Aidan Redding Against the Universes

Forever Falls-7

Every muscle in me ached. My unarmed combat training had included bare-knuckles brawling, but the bruises and bludgeoning I’d suffered from then didn’t come close to the no-holds-barred battering I’d taken from the tumbling basket. My maimed hand felt like a numb balloon, somehow larger than the rest of me.

I let my good hand fumble for Cedar’s. She clasped it tightly. Her fingers shook for a moment, then were still.

“How’d you stop the roll?” I shouted above the roaring wind.

Cedar gave a thin, brave smile. Her red hair floated above her, blown by the wind into a shifting grass rising from her scalp. “I knocked the hatch open. The extra airflow changed the aerodynamics enough that we straightened out.”

If anything, the wicker felt more stable than it had before. Everything felt light and smooth. The air almost supported me.

Freefall had no weather beyond the constant slow rise of warm air. The basket wasn’t fighting through the air any more; it flowed with it.

Even my teeth hurt.

Surrender felt easy. Not only was there no way to fight, fighting this couldn’t accomplish anything. We were falling. We would always fall. Even if Montague expanded their operations downward, the Facility couldn’t grow at terminal velocity.

I was going to die.

I squeezed Cedar’s hand, and felt her squeeze back.

But I couldn’t give up. There was no way to fight death? Fine.

I would figure out why.

Takamoto had lied about doing payroll yesterday. He’d been willing to kill us to keep that secret.

What secret was worth killing over? Killing Gupper was the obvious answer.

“Cedar,” I shouted.

“Call me Lucy,” she said.

I smiled back. “Then it’s Aidan. Listen—when did you get to the lab yesterday morning? What time?”

“About eight. Why?”

“Takamoto was there all day?”

“All the time I was.”

Gupper had been seen right before seven. So, in an hour, Takamoto had killed Gupper, then somehow gotten his body up above the Debris Shield. Way above the Shield, judging from the damage done to his body. He couldn’t have taken a floater that high and returned in an hour, especially lugging Gupper’s body.

Gupper struck the Debris Shield at four thirty PM. Hours and hours later. While Takamoto was in the lab, with his staff.

And Takamoto wasn’t a calm, methodical killer. Standing in the pilot’s perch, he’d been almost paralyzed while I tried to climb out. He panicked. He wouldn’t have set up something in advance to take Gupper up to the Shield.

So how could Gupper have gotten up there?

An answer exploded in the back of my brain, and my eyes snapped open. I found myself sitting up, heedless of my injuries, mouth working soundlessly.

“What is it?” Cedar said.

The idea was insane.

It was ridiculous.

But it explained everything.

“I think… I think I might know how to save us,” I said.

13If I guessed wrong, we were dead.

If I was right but we screwed up, we were dead.

If we did nothing? Dead.

So we went for it.

Cedar—Lucy—and I pillaged the wicker passenger compartment, moving carefully. We weren’t quite weightless in the plunging box, but the screaming hurricane updraft that made talking almost impossible buoyed us. Each touch made the passenger compartment wobble and shake in a threat to tumble again, but it never quite lost its new direction.

Smoked glass goggles—we’d need those. Bamboo-cased binoculars, meant for sightseeing. Lucy found half a dozen liter bottles of water in a locker woven into the wall. I grabbed a bottle and drained it, feeling my parched tissues soak up the fluid.

Then we took MacConnor’s pants off.

Don’t give me that look. We needed something to tie everything together with, and the passenger compartment didn’t come with rope. And he lost the vote, two to one. So we stole MacConnor’s pants and cut them into long strips. Lucy lashed the first-aid kit to her belt. I knotted the spare chute box to mine—I didn’t have a plan for the chute box, but if we needed it, we’d really need it.

And MacConnor still had his boxers. Red ones.

I grabbed the white box containing last night’s supper.

Lucy’s face wrinkled. “You’re not going to eat that!” she shouted over the roaring wind.

I shook my head. “Windburn!”

The fried chicken, and the butter on the potatoes, had all cooled and congealed into a greasy mess and tumbled. I dug my finger into a lump of alloyed grease and butter, took a deep breath to still my revulsion, and smeared it on my face.

Lucy made a face, nodded, and grabbed a greasy chicken breast.

We were able to cover our own face and hands, and used the rest slapdash on MacConnor’s bare skin. There was an awful lot of him. We tied his torn shirt around his torso for more protection.

I took a few strips of MacConnor’s torn pants and tied them together, forming a makeshift rope. I tied a slipknot in each end and put one around my right wrist, tugging it snug. The other end I looped around MacConnor’s left wrist. Our ankles got the same treatment. Lucy mirrored me on MacConnor’s other side.

Lucy’s face gleamed pale beneath the speckles of greasy breading. “Are you sure about this, Aidan?”

“If you have a better idea,” I said at the top of my lungs, “I’d really love to hear it.”

Lucy took my good hand in hers. I squeezed. We grinned at each other. I hoped mine didn’t look as maniacal as hers and tied the smoked-glass goggles over my eyes.

“Whatever happens, it’s been a pleasure,” I shouted.

“Don’t say that. After we pull this off, we’ll be invited to all the best parties.”

I gave her a thumbs up and looked towards the entrance hatch on the wall.

