Downburst (20 page)

A bird dives down from its perch on a nearby pine, and I watch it glide above the water, mark how the wind lifts its wings. As I stare at the space beneath those graceful feathers, I see something. A slight swirl in the air, a diaphanous ripple. I blink.

“You saw it, didn’t you?” Rye asks. His eyes are fixed on my face.

I don’t know what to say, so I stare harder. The faint movement comes gradually into focus. It flickers at first—I catch only a glimpse here and there. But then it sharpens, steadies, until I see gauzy waves billowing across the sky. I clutch a tree for support.

This can’t be real.
But it is. The nearly translucent streams of air stretch all the way across the lake, pushing back the pine trees and tugging gently at my hair. I look up and see more of them, thicker and more forceful the higher I cast my gaze. Most of the currents remain horizontal, but some rise sharply into the sky while others veer off in a different direction entirely.

I remember one summer evening, back in Williams, walking near the marsh by my house. Thick fog swooped over the cattails, curving up and down, surrounding me in its ethereal swells. It separated into various strands of opaque air, some denser than others. This is what the wind looks like, only not as gray, not as easy to see. But why can I see it now when I couldn’t before?

“Now feel the pull,” Rye says, “from in here.” He points to his mid-section. “Open up and allow yourself to connect.”

Do I dare? I can see the wind, but can I actually feel it, ride it? It’s too much to hope for. What if I can’t do it?

Rye takes the backpack from my shoulders then steps behind me and grabs my arms. I try to twist out of his grasp, but he’s strong. “Relax,” he says in my ear. “I’m going to help you.” He places my hands on my abdomen. “Do you feel your emotions?” he asks.

My emotions? The debilitating fear and misery that swirl in my gut? Yes, I feel them all right.

“Now let the wind take them,” he says.

“How?”

“Release whatever you’re feeling. You have to remove yourself from your emotions before you can concentrate enough to create
honga
, your bond. You have to have control. So give them to the wind. Close your eyes if that helps.”

I close my eyes and visualize the turmoil inside my chest, the dark pit that’s eating me from the inside. It’s been there for so long, how do I actually let it go?

The wind surrounds me, and I imagine I can hear it speaking to me, encouraging me. I envision an opening forming under Rye’s hands, see the black fog leak out of my torso, watch the breeze whisk it away. I feel the wind enter the void, fill it with light and air. Maybe, just for a moment, I can forget the pain.

And then it happens. I feel a tug in my chest, my feet want to step forward, my heels rise up, tipping me onto my toes. Rye moves his hands to my back and pushes me gently.

“What do I do now?” I ask, snapping my eyes open and halting at the edge of the water.

“Just do what comes naturally. I’ll be right there with you.”

Do what comes naturally.
But there’s nothing natural about thinking you can step off the ground and fly. Some of the dark fog returns, and I force it out, letting in the wind again. The tug grows stronger. The air in my stomach feels lighter, the light spreading down to my legs. My heels lift up again. The wind is everywhere in my body now, hovering, waiting. I just have to grab it. Become one.

“You’ve got it,” he says. “Now go for it!”

So I do.

I jump into the air, and instantly, I’m zooming forward, gasping as a tingling shock rips through my nerves. I speed over the water, faster than I’ve ever run, the wind whipping up a spray beneath me. Knees slightly bent, I move along the barely visible currents, surrounded by the trees and the birds and the endless indigo. The moving air thrums in my veins.

Rye keeps pace beside me. I look at him, eyes round. I’m doing it. I’m windwalking.

“I told you,” he shouts.

“I can’t believe it.” The wind hums even louder in my chest than before. The connection seems unbreakable. I can’t separate my body from the rushing air. It’s all the same. This is nothing like when Rye carried me across the river or when Jeremy flew me from the Aerie, maybe because I was merely a passenger.

Suddenly, I feel Jeremy’s arms around me. The weight of the gun in my hand, the bullets ripping past my ears, the screaming weapons and people. They drown out the buzzing of the wind, and my body begins to feel heavy.
No, don’t! Stay focused!

