Sykport

Previously

There was a knock on the door to my room, which startled more I think than if they had just entered. It indicated some kind of courtesy, and given the broken tooth I had recently endured, this seemed alien. A trick, perhaps? "Hello?" I ventured.

The door opened (neither quickly nor slowly, instead at a perfectly reasonable pace) and a woman entered, wearing a black shirt and skirt, with a white scarf. Her eyes were amber and her face looked kind. She said something that I failed to hear.

"What?" I asked, maybe impatiently. I was probably shaking, for I was afraid. There was something deeply unsettling in what I had thought she had said, that after I ran her words through my mind over and over I could produce no satisfying answer. A null void.

"I'd asked if you were comfortable. I just asked, 'comfortable?' I mean." Her voice was no longer terrifying, and I could not explain it. Now her voice was cheery and I wondered who she was and what she was doing. I did not lack the ability to notice that she was beautiful.

"Yes," I said. "Why do you care?" I asked. Foolish, I thought, I should have asked for her name.

"You're quite precious chattel to me. The fire men passed you on to me, as a gift. They said you sought freedom; you muttered it while asleep. It seems your question never passed their minds. I gave them their freedom so that I may have yours."

A different kind of fear crept in, but it was not the same as before, and much more manageable. Her beauty was much diminished by the revelatory nature of her speech. I recognized her comeliness, but now recognized that her amber eyes held cruelty; and a desire for control.

"I offer freedom to all of my servants, if they are audacious enough to take it. I will offer that same freedom to you," and my eyes must have lighted up with hope, for she said, "I am glad to see your enthusiasm. I thought the fire men would never take it, but they surprised me."

"What do I need to do? To be free?"

She looked at me for a moment, and walked out. She closed the door behind her, and I gasped slightly. I thought she had ignored me (or intended to cruelly keep me waiting), but I heard a far off noise that I must have missed before; that called her off.

A low rumbling accompanied by screams.

I decided that this was a chance at freedom I did not want to avoid. She said she admired her servants who took it when it presented itself, and I guessed that in failure she would be impressed. I tried to turn the doorknob but found it was locked; either it locked behind her or she was swift in turning the mechanism. I struggled with it for a moment and stopped.

The rumbling now completely drowned out the screams and somewhere within the mass of noise I perceived a gunshot. And then another.

I turned to the window and opened it. I grabbed and tugged at the vine, and found it firm and closely taut to the side of the building. I say building now, as the snow had died down, and I realized I must be in one of many skyscrapers; I could see several others around me, and beyond them, more, with steel-grey buildings populating the distance, some shorter, some higher, all closely packed together, with narrow openings between them, through which harsh gusts of snow blew. I guessed that the tower I was within was placed unusually far away from the ones outside my window, and wondered if there was a jutting out structure that the vine grew from. There did not appear to be much vegetation at all in the other structures I saw.

So I climbed down the vine and descended. It grew thicker as I descended, and I was soon engulfed in the snowy white haze that had obscured my vision earlier. I climbed down in such obscurity for some time; I can not accurately say how long I was aware of only three directions (the fog obscured the fourth completely) but it was long enough that I realized my clothes were insufficient for the cold; and my hands and feet grew cold. I had on only the clothes of a fair-day citizen of the engine; long sleeved white cloth shirt, white jeans and thin grey slippers.

I suppose I relied on my gift (which was becoming more obvious to me by the minute). First was the healing ability I had; and now I think I discovered I could generate warmth and keep frostbite at bay better than the average human (I use the term human only for ease of terming; I have met many peoples during my life, and the only humans I met were in tunnels and bunkers, pale and maddened by their isolation from the world). It was this climb that instilled in me a feeling of superiority, to the people in this new land who (given my observation of the woman and the two men who had taken me on the airship) were physically inferior.

Below I began to smell plants and life, and I looked down to see trees suddenly appearing out of the snowy haze; trees that looked oddly tropical given the snowy conditions. I climbed further down and felt the snow hasten into freezing rain, and when I was far enough down the vine (the vine was now wide as a tree, and I wonder now if it was a species of tree that was converted to grow like a vine) that my feet were less than an arm's width away from the treetops, the rain was a fine mist. And I realized that the temperatures were now much warmer than below. I continued to climb down and felt as though I were climbing into the thick swamps that carpeted the land below the engine; only in atmosphere, because these trees were healthy and vibrant compared to the dark brown twisting apparitions of the swamps.

I had descended from a room much like a house, to high-altitude frigidity, to a rain forest.

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