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For Vivian, it all started with a book.
It was a gift from her mother, for her 23rd birthday. An antique birding book, generically named Birds of Britain, with beautiful illustrations and flowery descriptions. Old, outdated, and inaccurate, of course, but a gorgeous thing to flip through just to look at the pages. It apparently came from some private collection at some point, but her mother claimed to have found it in a perfectly normal second-hand book shop. “I saw it, and I just knew it had to be yours,” she had said. “It’s just your thing.”
It's true, of course. Vivian has always loved birds. As a child, she could be distracted for hours by the visitors to the bird feeder outside the kitchen window. As a teenager, she tentatively took up birdwatching with the help of her father’s old pair of binoculars. As an adult, she has travelled across much of Europe hoping to spot different species.
She’s not the most obsessive of birders, doesn’t feel the need to spend weeks hunting the rarest birds just for a glimpse at them. That’s not the point. She just loves birds, how they sound, how they look, how they move through the sky.
Birds of Britain, then, is an appreciated gift. The illustrations are lavish and detailed, and the descriptions might not be anywhere close to scientifically accurate, but the poetry in them is unmatched.
The blackbird sings its dulcet tones to announce its place, this small, black speck in an endless void, with nothing but its feathers to anchor it.
There is something vaguely unsettling about the nonsense prose of some of the bird descriptions, something that lodges itself in her brain long after putting the book down, but it’s fascinating too. She can’t help keeping it open on the coffee table just so she can read an entry or two whenever she passes by. It stays there for months, until it’s a fixture in her life, only put aside when she has guests, and always taken out again when they leave.
It might be driving her to distraction. It gets bad enough that her colleague Liz asks her if everything is quite alright, one day at work, and she realizes she’s spent the past five minutes simply staring out of the window.
Vivian mentions the book, hoping to explain, but quickly moves on to talking about birds in general, how it’s been too long since she went on a proper birdwatching trip, and perhaps she’s been working too much lately, perhaps she’s just tired. It’s easier to talk about that than it is to explain that she spotted a common goldfinch on her way to work, and a passage from the book has been replaying in her head ever since.
Even the goldfinch’s striking yellow wings and red face will fade against the blue. Only among the branches and twigs of the earth can it stand out on its own.
Vivian doesn’t even like Liz that much. She’s just friendly because she’d rather not make an enemy. She has no interest in trying to explain why she was scanning the sky outside the window for any possible flash of colour. There’s no good explanation anyway.
A week off will probably help, she figures, and calls in sick and goes home.
Birds of Britain lies on the table. She gravitates towards it, sits down on the sofa to read more without really thinking about it. It fits comfortably in her hands, and the pages feel pleasant under her fingers when she turns them. She really must be tired, feels a little dizzy, but as she’s planted solidly on her seat, it’s not a problem.
Owls carry the silence between the stars in their feathers, and strike from beyond the understanding of smaller beasts.
She closes the book and puts it away into her bookshelves. She’s been stuck inside for too long. That has to be the problem. The past month it’s been raining and raining, but now there is finally sun again. She needs to get out of the house and back in touch with the world.
The dizziness stays. She nearly stumbles when she walks into the garden, and doesn’t dare step too far away from any handholds. She already feels like she’s falling. The sunlight helps, but only a little. It doesn’t take long before she has to go indoors again, away from the wide open sky.
She goes to bed early and feels the world spin around her until she falls asleep.
The next morning, she feels better. It doesn’t take much thought to pack a lunch, grab her binoculars and set out for the woods. It’s not a long drive and not a long walk. It’s August, it’s warm, the sun is shining, and the birds are singing. She doesn’t need to see any of them to identify them. The bird song feels familiar, feels like home.
After a few hours, she feels almost like normal. This was a good idea. This is where she belongs, between the trees, surrounded by song, with her eyes pointed resolutely upwards.
She eats her lunch on a bench someone has set up along the forest path, greets the dogwalkers and old couples passing by, smacks a few bugs and just breathes for a while. Even now, something in her brain is pulsing anxiously at her, but it’s fine, she’s fine, it’ll pass. A week like this will do her good.
