The Children of the Sky

Then Johanna slipped down from the level of the top freight boxes, down below the line of sight of those on the pier. No one was going to see exactly where she was headed. Surely no one would think she was crazy enough to … she dove headfirst from under the overhang of cargo, aiming for a gap in the timber strutwork of the pier.

Numbing agony. She floated back to the surface, all but paralyzed by the cold. This was springtime in the arctic. As she sank back down, scarcely able to wiggle, Johanna had a very clear recollection of when all the Children had been young and Ravna and Pilgrim had lectured them on how quickly humans could die swimming in this water.

She forced her arms out, bumped into something solid. A diagonal timber. She hit another one with her foot, pushed herself up, grabbing at a horizontal beam. For a moment she just hung there, out of the water from her thighs up. Her legs were numb, and she was too weak to climb anywhere hand over hand. She bent her head against her arm, wiping hair out of her eyes. The barnacled strutwork was a zigzag pattern all around her. She had no place to stand and no way to move down the pier toward solid ground. Her grip slipped a centimeter or two. Where were the walkways!

Yeah, there were walkways, and just now the nearest one was a meter to her left—flooded by the rising tide. She swung herself from side to side. Her good fortune was to lose her grip at just the right instant. She splashed down on hands and knees—onto something solid and flat. The walkway was under only ten centimeters of water.

As Johanna struggled to her feet, her raft slid into the pier. The mob had slowed it down to under a meter per second, but the raft was so massive that that didn’t matter. Wood against wood, the front edge of the strutwork creaked and then snapped apart.

She staggered along the walkway, holding onto the struts for balance.

The raft had finally come to rest. The pier was still shaking, but the twist and tilt had stopped short of collapsing the entire structure. She heard shouts and even a few cheers from the Children. She picked up her pace. Shore was somewhere in the shadowed timbers ahead. Jefri and Amdi used to play on these piers; she’d had to come down here and apprehend them. There would be stairs at the far end of the pier, a covered passageway into the warehouses. What then? Maybe she should stay hidden for a few days until she could figure out what was going on, contact Woodcarver, Scrupilo, Jefri—if Jef had come to his senses.

As she stumbled along, she heard human and packs running the length of the pier. There were shouts, some in Samnorsk, but too loud to be human. “Johanna! Where are you?” … “You say she dove into the water?”

“So where is she now?”

She reached the stairs and discovered an unexpected challenge. Normally, you took Tinish stairs three at time, but now Johanna had to lift her numbed legs with her hands, and carefully watch that she set her nerveless feet down. It was like climbing on stilts. Fortunately, the stairs were only member-wide, so she could lean against the walls as she lifted first one foot and then the other.

She shrugged off the last of her icy cloaks. Sometime really really soon she needed to get dry and warm. For a few moments she forgot everything else as she negotiated the last few steps.

Then she was at the top, in a covered passage. She saw a dirty glass window mounted in an external door. She got close and looked back—just to see how everybody was doing, she told herself. Never mind that she was too weak to do much else.

Nowadays Scrupilo’s glassworks could turn out clear glass by the square meter. This little window was from the early years; for Johanna’s purposes, it was good enough. She could see humans and packs clustered around the raft. The second and third rafts were pulling in behind it. When the entire fleet arrived, the South End harbor would look like that jumble on the River Fell.

She could step outside and wave to the kids on the pier. She’d still be out of Oobii’s sight. The hell with further paranoia. As she reached for the door handle, she noticed several Tropicals climbing onto the pier, approaching the Children. They had recovered the radio!

No!

The side blast from the beam gun sent shards of glass ripping past her face. The shuddering wall bounced her off her feet. She rolled to her knees, her ears ringing with the thunder. No need for a door or a window now. In places the wood panels had been blown away from the wall studs. Thirty meters down the pier a cloud of steam was rising from a hole punched through the pier itself.

As Johanna struggled to her feet she tried to wipe the blood from her face, but the stuff kept dribbling. There were survivors, lots of wounded. She tottered a step or two toward the open pier. I should help! Yeah, and give crazy Nevil reason to shoot again.

She turned the other way and staggered up the passage, into the warehouse.