“Oghay,” I managed around a mouthful of bread.
“Our sun-cycles will be split between the classrooms and the dormitories—we’ll be given a timetable just like all the sols, but we don’t get to actually attend classes with them. We’ll be attending to the classes. Each classroom is assigned five dwellers to be at the disposal of the sols and the professors. When academy classes are over, we’ll each have an assigned dormitory room, and it’ll be our job to service the room and the sols assigned to the room. I don’t know when we’re going to have time to eat … they never explained that.”
“What about sleep?” I quipped, swallowing what was in my mouth. “Will we have time for that? Or the other essentials, like breathing?”
“Bathing?”
“No. Breathing.”
“You can multitask, can’t you?”
I huffed, stuffing the rest of my sandwich into my mouth. “Hard-ass,” I muttered, almost unintelligibly.
“What was that?” she asked, snatching the rest of the sandwiches out of my lap.
“Love you,” I amended quickly, causing her to laugh.
Emmy held off on lecturing me any further, even when we passed through Dvadel and into Soldel, which was the first ring after Blesswood. This city was different to the other sol settlements. It was actually stepping up into a gradual incline, with several lower tiers of what seemed to be general housing, below several higher tiers of … what the hell was that? It looked like they had taken a bunch of stone houses and stacked them on top of each other. There were buildings like this scattered all around, towering into the sky. How could they do that? How did it stay up so high in the air? Emmy noticed my slack jaw, wide eyes, and metaphorically drooling chin, and quickly leaned over to follow my line of sight.
“Wow!” Her voice got all breathy. “I’ve wanted to see skyreachers my entire life. Did you know that hundreds of sols can live in one building? It’s ingenious.”
All I heard was ‘did you know that hundreds of sols can all die in one go?’ Ingenious clearly equalled insane in Emmy-talk. No way would I ever step foot into something like that. Temptation for my clumsy curse was exactly what that was.
“If sols are so blessed—you know, with all the shininess, and the gifts, and the chance to kiss-ass the gods of Topia—then why do they live all stacked up on top of each other like the Minateurs are waiting to sort them out properly later?”
It didn’t make sense to me. I dreamed of living in my own home, surrounded by all my stuff. I’d have medical kits in the exact spot I last left them. You know, the little things. Emmy had her sol-worshipping eyes on, the deep brown colour as rich as the soil beneath the roots of the trees that we passed. She clearly loved the skyreachers.
“They’re supposed to be so fancy, Will. Like fancy fancy. Only the wealthiest of the sols are able to afford a skyreacher home. Can you imagine? Being so much closer to the gods?”
“Do we know that the gods live in the sky, though? I never really believed Teacher Hardy’s theory. He ate sardines for lunch. It’s never good to trust a person who eats sardines.”
Emmy shrugged. “Maybe they don’t, but I doubt they live in the ground, and whenever anyone talks about the gods coming to Blesswood every moon-cycle, they say that the gods are coming down.”
“Okay, but back to the skyreachers just real quick. How do they even pee? I mean a hole in the floor is going to be a real problem for the sols below.”
Even Jerath chuckled at that one, and he’d been a tough crowd so far. “They have indoor piping and proper bathrooms,” he informed us, a broad grin strong across his fair cheeks. “They can even bathe inside, and the pipes make sure no one gets a pee shower.”
Inside. Inside? Where did the water come from? Where did it go? Would my mind explode from all of the questions currently fighting for dominance? The higher we climbed, the more of the towering buildings surrounded us. Speckled intermittently between them were these huge, gated stone buildings. I had no idea why they needed gates. Sols were probably so badass they kept wild bullsen around their dwellings. Just for kicks.
It seemed that Soldel was coming to its peak; from our current vantage point we could see right out to the second ring, Dvadel. At the junction of this peak was another massive building, and it alone was almost the size of our entire village back home. It wasn’t a dark grey stone like most of the other structures, but instead, something white and pretty with sparkling stones embedded into the walls. That was the leader of the buildings, the one which was all ‘look at me, look at me,’ making every other building in Soldel feel like crap about itself.