The city at night from one hundred feet up was a different city than the one June knew from the street.
She knew Grisham from pavement level, from the perspective of someone who had walked its neighborhoods and ridden its trams and looked up at its buildings. From one hundred feet, the buildings were still tall but their tops were close, and the streets between them were channels of lamplight with dark moving shapes in them, and the elevated maglev line was no longer above her but approximately level, the cars on it passing with the resonant hum of their drive coils at a distance she could have thrown a stone to cover.
She held the Skiffer at that height and pushed west, keeping her airspeed low enough that the wind in her face was manageable without goggles in the dark. The goggles would have helped but she needed her full unfiltered field of view to navigate, and the April night air at low speed was cold but not punishing.
The instrument panel was invisible. She had not installed lamp backings behind the gauges because the gauges had always been used in daylight and the oversight had not presented itself as an oversight until this moment. She could feel the collective position by the lever’s detent and she could feel the stick’s neutral point by the pressure in her wrist, but the ammeter readings and the generator voltage and the turbine RPM were all dark faces behind dark glass. She was flying by the sound of the rotors and the feel of the controls and the evidence of the city in front of her.
Her mind offered her a series of scenarios involving objects she could not see. Flagpoles. Aerial telegraph wires. The top courses of chimneys. Clock tower ornamentation.
She flew through each imagined scenario without encountering it and after two blocks of this she made a decision: if something was in front of her that she could not see, there was a limited set of actions available to her in response, and worrying about it in advance was not among them. She filed the thought and let it go and looked at the city instead.
The landmarks resolved themselves in order. The massive form of Inspiration Station to the south -- Grisham’s central rail terminus, its huge dome lit from below by the electric lamps of the great concourse, the dome’s unstainium surface silver and catching the lamplight in a warm glow that was visible from a considerable distance. The station’s clock read eleven forty. Beyond the station, to the southeast, the darkness of the harbor where the city’s edge met the water and the water went dark and unlit to the horizon.
She was heading west. West and slightly south. She adjusted south.
Above the whole city, though she could not see it in the dark, the massive Skyloft, the floating city of Grandeur blocked out significant portions of the starry sky.
Grisham General Hospital occupied a full city block on Meridian Avenue, six stories of pale limestone that caught the light from the street lamps along its frontage and reflected it back with an institutional solidity. Above it, a Lewis Hospital Airship rode at two thousand feet, an enormous dedicated medical facility that served patients requiring surgery or sustained care, its massive structure lit along every level, floodlights mounted on the lower hull directed downward to illuminate the hospital’s roof landing platform. The combined light of the airship above and the hospital’s own exterior lamps made the building one of the brightest structures in the nighttime city.
She saw it from four blocks out and adjusted her course to aim for the roof.
The landing platform was approximately a hundred and fifty feet across, a flat deck of heavy timber planking with painted guidance markings and a series of mast-mounted electric lamps at its perimeter that were currently lit for the shuttle airships operating between the rooftop and the Lewis above. Three of those airships were in various stages of operation as she approached -- one descending from above, one on the deck being loaded by medical staff in white, one ascending. They were slim, compact, tri-hulled vessels, purpose-built for the vertical route and narrow spaces, their cabins small and their lift cells minimally sized for the load they carried.
The busy portion of the platform was on the north side, where medical access elevators were located. The south corner of the platform was clear of personnel and equipment and partly in shadow where the nearest perimeter lamp did not fully reach. She brought the Skiffer in over the hospital’s south parapet and descended into the shadow, the rotor wash pressing against the deck planking and scattering a few loose papers that someone had left weighted under a coffee tin that proved insufficient to the task. She set the Skiffer down on its four landing pads with a contact she felt through the seat and closed the collective to zero.
She sat for a moment in the sudden relative quiet. At least in her corner. The rotors spinning down, the turbine decelerating through its long curve, the city noise of Meridian Avenue coming up from six stories below. Across the platform the shuttle operation continued without interruption, the medical staff moving with time-sensitive efficiency, none of them looking in her direction.
She shut down the systems in sequence. When the last needle was at rest she reached under the instrument panel to the hydro-ionic converter’s housing and found the crystal by touch, a small hexagonal prism of the specific mineral compound that the converter required for its electromagnetic frequency generation, seated in a ceramic holder on the converter’s face. She pulled it free. The converter was inert without it. The Skiffer was not going anywhere without her.
She put the crystal in her inside coat pocket, buttoned the pocket, left her helmet and gloves in the seat, and went to find the roof access door.
~*~
The hospital at midnight had reached a point of reduced intensity, the daytime urgency compressed into a quieter register. The corridor inside the roof access stairwell smelled of carbolic antiseptic and something underneath it that was warm and human and not entirely pleasant, the combined atmosphere of a large building full of people who were unwell. The electric corridor lamps were turned to half their daytime brightness, the shadows in the doorways deeper than they would have been during rounds.
