Chapter 3

Bina had never seen Renko run so fast. She’d always had the build of a could’ve-been track star, but a general distaste for organization and teamwork had kept her mostly out of sports. Now, watching her friend sprint off through the grass and mud had her wondering if she led some secret moonlit life as a savannah predator.

What surprised her even more was how closely she kept up.

Bina’s legs were much shorter, and her damp hair adhered to her like a weight vest slathered in glue, but as she chased after Renko, wild and panting, she hardly felt her feet touch the ground.

They burst in through the glass doors, stared wildly into opaque darkness.

“Mom—!

Lightning. The dramatic kind that cuts a room up into bright angles and void, and always illuminates the most important aspects of a scene, but only in silhouette.

Bina had trouble parsing what she saw in the flash. Rain sluicing in from the hole in the ceiling, furniture overturned, a night sky of glass shards twinkling on the ground. It was what rooms looked like after a grenade makeover.

On the ground she saw two oddly splayed shadows, and though she knew somewhere in the back of her mind what they were meant to be, that pesky forebrain threw its hands up in front of her eyes, trying desperately to remind her that she had never seen a dead body before. Unfortunately, the details of their faces were captured perfectly in the lightning.

Grandpa looked like he did when he took a nap in his recliner. Peaceful, rested, with his lips tugged into a slightly waggish smirk.

Miss Hurane was less composed. She looked like she’d been thrown rudely onto the ground. Her eyes were half open, her hair strewn about her like a shredded veil. Beside her, just out of reach, lay a long sword still in its sheath.

But what kept them at the threshold was not the sight of their dead family, rather it was the presence of an unfamiliar, indistinguishable third guest. The lightning was a little less revealing with this one, the shadows a little more possessive. It stood hunched over miss Hurane, wicked claws aglint. Short, perhaps Bina’s size, with skin the color of bleached bones and eyes like neon violet beacons.

When the flash ended, those eyes still glowed, watching them. Bina felt a cold deeper than rain chills.

The intruder cackled gleefully. A pair of wings so black they punched holes in the darkness flapped out from its back with a crepitating snap. It launched at them in a rush of shadows and vengeful giggling, bowling them over as it flew off into the rain.

They sat dumbly, Bina might have remained there until she grew roots. If she wasn’t so allergic to the outdoors, she thought being a plant might not be so bad. Plants didn’t worry about anchors falling from the sky, even if it crushed them, and they certainly didn’t come home to find their family dead in their friend’s living room. They just soaked in the sun, and had the occasional rendezvous with a bumblebee.

“Mom!”

Renko’s shouting reminded her she was people, not plant. She had a bleary head, a pounding heart, and two legs she used to propel her in a wobbly dash to the body of her grandpa.

Bina didn’t know anything about CPR. She didn’t know how to check a pulse, or what pupil miosis meant. But she did know that he wasn’t breathing, and even with her thoughts moving through sludge, she knew that generally speaking, you had to breathe to be alive.

It wasn’t fair, he didn’t even look dead, really. If he’d been in a chair instead of on the ground she’d have thought he was sleeping. There wasn’t a wound on him as far as she could tell. No blood, no gore. He had one hand resting gently over his heart, and in the other he clutched his pipe.

Her hands trembled. Her eyes grew hot. Was she crying? It was hard to tell from the rainwater, but she ought to have been. You were supposed to cry when people died, and scream, and get terribly angry. It was a very active process. Instead the sadness seemed to be happening all on its own without any regard for her.

Renko had it right though. Tears spilled from her eyes, her body shook with angry purpose, and she let loose the sort of scream that could only be born from adolescent fury. She was always much better with emotions. Bina could do the happiness well enough, but she always fumbled over fear, and anger did funny things to people that she wasn’t built for.

Case in point: Renko went contemplatively still for a moment, like a spring pressed down by a finger, then in a burst of motion she grabbed the sword and made for the back doors. Bina could not on her grumpiest day have come to such a decision. All getting angry ever did for her was make her cry.

“Renko!” she shouted, staring at her friend like she’d gone off-script, and wilting when those furious eyes turned to her. “W-we…” she swallowed. “We should…call the police. O-or an ambulance. Or—”

“That freak just killed my mom,” was all she said, and then she was dashing out into the rain.

Fair enough. That was probably the right reaction, anyway. When a mysterious flying shadow killed your loved ones, you were supposed to do something. Did it make her a bad granddaughter that she was still sat there? Her body felt like cold lead, and there was within her a sorrowful indignance that she could not whip into rage even though she tried.

What did spark within her however, was worry. Not for herself, not for the dearly departed, but the viciously present.

A monster had just swept into their lives, and Renko had gone out after it. Alone.

Bina was at the door before she even realized she was on her feet. In her hand she held her grandfather’s pipe, which was odd because she was certain he’d been clutching it in a literal death grip only moments ago. But no, there it was, as if she’d had it the whole time.

She looked back at him lying there, half expecting to see an eye crack open and wink at her.

No sign of life. Just a still body. And that mischievous smirk.

Bina stuffed the pipe into her pocket, gave herself no more time to think, and ran out.

