Free Silverwing by Kenneth Oppel Page B

eighty-two!”
    Know-it-all! He flew faster, twisting and flipping through the air, snapping up every mosquito that flickered across his path.
    “A thousand!” he bellowed a minute later. “I did it! Where are you?”
    “What took you so long?” said Marina, hanging from a nearby branch, leisurely grooming her wings.
    “You got a thousand?”
    “Hm-hmm.”
    “You didn’t!”
    “A few seconds ago, actually.”
    “Well, you didn’t say anything,” grumbled Shade, landing beside her.
    “You didn’t hear me.” She burped loudly.
    “You know, I don’t feel so good,” he said.
    “Serves you right.”
    “Me? What about you? It was your idea!”
    “Look, I don’t feel too jaunty either,” Marina admitted.
    “I never want to eat another mosquito in my life.”
    “Did they seem unusually spicy to you?” she asked.
    “Please, don’t talk about it.”
    It took a while before their stomachs settled enough for them to fly. Shade felt like he’d swallowed a large stone.
    “Let’s call it a tie,” said Marina after a while.
    Shade smiled and gave a deafening burp. “Sounds fair to me.”
    They kept up a good pace through the night.
    It was the coldest yet, the grass sparkling with frost. They kept the coastline on their left wingtip. There was a Human road snaking along the shore as well, and by now Shade was used to seeing their vehicles race along it.
    “Do you think the Humans will help us somehow?” Marina asked.
    “That’s what my father thought.”
    “I’ve been thinking about the Promise. About coming back into the light. Wouldn’t we go blind?”
    “Only if you stared right at the sun for a long time,” Shade said. In the cold night he remembered its heat, its sheer power.
    “But you just saw a bit of it, right?”
    “Well, yeah, but Frieda saw all of it. They just don’t want us to have it, the other birds and beasts. Know what I think? If we could get the sun, we’d grow, and we wouldn’t have to worry about the owls hunting us. We can ask the other Silverwings—the males who are banded.” He stared at the horizon. “If we ever catch up.”
    “You said they’d follow the coast for a while. Then what? How do we know when to change course?”
    “I could try singing you the next bit maybe.” Not that he’d been taught, but he thought it was worth a try. He was good at catching echoes …
    “It won’t work.”
    “It won’t?”
    “Don’t you know anything? You’re a Silverwing, I’m aBrightwing. Our echoes aren’t the same. It’d just be a big mess.”
    “So only I can read the map,” he said, and couldn’t stop a grin. He liked that. Something he knew that she didn’t.
    “Don’t look so cocky about it. You’ll have to explain it to me best you can.”
    He called up his mother’s sound map. He saw the ocean, the lighthouse, the coastline, and then—
    “Lights,” he told Marina. “Like stars, only they’re not really. And they’re down on the ground instead of in the sky. And it’s like everything’s made of the light. Giant shapes …”
    “A city,” Marina said simply.
    Shade blinked. That was easy. “You’ve been there?”
    “Once. We’ve really got to go in there?”
    There was something important in that city, in the midst of all that light. A tower, higher than the lighthouse …
    “Yes. There’s a landmark. We use it to set course, something to do with the stars and a metal cross …”
    “Listen!” Marina said suddenly, cutting him off.
    Shade’s ears twitched, strained, and he could hear the unmistakable creaky flutter of wingbeats. Not just one set, but many.
    “Come on!” With a burst of speed he soared through the sky until, in the distance, he could see the bats with his echo vision, hundreds of them shimmering out across the tree line.
    “I think it’s them!” he told her. “It must be!”
    “I hope they like me,” said Marina. “How should I introduce myself? Hi, I’m a friend of the bat who got your roost burned