Fledgling: Part 1

But at the party Papa orchestrated for this to occur, Lein has yet to glance my way.

For ALIGN’s sake, I even deigned to dress in Lein’s favorite color.

Suzume is my closest companion—I would never say confidante—and she knows better than to ask such questions with any note of inquiry.

He is aware of the need for a propitious match.

Securing the job he’d dreamed of since his parental guardian, Nene Nushba, had taken his nine-year-old self up into the sky with her on a quick trip to Upper Earth was the impetus for the splurge to change his look.

Upper Earth formed a confederacy with the Bridge called ALIGN, to protect their advantages.

Later, much later, he learned it was because several months before the bomb blast, she’d begun having secret meetings with the revolutionaries to hear their grievances.

“And you think the palace that put them away for all these years is suddenly struck with feelings of magnanimity?”

Although Salwe had slowly turned most of the guards to her side, a feat in itself, there was a faction that wasn’t completely loyal to her.

Salwe’s lofty expression didn’t abate, but in an apparent gesture of goodwill, she held out her arm and pulled the right sleeve of her shirt up.

As the landscape changed from desert to mountains, from sparse vegetation to swaths of lush forests, from the dusty markets and shantytowns on the edges of Lower Earth to the bustling hubs of mostly black-market commerce surrounded by clusters of sunken buildings, the image of the bird began reappearing slowly — then, like flicking the pages of a book with corners of doodles that animated to life, it was everywhere.

“Ah, so you’re saying you still possess that willful and impulsive attitude that landed you in prison?” he goaded.

As she finished by dotting metallic violet on the outer edges of her eyes, she heard voices that grew apart from the street din.

She sounds dangerously close to an ideologue.

Guardian forces will be dispatched to the location of the crash with orders to apprehend anyone who appears to have participated in, aided, or abetted this savage act to disrupt the council’s welcome of Lower Earth into ALIGN.