the Spire. There would almost certainly be punishments. Still, Elna’s face seemed lighter now. As if my words had helped. I could hope. I ached to tell them how sorry I was, but Sellis’s grip bruised my arm.

My mother nudged Elna, and they bowed.

Ezarit stepped forward and stared long and deep at me. We had no more time to talk. I hoped Ezarit could see what my eyes begged her to see. I wanted her to know that I was trying to do the right things, to make the best trades I could. To help the city. To keep her safe.

We exchanged no more words, but I understood her better now. I hoped she could see that in my eyes before they filled with tears.

* * *

We left before I could give Sellis more things to report to Rumul.

When I leapt, I risked a look backwards, beneath my wings. Elna’s and Ezarit’s faces glowed from the balcony, on light reflected from the clouds. Looking for a last glimpse of us.

I did not blink or make a sound. I let the evening wind dry my eyes to salt. Hoped it was too dark for Sellis to see my face.

She began to whisper at me as soon as we’d cleared the tower.

“Too dark already, thanks to you. We will, for appearance’s sake, ask to sleep at Viit.”

She had not suggested sleeping at Densira. That would have been too much mercy.

“I will send a whipperling telling Rumul of your actions.”

She had more than enough tradition-breaking to silence me now. To send me downtower or have me enclosed.

I drew a jagged breath, composed myself. Thought about what would draw her attention away from me. What I could trade now.

“I think we should risk going back tonight. The council should hear about Narath.”

She was quiet for a moment. “Narath? The first tower?”

“You didn’t notice?”

Her silence told me everything I needed to know. I’d heard pride at Narath in the celebration of their challenger. Not grief. Not hopelessness. The Singers would certainly see more dissent from them soon. I explained this to Sellis.

“I heard nothing of the sort,” she said.

“Rumul sees the value of my insights. He has forgiven my Lawsbreaks. Why can’t you?” I decided not to bargain with her. I would speak my mind, not caring whether I earned another punishment. Duty. “Spire-born are sometimes very deaf to what tower words mean. I might break tradition, but I can help you understand the towers.”

A long silence as we flew nearer to Viit. “I see your point,” Sellis said. I hoped her flat tone meant she was giving my words serious thought. We angled around Viit. Headed for the Spire.

Another few heartbeats, and Sellis began to echo. I joined her. Soon the shapes of the towers, grown closer at this depth, were clear around us. We found a breeze that would take us faster towards the Spire.

We passed into the purple night, the towers glowing across the heights with warm lights. The city had grown so full while my heart had grown so empty.

22. ATTACK

As we passed Viit, I heard a disturbance, an echo in the wind that should not have been there.

Sellis fell quiet. She’d heard it too.

Then she began to hum again, turning left, then right on the breeze. Trying to find the source of the echo. The disturbance sounded like bubbles in the air. Like occupants of the cages in the Spire.

“Skymouths,” she said.

We rode the darkness alone. No one in the towers could see well enough, or hear well enough, to know we were out here. Only the giant hungry mouths of the sky.

“You could try to divert them,” Sellis added, her voice hopeful.

“I’ve never done it for long,” I whispered back. “Or on the wing.” I wished Wik were there.

“Look.” Sellis pointed around the curve of Viit’s lowest tiers.

In the dark, I opened my mouth wide and echoed until I heard the curve of a tentacle. Then more. The enormous limbs, curling.

A huge skymouth prowled Viit. My throat squeezed in fear. I heard Sellis swallow, hard.

“There are more, Kirit.” She said it in a rush. “We need to get out of here.”

I fought the urge to flee. We were Singers. We protected the city. “We must help them, Sellis. We should wake Viit. And Wirra. They can sound the horns.”

“We can’t fight off an entire migration by ourselves.” Her voice edged with strain. She angled her wings to lift herself higher, preparing to race back to the Spire without care if she was seen.

“Wait!”

“What would you do? I can rouse the Spire.” Sellis and I carried no weapons beyond our short knives. Our flight was ceremonial. We weren’t prepared for a fight.

But I’d heard something behind another, smaller skymouth in the migration group. I’d heard the sound of silk in the wind. A skyshouter call.

Against the purpling sky, two Singers appeared, their nightwings locked so that they could hold their weapons at their chests, arrows nocked to bows. Their faces were obscured by shadow.

“Ah.” Sellis sighed, relieved. She circled, looking for a gust that would take her behind the Singers. “We are lucky.”

But my own relief muddled with confusion. The Singers weren’t driving the skymouths away from the towers. The group rounded Viit and headed the direction we’d come. “What are they doing?”

Sellis slowed her glide, angling up for a closer look, risking a stall. I did the same, then circled, still echoing. The three long bodies and sinuous tentacles revealed themselves clearly.

“I’m sure they have a reason,” she said, finally.

“The skymouths came from behind Viit and are flying towards Densira,” I said slowly.

“Perhaps Singers are driving this herd out of the city,” she responded, too quickly.

She thought the same thing I did.

These skymouths could have come from the pens in the Spire.

The monsters hovered, waiting for something. Waiting for their masters. Flying low.

“Nat said something, during his challenge,” I whispered to her as fast as I could. “He said Singers would send a skymouth to kill him if he conceded.”

“That’s mad!” Sellis said.

“What if it isn’t?”

We both fell silent.

“If it isn’t,” Sellis said finally, “then there’s a reason. There’s a mystery we do not know yet.” Her voice was firm. “This is a Singer matter. If we’d needed to know more, we would have been warned. If we hadn’t lingered, we wouldn’t have been caught up in this.” Time to go back to the Spire like proper Singers.

I would not obey, not here. Only a few Singers could guide skymouths. Wik might be there. But they were too close to Densira. My first tower. My family.

“We must do something to chase them away,” I said.

Sellis frowned and shook her head. “We must not interfere.”

My frustration caused me to wobble out of the draft. Focus, Kirit. I hissed at myself. Managed to find a weaker gust. Sellis coasted above me, circling away from the path of the slow-moving skymouths.

All I could hear was Nat’s voice. Send a skymouth. Was that possible? Would we do that?

Sellis interrupted my thoughts. “The council talked about crowding after the challenge. During initiation.”

So she’d been listening too.

“They were. Go on.”

She didn’t.

A herding call from one of the Singers drifted back to us on the wind. The verbal nudging of “away” and “here” that Wik had taught me for use in the pens. With a sinking feeling, I knew that Wik was one of the Singers flying with the skymouths. And they were guiding a migration towards Densira.

Finally, Sellis spoke again. “It is for the good of the city, Kirit. Whatever they do.” She was quiet for a moment. “We should offer assistance.”

Pieces fell into place in my mind. Things Civik had said. And Wik. Then something Tobiat had said, long ago.

Terrin had wanted to work with the towers. He didn’t have enough support to change the council’s direction on this. Cages. Delequerriat. Singers did their best for the city.

Too many skymouths in the pens for just bridges and training. Too many.

“Sellis! This is what Terrin challenged for. He wanted to change something. This!” I felt sick as I realized what this was. Another way to control the towers instead of working with them.

Sellis shook her head. “We aren’t in the Spire, Kirit. We cannot argue a decision here. Challenge, if you want. See whether you share Terrin’s fate.”

Some Singers and windbeaters had supported Terrin. Others had fought before him. Naton, once he realized why he was building the pens. Tobiat. Nat, even though he hadn’t realized what he was doing.

If there was dissent within the Spire, there could be dissent outside of it too.

I signaled to Sellis that I would not follow. Someone needed to warn the tower. To warn those on the lowest tiers especially, for they were most at risk. Elna. Ezarit. The salvagers. Tobiat.

Sellis broke from my side to fly behind the Singers. Perhaps to witness what they did.

I tried to think, keeping to my circuit. Witnessing was not enough. I had to try to help, to change their path.

But how could I interfere besides throwing myself between the skymouths and Densira?

If these were Spire skymouths, they might recognize me and turn faster from their attack. Then again, they were being goaded by more skilled Singers. They might not listen to me. Or hear me at all.

And if the Singers turned them towards me? Could I stop them? I could be devoured, or I could fall from the sky like a stone if a tentacle struck me.

If I did not die here, would the Spire throw me down? Or would I become Kirit Notower again? Worse than Lawsbreaker. I would be outside the city, apart from it.

The skymouths were moving again, circling Mondarath on Densira’s near side.

The Singers signaled. Sound struck my ears: Forward. They were on the hunt.

A bat chased insects on an opposing air current to my glide. It darted fast on a tangential gust that carried it direct to the top of Densira.

I followed it. Once the Singers saw me, no one would doubt my intent.

But the Nightwing Singers dove, followed by Sellis’s bright day wings. They were not headed up the tower’s height, to attack from above as dawn broke. Instead, they circled closer to Elna’s tier.

I dove lower, echoing.

Elna emerged on her balcony, feeling her way among the few vegetables she’d grown. It didn’t matter to her that it was not yet light.

One skymouth, a small adult, saw her and began a slow turn.

“No,” I said.

Sellis spotted me and hissed. Tried to block my path with hers. She missed as I dodged down and away, echoing to see better in the dark.

Nat’s mother, my Elna, turned at the sound of wings passing close in the dark. At the sound of my clicks.

“Who is there?” she said. “Tobiat?” The hope in her voice broke my heart.

We dove past too quickly, and I had to turn again to reach her. Sellis, flying by my right pinion, tried to entangle me as I banked right, then up, then down. The tower was too close on my left.

Trapped. She had trapped me as she’d done in Gyre practice. I cast about.

Down, then.

I dove.

Sellis followed, hard on my heels. I tightened my grips, raked my wings back.

I twisted until I was in a searing dive, the dive that Macal had dared me to do at my wingtest. This dive ended in a sharp parabola before I plunged into the clouds.

Just as before, the airflow at the cloudtop was enough to power a climb. I pushed hard into it, using my grips to control curvature and angle. The battens tightened and formed new angles and arcs. It was glorious, all this speed. And now I controlled it with a Singer’s precision.

I stretched my fingers painfully into the curve and shot upwards, faster than I’d fallen, headed straight for Densira and the skymouth that was opening itself up, a red tear in the sky that Elna could not see. She turned her head this way and that, trying to hear who startled her.

I drew in breath, preparing.

She could not see the danger, even as a mouth opened wide, then wider still, and neared her tier.

I slowed enough to pass between her and the skymouth, and I began to shout the monster down.

The sound of my scream echoed against the inside of my skull. It bounced off the tower. I breathed in through my nose and let more sound out of my mouth. As Wik had taught me, I supported everything from deep in my stomach and pushed out, so the very air shook with the noise.

I tried to make a shield over Elna with my scream. To push the monster away with my voice. The sound expanded and spread. The skymouth slowed. Elna stood openmouthed, stunned. I dove through the sound of my own voice and flew down, hoping the predator would follow.

I heard Wik shout a warning from the back of the group. The Singer in the lead was cursing my name.

Then I was through my wave of sound, and I could not hear behind me.

I knew Sellis would draw her ceremonial knife and come for me, but would the rest of them follow? Would the skymouths?

Looking back, I saw Sellis flying just above the skymouth that trailed me closely. Sellis’s knife glinted in the moonlight.

I led both Sellis and the skymouth away from Densira. The night breezes were strong, and we moved fast on them, far from the tower that was my home.

I did not care what happened now. Singers could take me and throw me down. Elna would live to see Allsuns and bid Nat a real good-bye.

I realized that I cared about her more than I did the city. I would protect her against any challenge. Use myself as a weapon if I had to.

With a scream, Sellis attacked my wing, a slicing arc aimed to break battens. She caught a wingtip, and I spiraled away, losing altitude and control as the silk tore. The rip stopped at the first batten. The rest of the wing held, but I could not control my fall. I spun away from the Singers and their monsters, and fell towards the empty tiers of Densira and the waiting clouds.

The wind screamed in my ears. I grew dizzy with spin and fear. Sick welled in my mouth, hard terror against the dryness. I tried to work my legs from the footsling in order to use my feet to keep the rest of me from being dashed against a tower.

The clouds rose quickly to meet me.

I tangled in my wings.

Fell, blinded by the rush of wind.

* * *

With a powerful jerk, my wings were nearly ripped from my back.

Someone had hooked me. I dangled, then I rose.

I was dizzy, but alive.

Who had me? In the night, with my captor above and my wings in the way, I could not see.

I tried to speak, but my voice was a croak, muffled by my wings. My throat felt like I had swallowed scourweed.

From a slit in the mess of torn silk and broken battens, I saw a double shadow pass across the uninhabited tiers of Densira. One flier, one flown. We flew so far downtower, the bone core had nearly grown out to the balcony’s edge.

We cleared Densira’s curve, and my bearer found a strong vent. We began to move fast into the open sky, headed beyond the city.

Not a rescue, then. Cloudbound. I imagined what it would be like to fall without the towers around me.

But the air shifted, and a cold breeze flapped the torn wing silk near my face. We turned again, back towards the city. A dark shape rose from the clouds, rough edges blocking the white towers on the horizon.

Lith. Only the most recent to fall, I heard Rumul say again. The most recent tower to send citizens tumbling into the clouds.

We approached the broken tower top from the city’s outer edge. It was still dark. No one on the other towers could see us this far down. No one looked this way, if they could help it.

I struggled, hoping to slow my captor.

A hard shake stilled me. “You always have the worst timing, Kirit.”

Wik’s voice. The voice I’d grown to trust. The voice of the man who had led a pack of skymouths to attack Densira.

I kicked and flailed. Tried to loosen my arms from my wingstraps. I would have rather fallen.

“Stop! I wouldn’t have let them harm Elna.”

I didn’t believe him. I did not want to hear him.

He picked up speed, despite my struggling, and turned just before he flew right into the dead tower. As he turned, he tossed me hard at Lith. I tumbled through the air towards the filthy tiers. I heard my wings make another loud rip as he let them go.

I landed hard and rolled to a stop against a bone spur. Dust billowed around me and made me cough. The tower groaned.

Wik did not follow me in. When I looked behind me, I saw nothing but sky. He’d flown away. Stranded me here.

