Kingdom of Cages(6)

Chena opted for the stairs. They felt strangely uneven under her feet, as if they hadn’t been quite smoothed off. They were cold enough that she wished for her socks, but she kept going.

The staircase rose in a spiral through a second story that was shrouded in darkness, and up past that to another low doorway. Chena found the knob and tried to slide it sideways. It didn’t budge. Feeling foolish, she remembered to push.

A gust of damp wind, heavy with unfamiliar scents, caught Chena in the face and she shivered. She was outside. The rushing water sound that was the wind in the tree branches filled the world. She could see the black trunks like gigantic support girders against the gray background.

She almost turned back then, but her gaze dropped to the, what?— floor? roof?—that she stood on. It had been terraced and covered in dirt, and then in grass. Shafts of pale silver light slanted through the trees and touched the plants. Chena sucked in a breath before it could become a gasp. The roof was a garden. Flowers, closed tight for morning, grew out of beds of moss. Ivy crept along the rooftop and twined up the saplings, and that was just the beginning. The glimmers of silver light the forest permitted in highlighted more kinds of plants than she had known existed, just in this little space of a living rooftop.

It was alien to Chena, utterly and completely, but, even as she shivered in the unregulated wind, she found it beautiful.

Wrapping her arms around herself, Chena stepped out onto the roof. Damp, chilly grass cushioned her bare feet. She wandered here and there, just to see what she could—the shades of green on the different plants, the cup of a flower, all the kinds and shapes of leaves, the big rocks with their flecks of green and gray. Something touched her arm and Chena saw a bug with iridescent wings and a bright green body hanging on to her. It rubbed its impossibly delicate forelegs together and took off in the next heartbeat.

Beyond the edge of the roof waited a world of trees and rivers. The trees were so huge that any one of them could have been hollowed out to make a station module. Sunlight became tangled in the girder-like branches high overhead, up where the leaves made a shady mosaic that swayed in the wind. Here and there, a solid column of light made it down to the floor and lit up a patch of plants with tightly closed buds or furled leaves. Reed-choked streams dissected the village and then joined together to spill into the long brown river that snaked along the forest floor. More water fell in chortling cascades from the trees. Chena’s gaze followed the waterfalls up and saw that there were houses in the trees too, lashed to the crooks of the mighty branches. Entirely wooden, with living roofs, they looked like they had grown out of the gigantic trunks. Water cascaded down from the heights, collecting briefly in a series of cisterns, only to spill over their edges and down into the streams.

Chena had always thought that forests would be silent places. In the rig games, they were hushed except for the occasional call of a bird or growl of an animal. The games had left out the endless chatter of the water, and the great rushing of wind through the branches, and the way those branches creaked, as if they hadn’t been tightened on properly and might fall off at any moment.

Chena bit her lip nervously. She couldn’t help it. Creaks were bad noises. Creaks meant something was straining. Straining things broke and spilled the air out into the vacuum. Her head knew things like that couldn’t happen on a planet, but her gut didn’t yet.

Another gust of wind blew through her hair and tickled her nose. Chena sneezed, and one of the rocks straightened up.

Chena almost screamed. She stumbled backward, caught her foot on the edge of one of the terraces, and fell into what felt like a mass of feathers and thorns. Someone cackled with laughter while she struggled to get to her feet again, wincing at every snap and rustle underneath her.

When she was finally standing, Chena found she faced a stooped old woman who stepped out from behind a cluster of cablelike plants that ran up a bunch of skinny poles. She was even smaller and shorter than Chena. Some kind of apron covered her clothes, and its many pockets bulged with… something. In her hand, she carried a short curved knife.

Chena cleared her throat. “Good morning, Grandmother,” she said, saluting as politely as her mother had ever taught her, touching forehead, heart, and lips.

“I don’t know you.” The woman frowned and shifted her grip on the knife.

“I just got here.” Chena stared at the knife as if she’d been hypnotized. “I was just looking around, is all.”

“Were you?” The woman stepped closer. Chena could smell her now, and she smelled green and moldy. “Where’d you get here from?”