The Other Side of the Sky - Amie Kaufman Page 0,28

pair of dark eyes, staring at me, narrowed in suspicion.

A person—an actual human, alive and staring at me.

But there aren’t any people Below—everyone knows that.

Maybe I’m not a dead man after all.

Or maybe this girl is the next thing that’s going to try to kill me.

FIVE

NIMH

The glare from the beacon spell fades, my eyes dazzled even through my closed eyelids. The sound of the mist-bent boar splashing a noisy retreat tells me to relax, but they are hungry creatures, drawn by blood, not by light or noise. Something drew them here—something wounded.

Just before I cast the beacon, I saw a streak of fire swinging this way and that against the press of the shadowy predators. In the moment, I thought it must be a piece of the fallen object, jostled by the animals. But the truth dawns on me even before I open my eyes to see the figure half-fallen back against the crumpled, smoldering object.

Someone else has come seeking the Star.

He lurches unsteadily to his feet, sending me scrambling back, clutching my spearstaff more tightly as my heart begins to pound even harder. There’s nothing else inside the odd structure that fell from the sky, or at least nothing that I can see. The man—no more than a boy, really—is unarmed, and looks like he’s already had to fight his way to this spot. A thick line of blood coats the right side of his face from hairline to collar, and his arm is crudely bandaged.

“Have you taken anything from this place?” I demand, disguising my fear with an air of command.

He doesn’t move—he doesn’t even blink, nothing to register that he heard me, much less understood me.

I lower the tip of the spearstaff, shifting my weight so that I can level it at him. I won’t let some slack-jawed boy come between me and my purpose, not now that I might actually have one.

“How many others?” I snap, hoping to jar him from his stupor. “You cannot be here alone—where is the rest of your party?”

The boy continues to gape at me. He has big black eyes and an expressive mouth, and just now he looks as surprised as if I’d fallen from the sky along with this … this thing. His eyes are wide and fixed on my face with an expression oddly like one of hope.

“Move away.” At last, my demand gets a response—his eyes switch their focus to the tip of my spear, and, swallowing, he sidles away from the smoking ruin so I can approach it.

The structure that fell from the sky is clearly broken—even without knowing what it’s meant to look like, I can see the frame is bent and twisted, the outer skin crumpled and smoldering at its front from the impact with the ground. The lost stanza of the Song of the Destroyer describes the empty vessel wielding the Star against the darkness—the Star must be somewhere inside this tangle of broken construction. Keeping most of my attention on the boy, I take a step up onto part of the structure, making it creak ominously under my weight.

When I move again, there’s a loud, unpleasant cracking sound, and the boy awakens all at once.

“Stop!” he cries abruptly, swallowing hard, like it’s an effort. “If you break the carbon fiber there, you’ll crush the wing spar. I’m going to need …” His eyes scan the ruin of the thing, his shoulders dropping. “Skyfall. It’s never going to fly again. It can’t get me back to …”

He speaks with a strange accent, and I don’t recognize all the words he’s using. Still, after a moment, his meaning hits me. “You claim you were inside this thing when it fell from the sky?”

“Yes.” The boy’s eyeing me and the spear with equal trepidation. “This is my glider.”

Is he mist-touched?

I can’t see his eyes clearly enough in the darkness to observe how they focus, whether they have that strange, distant quality. Either way, it’s far more likely he’s lying, and thinks the object that fell might be valuable.

Or he has a more sinister purpose, and knows exactly what it is I seek. If there exists a copy of the ancient version of the Song of the Destroyer, then he could be here to prevent me retrieving the Star.

Not all who dwell in the forest-sea await the Lightbringer’s coming with longing and faith.

We’ve been staring at each other across the length of my spearstaff for some time when the boy says cautiously, “Thanks for scaring away