Rainbird Read Online Free Page A

crank, though halfway through, the man stopped, hands on his knees, breath harsh and gasping through his mask. His goggles had steamed up.
    Humans in high altitude. The cold, the lack of pressure, the thin air—it got to them all.
    Rainbird cranked the wheel one more time. “Almost got…THERE!” The cargo came up over the edge. Rainbird kicked the wheel-stopper in place and dragged on the ropes to get it safely up on the sunway.
    And then noticed the man was staring at her from behind his goggles. “Eiree.” The word, even muffled behind his mask, was unmistakable.
    Rainbird gasped, spun, and fled. Panic roared in her ears and her useless wings hammered against her back. Behind her, the man shouted—something—but all she heard was the bludgeoning of her own blood against her brain, beating out Stupid, stupid, stupid!
     
    The Up-High Market on Third Rib was halfway between the sunway and downside and reached by elevator. If any of the eiree-grown cheris gum could be bought or bartered for, it would be here. Petrus was convinced the cheris gum would help heal the bonerot. Rainbird was not so sure, but she knew that if she didn’t make the trip, Petrus would, lungsickness or no.
    She swayed on the wooden platform as it creaked slowly downwards. The air felt dense, humid, cloyingly rich with oxygen, with a hint of sea-brine. The warmth sank into her bones in a deep-seated fatigue. She propped herself against a railpost, relaxing into a grey half-drowse, mind expanding like mist.
    And in the edges beyond herself, movement, stirring. A reddish tinge in the dim light. Diamond hardness, star brilliance, volcano heat arrowed in on her. A great pressure against her skull, a not-voice swelled in her head. I am coming.
    For you.
    Rainbird jerked upright with a gasp. Several of the people she shared the elevator with glanced incuriously at her, then their gazes slid away. The elevator ground to a halt. The metal grill squealed aside and they trickled onto Third Rib.
    Rainbird, cheeks flushed, tucked her coat tight around herself.
    Guilty conscience. Only that. But she forced herself to alertness as she stepped into the market. Even in this crowd of freaks, undesirables, and people whose past it was best not to inquire into, she felt unsafe.
    And she thought she’d escaped all that by coming onto the sunway.
    Third Rib ran by its own rules, anchored as it was in the seafloor. Scallop-shaped platforms jutted from the gnarled bone of the rib at various intervals. They’d been induced to grow in the early days of sunway habitation, before so much of the dragon’s remaining soft tissue had been destroyed in the construction. The market took up the largest one, while hotels, warehouses, and elevator machinery took up the rest.
    Rainbird wound through the various stalls. Priests officiated one of the eight different types of marriages legal on Third Rib. Transvestite oracles with painted faces and falsettos chanted garbled messages from the aether. Hundreds of different mosses could be found here, the most popular being the ones with hallucinogenic properties.
    Rainbird stopped longingly by the vitality elixirs, pure jolts of energy that some inspectors swore by, but moved on when the stall keeper’s hard gaze flicked at her.
    There were fewer wares and less chatter than usual. A palpable layer of strain overlaid the market. Rainbird’s shoulders twitched against it.
    There was a lot of yellow. Yellow ribbons on women’s hats, yellow armbands, yellow pennants on stalls.
    The Morality League.
    Rainbird’s stomach clenched as she glanced at the news posts, many-armed metal poles sunk into bone. Information sheets fluttered from those. Today most of them were the thick stiff paper of Miss Levine’s wanted posters.
    Her face, plastered on every news post for all to see. There was no trench coat big enough in all the world to hide herself in, no hat big enough to cover all of her dandelion-white-and-wild hair and ears and face. She