Up ahead, the lake ends, and the wispy currents disappear into the trees.
Where do I go now?
The weight rapidly expands inside my chest. I don’t know what to do. Can I fit between the trees? Should I look for another current? I see Jeremy’s body assailed with bullets, twisting unnaturally, falling to the ground. Falling, falling.

I scream as I plunge into the lake. The cold water jolts my blood, and when my head breaks the surface again, my chest is aching. Rye lands on the shore and waits while I wade out.

“What happened?” he asks when I’m standing in front of him, shivering.

“I didn’t know where to go,” I say.

“So you chose the lake?”

I shrug and avoid his gaze. “I may have also gotten distracted.” I don’t like the way he’s looking at me, like he can’t believe a windwalker would have actually forgotten how to do this. I need to try harder. I rub my temple. It seems impossible, but I was doing it, I really was.

Rye clears his throat. “Ready when you are.”

“Sorry.”

“Okay, let’s go over some basics. Apparently, it’s not coming back to you like I thought it would. You know how to swim, right?”

“Clearly.”

“Well, windwalking is a lot like swimming. Imagine you’re in a fast-flowing river. You’ve got a few options. One, you can do nothing. Two, you can swim with the current. Three, you can swim against the current. Or four, you can tread water.” He looks me in the eyes, and I nod.

“If you do nothing,” he continues, “the river will carry you downstream. If you swim with the current, you’ll move even faster downstream. If you swim against the current, you might be able to move upstream, depending on how fast the water is flowing. And if you tread water, you’ll be able to stay more or less in place, again depending on how strong the current is. That makes sense, right?”

I nod again.

“Same with the wind. You can go with it or against it. If you move with it, you’re able to go really fast. Moving against it
is
possible, but it’s very difficult. You have to have a pretty weak breeze. It’s easier to tread the air and hover, but that can wear you out too, and you’ll still move forward a little bit. So the simplest thing, especially if you want to conserve energy, is to move
with
the wind. If the surf isn’t going in a direction you like, you find a new current.”

“Which is an option you didn’t have in the river,” I point out.

He blinks. “Right. So let’s practice treading. That way you won’t have to drop into the lake again.”

He connects to the wind current we had been riding before and bobs in the air in front of me. “Remember, it’s like treading water,” he says, “but you’ve got to do it with your mind as well as with your body. Picture yourself moving against the wind and lean into it with your chest. You can even paddle with your hands and legs if that helps.” He demonstrates, circling his limbs as if he were keeping himself afloat.

I close my eyes and open that spot in my mid-section, let the wind push away the images of Jeremy, the howls of the dying. Soon I feel the weight dissipate—more quickly than last time—and when I’ve made
honga
, I leap off the ground.

In my mind, I forbid the wind to move me, imagine I’m swimming in the air and pushing against the current. It’s difficult. The breeze wants to whisk me away, but I manage to slow myself down to a crawl.

“Good,” Rye says. “Now let’s practice moving from one current to another.” He frowns at the sky, probably worried that we haven’t put enough distance between us and the Rangi.

“I’ll do better this time,” I promise. “I think it is coming back to me.”

He nods. “You have to jump around a lot in order to move up, unless you can find a thermal—or an updraft, but that means you’re windwalking in a storm, which isn’t the smartest idea. When you locate the wind stream you want, reach out to it. As you jump, make
honga
again. Like this.” He leaps from the wind current we’re on to one that’s about three feet above us.

A vertical jump of thirty-six inches? That’s impossible.
Then again, I’m doing the impossible right now.

I focus on the gaseous tendrils surging past my shoulders, on sending my energy into the flowing air, and I feel the bond shift. My hold on my present current weakens as my link to the one above me grows stronger. When my connection to the wind underneath my feet disappears almost entirely, I jump. My newly formed bond helps with the rest, pulling me into place, and I land on the higher wind stream. Immediately, I notice that it’s stronger, denser even, than the wind below. And it’s harder to hover.
Gentle breeze. Eight to twelve miles per hour.