We made our way to the entrance hatch, moving almost weightlessly, MacConnor’s arms over our shoulders. Lucy looked like she could have carried MacConnor on her own. If MacConnor fell on me, though, I might smother before Lucy could rescue me.

We braced our feet on the seats and pressed our shoulders against the wall around the hatch.

I clenched MacConnor to my side with my good hand, and felt Lucy respond in kind.

Then Lucy yanked the hatch open.

The passenger cabin immediately whirled, wrenching all of us around. I held my spot, pinning my body between the seat and the wall with the strength of my legs and back. My bruised legs burned, but I held my place.

The basket steadied, wobbled, and stabilized, with the exit hatch in the ceiling. Freefall’s aerodynamics, its unnatural natural laws, apparently demanded that the passenger cabinet’s largest hole be at the top. That was one right guess, thankfully.

Cedar climbed through the door first, towing MacConnor after her.

The cotton leashes tied to my good wrist and ankle tugged, then pulled. Before they could grow more taut, I ducked my head out the hatch and shimmered out after them.

My feet cleared the hole.

We were free.

The passenger compartment rose above us, and we fell into hazy red oblivion.

14The screaming air cradled me like an impossibly comfortable bed. Air shrieked past me far more loudly than it had skydiving on Earth, but caressed me aloft. I felt utterly weightless.

If it weren’t for the part where we were falling at eleven hundred kilometers an hour, I’d almost enjoy this.

Lucy and I settled out facing the falling suns, a column of smoking red orbs that began impossibly far overhead and descended into infinity, casting amber and orange and crimson light through the featureless hazy air surrounding us. Even through the smoked glass goggles, I couldn’t look at the suns without blinking. My eyes teared, but I didn’t dare move the goggles to wipe them. If I lost my goggles, we all died.

MacConnor hung unconscious between Lucy and me, face-down, arms and legs pulled back by air pressure. The khaki lines torn out of his pants webbed the three of us together at wrists and ankles. Tethers trailed the binoculars, the first aid kit, bottles of water.

The wicker basket hung above us, slowly receding into the sky. Its greater surface area must have caused more wind resistance than its porous weave passed.

Beneath us, nothing but distant red haze fading into forever.

My left hand still felt paradoxically enormous and numb, and while my lightheadedness had faded I still felt woozy.

But best of all, my terror had gone.

We were falling into infinity, but we had a chance. A tiny chance, a chance built out of a single shaky hypothesis and a big cargo zeppelin overflowing with hope, but I’d grab that chance in my good hand and squeeze until it either carried me to safety or died in my grasp.

I tasted dusty air, rancid chicken grease and butter covering my face and lips, and life itself.

The loop of khaki rope hugging my ankle tugged. MacConnor fell faster than me, and had reached the limits of his tether. The Montague Corporation gave us tough clothing, but I didn’t want to test the makeshift rope unless I absolutely had to. I pulled my arms and legs in to reduce my air resistance and sank next to him.

Lucy and I had shouted this through before jumping out. I grabbed MacConnor’s shoulder with my right hand, inching myself closer and closer. MacConnor was even bigger than he looked, but eventually I had an arm over his back and a grip on his torn shirt right over his far shoulder blade. Lucy’s arm brushed mine, then slithered beneath it. Her hand edged between MacConnor’s ribs and mine and grabbed tight. Much more tightly than I could, with my smaller size.

I lifted my head to peer over MacConnor’s head, but the wind pressure rolled his head up. I ducked down, and saw Lucy in a similar position.

Now the tricky part.

In parachute training on Earth, they teach you how to move through the air before pulling the chute—that’s the “skydiving” thing. Steering is all about arranging your limbs. We needed to turn around and get our feet towards the sun.

I pulled in my free arm. We should have veered towards me, rotating towards the cliff.

Instead, our three-headed, six-legged skydiver tipped towards Lucy.

We’d talked this through, but we hadn’t agreed who would steer! I thrust my numb hand back into the air. We righted out, still facing the suns.

Lucy and I nodded at each other for a moment, trying to say You go or I got this, whatever we meant. Finally, Lucy rolled her head, dragged her free arm forward into view, and slid it up against her chest.

She had the better grip—heck, she had two hands. She could steer. Even though this was my idea.

Slowly, we began to turn. The suns majestically rotated out of sight, leaving us with a clear view of nothing. The sun shone past our feet. Above and below and beside was only the featureless red haze. Wind blasted my face, inflated my shirt and pant legs, shoved me against MacConnor’s warmth and nudged me away.

At the far edge of my vision, pale gray slowly coalesced from of the red haze: the distant cliff, still kilometers away but barely visible. Soon the world seemed split in two, with a vertical horizon separating the red glaring sky from the distant gray granite.

Finally the gray wall filled out my vision. Lucy straightened us out, and we lifted our legs to fall forward.

If we were going to have any chance at all, we needed to be closer to the cliff.

We hung in empty space.

The wind whipped my hair even as it cradled me aloft.

Skydiving training on Earth gave us two minutes of freefall. Any more than that and you had to go so high you needed breathing gear. We knew how to move forward, but I’d never thought to ask “how many horizontal kilometers can you cover in two minutes?” When the ground is rushing at you, you only care about the vertical.