CODEX

As children, we learned early that the clouds were dangerous.

Turns out the city wasn't all that much safer.

Between three towers, the council platform hung suspended, its thin profile on the horizon the only thing protecting the city from itself now. Councilors paced, barely visible at this distance, preparing for their morning votes, while I peered at them through sharp cracks in the Spire wall. I wanted to be out there, in the open sky, leading. Making Laws, rediscovering our past, keeping tower from fighting tower. Not here, accompanying Kirit Skyshouter on a cloudtouched expedition into the Spire's remains.

But Kirit and I dangled from tenuous ropes in the Spire's dim afternoon light anyway. We swung within the cracked walls and over the deep gaping center of the Spire because the council and my mentor, Doran Grigrit, had asked it of me.

"No one else can find the codex, Nat, and few want to go in the Spire as it is. She's offering to help," he'd said on the council plinth earlier that morning. "The Singers knew how the city grows, why it roars. How the towers rise. We're on the verge of a new age, with new discoveries, but we need to retrieve as much knowledge from the past as we can, before the Spire cracks further and our opportunity is lost. None of the other Singers have been near as helpful in this effort, not since the new Laws. Take her in."

And here we were.

I hummed a verse of a popular song.

The Spire cracked as a Shout rose up,
freed the city, freed us all.

"Knock it off, Nat. I'm trying to count tiers." Her voice was rough, even when she spoke. The healers said it could stay that way forever.

"That's Councilor Densira to you, Skyshouter."

These days, children sang of Kirit the hero. She was that. She was my wing-sister too, and would always be. But she had faults, and a stubborn streak, and her friends stood a fair chance of getting killed. I knew all about that. Worse, she'd been acting strangely in the past few moons, since the fever. Distant. Obstinate.

"What deal did you cut with Doran?" I said, then sneezed. Bone dust everywhere, even so many months after Spirefall. A cold east-spun wind whistled through the cracks running the Spire's outer wall. The stuff silted the dim light.

She didn't answer. Singers hadn't been keen on helping the council or the towers much lately. A fair number of towers hadn't wanted to help the Singers in a while either. And no one was sure whether Kirit was Singer or Tower any longer. Probably not even Kirit herself.

I took my eyes off of her for a moment to squint at the carvings we swung near. Panels depicting winged battles, skymouths attacking with grasping tentacles and rows of glass teeth, tower fighting tower. Singers and their carvings. Their tattoos. The city was well and done with all of that.

Life was better lived in the open towers, not in this walled one. Out in the sky. Not trapped in the Gyre's echoes at the Spire's center, where I'd nearly died not that long ago. Where Kirit had nearly killed me.

And where I'd tried to kill her in turn.

I sneezed again and the rope swung.

"Quiet, Nat!"

She made it sound like I was sneezing on purpose.

"It's the dust." I kept the irritation out of my voice. The city's hero wouldn't be able to blame the newly elected junior councilor from the northwest quadrant for botching her search. I wouldn't give her any reason to complain.

Besides, I was curious. My mother, Elna Densira, had spoken of the codex with a mix of reverence and fear since Kirit and I were children. She'd said the pages contained our city's survival in numbers: lists of what towers needed shoring up, a record of appeasements. I wanted to see what the city's roars and rumbles over time looked like. I couldn't imagine the heft of it.

We had nothing like that in the towers. Too heavy to carry up, too hard to maintain. Only the Spire and the Singers could keep records like that for generations. But instead of sharing their knowledge, they secreted it away. They practiced crimes against the city in its name.

We knew that now.

After Spirefall, searchers had cut carvings from the Spire walls and sorted through rubble, but the codex eluded them. Then more tiers collapsed, and rumors of rogue skymouths in the Spire began. Most wouldn't go near the Spire now, even if the new Laws didn't forbid it.

If I helped bring the codex back today, that would make me, if not more of a hero, more of a leader, despite having only nineteen Allmoons.

Kirit continued her descent on the gently swaying rope and I followed, inching down the rough fiber. The silk of my footwraps caught on a splinter.

What remained of the Gyre's winds were hollow sounds: bone shards knocked from balcony edges that skittered and bounced down the walls, the flap of a whipperling struggling to stay aloft and in the light, my breath coming fast as I lowered myself down the rope. Once a place to fight for the right to speak, the Gyre resonated now with ghosts and loss.

I gripped the twisted fiber and sinew rope tightly enough that my knucklebones showed hard and pale beneath my skin.

"I wish you'd brought newer ropes," Kirit said.

"Complaining? Not very heroic, Skyshouter." So many songs praised her deeds, her words, her sacrifice. She should know the city had bigger troubles than old ropes.

"If I'd had access to supplies, I would have brought my own ropes," she snapped, looking up.

She always hated when I teased.

In the sunlight, the web of scars across her scalp and face from her burns gleamed silver. I bit back my frustration, and felt a twinge of regret. I swallowed that back.

"Council gave us these." Most of the council had. Three councilors actually, from three separate towers and three different quadrants. These days, that represented a lot of cross-city cooperation. When Doran Grigrit, my mentor; Vant Densira, my tower leader; and Hiroli Naza, Lead Councilor Ezarit Varu's apprentice, first told me what Kirit wanted to do, I'd balked. I'd been tracking runaway Singer fledges since Spirefall and working to address the unrest that was blowing through the city. Important things.

But curiosity won out, and my sense of honor. Lead Councilor Grigrit trusted me to keep an eye on Kirit, and not give her any special treatment. Meantime, Vant had asked me to grab...