Hawking

The hiss of the milk steamer over the droning coffee grinder wasn't unbearable, even if the tunnel threw all that noise back in his ears over and over again, but Haraan would have preferred dealing with it another time. The bench he sat on refused to warm to him while he waited for his friend to finish at the coffee bar, and a constant breeze from the tunnel's mouth robbed warmth from where his clothes didn't cover his neck, wrists, and ankles. His shoes slid over grimy tiles.

Autumn had arrived at Talery Bay, bringing with it all the clouds and rain anyone could ever want. The bar had built up a solid line of locals -- he could tell what they were by the dripping, ankle-length coats wrapped around them. Those treated leather hides weren't anyone's idea of elegance, but they gave the wearer a solid look and kept more water off than any umbrella in the city. The winds made sure of that. Everyone knew umbrellas in the city were a swindle except for tourists, and Haraan knew several kids at the Academy who made rude amounts of cash passing "bloomers" off to hapless visitors caught under "these regrettable climactic conditions".

His friends had brought him along to hawk several times in the past couple of months, but this was the first time he was pulling a morning shift. Tired wasn't the right word to describe what he felt, but he did wonder if someone had stuffed his head with a noble gas while he slept. His hand kept straying to his bag, but all he did was play with the snaps. He knew what he carried: three sketchbooks of different sizes, pens and pencils, air tip and dye, and The Corthian Pageant, Volume One, for class. Yet part of him asked him to look inside anyway. Why? He couldn't say. His head wasn't together.

Footsteps approached him from behind. "Vac-flask, now," said a girl's voice.

He handed his up without comment. Flask in hand, the girl filled it from a tube-mounted spout connected to the half-gallon bladder on the side of her backpack. She took less than five seconds to give it back.

"Thanks." He let the steam rise to just beneath his nose, and smiled for the first time that morning. "You didn't have to get hot chocolate just for me," he said.

"It's your first time." She dropped in next to him. "I'll do coffee another day. I don't need to deal with anyone who doesn't like hot chocolate before first gun."

Haraan blew into his vac-flask and took a cautious sip. The drink still singed the middle of his tongue, and tasted as if the sleep-less twenty-something wringing a living from the bar's morning shift had simply poured boiling water over a bon-bon. He was no connoisseur, of course, but his mother did have a reputation among the gourmets about town... "Amina, it's like she didn't even care," he moaned. "She didn't even care..."

Without a word, Amina stood up and walked back to the bar, ignoring the line and the sudden protests -- she was five-feet-five and the man up front ordering a triple expresso with chili stood head and shoulders above her, and she pulled him to one side like he was a saloon door. The barista was rummaging beneath the bar for something; Amina wasted no time getting her attention.

"Hey, pimple-plex."

Haraan winced, as did one or two people in the line. If only he could know what the poor woman behind the bar was thinking. When you're up against a chick packing an electric-blue hairdo and short sleeves this time of year, you pay attention or end up regretting it.

The barista took her time standing up. When she got around to that, she gave Amina the kind of look that said "This ain't your fight, sister." Haraan couldn't tell if she was cocky or just slow in the head. Maybe both. Discouraging aggressive customers didn't take much brains when your job put you near convenient supplies of boiling water.

"There's a line."

"And I'm sure as hell that line isn't interested in getting ripped off by your gimpy drinks," Amina countered. "I know you're new, I come here every now and then -- but what's the big idea, cutting my cocoa like that?"

Flat as old soda, the barista insisted, "There's a line, ma'am. Wait your turn."

"No. I've got hard-working people counting on me to make their morning and what you gave me ain't gonna do that."

"Please get in line, ma'am."

Advice columnists for children led simple lives. A degree in psychology and a gentle, affirming voice was all they thought they needed to solve every problem a child could face growing up. Haraan had read the magazines when he was younger; the columnists told bullying victims to ignore their persecutors, which would frustrate them and cause them to find another target.

This barista put her faith in that quaint advice, and that was a mistake. Amina wasn't a bully. Far from insecure, she realized early on that going after what she needed ended better than going after what she wanted, and that the two were different.

Since she needed high quality hot chocolate, she knew how to deal with being ignored. She whipped her spout out and dispensed hot chocolate straight onto the bar.

"I knew I should have made my own at home," she said, watching the woman leap back from the sputtering torrent. "But then I would've had lukewarm cocoa, and nobody wants that."

"You asked for a reduced rate, you get reduced quality." The overwhelmed woman snatched up a carafe of hot water, but held herself back from throwing it at the last second. "What did you expect? A half of DeLaurenti's for your ten gambits?"

"I expected to be in Talery Bay, where we do this 'haggling' thing a lot. I don't understand your jam, sister. Did it ever occur to you that every cup I sell is a cup sold for your company? They won't come here for cut product, so give me the real deal. They're happy, they come here, you're happy. That's business. And I'm sure your supervisor would love to hear how you refused to capitalize on such an entreprenurial opportunity. Here's a tip: Taijuro's my older brother."

If he could only take one thing away from this morning, Haraan prayed it would be a memory of the woman's face paling to the shade of an ice cube.

"Put the pot down." Amina spoke, and the barista complied. "Good. Now let's do it right this time. In fact, I'd better see you putting cream in there. Heavy cream. I want it so rich that they'll still have it oozing down their throats by lunchtime."

Murmurs sprung up from the line, energized by Amina's performance. One spoke up. "And how about a gigante latte for me while you're up there?"

"Are you sure I can't interest you in a cuppa hot cocoa first?" she answered, slinging her bag back on. "I'll let you try some, and you tell me if Bimbolina back there did a proper job of it."

"Fair enough." The taster was well into his fifties, but he pulled out his flask with the excitement of a ten-year-old. Amina poured him a shot, he tossed it back. Looked skyward, smacked his tongue, nodded, held his flask out for more while digging in his pocket for money.

Amina held up three fingers, received three gambits, topped off her client's flask, bowed theatrically. "Pleasure doing business with you, sir."

"Likewise."

Haraan shook his head as his friend came back over, unable to suppress a grin. It was time for them to catch the steamer, except they were missing someone...

.. who walked out of an adjacent restroom at that moment. He was a tall one -- his hair, shaped like a corn muffin gone horribly wrong, came within inches of the tunnel's ceiling. In addition to his bag, which normal people would have used for week-long hiking trips, he wore a heavy overcoat which looked to be more straps and buckles than leather in places.

"I thought you were never coming out of there," said Amina.

The boy shook his hands out. "Hey, if it's a waiting game, nature wins. By the way, I heard you from in there. Rough much?"

"I smoothed her over." She stood up on her toes, just tall enough for the boy to plant a kiss on her forehead. "Got everything?" she asked. "Nothing fell in?"

He stepped back and snapped one side of his coat open. Playing cards, minuteglasses, capsules with four to twenty-sided dice, memo pads, compasses, pens, and even a barometer (its needle situated on "RAIN") were lashed in place with more straps, buckles, and harnesses. "Now that you mention it, I can't be sure it's all there," he said, "buuut it'll have to do." He closed his coat and turned to Haraan. "How are you feeling?"

He sighed, wondering inside how he was going to get a word in edgewise to people with those two working in the same steamer. "A little nervous. But overall, I'm glad I'm here. Thanks for bringing me out, Jasti."

The tall one put a hand to his face and groaned. "Ho, Lady, I can't believe you made me do this, this is gonna be terrible--" He removed his hand and grinned. "Kidding, kidding! Let's get you some sales! Come on!"

Haraan followed him and Amina further into the tunnel, beyond which lay the atrium of Grand Sentinel Station. Three kids from Altina Academy, artists in their own ways, hawking for laughs, getting a feel for what they could do in this world before the world could decide that for them.

This, he needed.

Another start

Given the choice, given the chance, Haraan would have remained asleep. There could be no escaping them, his memories, either waking or dreaming, but his mind in the latter state wouldn't object to the contradicting evidence of who he was.

His first memory, so it contended, was of sand, of flapping and pouncing along some secluded, sable shore before his mother's jaws reined him into deeper waters. His first memory, argued another: clashing a pair of forks together to music while wrapped in his mother's arms.