“Good work,” Rye calls. “Now follow me. We’ll weave through the treetops where the wind is a little bit faster and more reliable. Stay close, just in case.”

I follow him as he leaps to a higher current. Now we’re moving forward, zipping past the pine trees, and I keep my eyes locked on Rye and on the air. It’s slightly more visible up here. The airy threads are thicker, woven together more tightly, which makes it easier to see my options. The wind bowls right into the trees, but it also splits into little paths that go around them. I follow Rye onto these diverging trails.

At first I’m too slow, and the needles scratch my arms. One branch clobbers me in the face, and I almost lose the connection, but I regain control in time to mimic Rye and leap onto a different current before I crash into a thick trunk. Before long, I get the hang of it, and I focus less on Rye and more on the forest below me, on the sky above.

I’ve left behind the gray haze that clouded the world this morning. Up here, everything is lush and brilliant. The sun shimmers on the lakes and rivers below, and the vivid pine boughs steep the air in their rich aroma. In every direction there are more of them. Billions and billions of glorious golden-green trees, far outshining the view from the dining hall. A hawk glides alongside me, screeching as it dives toward the earth. I watch it twist into the boughs below, and the sight of my feet skimming the peaks of the pines, dangling thirty feet above the ground, only makes me want to laugh.

As we move up even higher, the winds grow stronger, tossing the branches and shaking the seeds loose from the cones. The fragrant pollen twirls in the air beside me.
Moderate breeze. Thirteen to eighteen miles per hour.
I zoom ahead, extending my arms and tipping my face up to bathe in the saffron beams.

The lightness in my chest is like nothing in this world. The wind hums through every section of my skin. The sun, closer than it’s ever been, melts into my face and mixes with my blood. The warmth seeps out of my fingers. My whole body must be glowing.

But riding the wind isn’t exactly easy, and after an hour or so, the work catches up to me. My lungs are heaving, my legs burn from all the jumping, and my mind is fighting back.

In many ways, windwalking is like running. When I run, I have to consciously block out negative thoughts. Here, bad thoughts would be even more perilous. They could distract me, and if I lose
honga
, I could plummet to my death.

When Rye gestures for me to follow him to the ground, I’m starting to see fuzzy black spots in the clouds. I drop to the lower currents and then to the forest floor where I collapse gratefully against a tree. We break out more freeze-dried meals for lunch, and as we eat, Rye asks if I remember the hand signals.

“No,” I say.

He runs his hands through his increasingly dirty hair then shows me the signs that mean go high, go low, north, south, east, and west, as well as the signals for danger and help. “We can use our Quils to communicate, but you should know the signals, just in case.”

“Our Quils still work?”

“Yeah, they’ll charge as long as they have enough exposure to the wind.”

“I mean, will they work if we’re not near a cell tower?”

“The Quils get their signals from a satellite, not cell towers. They’ll work anywhere in the world.”

“So, we can call for help?”

He shakes his head. “No. Ours are still in training mode. They would have given us full access at the end of the
maitanga
, but … anyway, right now, we can only call the people who were in our cohort. Hopefully, when the tribe realizes what’s happened, someone will remove the locks remotely and try to contact us.”

“We can’t manually dial a number?” I ask.

“No. They’re not like normal phones.”

“Oh.”

He pulls his Quil off his wrist. “What’s your number?” he asks. I tell him, and he taps it into his screen.

“Mine’s twenty-six,” he says. I program it into my favorites. Then I see Lila’s number next to his.

“Have … have you tried calling anyone?” I ask.

He tugs on his ear. “Yeah.” My finger lingers over Lila’s entry. “Try it,” he says.

I take a deep breath then push her number. I hold the Quil up to my ear and wait, but there’s not even a ring. Just silence, followed by a loud bleep. I lower the Quil and, hand trembling, delete the entry.

Rye looks down at his own screen. We sit there wordlessly for several minutes.

Then Rye coughs and looks up at the sky. “According to this, we’ve covered twenty-eight miles already. I’m hoping to go at least fifty more today. Unfortunately, we can’t go very high because we don’t have parachutes and the right equipment, and we don’t want to be spotted.”