She asked at the first nursing station she found, a woman in a white uniform with her hair pinned under a starched cap who was writing in a logbook and looked up with the expression of someone interrupted mid-thought.
“A man was brought in this evening,” June said. “By ambulance, from Clement Street. His name is Vernon Byle. He had injuries to his face and abdomen.”
The nurse consulted a different ledger, running her finger down a column of entries. “Byle. Yes. Ward C, room fourteen. Second floor, south corridor, turn left at the nursing station.” She looked at June’s coat. “Are you family?”
“Friend,” June said, again.
She found Ward C and the south corridor and turned left and found room fourteen by the light coming from its doorway. Silas was in the corridor outside it, seated on a wooden bench. He looked up when he heard her footsteps.
She looked through the open doorway. Inside, two nurses were moving around a bed with the calm purposefulness of people who knew what they were doing and were not alarmed by what they were doing. A heavyset doctor in his fifties with a grey beard was standing at the bedside with a chart board, writing.
“How is he?” June said quietly, coming to stand beside Silas’s bench.
“The doctor said it didn’t look too bad.” Silas looked at her face, at her coat, at her hands. “You made it alright?”
“Two men with revolvers chased me into the alley,” she said. “They fired, but they missed.”
Silas was quiet for a moment. His hands on the walking stick did not move. “Are you hurt?”
“No.”
He looked at her for another moment, assessing this independently of her answer, and apparently reached the same conclusion. “Good.” He looked back at the room. “The Skiffer?”
“On the hospital roof. I took the converter crystal. It won’t start without it.” She paused. “I landed in the south corner. Away from the shuttle operation.”
“The revolver?”
She patted her pocket.
He nodded once with an approving smile. “Sit down if you want.”
She sat beside him.
They were both quiet for a time, the sounds of the ward around them, a cough from behind a closed door down the corridor, the squeak of a wheeled cart being pushed somewhere on the floor above, the low voices of the nurses in room fourteen. June looked at the wall across the corridor, which was painted a pale institutional green that someone had presumably chosen for a reason she could not determine and thought about the day.
She was replaying the alley. The two men in the doorway, the revolvers coming out, the muzzle flashes in the dark. She was replaying the moment in the air over the farm when the left forward rotor stopped and the world began to rotate around the Skiffer’s vertical axis. She was replaying Vernon’s face on the Tinkery floor.
She suspected by his stillness that Silas was doing his own replaying.
She knew what he was replaying. She was replaying the same thing, in between the other things.
She took a breath to say something.
He took a breath at the same moment.
The nurses and doctor came out of room fourteen.
He was pulling the door partially closed behind him, and when he saw June and Silas in the corridor he stopped and looked at them over the top of his spectacles with an evaluating look. “Are you the people who came in with Mr. Byle?”
“Yes,” Silas said. He was on his feet now, the walking stick finding the floor in the same motion. “How is he?”
The doctor held the chart board under his arm. “Better than he looks, which is fortunate because he looks quite bad.” He said this without inflection, the dry delivery of a man who communicated medical facts to anxious people on a regular basis and had found that directness served everyone better than softening. “There is no internal bleeding. The abdominal bruising is extensive but the organs are intact. I’ve seen men beaten harder with worse results. The facial injuries are largely superficial aside from the orbital swelling, which will resolve over a week or two. He has two cracked ribs on the left side, which will be painful for several weeks but will not complicate his breathing significantly now that we have him properly positioned.” He paused. “He has a concussion. Mild, as these things go, but present. We’ll watch him through the night.”
“When will he be conscious?” June asked.
“He drifts in and out. By morning, probably. Possibly sooner.” He looked between them. “You can sit with him if you like. One at a time, though, the room isn’t large and he needs quiet.”
He moved off down the corridor with the chart board under his arm, his footsteps unhurried.
June and Silas looked at each other.
“Why don’t you go and see your mother,” Silas said. “I’ll sit with him.”
“I’ll come back and spell you,” she said.
“Alright.”
They found a single chair inside room fourteen, positioned beside the bed. Silas took it, the bad leg lowering him into it with its usual complaints. Vernon lay in the bed with his face turned slightly to the right, the bandaging white against the pillow, the undamaged side of his face peaceful in the way that exhaustedsleep produced. His chest rose and fell with a regular rhythm, slower and more complete than the broken breathing on the Tinkery floor.
She looked at him for a moment. Then she went to find her mother.
At the end of the hallway, a noise made her look back. A policeman wearing the uniform of the city police was just entering Vernon’s room. He probably had questions about the night’s events.
~*~
Eleanor Hughes’s room was on the third floor, in the wing June had been visiting for four months. She knew the route without thinking about it now, the stairwell at the corridor’s end, up one floor, left at the landing, past the nurses’ station where Margaret the night nurse usually sat and usually looked up and nodded without stopping whatever she was writing.
