At Galactic Central

1 Scout Shannon climbed in a steady rhythm, efficient but not so quick as to leave her short of breath. Life on Amatheon had very seldom called for climbing, so it was a new skill for her. One that would have come in handy back when she was on Schneeheim. But it had taken coming to Galactic Central, the urban heart of the known universe, for Scout to really hone the ability to scale rock faces. She had climbed this particular slope more than any other, and her muscle memory was so good she didn’t even have to look for handholds anymore. Her fingers already knew where to find them, and her toes knew every gap large enough to serve as a step. At last, she reached the top, pulled herself up onto the narrow ledge, then flopped down. She pushed the fog-wet hair from her face, drew in a deep breath of the oxygen-rich air that still carried the thick green smell of the plants that had created it, and looked around. No one should be looking her way, not when she was clinging to the outer wall of one of the many citadels that floated on islands remote from each other in this part of the cloud. But Daisy had pressed upon her the importance of always being vigilant, and Scout had taken the lesson to heart. She looked carefully from island to island, the reflective lenses of her glasses automatically changing range to bring each up in sharp detail before she turned her attention to the next, an island closer or further away. Some were walled all around like her current perch; nothing much to see there. Others were built in elegant terraces, level after level of gardens with small buildings dotted among the plant life. One consisted entirely of trees, immense trees with trunks hundreds of meters across. The human structures on that island were hidden among the leafy canopy, just a bridge or walkway visible here and there where the foliage was sparser. She kind of wanted to explore that place someday. Not that she’d ever get the chance. All these islands were the private property of trade dynasties. Trade dynasties who had entire armies of security people to keep the riffraff at bay. Scout knew the owner of the wall she was crouching on and had his permission to be there, but even still she kept out of sight, only scaling as far up the wall as was necessary to see into the gardens of one of the terraced islands. Today she was early. No one was walking the paths yet. She reached into her pockets and pulled out a pair of gloves, then snuggled deeper into her jacket to wait. The vegetable smell of the air was so thick it was coating the back of her throat like she was growing moss of her own back there. She tucked her nose inside her zipped-up collar, breathing in the more pleasant yet faint smell of her dogs that always lingered in her clothes. They would be missing her. They hated being alone. But there was no way to bring them with her. She didn’t think they’d understood when she’d explained it. Well, she’d make it up to them just as soon as they left this place. The constant wind was chilling, especially wet as she was from her trip through the fog, and the stone beneath her resisted her body’s attempt to warm it. The larger floating islands closer to the center of the cloud contained their own warmer atmosphere, drier and less prone to shearing winds. Scout supposed the homes on these islands had something similar. The people she saw in the gardens seemed perfectly comfortable in shirt sleeves, their long hair flowing softly behind them with only the slightest ripples from gentle breezes. Outside the walls it was different, the opposite of warm and sheltering. But at least she could breathe. She could ignore any amount of cold and wet; she was even growing used to it and rather liked that first touch of it when she stepped out in the morning, that first lungful that made her shiver but brought her sleepy brain to full awareness. But not having to wear a mask while she was climbing was a bonus she never stopped being grateful for. A flicker of motion caught her eye, and she sat up straighter, letting her glasses bring the scene into detail for her. She still had no implant, but the glasses were smart. They were learning to anticipate her needs to a degree where she seldom had to make a verbal command. She intently watched the section of path that emerged from between two trees with long, sweeping leaf-covered branches. The trees stood to either side of the door that opened out from the side of the enormous citadel that sat atop the highest terrace. It was a small garden, just a narrow path that wound around two adjoining ponds, a perfectly useless footbridge spanning the narrow channel where the two ponds joined. Perhaps a child could cavort across that bridge, but it seemed largely there for show. The walls around the garden were too tall for anyone in the garden to see over, and the many prickly plants all around the base of the wall discouraged climbing. There was just enough room for someone trapped indoors to take a quick turn, breathe a little fresher air, and then disappear back inside. Or at least that’s what the three girls trapped inside did every day at exactly the same time. Scout knew those girls. At least one of them would have balked at such a regimental schedule. But then Scout knew they weren’t the ones deciding the schedule. They were prisoners in all but name. Her friends. She and Daisy had spent weeks refining their plan to break them out, but the time wasn’t right to make a move. Not yet. The waiting was driving Scout mad. But she came every day just to see them and make sure they were OK. The twins emerged first from between the trees. Seeta was looking stronger than Scout had seen her in a long time, walking on her own, with her sister Geeta hovering near to catch her if she should stumble again. The Months had been true to their word. Their doctors had gotten Seeta out of her coma, and she was recovering. Slowly, to be sure, but Scout supposed that was always going to be true. She had come so very close to dying, her breathless body freezing as she tumbled through the vacuum of space. They had caught her, but not quite in time. That she was walking through a garden at all was a gift. Then Emilie appeared, hands in her pockets and head down as if looking at her own feet as she walked. Everything about her body language said this walk was mandatory and she didn’t like it even if she doubtlessly needed it. Scout couldn’t help but smile. Emilie’s restless longing to be back indoors was strong. It also meant the Months were still letting her have access to their own library, as much as they had cut Emilie off from their cousin’s library. Even filtered information was information Emilie could use. She was very good at inferring what was missing in what she saw. If anyone had worked