Left to die?

My hand rested on a dusty pile of feathers. Bones snapped beneath my palm. Lith smelled of rot and decay.

The sun broke the cloudline. I caught my breath and checked for broken bones, moving feet and arms carefully.

Around me, Lith glistened darkly in the dawn.

My throat was dry from my screams and my robes were torn from the fall. I would not last long here.

A wail echoed against the dark bone: my voice, burred and painful.

At least no one was around to hear me.

I was little comforted by that thought, until a shadow peeled from a wall and limped towards me, jittering and waving one starvation-thin arm.

“Look who fell!” Tobiat peered down at me, his robe flapping in the shadows of the dead tower.

He sidled closer, bringing a familiar Tobiat-stench with him. I lifted myself up to sitting and looked at him.

“Where did you come from?” I said. But he didn’t answer.

The wind coursed through the tower. The pitted bone whispered like a cracked flute.

Had he been left to die here too? Tobiat danced his feet back and forth. His old breaks creaked and stuck out at odd angles; he looked like a broken kite. But when the day brightened enough that he saw the color of my robes, he whistled and backed away.

“Singer.” He warded the air with his hands. Began to disappear into the shadows.

“I won’t hurt you.” I didn’t want to be alone, not now, not on Lith. “You remember me, right?”

“Tobiat, it’s me, Kirit,” I tried again. “Nat’s…” My voice failed. Nat’s what? Friend? Murderer? I couldn’t say it. “Remember the cleaning? At Densira?”

I rose and shrugged off the remains of my wings. Tobiat continued to back away.

“How long have you been here?” I asked gently, hoping to keep him near. “Who brought you here?”

Instead of answering, Tobiat ducked into a hole in the blackened wall.

I crawled after him, deep into the broken core of Lith. The tunnel we passed through was neither smoothed by age nor worn away by rot, though Lith smelled like rotting bone. This tunnel had been gouged with sharp tools, recently, to make passages.

The tower’s core was hard and cold. Where layers of bone had been peeled back to the marrow, the scent of rot lingered. I brushed a spot with my fingertip. It crackled and compressed at my touch. Nothing like the warmth I’d felt when Viridi let us touch the city.

Wind blew the gray dust of the tower from my finger. We emerged from one tunnel and crossed an open balcony. The floor’s odd angle made me wish for my wings. We stood on a dead tier, within a dead tower.

Cracks latticed Lith’s core, deep black lines on blackened bone. Nothing grew here except the resilient scourweed and lichen. No families made their homes here. No ladders hung from balconies, no banners. Lith was nothing like the towers of my childhood, and nothing like the Spire.

Tobiat didn’t seem to care. He’d threaded a line of silk through the tunnels. As he walked, retracing his steps, he gathered it up into loops. He didn’t look back.

“You talked to Nat before he challenged the Spire,” I said. This time, at “Nat,” Tobiat froze in place. “Why did you let him do it?”

“Wind was right,” Tobiat answered gruffly.

“You were a Singer once, weren’t you?” I asked, but he was silent.

We entered another tunnel. The gouges looked fresh here, as if someone had dug deep to make new passages between hollows. This passage ended in a narrow cell, walled on all sides and crowded by the central bone core. Two oil lamps glowed weakly in the darkness.

I saw a nest of rags. Smelled the stench of long residency and rotting meat.

Tobiat skittered away from the bedding and placed a small sack of water precariously atop a tripod. He cackled softly as I licked my lips.

A basket of wilted greens waited near the fire, spices and herbs nearby. Bird meat was drying on a rack. Tobiat hadn’t lived this well at Densira. Someone was taking care of him. Keeping him alive.

The old man crouched by the fire in his cell. Smoke wound its way out through holes drilled low in the wall. The tower’s walls sighed and moaned with the wind; ghost sounds made by a dead tower teetering dangerously on the border of bone and sky.

He peered at me from under heavy eyebrows. “Singers. Skymouths.”

“How did you know? Why did you tell Nat?”

“Nat,” he said again, echoing my words.

My throat constricted. I heard Nat falling again, sucked out the vent. I should have tried harder to save him.

“Kirit,” came a whisper from the cell’s far corner. Not Tobiat’s voice.

The ceiling was very low there. I crawled to the pile of rags, my hands needled by the rough bone floor.

The pile moved at my approach. A tangle of black hair. A glint of white robe spattered with old blood.

Nat.

23. SURVIVAL

My head spun at the sight of him. “You survived the fall?” I reached out and touched Nat’s arm, hoping.

He flinched, and I pulled my hand back, still reeling.

“How—” I began, then stopped. When I fought him, he fell. That was part of the how. He lay injured before me, while I knelt there whole.

I stepped back, nearly knocking the water sack into the fire. “I don’t understand.” By my hand he fell.

Tobiat crawled to Nat’s side and lifted the rag blanket away. I saw clearly what I’d done. His left leg, broken and splinted, but seeping. His right, torn in long gashes. His ribs, his arms, his head. Wrecked and bleeding, still. His broken form looked so much like Tobiat’s.

I knelt at his side. If his wounds healed badly, he would be as crippled as Tobiat. Unable to hunt or fight. Unable to fly? His fate would be tied to a single tower and those willing to care for him. I knew Nat well enough; that would be the worst of all the injuries.

Injuries I caused.

Tobiat’s breaks had never been set, never properly healed. And Elna had looked out for him. Someone would do the same for Nat.

I looked closer, thought more clearly. Nat’s left leg had been splinted. The gashes on his right were roughly bandaged. His ribs and arm also. I saw the start of a poultice heating beside him, though it was missing some elements.

A whipperling nested in a fold of fabric by Nat’s feet. Maalik. Nat’s bird.

Someone had found him and brought him here. Someone cared for him. “Tobiat, did you do this?”

“Some!” Tobiat laughed. He pointed at the rough bandages. “Others too.”

Someone with enough knowledge to make a poultice. A splint. Someone who could fix Nat and make him straight again. Straight enough to fly.

“Who?” I turned and nearly caught Tobiat. He skittered away. “Who comes here? Who brought you here to tend Nat?”

Tobiat echoed me. “Who comes here? Kirit comes here.”

Kirit did indeed. And Wik had brought her.

Nat’s eyes opened again. This time they stayed open, blinking at me. Not looking away. They were angry eyes. Fierce hunter’s eyes. I, his prey.

“Didn’t you hurt me enough in the Spire?” His voice was rough and filled with pain. “You’ve come to finish the job?”

No. “Never.” Never again.

“Liar.”

I heard again the sound of his arrow passing close to my ear. He had known what he was doing too. I watched his jaw clench and looked for clean rags to rebandage his wounds.

When I found none, I tore the hem of my new gray robe. The rip of silk broke the silence.

“Stop,” Nat said.

“Please hear me, Nat.”

“Singers hear.” Tobiat chittered behind me. He waved his arms above his head. I recognized a windbeater pattern.

“Tobiat,” I said, “you were in the Spire. You know how things work.”

He mumbled. “Bargains. Bribes.”

“Right! I made a bargain. I had to.”

Nat didn’t answer. He watched me from narrowed eyes.

“How did you survive the fall?” I started to reach out again, then drew my hand back.

He went quiet. Looked older for a moment. Harder. Gaunt. The hollows around his eyes weren’t just from pain. Since Allmoons, he’d been under Singer punishments. Weighted with Laws. A broken set of wings.

“How did you survive?” I repeated, though I meant so much more than the challenge now. “And Elna? Did Densira help you?” Elna too had looked gaunt, her eyes much worse, when I saw her. I’d been too caught up in my own guilt to realize.

The look he gave me told me all I needed to know. Worse than unlucky. They had become pariahs in the tower.

“I hunted,” he said proudly. “Ezarit gave us everything she could, when she could. No one would trade with her for weeks, until the Singers did. I kept us all fed. Went lower on the tower than anyone has in years.”

While I ate well in the Spire, Nat had taken care of everyone.

“How did you survive the fall from the Spire?” The third time I’d asked. Despite my shame, I could not ignore the fact that he was dodging my question. I caught his gaze. Held it.

“Tell,” Tobiat shouted, chuckling. So close to my side that I jumped.

Nat took a stuttering breath. “Tobiat taught me how.”

My face must have shown confusion, because Tobiat laughed again.

Nat coughed. “I didn’t go to the Spire to die. I went to survive. To gain the right to tell the truth my father knew.”

“The Singers would never let you speak a truth about Naton.” Even my mother had been held to secrecy. Had bargained for it. Another realization swept over me. Ezarit hadn’t known who she would have to fight either, in her challenge.

Just as Nat hadn’t come to fight me. That match had been Rumul’s doing.

“I had to try. We had nothing left but the truth. And Naton wanted people to know that Singer secrets are killing the city.” Nat’s voice was older, deeper. Even as injured as he was, I heard the strength in it.

“I know their secrets now,” I said. Some of them, at least.

“Spire secrets!” Tobiat shouted, and spat at me. A gob of phlegm landed on my foot. “Keep them in the tower!” It sounded like a caution.

“What does it matter anymore?” I raised my arms, palms up. Now Nat watched me intently as I argued with Tobiat.

“Tradition!” Tobiat shouted.

Nat looked between us, then took a deep breath. “Tobiat told me a way to survive, if the windbeaters could be bribed.”

My jaw hung open. Tradition indeed, Tobiat. “You bribed the windbeaters?”

Now Nat looked very uncomfortable. “Elna did.”

“To win?” I was shocked. She knew how to do this?

“If I could win.” This time it was Nat who looked away. Both of us, complicit in this fall.

I reached out and touched my once-best friend’s shoulder. “I did not want you dead. I am happy you are not.”

His face creased with a small smile that folded into a wince. “I am glad I’m not either. Nor you. But that challenge was never meant to be a fair trial.”

If I’d known who my challenger was going to be, I also would have bribed the windbeaters to let him live, as he’d done. I sat back on my heels.

Nat tried to raise his head, licked his lips. I brought him the goosebladder of water and let him sip at it. “We need to get you medicines. Herbs. Honey to keep out infection.”

“Soon.” Tobiat nodded.

Not soon if there were skymouths lurking near the towers. No one would get through. “Not with Singers on the wing.”

“Why would you want to be one of them?” Nat spat.

I searched for words to describe the enclosure. The feeling of learning my fate and my past. Rumul’s enticements. You were born to be a Singer. It had felt like hope within the walls of the Spire. A way to survive.

I took a deep breath, hoped he’d believe me.

“What I learned about the city, Nat, and about what Singers do, what they’ve done in the past — I thought I could help.”

Tobiat waved his hands emphatically. “Singers help kill.”

My mouth hung open. I stared at Tobiat. “That’s not what I mean.”

“But you were trying to kill me,” Nat said.

“You were trying to kill me too. Why did you keep fighting, once you saw me?”

He blanched and lay back. “I wanted to know. We needed a better life. We had a plan. Why did you?”

“I thought I could win and save you. And, yes, I wanted those wings. To try and change things. Some Singers disagree with Rumul.” He was weakening, needed rest. But I pressed him again. I was newly ruthless. “What did you give them? And to do what?”

Nat coughed, each jerk causing him to stiffen in pain. I tipped more water to his lips. The sack felt very light. Not much water left to us. He sipped.

“Take more.”

He handed it back. “You feel guilty. Don’t. You made your choice to be a Singer. Live with that. Change your course if you feel you should, but don’t feel guilty.”

I bristled. “I wouldn’t have flown the Gyre if you hadn’t challenged, Nat. I wasn’t near ready. So if I am a Singer now…” I paused. Was I still a Singer? Someone who killed people? With skymouths? And did I still want to be? “If I am a Singer, you helped make me one.”

Turning away from our argument, Tobiat grabbed the bladder and an empty satchel and crawled back through the tunnel, yelling, “Singer. Sing. Singing.” He left me alone with Nat, who began to doze again while I thought about the Gyre fight, the Singers. The skymouths.

* * *

Nat yelled himself awake from a nightmare that had him grasping the air with his hands.

“Shh.” I held his hand, and he didn’t pull away. “You have more lives than a nest of silk spiders.”

He grinned. A real Nat smile, from before everything. “Can’t give up. Worse than falling.”

“I didn’t give up.” I realized it was true. I had found a way to keep going. That was part of who I was. And part of who Nat was, also. We fought hard to live.

As the space around us grew pale with early light, I realized we had a bigger fight ahead of us. If Rumul knew we were alive, he would do everything to change that. We knew too much. I knew too much.

The truth was a gift I could give Nat.

“Nat,” I whispered, as he tried to find a more comfortable spot, “Singers fly at night. Nightwings are real.” I was nearly bursting to tell him how it worked. The old Nat would have loved to know. Would have been desperate to heal fast in order to try it himself.

He only looked tired. “One of too many secrets kept by the Spire.” He shifted position, trying to escape the pain. “Like what happened to Naton.”

It had been decided. The challenger was defeated. We keep the silence.

Still, the words rushed from me. “I know what happened.”

I’d betrayed Nat in the Gyre. But my father had betrayed his father, so many years ago. How many layers of betrayal did it take to work the cracks in a friendship — especially one like ours — and break it apart?

I took a deep breath. “Your dad discovered that the Singers could fly at night. He was going to trade the information. To Ezarit.”

“Ezarit? Why?”

Now I couldn’t bring myself to answer him. The words stuck in my throat. Because she wanted power and standing. She wanted it even before my father disappeared. She wanted to be the best and the fastest trader. No matter whose life she risked.

It was too close to a confession. Like mother, like daughter.

“Someone found out Naton was trading Singer secrets?”

It would have been so easy to echo his word—someone—and leave it at that. But I couldn’t keep things from him anymore.

“My father. He was in love with Ezarit, but he was Spire-born. He was trying to protect the city. He didn’t know—” I stopped. Civik knew.

Nat hitched himself up so that his back was propped against the wall. He looked for the water sack, but Tobiat had taken it with him.

His lips were so dry. I wished Tobiat would hurry back.

“And that’s why the Singers threw Naton down? Because he stole their secret?”

I pushed a strand of hair back behind my ear. “Yes.”

