Vani is short with bright red hair and very pretty green eyes. Charger is bigger and quite muscly and I wish I was as strong as her immediately because she looks like she can probably rip a tree out of the ground if she wants to.
“More the merrier,” Charger says. Vani jumps up from where she’s sitting and gives me a hug.
Something inside me breaks. Not in a bad way. Like I’ve been holding on to something for a really long time, trying to be strong, and in this moment, my body knows I don’t have to do that anymore. It’s like being freed.
“Aw! Don’t cry! Or cry if you want! It’s hard being new here. Did you fall?”
“I don’t think so?” I don’t really know what she means. “I just woke up in the doctor’s hut. I don’t know where I came from.”
“Oh,” Vani says, nodding. “You arrived mysteriously. That happens a lot here. Sometimes people come out of the woods. Sometimes they fall from the sky. Sometimes they just get left in the middle of the village when we least expect it. It’s weird. But fun.”
“We should show her the place,” Charger says, running a hand through her short, dark hair. “The dangerous stuff, you know?”
“Good idea,” Seeker says. “There’s some stuff you really need to know about living here. It’s nice, but it can be risky if you’re not careful. Like, stay away from the common house. I can’t believe the doctor sent you there. That’s crazy. You’d be pregnant by morning, I bet.”
I give a shudder.
Seeker hands the kitten off to Vani, takes me by the hand, and gives me a tour of the village.
“Okay. Most important thing is the fact that there’s stuff above,” she says. “See over there, outside the village? No? Come with me.”
She leads me on one of many trail paths out of the little place. I try to remember which one it is. I think I’ll be able to, because there’s a yellow marker at the beginning of the trail and other little yellow dots on trees along the way.
I know when we’ve reached our destination because the temperature drops, the sun goes away, and the forest stops being the forest. For what looks like hundreds of hectares, it’s just scrub and weird ferns and scraggly bushy things that look dead, but are still somehow thorny and present.
“What happened here? Was there some kind of explosion or something? A fire?”
“Look up,” Seeker says.
I look up and see vast shapes above us, casting areas of the land below into constant shadow. Nothing good grows in the shadows. I shudder a little, feeling creeped out. I feel as though I can see things scuttling in the shadows. Some parts of the land are so dark because almost all the light is blocked out that there’s no way to even see them. I don’t need to be told not to go in there. Fuck everything about going in there.
“What’s up there?”
“Those are the cities of the sky,” Seeker says. “Don’t ever stand beneath them. There’s one here, obviously. But there’s others. And the edge is more dangerous than the shadow. So you want to give them a really wide berth.”
“Why? Is it bad luck to be near them?” Feels like it is bad luck.
“No. They like to drop things off the edge.”
Whump!
Almost as if to prove the theory, something heavy lands a dozen or so feet away, kicking up a cloud of dirt and old wires as it displaces what was there.
“What the hell was that?”
“Refrigerator,” she says. “This is going to be very popular.”
I hear the sound of a dozen bare feet rushing down the path behind us.Tappety-tappety-tap.
A few people rush in to see if the refrigerator has anything in it. There’s a pack of cheese slices, which are cheerfully handed out among everyone. We don’t get processed food down here, but it seems that sometimes the city above sees fit to provide it.
A couple of guys start taking bits and pieces off the fridge too, just whipping off coolant lines and copper stuff and other electric… I’m not even going to pretend I know what they’re taking.
My amnesia seems to be not entirely, well, entire. I know how to speak. I know what a fridge is. But I don’t know fuck all about floating cities, or where I am, or who I am. It’s like someone’s gone through my brain and very carefully drawn lines around the parts of my mind where certain memories are stored. It’s creepy. But not as creepy as the void of land stretching out in front of us. I want to get away from the shadow place, back to the cute little cottage hut with the friendly ladies who have a kitten.
“We can go back home,” Seeker says. “I know how unsettling this place is the first time you’re near it. Some of the guys like to dare each other to go right into the shadows.”
“What happens to them when they do that?”
