“I didn’t do anything wrong,” he roared back at her in Stone, over the rattle of the elevated train down which he ran, leaping from car to car. Within the cars, screams and shouts—panic at heavy footfalls on metal roofs. “They needed help. The Lady willed me to go. I don’t see why you’re so mad about this.”
That brought her up short. In surprise she almost let an overhead pylon strike her in the face. “You don’t see why I’m so mad about this. You don’t see why I’m so mad?” She spotted him two blocks back, climbing a skyscraper. She leapt off the train, wings spread, but by the time she brought herself around he’d vanished again. She flew forty stories up a jewel-faceted tower and perched at its peak, steadying herself against one of the needlelike protrusions Tara called nightmare antennas. Terrors clawed at Aev as she held it, like a kitten testing its claws. Not for the first time Aev wondered what exactly had broken inside Tara Abernathy’s mind that let her judge her way of life normal.
Where, in the streets below, in the alleys and dead ends, in the shop windows and blacktop street ball playgrounds, where was her wayward son?
She remembered her debates with the Lady about carving him. We’re strong, Aev had said, almost too strong, and fierce. Perhaps we need a young one who’s fast, who can move unseen in shadows, a king of infiltrators and sneaks, a messenger no door will bar.
Should have made him clubfoot and slow, and ironed out that infuriating spark of personal initiative.
(Not really, but some days she wished.) There. Two skyscrapers over, by a tower with a starburst logo and the legend GRIMWALD HOLDINGS—Shale was a winged black slice against garish ghostlit colors. She launched herself into space, mouth wide to drink the moon.
He hid in shadows, so she searched every shadow. He flew and she flew faster. He reared and she doubled back. No crowd could conceal him, no bolt-hole was deep enough to hide.
But he was fast. She’d carved well, with the Lady in her hands.
And he must have known this would happen, that midway through the chase her rage would unclench and leave her simply running, flying, as she had done centuries ago when Alt Coulumb was a small town and she its sole guardian. He must have known, because when she cornered him on a low roof between two skyscrapers near Uhlan and Brakenridge—when she slammed into him and they tumbled together on gravel, spinning, tearing gouges in tar paper, a ball of claws and teeth, and she ended the tumble on top, legs pinning his wings to the roof—he bared his throat to her and said, with an imp’s smile she never could harden herself against, “Good chase, Mother.”
She sat back on her haunches astride him. “You don’t even understand”—that last word even more a growl than usual in Stone—“why I’m angry.”
“Can you get off me?”
She bared teeth.
“It’s hard to talk this way, is all.”
One wingbeat drew her to her feet. He stood more slowly, exaggerating submission. She’d seen him kip up from worse falls. “Your stunt risked the Lady’s life.”
He picked gravel out of his ears and brushed more from the hollow between his neck and collarbone. Across the street, a billboard man with improbably orange skin blew smoke rings into the night. The rings, swelling, faded to air. “Let’s not do this here.”
He flew slowly, painted greens and oranges and browns by billboards and streetlights. She followed. A late-night worker gaped from a high window at them both, and Shale waved. Aev landed after him, on an observation deck beneath a towering nightmare antenna. The city lay below, river flowing down to bay and blackly glittering ocean. Out there, Captain Pelham’s crew guided the captured Dream and its foul cargo to port.
“I’ve seen the view before, Shale.”
“But it’s no less beautiful for your knowing it,” he said. “They pay to come up here these days, the humans I mean. In the forty years since we left the rooftops, they’ve learned to love them.” He patted coin-op binoculars mounted at the observation deck’s edge. “Five-year-olds press their faces to this lens and stare out to the edge of the world.”
“Wearing skin has fogged your mind.”
“The Lady made me to walk among them, with your hands. Will you blame me for that?”
“I blame you for your meathead stunt tonight.”
“I know those girls. Their father’s a broken man—all the anger inside his skull has left a calculus of hate. We want followers for our Lady. Do we serve Her by deserting her people?”
“You did not intervene in the market to serve Her.”
“She asked me to go there.”
“You petitioned Her! You wheedled and convinced because you didn’t want to let that girl down. You had to be the hero. And now we all might die because of your pride.”
“As if I’m the only one.”
“What are you saying?”
“You saved the reporter.”
Aev walked to the high railing, vaulted over, and let herself fall.
She grabbed the roof’s edge and jerked to a halt above the windows; her talons scarred the concrete, leaving grooves that caught moon-and city-light.
“Mother?” Shale asked from behind her.
She said nothing.