Another hour into the trip, she spots movement and raises her binoculars with an excited gasp. A sparrowhawk soars above, barely visible between the trees and shadowed against the sky. It’s beautiful. It’s…
The sparrowhawk rises and dives like a dancer, always a single step from the precipice. If it were to lose it wings, it would fall up, into the endless sky.
The hawk flits out of her view, and she’s left staring up into the blue.
The knowledge seizes her that a single misstep will let it take her. It petrifies her. The sky is so deep and so close, and she has nothing but her feet on the dirt to ground her. It doesn’t feel like enough.
Humans must have wings too, she realizes. They must, or else there would be nothing between them and the sky.
She hopes her wings are strong enough to hold her.
She has her wings. She has her wings. She must. She knows they’re there. She can’t see them or feel them, but she knows they have to be there. The sky is so close, resting on the canopy above her, and she must have her wings, or it would have taken her already.
One foot off the ground and her heart in her throat, she takes a step. It won’t make her fall. She walked all the way here; she won’t fall now just because she’s noticed.
But she’s been so dizzy lately. Maybe it’s a sign of something. Maybe she’s in danger. Maybe there’s something wrong with her wings.
It takes her a long time to make it home.
The second she’s under her own roof, she breathes easier. The sky is safely locked away. It can’t reach her here, even if she falls. She sinks to the floor and breathes through the fear. And then she gets up and pulls Birds of Britain out of her bookshelf. It will have the answers. It has to have the answers.
She sits on her sofa and reads and reads and feels too dizzy to stand up.
Come Monday, Vivian is back at work.
It’s raining, the sky heavily overcast, and it helps a little. She keeps her eyes on the ground and her breathing steady, and tries not to be too obvious about the sigh of relief as she enters the office building. She plasters her smile back on and is friendly as can be. They like her here. She puts a lot of effort into it.
Liz comes by just before lunch, and Vivian smiles wider. Friendly. She’s friendly.
“Feeling better?” Liz asks.
“Much. I just needed a break and some air.” Pause, make it sound natural. Liz lives alone, has a boyfriend, but she only sees him on the weekends. “In fact, I’ve been thinking it might be nice to go for short walks over the lunch hour if the weather is good, just for my health. I don’t suppose you’d like to join me?”
“Oh, that does sound very nice,” she says, but it’s raining today, so they say nothing more of it.
Two days later, the sun is out again. The sky is blue between the clouds and Vivian’s feet are too light. It’s right there, right above her, and she knows her wings are fraying, but she’ll solve that issue soon. Just a few more hours. She can do it.
Actually convincing Liz to come with her out of the building for lunch takes some effort, but she’s friendly, she’s smiling, it’s important to get some fresh air occasionally. Liz gives in, and then they are under the sky.
There’s a small park not far from the building they work in. This time of day it’s almost empty. It’s just the two of them, the birds, and the sky.
Vivian takes deep breaths and tries not to shake.
“You know, you were right,” Liz says, stretching in the sunlight. “This was a good idea.”
“Oh! Oh, I’m sorry, I think…” She can’t keep the shivers out of her voice, but it’s fine, it’s fine, soon it’ll be fine.
“Hm?”
“I think there’s a bug on your back. Turn around?”
“Oh dear.” She turns obligingly.
There’s no bug, of course. Vivian reaches out with shaking hands. This is the only way to do it, and the book explained how. She can’t see anything, but it’ll have to work anyway. It shouldn’t be that hard.
She puts her hands on Liz’s shoulder blades, closes her eyes, and feels for feathers.
There’s something there. Soft and immaterial, a wisp of something invisible.
“Viv? Did you get it?”
Vivian grabs, and before she can hesitate further, she yanks as hard as she can.
Liz yelps with pain, whirls around and takes several steps back. “Hey, what the… what did you do? That hurt, Viv, that…”
There is something clenched in Vivian’s hands. Something heavy and solid. It grounds her. Stops the vertigo.
Liz’s next step back doesn’t hit the ground. “What… What the hell…?”
She falls, screaming, and disappears.