Around us, Lith creaked. The floor rumbled.

Nat shook his head. “That might be half of it.”

I stared at him, not understanding. “My father told me himself.”

Nat rolled over, groaning. I tried to help him, but he pushed me away. “Let me do this.”

With his finger, Nat traced from memory a pattern in the dust. After staring at it for a moment, I realized I knew a part of that pattern well. Even upside down. The skymouth pens. But the rest of it baffled me. Nat misunderstood my confusion.

“It’s one of the carvings from the back of Naton’s bone chips. Though it doesn’t look like instructions for night flying. It looks architectural.”

So even now, I’d not been told the whole truth. I sat back and studied the drawing. “What do you think these are?” I waved my hand over a tiny mark on the pattern, then another similar one.

“Elna called them Spire holes.”

I thought about that. The holes marked tier after tier. There were even more near the thick pattern that I’d recognized. But the holes marked tiers where there were no pulleys or pens. “Why would Naton drill so many holes?”

Nat shook his head.

“Where are the chips now?” If we could study them together, we could connect the secrets. Figure out Naton’s message.

He wiped the dust flat. “We traded them to the windbeaters. They didn’t want them at first, but Elna knew what to say. That they were from Naton.”

I could only imagine what kind of sabotage the windbeaters could get up to with that map. The ways they could foil Rumul, or those like him. The thought gave me pause. We were trapped in Lith, but Naton’s chips could still cause havoc.

But another question still bothered me. “How did you know about the vents?”

Tobiat crawled back through the wall and interrupted. “Me!” he hooted.

“Elna said she went looking for Naton after he disappeared, after he was thrown down. She flew as far downtower as she could, around the city. She didn’t find him.”

“Found me!” Tobiat spread his arms wide. “Shiny present for the artifex’s wife.”

Nat looked at me, dirty and wounded, and rolled his eyes. Squeezed my hand quickly. I squeezed back before he let go. Almost like old times.

“How long have you been here?”

“Days,” he whispered. “Shot through that vent in the Spire, got banged around, and fell again. Landed hard. Then someone found me. Brought me here.”

“Who?” I asked. This was important. Tobiat had said, Wind was right.

“I never saw. But then your Singer brought Tobiat to take care of me.” Nat laughed until he coughed, and his eyes closed again. He passed into a restless sleep, exhausted by our conversation.

Wik. I heard the dark Singer’s voice in my memory: I wouldn’t have let them harm Elna. Felt him catching me while Sellis flew on. So many secrets in the Spire. So many currents working round each other.

I crawled past Tobiat, back through the tunnel, and onto the empty, black balcony. I leaned against a crumbling wall and looked up at the city that had risen beyond Lith’s broken tiers.

24. HIDDEN

A shadow passed the balcony. One shadow, but two people: Wik, carrying Elna.

When Wik set her on the ledge, Elna stood for a moment before her legs wobbled. She caught herself against a spur, then sank to the ground and began to crawl towards the tunnel. Towards the sound of Tobiat’s voice. She’d been here before. But to fly like that, without wings, blind, after a near attack. She was stronger than I’d ever imagined she could be.

Wik stood on the thin balcony, furling his wings and looking to the horizon. I resisted the urge to push him off.

Elna disappeared into the tunnel, and I followed. She hadn’t realized I was there yet. I watched her tend Nat, listened to her clucking at him. She touched Nat’s wounds gently and reached into her satchel for a packet of herbs. Pulled back the gray silk, but kept it to reuse. “Who has been here?” she asked.

“Singer,” said Tobiat.

Elna dipped her head. “On your wings, Wik.”

Wik, who had followed us to the tunnel’s mouth, said, “Not me. Kirit.”

Elna paused in her work, and her face brightened. “Where?”

The tiny grotto had grown very crowded. I stepped closer to her and put my hand on her shoulder. But I turned to Wik. “Whose side are you on?” I put timbre into my voice. As I’d been taught. How could someone know all that Wik knew and not do something to stop it?

Elna touched my hand. “We trust him, Kirit.” It was almost enough.

“Why?”

Tobiat chuckled and gestured to Elna. “Trust,” he said. “Can’t remember why.”

My softhearted, gentle second mother. The woman who never picked a fight, who was always two steps ahead of us as children. Her chin hardened as she ran fingers along her only son’s broken limbs, ably adjusting bandages and applying salve as if he had just tripped while running in Densira.

“I went looking for Naton after Conclave. I left Nat with your mother, who was pregnant with you. I spent days at it, all through Allsuns. Broke my eyes, it turned out. Too much sun. Slept in a hang bag down every tower around the Spire for days in the winds. But I never found Naton. I found Tobiat. Hanging by a wing from an abandoned tier on Bissel. Birds had already started pecking at one of his eyes.”

She turned her face towards him, smiling fondly. “I don’t know how long he’d been there, but he was alive, and he was wearing a Singer robe.”

I held my breath. I’d been right.

“I figured if I could make him well, he might tell me of Naton’s last days.”

“How did he get there?”

Elna quieted and turned to Tobiat. Waited.

Tobiat cleared phlegm from his chest and spat. He coughed for a few seconds more, then drew a long breath.

“Challenge.” He cackled.

The sun was going down. Tobiat would babble until it came up again. I tried to hurry him. “Who did you challenge?”

Nat’s eyes were open; he was listening too. Tobiat spat again, hitting his first gob with the quivering mass of the second. “Young Rumul. For Naton.”

“Why did Rumul want this so badly?”

Wik stepped in. “A Singer historian found a set of bone plates hidden far downtower. They showed Singers using skymouths to hunt in the clouds, and Rumul saw the potential. There was not enough dissent to stop him. Not then. The council brought in an artifex. Called it tradition. Before the Rise, they said, Singers had trained skymouths to defend the Spire. They stopped long ago. Rumul thought it necessary again.”

My jaw hung open. Those? To defend the city? No. That wasn’t what Wik had said. He’d said the Spire.

“How long have people been trying to change this?”

I’d asked Wik, but Tobiat answered. “Too long. Too slow.”

Wik nodded. “Rumul had the votes in council and strength in the Gyre. He had many of the windbeaters too. With some towers rebelling against tithing and Conclave especially, Rumul has fought hard to keep order. Singers were afraid to have another Lith. He gained more supporters. Inside and outside the Spire.”

The southern towers, I thought. Where the Spire got its apples. Its muzz.

“We have only recently been able to shift the balances,” Wik continued.

All those people. The towers.

I turned to Nat. “What were you willing to die for to have spoken aloud?”

And he looked at me full on, for the first time since I’d found him here. His eyes looked harder, and sadder, than I’d ever seen them. “You mean, what did I risk killing a friend for?” he said.

I winced, but stood firm. Waited for him to answer.

“I wanted the city to hear what Naton knew, and what Tobiat knew, but couldn’t say.” He paused. His voice was deep and firm. Determined. “I wanted them to have to sing it from the towers. That the Singers kept skymouths. Used them against the city.”

No one would have listened to someone like Tobiat.

Except someone had. Nat had. Elna had.

Nat said, “After you disappeared and Singers told everyone I’d attacked the Spire, they weighed me down with Laws. I had to hide during Conclave, or they would have taken me.” He paused and drank the tea that Elna held to his lips. “I went so far down. Into the clouds, Kirit.”

Into the clouds. The nerve that had taken. The desperation.

Nat kept talking. “What I found down there, the city needs to know that too.”

I looked at Wik, who shrugged, confused.

“In the clouds, I had to hide often, letting gryphons and skymouths that were the size of whole tiers pass by.” Nat swallowed. “It was dark down there. I stumbled around a lot. Nearly fell off the edge of a tier more than once. Then I tripped over a nest of them. Hiding. Tiny ones, little bigger than my hand.”

“Them?”

“Littlemouths. They live in the towers. But they’re not like the ones that migrate. They’re small. No sharp teeth. They climb. Can’t fly. They eat waste and weeds. Not people.”

“Then they’re not skymouths.” I thought of the baby skymouths in the cages. Those had been big. They’d had teeth.

Nat reached into a basket by his side and pulled out his hands. His palms formed a seemingly empty cup. “Look at it. Feel it.”

I turned to Wik, questioning. He began to echo at Nat’s hands so that we could better see what he held. I joined him. There was something soft in Nat’s hands, for all that they looked empty. I reached out a fingertip and touched an eye ridge, the crease of a mouth.

The creature was something like a skymouth, a baby skymouth, but much smaller. Large, wide-set eyes, a ridge of glass teeth, but not the sharp edges that gouged and tore. Grinders.

The creature nestled in Nat’s hands.

Wik was doubtful. “Another kind of skymouth?” He crossed his arms and frowned.

Nat shook his head.

Tobiat made a sound that was part yelp and part laughter. “Same kind.” He stared for a long time at Wik.

I turned too. “What does he mean?” I watched Wik’s expression shift from confusion to understanding. To horror.

He spoke in a rush. “The Spire’s skymouths are bred there.” He reached to touch the tiny creature. Hesitated and pulled his hand back. “It’s not night and day. The city needs the sinew. Needs the bridges. Singers have kept a few skymouths for that purpose since the Rise. Rumul argued in council to breed more, bigger mouths. They got more than they bargained for.”

Elna bent her head.

“Why was he allowed to do this?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Was the council truly that weak? The Singers that easily led? Why had no one challenged?

“Not everyone knows. The skymouths aren’t exactly easy to see down there, and so their true number goes unobserved. The shouters and the council know. There’s been gossip, but there have been accidents too. And the council has to be careful. Rumul’s beaten every challenge so far.”

“Terrin.”

Wik frowned. “Others too. Civik, long ago. Rumul is too good in the Gyre and has many windbeaters on his side. He bribes them well. When Rumul kept winning, we decided to try to work for change in different ways.”

“Sabotage.”

“And changing minds. It’s slow and dangerous. There are more dissenters among the younger Singers. A few of us try to blunt the effect of Rumul’s policies.”

“Why can’t you tell the towers? Or kill the skymouths?” My outrage brought the pitch of my voice close to a scream.

Wik smiled weakly. “The needs are too great. Rumul has consolidated too much power and removed most of the strong-willed among the council. Only Viridi opposes him openly, and then very cautiously. She — we — have been trying to secure windbeaters we could trust, biding our time. Too much so. Rumul’s trade with the wealthiest towers has enhanced the Spire’s food; the towers themselves enjoy more bridges, nets too, though they fear the skymouths as everyone does. The wealth keeps Rumul popular. The fear keeps the towers under his thumb.”

Tobiat moaned. “Secrets, secrets.”

I ignored him and pushed forward. “You are trying to stop it? And Viridi too?”

When Wik nodded, I continued, “Yet she let Terrin be destroyed? She—” I stopped. I turned and looked past Nat. To Elna. “You knew. Naton worked on the pens. He told you.”

She blinked and frowned. “I knew something was wrong. I knew he thought he was doing something important for the city, but then he had questions. He gave me the chips before they took him, but before he could tell me what all the marks meant, he was gone.”

“Does Ezarit know?”

Elna shook her head. “No one outside the Spire but me. Naton smuggled the carvings on a necklace to me, for safekeeping. If I’d said anything, I would have been cloudbound. And Nat—” She put her hand to her head and turned towards her son’s sickbed. “Now you know everything.”

Nat threw a bandage in the fire pit, nearly knocking over the tripod, enraged but unable to rise. “I would have told the city! We could have gathered the towers together. We could have done something. Not waited to build support over generations. And now we’re stuck here.”

“You would have died trying, like Naton,” Wik said. In the dim light, his eyes reflected the oil lamps. His face, etched with the marks of his battles in the Gyre, looked grim.

“Just like we’ll die here. Once they come for us,” I said. “We are two Singers missing, with Sellis gone to report me to the council. They will come looking. They’ll search the towers for me. And they will then find you.”

“Then we have to rouse the towers, tell them!” Nat said. “They will fight!”

Wik said, “The towers no longer know how to fight. They know how to break things, like Laws, and make minor rebellions. They know how to issue a challenge to the Spire, because that is what they’ve been trained to do.”

“Trained to guard, and to hunt. But only within their own quadrants. Trained to Fortify. To hide. Only a few fly the whole city.” Nat’s voice was bitter and mocking as he sang, “Tower by tower, secure yourselves. We watch while others suffer. Call it unlucky. Turn away.”

“And Singers decide which towers gain connections,” I said. “Which can rise. Which fall in the path of migrations.”

“But”—Wik gestured to the blackened walls around him—“we do not wish another war. Wars break towers. People die. Fighting throws the city into mayhem, and worse. We cannot sink to that. That is what we were before the clouds. We were not a city.”

“Are we a city now?” I asked the question. “The towers humbled and begging for Singer attention. For freedom to speak? Who can fight this?”

Tobiat pointed his crooked finger at Wik and me. “Singers fight.”

Wik agreed. “One of us must gain audience with the council. Try again to stop Rumul. His last wingfight injury has not healed well, though not many know it. I will go back. If I fail to get them to hear me, I will challenge, and then Kirit will get to the windbeaters. Convince them to support us.”

“You want me to go down beneath the Gyre again?” I was suspicious. “You just said Rumul has too many windbeaters on his side.”

“Civik sent Moc with a message after you and Sellis departed. The message in Naton’s bone chips swayed more windbeaters. He said he’d found places where Naton drilled the extra Spire holes. He thinks Naton meant to use them to undermine Rumul. He also says that some see a way to use the holes, where before they only knew defeat. We could gain more support.” Wik pulled a small wrapped package from his robes and held it out to me. “He sent these as his promise.”

I took the package and slowly unwrapped it. Glass and metal gleamed. Civik’s lenses. Heavy in my hands.

I stared at Elna and Tobiat, then at Wik. Perhaps Tobiat was not so damaged after all, nor Elna so gentle. “Who else is part of this? Why doesn’t Ezarit know?”

“She was already too much at risk,” Elna said. “The Singers watch her.”

Because of me.

“My brother has tried to help, while on excursion,” Wik said. “Though he sometimes acts too quickly.”

