Free Rainbird by Rabia Gale Page B

marker tonight myself.”
    Sanders pressed his lips closed and hunched over the board. Rainbird hit the numbers again. No response. Again.
    Nothing. Not even a ringing.
    Bastard must’ve unplugged his callbox from the socket.
    “Damnit!” Rainbird followed it up with a few more choice curses, picked up from Marvelo’s thugs. She lunged to her feet, stalked over to the spinal cord. Considered kicking Sanders’ useless machinery, but the mulish set of his chin and his protective hunch over it deterred her. Instead, she reached through the mesh of wiring and touched the nerve.
    It was covered in a whitish sheath and felt slightly slippery and warm. Within the sheath, currents hummed as they ran through tissue and metal. Her fingers tingled.
    Please. Rainbird willed her thoughts into her blood and down to her fingers, along with memory and longing. Where’s Petrus? Tell me where to find him.
    And then she was no longer surrounded by bone, sharing cramped quarters with Sanders, his machine poking into her calf, but stretched out and shooting through nerves, buffeted and pricked by zooming particles. She’d have gasped at the speed, but she had no lungs to breathe with—they’d been left behind with the rest of her body. Already she felt herself spreading thin and disintegrating, no longer held in by her skin, bombarded by sound and sensation.
    “…play Jacks tonight…” sizzle tingle “…nagging woman downside…” pierce-pain flash-star –glimpse of loading dock, empty and cavernous—“…track’s set, but the bone…” hot hot hot—if she could only shed her clothes, her skin…giant muscles clenched and relaxed, in slow tempo… longing longing for the stars to stretch wings and fly …
    Rainbird hurtled headfirst towards something electric and alive that beat beat beat and beyond that, the lightning-flickers of dreams in a vast sleep. Just before she clenched her eyes shut she caught a glimpse of something.
    Someone.
    Pain flared all over her, and she screamed but no one could hear she couldn’t hear because she had no throat to scream with no ears to hear with…
    “Rainbird. Rainbird!”
    Reek of burning flesh. Rainbird’s stomach churned. She sat up hastily.
    “What the—?” Her hands hurt. A lot. She looked down. They were slathered in emergency-kit cream, clumsily wrapped in bandages. The skin that showed through was an angry splotchy red.
    “You put your hands right in the nerves, among all the wiring! Right through the sheathing!” Sanders’ anger almost masked the lines of exhaustion etched into his face and the residual fear lurking in his eyes. “That was a downright stupid thing to do. Do you even know how much voltage goes through there? You were lucky I pulled you off!”
    She noticed the hooked poly stick on the ground. “How long did I—?”
    “You touched it for a couple of seconds at most. But you were out for several minutes.” Sanders shook his head. “Don’t ever do that again.”
    Then she remembered. “It was worth it.” She pushed herself up to her feet. “I found Petrus.”
    “You found—?” He gaped at her. “How?”
    I don’t know. Rainbird’s stomach tightened, thinking of the beast and how alive it had felt. “I just fell into the current and it took me to”—she swallowed, thinking again of that vast bloody beating thing— “a heart. Sanders. Does the—Is the Company keeping the heart alive still?”
    He blinked, too fast. His gaze flickered away from hers. She could see it on his face—him almost deciding to lie. Then, “Yes. The heart’s kept alive, because it powers the movement of the Day Sun on its track. But you can’t tell anyone that, Rainbird! Think of the panic.”
    He sounded just like Turnworth, but he was right. The public could accept living under the arch of the dragon’s spine, accept its eye glaring down at them as it traveled the sunway, accept the bundle of nerves that sped messages and power across the spine, but the