Saia started running, keeping her domain expanded to better avoid the spirits on her path. Serit's platform had disappeared somewhere above, too far for her to catch, but it was being hoisted straight upwards and it didn't look like it could change direction.

She climbed every ladder she could find, using her viss to propel herself. They became sparser the higher she went, as the market's stalls gave way to communal platforms, then to a residential district.

She stopped, looking all around her. There seemed to be a lot more guards in the area compared to Filsun's residential district. The cylindrical buildings were mostly empty. She couldn't find any other ladder that led to the platforms above her. From that point on, only flying spirits could access the higher parts of the city.

The birdguards climbed the ladder behind her. One of them took off the blindfold from their eyes, showing two giant black pupils surrounded by bright orange irises.

"I can see it," he said. "We need to climb."

Not waiting for an answer from his colleague, he ran up to the nearest platform and jumped. His body seemed weightless as he descended toward one of the thick ropes and grabbed it with his arms. He started climbing it to the top, the trident strapped to his back and the pouches dangling from his waist.

The other birdguard was about to follow him, but Saia stepped in her way.

"What about the wind guards?"

"They know we are here," she replied. "The policy is not to mess with each other."

"What do I do then?"

"Alert Atan and go back to the hostel. We'll join you once we rescue engineer Serit."

She walked around Saia and jumped right behind her colleague. She ripped away the blindfold before starting to climb upwards.

Saia observed their ascent. She knew it was their job to protect Serit, and their words had already relieved her of any responsibility she had toward the engineer. Still, she doubted the representatives would consider it a good justification, if something actually happened to them.

Even disregarding the possibility of being deactivated forever, she couldn't ignore the fact that she was more powerful than those birdguards, and she already knew, or at least suspected, who they were up against. She couldn't forgive herself if something happened after she left.

She resumed running, gauging the distance which divided her from the nearby platform. She pushed her viss into her statue's legs and jumped. She'd expected her stomach to clench and her heart to flutter, but found only the air's resistance against the rock of her body.

She touched the platform, stumbled without falling, and ran toward the next one, which was slightly higher. She kept going, expanding her domain a bit more to better evaluate how far she had to jump. She could feel the platforms lowering a bit every time she landed and couldn't help but imagine the newborn spirits that were holding them up. She could only hope they were strong enough, the ropes resistant, the knots tight.

She climbed upward, leaving behind a path of swaying platforms. She was almost past the houses and inside an industrial area, when three guards descended from above to block her way.

Their commander yelled one of the first words she had learnt from Serit's story-bottle: "Stop!".

"My friend was kidnapped," she answered. mentally recoiling at the word 'friend' used for Serit, but 'my captor was kidnapped’ would have elicited more questions.

Only one of them hesitated, while the other two tensed, gripping their needle-like weapons. The fact she was still running toward them didn't seem to help their nerves. They became a blur, the only warning Saia got of their imminent attack.

She created the strongest gust of wind she was capable of. Two needles appeared again, not even an armlength from her chest, the guards holding onto them with two barely tangible hands. The wind tore away pieces of luminous fog from their shapes. Saia created two more winds from the sides to smash them together, forcing the fogs to become one. They screamed and flew away in a confused vortex, trying to disentangle their bodies from each other.

The third guard had been slow enough to avoid their fate. It flew away down the side of the platform, probably to call for help.

Saia took a running jump onto the next platform. From there, she searched for one that was covered by curtains on all sides, quickly checked that there was no one inside and jumped again. She landed between piles of crates.

She quieted the swinging of the platform with some strong winds going in the opposite direction. She had a sudden inspiration and made a nearby deposit swing, then another further ahead, as if she had gone in that direction instead.

She'd gained a bit of time, but needed to be quick if she didn't want to lose track of the birdguards. She focused on her statue: she couldn't change the shape well enough, but she knew how to alter its color. She made the statue as transparent as she could, to the point it almost looked like glass, even if there was a lingering opacity she couldn't remove. It didn't matter, as long as the light of her sphere could shine through, similar to the golden light of spirits' fog, even if a bit too intense. She changed her hair and eyes too, until it was impossible to consider her human or even shilvé, at least from afar.

She checked with her domain that there weren't guards nearby, then jumped from the platform to the next. She resumed running, following an upward path from platform to platform. Soon she could see the distant shape of the second birdguard and adjust her ascent accordingly.

The industrial area was full of closed platforms from which came various grating sounds. The passageways were few and far in between, which forced her to make longer jumps and waste more viss. At least there were more spirits around, each of them occupied enough with their tasks that they only paid marginal attention to what she was doing, without alerting the guards.

