"Why does she always look angry?" she asks Dirty Waves. Brush Cut put them both together, told her that she was the learner and Dirty Waves the teacher. Now they're standing on a low level, staring across a bridge of space past the Fades' boundary wall. The night wind whips her hair across her face, the Pale Sliver shining on both of them. Their skin is snow, but not, Troud thinks, Back Curls' milk white. Maybe no one else alive has skin that white.
"It's her visions," Dirty Waves says. He's swaying in the wind. "She doesn't tell us everything she sees. There's some things she sees that she doesn't like." He pulls his hair back and it streams behind him in the wind, tangling even more. "Come on," he says, and drops into space.
She follows. Moving like this in daylight felt like fighting, fighting against the Circle's light that made them heavier, hardened their skin and closed their eyes. In the Sliver's light it feels like nothing. Just nothing, floating down levels, up two, down another. Scrape your foot off the ground, here, there, just keep floating. Push off, not hard pushes, just feathering the ground. Float and twist in the Sliver's light, blow her a kiss bold, and spin and feather again. Dirty Waves flings his limbs out and just falls forward, touching the ground slanted, feathering with both his feet and fingertips. When he jumps off a high level and drops into space he looks like paper catching the breeze, rising and falling.
They had to dip before the boundary wall, but there are levels jutting out from stacks that she didn't even see in the shadows. For Dirty Waves they're like a staircase, and he floats up them and over the wall, like it's not even there, though it's hewn dark stone. She thinks that, and then she's floating over it too. I stayed in the Fades all my life because of this wall, she thinks as her feet feather the chipped and cracked surface. Why? Dumb.
There are spiders, she knows, living in the wall, scrabbling in places dagger legs have scored. There are so many of them, but they don't know what's happening outside. They've walled themselves up, and they don't know that outside, people just float.
Outside the boundary wall, homes are still made of stone, caves jutting from the wall, stacked high at flat planes, but there's silk also, stretching over breaks. She can see shapes and shadows underneath, faint whispers of lines in the moonlight. Some are moving but some are still, prone, sleeping. This is how merchants live, the lovers of life and people, cloaked only by silk at night, and in the day too.
Troud wonders if the Pale Sliver loves them. She can't love everyone.
Dirty Waves slows to slim over a hanging silk roof. He drops, springs and tumbles, not too high, just enough to feather off the stone at the other side. Troud doesn't hear a shout, any sign anyone under noticed. She still twists to the side and scampers around on the thin edge of the rooftop to miss the silk. She hears Dirty Waves call out in owl song. It sounds owlish, but she's still nervous and tries just to pay attention to how she's moving so she doesn't fall.
Then the silk vanishes. She sees the far walls of Ismayah break the horizon. They're leaping off towers now. The air is cold.
The towers grow together in crystalline clusters. Dirty Waves drops back at one point and when he flies past again she sees his face is set harder, more focused. His arm straightens in a way that may be a follow me sign, or may be what he needs to hold enough air to stay ascendant. She focuses too, sees the steps, and sometimes she has to scramble sheer against stone, fingertips searching fast, and pull herself up.
The walls never stop her and Dirty Waves never has to help her.
Finally she tucks her knees and slows to a stop, sliding over spire top. No dust or fragments. This isn't stone.
She stops and Dirty Waves drops next to her. "What is this?" she says.
"They call it asphalt. If I remember right and said it right. I think these towers are as old as me, if as old. Our fearless leader says he remembers when they were half built. He says a lot of things, though. But," he says, his brows furrowing, "he is old."
