After trying for two days to solidify éshan first in the shape of a hammer, then a feather, a nail, a bolt and finally a simple glass marble, each one impossible to pick up and use for their original function, Saia and then Serit had to accept the evidence that she didn't even know where to begin to solidify liquids and they weren't able to help her.

Serit was folded over on a stool, elbows on their knees, looking intensely at the basin on the floor as if they could force the liquid to collaborate with the strength of their frustration.

“I really thought you had an instinctual knowledge of how to manipulate viss. I didn’t consider you needed to know the patterns.”

Saia was pacing around the chair that Serit had insisted on bringing over despite her reassurances that she didn't need it. She’d found out she could move viss inside objects, just like Aili had suggested when talking about being a goddess, but it was useless if she didn’t know which movement was required to solidify water.

“So what’s next?” she asked.

Serit breathed deeply, sitting upright.

“We already established that your powers have diminished since you left mount Ohat, probably another decision of your monks. You can control the viss inside liquids to some extent, which is promising, but you don't know how to do that in a way that accomplishes our goals. Which means that it's something you hopefully can learn, but someone has to teach you.”

Saia looked over at the table. Two more basins occupied it: one filled with water, the other with bird blood. She’d practiced with them to gauge whether they were easier to work with, but she’d failed in both cases. She could create a shape by using winds, but not by manipulating the viss directly, and she couldn’t figure out the steps to make that shape solid.

“Unfortunately, I can't explain to you what to do. I hoped you would know.”

“I did, back at the mountain,” she lied. “Maybe you should bring me there.”

Serit sighed.

“I have no say in this. Also, someone should have to accompany you, and we can’t even descend as high as the tip of the mountain without becoming liquid. We generally try to avoid it anyway, since your gods repel or dispose of every shile that rains in their territories. The holes in the temple get closed when the city flies over the area, so no one can jump down.”

“What else can we do, then? Is there anyone in the city who knows how to do something like this?"

Serit shook their head.

“It requires too much energy.”

Saia's viss started to buzz with a mix of anger and fear.

“What will happen to me if there's no solution to this?”

Serit glanced at her, then lowered their eyes.

“I’m going to be deactivated, right?”

“No, it’s too soon for that. There’s someone who knows everything about this kind of stuff, but I hoped to use him only as a last resort, in case we really needed an external opinion on something. But I don’t have any preliminary results, which means that convincing the representatives is not going to be easy.”

“Why do you need to convince them?”

“Because I’m talking about wind spirits.”

“What are they, now?” Saia asked with an exasperated tone.

Serit produced a bitter laugh.

“The short answer is: sentient winds. The long one is that they created us shilvé and could probably destroy us easily if they wanted to, which makes dealing with them quite a delicate matter.”

They lifted the basin and put it onto the table.

“We need to put all of this,” they gestured to include all the three basins, “Inside some bottles.”

They walked out of the room. Saia followed them.

“Wait, created you? What do you mean?”

Serit crossed the hallway to enter the storage room.

“There's a story-bottle about our history in the cabinet in your room. The gist is that wind spirits live for a long time and their society tends to change radically every few centuries, based on the plans and goals of their elders. About two millennia ago, their collective goal was to build a perfect city in the sky, and obviously each elder's conception of a perfect city was different.”

They opened a box full of bottles as they spoke and started handing them to Saia until her arms were full.

“At least they all agreed that a perfect city wouldn't require them to work at all, so they started gathering humans with the promise of free land, taking advantage of the populations that believed their gods lived in the sky, or that wind spirits themselves were some sort of minor deities.”

“I’ve never seen them.”

Serit took some funnels and rubber hoses.

“Doesn't surprise me, we don't see them much either. They've since outgrown their perfect cities and moved on. Literally.”

They nodded in the door's direction and Saia turned to leave.

“Before then, they had kids with humans. The end result is us, shilvé. When they left us behind, we took hold of the cities, but we know who they actually belong to. Even after all this time, we act as if we still consider them our parents. As if they could come back at any moment and scold us for being bad kids.”

