Chapter 197: The Falling City Forgot Which Way Was Down

Kaul’s breath moved before his body did.

The foreign tendril tightened around his living strand. Every copper mouth in Skykeel emptied at once. Water burst from flooded horns, doors slammed in distant towers, and Kaul bent over the hook with no air left to cry out.

Aylin reached for the blade.

The green-sailed rider turned its edge toward Kaul’s throat. "The hook comes out."

Jiang put his beak across the metal.

"Move," Aylin told him.

He held his place.

Her free hand closed around the release line at his back, but she did not pull it. "That root is breathing with him. We wait, it takes whatever the hook touches next."

Jiang struck the copper brace with one foot, then pointed his beak toward the red strand where it entered the black-green root. The hook did more than pierce Kaul. It had grown through the frame carrying the center’s weight.

Cutting blind could free his throat.

It could also open it.

Aylin understood. That did not make her agree.

"Doing nothing is a choice too."

Jiang looked at Kaul.

Kaul’s face had gone gray beneath the water running over it. He caught the rider’s wrist, guided the blade until it rested against the base of the living hook, and kept it there.

Then he shook his head.

With his other hand, he pointed at the foreign tendril.

The rider’s jaw tightened. "You want that cut instead."

Kaul answered with one nod.

"There is no clean edge."

Kaul placed her blade back in its sheath. Whatever else he had once taken from other voices, this choice belonged to the throat paying for it.

Aylin released the hilt. "Fine. We find the edge first."

The tendril pulled again.

Skykeel rolled around them.

The flooded center became a shaft. Aylin fell toward the wall that had been behind her, caught Jiang’s line, and swung hard enough to tear a cry from her injured shoulder. The rider flattened her cracked green sail before the water could fill it. Kaul’s frame struck copper, but his pale adult bell spread across the brace and kept the living hook from twisting.

Jiang entered the turning water feet first.

His body righted itself before his thoughts did. Tail down, breast forward, flippers wide: the old floor could vanish, but buoyancy still argued for one direction. He followed that direction through a doorway while two Hook Choir riders tumbled past with their folded wings pinned uselessly to their backs.

One rider clawed for a chain overhead.

Jiang swam beneath his hand and knocked the chain into reach. The man caught it, hauled his wingmate close, and used his own belt to join them to the wall.

"I thought flight was the difficult craft," Aylin called from the chamber.

The rider coughed saltwater. "Flight usually agrees where down is."

Skykeel no longer did.

Across the city, people abandoned stairs and kept doors. A kitchen family kicked out the hinges of an upper hatch before their room became a well. Two riders cut their wing-sails free when the cloth began dragging them through a window. Residents stretched sleeping nets across passages that alternated between drops and ceilings.

No signal reached everyone.

Each street discovered its next floor by hitting it.

The broken nursery rolled along the outer root. Dema lay across Tovar’s cradle while the shell hung from a rope that had become a bridge. Kesta crawled above it with both injured hands hooked through the weave. She could not grip tightly, so she passed each loop over her forearms and dragged herself by the elbows.

Beras moved below her without a frame.

His first jump carried him where habit expected a sail to open. Nothing opened. He dropped through a flooded room, struck a door with both palms, and folded himself around the cradle rope before the current could take him.

Kesta looked down at him. "You forgot again."

"I prefer to call it optimism."

"Your optimism is bleeding."

"That is why I keep it outside."

He wiped his split chin on one shoulder and climbed hand over hand.

Neris remained beside the dry thorn bundle. The wrapped splinters strained toward the center whenever the foreign root contracted. Her gray adult bell tried one grip on the roof, rejected it when the district turned, and crossed to another without waiting for her.

"It knows something about that root," Neris said.

Tovar answered from inside the occupied cradle. "Knowing and wanting are different diseases."

"Can you get it to Kaul dry?"

Silence followed. Tovar had once answered such questions by opening his repair chest. The chest was gone. So were his fitted clamps, his warm-stone rack, and the little brass saw he had complained about every day until he lost it.

He pushed open the cradle flap and stared at the crushed empty shell caught beneath them.

"I can get it there," he said. "Dry depends on whether the city apologizes."

The city struck another root.

"I withdraw the condition," Neris said.

Tovar made the carrier from what had already failed.

Beras tore a curved rib from the crushed cradle. Dema gave up the waxed inner cloth that had kept spray from the juveniles’ sleeping hollow. Kesta could not tie small knots with her damaged hands, so she held the wrapping between her forearms while Tovar worked the cords with his teeth.

The result looked like a narrow cage wearing an oversized coat.

"It leaks at the ends," Dema said.

"Those are air doors."

"You just invented that name."

"I have no tools. Names are what remain."

Tovar wedged the dry bundle inside without opening either layer of cloth. The carrier floated on its curved rib, but it tipped whenever the hidden splinters dragged toward the center.

No one trusted it enough to throw.

So they carried it instead.

Neris crossed the first flooded room on one boot while her adult bell chose a separate root above her. She passed the cage to Kesta when her knee stopped bending. Kesta trapped it against her chest with both forearms and slid down a door that had become a ramp.

The ramp ended over open water.

Beras hung below it from the cradle rope. Without a sail, he could not reach Kesta or return to Tovar. He swung once, kicked off the wall, and let go.

Beras had called every uncontrolled drop a flight since Jiang met him. This one he let remain a fall.

He caught the carrier against his ribs. The impact drove him under, but the waxed cloth surfaced before he did. Broad Mouth swept past through a broken window, changing course around the awkward cage. Its wake rolled Beras close enough for Dema’s rope to slap across his hand.

His hand caught the rope.

The bell juvenile did not return for praise.

Beras pulled the carrier through the window and handed it to a resident who had turned a table into a raft. From there it moved by arms, belts, sleeping nets, and one bent shutter. Sometimes the relay went toward the center. When Skykeel rolled, the same people carried it sideways or back through a room they had already crossed.

The route could not remember down either.

At the center, Kaul’s next breath failed halfway in.

The foreign tendril pulsed around his strand. Its pale tip had darkened to the same red-black as the living hook. The rider tested the blade against a loose black-green shaving, but the shaving bent around the edge and returned to the tendril.

Aylin watched Kaul’s chest. "We do not have long."

Jiang floated beside the hook, feeling each failed breath through the water. His head still throbbed from the wake he had forced days earlier. No hidden sense arrived to name the root or show him where to bite.

Only the current gave anything away.

It curled around the tendril, slipped past Kaul’s strand, and dragged every black-green splinter toward the same knot beneath the copper lip.

Jiang surfaced and struck that knot with his beak.

The rider crouched closer. "Material from the same growth might show what belongs to it."

Aylin looked toward the outer passage. "The thorn bundle."

Kaul’s fingers tightened around the brace.

He knew what voice slept inside it. Jiang saw that knowledge without granting him absolution for how the voice had been stored.

Kaul pointed toward the passage anyway.

The carrier arrived upside down.

A young resident shoved it through the final doorway, then caught a net before the turning street carried her past. The green-sailed rider hooked the cage with her cracked spar. Aylin hauled the net. Jiang swam beneath the carrier and kept its waxed wrapping above the flood with his back.

For several strokes, it stayed dry.

Then Skykeel rolled far enough for the center’s trapped air to escape.

The water rose over Jiang’s head. Aylin lifted the carrier, but her injured shoulder failed before the cage cleared the surface. One open end dipped into the foreign saltwater.

The cloth drank a dark line.

Every splinter inside stopped pulling.

Kaul’s breath stopped with them.

From beneath two layers of wet wrapping, Jiang’s old human voice whispered one name.

"Aylin," the wet cloth breathed.