Beyond

In the back corner of the Montgolfier's cargo hold, between a crate of untaxed coal and three canisters of reserve aethelium, a dark-haired girl named Neive sits in the half-light and peers at the flintlock pistol in her hands.

Her body is thin and clothed in linen rags, and her face is streaked with ash from the mills of her homeland. She is seventeen. She has only ever known the island of Cinis and its black-stone hills and leaden skies, where her path in life diverts seldom and will always lead to marriage.

This is why she runs away.

Two steps forward, her father used to say. Always two steps, because if you have to take one step backwards, at least you've still made a little progress.

And now here she is, moving forward, fifteen-thousand feet above the Copper Sea, stowed away in the cargo hold of the Montgolfier—an aethelium-fueled airship illicitly transporting goods to Meridian City, capital of the Inner Islands, nine hundred kilometres west of Cinis.

Neive clips the pistol to her belt and eases to her feet. There is a porthole somewhere up ahead, filtering grey light into the hold. She steps over the bundle of blankets by the crate, pausing when the blankets stir and a young girl peers up at her.

"How much longer?" says the girl. Her voice is small against the hissing wind outside.

"I don't know, Cleo."

The girl yawns, sitting there, cocooned in her blankets and looking for all the world relaxed, and then she says, "I'm hungry."

For a twelve-year-old, Cleo is handling their journey remarkably well. Neive sighs and adjusts the satchel on her shoulder. "I'm hungry too. We'll eat at sundown. We have to be sparing with the food we have."

"What if the crew find us? What if they send us back?"

"They won't send us back. It's too much trouble. Besides, the jewellery you stole from the Headmistress will pay them off if need be."

Cleo nods, her blonde curls bobbing, and then her expression darkens. "We should have brought the others, Neive. Maya and Dalia and all the rest. There's room for them here."

Neive thinks about the other girls from the orphanage, back on Cinis: growing up beneath the sagging clouds, to be wed to coal miners and foremen when they came of age. "We couldn't bring them," she says, with more conviction than she feels. "We would attract attention if there were more of us. We need to stay invisible, and when we get to the Inner Islands we'll start over. We'll pick new names for ourselves. We'll lie low."

"I don't want to lie low," says Cleo. "I want to be seen. I want my adventures to be stories told in taverns. And I like my name. I want them to say, and this is how Cleo became prince of the Emperium."

Neive rubs her aching eyes. "Only boys can be princes. You would have to be a princess."

"Well, I'll be the first girl-prince. Princesses never do anything in the Headmistress' stories. And as prince I'll discover new islands, and I'll rule them, and maybe I'll let you rule some too, but only if you do everything I say—"

"One day they will tell stories about us, Cleo. But not yet. If they told stories about us now, we'd be found out and sent back to Cinis, and that's the last thing we want."

The younger girl frowns and folds her arms. "Fine," she says.

Neive shuffles around a drum that smells of gasoline, picking her way through the hold until she reaches a crate brimming with scrap metal. Pale light spills from behind it. "Help me move this," she says. "I think there's a porthole here."

After a moment of stubborn silence, Cleo shrugs the blanket from her shoulders. She stands up and pads over to Neive, and together they push against the crate until slowly, gratingly, it slides to the side, revealing a circular, steel framed window. The hold brightens.

The sky outside is impossibly white.

Neive blinks and waits for her eyes to adjust. There is nothing but the green sea below them and the cloudy sky above.

"Oh," says Cleo, disappointed. "I thought it would be prettier. I thought the sky would be blue, at least."

Neive tries to smile, but her thoughts are weighing heavily on her mind. "We'll see blue sky," she says. "Soon. On one of our adventures."

They lapse into silence, and the world passes by outside. Cleo sits back and wraps herself in blankets and Neive pulls a leather-bound flask from her satchel and sips the warm, metallic water. When they reach a small archipelago the view is no more exciting than before: several small islands, just chunks of rock bristling with dead grass and wiry trees, not unlike Cinis. The largest of the islands is perhaps five times the length of the Montgolfier. Neive can see a hut nestled in the vegetation, made of wood, rotted and leaning slightly to the side. A fisherman's lodge, perhaps.

"We're getting closer," she says.

~

They reach the first of the Inner Islands after two days of travel.

Through the mist below Neive can see green fields rising into hills, in turn rising into sharp peaks at the centre of the island. They fly just above the peaks, and there, in a valley between hills, is a town of several hundred buildings.

Around the town are fields of grass, green grass, not like anything on Cinis, growing in neatly trimmed squares of land. "Farmland," whispers Cleo. She has joined Neive at the porthole, and together they absorb the colours and the beauty and the sheer vastness of the island. The setting sun paints the clouds orange, the world orange.

"I can't wait to start exploring," says Cleo.

Neive looks at the little girl, and her freckled face and curly hair, and she is glad not to be alone. She is glad to have this ambitious, headstrong presence at her side.

They peer out the porthole for a time, watching the island disappear from view, and then Neive says, "My father told me something once, before he died, and before I was sent to the orphanage."

"Uh huh," says Cleo, pressing her nose against the glass.

"No, listen. He said, 'Carve your way through the world.' I didn't know what he meant, not at that time. I wondered why I couldn't simply move through the world, or walk, or run, or something like that, but he said carve. As if I would be moving through stone. So I asked him what he meant, and you know what he said?" Neive deepens her voice. "'You have your whole life to figure that out.'"