Serit's tone was extremely bitter. Saia entered the laboratory and put down the bottles around the basins.

“I’ve only seen a couple of humans around since I came here, though.”

“I told you: fourth level, third if they're lucky or part of illustrious families. We are not proud of our earthly origins, even if I personally find the concept of following wind spirits around like lap dogs and despising humans when they both had the same role in creating us completely absurd.”

“Following like… What?”

Serit gave her a surprised look, then shook their head.

“Nevermind. Point is, wind spirits have educated their children to look up to them. The more our ancestors pleased them, the more they were considered similar to them, even if never perfectly equal. Humans, on the other hand, could never hope to obtain that. So they were confined at the borders of the cities, and they’re forced to stay there even after centuries from the wind spirits’ departure.”

Serit put an extremity of a rubber hose inside a funnel and gestured for Saia to give them a bottle. She didn't move.

“So humans are stuck up there? They can't even leave?"

“If they live below the fourth level they have documents, so they could. But most of them don't want to leave, believe me. Their families have lived here for millennia.”

“But what if they wanted to?”

Serit leaned forward and took a bottle from the table.

“They would have to wait for a merchant to leave the city and go down with them and their people. It's the only case when the iron ladder gets extended. But to do that they have to reach the bottom level, so they still need to be citizens.”

Saia crossed her arms.

“You keep repeating that word, but I have no idea of what it means.”

“That they are inhabitants of the city.”

“And isn't it enough to live here?”

Serit tried to slip the bottleneck inside the other extremity of the rubber hose.

“If you’re born inside the first three levels, yes. Citizens also have more rights, like voting and circulating freely inside the city.”

“Can those humans become citizens?”

Serit nodded.

“How?”

“By working. Can you please help me instead of standing there?”

Saia reluctantly lifted the basin full of blood and tipped it forward, so that a stream of red liquid could flow into the funnel. The bottle was filled quickly, and a bit of blood spilled onto the table and the rough surface of the floor. Serit carefully closed the bottle and took an empty one to gather the remaining blood.

“I’m sure wind spirits will be able to help us because they can manipulate the shape and solidity of their bodies. That's how they managed to reproduce with humans in the first place.”

Saia nodded, shaking the basin to let the last drops fall into the funnel. She was glad she couldn't smell the combined iron aftertaste of both the basin and the blood.

“I’ll send a request for a hearing with the representatives as soon as we're finished,” Serit said, closing the second bottle. “If we're lucky, we'll get it even tomorrow. Enanit will refuse, Héshe will listen to her because she's too young to know any better, and we at least won't have wasted too much time.”

“Why are you so sure that they won't listen to you?”

Serit took a second before answering, holding the bottle tight with two hands.

“Enanit doesn't like me at all. She doesn't trust me, and this request is so out there I'm pretty sure she wouldn't agree even if I weren't the one asking.”

“And you can't convince her?”

Serit shook their head. They threw the blood-stained funnel into the empty basin.

“No. Her problem is with me specifically, not with something I did.”

Saia watched as they prepared another funnel and bottle at the extremities of a new hose.

“Why?”

“She's like that.”

“Why you, then? There must be a reason.”

They sighed and nodded at the basin with the éshan. Saia lifted it and started tipping it forward.

“I’m a child of viss.”

They glanced at Saia, as if expecting a reaction from her.

“I don't know what it means. Is it bad?”

“No. I'm essentially…”

Up to that point, they'd been eager to answer Saia's questions and share their knowledge, only reacting with hilarity to her ignorance of some things they considered obvious. Now they were visibly battling with themselves on whether to complete that sentence.

Saia waited. Had it been anyone else, she'd have tried to reassure them. But she needed to hate Serit, detach herself from them as much as possible, because there was a concrete possibility she'd have to hurt them to escape from there. If their words could help her despise them a bit more, all the better.

“I wasn't born like everybody else,” they blurted out, still holding the bottle in position despite it being already full. “I solidified spontaneously at the top of the city. Everybody does that when they return from the voyage, but I never rained. I just... Started existing.”