We may rest easy at night despite whatever turmoil life brings into our lives, whether we lose our possessions in a fire, accident or arson, or if the loss is felt on an emotional level, such as the departure of a loved one, on the basis, the simple refuge, of acknowledging ourselves as human beings -- when we can't count on anything else, at least we may count on that, irrelevant to circumstances as that fact may be. Excuse the pedant, the contrarian, the fantasist: we go to sleep human, we wake up human, such it is that we may rely on (or resign ourselves to) it as certainty.

Such is not the case for Haraan Akema Siarke, who despises sleeping in a dragon's body, for he wakes up convinced he wears the wrong shape.

***

Let us be fair. Haraan has certainties to his life as well -- what a punishment it would be to live a life without certainty, a cruel hoax devised by something beyond God, for God creates life with the guarantee that whatever has life does not merely exist as does a rock, or the sky, or fire; it lives. Juxtaposition is a beautiful instrument for deriving certainties.

If he were the optimistic type, Haraan would admit he was living, and not living dumbly as a bacillus, or a stalk of kelp, but as a creature capable of reasoning and recollection, and not only that, but of abstraction, too. His human memories inform him two times five gives him ten and he can believe that without an array of pebbles spread before him to illustrate the point.

Why two times five equals ten is useful to know as a dragon, he couldn't say. The most important knowledge his dragon-self possessed tied intimately with his senses: the stench of oil signaled the presence of what his human-self called a boat, or a ship, it really depended on how big it was, but his dragon-self only cared that it had dragged his mother into the sky with giant hooks when he had been eight grand tides from the egg. The hooks had ripped through blubber into her arteries, so the oil mixed with blood.

Every time he had come close to a boat in the ocean, so his dragon-memories told him, every time he smelled their oil in their frothy wakes, he also smelled a little of his mother's blood, too.

Haraan is certain about hating boats. And as the first bars of dawn light begin to filter through the water, he is not at all optimistic about the coming day.

***

Why these contradictions? he wondered. When the contradictions overlapped in time, such as the matter of his first memory, they left holes in other places: entire seasons, tides, other spans of human and dragon measure both obliterated, leaving behind faint, smeared hazes of intuition best viewed as through the corner of an eye, if these ex-memories could even be seen with eyes.

On a very cold, very analytical level, it would be better to dismiss his blasted, carved-up past and focus on living out the rest of his days as a dragon. But no sooner did that idea come to him that other voices cried foul, most of them his, some of them imagined, conflated, or redacted from his recollecting, the rest, from her.

Especially from her. Hers was the only voice that didn't object as an echo in his brain.

"Not now, Kaela," he moans, rolling over. He knows she floats just a foot above him; he can scent her. She smells of strawberries today, tangy and light on his tongue, slowly, inexorably drawing him back to the waking world. Stop making me think about everything.

"Something came back to you yesterday morning."

"And it's only confusing me more. Let me sleep." Something blunt digs between his back and the sand, trying to nudge him up. He hears her voice bubble up from under him.

"I think we're going to find lots of memories today."

Lady, she is insistent -- and until yesterday, religion hadn't played any part of his life. He'd woken up with visions of temples, their inward-curving columns and somber, candle-lit statues of humans garbed in fabrics ruffled by impossible winds, the name of the goddess he invoked just now. Chants of worship resonate through his head before he realized what they were doing -- making him remember -- and quashed them. He brushes his companion away. "Not today."

He feels her wake pass over him, getting a whiff of strawberries again. He hears a sigh as she drifts into the curve of his chest and settles there, her dorsal frill tickling his skin. The sigh is his; he cannot decide whether it was a sigh of frustration, or a sigh of relief. The first night she had done this to him, snuggle up with him, that is, he had been asleep, only to bolt awake in fear. Despite one part of him having lived life quite happily in nakedness, the other, blurred, fragmented part of him screamed in an awkward terror groomed by a half-remembered, air-breathing, clothes-wearing society. He realized a week later that that society was nowhere nearby to judge him, and the warmth, the deep-seated whisper of her pulse, was nicer to have close by at night than a cold boulder.

"Are you still sleepy?"

"Very sleepy," was his reply.

She shifts, thinking to herself, probably. "Am I still waking you up too early?"

"Yeah."

"I'm sorry."

"It's okay."

"I'll wait more next time."

"Until you can tell what color your flipper is in the light."

"Okay."

She would get better. At first, she woke him with several hours to go before sunrise.

1

Given the choice, he would have preferred to stay asleep. He had to deal with them regardless of his state of consciousness, the fogs, the fogs which crept over the hills and crevices in his head, the fogs he knew were keeping his own memories hostage. In his dreams, they were just as hazy as anything else -- he never had to question what lay within those memories as he passed by.

Or, rather, those memories never got to question him.

And so it happened, every morning, the daily fight to keep his eyes closed for a few minutes longer -- but the act of keeping his eyes closed roused other parts of his mind into waking, and with the waking came the questioning.

What was so strange about waking up underwater?

What did he care about being naked?

To address the first question, waking up underwater was a perfectly normal thing for a dragon. Waking up in a bed, not the kind that formed by chance in a thick swath of sea grass, but in a bed covered with cloth sheets and cloth blankets, with a pillow stuffed with feathers under his head -- wouldn't be. As for the second, he was plenty warm enough, owing to the layer of blubber wrapped under his skin. And yet, he couldn't stop looking for anything flat and wide enough to drape across his stomach, even if he only found stones -- such as the one lying on him right now.

In short, he missed having underwear. Here he was, a creature with fangs in his mouth, webbed spines running the length of his back and tail, a pair of horns long as his head -- and he was prepared to trade them all for a piece of cloth he could pull between his back flippers (and how would he do that without fingers to grab on with?).

As the days passed, hints of before trickled back to him despite the fogs' best efforts -- the first had been a smell, the second, the word belonging to that smell.

That smell, the smell of fruit, tangy, and light enough to stay off his tongue, drifted through his nostrils now. She was nearby. In the end, sleep lost out, as it always did, every day, and Haraan opened his eyes.

"Has anything else come back to you?" she asked him.

He nodded.

"What was it?"

"Chalk."

"Mmmm." The little dragon before him closed her eyes and smiled as if receiving a back rub. "I know that one. You can use it to write stuff."

Another memory struggled against its hazy prison, its fierce babble dumbed into a moan. Something thin and rigid pressed between his fingers -- from when he had fingers, if he ever _had_ fingers -- he couldn't choose how these things came back to him and what he remembered by touch was hard to ignore.

"Really? Don't pencils do that, too?"

The smaller dragon shook her head. "They're different. You use a pencil on paper, but you use chalk on a street."

"Spoken like a human."

"I am one. And you are, too."

"I still don't believe you."

"I remember bein' human. All we have to do is get you to remember, too."

Haraan groaned. She said that same thing every day for the past half-tide. "I doubt that's going to happen. The way I am right now? I'm fine with it." The lie burned on his tongue. "Really."

He rose from his resting place from last night -- nestled against a quarter-arc of stone set on top of more stone, cut in even blocks and laid in a flat, interwoven pattern. He knew the arc had belonged to something called a fountain, and that it belonged above the water so it could shoot more water into the air. Wide stairs led up and out from the area around the fountain in four directions, passing under algae-slimed arches at their apexes.

heritage - two

"Lady, that was completely amazing," Haraan said, getting off the steamer.

"What was that one thing he did after the helix?" asked Jasti, going after Haraan.

Amina swatted the back of his head, lightly, to preserve whatever there was inside. "How could you forget that? He started flying upside-down."

"Oh yeah. Ow."

After the show, they'd said their goodbyes to Kaileen's group and boarded a Sapphire steamer to Sunset Marina Landing, right on the bay. The title said everything: whatever didn't ply the canals cutting between and even through the various islands in the Bay moored here, from pleasure boats to rusting tugs to fishing charters to huge, looming tankers bearing oranges from Kamania, beef from Lipar, and many other luxuries destined for Da Santra.

Haraan's eyes found a certain, empty berth in the dyling sunlight and scowled. He never could decide what he liked more: seeing his dad's berth unoccupied, or not. He motioned his friends over to the ferry line, a snake of depleted exhibition attendees recovering under a heated glass canopy.

