Reading the Wind (Silver Ship) Read Online Free Page A

cave floor. Her words spilled out low and fast. “I’ve been coming up here every few nights this spring. We can’t take years to learn. I have to do whatever Hunter and Nava and the other Council want, and even Mom won’t help me fight to change it. She says we have peace and we should keep it.” She looked at me. “I’m sick of acting like Nava’s slave.”
    Liam leaned forward, closing the gap between them, putting a hand on Kayleen’s shoulder. “No one has seen you come up here?”
    She snorted. “I can doctor the nets so anyone watching after the fact sees me in Artistes when I’m really here. I come here all the time.”
    I tried to keep from looking startled. Kayleen had always been compliant. “It’s dangerous,” I cautioned.
    She shot me a disapproving look. “I’m
very
careful.”
    Liam dropped his hand, sat back, and turned the conversation. “What have you found?”
    The feral look returned for a moment, raising the hair on the back of my neck. The cave held whole rooms of weapons, and generally we left them alone.
    But Kayleen headed toward the room she had moved the skimmer into two winters ago, under cover of a storm. We followed her down a short, wide branch just to the right of the cave entrance, and entered an equally wide doorway
    Although Liam didn’t say anything, I could feel him questioning the wisdom of following Kayleen. I had no answer; I didn’t trust the Kayleen who walked in front of us, purposeful and sure of herself in this place where Liam and I always walked carefully.
    A light flicked on, Kayleen’s work. Her abilities felt like magic, even though I knew from working with Joseph that they reflected a connection between microscopic data readers that sang in Kayleen’s blood and any altered technology tuned to her or others like her. A common genemod, but Liam and I did not have it, and there was no way to get it here, where everything altered was despised, and information about genetic engineering scrubbed from databases. Envy crossed my heart, followed by the memory of what those skills had cost Joseph.
    I stood in the doorway, eyeing the skimmer, the Burning Void. Tiny sister to the New Making, the silver cylinder gleamed brightly even in the relative dark of the cave, twice as tall as me, twice as wide as tall, and so long I could have laid down in it ten times. It sat high on five wheels, two near the front, two near the back, and one just below the nose. We could walk under it and hardly bend.
    As we approached, the silver passenger ramp unfolded and set down with a soft click on the cave floor.
    Kayleen climbed up the ramp easily, as if she were intimately familiar with the machine. Liam followed her, and I followed him.
    I drew in a startled breath at the young hebra with bright brown side-stripes who stood unsteadily between the door to the cargo bay and the last row of seats, blinking at us. She had been cross-tied to the last row of seats, with only a meter or so of room to move around. This must be the hebra Paloma talked about, but what on earth was she doing in the skimmer?
    Kayleen sat relaxed, one leg thrown lazily on the seat in front of her. She smiled at me. “Sit down.”
    “Is that Windy?”
    Her eyes widened. “How did you know about her?”
    “Paloma told me about her. That’s why we went to the barns to look for you.”
    Kayleen frowned. Relaxed body position or not, she felt like a snake about to strike. I glanced from the hebra to the open door, still standing.
    “Hang on.” She licked her lips and her fingers went to her hair as if to knot themselves in it, something she often did, but she put them back in her lap. “I’m closing the door so I can let Windy loose to meet you.”
    The soft whine of whatever mechanism controlled the ramp became background noise as the hebra bugled.
    I glanced at Liam in time to see him to take two steps toward Kayleen. He stood over her, looking down, and I recognized the set of his stance from hunting,