Wik’s family: Spire-born, all of them. They had siblings, cousins, parents all around them, as the tower-born did. And they got to keep their families, as long as they remained Singers. His brother — Macal. “Then Magisters can help.”

“Some, yes. Some, like Dix and Florian, are Rumul’s.”

Nat pushed against the floor with his hands. “You Singers have had your chance. I will tell everyone. The towers will take the Spire. End this.”

Elna pressed firmly with her hand, stilling him. “A few more days yet.” Her eyes said more than a few days.

My hair fell across my face, and I tucked a lock behind my ear. “Wik shouldn’t reveal himself if we can help it. If I return, I can try to lodge a challenge before the council can stop me. Rumul, trying to silence a new Singer that he’s just elevated? That would raise some eyebrows among the broader Singer ranks, and the windbeaters too.”

“Sellis has likely already spoken against you to the council,” Wik said. “You’d need to sneak in, or they’ll throw you down. Wait until dark. Then come.”

Nat looked at us, darkly angry, the old wing-sibling long gone. “If you don’t succeed this time, I will find a way to stop the Singers from outside the walls.”

Elna put her hand on his. Then I put mine over hers, and Tobiat joined me. Then Wik clasped our hands together. We were five for certain, set against the might of the Spire.

“I was wrong to hope this would all go away,” Elna said.

“We will make sure Naton’s message gets out,” I promised. One way or another. I hung Civik’s lenses around my neck. “Can you get a message to Macal? Tell him he’s needed at the Spire? Would he understand?”

Wik pulled a Spire marker from his robe. Made a symbol on it with his knife. Gave it to Nat. “Send Maalik to Mondarath with this.”

Below us, the tower shook anew.

Wik and I crawled back through the tunnel, leaving Elna, Nat, and Tobiat in their hiding place.

When we reached the balcony, we could hear a bone horn in the distance. Calling the city elders to the Spire.

“Something is happening,” Wik said.

“Not another Conclave?” Not so soon.

“I will find out. Will try to slow it, if so.”

Before I could say anything in response, Wik leapt from the tower. I was left to address the biggest hurdle of returning to the Spire: wings. Sellis’s knife had ripped mine, and my fall had made it worse. Four of us, trapped on Lith, with one working wing among us.

And a Singer who had so far kept secrets from both tower and Spire.

I looked about the abandoned balcony, then crawled back through the first passage, rummaging through the discarded refuse of Lith.

I would find a way to turn one wing into two. I would figure out how to get into the Spire without being seen.

Then I would make the Spire tell its secrets to the city.

25. TRUTH

As the day warmed, I descended through Lith’s broken tiers with increasing desperation.

Tobiat brought more strong silk rope with him, and he insisted on joining me while I picked through the tower. I couldn’t stop him. Nor could I keep him quiet. I struggled to focus. He smacked his gums together and rambled.

He hummed an old tune. Sometimes sang a verse. I listened, despite myself. This was another song long fallen from the city’s memory. More than that, I noticed that when he sang, Tobiat’s speech made more sense. He could remember longer sentences.

When Tobiat said, “Lith song,” I smiled, even as I searched.

“I don’t remember much of that one,” I said. I expected he wouldn’t either.

“Many bridges ran to Lith,” he sang, the legend clear and true. My jaw dropped. “They traded easy and made things beautiful.”

Now Tobiat did not skip or mumble. He sounded whole when he sang. His memory intact. I listened harder. I’d never thought to ask him to sing.

But they grew jealous of the Spire,

tried to raise their tower higher, without Singers’ help, nor Spire’s blessing.

Men found Lith who wished to fight.

They made it grow,

they made it strong.

They angered many, Lith cracked and died.

Singers helped them flee, made survivors beg shelter. Plenty perished.

No one came to sing their dead.

City punishes those who forget.

Tobiat’s song ended. Amazement washed over me, along with new appreciation for Tobiat. Then he shouted, “Roar!” as the city rumbled again.

I shuddered and sped up my search efforts. On one tier, we found a crafter’s studio, the floor broken and treacherous. A spine wall had caved in, and the bones scattered across the floor were big enough to be human.

If any of this tier’s residents had survived, they’d left everything behind when they went. Tools had blown against the central core and lay covered with dust: needles and saws and nails. Metal. Things I’d seen in Rumul’s chambers, in the wingmaker’s studio, and nowhere else. No one had risked coming back to Lith to salvage, even though the need was great. I gathered what I wanted: needles — even a metal one — awls, bone battens from a pile.

“Rise.” Tobiat held up a carved bone panel. It was gray with dust, but much lighter than the darkened tower. He cleaned it with a corner of his ruined robe.

The panel was beautiful. The carving crisp and confident. Cleaner even than the carving in the Spire. Our bone tools could not compete with the artistry. The sharp wings, the flowing hair of the fliers.

We’d lost so much.

“Oh,” I said. “The clouds.”

The swirling cuts that ridged the panel’s surface could be nothing but clouds. In every direction. Even thinking about clouds all around made me squirm. The panel must have come from the Rise. Part of our history.

At the center of the bone tablet, a woman with a marked face lifted a wingless citizen away from a hunting bird. A Singer saving someone. Not the whole city. One person.

This was almost too humble for the Singers. Most often, their carvings showed Singers lifting the towers themselves, filled with people. My hand, which had carved this very scene in the council tier as a novice, flexed at the memory.

We’d lost so much. We’d lost ourselves.

“The towers sing one version of The Rise, and the Singers know another,” I said.

Tobiat nodded. “Secrets.”

“But what if that’s wrong? What if secrets are destroying the city?” I traced the carving with a finger. Tucked it into my robe.

“Fear Singers. Sing. Fear.”

Sure. The towers refrained from fighting because they were afraid of the Singers. I could see that. But Tobiat shook his head, frustrated. That wasn’t what he’d meant. “Do you mean to say that the Singers are afraid?”

A bob of the head. A cackle.

“They’re part of the city, not something separate,” I murmured. “We have forgotten.”

“Maybe, maybe,” said Tobiat. He singsonged, “City punishes those who forget.”

What else had we forgotten? How much more could the city lose if Rumul remained unchecked?

We returned to the hideout, Tobiat munching on some gristle he’d pulled from a pocket. I turned over thoughts in my mind, frustrated from the search.

How many generations ago had Lith fallen? Recently enough to haunt the city. How could we keep tragedy from happening again without resorting to Singer methods? Were the stories and songs true? How would I fly away from here in time to meet Wik?

I had one good wing, a needle and awl. Battens.

I spotted Elna’s satchel on the floor and remembered how heavy it had felt. I looked inside. Under the herbs she’d carried when Wik had flown with her, and her sewing box, she’d tucked the silk and the furled, broken wings from the Spire, the ones I’d presented to her.

I began to hum The Rise, softly. Soon, Elna, Nat, and Tobiat fell asleep around me, heads nestled on arms, legs tossed by dreams. Nat snored.

I pulled the silk and wings from Elna’s bag, took a piece of dried goose from our stores, then crawled from the cell and retraced my path until I found my wing and its broken mate. Lifting them, I could see that the tear in the right wing was devastating. There was no repairing the shredded silk, unless I could summon Liras Viit to this broken tower. But I had Nat’s ceremonial wings. One was less damaged than the other.

I could patch his better wing with mine, stitch the stress points and make them whole. I ripped out the seams and dissected his broken wing, pulling the silk from the battens. My fingers lingered on the torn silk, imagining Nat’s wings as they shredded in the Gyre.

Using the tools Tobiat and I had found and Elna’s kit, I patched myself new wings with the silk of both his wings and mine.

I hid what remained, but did not throw it over the edge. Nat was not strong enough to come after me, not yet. He’d want to fly before he was ready. Too soon.

A rustle in the pile of silk and battens I’d pushed into a corner made me jump. A bulge moved. My skin prickled with fear. Perhaps I should have thrown it over.

When I peeled back the silk, I saw nothing. Carefully, I put my hand out. I heard a cheeping sound and saw my dried-goose dinner disappear into an invisible mouth.

The little skymouth. I shuddered, despite myself. A stowaway, and a thief.

No. It was a garbage eater. Perhaps these littlemouths helped the city too.

I carefully laid the silk back over the creature and let it eat undisturbed. Began to hum The Rise again.

I pressed the seams on my wings with the heel of my palm. Tugged at them. They seemed solid. Solid enough to get me to the Spire, at least.

A gust of wind caught the wing’s edge and lifted it. I pulled the straps over my shoulders, tightened them against my aching muscles. No one else to help me. My fingers brushed the lenses’ cold metal. I thought of my father, of Ezarit. Of the bargains they’d made.

I imagined them fighting in the Gyre. Imagined Civik falling, his body breaking. My mother, wounded, a knife cut to her chest. Saw again Terrin’s fall. The young woman who’d challenged Sellis. Nat. Heard the wind in the Gyre, felt the heat from the skymouth’s maw.

My humming had become a keen. I bit it back.

At a scuffling sound from the tunnel, I turned, prepared to face Tobiat. But Nat pulled himself through, lowering himself to a sitting position against the wall. Elna followed.

“You’re going,” Nat said, panting.

“Yes. Right now.” I looked at him, at the wounds I’d caused. Looked at the worry on Elna’s face. I might not have another chance to say it. “I am sorry I fought you.”

He frowned. “I fought you too. But you’re right, what you said before. I made you a Singer. It wasn’t exactly how we’d planned it.”

I could feel my face flush with anger. They’d made a plan but hadn’t figured out a way to share it with me. “I thought you died! I thought I killed you!”

Nat held his hands up. “I’m not fighting you now.” His voice was still tired, and resigned. “Besides, someone from the towers needed to try and fight. Someone needed to fight.”

I took a deep breath and blew my anger away. He was misguided, headstrong, and more than a little right.

“Someone will fight. Me. Once I find Ezarit,” I said, squeezing his hands. “You heal.”

I had to fly. Now. I couldn’t undo what had happened. But I could try to keep it from getting worse. I lifted the lenses. Blew in them to keep the glass from fogging.

Elna coughed. “Hurry,” she said. “The Singers will be out again at dark.”

Her words reminded me that I’d made a bargain too, with Rumul, so long ago. Your Laws, and those of your mother.

Trapped here on Lith, I had forgotten the full consequences of my betrayal.

Ezarit. I fought to keep my hands from shaking. I had to find her before I went to the Spire. I had to make her come to Lith, to hide. If I flew fast enough, I might reach her before Rumul’s people did.

I tightened the last strap as much as I could.

“What if Ezarit won’t listen?” The sadness in my voice surprised me. Ezarit had always done things her own way.

“She fought to keep the Singers from knowing about you; she tried to find a place in a tower that had more power in the city; one that could protect the two of you better than Densira. But Grigrit required an apprentice in order to consider it. She’ll listen.”

I understood a little better now. The bargain she’d made with Doran Grigrit. Her desperation after the wingfight. “She should have told me.”

Elna nodded. “We both should have told you. And each other. I thought my silence would buy your lives.”

The sun began to sink below the clouds, turning the sky pink and red.

Silence. Tradition. Secrets. I’d thought I was keeping Elna and Ezarit safe too. Now we were stranded on Lith. Now I had to hurry.

I stood and tightened my other strap, then stepped through the footsling, ready to fly. The sun was setting as I checked the wind at the balcony, low on the city’s darkest tower. What Elna and Naton had sacrificed for, and Ezarit, and Nat too, I needed to finish. As soon as Ezarit was safe.

I unfurled my new wings, my lopsided, mismatched pair that was everything I was at the moment: stitched together pieces of my friends and family.

As I leapt from our hiding place on Lith, they watched me go. I stuttered in the breeze until I learned to balance on the unmatched, patched wings. If I were attacked, I would not survive it.

The patchwork wings wobbled. My lenses swung on their strap and banged against my collarbone. I reached carefully to still them and my right wing dipped precariously. I fought to right it, twisting my arm up, just as a small tentacle wrapped around my wrist.

“Bone and blood,” I whispered, more startled at the touch than anything. The littlemouth had stowed away with me.

The tiny creature worked its way up my arm and clung to my shoulder. I slipped my hand back into the grip on my right wing. My path straightened immediately, but I still fought for altitude. My neck prickled as the tentacles felt their way forward, dragging the small sack of the skymouth’s body behind it. Its hide was rough and dry, not wet like its bigger, fiercer cousins.

The creature pulled itself over to my left shoulder, which was higher ground, I supposed, since the right one kept dipping as I fought to control my new wings. As it settled there, the slight weight change steadied me. The wings soared better. They lifted me, finally, to the clearer air.

“Thanks,” I whispered to the tiny monster hugging my left arm, my shoulder, and my back. “Enjoy the ride.”

I began to hum again, softly.

The towers rose over me, tinted blue-violet and blackberry hues by the setting sun. At this level, only a few scavengers might have seen me by mistake, but soon I’d rise to a level that didn’t have such downdrafts. It would be safer, but if a Singer — or someone loyal to them — saw me there, I would never reach my mother in time to warn her, nor the Spire in time to challenge Rumul before they threw me down.

I would simply disappear. Like Naton and so many others.

Densira and the edge of the city drew close. I found an updraft and circled gently with it, aiming higher. A dark shape passed above me. Two Singers, flying wing to wing.

I dodged around the tower, taking extra time to circle Densira and avoid them.

When I emerged from the other side, the Singers were leaping from a balcony, carrying a burdened net between them. The person in the net struggled.

My mother’s voice drifted down the many tiers to my sensitive ears. I was too late.

26. REVOLT

Ezarit shouted at the Singers who carried her away from her tower and towards the Spire. She cursed them, then tried to bribe them. She was still negotiating. But the Singers ignored her.

I tried to climb faster, but my wings would not permit it. I had no weapon to use against the Singers. And my mother wore no wings. My attack would doom her if they chose to let the net fall.

The Singers who bore my mother to the Spire faded quickly into the distance. The city’s towers turned to shadow and darkness.

I stumbled along in the twilight air, frustration filling my eyes. Freezing on my cheeks. I kept flying. I could not fail in my goals.