Human wings don’t look like bird wings. They don’t have to. They’re not used for navigating the sky, just for staying out of it.
Human wings look like ropes, heavy and branching, dragging along the ground like anchors. They’re coloured the dull grey of dusk as the colours fade, and their feathers are limp and soft. Vivian has six pairs of them on her now, aside from her own. She ties them around her arms, pushing them up towards her shoulders as they age. They wilt, after she’s plucked them, wither and shed until there’s nothing left but frayed strings. It takes roughly two months from she’s taken a pair until they’re gone, but she can always get new ones.
Her own pair hangs from her shoulders. She can see them in mirrors by twisting her neck. She doesn’t dare touch them. Now that she can see, it’s clear she was right. They’re damaged, fraying, not as quickly as the ones she takes, but after almost twenty years since she learned to see them, they barely still reach the ground. She doesn’t know how long it’ll be until she’s not tied to it by her own power at all.
It’s fine. It’s fine. As long as she always has some to tie around her arms, it’s fine. No one else can see. No one else even knows they exist. No one will ever know what she does.
Liz was a one-time thing. She hasn’t taken wings from anywhere that close to home since. Instead, every week or two, she drives off to some popular hiking trail and walks until she finds someone wandering on their own. The bug trick usually works. Hikers and dog-walkers are friendly people. If you tell them there’s a spider and you’ll get it for them, they’ll usually believe it.
No one ever realizes how vulnerable they are, how easy it is to reach out and cut their tether to the ground, send them plummeting up into the sky.
Vivian knows. Vivian can never forget. The wide blue sky is a constant pressure on her skin. It looms, it hums, it reaches down as if to hold her, every second of every day. No one else seems to notice, but all their wings are whole and unblemished. Maybe there’s nothing for them to notice. It serves them right, really.
For Vivian, only two things give her any measure of safety. The wings tied around her arms, and the roof of her own house.
That’s where she’s heading now. Home.
She was too busy last weekend to go hiking, and even her newest pair of wings is starting to wilt at the tips. It’s fine, it’ll last her for a while yet, but it makes her antsy. In her car on the way home, all she can think about is getting home, under her own roof, locking the sky safely outside.
There’s an unfamiliar car parked on the side of the road just a couple houses down from her own. It makes her twitch. This is a good neighbourhood, not somewhere people park like hooligans. Someone might need a talking to. Not from her personally, of course. She’s the friendly neighbour. Interrogating people about improperly parked cars would be out of character.
It can wait. It can wait. There are no clouds today, and the horizon is too open for her to think about other things. She needs to get under the safety of her own roof, and then she can figure out who she needs to raise careful concerns with to have this solved.
She parks her car in the garage, exits the garage, walks to her front door, unlocks the front door, and finally gets to let out a breath of relief as she gets her roof over her head.
The same moment, a noise comes from somewhere in the house, as of something being dropped on the floor. There’re voices, cut short by a hiss. People, in the house Vivian lives in alone.
She doesn’t lock the door behind her. She doesn’t run. She doesn’t even feel like she’s panicking. Not yet. All of a sudden, the world feels balanced on a knife’s edge. Her one safe place has been breached.
Walking with her heart somehow still beating steady in her chest, she rounds the corner into her living room.
There are three people there, two men and one woman. They’re clustered around a window that stands open. One of the men—the one dressed like the worst sort of punk—is on his way out through the window. In his hand, he’s holding Birds of Britain.
Time slows down. The sun shines through that window, glints off the glass shards littering the floor. It seems they’ve broken through the glass pane and opened the window that way. She can see them turn to look at her, tense and scared, but closer to freedom than she is to them. She can see the book, moments from being lost forever, and she can see the blue sky outside.
In here, the sky doesn’t press on her, but it presses on the house, still, against the walls and windowpanes, swaddling it in endless blue.
Her taken wings are fraying, but only a little. They’re still heavy on her, still holding her down, and she is still in her house, still safe, still secure. The sky can’t reach her here, even if she reaches back a little. And she cannot lose that book.
One deep breath, and she calls on the sky.
