The boy!
It laughed—a jubilant, wild noise—as pigeons vaulted frantically toward the sky. The earth shaking wasn’t the sort felt by man. It was only noticed by birds, rats, dogs, and the wind.
This quake was so far to the east it was only a distant, muted rumble.
What was the boy doing far, far out in the Atlantic? No wonder the wind hadn’t found him. He wasn’t in the Hudson, the harbor, or even the islands around the city. He was far, far away, in the vast Atlantic Ocean.
Under normal circumstances, it would take the wind long, albatross-winged days to reach the epicenter of the boy’s plea for help. The wind would meander, soar on wings and wispy clouds, and rest for a while hammocked in a boat’s white sails.
But the boy needed the wind now.
So the wind caught the pigeons’ frantically beating wings and launched itself skyward. Up. Up. Up. It flew heavenward. It climbed until the air was weak and thin, so threadbare that icy molecules nipped and stung. It gasped and huffed, veering west, pushing up.
A human might think the wind should fly east, toward the boy. Then down, toward the ground. But humans were always thinking illogical, straight-lined things. It was exactly what the wind had told the girl. The only way up is down. The only way back is forward.
A giant sonic boom, like a mountain breaking in half, struck the wind.
It spun, flung violently through the air.
There!
A black hawklike jet torpedoed through the heavens, charging east. This human-made thing was faster than any creature on earth. Faster than the wind. Faster even than sound. It moved like a cosmic storm, racing the sun. This black jet would speed the wind to the boy in a heartbeat and a half.
The wind had once ridden a rocket missiling on fiery plumes toward space. It had once sailed on the air bubbles whirling around a submarine’s torpedo. And in wars past, it had whistled through dark skies littered with the percussion of falling bombs. But it had never flung itself onto the back of a black hawklike jet speeding faster than sound.
It was far from safe. It was reckless.
But the boy needed the wind. The boy was calling for help. Many humans cursed the wind when it destroyed. Many blessed it when it cooled their perspiring skin. Some tried to destroy it, and others tried to corral and use it. But no human cared about the wind.
Except, perhaps, the boy.
So it flung itself at the jet and desperately clutched its tail. It screamed as it rocketed across the Atlantic sky, shrieking at the whiplash force of the jet’s propulsion. It was torn apart, fraying and flagging. Its voice was ripped away, and far below, the ocean blurred until it became a giant, waving field of green, gold, and navy grass, slippery and luminous. And then the grass became snakes, wave after wave of them, undulating in indigo currents. The snakes had swallowed the boy.
The wind’s voice had been stolen by the jet, but when it saw the black, rippling, scarred surface in the middle of infinite blue, the wind let out a startled, soundless shriek. It shoved free from the jet and screamed, diving toward the ocean. It hurtled through thick, wet clouds, shivering at the cold. It sped through thin cobweb clouds, blowing them aside. It rushed through sunlight, sped past sea birds, and hurtled toward the water.
Help! Help!
The wind shrieked. The boy was calling it. He was under the ocean. Deep, deep underwater.
Oh, the wind hated deep waters. What could the wind do in deep water? Nothing but float, trapped in an air bubble, crushed beneath the breathless pressure of an endless sea.
Of course, there was the fun of soaring beneath a cormorant or a shearwater’s wing, diving down and then bursting free. But that was a breath, a flicker of sun. And yes, the wind had traveled with the girl underwater when the rocklike one chained her beneath the surface without air. But what was a small concrete pool compared to an ocean? Nothing.
Was the boy in the Hadal—the nightmare abyss the water currents whispered about and the fearful streams gurgled over? Was he trapped in the midnight lands, where there was no light, only dark, dreadful, twisted things?
The wind hadn’t liked the Hadal when the Bards built their game around it, and it liked it even less now.
The wind moaned and tapped a cresting wave. It wasn’t fearful. The wind was never fearful, but it might hesitate. It might consider. It was prudent, the wind. It couldn’t just dive into the water and kick to the bottom of the ocean. No, the wind couldn’t do that. The water always pushed it back, shoving it out like an angry rodent expelling the wind from its nest.
The wind sliced through another wave, stirring up froth. It circled and spun, trying to find a way to breach the water’s impregnable surface.
The earth rumbled again, shaking far, far below. The wind shrieked when cold, salty water splashed over it.
Oh, the boy needed the wind. But how would it descend?
The wind knew—because the current mumbled, gurgled, chattered, and sighed so much that the wind couldn’t not know—below the Atlantic waves was a giant canyon. The Hudson Canyon, they called it. The underwater earth was gouged and split wide like the gaping maw of a giant, hungry beast. It sat at the edge of a flat plain, waiting to swallow the city or to expel giant buckets of water over the land.
The wind had barreled through the twisty, red and orange sunset-streaked canyons of the west. It liked the deep, scooped-out grooves, the switchback curves, the wild, sheer drops, and tumbling rockslides. It especially liked flicking the expressive ears of the slow, plodding mules picking their way over steep canyon slopes. Those were canyons. The air, wind, sunshine canyons.