Like them, Haraan was exhausted. But the ferry would stop by his neighborhood first, and a part of him didn't want to call it a day just yet. He polled his friends and they agreed with him right away.

"Where would we go?" Jasti yawned, stretching his arms.

"What about the Purple Moon?" Haraan suggested. "Do you guys want to go there--"

Stompstompstomp "YES."

Haraan knew if he turned around, someone was gonna get kissed with eyes wide open. He put his hands behind him instead and pushed Jasti and Amina away, slowly.

"Do they still have those chocolate lava cookies this late?" demanded Amina.

"I think so."

"Will your mom be there?" asked Jasti.

Haraan sighed. "I hope not."

"If she's there," said Amina, "will she bake us free stuff again?"

Haraan wondered if some hidden part of him reveled in this masochism. "Has there ever been a time she was there and didn't?"

"Aaaah!" Amina hugged him. One time, an Iron glimpsed her hugging Haraan and almost arrested her on assault had Haraan not explained to the officer that was how she showed affection. "Let's go, let's go let's go letsgolesgo."

"Amina! Which one of us is really your boyfriend?"

"Stop being so insecure, you big lunk. Nothing could ever tear me away from you."

"I'm not insecure. What'll happen after you end up crushing the chef's son to death?"

Amina let go immediately. Cool, sweet air surged back into Haraan's lungs. "Thanks, Jasti," he coughed, "I owe you one."

Jasti grinned like a wolf, canines and all. "I know."

A woman's voice crackled to life over speakers placed at the front of the line, inviting all passengers to board the ferry.

Talery Bay's ferries were not ostentatious: transportation being their primary function, the ferries gave passengers a bank of forward-facing benches to sit on, with a hard top arcing overhead for weather protection. Reinforced windows allowed the passengers and crew to look out over the water, while protecting them from the city's autumnal crushes.

Incidentally, today had been a fine autumn day.

Haraan and his friends fed their student passes through the turnstile and picked seats on the ferry's starboard side. Jasti sat in the middle to act as a pillow.

The crossing to Eslina, Haraan's island, ended within ten minutes. Some passengers got off, others got on. The ferry continued on, making stops at Champelo and Gierdi, the Market Island, and then --

"Acitamel Island," the captain declared over speakers. "Stop here for Twin Hills, Ogea Theater, Temple Complex, and Orange Prospect. This is Acitamel Island."

Haraan rubbed the sleep from his eyes -- he always hated how dry they were waking up -- and poked Jasti and Amina on their heads. "Hey, you guys, we're here."

They bounced awake.

"We're racing there again, right?" asked Jasti.

"Don't even start," Haraan growled.

The ferry pulled into the tunnel leading to Acitamel Island Landing, following a narrow canal into a larger tunnel laid out much like a conventional steamer station. Once the ferry came to rest against the landing, Haraan led his friends onto shore.

"Up those stairs, bear left, keep going until you see the Purple Moon on the right," Haraan murmured to himself.

A blue blur sped past him, yelling, "First one there gets a sweetbun! Last one pays for it!"

"Amina, I swear I'm gonna--" Haraan's threat was cut off as Jasti followed suit. "Shbyk, those two..." He had little other option than to take off after them.

He burst out of the landing into an electric night. Strings of lightbulbs criss-crossed Orange Prospect up and down its length, working together with ancient, gas-fired lampposts to glaze the street in its namesake's color. Rich couples strolled over the cobblestones in bodices and lace. Whatever reason there was for wearing such itchy and uncomfortable clothes eluded Haraan, though he did make sure to say "Excuse me" as he thundered past their displays of indignation.

The Purple Moon Bakery lay less than a block ahead — its sign stuck out further into the street than the rest of its competitor imitators. Jasti and Amina were too far up the slope for him to catch up in time.

He thought about turning around and going home. The very special Friends of Haraan discount didn't apply when he wasn't around (Amina would clean out the store in days), and the possibility of leaving his friends laden with custards and pastries and no money was a delectable one.

For a sadist.

It wasn't in him to leave. Sure, his allowance would burn for buying that extra sweetbun, but he chose to come out here instead of going home for a reason. From Acitamel Island Landing until he turned the knob on the Purple Moon's front door, he never dropped his speed.

The smell of glazed dough, coffee beans, and butter bloomed inside his nose as he came inside. A glass counter sat on the right side of the bakery as the only barrier protecting the pastries, pies, tarts, and buns from Jasti and Amina. Tables and chairs lined the left side for customers, but fortunately, they were empty. Nailed on the wall above the tables were loaves of bread shaped into letters, spelling "Moon" with a heart at the end.

BANG.

The door in the far wall behind the counter flew open, expelling a middle-aged woman in a chef's jacket and apron. All attention went straight to her eyes — of all the eyes floating around Talery Bay, hers had the greatest chance of someday glaring literal daggers by unofficial consensus. "Blazing blue" appeared in editorial columns throughout the city whenever she went in front of the City Council, most recently to defend the bakery she loved.

She was the aggressively slender, pastry-making sous-baker of the Purple Moon: Pattissiere Lyra Siarke.

"Hi, mom."

"Hey, kiddo," said Lyra, dusting off her hands on her way to the counter. "Are these two going to clean me out again?"

Jasti suddenly shrank two sizes and opened his eyes as wide as he could manage. Presumably, he was trying to look pitiful.

Lyra averted her face. "Oh, Lady, is that the best you're bringing me tonight?" Then she lunged over the counter and stared Jasti down. "Is it?"

One of the chairs groaned across the tiled floor after Jasti lost his balance and fell backwards into it. "No, mam," he said, coming to rest under the heart of bread.

"I'd hope not," she said, cracking a grin. "That was terrible."

"I'm bringing this," said Jasti, grabbing Haraan around the shoulders.

His mom was a potent force, Haraan knew, but why did she have to bring out the violent side in everyone? He barely managed to keep on his feet.

"Fair enough," Lyra conceded, rising from the counter. "I'll be right out with some things. Have you had dinner yet, the three of you?"

"Not yet, mam," said Amina, taking the seat next to Jasti's.

"It's a good thing you chose to come here tonight, then." Lyra pushed the kitchen door out of her way. "I wasn't sure why, but I decided to try baking seasoned meatballs and marinated peppers with sliced mushrooms and roux inside a sealed dough and made four instead. Does that interest anyone?"

"That sounds amazing, Mam Siarke," exclaimed Amina. Jasti was quick to chime in with a "It does!" and even Haraan had to say, "Sure."

Lyra smiled. "Meatball pouches it is, then! It'll be about two more minutes until they're ready, so Haraan, if you could pour our guests some hot chocolate?" She disappeared into the kitchen.

"The regular kind?" he called after her.

Her reply, echoing from the kitchen, was, "What are you, crazy? Give them the DeLaurenti's!"

Orange Prospect, and Acitamel Island in general, was so well-suited for the well-off and well-to-do that even hot chocolate had its own cultural following. Asking for a DeLaurenti's was the hot chocolate equivalent of going to a nice restaurant and ordering that bottle of champagne resting on the velvet pillow in that locked glass case with the two hand-blown and embossed wine stems commissioned specifically for drinking with that one bottle and that one bottle only.

Haraan went behind the counter and pulled out three round mugs from a cupboard. He passed the regular hot chocolate dispenser for the Delaurenti's next to it: a seven-sided, one-gallon tank made of hammered silver with a gold tap on the bottom. When he turned the valve all the way on, a full second elapsed before the tip of the stream oozed into the bottom of the first mug. The chocolate was so thick, he could lay a spoon across the top and it wouldn't sink. Somehow, using only the freshest cream and richest cocoa beans from Kuala Norwi and all that and more, the makers of Delaurenti's ensured every seven-gambit mug left a warm glow in the drinker's stomach leading into the next month.

Haraan plunged a cookie straw into each mug and carried them back to the table. "Bottoms up, guys," he toasted.

"It's so heavy," Amina laughed. "I can't handle this! This is intense!"

"You can do it!" said Jasti. "Drink it for me!"

Haraan had to set his mug down before he snorted it all over the table. Strangely, the best part about it all was his sudden and genuine anger at them — why were they keeping him from drinking the best hot chocolate in all of Sosara?