The man in the window lurches inside, slams the broken window shut just as the sky engulfs it entirely. The wind whistles through the hole, but the sky can’t breach the walls. Not here, not yet. Even as trees and dirt and roads give way to blue and blue and blue outside, the house is still on the ground, still safe.
“How dare you,” Vivian hisses. “Do you know what you’ve done?”
“Look, sorry about your window,” the woman says, stepping in front of her male friends protectively.
With the sky this heavy, Vivian feels lighter. Even with the anchoring wings on her arms and her blood freezing with fear, she flies across the room towards them.
“Just run!” one of the men yells, and they all turn in various directions to take off.
The woman is between her and the man carrying her book, but she won’t be for long. Her wings flare as she turns to run, and Vivian grabs for them. Too fast and unprepared, she only catches one, but it’ll have to be enough for now.
She yanks, and the woman falls.
Not all the way. With one wing still holding her, dangling towards the floor, the sky can’t take her, but she crashes to the ceiling with a crunch and sticks. Vivian would reach up, pull her down and take the other wing off her too, but the men are disappearing in different directions and they still have her book. She doesn’t have the time.
The woman will stay where she is, stuck to the ceiling as surely as the chandelier is. Vivian ties the wing quickly around her wrist and runs off after the man who held her book.
He’s fast. She’s faster, with the sky pulling at her, but slower around corners, and he’s keeping just ahead of her, wings always just out of reach for her to grab. She’s shaking with the effort, heart racing in her throat. The sky is too heavy, the fall is too long, she can’t slip, she can’t lose him.
The next room she enters is empty, though she swears she was on his tail. The door slams behind her just as her panic crests. He must have hidden behind it, gotten around her. That obnoxious cunt.
Her breath catches in her throat as she chases him. This could be over in a second. All she has to do is open the window, let the sky in.
She can’t, she can’t, she can’t. This is the only place she has left. They can’t get out. If she can only catch them once, it’ll be over. No need to do anything rash. She needs to breathe, she needs patience, she is still in control here.
She nearly snags him at the end of a hallway, but he dodges and chucks her book, like he doesn’t even know it’s an antique! The other man is there to catch it before she can even turn to dive after it and disappears through the door back into the living room.
He’s pressed up against the opposite wall when she follows him. The light from the sky refracts through the crystals of her chandelier and plays across his terrified face.
He holds Birds of Britain in one hand and a lighter in the other.
“N-Not a step closer!”
She doesn’t stop. Her head is buzzing with the pressure of her pulse in her ears. She can barely breathe. She can kill him—will kill him—but if he sets that book on fire it’ll all be for nothing.
“I mean it!” he says as she stalks towards him, inching the flame closer to the pages.
She should dive at him, reach him in a second, but the warning in his voice locks up her muscles. The one extra wing is unbalancing her. Crystal refractions dance like mad across the walls and there’s a creaking sound she can’t identify, but she can’t think.
“Right there! Stop right there!”
He nearly touches the flame to the book and she slows to a halt. No no no no no no no no no no.
She tenses, ready to dive. One moment’s fall and she’ll crush him against the wall, she can throw him out a window. He might singe the book, but he won’t have the time to burn it. She’ll bring the whole sky in first.
A last crack sounds, and the chandelier slams into her from above.
The sound is incredible. The heavy wrought iron frame and about a million little crystals crash down and shatter across the room.
Jon sinks to the floor in a puddle of lost tension. He’s not shaking yet, but the adrenaline crash will come soon, he knows. There had been no way to know or even believe that the plan would work out.
There’s a long moment of absolute silence.
“Wow,” Gerry says. He’d been sneaking up behind the woman with a metal candle stick. There’s a cut across his cheek from a crystal shard he doesn’t seem to notice. He looks up and finally spots Georgie. “Jesus!”
She looks exhausted, sitting on the ceiling next to the bolts that used to hold the chandelier up. She’s tucking her multitool back into her giant purse, moving carefully like she’s in pain.
“Just me,” she says.
“You’re bleeding.”
She is, though the red spot on the back of her top luckily doesn’t seem much bigger than it did when Jon saw her a few minutes ago and they came up with this hare-brained scheme.