* * *

Even the long days before Allsuns had moments of darkness. The last of the sunset’s colors disappeared below the clouds. Oil lanterns flickered in the nearby towers as people drew close with their families.

I hummed quietly, hearing the city as well as seeing it for a short time. The darkness thickened, and I heard the Spire ahead of me.

As my echoes struck the Spire’s solid-seeming walls, they revealed hidden hollows and panels. I glided close to the one I needed, the access gate closest to the pens. I pulled my fingers from a wing grip and flexed them.

* * *

In the dark, I clung to the Spire’s side, a mottled shadow against the bone-white wall. Wik waited for me inside, and Civik, but it was up to me to break in without being caught. Above, Nightwings launched from the Spire and flew into the city. They did not see me.

I had to get inside the Spire, fast.

I traced my fingers along the wall until I found the pressure points that opened the gate from outside. One stuck, then depressed. I heard the sound of a panel rolling back. This was a small gate. I furled my wings before pulling my upper body through.

I entered the Spire sideways, on my belly, near an empty alcove in the windbeaters’ tiers. I heard heavy snoring nearby and cinched my footstrap to keep it from clattering against the floor and waking my neighbor.

Hidden on the windbeaters’ tier, I waited and tried to think how to find Wik or Civik. On the tier’s far side, I saw a small shadow work its way past a moonlit patch. I held my breath and sank back against the alcove wall. Hoped.

When Moc passed by on silk-soft feet, I reached out and grabbed his robe.

He bit back a screech. “I was looking for you! Wik said you would come back.”

“I need your help. And Civik’s.” We kept our voices low.

Moc caught sight of my lenses, still hanging round my neck. “He gave them back to you. Windbeaters don’t do that.”

“Perhaps he’s something more than a scheming windbeater, Moc. He might want things to change too. Ask him.”

Moc slunk off in the direction of Civik’s alcove, and soon both returned. Parted ways as Moc climbed from the tier to find Wik. Hurry, Moc.

Civik tapped my hand with a finger. “Council’s already met to hear from Sellis about your interference. Rumor is you’re cloudbound.”

“I’m not cloudbound yet. But they were going to hurt Elna.”

Civik bobbed his head and shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe Wik would have diverted them.”

“People still would have died. We have enough troubles without Rumul making more.”

He frowned. “He’s still got too many on his side. No one wants to see more towers fall. No one wants war. Our plan is to work slowly.” I could see his face as the brief moonrise brushed our side of the tier. He looked afraid, and very old. My heart sank.

“You sent me these,” I said, holding his hand to the lenses. “Why?”

“They’re yours now. Not mine. I can’t do anything with them.” His fingers traced the lenses’ edge. Then one finger touched my nose. Hovered away. Then his hands covered my face. Softly, he used his fingers to see me.

I held still, hoping Wik would come soon. I’d never talked to Civik alone. When he didn’t move his hands from my face, I stepped back and caught his fingers in mine.

“It is time to do more,” I said, squeezing his hands. “I need you to get windbeaters who share your views out to the Gyre at dawn.”

He nodded. “I can do that. They know what’s possible now that we have Naton’s chips. We looked at the holes he drilled in the walls. The weak points he created but never had the chance to finish. But Rumul still has influence down here. We have to be cautious.” Civik hesitated, caught between hope and doubt.

At the sound of footsteps tripled by a bone cane and the swish of robes on the passage outside the alcove, we both fell silent. We barely breathed until the noises passed. Where was Wik?

I tried to think of something that would make him act beyond his fear. “Do your rumors tell you who they’ve caught and brought to the Spire?”

Civik shook his head. “Who?”

I paused, thinking of Ezarit’s scars, of what she did to Civik in the Gyre. I didn’t know how he’d react to the news.

“Who?” He tightened his grip on my hand. Then, as if he could read my mind, he said, “Ah. Yes. Ezarit.” The way he said it gave me no comfort. I should have stayed quiet.

“I can’t let them hurt her either.”

The old windbeater frowned. Then he tapped my lenses again. “You are right. Now is time to fight, and to speak.”

I breathed out, relieved. I would have his support if I fought in the Gyre. I hoped he could gather enough of the others. But I needed more than that. “I need better wings, Civik. And a good blade.”

My father let go of my hand. Rolled back and forth on his cart. “We do not have those things down here. The Singers took all the nightwings we’ve made. And there are no blades among the windbeaters. You must get them elsewhere.”

There was a scuffling sound, and Moc tumbled into the alcove. “They’ve blocked off the council tier. I can’t get past the guards. Can’t get to Wik.”

“They kicked me out earlier,” Ciel said, appearing behind Moc. “No flying, either.”

New plan, then. I couldn’t use the ladders to get to the council. I couldn’t fly. And Wik was somewhere up there.

“Moc, you need to help me sneak into the pens. Right now.”

He started to argue. “They’ll see you.”

But Ciel said, “I know how,” and pulled me from the alcove, towards the galleries where the windbeaters worked the Gyre. She grabbed one of the ropes that ran down the Gyre’s sides and handed me a large bucket. It still smelled of stink, but it was empty, and big enough to hold me, if I kept very still.

But the bucket couldn’t hold my patchwork wings. I stripped them off. Felt the small skymouth wrap itself tighter around my shoulder.

I tucked myself as best I could into the bucket. Both twins and Civik, working the ropes together, lowered me down on the cable to the knotted ropes of the pens.

They worked fast, and when the bucket came to rest, I rolled out and ducked into the shadows beneath an overhanging gallery. They reeled up the bucket and disappeared.

Alone in the dark, once all had grown quiet again, I crawled to the center of the nets and let myself into the core of the pens. Felt the captive skymouths bump against the ropes and poke the thin points of tentacles out as I passed. I hummed, and the tentacles receded.

When the skymouths settled, the littlemouth still at my shoulder loosened its grip. “Oh, no you don’t,” I whispered, then tucked it into my robe, by my ribs. I tightened the fastenings to secure it. “You’d be like dinner to your cousins.”

Too close beside me, someone coughed, and I jumped. In the darkness, I could make out a tall form with broad shoulders.

“You made it,” Wik said.

“I did.” My heart pounded from the scare. “How did you get away from the council tier?”

“I told Rumul someone needed to check on the pens. He told me to get them ready to migrate again tomorrow and then return. The council will discuss Ezarit’s fate in a few hours.”

Worse and worse.

“How did you know I’d come here?”

“I didn’t. I’d planned to ask Moc to help find you, but he’s made himself scarce.”

I wanted to laugh, but it was too awful. “He was looking for you. You passed each other. One going up, the other coming down.” I grew serious. “We need to get back up there.”

He wrapped a hand around a thick rope. “They will try to stop you from reaching the council and issuing a challenge, Kirit. Rumul says that the city is already angry. That a sacrifice needs to be made.”

“Did you try to challenge?”

Wik bowed his head. “I began the process. No one would support me. Not with another Conclave possible if the city keeps rumbling. They are frightened. They don’t want to lose my vote on council, if I fail. We were so close to breaking him before the city—” He stopped. Dragged his fingers through his hair. Exhausted. “Instead, I tried to blunt Sellis’s attacks on you, tried to keep them from tearing apart the towers looking for you, the traitor Singer. I told her I’d disposed of you already, but that did not satisfy her, or Rumul.”

I couldn’t imagine it would. “They wanted to dispose of me themselves.” Cloudbound. The first sacrifice at Conclave.

“Yes.”

“Why should I believe you? You led the attack on Densira.”

“I was trying to foil it, Kirit.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No. But I saved you. And brought Elna to you.”

That was true. “They have Ezarit now, up there.”

He met my gaze. “She’s being held in Rumul’s enclosure.”

I thought of Ezarit, encased in the walls of the Spire as I once was. “I can’t get to her there.”

“If you win your challenge, you can free her.”

“And if I lose?”

Wik was silent. The nets creaked. “Then I will challenge without support. Like Terrin. And more people will die tomorrow.”

I thought of Nat, and my mother. Of the enclosure’s carved walls. Of the skymouths. I had to try.

Wik reached into the sleeve of his robe and removed his knife and its sheath. He handed these to me. They were heavy in my hands, and the glass blade was dark as the night. I bound the sheath to my arm.

He said, “I’ve been down here too long. They are watching everyone. Every tier. How will you get to the council?”

“It’s better if you don’t know.”

He stared at me. “You are a Singer, Kirit. Truly. The kind we need.” He leaned close, his eyes fierce. “Don’t let them tell you you’re not.” He climbed quickly from the pens and onto the next tier. Then he was gone, leaving me alone, surrounded by skymouths.

When I echoed, the Singers’ skymouths sounded like soft objects, bobbing in the pens. Their tentacles trailed across each other. In the far corner of the pens was a different shape, less buoyant. Not moving.

Any breeding program had successes and losses. I thought of Nat’s whipperlings, his search for the fastest ones. Of my own silk spiders. We didn’t feed the ones that didn’t make enough silk. There were always culls.

I hoped I was right, that it was the same here. Skymouth culls didn’t need their skins any longer.

The rigging and cages designed by Nat’s father for these pens almost seventeen years ago filled the center of the Spire. I stood on the side, echoing, until I found more still shapes. Beyond them, I could hear the harder objects, the pulleys and cams that raised the pens when the Spire rose.

I imagined how far the cages had risen in the intervening years, and what horrors they’d hosted.

Then I took a deep breath and, humming softly, entered the pens. The littlemouth squirmed against my chest. Gripped tighter. I kept moving, gathering the piles of skymouth skins I’d spotted a moment ago.

I walked the outer edge of the pens, humming. The skymouths quieted, though tentacles still reached for me, curled round my ankles.

A roar on my left drew me towards double netting held fast with spidersilk, thick tendons, and something else. Metal wire. Metal. The desperation of that shocked me. The reinforcements were recent and rough-hewn. The big skymouth Wik spoke of at Lith — they must have enclosed it here. And it did not want to be kept. I backed away quickly and gathered the last few dead and dying skymouths from the pens’ edges. My arms filled with them. The deflated bodies and slack limbs slopped over my hands and dragged on the floor, tripping me. Their acrid stench burned my nostrils.

I returned to the center of the pens and put down my burden. I echoed and saw the culls. A dozen of them, piled at my feet. Either they couldn’t survive or their keepers didn’t want them to.

The pens shifted and creaked as their occupants grew restless with the smell of death so near. I hummed while I worked, hoping it would calm them enough to stay their movements.

All the culls were recent, dying now or dead within the last day or two, by my guess. Several were as large as my wings. Not big enough to be farmed for sinew, so left to feed their brethren in the pens.

I took Wik’s knife from my sleeve and dragged its point across the first cull’s skin, separating the hide from the muscle below. I wasn’t sure what I was doing would work, but I had to try. More rank scent filled the room. I gagged and prayed it wouldn’t get worse.

It took an hour to get what I needed.

Above, the night sky showed through the distant opening at the top of the Spire. When I’d begun my task, it was still dark. Now the apex was starting to lighten. The city rumbled again below. I stood on the pens, covered in the gore of dead skymouths and looked up into the Gyre. The galleries and tiers rose to the distant circle of sky.

I put on my lenses to protect my eyes from the increasing burn in the air. The skymouths’ skins stuck to my fingers as I worked.

Good.

I took the skin peeled from the culls and pieced two slippery edges together on my lap. Then I took out the metal needle I’d found on Lith and clumsily tried to thread a thick vein through the needle’s eye in the dim light. Faster, Kirit. Work faster.

I pushed the needle through the skins, denting my fingers and drawing blood when I had to, pushing too hard.

My arms ached, and my knees grew numb from kneeling as I seamed one hide to the next. Soon, I held an acrid cloak of shame and death that clung to me wetly when I wrapped myself in it, making me shudder.

“Clouds,” a small voice whispered, just above my head. Moc had climbed onto the pens. He helped me adjust the cloak so that it hung low over my face, dripping and filled with an unbearable musk. I was grateful again for the lenses, which kept the worst of the gore from my eyes. I tried to breathe through my mouth, tried to avoid throwing up at the stench.

Then I left the pens, and, using the slops rope, began my slow climb up the inside of the Spire, wingless, and, I hoped, completely unexpected.

I lifted my hand. It was a shimmer in the air. I was as invisible as a skymouth.

27. CHALLENGE

Once I climbed from a prison within the walls of the Spire, half starved, my skin torn. Once, I begged for my life and traded my will for a pair of wings.

I would not beg this time. I was a Singer, and a citizen. They would hear me. They would free my mother. They would find another way to protect the city. They would admit what they’d done in its name.

I clung to the refuse ropes, lifting myself up arm over arm, past the windbeaters’ tier. Unseen, I glimpsed my father rousing his peers, preparing them. I saw a closed vat over a new fire. Rot gas, heating. My face grim beneath my hood, I continued to climb.

Above me, the Spire’s mouth opened, distant and toothed with the last of the night’s stars. I had to reach it, and the council’s tier below it. Each tier I passed brought me closer.

After ten tiers, I rested an arm on the railing of an observer’s gallery and flexed my aching hands. The skymouth skins had thinned and turned silver where they had rubbed too hard against the fibers of the refuse ropes.

A bone hook clattered to the floor of the tier. My clumsy hand had knocked it loose from its prop against the gallery wall. A Singer must have left it there to push challengers away from the walls. I looked around the tier, a novice level. Saw only one bleary-eyed, gray-robed acolyte trudging with a bucket towards the pulleys. He didn’t give the noise a second look.

The wind knocked things over, shook things loose. Now I was the wind, come to knock at the Spire’s walls.

Once the novice had finished disposing of his stink, I returned to the refuse rope and continued climbing. I had to move faster now. The ropes would soon be put to hard use.

A breeze wound its way up the Gyre. Were my wings with me, it might have lifted me slowly up the last few tiers. I didn’t have time to look down to see if the breeze was natural or created by the first of the windbeaters working the vents. I had to climb.