"Just drink it already!" he snapped before realizing his voice got a little too serious. Even still — the best hot chocolate in all of Sosara. One controlled gulp flowed and swirled over every surface in his mouth before it slid down his throat, massaging his esophagus along the way. Science had proved bad days and drinking DeLaurenti's were mutually exclusive, and Haraan and his friends were laughing with each other when his mom came back from the kitchen.

"About that chocolate," said Lyra, "if one of their cows wanders off and doesn't drink from a specific stretch of the Pangalaar River at sunrise and sunset for even one day, they deem its milk unusable and burn the animal."

heritage - one (new!)

"No one bothers to take the streets these days because they're so crowded."

Haraan almost let go of the cable. His friend hadn't delivered one of his funnier lines; he had delivered a weirder one, and Haraan couldn't make sense of his words and remain suspended fifty feet above the vulgar crowd at the same time. He alternated between pulling with his arms and bringing his legs in until he had shimmied to the other end of the cable. Once his feet were planted on that higher rooftop, he was safe to call back to his friend on the roof below.

"Jasti, where did you get that from?"

The addressed slung himself under the cable and grinned, his wild corn-muffin hair bobbing in the breeze. "A book," he replied.

"Which one?"

"Quotes to Mess with Haraan's Concentration While He's Striding, naturally."

The mast anchoring the cable to the second roof twanged in distress. It bowed under the load of Jasti's large frame, but, like countless others before it, would not give. Naturally, Haraan made sure his friend noticed the noise.

"How sad would it be if this mast broke off?" he asked, putting a hand on it. "Then I'd have no one to sing me Beliaggi's finest corruptions of the Corthian language."

"Hand off the mast, Haraan," Jasti growled back.

The fourteen-year-old indulged him. He thought, what were friends for, after all? You could do stupid things to anyone, but friends let you do those things without the threat of jail time. Mostly.

Having traversed Digio Prospect, Jasti dismounted next to his friend and signaled below to the third member of their group to climb up the cable. While she made her way up, he and Haraan squatted at the edge of the roof to examine the crowd below.

They saw the young and ambitious dressed in crisp wools and top hats. They saw aviators walk side by side with longshoremen and cobblers and deacons. They saw the wrinkled skepticals, impelled to the spectacle to herald its failure. Roving vendors hawked flapping and whizzing metallic baubles at the tops of their lungs. Fathers tucked wayward children at their sides in perpetual games of catch-and-escape.

"This is just as bad as when we had Helium Smack performing at the Ampha," said Jasti.

Haraan laughed. "Oh, Lady, that was fun. Watching that concert for free after finding the right roof to listen from?"

"Priceless."

"No better word for it!" Haraan's eye caught something down the road. He reached around his back for the bag strapped snugly over his shoulder and unbuckled one of its compartments. A hand-sized sketchbook and pencil slid out of the leather orifice.

"What is it?" Jasti asked.

Haraan pointed at the crowd in the direction they were coming from. A three-tiered fountain rose from the intersection of Digio and Meridia Prospects. On this fountain was a girl in a rippling dress who was leaning out to search something ahead of the throng.

"Real quick," Haraan muttered, putting pencil to paper. He scratched in a series of constructive outlines for the fountain and the girl (her hand level with her forehead as a visor). Next, quick indications of curves — the dress this way, same with her hair, the fountain curving away. He scrutinized her face for the shape of her nose, the vertex of her chin, hinting at form with shadows and blank space.

"Nice."

"I'm not done yet."

In her free hand, he crafted a small vortex of power, a projectile waiting for form and propulsion. He gave her a halo and two thin curves behind her shoulders, then extended their breadth with perpendicular, hooked lines — feathered wings. The fountain transformed into a beacon, light radiating from its apex.

Haraan offered up the sketch. "What do you think?"

Jasti paused in the manner of an appraiser, but wasn't convincing for a second. Failing this, he said, "Really, Haraan? To you, a cute girl is automatically an angel? Don't you think that's been done before? Come, man, be a little more original with your work."

"Fine," Haraan grunted, taking back his drawing. He scribbled in a couple more lines just as his other friend made it to the rooftop, and gave the new sketch to Jasti.

The cringe on his face suggested he was looking at that night's nightmare. "Haraan? Why does she have three faces?"

Haraan shrugged. "I thought you wanted originality."

"Give me that."

A hand snatched the sketchbook out of Jasti's grasp. Its owner studied the page for a second, then gave a snort of approval.

"She's gorgeous," she declared.

"Why thank you, Amina," said Haraan as she handed his sketchbook back. He put it back in its pocket and buckled it shut. "Come on. Let's keep going."

He stood up, then sighed. He had come this way with his friends several times before to watch the Aerial Guild stage exhibitions. Normal people took the Opal Line steamer along the North Arm to Aucus Battery Station, then hiked up zig-zagging Digio Prospect for two miles until they reached Airfield Caelius, seven hundred feet above sea level.

Striders cut straight up by crossing roofs.

From this roof alone, Talery Bay spread before Haraan like a colossal bowl: him on the slopes of the North Arm, the South Arm rising to his level across the water, and the eight Islands of concentrated civilization sitting at the bottom. To the east lay the Homestead Range and Karnadine's Access, the main artery linking the city to the rest of the mainland; to the west, the Ourobis Ocean waited, inscrutable and unassuming, and all the deadlier for it.

No wonder the Guild chose such an exposed place for their facilities, thought Haraan. For the other ten months of the year, when the feyfloods retreated to the ocean, the explorers had an incredible view of the city.

It was time to concentrate on getting to the Airfield. On the other side of the roof was a wall leading up to a second level, and the builders had been kind enough to anchor a brass pipe in the wall for climbing. Haraan checked his bag to make sure nothing would spill out. Satisfied, he took off at the pipe, preparing vertical momentum with large swings of his arms, and leaped.

Some pipes acted as condensers, and made for poor choices in handholds. This one, about as big around as Haraan's leg, was not — it did not scald his hands as he grabbed on. Just as before. He surmounted the pipe in seconds and waved his friends to come join him.

Still a quarter mile away and twenty stories above Haraan's head, the Guild's latest ornithopter waited to take off into the low afternoon sun.

***

The first manned flight on Sosara occurred on this autumn day in 917, a mere seventy-one years removed from the present day, when Geogo Hellers of Lents installed himself in a lightweight self-propelling frame and pedaled off a cliff. He was found a full mile distant from his starting point with his legs bent at unnatural angles, but he went on to make a full recovery.

The second man to fly, Aimes Caelius, a Corthenman, replicated Heller's feat a year later, minus the physical trauma.

The City Council of Talery Bay saw to it that Airfield Caelius could never be mistaken as second rate. Their first idea, passed by municipal referendum, was the construction of a spectator's embankment on the side of the airfield closest to the city. Those wishing to observe a Guild exhibition paid the price of admission to do so, or settled for a truncated view from behind the towering stands.

Airfield Caelius was the only one in the country that doubled as an entertainment venue.

With the Council's blessing, luxury hotels and boutiques sprung from the ground circling the Airfield, though none of them came close to matching its altitude. This district, the Golden Tenth, attracted the wealthy and the curious from all over Corth and its neighboring countries. The Golden Tenth's mission was simple: distract the tourists enough so the coin flowed from their hands to the city, and please them enough to warrant a return visit.

For his part, Haraan had his reservations against striding through the Golden Tenth.

"Let's take a left at Suzinnet," he said, gaining the next roof. "There's Iron prowling the roofs past here."

Amina came up behind him and arm-tackled him at shoulder height, using him as a post to hang off of while she looked ahead. She didn't have to do that on a flat surface, but attacking others was her way of showing she liked them. Haraan had learned to keep his balance around the likes of her.

"What's with them?" she demanded. "All we want to do is pass quickly through private property and watch something we're supposed to pay to see for free. Right?"

Haraan removed himself from her hold. "I don't think I could have put it any better," he said.

"This is a total steamkill," she joked. "Providence knows it's not like we'd get a better view from the west, what with the Guild shooting off that way and everything."

"Absolutely not."

"We'll have to settle. Come on, tons o'fun," said Amina, beckoning Jasti along.