“Yeah, I have no idea what she did to me, but it left some wounds.” She touches her shoulder gingerly. “I might also have broken something when I fell. Honestly, I’m more concerned about… gravity. Was hoping that would fix itself when she…”
The woman twitches, pulls her arms under her as if to get up.
Gerry strikes like a snake, hitting her over the head with the candlestick, and she falls still.
There’s a sourceless lurch, a sensation that leaves Jon’s stomach somewhere far outside his body, and suddenly there’s things outside the windows again beyond clear, sunless skies.
Georgie is still on the ceiling.
Gerry looks up at her. “I… I don’t… Christ.” He glances back at the woman under the chandelier, furrows his brow. “She’s still alive. That might be why you’re still… but I don’t… I don’t know.”
Georgie just winces.
“S-She’s…” Jon swallows. He thinks the adrenaline crash might be hitting now. “She’s a f-full avatar, r-right?”
“Yeah,” Gerry breathes.
“Y-You said, ah. They’re r-rather hard to kill?” The fact that he’s even saying it is making him dizzy. The woman doesn’t look like a monster.
Gerry glares down at her. He clenches his jaw. “I might have some ideas.” His eyes snap to Jon, and to the book Jon has almost forgotten he’s still holding. “Throw that on the fireplace and burn it. We’ll want to be quick.”
The house’s back yard has a hedge, tall, dense and well cared for, preventing any neighbours from watching anything that goes on there. It’s why they decided to break in from the back in the first place, and it’s where Gerry heads now, without any explanation.
Jon tosses the book into the room’s fancy modern fireplace and lights it up. Even now, watching it burn brings a deep satisfaction.
“You should… probably go help Gerry with whatever it is he’s doing.”
He looks up at Georgie. It makes him feel a little like he’s standing in an Escher painting. She’s just sitting there, in all defiance of gravity. If this is permanent… he doesn’t even know where to start dealing with it. His eyes fall to the woman’s still body on the floor and he quickly looks elsewhere.
“I… yes, yes,” he says. “Will- Will you be alright?”
She shrugs, and then winces with obvious pain. “Ow, uh, yeah. Not like I can go outside.”
“If you fall…”
“I’ll try not to land on my head?”
It’s a miracle she didn’t crack her head open the first time. He ends up shoving the sofa halfway through a door and helps pull her down to sit on the inside of the doorframe. Not as far to fall and a softer place to land. It’ll have to do.
He tries not to think too hard about what happens if she never falls at all. They can probably still get her safely to the car. They’re more than capable of carrying her, upside down or not.
When he finally follows Gerry into the yard, Gerry is well on his way through digging up a flowerbed. The flowers have been carefully dug out and set aside, and the hole is half a meter deep already.
Jon stops for a long moment as the dread runs through his body, and then he grabs a spade and helps.
Despite trying to work fast, it takes them well over an hour before they deem the hole deep enough. Then they just have to carry the still unconscious woman out of the house without trailing an entire garden’s worth of dirt onto the floor.
“This…” Jon says, voice shaking as he grips the handle of his spade, looking down into the hole. “This is… it’s- it’s murder.”
“…Yeah.”
It helps, a little, that Gerry doesn’t look comfortable with it either.
“Have you ever…” Jon starts, not confident at all he can finish the sentence.
Gerry shakes his head. “Nothing that was still recognizably human. Maybe nothing that ever was. I’ve killed a vampire before, once, but this… Look, if you want to go wait with Georgie, I won’t blame you.”
Jon considers it. He does want to make sure Georgie is okay, and it’d be so easy to take the excuse to escape. “You’re sure this will work?”
Gerry shrugs. “It’ll almost definitely kill her, Vast avatars don’t do great with burial, but… I’m guessing. Things don’t stick to Georgie easily, and this isn’t exactly a small thing. Good chance something external is maintaining the effect, and I don’t know what that is if it’s not her.”
Jon takes a deep breath. “She- She tried to kill us. We d-did break into her house, but even so.”
