Rainbird Read Online Free

powder. Hoping that she’d be able to get that sunmoss soon. Worrying that whatever she did was not going to be enough.
    Worrying that she’d be captured, Petrus would die, the sunway would fall.
    And behind it all, a crushing sense of being watched.
    Petrus had slept, finally. Rainbird was too wound up, so she crept out onto the nightside and let the stars sing to her in their cold, white voices.
    It helped, a little, but it didn’t quite alleviate the feeling of doom pressing in from all sides. She avoided looking at the red wanderer in the sky.
    Had it spoken to her? Had it really said am coming ? If stars could sing, could they not also talk?
    The sunway quivered and Rainbird froze, desperately hoping that no one had noticed, that it hadn’t registered on the wizzes’ instruments in the Hub.
    “Be still,” she whispered, laying her hand on the bone. “Hush, there. Everyone needs their rest, even you. Tired inspectors are stupid inspectors. Let everyone sleep, all right?”
    A sharp crack sounded, not through bone, but through the air. Rainbird jerked her head up. The sunway itself was still. Not a tremor.
    Someone else on the sunway? In Deep Night?
    A muffled grating noise came to her ears. Rainbird ran towards the sound, then stopped on top of a rounded protrusion. There were no inspections scheduled for this section of the sunway—and who would be out in the thin air and bitter cold, this long from sunpass, when the heat from the Day Sun had long dissipated? She was used to being the only person up here at night, a dancing spark among white mountains of bone and deep valleys of shadow.
    A midnight rodent, nuzzling around for bone maggots and whitefrill?
    “You’re out of luck, little one,” Rainbird’s whisper didn’t extend much past her mouth. “We sweep the area clean. No food for you here.”
    A shaking of the shadows, a flash of light.
    Not a rodent.
    Rainbird leapt off her peak, bounded down into the valley, ran-tiptoed up to the next summit. There. A figure, potbellied and thick-handed with layers, face elephantine with the oxygen mask, wrestling with cables at the edge of the sunway.
    Smugglers? On the sunway? Oh, you heard rumors, but why bother to smuggle onto Company land when Third Rib was free, forgiving, and so much easier to get to?
    A wrenching sound ripped the air, ropes whipped, the figure grabbed for them and caught.
    And the whole mess of person and wire and whatever was weighing it down went sliding over the edge.
    Rainbird was running before she’d even registered what had happened. She twitched her shoulders. Her coat fell behind her. Unfettered by its folds, she sprinted towards the stranger.
    Smuggler or not, plummeting several markers to the ground was not a pretty way to die.
    She jumped over a contraption— sled!— , dodged a dark shape— wire cutters! —and snagged one hand into the collar of a Company-issued insulated coat.
    She’d been prepared for weight, but not this much. She nearly lost her balance but managed to grab the stranger’s arm, brace herself against bone, and pull. The tangle stopped its mad slide for the edge, but her muscles screamed with strain.
    She couldn’t do it.
    A real eiree could’ve.
    The stranger flailed and kicked off the ropes from around his boots. His feet found purchase. Rainbird let go off his collar and lunged for a cable instead. Hanging over the edge of the sunway, sagging between the pincers of a balloon catcher, was a flabby envelope of canvas. A resupply balloon, clumsily caught, its fabric pierced. Now its burden dangled from ropes off the sunway itself.
    The man freed his arm—Rainbird immediately put both hands on the ropes—and hurried off.
    Rainbird glared at his back. Why is he leaving me and why am I still holding on? She thought about letting the cargo drop—it was no concern of hers—but the man was back with the sled, a winching machine atop it.
    Together, they got the cables attached. Together, they pulled on the