The Other Side of the Sky - Amie Kaufman Page 0,32
smiles at me a little. The expression suits his features. “I’m glad you found me.”
He is unscarred, no sign of callouses on his hands or of wear from the elements on his face. His skin beneath his strange outer garment is clean. He is as fresh and new as if he were just formed.
My eyes fall upon the suit he wears, its sleeves tied around his waist. On the arm of one of them, I can just make out the shape of letters, distorted by the folding of the fabric—but unmistakable.
The writing of the ancients. Just like the lettering inside the fallen glider.
“Do you have names, in the sky?” I ask, not sure what I’m expecting him to tell me.
The boy smiles a little more widely. “My name’s North. What’s yours?”
I stare at him, bereft of words. He looks about as divinely significant as the bindle cat. But then, not even a god is born knowing their place in fate’s design. I had to learn about my purpose when I was called to divinity, as any child learns about the world.
If this boy is the Last Star, brand against the darkness, whose light will lead me to the Destroyer and to the end of days …
He doesn’t know it.
I suddenly need to breathe free, and I reach up to tug my kerchief down from my lips so that I can gulp a breath of fresh air.
“You may call me Nimh.”
SIX
NORTH
Nimh leads the way across an open plain, the stars above reflected in the water around us—a thin sheet covering the ground, less than ankle-deep. It’s like walking through the sky, except that it’s already soaking through my boots.
It hurts to leave the Skysinger behind, but I can’t stay with her. She can’t get me home, destroyed as she is. My only hope right now is that Nimh was telling the truth, that there might be someone in this temple of hers who can help me.
Every time I look at Nimh’s agile silhouette ahead of me, try to wrap my mind around the fact that she’s human and she’s right here, my mind staggers back. Nobody’s meant to live Below, but here she is. And she talks sense, sort of. She knows medicine, or at least chemistry—and she says there are other people.
We’re told the surface is uninhabited. We learn this from the time we first speak. I have no idea what to make of this girl, of her showing up at my crash site, except that I’m not dead yet, and I would be if she wanted me to be. For the first time since my glider stopped responding and I dipped below the city, I have hope.
And if I’m honest, there is a tingle of excitement somewhere deep in my chest. I dreamed of the surface. I dreamed of exploration.
I never dreamed of anything like this.
She’s setting a decent pace, and my aches start to assert themselves, my breath forced shallow by a pain in my ribs.
“Nimh,” I say, and she turns her head without breaking stride. “Could we slow down a little? I’m sorry, I’m hurt.”
She shakes her head. “My … friend said she would come for me after half an hour,” she replies. There’s just enough of a pause before friend that I wonder what she was going to say. Is the girl she’s talking about her pair? Her superior?
“Then she’ll find us,” I say. “And I assume she’s going to notice me sooner or later. Will it be a problem?”
“Your presence will be a challenge,” she says. “But I cannot have them raising the alarm when they realize I have slipped away. That will be worse.”
“All right,” I say, reaching for a lighter tone. “Better get introduced before I get you into trouble, then. Everything else I’ve met here except you has seemed to take a deep dislike to me.”
I need her help. I need to be charming. I need to avoid any hint of a threat.
Her lips move, forming for the first time the faintest of smiles. She wears it well, that smile. She can’t be much older than I am, a fact I missed thanks to her spear and her magic and her fighting off a horde of terrifying creatures. The smile is only there for an instant before she’s walking on again. But she’s moving a little bit more slowly now for my benefit, and with a private grin to myself, I follow.
The dark shadow ahead turns out to be a tangled mass