Chapter 4

Renko Hurane had made many questionable decisions in her life, and as a rule she tried not to regret any of them. If you threw a stone into a crowd of those decisions, you would invariably strike one that was at best, iffy, and at otherwise, pretty bad. But if you somehow managed to hit her decision to drop fifteen feet onto a metal grate, in the middle of a biblical storm, to save her friend from falling into a closed-casket funeral, shockingly, too all’s surprise but her own, you would not score a point. It was, universally, a good call. Well done, Renko.

It still sucked.

The rings dug into her ribs, the wind was turning her lips blue, and she was almost certain that she had dislocated her shoulder. Most of the time Bina felt like she was made of bird bones and paper, but with her clothes drenched and a sky’s worth of open air under her feet, she was suddenly more like a proper person. Or a dumbbell.

Renko hadn’t lifted weights since she was kicked off the basketball team in fifth grade.

“Renni!” Bina squealed, trying to reach up for a more stable hold. The wriggling sent water streaming down to slicken Renko's grip.

“Stop…moving…” she grunted.

To her credit, Bina listened. She was terrified, that was clear as day, but adrenaline was a powerful equalizer. Or so she was told. Renko had read the tabloid phenomena; mothers lifting cars off their children, mugging victims running like Olympians even after they’d been stabbed.

She was waiting for it now. Waiting for whatever chemical processes she’d slept through learning about to kick in and grant her the herculean strength she needed.

It didn’t come.

What did come was the cold, and the thinning of the air shortening her breath. Her shoulder morphed from a joint into a locus of pain, a little storm cloud of its own sending bolts of lightning racing down her arm.

Her fingers were trembling, growing numb.

“You gotta…” her throat colluded with her shriveling lungs to make her voice as pathetic as possible. “You just…”

Bina remained obediently still. Wide eyes stared up at her, little minnows of faith swimming in pools of terror. It was always there when she looked at her. A whole lifetime of bad decisions, but she could never seem to shake Bina's trust.

She should have trusted her before. Should have gone home and waited like she was told. Renko wanted to be angry, but she couldn’t muster it. She could almost always muster it.

Her hand slipped up Bina’s wrist, squeezed tighter around her palm. Still she didn’t struggle. The weight deepened, the heat in Renko’s shoulder made her eyes water.

The clouds thinned around them, but the wind and rain kept batting at them like playful cats. The world below was dark. She couldn’t see roads, couldn’t see cars, couldn’t see the distant lights that teased towns too far to reach. Just the shadowy impressions of countryside topography.

Renko hardly noticed. Black spots crawled in from her periphery. The shooting pains in her arm were fading to twitches and tingles. It was getting harder to breathe, harder to think, except for one thought, stubbornly pounding against her skull like it wanted to be anywhere else:

Her mom was dead, the old man was dead, and soon her grip would slip and then the last person in the whole stupid world that mattered to her would die too.

“I-I…” Bina’s words crawled through chattering teeth. “I’m s-sorry…I ye…yelled.”

Renko wheezed, it was just about all she could manage. She didn’t need to speak anyway, didn’t need to breathe, or see. Every ounce of energy she had she threw into holding on.

“R-Renni. Not…y-you’re fuh…fault.”

Little jerk, Renko thought. Bina was good at that, at accidentally pushing buttons she didn’t know were there. And Renko, who, despite what the gossip would imply, really did try her best not to get angry so much, was herself a veritable space age control board. An aviator’s nightmare of buttons and switches and clickers that all, invariably, made her mad when touched.

Like a toddler running their hand down an elevator panel, Bina hit them all.

Renko’s eyes snapped open, tiny strands of ice crackled off her lashes. The fury she leveled down at Bina was perhaps misplaced, but it was also effective. The burning in her arm ebbed through her, not as pain, but potential. The volatile warmth of tossing oil onto a fire. Every last muscle in her body coiled with sudden, angry purpose.

“Shut…”

She sucked in air through gritted teeth. Filled her lungs to bursting, and screamed.

“Up!”

A spring sprung. Strength unlike anything she’d ever felt exploded through her and she wrenched with her whole body. She felt like a giant wielding a feather, or a feather throwing a giant. It was powerful, it was exhilarating.

It was entirely too much to lift a girl who weighed about 90lbs soaking wet.

Bina flew. Quite literally. As soon as Renko got her above her head, her grip slipped and Bina kept going. Up, and up, and swallowed by the cloudy fog above, too breathless herself to even shout out her surprise.

Renko’s heart skipped straight from elation to oh shit. Her eyes went out, waiting with dread to see a Bina-shaped shadow go plummeting into the distance.

Instead, the chain jangled, and she looked up to see her friend clinging to the links for dear life.

The relief and confusion were mutual. And brief.

Bina scooted herself down to the anchor’s base, one arm slung through the link, another hand clutching desperately onto Renko. She shivered with the intensity of a chihuahua, and like a chihuahua, it wasn’t necessarily because she was cold. Actually, she wasn’t cold at all.

Despite the fact that they were soaking wet and beleaguered by the windy altitude, Bina was quite warm. So warm that there was steam wafting off her skin. Renko’s hand recoiled on instinct, and she took a moment to wrestle aside her panic and actually look at her.

Something wasn’t quite right.

Mostly, she looked the same, except for her hair, which was now the sort of red you see on candied cherries or cherry candy, and her eyes, which had lost their banal color and were now filled with, yes, that was fire, or anyway it looked and moved enough like fire.

“Bina—”

“Renni—”

“Your—”

“You’re purple!”

Every thought in her mind aside from, ‘I’m what?’ was instantly and uncritically jettisoned.

Bina wasn’t lying. She wasn’t even exaggerating. Renko stared down at her hands, and while she hoped to see something explicable like a giant bruise or cartoonishly severe frostbite, instead she found a gentle, pleasant shade of lilac. She checked up her sleeves, down her shirt, she peeled up her pantlegs. Purple, purple, purple.

Bina yelped. Renko started so badly the anchor shook.

“What?”

“Horns!” Bina said, and poked what should have been the empty air above her head.

Renko reached up and found two stubby, stoney horns had sprouted from her head like bamboo shoots.

“Whaaat the shit.”

“Renni!”

Renko braced herself for another shocking mutation she hadn’t noticed. Instead she found Bina staring at her own hair.

“I’m red!”

“I’m purple!”

Bina glanced around like she expected an explanation from the clouds. Bad luck for her, the clouds weren't in the mood; they'd almost all gone by now, the rain with them. Even the wind was settling. It would have boggled the mind how such a fierce storm had all but evaporated so quickly, were the minds present not preoccupied with a more concerning detail.

No, not the change in palettes. Something somehow more obvious. That awareness of space, and the looming feeling that comes from being surrounded by shadow in the middle of the day.

They had their realizations separately.

Bina shut her eyes because she feared if she kept them open she might look down, and then pass out. So instead she rightly inferred that anchors were not vagrant objects—they had a purpose. They anchored things, and when they were done they were lifted back up into the things what needed anchoring. Naturally, she concluded that they were not rising into a storm, but something else that had been lurking inside or above it. Something that cast a wide and terrible shadow that could block out the midday sun.

Renko, performing her own analysis, simply looked up.

“Bina…”

“What?”

“That’s a goddamn island.”