She saw the birdguards deviate toward the outer parts of the city and followed suit, climbing the ropes at times when there weren't open platforms around her. She was wondering how the kidnappers were even moving Serit's platform horizontally when she saw it, still and hanging to the side, since it was being held up by two ropes instead of four. The birdguards were going in a completely different direction, so she called out for them. Only the closer one stopped, looking at her pointing finger.

“There’s no one there. Go to the hostel.”

“You didn't check,” Saia yelled back, but she kept going without acknowledging her.

She climbed some more, expanding her domain until it included the platform. It only contained some crates labeled on the outside as 'clothes' in Shilizé, but empty on the inside, and a disassembled merchant stall. Most likely a disguise.

She had no idea how the birdguards knew, but there wasn't anyone inside. She checked the curtains that covered the platform on all sides, wondering whether the guards' sight was so good they could see through them.

She resumed her pursuit without finding an answer. The platforms were becoming sparser as she approached the far end of the city. Most of them weren't held up by ropes anymore, but were propped on top of the ones below through wooden beams. They didn't seem stable, but they were also mostly empty. Large pieces of waving cloth moved in the empty space between them, trailing past the borders of the city and into the azure sky beyond.

Soon she got close enough to notice something else that was obstructing her view, past the curtains and ribbons: a huge shape of dark metal, the surface covered with grooves that reminded her of the monks' binoculars, with three round windows on one side. There was a short metal footbridge connecting the base of the structure to one of the most external platforms of the city, but it wasn't held up by ropes or bolted to the wooden floor. The structure itself seemed heavy too, but it floated without anything holding it up.

Saia didn't have time to ponder the situation further because two people, a human and a shilvé, were transporting Serit's unconscious shape across the platforms and toward the footbridge. A hole opened in the large structure where the two connected, and she could see more people moving inside, inciting the other two kidnappers. They were almost three platforms away from their goal, but the birdguards were getting closer, closer than Saia was anyway. The human let his partner go on with Serit and turned around to face them. He had the same shaved head and arm tattoos as the ones that had tried to kidnap Serit at the arena.

The birdguards extracted their tridents. Someone from inside the metal structure pointed at Saia's distant shape: there was a quick exchange of words, but nothing else happened.

It was her disguise, Saia realized. They thought she was a wind spirit, so they considered her less dangerous, at least as long as she didn't turn gasseous. She could take control of them and the entire structure, if she was quick enough.

She accelerated, injecting viss into her legs.

Meanwhile, the birdguards were closing in on the human who had decided to stay behind. He didn't look particularly worried as he slowly walked backward, glancing over his shoulder at his comrade’s progress. Once the birdguards were close enough, he extracted a long knife from his pocket and a whistle from the other.

Saia was about to jump past the platform where the guards were standing with the intention of reaching the metal structure, but she remembered in time that the birdguards were still shilvé under those plumes.

“Run!” she yelled at them, but even if they had understood what they needed to run from, the sound would have reached them first.

She knew that gods could silence sounds since the night Vizena had trapped her in the temple, but there was no time to figure out how, because the man had already brought the whistle to his lips, raising the knife to strike at the birdguards as soon as they would fall.

Saia sent a wind to tear away the instrument from his hand, letting it fall from the platform. His eyes widened, focusing first on his empty hand, then on Saia standing on the platform right behind the guards.

“Sphere!” he screamed as the metal of a trident bit deep into his shoulder. His legs gave way, but the birdguard managed to grab him before he could fall over the edge of the platform.

The movement near the metal structure became frantic. One person descended onto the footbridge, and the whole structure seemed to lower a bit, tilting to the side. The person, another human, ran toward Serit and the kidnapper who was transporting them, then noticed Saia and stopped. The other looked over his shoulder, dropped Serit and scrambled to get inside the structure before she could get too close. The passage retracted without anyone touching it, leaving the structure suspended in the air.

Saia expanded her domain, but before it could touch the metal, the structure lurched back and out of her range. It kept flying downward and away from the city until it disappeared from her sight.

Saia grabbed Serit's unconscious body and sent them a spark of buzzing viss. They slowly started to awaken.

The first thing they did after opening their eyes was bringing a hand to their head. Saia thought they were concussed, then saw what had actually happened: a huge lock of hair had been cut away from the scalp.

"They can control me," Serit said in a whiny tone.

"No they can't," Saia replied, irritated at the idea of having to comfort them. "I'll check your viss and kick you out of it if they even try. Get up, we're not supposed to be here."

