“Sorry, Sky.” He wouldn’t meet my eyes.
Tuck. “Please? Can’t we even try?”
Tuck shook his head.
“Sky, I know how difficult this is. Believe me, it’s hard on all of us,” Dad said, his voice soothing, as if I were a tantrum-throwing toddler. “But we have to wait it out. Everyone understands this, except you, apparently—we stand precariously balanced on the edge of a cliff, and if we fall, then down will fall everything we’ve worked for, everything our ancestors ever achieved here on Earth….” He kept talking, but the words didn’t penetrate. I sank down on the piano bench. My own family, turning their backs on our future, refusing to even try. “I’m truly sorry, Sky,” Dad said, “but the answer is no. Do you understand?”
I nodded.
“Say it out loud.”
“I understand.”
He beamed at me. “That’s my girl.”
I understood that they said no—and that I was saying yes. I was stealing that jewel, reclaiming our family honor, and finding Mom. And I was doing it without them.
THERE’S AN ART TOsneaking out.
You choose first from a palette of lies: you’re tired so must go to bed early, you have a headache so please don’t disturb, you’re going out to meet someone but not the someone you plan to meet. Next, you paint the scene: you put on your comfiest PJs, you groan and clutch your head (don’t overdo it), or you conduct fake phone calls to discuss fake plans.
Or then there’s my approach, which involves sappy music and a grappling hook.
After a silent and awkward dinner, I retreated to my room. All of us did, doors closing up and down the hall. Mumbling about reviewing the family finances, Dad locked himself in his office. My brothers didn’t bother with excuses before shutting themselves in their rooms.
From Tuck’s, I heard the whir of his new pottery wheel—he’d churned out three lopsided vases just today. If we had all still been speaking with each other, Liam and I would have made bets as to how soon before he tossed the wheel out the window. He’d lasted two weeks on his yoga kick and only one night on improv comedy. If we had still been speaking, Liam and I could have tried to convince Tuck to go back to cooking—he was an excellent chef. But Liam was already playing his video game, with the volume turned up so loud that it sounded like he was hosting car wrecks on his bed. He loved anything with explosions. As to Charles, no sound came from his room, but that was only because he owned headphones.
Searching my music, I picked my saddest, most bare-my-soul playlist, the kind of music you listen to with mascara running down your cheeks. It would keep my brothers out. But in case it failed, I also left a note on my desk: “Gone to Gabriela’s,” then climbed out the window, tossed a grappling hook up onto the gutter, and rappelled down the three stories into a flower bed.
I’m very fond of that grappling hook. It was a birthday present from Dad when I was twelve years old. I had all the usual mountain-climbing equipment already, clips and ropes and harnesses, but Dad thought I’d like a more old-fashioned challenge. Our distant ancestors used to live in caves in the mountains of Home, he said, and the children would all use ropes with hooks to visit one another until they were old enough to transform and fly.
He didn’t talk much about Home, the world our ancestors came from, despite the fact that as a council member, he knew as much about it as any wyvern alive. It was a touchy subject, since said ancestors had supposedly been exiled here for being notoriously unrepentant criminals—exile to Earth was supposedly a common punishment for a few hundred years, until the Door was lost. Since then, no more exiles.
To be clear, the source of shame wasn’t that they were all thieves; it was that they’d been caught.
Like Mom must have been,I thought.
But how? And by who? And what had happened to her afterward?
Sneaking across the lawn into the garage, I shimmied over the front gate and unlocked my mountain bike, which I’d left chained beside it. Looking back once at the house, I wondered how much my father knew about what she’d done, or about what had happened to her afterward.
Don’t think like that,I ordered myself. The answers lay with Ryan’s family, not mine. Once I stole their precious jewel, they’d have to cough up their secrets if they wanted it back.
Jamming on my helmet, I mounted my bike and kickedoff.
It took all my self-restraint not to let out a giantWhoop!You haven’t lived until you’ve ridden a bike down a mountain without hitting the brakes. You breathe in wind—it races into your lungs, and it flattens your cheeks back. You watch the curves ahead, but you see the trees whip by out of the corners of your eyes, caught in your bike’s headlight, so fast that they blur into a wall of brown and green. You can’t think about anything else, and that’s good, because I have been thinking too much lately. I don’t want to think.
For ten glorious minutes, I am as close to flying as I’ve ever gotten.
And then the road flattens, and I’m sailing alongside cars in the narrow strip of the shoulder. If I veer right, ditch. If I veer left, smushed by a truck. It’s a different kind of excitement, thanks to the variety of types of potential death.
Mom hates when I bike this fast.
Or hated.
Hates.
She’s alive,I thought. Dad said so. And when I retrace her steps…Ugh, I was back to thinking again. Trying to focus on the road, I found my way to Gabriela’s house.
