Excerpt

The Great Wall of Wendis loomed over Nia like a glass cliff. Her footfalls echoed on the Wall's wide fauxstone stairway. On the other side of the clear Wall was the space shield, with complicated metallic corrugations the size of ravines. She climbed upward in the space shield's shadow, in cold and stillness. Except for her, the Great Wall seemed deserted tonight.

The absence of other people puzzled but also pleased her. There was no one else around to witness her missteps. As she climbed higher, the spingravity lessened, but the tendency to misplace her feet increased. Wendis was an enormous, solitary, spinning cylinder in deep space. Spingravity held everything in Wendis in place, but it was a tricky facsimile of gravity. For someone like Nia, who had grown up on a terraformed planet, spingravity and stairs were a bad combination, and the vast whorl of stairways inside the Great Wall of Wendis posed a severe test. Every year she lived here, though, it got easier.

The proximity of space chilled the air. Nia's breath condensed into white wisps. Now, faint starlight glazed the fauxstone steps. Higher up, the concave rim of the space shield glittered with reflected starlight, and starlight flooded the steps. Encouraged, Nia dared to run up the rest of the way. She reached the High Landing breathing hard, but victorious.

Then she realized that someone was already there, turning around in an irritated flicker of motion at the sound of her footsteps. He was shirtless and pale as white marble. He had the slim-hipped build of a boy. But behind his shoulders, transparent membranes with red veins angled over his head and slanted down beside his torso—he had diaphanous wings, tented like the wings of a bug. Nia froze. She knew Wendis harbored two or three of his kind, but she'd never seen one before. She didn't like meeting one here.

They were called Angels, a flattery intended to placate them, because everyone was afraid of them. The rumor of an Angel on the Great Wall would clear everyone else away in a hurry. That explained why the Wall was deserted tonight. And it meant she might be in danger. She suppressed an urge to bolt back down the stairs. For her, that could be more dangerous than the Angel. Instead she sidled away along the High Landing. Apprehension made her skin prickle.

The Angel stared at her with large dark eyes. Then the Angel said, "Azuri."

Nia stiffened with anger on top of her apprehension. A person from the planet Azure was an Azurean. Azuri meant a thing from Azure. "Shandy," she retorted. A thing from Shandy.

The Angel responded with a cold flicker of a smile.

Nia circled around the High Landing, taking slight, low-energy steps lest she accidentally launch herself over the guard rail in the scant spingravity. Above her, starlight shone on a latticework of metallic beams and gratings. When Nia reached another stairway, a third of the way around the Landing, the Angel was distant and lost in silvery light. She breathed easier.

The Angels had been human before they were changed to live in low-gravity, artificial environments in deep space. According to Wendisan lore, they were the creatures of a merciless interstellar god named Shandy.

Nia scanned the landing. No sign of the Angel. Fact: all he had done was toss an insult at her. Another fact, one she knew too well: rumors can mutilate the truth. The Angel had been looking out at the stars before he heard her coming. Maybe all he wanted was the view. Nia stretched to ease her leg muscles and let the view claim her own attention.

The Great Wall of Wendis was the transparent western end of the spinning space cylinder. Above the glittering rim of the space shield, around the spin axis, the Great Wall was a window on the universe. All around Wendis, starships and star bubbles flickered like fireflies in an eternal night. Arriving starships re-entered realspace with flares of light. Lesser flashes heralded bubbles containing messages and small goods from other worlds. Fading, the ship lights and bubble lights sorted themselves out. The ships maneuvered toward the Port on the other end of Wendis. The bubbles streamed into the Mailyard net below the Great Wall. And the backdrop of it all was starry space, rotating with the incessant spin of Wendis.

Wendisans had their own constellations. Nia didn't know most of those. But she recognized the Raptor, the seven stars of the Faxen Union. Above the Raptor's back—in the safest position that close to the Raptor—wheeled the sun of Azure. Her home. So far away that the blue seas and white continents were only a trace of photons in the spark of light of that distant star.

Homesickness rolled over her like a cold, heavy wave. At this moment, the dawn of Greening Day was sweeping over Azure. Once every year for three years, Nia had climbed the Great Wall of Wendis when it was Greening Day on Azure, observing the holiday in her own lonely way from here. With a hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach, she remembered her last Greening Day at home. It came just after her career crashed down in ruins along with her father's ambitions for her. They had an argument wracked with pain and anger on both sides. He had finally shouted at her. "You made an interstellar fool of yourself! Admit it!" She fired furious words back at him. Unspoken, yet ringing in the air at a psychologically deafening volume, was their family history. The Courants were descendants of the starship astronauts from Earth, the star voyagers who first brought green hope to a barren ice world. From her childhood on, much had been expected of Nia Courant. Before the end of her last Green Holidays on Azure, she had argued with everyone in her family. Was it still homesickness, if you'd been sick of home and they of you when you left?

Behind her, a voice said, "Hello, Inanna."

She whirled. The landing was empty. But the Angel knelt on a metal beam overhead, intently regarding her. Nia felt the chill of fear. She hadn't realized that with wings, in low gravity, he could glide this far. "How do you know my name?"

"Don't be surprised," the Angel answered. "You're famous."

Nia retreated to the stairway. She found the first step by feel. Her heart pounded. Acutely aware of how steeply the stairs curved down, she hesitated. The Angel flexed his wings. Stars shone through translucent membranes with ruby-red veins. Unnerved, Nia said, "Enjoy the view," and turned away from the Angel to the stairs.

Down was safety.

But safety was a long way down.