A small smile pulls at Cleo's lips. "Let me guess. You've figured it out?"

"I think so. I've grown up, and I'm still growing up, but it's clearer now, what he said back then. The decisions we make, the difficult ones—like running away from everything we've ever known—sometimes it feels like we're carving our way through a block of stone to move forward. It won't always be easy."

"But we still move forward," says Cleo.

"Yes."

"Your father sounds very wise."

"He was different."

Neive watches the world pass outside, watches the sky darken from purple to inky black, and she thinks about her father, and his sandy beard and bright eyes, and she is glad for the growing darkness because tears are wetting her cheeks and now her nose is running and just as she has done every night since her father's death, she cries. She is silent about it. Then she collects herself and arranges her satchel like a pillow on the steel floor, and she curls up and closes her eyes and soon her mind has wandered from the waking world.

She dreams of fields and rolling hills. The fields are green with sedges, and they whisper in the breeze, a cool breeze that smells of citrus, and there, beyond the hills to the north, or what she guesses is the north, are black mountains that rise into the clouds and out of sight. She is there. She feels the soft earth beneath her bare feet. She wades through the sedges, toward the mountains, and her hair fans out behind her in the breeze.

She imagines this is paradise.

She wanders out of the fields and into the hills. Oaks and pines and beeches rise around her, stretching toward the sun. As she walks the trees grow smaller, more sparse, and the ground grows steep and rocky, and she is picking her way along a path of scree toward the sharp and ragged peaks when a voice says, "Neive."

The wind blows stronger, colder, howling over the shale and stinging her face, and now she can hear the faraway drone of an airship, the rattle of steal and the roar of propellers, and someone is vigorously poking her shoulder.

“Neive!”

She opens her eyes and finds Cleo’s face inches from her own.

“Huh,” she says.

The younger girl's eyes are wide in the pale oval of her face. The hold is still dark and it is still cold, but a blanket has been draped over Neive and she is no longer shivering. “We’re here,” says Cleo breathlessly. “Or, I think we're here. Come look!” And then she is gone, and Neive blinks and pulls the blanket from her body and eases to her feet.

Cleo’s face is pressed against the porthole, her breath fogging the glass. Outside, perhaps three kilometres in the distance, built upon an island several thousand feet below, is a city of amber lights. Towers and spires and lightning rods jut towards the sky, rising from a mass of what Neive imagines to be houses, shops, churches, government quarters, all of the buildings constructed on top and below and beside each other in such a way that the city looks to be one monstrous, patchy entity.

Neive suddenly feels very small. "Meridian City," is all she can say.

"The heart of the Inner Islands," breathes Cleo. "When we dock, I'm going to climb that tower. See it, Neive? The one on the left, next to the big dome. I'll take my sketchbook and I'll draw the view from the top, and then maybe I'll sell what I draw and I'll start a business drawing, and then I'll save up enough money to explore more islands and that's when I'll become a prince..."

While Cleo talks, Neive feels her mind grow numb. She swallows, and her mouth tastes of ash. How, she thinks, will they navigate a city that large? How will they stay safe, stay fed, stay alive? Where will they even begin?

Neive closes her eyes, clenches her jaw, and her mind reels through the possible outcomes. They might starve to death. They might be murdered by a Meridian gang. Or perhaps they would simply be sent back to Cinis, to face the wrath of the Headmistress and the resentment of the other girls...

What had she dragged Cleo into?

"Neive?" Cleo's voice sifts through her mind like a warm breeze. "Are you okay?"

Neive takes a breath and opens her eyes. "Yes. I'm fine."

"You don't look fine."

"I'm just tired, is all."

Through the dim light she can see the younger girl raise her eyebrows. "You're lying. You're trying to act like an adult, all calm and collected, so that you don't worry me. It's okay. I'm not worried." Cleo reaches out and takes Neive's hand. Her fingers are small and delicate; her hand is warm. "We'll be okay," she says.

"Yes. I know." But Neive can feel her facade cracking, her shoulders slumping, tears prickling her eyes. "I just don't know where we're headed. Where's our final destination?"

Cleo is silent for a moment, and then she says, "Someplace better than where we came from. Remember what your father said? We'll carve our way through the world. Sometimes it will be difficult."

"But what if this is stone we can't break through?"

"All stone breaks."

Neive sniffs and manages a smile. "You sound like my father."

"I'm very wise."

"Shut up."

"You can't deny it!"

Neive laughs weakly and squeezes Cleo's hand. They watch the island draw closer, buildings of brass and marble taking shape in the night. Hundreds of other airships hover near the city like bees around a hive: zeppelins and Raizortails and triple-celled galleons, Windhawks and Starsights and great ponderous coal freighters. All navigating their own paths through the airspace.

Two steps forward. Always two steps.

"Alright," says Neive, and she straightens and wipes the tears from her eyes. "Here's what we'll do."

Cleo's eyes are bright, expectant. "Go on," she says.

"When we dock, and when they open the hold, we'll run."

"We'll run? "

"Yes."

Cleo smiles and nods. "I like that plan. It sounds like something from a storybook."

"It does, doesn't it?"

"And then where will we go?"

"Everywhere," says Neive. "We'll start by heading west. Then we'll figure it out from there."

"Everywhere," Cleo echoes.

"That's right."

"We'll find our way."

"Yes."

They crouch together in the darkness of the hold, among the aethelium canisters and crates of coal, and outside, beyond the porthole, the far corners of the world beckon them forward.