Hand over hand, feet twisting in the ropes for extra purchase, I climbed alone, save for the kaviks that passed me and tried to coat me with their waste. One hit its target, my shoulder, and the white goo splattered. The guano slid off the skymouth hide and continued its fall into the Gyre. I remained unmarked, hidden. “Incredible,” I whispered, thinking of the littlemouth in my pocket. My voice sounded strained and worn.

The dark night and the dimness of the tower helped me climb past many tiers without incident. But I had been lucky for too long. The refuse rope jerked against my hands, and I clung to it, yanked upwards at a fast clip as someone hauled on the rope from above. I saw a face peering over the edge confused. Lurai, looking for tangles in the rope and finding none.

My heart rode high in my throat, threatening to choke me. I was so close. Then the pulling stopped. I swung on the rope as it halted its rise. Above me, Lurai circled his tier, headed for another pulley. One that worked.

Relief slowed my heart a bit, but I knew this was a short-lived reprieve. I had to climb faster.

Lights began to appear in alcoves. Oil lamp sprites moved up and down ladders. I heard whispering, but could not make out the words through my cloak.

I heard a familiar melody. What sounded like Ezarit’s voice, muffled, singing The Rise. The city’s version. At least it sounded like Ezarit’s voice, from very far away. With a clatter, followed by shouts, the song broke off. But not for long. Another voice, from a much closer tier, boomed across the Gyre. Wik. Singing The Rise in response to Ezarit. He sang the Spire’s version to her, telling her the truth. It was a subtle rebellion. One that cheered me on. Five tiers to go. Four. I sweated and choked inside the cloak. My skin stung from the still-acrid veins that I, in my hurry, hadn’t scraped away.

Below me, windbeaters began practicing their dancelike movements. The edge of my cloak flapped, slapping at my feet. The rope twisted, and I scrambled for balance. The novices just waking and the windbeaters not aligned with Civik would spot me soon. Hurry, Kirit.

A pair of carvers dropped over the gallery edge nearest the Spire’s opening and hung suspended above me. They spoke quietly as they continued work on the fierce decorations scraped into the newest Gyre wall.

I was nearly to the council’s tier, but I could not move without them seeing the rope shake.

As I wavered about what to do next, my foot slipped. In my scramble to recover, the sewn-together hides began to slide from my head and shoulders. I could not hold them in place and still keep climbing.

With one hand, I managed to grab the trailing edge of the cloak I’d made from dead skymouth culls before it fell away completely. I hung, revealed, at the edge of the council tier. Air struck my skin where the hide had touched it, painful and raw.

With arms on fire from the climb, I slung the cloak over the tier edge and grabbed the nearest gallery railing. Pulled myself up and over it. I rested for a moment, a pile of oil-damp, foul-smelling girl, my cheek pressed against the young bone of the tier. My scalp burned. Some hair had torn away when the cloak slipped. The palms of my hands bled. The skin on my arms and face was red from contact with the hides. I pulled my lenses away from my face and down to my neck. I shooed off the pain as one of the carvers approached.

“All right, Singer?” she said, curious at my appearance. My lack of wings.

“Very,” I said with all the breath I had. “Special training for night flying,” I added.

She shrugged and went back to her work. Rumul may have had Singers searching for me, but he’d failed to inform the novices. My familiarity to the carvers, from many days of punishment as I had learned the Spire’s ways, was now another kind of invisibility. I approached the council unchallenged, dragging the cloak behind me.

The council huddled in Rumul’s alcove, crowding the space and spilling into the passageway.

Below, more voices began to sing. The morning ritual of The Rise had begun. Sound surrounded me: the story of the city and how the Singers saved it from ruin. In her enclosure beneath Rumul’s alcove, my mother might have been able to hear the singing as I had, once.

A shout from the rooftop broke the song’s rhythm. I crouched behind a spine as an older Singer climbed down from outside and rushed to Rumul’s chambers.

“Fliers approaching! A Magister and four others,” he said.

“Who summoned them?” Rumul’s voice rang clear over the song coming up from the tiers below.

The council broke its huddle. I hauled the stinking cloak back over my head. Obscured myself. Delequerriat, Rumul.

Several Singers began speaking at once. Over the tumult, I heard Wik say, “Let them land. Perhaps they have found Kirit.”

The other Singers murmured agreement.

This was my cue. I could rush into the alcove and challenge Rumul while the council waited for news.

But I could not move from my crouch. My muscles had seized after the long climb, my toes were asleep. I watched the visitors land on the roof above and be escorted down to the tier. Only when Rumul emerged from his alcove, the council behind him, was I able to feel my feet once more.

Macal had returned to the Spire. He’d brought Beliak with him. And several traders. He must have told the trade council that Ezarit had been taken to the Spire.

Macal stepped forward, but Wik held up his hand and stopped his brother from speaking. One tan-robed trader, his hair beaded with glass like my mother’s once was, cleared his throat.

Rumul spoke before the trader could. “We did not summon you to the Spire.”

“We thought we heard horns,” the trader said. “Macal said we were summoned.” He was layering the truth. I could tell from the set of his jaw. Macal nodded in support. Met Rumul’s glare with raised eyebrows.

The trader looked over Rumul’s shoulder, eyes searching, perhaps for Ezarit.

Several thick-shouldered Singers climbed up the ladders from downtower. Rumul had called for reinforcements. Once they closed ranks around him, I would not be able to get close enough to challenge him. I would be captured. I racked my tired brain for ways to get around them. Then Ciel burst past me and ran to the assembled Singers.

“I saw her, Kirit, she’s in the novice’s tier! The traitor!”

The guards reacted by unfurling their wings and diving into the Gyre. The fastest way down.

Sellis’s voice came from the alcove. “I told you she wasn’t dead yet.”

My path cleared, I pushed past the traders, past Macal and Beliak.

“Hey! Hands off!”

“You pushed me.”

“I didn’t.”

I barely registered their confusion. Then I remembered. My cloak shielded me still.

Invisible, I made it all the way to the council members who had gathered in a gray crowd around Rumul.

Wik stood close to Rumul, arguing with him. Rumul watched him as a gryphon regarded its prey. The council was slowly backing away from Wik.

I pushed my way into the circle. “I challenge the Spire,” I said as loudly as I could.

Rumul and the council members turned left and right, searching for the speaker.

I pitched my voice so that the traders and Sellis and the carvers in the Gyre could hear me. “I demand to be allowed to fight as a Singer for the good of the city. I challenge you, Rumul.”

I reached up and grabbed the skymouth cloak with my bare hand. My fingertips burned as I pulled it away, more hair going with it. I let it drop to the ground and stood at the center of the council, just inches from Rumul.

Council Singers gasped and whispered. The traders looked shocked. Macal and Beliak folded their arms, blocking the alcove’s exit.

Rumul stared at me, then pointed to Wik. “Drop her into the enclosure as well.”

“No,” Wik said. “Once a challenge has been put forward by another Singer, it must play out.”

“Singer’s right,” several council members said. So there was dissent, even here.

Viridi, who days ago had held my hand to the city’s mystery, its very heart, stepped forward. “It is tradition,” she said. Several more council members shifted uncomfortably. They knew she spoke truth.

Another tradition was for Rumul to win in the Gyre. His face held the map of his wins. But the knife wound from his fight with Terrin had not healed easily. I had a chance.

“I challenge you, Rumul, and bid my life for my mother’s,” I shouted again. Loud enough to be heard in the tiers below. “I offer it for the good of the city.”

The morning song stopped. Singers and novitiates turned their eyes to the council tier. I heard the low grinding sound of a vent opening and felt the Gyre wind deepen and quicken.

Rumul’s jaw clenched. His tattoos curled and folded as his frown deepened. “You had such promise.”

I met his eyes. “I still do.”

He did not respond.

Sellis shoved a council member aside and pushed into the circle. She looked long at Rumul before she turned on me. “I take the challenge up in Rumul’s name. There will be no concession.”

“Singer’s right,” the same group of council members spoke again, joined by more who had stayed silent when I issued the challenge.

Wik groaned. Sellis was young and whole. She was an excellent fighter. I was tired from my climb, hungry from my days away from the Spire. Wik began to step forward, to take up my challenge for me. I would not allow it. I held up my hand and met Sellis’s eyes.

“I accept.”

Far below, enormous white wings edged the windbeaters’ tier. They began to move, creating eddies and whorls in the Gyre. The wind picked up.

Singers stepped back from us, gathering weapons for us to select. A rustle of silk and clatter of wing battens nearby nagged at the edges of my attention, but I refused to turn from Sellis’s glare. The challenge began now. Here. I would win, or she would. One of us would die.

Only when Rumul pulled her aside did I drop my gaze and look around me.

Wings surrounded me. Viridi, Beliak, and Macal held theirs out, straps ready for me to slip over my shoulders. Wik held a different pair. They were tea-stained, with a kestrel stamped on the silk. As familiar as home. My mother’s wings.

I reached out to touch them. Drew the straps over my shoulders and tightened the buckles.

“I would see her.”

Rumul started to argue my request, but Sellis whispered to him and his face changed. “Open the enclosure.”

They took me to the moon-window above the pit and I looked down on her, curled far below.

She peered up, unable to see who watched her.

“I cannot make the same choice you did,” I said. She sat up, listening. “But I understand why you made yours.”

“I wanted to know you would be safe,” she whispered. Her voice carried up the walls of the pit, and my ears helped it the rest of the way.

“There is no safety here,” I said. I turned so the council could hear my words as well as Ezarit. “The city must know what I know. Why should I die silent?”

She reached her hand up, towards me. I reached through the window, towards her. We were separated by the deep pit, but I could feel her there with me. A breeze cooled the stinging rash that had risen on my hands. I closed my eyes and imagined she wrapped her arms around me and held me until I stepped away. I walked from the alcove across the passageway to the council tier.

Without waiting on tradition, I leapt into the Gyre.

* * *

As I hurtled from the ledge, the windbeaters whipped the challenge winds higher. The churning gusts confused me. Some vents buoyed me up; others seemed to disappear from beneath me.

Heavier gusts began to rattle from far down the tower. The carvers grabbed their tools and pulled themselves from the walls. Singers and novices ran to the galleries to watch.

I locked my wings in fighting position. Reached into my sleeve and undid the sheath. Wrapped my fingers around the hilt of Wik’s glasstooth knife. I felt a small tentacle wrap my arm, then release it.

My throat closed. I had forgotten my small passenger. I had doomed the little skymouth too.

The windbeaters were my hope. If Civik had convinced enough of them that I was worth the risk, they would support me. If not, or if he was still convincing them, then I could fly right into a void and drop like a stone.

I could not know how well Sellis would fly these gusts, nor what she was armed with. That was the right of the challenged. My own knife — Wik’s knife — smelled acrid. Like skymouth skin.

Taking a tactic from Nat’s fight, I circled the Gyre and grabbed a carved post below the council balcony — the traditional launch point. If she chose that, I could get behind her.

The spectators roared and looked above me. My guess had been right. Sellis soared over my head, carrying a long bone spear in one hand and a glass knife in the other.

She locked her wings in fighting position and dropped quickly, searching for me.

I pushed out from the wall, twisting into my glide, and circled on her heels.

She made a sharp turn and came at me from the side, intending to crush me against the Gyre wall. Her eyes searched for the best angle to take me out quickly.

I’d seen Sellis fight in the Gyre, and I’d trained with her. I knew the tricks she used. I slammed into her before she could build up speed. Knocked her into a spin that sent her against the far gallery wall. Her pinions clattered against the carvings.

As she fought to recover, I began to shout.

“You know the truth, Sellis. So should the others.”

We were high enough that we could be heard by many of the tiers. At my words, the galleries rumbled. Not everyone here knew what was done in the Singers’ name. Not even Terrin had gone so far as to speak the truth before he won the right to do so.

Tradition.

Sellis would never break the Silence. She would never allow me to do so.

Whose permission did I need to speak? No one’s.

Tradition had created a place where Rumul could breed secrets. I was finished with tradition.

My voice rang rough and barbed across the Gyre.

I shouted the truth for Ezarit, who could not hear me. For Naton and Elna, who were not here. I shouted to the traders from Naza and Bissel, and to the shadows I saw gathered at the Spire’s roof.

“Below you, in the pens, we have bred monsters. This has been done in the city’s name. You were lied to on purpose. The city was deceived.”

“Silence!” Rumul roared from the balcony.

The Singers were so caught up in the fight, and in my words, they did not notice the growing audience on the rooftop. As Sellis and I circled higher on the maelstrom, I thought I could see Ceetcee, Sidra, Dojha, Dikarit, Aliati, and citizens from nearby towers, gathered to witness. Macal had summoned them. I squinted at their robes and colorful wings, dazzled by the bright light of Allsuns.

Sellis threw one of her knives. It flew past my ear and clattered down the carved wall.

She shrieked in frustration. “Shut up, Kirit! You cannot speak! Not until you have won!”

But I kept shouting and more. I sang. I sang of the tiny skymouth in my sleeve. I sang of the attack on Elna the night we blessed the bridge. I sang how Sellis had hung back. How she would have let a blind citizen die.

She paled at this.

I sang to the Spire the horror that the Singers had made, so that no one could deny knowing, so that none could stand by, robed in ignorance and tradition any longer.

As Sellis and I wheeled in the Gyre, first high, then low, I could see the galleries and watch some of the other Singers’ eyes widening. Novices turned to each other, whispering. The council shattered as several members ran for the ladders, hoping to reach the windbeaters and force them to drop me from the sky. Too late.

My voice cracked as I sang of Naton, Tobiat, and Civik, one gone, one broken beyond repair. One lost, then found again.

A rumbling dissent sounded from the very walls of the Spire, even as I continued singing and shouting the Singers’ crimes.

A gust lifted me higher again. The windbeaters supported me.

But I did not stop. I shouted the Spire’s triumphs too. I sang how the Singers saved the city, how they kept its people from warring against one another. How they collected our stories and kindled our culture. I sang Tobiat’s story of Lith.

Finally, I sang the skymouths. My voice grew hoarse, but I sang their past and their present. I sang the pens and the truth about the migrations.

I was still singing when a horrified Sellis threw herself at me. “You lie!” she said. “You will be silenced!” She stabbed at my side with a long bone blade.