out that Scout herself was also at Galactic Central, it was Emilie. But none of the three ever looked up, ever tried to see beyond the walls of their prison. From their viewpoint, the other islands around them must have looked cold and remote, unfeelingly distant with their relentless stone walls blocking the view. But Scout kept hoping at least Geeta would see her one of these days. Not that she could recognize her from such a distance, not with unassisted vision, but Scout still hoped they knew she hadn’t abandoned them. After a few minutes walking around the pond, Seeta pausing to toss crumbs of food over the water—to feed some fish she couldn’t see, Scout assumed—they were called back indoors. Scout blinked, and her glasses returned to normal settings. The day was colder than normal, her hands growing numb even inside her gloves. She gave a moment’s consideration to not finishing her daily rounds, but quickly dismissed it. She had to check. Nothing ever changed, but she still had to see. She pulled off the gloves and stuffed them back in her pockets, blowing on her hands briefly before reaching up for the handholds. She was only a dozen or so meters from the top of the wall, but everything above the ledge she had been resting on was much smoother, the handholds smaller and further apart. Her muscles still knew where they all were without looking, but she forced herself to take it slow, to be sure the stone wasn’t slick under her fingertips before putting weight on it. She didn’t actually know what would happen if she fell. Daisy had said the cloud that enclosed the islands of Galactic Central was human-made, a construct designed to contain atmosphere around the disparate islands that were in a lot of ways like separate city-states. They could move away from enemies, closer to allies, all without leaving the cloud. The islands generated their own gravity. The wall she was scaling was nearly flush with the island, but not quite. There had been a narrow band of rock under her feet when she had stood at the bottom. If she fell further out than that band of rock, would she keep falling? Daisy had said she’d have all of her falling momentum, but the direction could be random depending on lots of things that didn’t make a lot of sense to Scout just yet. She had been learning a lot of physics with her teaching AI Warrior, but they still hadn’t covered more than the basics, hampered as they were with Scout’s poor grasp of the math involved. But if even Daisy didn’t know where a falling person would end up—if they would drift lost in the cloud forever or plunge out of it into the vacuum of space—Scout knew it wasn’t worth taking chances. Just assume a fall was as fatal here as anywhere else she had ever been. She pulled herself up on the top of the wall, not technically wide enough to accommodate a person, but Scout was small enough to pull herself up into a half sit and look around. Below her were rolling hills of waving grass, a shallow stream curving around to her left. Here and there a black or brown dot moved, all but hidden in the grass. One of Bo’s beloved horses. She looked the whole scene over very carefully, but nothing had changed. She double-checked, but another blast of cold wind dissuaded her from checking for a third time. Bo said he would get a message to her if he needed to speak with her. He hadn’t said what form the message would take, just that it would be obvious. So why couldn’t she get over the feeling that she was missing it? Because it had been so long, Scout said to herself with a sigh as she climbed back down, past the ledge to the base of the wall itself. She and Daisy had been here for more than forty days, and still nothing had happened. The Torreses were in protective custody, unable to ever leave the massive, towering court building that dominated one of the larger interior islands. Scout had seen not a hair of either of them, but Bo said they were safe. Safe, but far out of her reach, just like Geeta, Seeta, and Emilie. The McGillicuddys had stayed on Schneeheim, and Bo promised her they were safe as well. But the one time he had communicated with her, back when she and Daisy had just arrived at Galactic Central in their stolen ship with all of the best tech, including encrypted communication systems, he had only been able to give her the broadest strokes of the situation. That and his promise to send her a message if anything changed. Surely they had the same idea of obvious, right? Scout reached the rocky ground at the base of the wall and put her gloves on before reaching for the kite-like glider she had left carefully weighted down to keep it still while she climbed. She blinked, and her glasses brightened briefly, letting her know they were prepared with antifogging measures should she need them. She kind of wished she had a pair of goggles to pull down over her eyes, just for the “I’m about to do this” ritual of it. Stepping off into nothingness was an act that should be marked, she thought. She set the spine of the glider against her back, grasped the handles at the ends of the triangular wings in her gloved hands, and jumped out into the fog. She spiraled down, but only for a moment. She felt a swell of wind beneath her and her body adjusted the glider to ride it, a movement she didn’t even have to think about anymore. The wind carried her up, high over Bo Tajaki’s island. She skirted well away from the Months’ compound, just in case their security forces were on the lookout for her. Then she folded her wings close to her sides and dove through layer after layer of cloud, angling down but also towards the center, to the heart of the city. She felt the heat on her cheeks as her glasses warmed up, not letting the droplets that wet her hair into slick clumps fog up her vision. Then she felt a shiver run up her spine. She was surrounded by clouds, the wind whistling loudly past her ears. Why did she have the sudden feeling that she was about to be caught in the jaws of a trap? Scout had learned the hard way to trust her instincts. Even though her rational mind was still insisting she was in the most sparsely populated quadrant of the cloud and no one would have any reason to be near her, she spread her wings, slowing her descent to a crawl, then leveling out when she reached the next patch of open sky between clouds. She was just about to laugh at her own paranoia when five more gliders appeared, one by one. If they had been diving when she had, they had also pulled up when she had, matching her velocity even as they tightened their formation. They were closing in around her, some a little lower and some a little higher to maintain a sphere around her. She had no idea who they were. But she knew trouble when she was in the middle of it. She had had far too much experience with it.