My apologies for the shameless self praise, but I think this is the best chapter yet ;) well at least it's the one I've been waiting to write for a while now! oh and the image doesn't belong to me, all credits go to the supremely talented artist!
Will didn't answer, because he had already jumped.
Mith's jaw dropped as she peered out of the hatch. The engines were whirring loudly and the sky was filled with stars. Will was soaring, his arms spread in a graceful approximation of an eagle. And that's when things got weird.
Rather than plummeting to the ground, he was gently floating upwards. It was as if some invisible air current was carrying him.
"Jump!" He yelled, as he floated past and then above her.
Mith's legs began to tremble. Her heart was beating too fast. She looked down, where she could see the lights of a small town. There were stars above and stars below, and her fear of heights was making her dizzy.
"Jump, damn it!" Will was a good twenty feet over the plane now.
"I can't!" Mith screamed, backing away into the recesses of the plane.
With great effort, Will propelled himself downwards so he was floating next to the hatch once again.
"Is that so?" He asked calmly.
Mith was too terrified to say a word.
"Well, I'm afraid we're going to have to do this the fun way," he continued, grinning like a maniac.
Yeah, she was definitely going to pass out now. There was a boy floating next to the hatch of a plane in the middle of a starry sky, and he was telling her to jump. Without a parachute. With just a flimsy oxygen mask slipped behind her ears, the heavy, compact cylinder weighting her down. She was going to fall like a bird with broken wings.
"Unleash the corkscrews!" Will crowed, and the plane suddenly listed to the side like a ship caught in a current. It then flipped over in a horrendous belly flop that left Mith screeching like a banshee. The world spun, and she hit her head on the roof of the plane. After another flip, she was thrown out the hatch.
Mith watched the plane fade into the distance as she fell.
"Use your arms! Goddamn, what the hell do they teach you at that Academy? USE YOUR ARMS!" Will was hollering now, and Mith belatedly realised that she had to fly.
She spread her arms out, like the sky was a large swimming pool, and gently kicked her legs.
You're just floating. It's a calm day at the beach.
Obviously, whoever had invented the concept of 'go to your happy place' was retarded.
Mith was not at the beach, and she was fairly certain that going to the aforementioned beach would not involve such a lot of profanity. She was screaming words that would have earned her a sharp smack if her parents were in earshot.
But she was no longer plummeting.
She was rising slowly, lopsidedly, and occasionally she thought she was going to flip over and fall.
It was aerodynamics. She was the bird. Not the one with the broken wings, but the one that ruled the skies. Her arms and legs spread out wider, giving her more stability.
And oh my, what an experience the flying/floating was.
Her screams changed to shouts of delight as she rose up, higher and higher, until she had nearly caught up with Will, whose expression hovered between exasperation and dry amusement.
Mith realised that she didn't know how this worked at all. Would they float straight up into space? What did the Ark even look like?
Her grandparents had told her the most fabulous stories about their own visits to the Ark.
The sky is like a dome studded with diamonds. It arches above you, and you walk under it. You are close to the sky, but not in it, so you still have to look up. Mithali, what we do is gritty work, but what a setting! You can't come that close to infinity and not want more of it. The heavens open up to the vast universe beyond, and it is unforgettable. It sucks you in, because you won't find that kind of raw, untamed beauty anywhere else. Don't tell your ma I said this, but I wish that you get to see it at least once in your life.
That was something Mith's granddad had told her, when he had given her the compass. She remembered his exact words, the exact crinkly smile that had appeared as he talked.
Mith was seeing it now. Holy hell, her granddad's description did it no justice. She angled her head up, trying to take in as much as she could.
Mith and Will rose for a few minutes. Suddenly, Mith felt something careen into her and push her upright.
She thought that she was going to collapse and hurtle down, but incredibly, there was now something solid beneath her feet. She was standing straight in the sky, with the heavens giving way to deep space and an infinite universe above her. She looked up and not down. Her legs shook, but she took a tentative step forward. She was now walking. In the sky.
She held in her delighted laugh. It would not do to make it look like this was her first time. She couldn't help looking up though. The view transfixed her. It was glorious. It was mesmerizing. It was breathtakingly beautiful. This was as close to the Great Beyond as any human could ever get.
Mith had not, however, forgotten that her life was on the line. She dusted herself off and looked at Will, who was staring at her, studying her reaction.
"What are you looking at?" she said with a sniff. "Chop chop, we've got memories to harvest. Or something of the kind anyway. Let's go."
He grinned.
"That's the spirit, love."
And then he sang. It was not a song in the true sense of a word. It was a pure, haunting note that seemed to echo through the skies. Even through his mask, it sounded beautiful.
And as Mith looked up, monsters began to appear.
It's November now, so I should be looking for Eridanus, Orion, Taurus...and what's the other one? Oh yeah, Cetus. The sea monster.
Holy shit. A sea monster!
She held her breath, expectant. It felt like her entire life had been a build-up to this moment.
The sea monster shimmered to life first. Arcs made of some sort of silver mist appeared between the stars of its constellation, the empyrean version of a join-the-dots exercise.
It took a few minutes. The part Mith was looking at was only the head, she realised. The creature's magnificent, scaly body snaked out behind him, curving along the dome of the Northern hemisphere.
Even so, the head was huge. Like let's-shove-a-pod-of-blue-whales-in-there-and-watch-them disappear kind of huge.
It was a like a dragon's head, scaly, with fierce eyes and sharp teeth. One eye swung around and fixed on Mith. She gasped.
"Impressive, isn't it?" Will said. "They don't like showing themselves to Carcerem Society members."
"I know," Mith said. This little nugget of information had actually come from her parents. When Mith was thirteen, she had, for some odd reason, taken to spending long hours inside her room with her door locked. She didn't remember what exactly she had done in there, but she did remember going downstairs only at mealtimes for a couple of months.
Her parents had grown up in the Carcerem Society, so even though they had given it up in pursuit of a normal life, they had still affectionately called her their 'little Ark monster' then.
"Why d'you call me that?" Mith had asked.
"Because you appear only when you want to be fed," her mother had said with a laugh.
Mith thought of this now, and her chest twinged. She missed her mum and dad already.
"They appear only during the Great Feeding," she said breathlessly, hoping she sounded like a well-informed Academy student. "But you can make them appear. How?"
"The promise of a drug that will let them escape wakes them up just fine," Will said dryly.
"The note is just my signal to let them know I'm here. Penetrates whatever eternity-induced brain-fog they live in."
Cetus opened his mouth and roared, a vicious sound full of rage. It was loud, and majestic. Like the roar of a lion, with a more human depth of emotion to it.
Mith was in awe of it.
The force of the roar threw her back several feet, and she picked herself up, too amazed to wince or feel the searing cold that came with being so high up.
"You alright?" Will asked, eyebrows furrowed.
"Never been better," Mith whispered, her eyes still on Cetus. Hells, it was true. She felt a new clarity, and a touch of destiny: like this was where she was meant to be. Like this was her place in the world.