“She’s killed before and she’d kill again.” Their eyes meet, heavy and uncomfortable. “That doesn’t mean you have to be okay with this.”
“I’m not.” And somehow, that settles it. He squares his shoulders. “But I’m not letting you do this on your own.”
The spade feels heavier as they fill the hole back in.
They’re almost all the way finished—only the flowers to put back in place—when a yelp sounds from inside the house, and soon after, Georgie wanders out, looking unsteady, but with her feet on the ground. The weight that drops from Jon’s shoulders almost makes him feel ready to float off himself.
“Did you…” Georgie says, eyes on the dug-up flowerbed. Then she takes a deep breath, lets it out. “Okay. Okay. I guess that worked. I think I need a doctor.”
By the time they’re back in the rental car they’d parked on the side of the road, they’ve hidden most of the obvious tracks of what happened. The spades are back in the garden shed, the sofa back in its place, the Leitner is a pile of ash, and the flower bed is left visibly disturbed, but hopefully not obviously dug up.
When they finally make it to an emergency room—almost an hour’s drive down the road—Georgie is pale and shivering. They bundle her up in a warm jacket and bring her in to see a flabbergasted doctor.
“You… fell,” the doctor says when he manages to peel off her blood-encrusted top.
Gerry stayed outside, but Jon was allowed to come along to hold her hand, and he understands the confusion. The wounds are long and branching, and extensive bruising implies more damage under the skin. It forms long, feather-like lines spreading out from her shoulder all the way to her lower back.
“Hard,” Georgie confirms. “On some crap. Cracked my shoulder.”
The doctor sighs, mutters, “This is going to take a lot of stitches,” and gets started.
Two hours and—indeed—a staggering number of stitches later, Georgie has an x-ray photo confirming a fractured collarbone, a sling for her arm, one of Jon’s shirts to replace her own doomed one, and enough prescription painkillers in her to almost knock her out.
Jon ends up driving mostly because Gerry had to carry her most of the way from the clinic to the car and just stayed in the back seat with her. He doesn’t mind it. The road is a welcome distraction from the weight of a spade in his hands and the smell of dirt and blood, the impossible wind whistling past windows and walls.
After a long, heavy silence, Gerry says, “I’m sorry.”
Georgie makes a sleepy questioning noise. Jon says, “For what?”
“Getting you involved in all this, I guess. You shouldn’t have to be out here getting injured and committing crimes. I don’t… I knew I shouldn’t get others involved, but I didn’t…”
Suddenly, Jon’s concerns feel secondary. “Gerry,” he says. “You do know we do this with you because we want to? We’re here intentionally.”
“You can’t tell me you wanted this.”
The woman whose name Jon is actively trying not to remember looked almost as terrified as he felt, stalking towards him with the intention of killing him. Georgie didn’t look scared at all as she got out her multitool, planning to drop the chandelier, but she was bleeding and injured and out of reach, and he was scared enough for both of them.
“I’m not thrilled,” he says through his teeth as he clutches the wheel of the car and stares out at the road, trying to see it through intrusive memories. “But we knew there was a risk. There’s always a risk, we knew that from the beginning. We were both injured the day we first met, did you forget?”
“I didn’t forget, I just…”
“Mm,” Georgie says, half asleep. “Di’nt think we’d go if we thought… w’might gt hurt?”
“…maybe you shouldn’t. You have normal lives to get back to. You don’t have to be getting hurt like this.”
“…’ll be more careful next t’m.”
“Next time?”
“Yes, next time.” Jon glances in the back mirror and meets Gerry’s eyes. “Ultimately, we’re all adults here. We made our choices, and we’ll keep doing so. You’re not forcing anything on us. None of this was your fault.”
“Hard to believe, sometimes.”
“I’ll keep saying it until you do.”
Jon isn’t sure which intrusive memory is worst right now. The sky knocking on the windows, the dirt on his hands, a hundred stitches in Georgie’s skin.
But between all those and the spiders, he still feels more in control now than he did then.
Nearly ten minutes later, he hears a very quiet, “Thanks,” from the back seat. No one says anything else for the rest of the drive.