The storm was in full tilt now. Wind ripped through the village, tearing shingles off roofs, making the trees bow and scattering all manner of brittle plastic furniture. Finger-sized streaks of rain pelted her from all directions. If it weren’t for the muddy earth suctioning her steps, a strong gust might have carried her away.

Lightning struck somewhere on the distant mountain, and in that flash she glimpsed a shape wind its way up the great chain and vanish into the clouds. When she reached the anchor’s base however, she despaired to find herself alone.

“Renko!” she shouted, but her lungs hadn’t taken to the humid air, and her words came out as a gargle that the wind quickly swept away.

Then, above, grunting.

Bina peeked up into the rain and saw Renko, twenty or so feet off the ground, climbing the gargantuan links like some oblong ladder with the sword strapped to her belt.

Bina swallowed a deep breath. “Renni!” she shouted again, and this time she cupped her hands so the wind couldn’t muzzle her. “Stop!”

To her surprise, she did. Just long enough to yell, “Shut up!”

A little uncalled for, Bina thought.

“We should wait! Call the…” well, who were you supposed to call in a situation like this? “Someone!” she finished lamely.

“Go home!” Renko shouted.

“You’re gonna get hurt!”

“Not as much as I’m gonna do the hurting!”

She kept climbing. Madness. Pure, unfiltered madness.

“It’s too high! The air’s too thin! You’ll freeze, or—or suffocate! You can’t just climb into the sky!”

“Watch me!”

“Renni!” But it was futile. Bina couldn’t believe it, and as she watched Renko pull herself up another link, she began to think that she ought to give anger a try.

Normally Renko’s stubbornness sort of washed over her, like when someone flushed the toilet while you were in the shower and the water would go cold. A little annoying, a little bracing, but then it was over.

Except it wasn’t over. The wind was cold, the rain was cold, she was cold.

And darn it, she was just a little bit mad, maybe.

“Renko Hurane!” she shouted, as loudly and as firmly as she’d ever shouted anything. “If you don’t come back down here right now, I’ll…I’ll—”

“You’ll go home!”

Well, she was absolutely not going to do that, and almost entirely because she was told to. Was this what being difficult was like? People often praised her for how well-mannered she was—especially as a comparison to Renko, which tended to sour the compliment for her—except for grandpa, who always talked like one day all that reason would melt off her like fat in the fire.

She would have to admit, there was a certain satisfaction in it.

Bina took a few bold puffs from her inhaler, then grabbed hold of the chain and hoisted herself up. She made it one whole link before she realized that stubbornness, while gratifying, did not miraculously add fifteen pounds of muscle to her body. Or cure her rebellious fear of heights.

Ridiculous. It struck her all at once. How ridiculous. She couldn’t climb this thing, not in a million years, not ten feet and not ten thousand. Renko couldn’t either, it would just take her a little longer to understand, and she had a capability that Bina didn’t to climb back down once it donned on her just how ridiculous this all was.

Bina would do what she was told, because that’s what she was good at. She would go back to the house, and call the police, and the hospital, and wait for the grief to hit her so she could mourn properly, like how people were supposed to.

She let go of the chain and stepped back—

Onto nothing.

Her foot hit open air and she realized, just as her stomach flew up into her gut and all her weight fell backwards, that the great metal base at the end of this chain was an anchor, and now it was aweigh. Several feet off the ground.

And rising.

With an undignified shriek, Bina lurched forward just in time to loop her arms through one of the concentric rings that comprised the anchor’s shape. It dug uncomfortably into her elbows, and she could feel immediately that her hold was not very stable.

Between the wind and rain and her own weight dangling, she was going to slip.

Naturally, because fear is a fiery bull in a dynamite China shop, she looked down.

Thirty feet now. Maybe. Bina wasn’t so good at measuring distances beyond the very low threshold of ‘makes me dizzy.’

Drop, she thought. You might live if you let go.

A reasonable argument. Broken legs and some bad bruising would suck, but it was also better than dying. If she were on the ground looking up, she would probably scream at herself to do the same thing.

Counterpoint: falling is scary.

As the ground vanished into a rainy haze, Bina held on tight. Or she tried her very best. But the anchor rose higher, and the air grew colder, and the wind lashed not only at her, but at the chain too.

It shuddered and wobbled. The vibrations that rattled down the links hit the base like small earthquakes.

Her chest felt sudden smaller, like her bones were squeezing everything in. Her arms went jelly. Quickly, the looped hold she had on the outermost ring was jostled free.

“No!”

She grabbed the lip, but it was too thick to get her hands around. Her fingers crimped along the edge, so tenuous she could feel the rainwater slipping between her fingertips and the metal.

Another spasm through the chain, so slow and deliberate she could have tracked it through each link. Her breath hitched, her heart beat so fast she’d have needed three legs to man the kick drums.

The anchor lurched, her fingers slid free.

Rabbits could die from fear. She remembered hearing that once. If you chased them hard enough, long enough, or maybe if you just shouted boo! with enough lethal intent, their little hearts would simply stop.

Bina screamed. Maybe if she was lucky, she’d pull a rabbit before she hit the ground.

No such luck.

A hand closed around her wrist, tight as a vice and strong like it was bolted onto the frame.

Renko.