And then I screamed, with all the sound that I had left. I had run out of words. I screamed and screamed and screamed.

28. RELEASE

Sellis did not land a second blow. She instead circled with her third knife still aimed, listening. Not to my screams. To the city. From deep in the Spire, the rumbling rose. It built to a roar. The watching Singers clutched their ears.

My scream poured from me anew. My voice, echoing down the Gyre, mixed with the city’s anger until the Spire shook. Sellis wobbled in her glide, too stunned to make the turn, and crashed into a wall. Where sharp bone tools had carved deep gouges long ago, the Spire’s walls now oozed yellow ichor.

Sellis’s hands came away from the wall, and she fell backwards. Her hands were stained yellow with the city’s blood.

My shout continued, though my voice had begun to falter and fade. Then another voice joined mine: Wik’s, strong and deep. Then a third, elderly and tremulous, but shouting from the windbeaters’ tier. Civik. My father. I found my breath again, my voice, and continued to scream.

“You must stop!” Rumul dove from the council tier as he shouted to be heard. “You are breaking the Spire. The city.”

He hurtled like an arrow towards me.

“The Spire isn’t all of the city, it is just one part!” I shouted back. The Gyre echoed with sound.

Rumul’s wings were tucked tight. He aimed to knock me into a pen or a vent. He did not intend to fight. He plummeted, willing to sacrifice himself for Singer secrets, for the Spire. The force of him hitting me knocked my breath out. I was silenced.

But Wik and Civik continued shouting.

Rumul and I fell past the occupied tiers. We fell past the windbeaters.

Fell until Sellis, blind from noise and fear, struck us both. She hit me again with her last knife, slicing my arm. As she struggled to right herself, she knocked Rumul loose with a bone hook gripped in her other hand.

Rumul hit the nets above the pens first, and I fell hard beside him. He struggled as something held him there, pulled at him. A tentacle grazed my leg.

The sounds of the Gyre merged with a new noise from the pens. The skymouths. They were screaming back at me. I was so close to them, my head rocked with pain, and I pulled my arms from my wing grips so that I could cover my ears. I found my breath and resumed shouting. The sinew nets pressed hard against my knees and elbows. Beside me, invisible limbs pulled Rumul’s arms and legs in different directions. He screamed with the pain.

Some of the smaller skymouths gathered beneath me. I could feel their snouts bumping the netting. One grazed its teeth over my hand, a soft gesture. They pushed on the net and then moved backwards as a group, then they pushed forward again. I could not understand what they were doing, but I rose and fell with their motion. I rolled. They pushed me towards the edge of the pens.

The smell was all around me. The musk. My skin burned with it still.

I smelled like them. And they were screaming like me.

We shook the tower with the horrible pitch of our voices. Then the Spire trembled worse than ever before and a terrifying sound wove between my voice and the skymouths’. A sound like a giant wing breaking. Louder. The bone walls of the Spire began to crack.

The Spire shook again, and the city roared, sharp and piercing. I heard a sound no city dweller lives to describe: the sound of bone splitting.

The cracks began to run through the tower, but while another tower would have cracked across its center core, across a tier, the Spire cracked vertically. From one carefully drilled hole to the next, the breaks ran along carvings, forming arches and circles. In many cases, the breaks started where Naton’s carving had gone deepest.

The Spire itself moaned and shrieked as the bone walls of the tower split and cracked. I squinted as entire panels fell from the walls and daylight poured for the first time into the Spire. Novices blocked their eyes. They ran from the winds and the suddenly open tiers. Teachers tried to put wings on their students, to get them aloft.

The tower rumbled, and more walls shattered.

Holes opened around the pens. Naton’s tools had cut deep there too. Wind whistled over skymouths escaping the pens and squeezing themselves out of the Spire, suddenly free. The screaming faded as they scattered.

The pressure of invisible bodies gathering beneath me lessened, then disappeared. The netting sagged, and I sank into the depths.

A rough howl shook the tower. Sinew broke and metal snapped as the last giant skymouth’s pen twisted apart with a rush of air. The monsters were free.

“What have you done?” Rumul moaned. The line of his collarbone ran jagged beneath his skin and his legs were splayed, broken. Now freed from grasping tentacles. He could not move.

For the first time, the Spire was open to the elements, to the eyes of the city. For the first time, its tiers were unguarded. Singer-bred monsters flew in and out of the gaps in the walls, mouths open and searching for prey.

Sellis circled above us on a gust let in by new air. “What has happened?” Her voice pitched high and panicked. “What has—”

A whistling roar cut off her words. The biggest maw I’d ever seen opened howling and red behind her. Her robes puckered as invisible limbs grabbed her waist, crushed her wings. Drawn backwards, like she was being sucked out of the Spire, Sellis flailed, her arms and legs towards us, her head thrown back, before the mouth swallowed her whole.

The monster turned, the wind from its passage pushing me into the sagging net. A torn wing hung from its invisible mouth, rising to the top of the Spire and out, into the sky, into the city.

I turned to Rumul. His face was sallow and waxy, his eyes closed.

“Sellis! It took her!” I yelled, but he did not respond.

Wik appeared on my left and reached his hand out. “Grab my hand, Kirit. Hurry.” He helped me stand.

I followed him up a ladder to the windbeaters’ tier, then looked down. Two Singers, one with a large cut on the back of his head, the other with a torn robe covered in dust, braced Rumul’s legs on his folded wings, preparing to move him, unconscious, to safety.

The Spire stopped rumbling.

Civik lay crumpled beside the gallery, his wings beside him. With his mouth open, he looked as if he was still shouting, silently now.

“It took his last breath,” Wik said. “Shouting with you.”

When I took Civik’s cold hand in mine, I found Naton’s bone chips wrapped around his fingers. I left them there with my father as Wik pulled me towards the next tier. Naton’s holes had not weakened the ladders here.

“Moc? He was down here with the windbeaters. And the novices?”

“Being evacuated to the towers. They’re safe.” Wik climbed faster.

After three tiers, my arms were shaking. I could not lift them to the next rung. All around us, Singers gathered pieces of the Spire and tended the injured. The Gyre seemed clear, though with the walls blown open, it whistled with a complex wind. “You have to fly, Wik. You have to get to the top of the Spire. I am too slow.”

In answer, he unfurled his wings and locked them. Held out his arms to me.

Lifting me up, Wik made a running leap from the tier, and we plummeted into the Gyre. He found a gust glittering with sunlit bone grit, and we lifted, circling slowly higher.

I expected a mouth to open above us, or behind us, at any moment. I echoed, but heard and saw nothing. The mirror in my lenses showed me only Wik’s robe and his wingstraps. Below us, the nets and the scattered windbeaters receded.

As we rose, Wik called to different tiers, asking after the injured, shouting instructions. Singers waited by the galleries, making ready to fly up after us, but waiting so as not to foul our wind. More flew from the holes in the walls, searching for cracks and signs the Spire was about to collapse. The first of these, a woman Wik’s age, with a bruise ripening on her cheekbone, reported back as we reached the top of the Spire.

“It’s lacework out there, all open to the city,” she said. “But the breaks are evenly spaced. The tower seems to be holding, at least for now.”

“Find weapons,” Wik instructed her as he set me down. She descended a ladder and ran down the passageway below, following his orders.

“This is what Terrin feared would happen. That the skymouths would escape,” Viridi said. Her silver-streaked hair was dusted with bone shards. Her voice cracked. She held Ciel’s hand tightly. “We were wrong to pen them, to breed them.”

Another Singer interjected, “We’ll need weapons if the towers attack.”

I flexed my arms and bounced on the balls of my feet, trying to work some feeling back into my legs. “The towers attacking? That’s what you’re worried about right now?” My voice was rough as scourweed.

The Singer turned to look at me. Who was I to speak?

Wik said, “Listen to her.”

“She’s won the right to speak,” Viridi agreed, silencing any doubts.

“Skymouths are loose in the city.” My doing, in large part. I knew this. I would make it right.

Macal ran up to us. “The Spire may stand, but everyone knows its secrets now.” He gripped my shoulder in thanks. I winced, then spoke again.

“So now the city knows. And now the city suffers. We are still Singers,” I said. “We must do our duty. We must catch the skymouths.”

We would be stronger working together. No more separation between tower and Spire. I spotted Beliak on the council tier, helping clear large pieces of bone. “Tell the nearest towers to spread the word. Skymouths are loose.”

Beliak yanked at the Bissel trader’s robe and they climbed onto the roof of the Spire, unfurling their wings as they went.

I turned back to Viridi. “My mother.”

“She is safe. Lurai and the traders pulled her from the enclosure when the Spire began to crack. They’ve taken her to Varu, to let her rest.”

A shout from the Gyre. Singers climbed the pulley ropes laden with weapons. More gathered on lower tiers. They waited for instructions, ready to fly.

What if they would not follow me?

“What you did…,” Wik whispered.

“They’ll sing of it,” Viridi finished for him.

“Not yet,” I said. “Not unless — not until — the skymouths are caught.”

Beliak returned. “Varu is sending as many people as it can to warn the nearby towers, and the traders are flying to the city’s edges. Guards and hunters are ready to fight.”

“We have to work together.” I turned to Wik and Macal. “All of us.” They would follow the three of us, united in purpose. Spire, tower, and me — who was both at once.

With a worried look, Wik ran his hand through the air near my cheek, where ugly welts had replaced the rashes raised by skymouth oils. They no longer burned, but I could feel the passage of air across them, and it made me shiver. I steadied myself as his green eyes met mine and then looked to the horizon, which had emptied of birds.

Sacrifice. Duty. This was what we shared.

From around the city, we began to hear the klaxons. Bone horns sounded warnings, at first from Varu and the towers near the Spire, but soon rippling out. So many.

“We must fix this,” I said.

Wik shouted over the edge of the balcony, to the Singers and older novices assembled below. “We will catch the skymouths. Save the citizens first. Worry about the Spire later.”

* * *

At Wik’s words, the Spire’s chaos was replaced by years of training. Singers grabbed weapons and found their fighting groups. I returned Wik’s knife and found several of my own, along with a bow and a quiver of arrows. Beliak lifted a set of drugged spidersilk nets.

“Eat,” Ciel said, holding out a fistful of dried goose meat, a sack of water in her other hand. When I took some, she circled the tier, making sure Singers drank and ate before they flew.

I chewed, exhausted. The food gave me strength, for now. “We need more fighters, more guards.” I grabbed Macal’s sleeve. “Get the whipperlings.”

To my surprise, he ran to do what I’d said. The Spire’s whipperlings were dispatched with hastily carved message chips. Anyone who saw them could read the danger, the need to fight together.

Viridi found me another new pair of wings, Rumul’s own spare set. They were big on me, but tightened fine to my shoulders.

Wik strode past, on his way to assemble his own flight of fighters. Hunters had begun to land on the roof. I caught up with him.

“We have to warn Elna and Tobiat and Nat. Lith isn’t safe.”

He frowned. “I’ll make sure they know.”

Around me, Singers snapped into action as they’d been trained to do, protecting the city at a moment’s notice.

Soon fliers flew formation from the top of the Spire. We heard horns blowing farther away. In the distance, on Amrath and Ginth, I saw Allsuns banners and gardens being hastily pulled in. Atop many towers, guards’ glass-edged wings sparkled in the sunlight as they massed for a fight.

The Singers rose to join them as the sun climbed high into the sky.

It was Allsuns. The day when towers remembered their fallen. Looked up in their honor.

But this year, the traditional Remembrance songs would have to wait.

Flight teams joined, not tower by tower, but as groups. Singers and traders, Varu and Naza, Grigrit and Viit. Mondarath guards flew with Amrath councilwomen.

We flew, and the city flew. Wings of all colors, gray and yellow, bright-dyed and faded. Flew to fight, to protect, all of us, together.

I leapt from the Spire. Five Singers, three able older novices, and two council elders followed me. We were joined by two hunters and a trader from the south.

“Flew with your mother once. Hope you’re as good as she is,” the trader said grimly. She locked her wings for fighting.

We spread out in a chevron pattern, sweeping around Varu, then southwest, searching for monsters.

From the closest towers came whoops as the hunter-Singer teams netted the first skymouths. Then a scream, hastily cut off.

We found our first skymouth tangling with Ginth’s guards. They circled a turbulent space in the air, just out of reach of its arms.

One of my hunters, armed with a bone spear and a set of nets, began to climb, his spear at the ready.

“Go with him,” I shouted to the councilors. I took the novices and the second hunter and circled to reinforce the guards.

The hunter could not see where to aim his spear. I looked at the guards. They circled, guessing where to fire their arrows. We’d wind up shooting each other this way.

“Use your nets,” I yelled.

Soon, the skymouth was trapped in a confusion of spidersilk and fiber nets. It yanked at its traces until I hummed it calm.

“What do we do with it now?” a novice asked.

What indeed. Taking them back to the Spire and tying them down would only repeat the problem. I circled the group once, thinking. The hunter with the bone hook yelled, “It’s getting loose!” and threw his spear. The net stopped jerking.

My heart broke. This was not right. None of it was. “Make sure it is dead, then leave it on Ginth, with a guard.”

The sun stayed high, and the net, as they tied it to Ginth’s rooftop bone cleats, glistened pink and damp. As the long day stretched on, I realized that the hunters and guards who fought with us were in danger. It was not night, but they still flew blind.

A shadow passed overhead, then Wik circled to position on my left pinion.

I smiled at him, then heard another flier on my right. From beneath a borrowed pair of nightwings, Nat grimaced, pale and determined.

“Elna and Tobiat are safe,” he said in response to my startled look.

“Nat, you can’t fly now!”

“Everything’s braced and bandaged,” he said. “Once I got up in the air, I was fine. The challenge will be landing.”

I shook my head, angering him.

“I’m a hunter, Kirit. I have to fight.” He set his wings and nocked an arrow to his bow with a wince. “Besides,” he added sadly, “someone needs to help you clean up this mess.”

The two flew on either side of me, Singer and Lawsbreaker, my future and my past. One in Singer gray, one in black silk: Allsuns and Allmoons.

