Seven at Two Past Five by Tara Basi

Author:Tara Basi [Basi, Tara]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2017-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen – The Pre-Hearing

Through Zero’s hand, I can feel that his whole frame is trembling, setting the buttons on his gown softly snickering. He is whispering a nonsense to himself.

“Twinkle, twinkle, drunken bat,

What inebriation levels are you at?

Up above the world you fly,

Please don’t poop us from on high.

Twinkle, twinkle, giant bat,

Please don’t let us fall and splat!”

I share his trepidation, if not his outburst of silliness.

The first indication of the bat’s arrival is a great down-rush of wind and then, up, we are snatched and spun away. It is certainly a more ragged experience than our first take-off, though it is not as terrible as I might have imagined an inebriated bat’s ascent would be. Only Zero’s howl of pain alerts me to the pressure I am applying to his hand. I release the poor boy’s appendage and open my eyes. We are again soaring over the Inns of Courts, bound for the pyramids. It is not the arrow-straight flight of our previous trip. This bat is drifting, first one way and then another, as though it is unsure of our destination. Or it is dozing off, drifting off course and then jerking awake and overcompensating its course correction. The result is that Zero and I find ourselves hanging at an acute angle as the bat banks this way and that. We are very rarely perpendicular, which provides some comfort as I feel that any bat deposit is unlikely to strike us while we are banking.

The pyramids are closer now, and I can observe some of the detail. I count seven pyramids, one behind the other, each taller than the one in front. Even the first and smallest is by far the largest structure we have seen, and the last is at least as high as the tower Zero and I descended to reach the Inns of Court. The surfaces of the pyramids are covered in close-fitting, triangular, ebony tiles, which shimmer in the warm, rising air. Some of the ebony tiles have been replaced sparsely and irregularly with triangular windows that let out a bright light. It appears, from this distance, as if they are jewels adorning the pyramid’s surface. The oncoming structures are so fascinating that I have quite forgotten to worry about the dangers of defecation or of being dropped.

These thoughts reassert themselves when our bat abruptly turns away from the pyramids and dives towards a flat-roofed building set apart from all others by a wide boulevard that frames it. The bat’s descent is precipitous. Zero is mightily alarmed and is wailing loudly. I join in. The bat flattens out at the last moment and whips across the roof so low and so fast that we have to bend our knees to keep our feet from being scraped off. Intentionally or otherwise, the bat overshoots the roof, arcs steeply around and returns to fly low over the roof once more, this time a little more slowly, but only a little. Halfway across, it drops us, crashes into the roof and tumbles over and over till it rolls over the edge and disappears.

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