Since they weren't moving, Saia took another empty bottle and handed it to them.

“How is that possible?” she asked.

“Nobody knows. There are a lot of superstitions connected to the children of viss.”

“So you just appeared from nothing? You don't remember anything?”

They started to shake their head, but stopped before completing the gesture.

“Sort of? Every person who returns from their rain-voyage has some vague memories about the places they've seen and the people and creatures that drank them. That happens because our blood stores the viss in a way that makes the information it includes readable by our minds through our senses, which is why story-bottles work the way they do.”

Saia interrupted them by raising a hand.

“So that’s why you knew so much about the mountain. We drank you.”

Serit nodded.

“We took advantage of the fact that one of your gods had disappeared, as we learnt from that friend of yours.”

“Rabam?”

“Yeah, him. Every time a person recomposes at the top of a city, they’re required to report all the information they can remember about their last voyage. We were careful to rain only inside the territory where the god wasn’t active, at least until the monks took control of the situation. Still, we gathered a lot of data that way, and Rabam filled in the gaps. Also, we were observing you with our instruments.”

They closed the second bottle.

“Going back to the children of viss, we have the same kind of memories one would gain after a rain-voyage, plus others about shilvé that don’t seem to follow a single thread. They’re all confused, sometimes in direct contradiction to one another.”

“Like?”

“They're set in different cities, for example, with different people. They feel like pieces of many different dreams.”

They started preparing the hose, bottle and funnel for the third basin.

“There are theories, of course. The most important one is that we are a partial attempt at recomposing of people who rained and couldn't reform.”

“That happens?”

Serit nodded.

“Sometimes people wait too long to rain, so the viss in their bodies is too little and doesn't contain all of the information they need to recompose themselves. This information gets lost even with age.”

Saia thought of Hilon, the woman who had jumped, and how she’d pointed out that she wasn't that old.

“Sometimes they manage to reform again,” Serit continued. “Without limbs or something else missing. There are people who have reappeared only to die immediately for some internal damage.”

Saia recoiled at that. She started to pour water inside the new funnel.

“So what did you lose? Your memory?”

Serit produced a small smile.

“That's another theory, good guess. But no, apparently when the residual viss of a lot of dead or dying cloud people gets together, sometimes it has enough information on how to form a person to solidify into a new individual that isn't one of the original ones but has some of their memories.”

Saia poured the water until the first bottle was full.

“There's also the fact that the underworld is under the earth and sea. For us, at least,” they added as an afterthought. “So some people think that we're actually dead souls who escaped from the goddess of death, or were rejected, or even sent back to fulfill some mission or take souls.”

“And Enanit believes that?”

“I don't think she believes it word for word, but the consequences of these superstitions run deeper than that. We are essentially considered the leftovers of dead people, and there’s this underlying belief that we could remember who we were at any moment and turn out to be completely different people from what we were up to that point. Which means that we're not trusted, and we generally don't get important roles or big responsibilities.”

They finally closed the last bottle and put it down next to the others.

“We also have a reputation to be criminals. But that's more due to the fact that we don't have anybody to wait and support us after we appear, so a lot of us have to steal or engage with the criminal world. I was lucky because Iriméze has a small community in the fourth level, even if it's not a good place to live in. I'm one of the few who managed to leave. And people like Enanit hate that.”

They piled up the funnels and rubber hoses inside the basin at the top of the stack while Saia took the bottles. They walked back to the storage room.

“By the way, my god-particle is connected to the goddess of death, and children of viss can't change it. There's a stigma associated with it, so no one else chooses that particle as their own.”

They gestured for Saia to put away the bottles next to the ones that contained empty éshan.

“I’m going to wash this stuff and send that message. I guess you have the rest of your day free.”

“Can I go out?”

“Not by yourself.”

Saia rolled her eyes.

“Then I guess I'll read.”

Serit nodded.

“I’ll tell you the answer as soon as I get one.”