Margaret looked up and nodded.
The door to room seven was ajar and the lamp inside was at low brightness. A nurse June hadn’t seen before was seated beside the bed with a small tray, and her mother was partially upright against the pillows, accepting small spoonfuls of something.
Eleanor Hughes looked up when the door opened and her face did the thing it did when she saw June, a softening and a brightness, the expression of a woman for whom the arrival of her daughter was the best thing that had happened since the last time it happened. She was thinner than a year ago, the bones of her face more present, her hands on the coverlet visibly lighter than they once were. But her eyes were the same eyes, the dark Hughes eyes that June saw in the mirror every morning.
“June.” Her voice was lower than it used to be but the warmth in it was undiminished. “What time is it?”
“Past midnight, most likely,” June pulled a second chair to the bedside and sat. “I was nearby. I wanted to look in.”
“Past midnight and nearby.” Her mother’s eyes moved across June’s face with the attention of a woman who had been reading her daughter’s expressions for twenty years. “You look like you’ve had a day.”
“I’ve had a day,” June agreed.
“Oh?”
The nurse finished the last spoonful, set the tray to one side, and slipped out of the room with the ease of someone practiced at becoming invisible. June waited until the door was almost closed.
“The Skiffer finally flew,” she said.
Her mother was very still for a moment. Then: “Tell me everything.”
So June told her. She told her a version that was true in all its details and carefully bounded in its scope, of the farm, the morning checks, the pre-flight sequence, Silas’s thoroughness. She described the first hover, the ten-foot mark, the sensation of the controls in her hands and the farm’s wide yard below her and the way the Skiffer had responded to every input she gave it. She described the afternoon flight. The energetic acceleration, the airspeed indicator at sixty-five miles per hour at twenty-five percent throttle, the moment she pushed to fifty percent and felt the machine’s reserve come alive under her.
She described it as she had experienced it before the left forward rotor stopped, which she chose not to give her mother. As well as the part that came after, and the part that came after that, and the men in the alley with revolvers, and Vernon Byle on the Tinkery floor. These were in a different category of the day’s events, a category she held in a separate place in her mind while she talked.
Her mother listened with her hands folded on the coverlet and her eyes on June’s face, and when June described the sensation of the Skiffer at altitude, with the fields below and the treeline and the quality of the wind, something moved through Eleanor’s expression that she tried briefly to conceal and then let show.
“You are frightened for me,” June said.
“I’m always frightened for you,” her mother said. “I was frightened for you when you were seven and you climbed the elm tree in Mrs. Corrigan’s yard. I was frightened for you when you were twelve and you started working.” She paused. “Being frightened for you is one of the conditions of being your mother. It doesn’t mean I want you to stop.”
June looked at her hands.
Her mother reached out and put her hand over June’s, the fingers thin but the grip present and firm. “You looked like your father just now. When you were describing the flight.” She was quiet for a moment. “He loved flying. He told me once- we were young, very young, before any of you were born- he said, ‘We may not have been born with wings, but our minds have proven more than capable to take us to the sky.’“ She smiled at the memory, a specific private smile. “He was pleased with that. He said it three or four more times over the years.”
June pressed her lips together.
“Go home and sleep,” her mother said. “Mr. Jerry is very patient but I don’t like to impose on patient people indefinitely.”
“He said he doesn’t mind watching the boys.”
“Patient people always say they don’t mind. That’s what makes them patient.” Her mother squeezed her hand and released it. “Go home. Sleep. Tomorrow will keep until you’ve rested.”
June stayed until she was sure her mother was asleep, which took eleven minutes. Eleanor’s breathing settled into the slow, regular depth of genuine sleep .
June watched the rise and fall of her chest and listened to the ward’s nighttime sounds and did not let herself think about the Tinkery floor or the alley or the muzzle flashes until she was out in the corridor with the door pulled to behind her.
Then she let herself think about all of it.
She stood in the corridor outside room seven and looked at the wall and thought about her mother’s hands, which were lighter than they had been, and about her brothers at home with the neighbor, and about the Skiffer on the hospital roof with its crystal in June’s inside coat pocket, and about the Exposition in eleven days, and about the men in the alley who had drawn their revolvers without hesitation and fired them into a dark space where a person was.
She looked at the window at the end of the corridor. Through it she could see the edge of the hospital roof and, in the shadow of the south parapet, the silhouette of the Skiffer against the night sky.
She was so close.
So close.
She could see the distance between where she was and where she needed to be, and it was crossable. The Skiffer flew. It flew at speeds that had surprised her and with a reserve of power she had not fully mapped. The technical problems were solved or near solved. The path to the Exposition was clear.
And there were men with guns in it.
