Chapter 196: The Sea Beneath Skykeel Had Stars in It

The first white light struck Jiang from below.

Cold saltwater burst through the root mouth and climbed the center chamber wall. The light moved inside it, too steady to be foam and too far away to touch. Jiang saw it once through the dark water before Skykeel rolled and the wall became the floor.

He slid toward Kaul on his bad hip.

Aylin caught him by the loose line behind his flippers. Her injured shoulder buckled, but she did not let the line draw tight across his throat. She dropped beside him, braced both boots against a copper rib, and hauled until his feet found metal.

For one breath, they only looked at each other.

Mud streaked her face. Blood had soaked the shoulder of her coat again. She was alive, furious, and close enough to put two fingers against the side of his neck.

"Hold still while I check you."

Jiang clicked his beak at the water rising around them.

"Yes, I see the sea," she said. "The sea can wait its turn."

The green-sailed rider hooked an arm through Kaul’s bent frame. "It appears unwilling."

Aylin’s hand traveled over Jiang’s shoulder, breastbone, and ribs. She stopped when his body flinched beneath the feathers.

"That one is worse."

Jiang answered with one sharp clack.

"I know there are several. I meant the shoulder."

He leaned his head against her wrist before he could decide whether that was dignity or exhaustion. Aylin’s fingers stayed there for the length of one hard breath. Then the chamber rolled again, and survival resumed its rude habit of interrupting everything.

Water swept over the copper lip.

Kaul could not climb above it. The living hook beside his voice box held his body to the center root, and the red-black strand trembled whenever the current pulled his frame. His pale adult bell wrapped itself more firmly around his wrist and the brace. Kaul opened his mouth, but no word left it.

His breath came from the tower mouths instead.

It passed through Skykeel as a wet rasp. In the flooded chamber, bubbles poured from a copper horn near Jiang’s feet. Farther away, another mouth coughed water across a street that now hung on its side.

The city was breathing through him and drowning him with the same breath.

Jiang shoved away from Aylin and entered the flood.

His left leg dragged through the first stroke. Pain scraped from hip to tail, but water gave his body what the turning metal would not: a direction that belonged to him. He rolled onto his breast, drove with his good foot, and reached Kaul before the next surge covered the man’s face.

Kaul’s boot struck Jiang’s chipped beak. Jiang caught the leather anyway and pushed upward beneath the heel.

The rider hauled on the frame. Aylin moved the loose line from Jiang to a copper rib above Kaul’s head, tying a loop large enough to follow the city’s turn without tightening around anyone. Together they raised Kaul until his mouth broke the surface.

He dragged in air. Every copper throat in Skykeel dragged with him.

The sound made Aylin glance toward the chamber walls. "Can he stop that?"

Kaul shook his head.

The rider answered without looking at him. "He used his last word setting us loose."

"I heard it. I was hoping he had kept a smaller one."

Kaul’s mouth bent around something that might once have been a laugh. No sound survived it.

The dark root below them contracted.

Foreign water surged through the opening. It did not spread evenly across the chamber. The flow seized loose cloth, broken links, and chips of pale root, drawing them back toward the black-green throat between each upward pulse.

Skykeel shifted with it.

The copper ribs groaned. Somewhere beyond the chamber, an entire street slammed against its new lower supports. The white points in the water remained fixed while the city’s beams crossed in front of them.

"We are not filling," Aylin said.

The rider watched a broken chain crawl toward the opening. "We are being pulled."

Jiang felt the answer in his feathers. Each surge combed them toward the root, even when the chamber’s roll should have carried the water elsewhere. Whatever waited beyond that throat had a current of its own.

A deep crack traveled through the ceiling that had become their western wall.

The center rain cistern tore free.

It came sideways through a curtain of water, a swollen wooden drum bound in copper. One hoop had already broken. Freshwater spilled from the split and vanished into the salt flood as the cistern bore down on Kaul’s frame.

The rider had one hand on Kaul and nowhere to jump.

Jiang released the boot.

He drove both flippers against the rider’s knee and threw his weight across the current. She stumbled clear, dragging Kaul’s frame as far as the living hook allowed. The cistern clipped Jiang’s back instead of crushing her hand against the brace.

His bad hip struck copper.

Blackness crossed his sight, brief and hot. He surfaced beneath Aylin’s arm with no memory of taking the stroke. She caught his chest, swore into his wet feathers, and pulled him against the rib while the cistern rolled past.

It entered the root mouth broadside.

The remaining hoop snapped. The drum folded inward, taking Skykeel’s center water store with it. Broken staves lodged across the opening for half a breath, and the whole city jerked hard enough to fling water from the chamber.

Then the foreign current crushed the staves and swallowed them.

"You cannot keep spending the same hip," Aylin said.

Jiang lifted his head from her elbow.

"That was not permission to offer the other one."

He gave her the smallest beak click he could manage.

She retied the loose safety line through the harness loop at his back. This time she held the open end where he could see it and waited.

Jiang tugged the release knot with his beak. It opened cleanly. Only then did he let her close it again.

Outside the center, the foreign flood reached the broken nursery.

It poured along the root where the district had struck Skykeel and climbed through gaps that had been roofs. Dema held Tovar’s occupied cradle shut while the two juveniles inside worked the inner flap. Their changing movement kept the shell from filling, though every turn knocked them against a different wall.

Beras caught the cradle rope with both hands. Without his frame, there was no graceful way to move. He hooked one knee through a roof joint, passed the rope to Kesta, and landed face-first against a beam when the district rolled.

"Still less ambitious?" Kesta asked.

"I have lowered my standards to breathing."

Neris crawled across what remained of the outer roof. Her injured knee refused to bear her weight, so she moved on one boot and both elbows while her gray adult bell chose its own grips ahead of her. Notch-Fin and Broad Mouth swam through separate broken rooms, driving trapped air toward Throat-Scar and the injured juveniles.

No call ordered them into place.

They changed whenever the water changed.

The dry thorn bundle hung beneath a roof root in two layers of cloth. It had not touched the flood, yet every black-green splinter inside turned at once. Their tips scratched toward the center hard enough to lift the bundle against its ties.

Neris put her good glove over it.

The cloth jumped under her palm.

"Tovar," she called. "Your ugly parcel wants to swim."

From inside the cradle, Tovar shouted, "It has never wanted anything useful. Keep it dry."

The bundle pulled again. Not toward the nearest water. Not toward the brood or the open sea above them.

It pointed through Skykeel at the deeper root.

Back in the center chamber, Kaul’s adult bell released his wrist.

It climbed across his chest and spread its gripping limbs around the living hook, shielding the torn flesh from the broken links passing in the flood. Kaul touched the animal’s pale back. It ignored the old place where a signal plate had rested and tightened only when his breath failed.

The city rasped around them.

Jiang swam beneath Kaul again. Aylin held his safety line without pulling. The green-sailed rider braced the frame and watched the root mouth for the next piece of wreckage.

Nothing broken came through.

The black-green opening widened by itself.

A thinner growth unfolded from inside it. The tendril was pale at the tip and darkened where the foreign water touched it. It tested the crushed cistern staves, passed over the copper lip, and entered the chamber against the current.

The rider raised Kaul’s hook blade.

Kaul caught her wrist before she could strike.

He pointed to his own throat.

The tendril had found the living red strand.

It curled around Kaul’s voice and pulled.