She helped them stand, then realized they couldn't jump or climb the ropes in their conditions. Her viss flared with irritation, but she still picked them up and carried them over one shoulder. Serit was too occupied with touching their bald spot to comment on what was happening.

Saia jumped over to the birdguards' platform, where they were bandaging the human's shoulder. They tried to awaken him, but he was completely unconscious.

Saia checked his viss: even pushing a small quantity of buzzing energy into his body wasn't enough to awaken him. A flux of extra viss was constantly replenishing his reserves, drowning out her inference.

“They're keeping him asleep,” she said, impressed by the amount of viss they had at disposal. “Let's hide, we need to decide what to do.”

The birdguards nodded. One of them gave all of their equipment to the other, who tied the man behind their back in turn. Saia guided the group toward an empty platform that had curtains on all sides, then put Serit down onto the floor.

“They used a knife," they said, still touching their head. “I thought they wanted to kill me.”

Saia was about to comment that they could have done it at the arena, but held back, not knowing what the birdguards knew.

“The spirits seem alarmed,” the birdguard that was carrying the equipment said, looking out. “I’ll reassure them that everything's fine and alert the guards that we're passing through.”

They left the extra pouches on the floor and left.

Saia sat down between Serit and the other birdguard.

"What was that?" she asked, to no one in particular.

"We'll heal him and interrogate him," the birdguard replied, pointing at the man tied to his back. "Provided we manage to awaken him."

"Whatever it was, I know who could have built something like that," Serit said.

Saia waited for them to elaborate, but they stayed in silence. She checked their viss for external influences, but they were only trying to think while also feeling the shock of the kidnapping.

"Who?" she asked.

"One of the higher elders. She was the one to come up with the technology for our flying cities."

"Is it really the same technology or you're just saying that because it flew?”

Serit stayed in silence for a bit.

"We'll ask her at the meeting. But even if it wasn't her to create that thing, the elders are certainly involved."

The birdguard had raised his head a bit when Serit had mentioned a meeting with the elders, which made Saia realize they were supposed to keep that a secret.

"Why the elders?" Saia asked. "Your kidnappers were all humans and shilvé."

Serit looked straight at her for the first time.

“There's absolutely zero chance a thing like that could approach the city without the guards noticing and the elders giving their approval.”

The birdguard reached over to the pile of equipment his colleague had left on the wooden floor. Saia tensed, but he only took out a blindfold. They wrapped it over his eyes and around his head, letting out a sigh of relief.

Saia realized the light shining through her body was still quite intense and made the rock completely opaque, of a faint gray color that only suggested the presence of light beneath it.

Serit laughed.

"You look like a cloud."

Saia gave them an unimpressed look.

"We seriously need to get you checked."

"I'm not concussed."

"You're going to be if you keep behaving like that."

Serit slowly returned serious, looking around as if following a sudden thought.

"There's another thing we need to investigate. How did they know we were going to Filsun's house?"

Saia frowned. Of course the kidnappers had to know where they were going in order to place the platform in the right position, but they'd been at Ifse for only two days.

"Do you think it was already there before today?" she asked, failing to locate its general shape and the color of the curtains among all the platforms she'd seen in the market.

Serit shrugged.

"Maybe. They were already inside, though. They cut my hair while we were moving up."

"Do you think Filsun is involved?"

"We can't exclude it. The only people who knew apart from him were the representatives and, well, the guide."

"And the guards," Saia said in their ears.

Serit nodded.

"We can't exclude they didn't know anything and it was all a plan of the elders. Or maybe the kidnappers have been observing us and took this decision autonomously. You're sure the memory reader hasn't seen something he shouldn't have?"

Saia wanted to say she was sure, but couldn't bring herself to lie.

"No. He was fast and I couldn't figure out what I needed to pay attention to."

Serit nodded, their face hiding the turmoil that was taking hold of their viss.

"Then he could be involved too." They sighed. "So many possibilities, and I'm pretty sure we're not even considering them all."

"What do we do with Filsun? Next lesson's tomorrow."

"We'll behave as if nothing happened. Let's not mention the attack and see if he reveals anything."

Saia perceived the tent opening before the birdguard's beak appeared inside the platform.

"I clarified the situation, we can go now."

Serit tried to stand up and failed. It took them a while to climb to their feet, enough for the birguard to put on the abandoned pouches again.

"Can I ask you..." Serit started, looking at Saia.

"Sure, I'll carry you," she said in a flat tone.

"Thank you."

"Fuck off," she answered, then picked them up and jumped.