She stood with this for a measured moment. She felt the anger and the fear and the exhaustion of the day pressing from all sides, each one wanting a response she did not have the time or the privacy to give it.
She straightened her spine. She put her hand in her coat pocket and felt the weight of the revolver and the three loose cartridges beside it. She took her hand back out.
Come hell or high water, she would win that competition. That’s all there was to it.
She turned and walked back toward the stairwell.
She was halfway down the second floor corridor, rounding the corner toward Ward C, when she remembered the policeman.
She stopped walking.
She had seen a policeman going into Vernon’s room when she went to see her mother. A uniformed officer, going into the room of a man who was unconscious with a concussion. It was possible this was routine, possible that someone had reported the ambulance call and the department sent a man to take a statement once the patient was able to give one. But Vernon was not able to give a statement.
She thought about the two men in the Tinkery alley. The professional way they had drawn and fired. How brazenly they attacked even where people could hear them.
She ran.
Her boots on the hospital’s tiled corridor floor were loud in the nighttime quiet and she did not slow down for it, rounding the corner to the south corridor and pushing through the door to Ward C without breaking stride. Room fourteen’s door was ahead of her on the left, the same low light in the gap.
She went through it.
Silas looked up from the chair beside Vernon’s bed. His eyes registered her face and then moved immediately to the corridor behind her, checking it, finding it empty.
The room was as it had been. Vernon in the bed, the bandaging white, the regular rise and fall of his chest. No policeman. Silas, the chair, the small lamp on the bedside table, a water glass. Nothing else.
June stood in the doorway breathing harder than she wanted to and looked at all of it.
“There was a policeman,” she said, when she had her breath sufficiently under control. “When I left. He was going into this room.”
Silas looked at the room. He looked at Vernon. He looked at June. “He came in,” he said. “He looked at Vernon. He asked me who I was and I told him. He asked what had happened and I said we found him at the Tinkery and called the ambulance. He wanted my statement for the ambulance report. routine, he said. He wrote something in a notebook and left.” He paused. “He seemed like a policeman.”
“We should watch Vernonthrough the night,” June said.
Silas looked at his watch, tilting it toward the lamp. Quarter past one. “I’ll take until four. There’s a chair in the corridor. Get some sleep if you can.”
“I’ll call home first.”
She found the telephone in the nursing station, a wall-mounted unit with a crank handle, and asked the operator for the Prospect Hill exchange and her number. The phone rang four times before her brother Thomas answered, his twelve-year-old voice carrying the specific alertness of someone who had been awake and waiting rather than asleep and woken.
“It’s me,” she said. “Is everything all right?”
“Mr. Jerry made us supper,” Thomas said. “Stew. It was good. Peter ate three bowls.”
“Is Mr. Jerry still there?”
A pause, voices in the background, and then a different voice, older, with the broad vowels of the building’s longtime resident from the floor below.
“Miss Hughes. Everything is fine here, don’t you worry.”
“Mr. Jerry, I can’t thank you enough. I want to pay you for your time.”
“You will not,” he said, with the firmness of a man who had made a decision and was not revisiting it. “Your father was a good man and I don’t forget it. You take care of whatever it is you need to take care of and don’t worry about these two. They’re no trouble.”
She thanked him until he stopped her and put Thomas back on. She told Thomas she loved him and told him to sleep and be good and said she would call in the morning.
She set the earpiece back on its hook and stood at the nursing station for a moment with her hand still on the telephone.
Then she went to find a place to sleep. Hopefully Vernon could tell them more about his attackers and how much they knew about Silas and June.
~*~
She was asleep in the corridor chair inside five minutes, which was not something she had expected to be able to do. At four Silas woke her and they traded, June to the chair beside the bed, Silas to the corridor. At six-thirty he looked in on them both and went to find coffee.
The sky through the room’s single window was lightening from the east, the deep blue of the pre-dawn giving way to the grey that came before the grey that came before the color. The city was beginning to reassemble itself . Shecould hear the early traffic on Meridian Avenue below, the first trams, a delivery cart.
She was in the chair with her coat still on and her hands in her lap when she heard Vernon move.
It was a breath that was different from the sleeping breaths, a slight shift of weight in the bed, a sound that was not quite a word.
She leaned forward.
Vernon’s right eye opened. It found the ceiling, tracked to the window, tracked to her face. It held there. The eye was fully present in a way it had not been in any of the moments since she and Silas had found him on the Tinkery floor. The vacancy of the concussion gone, replaced by something that was recognizably Vernon Byle but a much reduced version.
What was there instead was something she had not seen on his face before.
He looked at her for a long moment without speaking. His visible eye was wet at the inner corner.
“June.” His voice was rough and low after hours of disuse. He stopped. He looked at the ceiling. When he looked back at her his expression had not changed. “I am so, so sorry.”