Poor him, Haraan thought as he took off after his friends. Every time, it's a new nickname for him and his weight. This, he decided, was a definite upside to forgoing a girlfriend.

For several blocks, the gaps between the roofs along Suzinnet Road were manageable leaps, except for one: a small plot containing a local open-air market. This part always made Haraan's stomach do flips. The only way across the divide were three parallel pipes spaced far enough from each other to rule out a two-pipe crossing. Six inches was a generous estimate for the pipes' diameters, and though he had seen enough lumocines of burglars falling into awnings without injury, he doubted the stalls would support a hundred and twenty pounds if dropped from several stories up.

As Jasti hustled across, the pipe under his feet quaked a little more than before. Even though he'd choose a different pipe, Haraan couldn't expel those unpleasant flashes of anchors failing, and metal warping under his falling body.

Crossing quickly was always the best choice. It took him as long to get his first foot on the pipe as it took for him to traverse, stepstepstepstepstep. He lunged and tucked into a roll off the final step, felt the roof's reassuring solidity cradle his back, and tumbled upright in one motion.

Grinning, he dusted his clothes off and turned to admire his work -- and then he spotted pursuers.

He didn't know who any of the five were, personally, but no person took to the roofs if they weren't striders. As a community, striders respected each other and helped when they could -- luring Iron away from the younger ones to keep their records clean, or constructing rooftop ramps and bridges -- but it also had this fundamental creed.

Get to your destination.

With the exhibition drawing hundreds of spectators from outside Talery Bay, its residents surged to the North Arm in greater numbers. Striders were subject to this rush, too.

"Come on," Amina barked, grabbing his wrist. "Do you want to watch the aerobats or do you want to watch them take our spots?"

Of course! Haraan had gotten everyone to meet at Aucus Battery an hour before the exhibition started because there would be competition to nab the best views. He gave the other striders no more thoughts as he charged the next wall, grabbed Jasti's hand, and pulled himself to the top.

"Are we taking the windows?" he asked, referring to the thin ledges spanning the next building over. Even if they jmped across the gap between the buildings, crossing the ledges took precious upper body strength.

Jasti vetoed the idea as he pulled Amina up. "My fingers would kill me hanging on like that."

"All right, all right, boost me and Amina onto that roof, then we'll pull you up together."

The benefit of friends like Jasti, in addition to the threat his height and rugged longcoat provided (and looking scary worked for him when he needed to be), was that he was a ladder on feet. Cupping his hands together, he provided Haraan a step up, then launched him off.

He had enough momentum at the top to vault over the raised edge of the roof and land on his feet.

Seconds later, Amina was up there with him. They braced against the edge and reached down in unison as Jasti made his leap into space.

Haraan didn't even blink. His hand found Jasti's wrist and closed around it.

"We got you, we got you." It was a focusing mantra of sorts to Haraan -- though he cut Jasti's downward momentum,
gravity continued to pull against them.

Unfortunately for gravity, Haraan had Amina tugging with him. And he knew no fundamental force could hope to separate her from her beau.

Amina sucked in a fortifying breath, and expelled it in a blood-quickening "Raaaaah!"

A few seconds later, Haraan heard a woman screaming down below. He burst into laughter. Amina was never afraid of being loud, even if she drew attention to the six-foot-six hulk dangling from her arm fifty feet above the ground.

Now they had an audience. Though his artistic expertise covered mostly sketchbooks, and maybe a canvas now and then, Haraan knew enough about acting to know audiences deserved a show.

"Rrrrrr!" And just because he felt like it, he crossed his eyes as he pulled. Maybe someone down there would notice.

Inch by inch, Jasti rose through the air like a heavy spirit approaching a heaven with a two-person welcoming choir. Haraan wasn't completely pleased with the song selection, but he felt it hit the right notes of suspense for the crowd below. He hauled until Jasti's chest saddled the edge of the roof, and with a final tug, rolled him to safety.

When playing tug-of-war against gravity, a strider always won.

"Lady," huffed Haraan, helping his friend to his feet. "Listen to that applause." Intercepted by the corner of the building, the sound of clapping and whistles reached their ears like a coda.

"We'd better get moving, huh?"

"If we don't want Iron on our tails, yeah." This time, Haraan let the other two go on ahead. He peeked over his shoulder.

The five pursuers had disappeared.

***

"Auugh! We're too late!"

Amina's hands flew to her blue hair and squeezed. She, Haraan, and Jasti had arrived at the entrance to West Gharade Park and the spectators' blankets already began to overlap the others. What was once a verdant lawn was now a tapestry of bright colors smothered with people and picnic baskets.

Haraan's face set, and he strolled through the park's filigreed gates with grim determination. The park, a natural protrusion raised several stories above the rest of the North Arm on three sides, was about a mile long from tip to base and half that as wide. There had to be a spot somewhere in there no one had claimed yet.

Instead of continuing west toward the middle of the park, Haraan made his way toward the south cliff, the one opposite from Airfield Caelius. As he expected, the spectators had bunched heavily toward the north side. The ones closest to the edge were packed in so tightly they stretched the restraining chains running the perimeter of the park to their limits.

Hardly anyone would glance his way if he slipped under the south chains, dropping down to the ledge below. Most people didn't know about the secret tunnel connecting the north and south faces of the park.

When Haraan reached the granite slab hiding the tunnel's entrace, he said, "Jasti, a little help here?"

"Move." Jasti half-spoke to Haraan, and half to the rock. They both complied.

Back when the Guild first began hosting exhibitions, Talery Bay's striders had predicted the Guild's success and made preparations for the airfield they knew was coming. Working by lantern, they dug down through the guts of the earth, shoring up the tunnel with whatever happened to be nearby and unguarded: bits of scaffolding, stones, excess planks. Mercifully, a chain of electric lights drew power from a secret tap on the city's power lines, providing light down the tunnel's entire length.

Furthermore, it was quiet.

"You'd think you'd hear the people above walking around, or talking," Haraan whispered. "Or else you'd hear a steamer, or machinery. This is the quietest place in town."

"Why are you talking?" demanded Amina.

Haraan whirled on her, eyes bulging.

"Can it." Amina walked on, apparently undisturbed by self-contradiction.

Haraan ignored the barbs in her taunting. He knew she was more than happy to switch up her game if it meant getting into his head, and he wouldn't give her the satisfaction. He had had one time at the Archive when she snuck behind him and jumped on his back, all so he cried out and got in trouble with the librarian.

He still had to find a way to repay her for getting his pass revoked for a week.

The tunnel ended with the same way it had started: a concealed exit. Haraan heard muffled chatter on the other side. Of course there would be people down here, too. Hopefully, by the difficulty of finding and getting to such a secret place, there wouldn't be many. Jasti gripped the stone and heaved it aside.

Despite the lights in the tunnel, Haraan had to throw a hand across his eyes before the bright afternoon could claw them out. While his vision swirled with oiled darks and blinding flashes, he heard conversations going on all around him, and, far off, a swelling cheer.

"They're about to start!" a girl's voice said.

"Progit, I can't see anything from down here," some man said.

"Did anyone bring binoculars?" asked a third voice.

Haraan's sight adjusted, placing him within a small and crowded alcove in West Gharade Park's northern face. Most of the people here were older than him, but very few looked beyond thirty. Body fat struggled to make a tenth of their combined weight — in the world of striding, one couldn't waste energy transporting extra weight.

Haraan picked his way through the crowd as if he were stepping through a rose garden. offering apologies to the tag ends of leather overshirts and shoe tips. He expected the occasional glare that came his way for cutting in front, but there was a understanding among everyone present that no one would be cut off from their view.

Reaching the edge of the alcove, he consulted with his friends on which way to go.

"Left," said Amina, taking to the rocky slope before Haraan could voice agreement. He followed her as she climbed across; here and there on the north face were boulders doubling as benches, provided that one wanted to get to them. Most of the rocks sticking out from the grassy slope were already taken, but Haraan's eyes found the same unoccupied perch Amina was going after.

"Hey!"

The hail came from on high by a group of three, two girls, and one boy. Were they waving at him? Haraan recognized them from the Academy, but he hadn't spent much time with them.

