“Do you trust me?” I asked Sita.
She was looking from Maddy to Alan, and back again. “What do you mean?”
I pulled her back toward one of the notches where a tied down balloon snapped at its rope. “I have a plan.”
There was extra rope on the other side of the highwayman’s knot. I hid it from Alan and Maddy and slipped it into Sita’s left hand. “Wrap the rope twice around your hand, so that you can let it go quickly, but so that it won’t jerk away.”
Then I looked at the backup key. It was slightly too large for my pocket, but where else could I put it? I’d lose it if I tried to hold onto it for this. I shoved it in as best I could.
“Kadie… they’re getting really close!” Alan and Maddy moved carefully at us. “Is she carrying a bow?”
I had my hand right over hers, and wrapped it once as well, made sure Sita was secure, and looked over at Maddy.
Sita was right. Maddy had a bow slung over her back.
“Just be ready, the balloon’s going to yank hard,” I told her. My only hope was that it would be strong enough to get both of us in the air. It certainly had yanked me up easily enough earlier.
“Wait, Kadie, is that a good idea…” Sita started to say, right as I grabbed her and started running.
Alan and Maddy leapt forward at us. As we reached the end of the trailing rope from the knot I tugged at it. The highwayman’s knot pulled apart and the balloon shot up, yanking us both up by our wrists.
For a moment we kept running, right at the dome of the workshop in front of us with its almost impossible-to-climb surface. Then the balloon yanked us both up into the air, still moving forward.
Our feet twisted in the air, then bounced along the workshop. We slammed against it, bounced, slammed again, and then were dragged across the top.
A crosswind slapped the balloon and we started to move quickly sidewise.
“Let go!” I screamed. I knew Maddy and Alan would be running around the edge of the workshop to catch us, even though I couldn’t see anything with all the twisting about and spinning we did while dangling from the rope.
I felt Sita drop away, and the balloon yanked me up into the sky even higher. If I held on a second longer I was going to be blown over the edge.
I let go, and the drop was longer than I expected. I twisted to make sure I wouldn’t land on the pocket with the backup key in it, and managed to succeed. I slapped against the top of the workshop on the other hip, jarring every bone in my body, and slid down, tumbling into Sita who was already standing.
“Come on!” She yanked me to my feet as I patted at the backup key, hoping I hadn’t damaged it.
“Wait, hold on!” I stood on the edge of the workshop. “Go further along, we both can’t stand on the same section of the bridge.”
Sita nodded and ran further along, and then I ran along the first section, then onto the second section as Sita jumped onto the third.
“Stop!” Maddy shouted, clear and loud from behind us.
I froze and turned around. She stood at the edge of the bridge with her bow out in her left hand, an arrow ready to fire. She’d spit out her mouthpiece, and was holding her breath. I still amazed me that they wouldn’t use earpieces. She walked forward, about to step onto the bridge.
For a moment, an internal war ripped through me. One set of impulses telling me to be still, let her step on the bridge. She wasn’t a hundred pounds, not with all that muscle and speed I’d seen. There was a good chance the section would collapse, and she’d fall down toward the clouds far under us, the ones I could see by glancing down between my feet through honeycomb-like material of the bridge.
And the other part of me, it told me I couldn’t just kill someone by not saying something.
Because that’s what I’d be doing.
Even if she’d do the same.
The ends don’t justify the means, I had shouted. I was not like them. I bit my lip hard, tensed, and then right as she was about to set foot on the section, I ripped my helmet off after taking a deep breath.
“Don’t get on the bridge. It’s not supported well enough. It’ll collapse.”
Maddy released the tension on the bow, holding it and the arrow in one hand, and took a few deep breaths from her mouthpiece. “Don’t play games Kadie. Stay right where you are.”
Oh, I planned on trying for that, for sure. I didn’t say anything, but I was thinking hard on what to do next. I wasn’t coming up with much that made sense though, after all, she had the bow.
I wished that the cloud or mist that had obscured the workshop had remained. We could have gotten out of sight quickly enough. But now the air was clear, all the way to the visitor’s center.
Kyros burst from underneath the floating workshop, flashing green and yellow and dusty red, his tentacles flailing. “Let them pass!” my ear translator screamed.
I saw Maddy swing around, and I screamed, “Go! Go!” at Sita.
We ran across the bridge, one section behind each other, as fast as we dared. But we both froze when an arrow bounced off the bridge just in front of Sita.
“FREEZE!” Maddy shouted through the air. “Or the next one will kill you.”
I turned around, just in time to see Kyros, several arrows sticking out of his body, slide off the side of the workshop’s platter-like edge, shoved by a grim looking Alan. The Ehallan fell down, dwindling away until he was swallowed by the clouds half a mile below us. Alan had a broken bow in his hands, which he tossed after the Ehallan, like it was just more garbage to him.
My stomach clenched and Sita muttered, “murderers.”
Kyros had tried to intervene, and been killed for it. I felt sick. And angry.
Maddy trotted forward, her face a mask of anger.
“Don’t!” I yelled, yanking my breather up.
The section she stood on see-sawed as she passed the center, and the hitch on the workshop’s side lifted up into the air as the whole section destabilized.
That portion of the bridge then sunk down, and Maddy, realizing we hadn’t been lying, scrambled to get back to the workshop.
“Run,” I told Sita. But I could feel it under my feet, she’d already seen what was happening and dashed for the Visitor’s Center.
I turned and bolted along the bridge even as it sagged underneath my feet.
Once on the firm surface of the Visitor’s Center, we both looked back at the workshop where three parts of the bridge had come apart, hanging loosely in the air.
“I can’t see her,” I said.
Sita pulled me closer to the edge and pointed.
A small dot dwindled slowly down toward the roiling red clouds below.
“She fell,” Sita said.
We looked across the chasm of air at Alan, on his hands and knees looking over the edge.
“I told them,” I said to Sita, horrified. “I didn’t trick her. I thought about it, but I didn’t.”
A familiar, squid-like form dropped out of the sky in front of us. It was the greeter for the Vistor’s Center, skin a mottled red, almost like camouflage for Ehalla.
“Kyros says hello!” the greeter said. “One of his bladders was punctured, leaving him unable to keep to this abnormally high altitude.”
I jumped to my feet. “Can he save Maddy?”
The Ehallen twisted in the air in front of us so that one of its giant eyes looked below us at the clouds. “The puncturer? No, only Kyros is below us, and he would not be able to catch her with a punctured bladder. But don’t worry, the falling human will be far more beautiful in death than she ever was in life.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, blinking. Raising my breather to speak so much had left my eyes stinging from Ehalla’s air.
“She will fall for tens of miles, the pressure growing stronger and stronger, crushing her, until she joins the rains of elements falling into the seas of metallic hydrogen far below us. Her carbon remains will be compressed by the heat and pressure to turn her scattered remains into diamond crystals. Or so it is said by those smarter than I.”
“Alan’s going back up to orbit,” Sita said.
Behind the floating Ehallan, I could see the elevator pod rising up the line, speeding back up toward the All Tree.
“We’d better get going too, then,” I said.