“Then take months.”
“I’ll tell you when I need to,” Bel said. She turned her head as the elevator opened for Jainan. When she stepped back, something in the set of her shoulders looked like relief that the conversation was over.
Jainan’s eyes went to her as he drew nearer—he was observant enough to pick up when something was even slightly wrong—and his hand gripped his case a little more tightly. “I’m late,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Nope, you’re early,” Kiem said easily, taking Jainan’s case off him. Kiem would have to ask Bel later if he could tell Jainan, but Bel was intensely private with her own life, and he wasn’t going to air anything without asking. “Let’s head off, and Bel will breathe a sigh of relief and get some work done without us interrupting.”
“Don’t pretend Jainan’s as bad as you,” Bel said dryly. “Jainan, feel free to ditch him somewhere over the mountains if he’s a nuisance.”
Jainan didn’t smile, just paled. Damn Taam. “Hey,” Kiem protested, “do I pay you to gang up on me? Jainan, mind if I fly?” Jainan nodded silently and got into the passenger seat.
Bel waved from the walkway as if they were leaving at a shuttleport. “Have fun with the kids at Braska,” she said. “I can send you some thumbscrews if you need them for the military officers. See you in three days.”
“You should be sending me armor for the kids!” Kiem called, while Jainan flinched at the thumbscrews joke. “Later!” He set the flybug to automatic to get out of the hangar and keyed up the tractor beam.
The dome closed them into a pool of quiet. Jainan stared straight ahead while the tractor field inched them delicately out of their docking space. The sky was opening up above them, icy and pale blue: a good day for flying. Kiem sighed and settled back into his seat, resting his hands in the mesh of filaments that controlled the flybug.
“Right,” he said. “Tell you what, we’ll free-route the first bit overland. We can join the tunnels when they come up from the coast.”
“The tunnels?” Jainan asked.
Kiem had heard that tone before. He didn’t know if Jainan was tense because of the treaty or because of this bloody Taam thing, but he was helplessly out of answers for both. “The commercial routes,” he said. “You know. You’d have taken them any time you left Arlusk’s city limits.” Jainan looked blank. It must be a cultural thing. “Light-tunnels for high-speed freight. Like the city networks but bigger.”
“Oh,” Jainan said. “Yes. We had something similar on Thea.”
“We’ll just hop over the mountains for the first bit, then,” Kiem said hopefully. “I learned to fly around there. Peaceful. Dramatic crags, snow, that sort of thing.”
“Snow,” Jainan said, leaning forward to survey the early winter city skyline as they rose into the air. “You do surprise me.”
It took Kiem a moment to catch on, and then he grinned in relief. He pulled them into a vein of light that would bring them out of the city traffic network. “Feels good to get out, huh?”
“Mm,” Jainan said. His voice had gone colorless again. He was watching the city recede under them, giving way to the foothills to the west, now covered in deep snow. True winter was setting in. The spine of the range loomed up in the distance. “I haven’t been this way before. Taam liked to go the other side of Arlusk for skiing.”
“There’s an idea,” Kiem said. “We should have brought skis. Dammit. Think it’s too late to go back?”
“I preferred the flying to the skiing,” Jainan said. His eyes were starting to gleam with curiosity as they skimmed closer to the first of the real mountains. “Can you go a little lower?”
Kiem grinned. “Can do,” he said. “Tell me if you want me to veer off.” He switched the controls to a more sensitive setting and dived down.
They skimmed around the sheer cliffs and into the first of the ravines. This one was too close to the city to be really wild and there were a couple of cabins nearby, but when they shot out of the first valley and into the next, Kiem got the reaction he had been hoping for. Jainan took an audible breath.
The ground fell away beneath them into a deep gorge. A river crawled far below between dark pines that weren’t yet snowed over, and mountains climbed up dramatically on either side. “It’s beautiful,” Jainan said.
“Glad you think so,” Kiem said. “Made it myself, obviously. It took me ages to get all the trees in the right place.”
“I see,” Jainan said. “What a shame you couldn’t get the river straight.”
“It’s supposed to be crooked,” Kiem protested. “It’s artistic.”
“Is it,” Jainan said. A smile was threatening to tug up the corner of his mouth. He leaned forward to get a better view of the rushing torrent below. Kiem brought them down until they could see the white foam and the chunks of ice tumbling through the current from higher up the mountains. “There’s an unwise thing teenagers do on Thea,” Jainan said, apparently as a non sequitur.
“What’s that?” Kiem said.
“They take the flybug down as close to the water as possible and turn it sideways to try and dip the fins.”
“That’s a terrible idea,” Kiem said. He eyed the water speculatively. “We’re definitely not going to do that.”
“No,” Jainan agreed, in exactly the same tone. Out of the corner of his eye, Kiem saw his hand go up to tug his safety harness tighter.
“How long do you have to keep the fin touching the water for?” Kiem said, in the spirit of inquiry.
“I used to be able to do four-second runs,” Jainan said. “Some people got up to five.”
“Right,” Kiem said. He took a hand out of the dash to check his own harness. “Haven’t tried to flip this thing in years.”
“Don’t worry,” Jainan said. “You only need to get it halfway to a full flip and balance it there.”
“Oh, well, that’s all right then,” Kiem said. “No way this can go wrong.”
“If the trees look like they’re pointing downward, you’ve gone too far.”
Kiem reached up to flick off the stabilizers. “You realize Bel is going to kill us if we crash out here without her,” he said, but then his hand froze as he thought about that. He glanced at Jainan, remembering the last time Jainan’s partner had piloted a flybug. “Uh. Maybe we shouldn’t.”
Jainan shook his head. “This is relatively safe,” he said. “You can’t turn off most flybug safeguards. You would have to break them. But if Bel would object—”
“No, I mean, she’ll kill us because we didn’t let her join in. Bel has speeding tickets from every subdistrict in the city.” Kiem flicked off the last of the automatic stabilizers and firmed up his grip in the steering mesh, feeling the filaments all around his hands. “Are you holding on?” He gave Jainan a moment to grab on to something, and then dived.
The river came rushing up to meet them. Kiem had turned the filaments to the most sensitive setting and could feel every buffet of air against the flybug’s shell through the tingle in his hands. He gripped the steering, a surge of adrenaline going through him that he hadn’t felt in a while, and turned to veer sideways across the river. They tore straight at the oncoming forest.