"Oh, shbyk! Kaileen!" Amina's words broke through his confusion like a brick hurled at a flock of pigeons, complete with a fluttery feeling in his stomach. It wasn't an issue of height, or the effort it'd take to climb up there. He moved aside so Jasti went up behind his girlfriend.

"You should've told me you were coming here!" Kaileen exhorted once Amina had climbed close enough. She motioned her friends to move over for the three arrivals.

"I know," said Amina, taking her place next to the group. "If I'd known you were off for the weekend, I would've asked to go with you."

"I only found out after school, dewa shimalu o terisasen kaji..."

And then the rest of the conversation was lost to Haraan as the two girls switched into rapid-fire Kamanese. The most he understood about it didn't have anything to do with the language — having blue hair was some kind of custom for unmarried girls, apparently.

"Been doing all right, Jasti?" the boy in the other group asked, reaching around the girls with an extended fist.

"I'm hanging in there," he said, bumping the fist. "You?"

The other boy, Shasil, put his arm around the second girl, on the opposite end of where Haraan sat. "Kestrel and I are celebrating our six-months today."

"That's awesome."

"I know, right?"

"Yeah. You taking her out to dinner someplace?"

Shasil rubbed a finger across his upper lip in conspiration. "I was thinking about Hanni's."

"What?" Jasti rubbed the back of his head. "Sorry, but that's something you save for an anniversary, man. I'm sorry, Kestrel. I mean, it's a special occasion and you deserve a good place and all, but your boyfriend'll boil himself out thinking of a better place to go in half a year."

"It's fine," said the other girl, smiling. "We get along by not demanding too much of each other."

"Are you serious?" Jasti shoved Amina, getting her attention. "Stop demanding so much of me."

"You get what you signed up for, muscle-butt," she fired back before resuming her conversation with Kaileen.

A round of laughter.

"So," said Haraan, speaking for the first time since joining the other three, "did you guys have a good time getting here?"

"It was all right," said Shasil. "We decided to come here after seeing the Iron, you know?"

"Yeah. Going through the Golden Tenth would've been like... um." Haraan cringed. His metaphors had abandoned him, but he was in too deep to back out. "It would've been like going through a pasta machine, right? 'Cause they'd both be hard to squeeze through. And then you'd end up all noodly... and... stuff." The fluttering in his stomach grew worse.

Shasil smiled at him weakly. "No kidding." He turned back to Jasti. "So we passed by this one store on the way here — you like swords, right?"

"That's what they say."

"There was this huge blade in the window of some shop by Coverly Ridge Station, almost as tall as you."

"Get out."

While his friends chatted the minutes away, Haraan sat there, stuck between pulling out a sketchbook or not. He loved talking about drawing with other people, but those other people were discouragingly far and few in between. When passed some of his drawings, most people gave him sincere compliments, and a few had even cottoned onto his dream of joining the Phoenix Enclave, but deep down, he knew their words wouldn't affect the quality of his art in any significant way.

He wanted to spend more time out of his room, and though striding helped him with that a great deal, he went either with Jasti and Amina or by himself. Connecting with other people required having an interesting story to tell, and having interesting stories required knowing and being with other people.

Where did he come into that loop? He wasn't the type to get frustrated, but it seemed an answer to that question didn't arrive by thinking about it, which bothered him a little.

They weren't ignoring him on purpose. They just had more to talk about.

At least the view was a lot better from up here. They sat level with the airfield, which was about a mile and a half away. A curtained scaffold rose from the middle of the tarmac, hiding the Guild's feature attraction from view. Between the scaffolding and the spectator stands (a luxurious bank of seats for ten thousand, decked out in streamers, flags, and carved heraldic birds about to take wing) was a modest platform with red and gold trim, on top of which sat a group of important-looking people waiting for their turn at the podium.

One stood up and took his first.

"Laaadiees and geeentlemeeen! Weeelcome to Aiirrrfieeeld Caaaelius!"

Spectators across the North Arm responded with a heart-stopping cheer. Some of the strider groups on the park face whooped and hollered.

"You guys, you guys, they're starting," said Haraan, grateful for the interruption. The others stopped talking immediately and looked out to the airfield while the emcee continued.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, opening his arms, "in conjunction with the Talery Bay City Council and the Arcit County Mechanists, the Aerial Guild is pleased and extremely humbled to present this marvelous machine to the general public!

"Consider, ladies and gentlemen, the primeval mysteries of flight! Consider, that secret art known by the majestic eagle, the elegant heron, and the common bluebird, yea, even the base sparrow and the brainless pigeon, but denied to mankind! Consider, my friends, the blatant injustice of our worldly chains!"

We do better than most people, thought Haraan, referring to the striding community. But he's right. We weren't born with wings.

"But of all the creatures put on this world, who among them can claim the title of greatest from the dominion of man? Our ingenuity unwinds daily into nature's domain, stealing from her secrets most jealously cached! We have developed technologies to outrace the horse, retain warmth superior to any furred animal, feed whenever and whereever we so choose to do so! We breed out of leisure, not necessity!"

"Hey, hey," Jasti said, taken aback by the audacity of those assertions. "The animals still have something we'll never have: a school system without homework."

"And field trips every day," Shasin added.

"Now, ladies and gentlemen, we take from nature her final key to the kingdom in plain sight: the sky! The Aerial Guild is pleased to announce and present... the Cirrus!"

On the emcee's last words, the curtains behind him collapsed and revealed the machine within.

Haraan estimated half the city heard the resounding "Oh!" of delight from the Exhibition, and it'd be easy to understand why. The Guild's sentinel-moth-winged models had impressed Haraan last time, which had been half a year ago — but this time, the wings folded and tucked in like a tan and steel bird of prey. If it were up to him, he would want to fly as a raptor, not as an insect. The only detail he made out at this distance was the steel they'd used for the frame.

"And now our brave pilot walks confidently toward our machine!" said the emcee to a rising cheer. "Ladies and gentlemen! Captain! Cael! Tigacci!" He indicated a figure rising from his seat on the platform, who waved to the roaring audience as one used to the spotlight, and false modesty. Haraan recalled a poster of the pilot's face from the Bell Tower: a slender, ruddy man sporting a leather aviator's cap, goggles, and a handlebar mustache.

"If only he weren't over forty," mused Kaileen, her voice floaty.

For a moment, Haraan played with the idea of joining the Guild — guaranteed adventure with intellectual explorers, a shining reputation, setting out to broaden mankind's glowing horizon. The smallest mention of the Guild incited such optimism and conversation that the public had a term to refer to the members of that organization: heroes.

Each and every one of them, a hero. Would it be so bad to be called one?

The emcee extended his arms out to the audience, palms down, and lowered them. The only sound Haraan heard after the emcee returned to his seat was a far-off steamer, chugging over its rails indifferent to the unveiling of a flying machine. His eyes remained on the pilot inside the ornithopter, the goggles twinkling in the sun every now and then.

The first basso cough of the ornithopter's engine echoed through the airfield, followed by a second and third in quick succession. Black smoke burst from the rear exhaust.

Then the wings snapped open, and Haraan heard the impressive crack of the opened fabric moments later. As the engine settled into a low thrum, the wheels underneath the open frame began to roll.

The ornithopter moved.

The ornithopter retreated to the east end of the airfield, and turned around.

The ornithopter began to beat its wings, slowly at first, and started its takeoff.

The ornithopter beat its wings faster, halfway across the tarmac.

The ornithopter reached the end of its runway, wings blurring!

The runway ended with a one-hundred-yard drop.



"Pull out, pull out." Haraan's fists were clenched.



The ornithopter fell slowly, Haraan's conception of time dilated with adrenaline.



A moment passed before he realized the ornithopter was falling even slower every second.



He knew it -- this was -- of course! The front!

"Yes!"

The ornithopter leveled out.

The ornithopter was flying!

It shot back the way it came, corkscrewing while it gained altitude, until it broke the edge of the cliff and came once more into view of the spectator stands.

Haraan joined everyone else in the northern half of the city in leaping to his feet and hollering at the top of his lungs for the little machine writing in smoke man's triumph over the sky.

heritage - one (part two)

Mam Ghieri was scary enough without a thunderbolt in the background, but the feyflood provided one close enough to rattle the inch-thick windows in their frames.