They flew as if they were my escorts. I did not want to be elevated like that. Like Rumul had raised himself above his peers. Above reproach. I set my jaw, stubborn. It was a protection I would not — could not — allow. We all fought as equals.

“Fine. We will each lead a flight. We need fliers who can see skymouths with each group.” I scanned the flight following Wik. He saw what I intended. Signaled a skilled Nightwing to team with Nat. I heard the Nightwing begin to echo as Nat and his Singer eyes peeled away from us.

“Wik, find Ceetcee and Beliak. Help them. Tell the Singers you see to team up with tower fighters.”

As we flew away from Ginth towards the west, we crossed another group flying in dove formation.

“We’ve bagged three,” their leader shouted. Aliati. She smiled ear to ear, buoyed by their success. The Singer at her side whooped as they turned and headed east.

Across the city, more emerged to fight than hide as the word spread through the towers. The traders, including Ezarit, made sure word spread faster than the skymouths.

I rearranged flights as I saw them so that each group had Singers who could echo.

We continued to hunt the air around the farthest towers for escaped skymouths large and small. Netted as many as we could. This was not the skymouths’ fault. This was what they were bred to do. We would capture them now, then figure out, as a city, together, what could be done.

When we left the Spire, the sun was high. Now we flew through the long day into dusk, seeking out the invisible.

In each tower, children and the old had been sequestered behind shutters and huddled close to the tower cores. Rooftops bristled with guards and volunteers. Bone horns sounded alarms.

“This is what the Rise must have been like,” said a Singer novice, flying by my wing for the moment.

No, this is nothing like the Rise. “This time, we all work together.”

I called for the flight to shift formation.

My flight assembled around me, wings to my left and right, bristling. The glass edges of the guards’ wings glittered.

“On your wings, Singer,” a hunter called. I looked around. She meant me.

I was the eye of my flight group. I shook myself awake and resumed echoing. Around us was open sky, then a curve of a tower. Below, fresh horror. A medium-sized skymouth, twice as large as my wings, crept towards the tower, its path confused. It zigged and zagged, not attacking, not yet.

“Net!” I said, signaling to those nearest. A big net of drugged spidersilk rustled as the novices unfurled it behind me. I did not take my focus off the skymouth. It moved below us, drunk with freedom, towards the tower.

We circled until the skymouth was directly beneath us and dropped the net. The monster fought, but the novices finally cinched the ties shut and secured it to the tower. I doubled back to make sure there were no more following this one.

From above, Beliak whistled, then dove to fly at my wingtip. Wik was behind him. “Finding fewer of them now, Kirit. Still some out there, but they’re hiding. Now what?”

I looked out across the city, hearing its towers as much as I saw them. “We have to stay vigilant, but we should start to rest in shifts. Fixing this will take time. Find places for the Singers to bunk on the towers for now.” My voice sounded tired.

“What about the skymouths?” Wik asked.

I closed my eyes for a second. “We’re not taking them back to the Spire.”

He agreed. “And we can’t free them. They’re too dangerous.”

The thought of more killing, even skymouths, made me lose my way for a moment. I tried to think. What would Ezarit do? What would Naton do? Ezarit might find a way to use the skymouths, to keep them for their sinew. Naton might build something to help hold them, away from the occupied towers. They’d trade bad for good.

But many of these skymouths were bred for killing. Even drugged in nets, they were still dangerous. One of my fighters had lost a toe, bitten off after he flew too close to a net.

My fliers grew tired. My own arms and legs ached, my mouth was dry with thirst. Fearing we would make mistakes if we grew too tired, I looked for a tower that did not yet have a flight or two of fighters already resting on its roof.

“I’ll scout for a tower that can host us,” Wik said. He found a breeze that took him southwest and slowly faded into the distance.

* * *

As I watched him go, I realized the rash on my hands from the skymouth’s hide had faded, along with the skymouth’s scent. The caustic oil had finally dried and peeled away. As I flew an updraft, my exposed skin pulsed in scrawls and etchings along the lines where I’d seamed the hides.

In the distance, Nat’s dark wings and those of the Singer flying with him led a line of hunters returning, seeking a place to land. I sighed with relief.

Then the sky opened below us. An enormous mouth, readying to swallow us whole.

The monster of the pens. The one that had devoured Sellis. It had tracked us through the night, hiding and waiting. Now it was upon us.

“Scream, Kirit!” yelled Beliak. “Shout it down!”

I tried. A sour sound, almost a bark, came from my throat. My voice was ruined. I had screamed too long in the Spire just this morning.

So I gripped my knife and dove instead. Angled to meet the thing sideways, its teeth as big as my hands; its eye, oiled and deep like the sky.

No chance this monster would stop, once it got through us. Not until the whole city was stripped bare and ruined.

I dove, my glass-tooth blade aimed straight at its giant eye.

I flew close enough that I could smell it: that acrid scent combined with smoke and blood. I tried to hum, to calm it, but the monster rolled its eye, flipped over backwards and fled, jettisoning behind it an acrid cloud that made breathing near impossible.

I choked on the cloud, wobbling on my wings.

“Kirit, where are you?” Beliak called as Nat’s flight crossed the skymouth’s path. I shouted a warning and tried to right myself.

Nat heard me. He whistled a turn. The Singer in his group signaled wildly and tried to order him back into line.

No! I was upright again, and climbing for them before I knew it. This time, I felt the scream in the back of my mouth, and I hoped that I was strong enough. Loud enough. Horrible enough.

The maw opened. I put myself between it and Nat.

The skymouth grunted and lashed tentacles in all directions. It scrawled motion in a sea of wings, tearing down one flier after another. In the midst of a pass, I jerked to a stop. The skymouth gripped me around the waist with a tentacle and pulled me in towards the rows of teeth. My rough scream had no impact on its intent. My voice faded in my mouth. The monster began to squeeze.

Behind me, Nat held his shot and yelled my name.

The skymouth now loomed as wide as a tower, as angry as the clouds. It shrieked and grabbed even as it drew me in. The fliers dove to stay clear of it, while still trying to make it release me. Arrows studded the invisible giant, but they served only to make it angrier.

The bone battens of my wings began to crack in its grip.

And then I heard a squeal, too high-pitched to be Singer or skymouth. The sleeve of my robe squirmed, then deflated. The littlemouth. I echoed, trying to see it, though I didn’t know if I could in all the noise and confusion.

Yes, barely.

The tiny mouth pulled itself along the tentacle of the monster, a soft moving shape against the harder arm. It cheeped and squeaked, sharp-pitched and noisy, like nothing I’d ever heard. When it reached the maw, moments before I did, it was sucked past the glass teeth. The tiny skymouth spread its limbs, reaching for purchase, stretching. It grasped a flap of the mouth and didn’t let go. It reached for another, and another. It began to choke the monster from inside.

The giant skymouth thrashed. Tentacles loosened as it clawed at its own mouth.

I fell away from its grip, and when a gust from the skymouth’s struggle hit my wings, I rose with the wind until I leveled off on a steadier gust. My wings still bore me up.

As soon as I was steady enough, I turned and flew at the skymouth one more time. On the monster’s other side, I saw Nat dive towards it, arrow nocked to bowstring.

I pulled my own bow and nocked an arrow. Aimed at its eye.

Nat was now out of my sight, hidden behind the bulk of the skymouth. The monster rose between us, reaching and reaching. I dove forward.

The air around me took on the sound of gust and the throttled whisper of tentacles thrashing through the air. My glide became turbulent, but I kept going.

The strangling skymouth, fighting its own internal battle for breath, could not control its limbs. I could see its eye, the size of my head, and hear the liquid in its echoes. I held my bow steady.

My elbows ached against the winghooks. My left forefinger and index held the bolt steady against the bow sight. The rest of my hand gripped the bow hard. The gust I rode now was a steady one, and I’d set a straight course. I checked the wind one last time as I drew the bowstring back to my cheek. I held until I was sure that I would crash directly into the creature if I missed, giving me a chance with my last knife. And then I opened my mouth to scream one more time, drawing all my breath. Hoping I had enough strength left in my voice.

Screaming rendered all other actions, fighting and flying and shooting, sharper. I had become an arrow of sound aimed at the most terrible creature in the city. The monster began a slow turn towards me.

No! The turn of its head would lose my mark.

I panicked and fired as fast as I could. My arrow hit the eye at its nearest point, straight through: white arrow into vast deep pool of dark eye. The tentacles stilled and drooped. The monster began to fall from the sky.

As it tumbled, another acrid cloud spewing in its wake, one long limb reached and wound around my foot. Dragged down, I felt another tentacle wrap around my neck. I looked above me and saw fliers circling and diving.

This is a good trade. Me, for my city. If they sing Remembrance at the end of this long day, those I love will sing of me too.

And then we fell, the monster and I, flipping over and over, weight over wing. Wind tore at my robe and hair as we plummeted towards the clouds and the sharp edges of the broken tower of Lith.

More tentacles squeezed my waist and throat. I realized that I might never feel the impact.

29. RISE

When I woke, it was to cold air and dense clouds, to slick acrid smells and the sound of the wind whistling across blackened bone.

I moved fingers and toes carefully, thankful for even this minimal range of motion. Pain was everywhere. I was grateful for that too.

I moved my right leg and shrieked. A blur of bone tangled in gray cloth, soaked with blood.

I turned my head in time to get sick on the floor and not all over myself.

My fingers touched my lenses, tried to wipe them clean of fog and splatter. Carefully, with my left hand, I pulled them away from my face. The dim light of the cloudbound tower was enough to show me finally what the hides had done to my skin.

Silvering paths, swollen and red on the edges, wormed across my hands, palms and backs both, in curls and blots.

I was marked everywhere the hides’ seams had touched me. My fingers brushed my cheek and forehead, and I felt ridges there too. They curved and curled like the ligaments of the skymouths I’d covered myself with. My hair was burned away in places. I could feel the scars on my scalp. Only my eyes, nose, and mouth had been spared, where the lenses held the hides away.

I swallowed dryly. I needed to see where I was, and find water if I could.

Testing one arm, then the other, I found I could move them without screaming. Careful not to move my leg too much, I sat up slowly. My wing was stuck. It wrenched me back, and I moaned in pain.

“Kirit?” a voice shouted from far away.

“Here!” I tried to call out. My voice sounded very loud and rough in the silence. “In here!” I wanted to laugh. I did not know where I was, but I kept shouting until a shadow crossed over my face. Someone stepped into the tier and jostled whatever was pinning my wing down. I groaned again.

“Oh, Kirit.” Ezarit’s voice. I felt her light touch on my cheek.

Behind her, Nat said, “I told you we’d find her,” and Wik chuckled softly.

“Your song will be very long, Kirit.”

They were here. I was here. They’d found me. I smiled weakly. “I’m not finished yet.”

Nat came into view, limping on a bone crutch. Wik, the tattoos on his face contorted by a deep frown, appeared beside him.

He handed me a small sack of water.

With Wik’s help, I sipped and coughed, then sipped again.

Ezarit tore bandages from her robes, then looked for a way to brace my leg. “We need herbs, honey, and some more battens,” she said to Wik. “There are supplies at Densira.”

Wik handed the water to Nat. Disappeared from my view. A moment later, he rode a breeze past the tier, headed for Densira.

“Did we get them all?” I asked.

Nat shook his head. “Not yet. Wik and Macal were helping the towers and the Singers work together. The traders have taken the Spire. They’ve destroyed the pens.”

“And the littlemouths?”

“The ones I found are safe. They seemed to have stayed out of sight, in the clouds. They didn’t like the skymouths any more than we did.”

“We will have to find new ways to make bridges,” I said. “No more sinew.”

Ezarit nodded. “We will have to find new ways to do a lot of things.”

“But,” said Nat as he freed me from the tentacles of the skymouth, “there’s enough of this monster to last a long, long time.”

I hoped the city could make use of that time to heal.

Wik returned with Elna and Ezarit’s supplies. Ezarit mixed an herb poultice and bound my wounds, using the remains of my wings to brace my leg. They brushed my new marks with a honey salve, tsking at the strange patterns on my skin.

Ezarit touched the lenses with a finger and smiled at me. “They are lucky, for sure.”

Using pulleys and sinew ropes, climbing beside me on sinew ladders, they eased me out of the clouds and to the broken top of Lith, where two more Singers waited.

They’d made a sling to hold me, to carry me back to the city’s center.

“No,” I said. “I will fly.”

Wik began to protest, but the Singer nearest me slipped off her wings without a word. I stood, one-footed, on the edge of Lith, as my friends tightened my wingstraps.

Ezarit approached, waving Nat back. She cinched the second strap tight against my shoulder, then checked the first. “On your wings,” she said, then squeezed my hand. I squeezed back, glad she was safe.

The clear blue sky filled with birds. Cooking smells wafted from the nearer towers.

When I unfurled my borrowed wings, the afternoon breeze filled them. I leaned off the edge of the tower and fell into the wind, the footsling bracing my leg. I rose as the strong breeze buoyed me up. Nat was right. Flying was simple. Landing would be hard.

Turning to catch the crosswind, I saw Elna being lifted back to Densira by the second Singer. Ezarit accompanied her. The first Singer rode the sling Wik and Nat carried between them. We passed through the city, and I felt many eyes watching us from the sky and the towers.

Wings of all colors wreathed the Spire. The thick bone wall of the Singers’ tower had become a lattice, open to winds and light.

I curved my wings and dropped slowly to the top of the Spire, curling my leg gently and letting a waiting Singer brace my descent. The gusts passing through the lattice played the Spire like a flute: notes rose soft and continuous from the mouth of the Gyre. The tower seemed solid enough, though it would never house Singers again. We had to change. To rejoin the city.

Quietly, beneath the strange new notes of the Spire, I heard singing. On Varu and Narath, and other towers too, my neighbors stood atop their towers, singing new songs and old. Some words were familiar. Some were words I couldn’t yet make out. I heard my own name in the mix.

I opened my mouth and sang back, notes without words, my rough harmonies weaving with the voice of the city. Together, we made a new song.