sustenance - three (part three)

Though they were only a quarter mile from downtown Liliota, the route they took swung wide around and stretched for over a mile. Between their house and the harbors below stood proud Vista Heights Ridge, the edge of some fictional titan's reckless footprint.

The cobblestones took them past the chapel, a white-washed and weather-beaten pyramid that, despite its tiny, fifty-person parish, appeared to balance the sky on its blunt summit. Twelve columns rose from its sides like teeth in a smile. Each column contained a bell, seven of which rang out in a scale of tenor voices to bid Kaela good morning.

Far below, the processors echoed the chapel's gesture with futility, their single, shrill steam whistle a struggling whine in the air.

Mama said, "You're late for work, love."

"Oh, no." Papa's pace remained steady, or as steady as he could manage with the stuff sack hanging from his shoulder.

They passed the kitemaker's house, a peeling cement box poised beyond the ridge's edge by diagonal struts hammered into the rock face. Ornate lanterns hung from these struts; how they got there mystified Kaela.

The kites themselves jostled for territory in the dusty windows, rhombuses and peacock tails, cubes and halberd scale fabrics, hammered thin as flower petals. One shaped like a moth always caught Kaela's eye as she passed — the iridescent patterns on its wings dismissed the light given it, returning its complement instead. Today, it blazed cobalt blue and royal purple under the fiery gloaming.

"Very rare," the old kitemaker had told her once, taking it down so she could hold it herself. "Diaphne skin. Divers go a hundred feet below the ocean to find them slugs."

The material erupted into concentric circles of black and white against Kaela's fingertips. "How do you know that?" she asked.

"I was one of those divers," he replied, fingering the velvet flier. His eyes focused somewhere faraway. He let her hold the kite for a little longer, then he returned it to its place and shuffled back to his workbench to resume his stitching.

One day, she told herself, she would have a kite like that.

Kaela's family reached the bottom of the ridge in shadow. The Squat, as this burrough called itself, was the exclusive domain of the processors: six corrugated metal facilities with sliding doors the size of houses on their ends and no windows, each of them belching greasy smoke from clustered chimneys taller than any tree on the island. They crouched behind chain-link fences on beds of gore-slicked concrete and steel rails, and their shipping bays fired carts of entrails or fillets or eyes at each other along these rails depending on which facility could make the best use of them.

Kaela skipped ahead to examine a fivepetal creeping out from under one of the rails. As she brought it toward her nose, she heard a bang, then her name shouted behind her. A hand seized her wrist and wrenched her away as a cart screamed through the space she had just vacated.

"Fayling—!"

She turned, and Papa's blood-tinged eyes drilled into hers — no, through hers. His hand remained clamped to her arm, his stuff sack abandoned on the ground behind him.

"Kaela— fayling Prozzet and shbyk—" Papa's face contorted as he sputtered and babbled. "Fayling carts— fayling stupid girl!"

Mama came over and put her hand on his shoulder. "Haust, let go," she said, swallowing hard.

"Didn't even look." One by one, his fingers released her wrist, leaving white imprints on her skin.

Kaela's pulse did not quicken during her near-accident or its aftermath. Spreading across the ground as a bloody, broken mess never crossed her mind. But she had felt the wind on her face, saw the flash of yellow pass before her eyes, and then Papa got upset.

The first thing she did whenever he was upset was apologize. "I'm sorry, Papa," she said.

Her remorse was genuine and spontaneous — the memory of that cart, unapologetically fast and coming at her, grew feelers and linked with the hunch of her father's shoulders, his averted head, his white-knuckled fist. That cart made Papa mad, so she would have to make sure she was never that close to a moving cart again.

"Stay close," said Mama, taking her hand.

Her parents led her past the processors to the docks — twenty-one guano-stained berths, most of them occupied, with a small flotilla of other ships puttering into the harbor to contest the rest. Spindly cranes like long-billed birds lowered tarpaulin buckets into the different holds. Groans weighed down the air — abused fenders against docks, sea-weary sailors leaving their ships, crane engines retrieving the captains' catches. Thousands of fish slammed their tails against the buckets as they were lifted into gravity's domain, layering thunder over the groans.

Kaela took as few breaths as she could until she habituated to the place's organic miasma of withered scale and congealed salt.