Under the Smokestrewn Sky by A. Deborah Baker

Author:A. Deborah Baker
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

NINE

SUBJECTS OF THE STORY

But we are part of this story too, even if we do not act within it: observation changes all things. By watching these events unfold, we render them inevitable, impossible to avoid. Put the story down and walk away, and while it may continue on, it will do so without witness, and thus cannot be said to be truly told. We are in communication, you and I, children of the same phrase, tethered to the same pulse and pauses. We are kin.

So we follow them, five children and one creature of fire that looks like a child, speaks at times as a child, but is something else altogether. And who can say that three of the five are children as we understand the idea of childhood? Niamh had drowned as an infant, and stopped her growing up, such as it was, in the instant she had been exiled from her watery grave. Jack had been born as human as anyone was in the Up-and-Under, but his heart had been stolen while he was still swaddled in his cradle, replaced by a clattering of jackdaws. He could be exactly as old as he appeared, or half as old—charting his growth against the curious calendar of corvids—or five times and more. Soleil, in addition to being the newest member of their company, was perhaps the least understood of all. Like Jack, she had spent her time as a subject of a different species, following a different set of rules. Unlike Jack, they had no evidence that she had been human in the beginning. Perhaps she was a line of music or a shaft of sunlight, somehow bound in physical form. With no way of knowing, there was no true way to guess her age.

Still, it is easier to call them children, and so children we shall call them as we describe their descent down the mountain to the burning plains, where the visible earth was still black riveted with red, as if the crust on the ground was on the verge of cracking open to release the flames beneath. The little white flowers had continued to spread during the night, blanketing everything: the blackened earth was a lacey spiderweb sketched between patches of flowers. Their perfume filled the air, heavy and indescribable.

Avery sniffed. “Peppermint and hot chocolate,” he said in a wondering tone. “The flowers smell like … like Christmas morning?”

“Try again,” suggested Niamh, stepping carefully to avoid stepping on either the white flowers or the red splits in the earth. It made her steps exaggerated, like she was tiptoeing into the first stages of some complicated dance.

Avery sniffed again. “Watermelon and cherry ice pops,” he said, even more wondering, and even more confused. “Why … how … those things don’t smell anything alike at all!”

“The fireflowers will always smell like whatever a person likes best in all the world,” said the Page, once again floating a few feet in the air, drifting along beside them with no apparent effort.

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