Haraan's throat balked. He had enough sense to not play innocent ("What do you mean?"), or Lady forbid, lie ("No."). Owning up was an equally terrible idea, but every second he spent thinking was a second spent silent, and that was bad, too.

He had to make her laugh. He couldn't remember anyone else trying that, ever, probably because they were too slow.

"Yes, Mam," he said, sitting upright. "Your lectures are so full of interesting information I thought it'd be faster to put my head down and let your words flow through my ears onto the paper. Y'know, like osmosis."

Silence. Even the rain let up, as if the sky itself wondered at his response. Those who hadn't turned around to look at him before did so then. More of them, thankfully, looked amazed at how he had turned such a hopeless situation around than those who looked livid enough to impersonate beets. There was that one girl in the corner especially, but her condition always made her look like that.

A second later, laughter erupted from the front of the room. All eyes turned to Mam Ghieri. She had thrown her head back at an exaggerated angle, and her laughter registered high, chilling, and completely genuine, which was much scarier than if she had faked it.

To say Haraan suddenly felt foolish wouldn't be enough. Wordsmiths would have to invent a new word for that kind of blunder when you are confronted with options, good and bad, and you pick the one that plunges so hard below the worst that the universe decides you are a threat to existence and ends you.

"I love it," Mam Ghieri raved, now looking straight at Haraan. "I love a good comedian. You may not think it, for I've earned my reputation here at Altina. No student of mine has ever tried what you have tried today, because they all realized I have a way of dealing with jokers before they opened their mouths." Smiling maliciously, she sauntered up the aisle to his desk, step by deliberately agonizing step.

"You may have realized that, too." Step.

"And yet, you dared." Step.

"You dared to try." Step.

"And I laughed." Step.

"But I didn't laugh because you made me." Step.

"I laughed because I can deal with you." Step.

"Oh, yes. You will be made an example of." Step.

Mam Ghieri towered above Haraan's desk. "On your feet," she commanded.

Haraan complied.

"What are you looking at? Eyes up here, funny man."

With a jolt, Haraan realized he'd been staring at her chest. He hadn't been paying attention, but that didn't matter to the rest of the class. More than a few of them let out suggestive _ooooohs_ and whistles. Haraan tilted his head up.

Mam Ghieri brushed aside a dislodged sprig of her hair, so nothing got between her eyes and his. "Come up front," she said.

The walk was both too long for him to ignore the grins coming in at him from all sides (wolves! Each and every one of them, expecting his hilarious demise at the alpha's bite!), and too short to postpone what came next. Mam Ghieri opened a drawer in her desk and reached in.

She pulled out a baby pink towel with a hood sewn on one corner. To Haraan's horror, the hood had whiskers, a nose, googly eyes, and long, floppy ears.

"Mr. Siarke, do you know who this is?" asked Mam Ghieri over the wild applause and cheers coming from the other students.

"That is Mama Pipsy Bun-Bun," he moaned, tragically certain where this was heading.

"He knows!" Mam Ghieri's arms flew into the air with celebration Haraan had no hope of being faked. She continued, "My girls love the Bun-Bun Family. We go to watch them when they visit Talery Bay every month."

Without blinking, she forced the Mama Pipsy Bun-Bun towel down on Haraan's head. Another cheer went up from the other students, Jasti being among the loudest.

"I think it fits him, don't you think?" Mam Ghieri's question received very enthusiatic and positive responses.

She reached into her drawer again and pulled out a large envelope. A picture of several well-dressed bunnies waved from their couch on the front. "I'll also have you know, Mr. Siarke, that I have a copy of their first record. I believe we've all heard this one before." More cheering. "Do you know the Bun-Bun Family theme, Mr. Siarke?" she asked him.

Haraan once loved the Bun-Bun Family, back when he had been two. And yet the words came crawling back to him like zombies, zombies with paws and fluffy fur, and with the words returned the hopping, hopping melody. "I do," he said.

"Are you beginning to understand what's going on here?"

"... Yes."

"I've been wanting to do this for a very long time." Mam Ghieri waltzed over to the phonograph, the song already playing in her mind from the look of it. She placed the vinyl disk on the turntable, placed the stylus, and started the machine. While the first scratching noises echoed out from the bell, the classroom door opened, revealing other students who were sent from adjacent rooms to investigate the riot in Mam Ghieri's class.

Haraan's gaze fixed on one girl in particular before averting his head, but not before it was too late. She pointed at him with an evil grin on her face, let out a single "Ha!" and sprinted off. Amina was his friend, but he would have to reconsider that after she came back with the rest of her class.

The opening bars of the Bun-Bun Family's theme song featured the familiar bouncing flute melody, underscored with warm guitar chords. Haraan couldn't suppress a loud groan.

"Sing like you mean it, Pipsy," exclaimed Mam Ghieri.

Papa Robsy Bun-Bun's husky voice warbled the first lines of the song.

Hey! (Hey!) What a wonderful day...

Mam Ghieri yanked the stylus off the record. "You have to sing the whole thing, not just Pipsy's part," she protested. "And why aren't you hopping? Hop to it!" She started the record again.

_Anything but that,_ Haraan thought, but as the music began anew, he had no choice. Arms drawn to his chest, he started hopping around the room. Oh no, they were pulling out their cameras.

He sang, with some of the others chiming in.

Hey! (Hey!) What a wonderful day
The sun's in the sky,
There's birds flyin' by
Let's listen to what they say

They say
Hey! (Hey!) The wind is goin' our way
Follow us where we fly
To the Bun-Buns, that's why
There we will learn and play...

Well, you get the picture.

After his second lap around the class, which kept filling with camera-wielding students, Haraan thought about stopping altogether, first by cutting the record, then removing the towel and stamping back to his seat. Show Mam Ghieri she wouldn't have the final say, not after exposing himself to the ridicule of his peers.

They studied the other. Mam Ghieri nodded her head in time with his singing, which was not slam star material, but held pitches well enough, and her fingers tapped the side of her desk disarmingly. She withheld her words, unusual.

He had her. He approached the phonograph, raising his hand as added theater to his stride —

And felt the lightning twitch of recognition freeze him in the moment.

Mam Ghieri would allow him to cut the record. She hid that well; not a line on her face gave away her intention. Haraan's mind had taken an intuitive leap as complex as one leaping off the Carillion onto a cirrus cloud. He followed that leap as it trailed consequences — he saw a violent scourging with black whips, a deluge of textbooks, the very far back desk in the corner, the only one not to face in front, with his name engraved on the backrest.

Metaphors, all of them, with one message: Rebel at your own peril.

The moment passed, the next line spilled from his lips. He understood the best course of action. The final verse began with the whole family chorusing in harmony, and his hops got hoppier, his voice rose higher, with more conviction, the Mama towel took over him until he _was_ Mama Bun-Bun herself, belting out a fierce falsetto few recording studios expected to find in a nursery song. The classroom was a forgotten thing; the students became trees in the Golden Forest; desks were stones for stomping on. From far away came a different sound from the one before. Cheers emerged from laughter emerged from taunts and catcalls.

It was told a hundred kids burst into applause before the Bun-Bun Family Theme ended. Haraan dropped out of his avatar trance on top of Mam Ghieri's desk, but the part of him that cared about the trouble he was in was buried under the rest of him that had never taken a bow in front of so many people.

That was still no reason to keep wearing Mama Bun-Bun around. He returned the towel to Mam Ghieri's proffered hand and stepped off of her desk. He wasn't sure whether to feel relieved or horrified because she wore an inscrutable smile. He motioned her to bring her ear close.

"Look, I'm sorry I slept in class today," he said. "It won't happen again."

"It had better not," she said, backing away. "Tonight, you can go home and write me a three-hundred word essay over the events of the Brenner expedition."

Haraan's euphoria dropped like an iron bar on a hard floor. No, do not open your mouth, do _not_ open it.

"We were all very much entertained by your performance just now," she continued, to another round of cheers and camera clicks, "but that was only a performance. This assignment will be your penance. Turn it into me tomorrow or it's your ass. Do a good job on it —"

"Or it's my ass," he finished.

"Watch your language. Now back to your seat. And back to your classes, all of you, show's over."

