9. Finisterra
A hundred meters, two hundred, five hundred—Bianca falls, the wind whipping at her clothes, and the hanging vegetation that covers Encantada's flanks is a green-brown blur, going gray as it thins, as the zaratán's body curves away from her. She blinks away the tears brought on by the rushing wind, and tries to focus on the monitor panel of the harness. The wind speed indicator is the only one that makes sense; the others—altitude, attitude, rate of descent—are cycling through nonsense in three languages, baffled by the instruments' inability to find solid ground anywhere below.
Then Bianca falls out of Encantada's shadow into the sun, and before she can consciously form the thought her hand has grasped the emergency handle of the harness and pulled, convulsively; and the glassy fabric of the paraballoon is billowing out above her, rippling like water, and the harness is tugging at her, gently but firmly, smart threads reeling themselves quickly out and then slowly in again on their tiny spinnerets.
After a moment, she catches her breath. She is no longer falling, but flying.
She wipes the tears from her eyes. To the west, the slopes of Finisterra are bright and impossibly detailed in the low-angle sunlight, a million trees casting a million tiny shadows through the morning's rapidly dissipating mist.
She looks up, out through the nearly invisible curve of the paraballoon, and sees that Encantada is burning. She watches it for a long time.
The air grows warmer, and more damp, too. With a start, Bianca realizes she is falling below Finisterra's edge. When she designed the paraballoon, Bianca intended for Dinh to fall as far as she safely could, dropping deep into Sky's atmosphere before firing up the reverse Maxwell pumps, to heat the air in the balloon and lift her back to Finisterra; but it does not look as if there is any danger of pursuit now, from either the poachers or the wardens. Bianca starts the pumps, and the paraballoon slows, then begins to ascend.
As the prevailing wind carries her inland, over a riot of tropical green, and in the distance Bianca sees the smoke rising from the chimneys of Ciudad Perdida, Bianca glances up again at the burning shape of Encantada, and wonders whether she'll ever know if Valadez was telling the truth.
Abruptly the jungle below her opens up, and Bianca is flying over cultivated fields, and people are looking up at her in wonder.
Bianca looks out into the eastern sky, dotted with distant zaratanes. There is a vision in her mind, a vision that she thinks maybe Edith Dinh saw: the skies of Sky more crowded than the skies over Rio Pícaro, Septentrionalis Archipelago alive with the bright shapes of dirigibles and gliders, those nameless zaratanes out there no longer uncharted shoals but comforting and familiar landmarks.
She cuts the power to the pumps and opens the parachute valve at the top of the balloon. This isn't what she wanted, when she set out from home; but she is still a Nazario, and still an engineer. As she drops, children are already running toward her across the field.
A small miracle, but perhaps it is enough.