The Skylark's Song

Two

Last month, the windows at the front of Robin's house had been blown out by a bomb. It had been dropped right onto the cobblestone street, with no regard for the dilapidated row homes on either side. It was by no means the first bomb to go off in a residential area, but it was the first in Robin's neighborhood, close as they were to the factory fields at the edge of the city. The Klonn usually saved their ammunition for the bigger targets if they were this far out. Not that night, though. The brittle crunch of brick under metal had given her about a second's warning before the flat crack of the explosion itself, followed by the reverberating whump of the shock wave, had sent her window flying inward in fragments so small she would have been blinded by glass dust if she had been standing nearby.

She tried not to think about what had happened to the neighbors who'd been stupid enough to watch the sky that night. Didn't mean the nightmares didn't still come when she had no work to distract her, though. Terrible visions of burned hands, or stumps where those hands should have been, haunted her in the darkness. Images of blood running from eyes, of mangled faces and limbs, danced in the shadows of sleep, and under it all, the horror of being rendered useless, of being unable to work, of becoming a ground-bound burden.

She'd been asleep when it fell, time-eaten curtains drawn tight across the pane, held in place with clothespins in the event this very thing happened. The glass that had smashed inward had been mostly caught by the fabric. The pieces that were big enough to break free had fallen in a waterfall, radiating out across the floor. Robin had been curled up on her lumpy old mattress in the closet. She hadn't slept in the room's actual bed in years. It was too dangerous.

Luckily, Robin's boots were in the closet with her, and she hadn't needed to navigate the floors barefoot. By the time Robin had gotten home from work that day, her mother had swept up the dust and shards, and had set them aside to sell back to the glassmaker. Anything that could be reused, or remade, was kept. Her father had scavenged a thin sheet of splintering wood to nail across the frame. He'd scrounged some rags from the fallen houses nearby and had stuffed wads of fabric into the gaping holes in the board.

Robin could see the ragged ends of those fabric wads fluttering in the early autumn breeze as she hovered under the guttering streetlamp a block away, peering through the haze. Her stomach unwound at the familiarity of it. It was the same sense of relief she felt each time a skirmish ended, and Wade turned their glider back toward the safety of the hangar. While she hadn't lied to Al when she said the shipyards were more home to her now than the building before her was, it didn't mean she wasn't still happy to see it standing at the end of each workday, and the finish of each nightly strafing.

She stalled, working the toe of her right boot into the ashy debris on the cobblestones, her satchel slung over her shoulder and her face smarting. The sun was weak and watery today, lost in the haze of brick dust and the smoke that blew in off the factory fields. The fires from last night's bombs must still have been going, to turn the late-morning sky so sooty-dark. The lamplighter hadn't even bothered to make his rounds that day—if he'd even survived the bombing at all, that is.

The smoke stung her eyes, but Robin's goggles, hung around her neck while she was on the ground, wouldn't be much use down here. They were reflective, amber-tinted, meant for intense sunlight. They would leave her blind under the cover of so much ash. And the roads had heaved again—she didn't trust that her muscle memory would lead her home safe. Around her, the close houses leaned against each other in the shadows. They looked like weary soldiers who'd just returned from the front. Square-toothed maws gaped from partially collapsed walls. Lightning-bolt cracks zigzagged from roof to foundation. But despite that, the familiar scents of her childhood neighborhood reached out to envelop her, to welcome her back—brick dust, wet stone, boiled vegetables, honey, and gunpowder.