Haraan trudged back to his seat. On the way, however, he couldn't ignore the congratulatory looks on everyone's faces, even managing a nod from the beet-faced girl.

Why shouldn't they congratulate him? he thought once he got back at his desk. He tapped Jasti's fist with his own in a quiet gesture of acknowledgment. He had, after all, just made history.

heritage - one (part one)

Haraan knew he slept in Mam Ghieri's class at his own peril. Nothing about her trimmed blond hair or cheery summer blouses betrayed any hint of the ultimate doom for the miscreant unfortunate enough to misbehave in her class. The upperclassmen's favorite start-of-year activity was informing the first-tiers of her uncanny ability to reduce a student to tears inside of two weeks.

Athes Kamael did just that on the first day for forgetting to bring his textbook to class. He met justice at the hands of Mam Ghieri's stapler and the wall.

Haraan didn't want to be like poor Athes, who, even in the back row, found a way to move his desk another foot from the blackboard and the teacher in front of it. The desk hadn't been bolted down properly, but still...

The bad end of a pencil for poking someone in soft spots found its way just behind and below Haraan's ear. It was all he could do to not scream at the top of his lungs, but his head did fly off the crook of his elbow and turn, a little violently, at his assailant.

His brown eyes flashed a look that said, Jasti, when we get out of this class I will murder you.

His friend returned a smile that said, At least you're awake.

He knew it wouldn't last. He listened to the words coming out of Mam Ghieri's mouth and began writing in his notes again. From their frames above the blackboard, the portraits of every former president of Corth glared at him, as if daring him to drop his head again.

He scrutinized the projection screen and struggled to connect the ships and icebergs in the picture with the lecture.

"After Nordusk's expedition didn't go well, Gaff set out with a fleet of ten double-hulls in 736, but that wasn't enough to save his expedition, either," said the National History teacher, placing the next slide in the projector. This one featured a dreadnought cracked in half like a candy bar, with sailor filling spilling out of its guts. Instead of sinking in the middle, however, it sank at the ends, like something had come up from underneath.

Checking every word as he wrote it, Haraan put down "Gaff went gravy in 736." He read it after he finished it, decided he liked it, then read it again and got hung up on "gravy." Why did he put that there? He had meant "filling".

Oh, no. Lady, no.

The edges of his vision began to blur. All right, staying up until four the previous night working on that drawing for the Exhibition wasn't the brightest move, but he wanted to get it out of the way so he had more time for the final piece they wanted. He should have known better than thinking a ten-minute nap during lunch could carry him the rest of the day, but still!

He pulled on his hair, taking a few black strands between each finger, then went to pull it again, and stopped. Was there no way to wake himself up without getting pain involved? He could ask to go to the drop and splash his face there, but that required an effort to get out of his seat, first.

It was also unwise to request the hall pass while Mam Ghieri teached. She made you do squats if you ever got the nerve. Very slow squats, in front of the class. There were no prizes for guessing whose hall pass, a wooden block painted Altina Academy's eye-blinding orange and gold, looked the nicest sitting next to the blackboard for all to see.

Maybe he could put his head down while she wasn't looking. One second. Only one second. Before she turned away, though, he had to stay awake. He listened so hard he swore his ears reached out to give her a kiss.

Cats poured out of Jasti's desk. He didn't seem to mind.

Haraan heard words coming in his ear, and blocked them from going out the other one. "Brenner," he heard, putting the name in his notes, then finishing it with a squiggly line for whatever the rest of the sentence was. He'd know what it was when it came time to study for the Exam.

That was enough for today. Like a fatal meteor, Haraan's head plowed back into his sleeve.

First, there was darkness, and he was only a cloud of warmth mixed into the warm background. A small part of him remained connected to the classroom and told him something hard and cold, a binder ring, pressed against his ear, but he ignored it. He only wanted to drift. Then, he dissipated, and didn't want anything at all.

A mountain rose from the abyss, pierced his center point, and then Haraan fouund himself rudely thrown together again, fully aware, several hundred feet above its zenith. Except, looking down, the mountain lacked something important — a crater sprawled where the proud summit should have stood. Through the innards of the crater ran veins of shifting orange, and the comfortable, ubiquitous warmth became a directed blast from below.

_Not a mountain,_ Haraan concluded. _It's a volcano._

He liked to think he was a logical person. Dream logic told him it was okay to investigate the volcano instead of finding another place where he wouldn't boil alive. It also told him not to worry about the lack of solid surfaces beneath his feet. A school of fish with glowing yellow tips passed underneath, and if they could breathe here, why couldn't he?

He inhaled a lungful of water and enjoyed it.

The right side of his vision lurched. His temple demanded to be let through his skull.

Concavity.

Fierce heat smothered every inch of him, almost like being crushed and boiled alive at the same time. Jets of superheated water erupted from the bottom of the caldera, now just a few feet away. The sun could tattoo the Inner Cerusian Desert for a month and would come nowhere close to the temperature down here.

His skin, however, refused to peel, and only the fact of it all being a dream kept the pain to manageable levels. As far as he knew, dying of heatstroke in water didn't happen anywhere except in a kitchen, if you happened to be seafood.

A deep rumble went off a foot from his left ear.

Haraan acted like he hadn't been startled and did a poor job of it. This close, he could only make out a pair of huge, dark, and scaly nostrils.

They sniffed him. Loudly.

Haraan flung himself back, back, past the point where he could make out the entire head. Even without the horns growing from the back of its skull, its head was taller than he was. Granted, dignity didn't come easily to Haraan, being five-foot-three at fourteen years of age, but this dragon here was large enough to terrify him.

Its ear frills stood on end, alert. The gesture had a simple meaning, meaningful to anything which possessed a neuron cluster: _You do not belong here._

Haraan fought to keep his pulse under control. Dragons could smell fear — they enjoyed a whiff to go with breakfast, obviously.

Maybe three hundred years ago, this dragon was young enough to be caught near shore and put on the menu for the epicures and the rich. Now, he suspected it weighed as much as the specialized vessels that caught young dragons for the table. The rocky-looking spikes bristling from its neck down its back to its tail helped. Its tail fluke looked like it could start a storm surge with one pass; a swipe from one of its four flippers could punt a man into orbit.

He was pleased at coming up with that last bit, and hoped it wasn't true.

More gazes fell on him like layers of dust — imperceptible until they suddenly smothered him. Most of the newcomers were shaped like his discoverer; built hardy for the harsh conditions of the caldera, while others were more sinuous, flaunted more frills, colors, and patterns, and didn't look as comfortable in volcanic water. Comments began to float all around Haraan.

"Look at him. Really, look."

"Don't provoke him."

"He's not going to last very long."

The voices sounded familiar, not the least because they were in Corthan (and really, would he go through the trouble of translating his own dream?). He closed his eyes and tried to place them.

His classmates? He had discarded a hundred possibilities in seconds before reaching that one, and suddenly the voices began to click in — every other dragon except the first floated corresponding to the desk layout in Mam Ghieri's class — the dragons behind him were silent, as no one sat behind the last row.

"Mr. Siarke," said a voice behind the dragons. This set off an "oh shbyk" vibe so strong Haraan almost bolted upright from his desk. Instead, he remained there at the bottom of the caldera, while the other dragons began to look and shuffle among themselves, suddenly at a loss at what to do.

Except one. One Haraan hadn't noticed because it floated in front of him, but hadn't spoken. He noticed it because no other dragon had the same pattern: black on top and white below, and the two tones swirled around each other three times down the length of its body. It was also a small dragon, a whelp, practically, but the look it gave Haraan told him it knew what it was doing. Haraan recovered and started to follow it to a safer place when the voice struck again.

"Mr. Siarke!"

The world wrapped itself into an ice cream cone on a point millions of miles away, trapping him in a crush of dragonflesh for one unbearable, unavoidable instant. He caught one last glimpse of the whelp looking back at him, a sympathetic look on its face, before everything collapsed into darkness.

A fierce tingle shot through his lower arm. He lifted his head and the tingle became a blaze, but he stopped caring when he saw almost every pair of eyes in the class stare at him. Mam Ghieri's yardstick trained between his eyes from the front of the classroom.

"Did you just do what I think you did?"