The Girl With Borrowed Wings by Rinsai Rossetti Page A

connected. Then I realized I could feel him breathe normally too—it was a rhythm between my legs. And that was
so
intimate that all at once there were nervous sparkles dissolving in my stomach. I almost jumped off.
    But Sangris lifted his wings first.
    Wings.
    A lurch with the first, slow beat.
    With the golden feathers rising on either side of me, I could pretend that they were mine.
    They came down for a second time.
    And a third.
    Then the world fell away.
    The school, the dirty sand, the stone wall, the dust, the spiky palm trees, the hard, glinting cars with sunlight on their windows, all sinking away. The long sun-bleached roads, gone. The scaly networks of wadis, gone. The white-domed roofs of the mosques, gone too. The weight of the heat, the claustrophobia, the little pockets of cold air that contained me as if I were a goldfish in a bowl—gone. And my parents—gone. I watched everything slide away. Only the itch on my back, no more than a pinprick, like the very tip of my father’s nail, remained, an invisible fishing line linking me to him.
    We were lifting, lifting. Pushing against the heat that fell from the sky. Then faster, finally, picking up speed, slicing through the blueness and the stiff folds of air. The sun stung on my back. Heat curled through my hair. Instinctively, I threw myself forward and wrapped my arms around his neck, bending into that hollow between his shoulder blades. “Faster!” I said.
    “Really?” Sangris said. But the world blurred before I could reply. He took off, so fast that I couldn’t open my eyes against the wind, but I didn’t care. In the dark world behind my eyelids, I saw bursts of red excitement blossom in the blackness whenever his wings rose and fell, and the pit of my stomach rose and fell with them.
    It seemed to take only a few minutes. Not nearly long enough. When I opened my eyes next, it was because leaves were brushing my face, and the air smelled new. Damp. “We’re here,” he said as I unpeeled myself from him.
    When my legs recovered, I slid down, squinting. All around us was a network of curly, complicated shadows. Crowded trees, frizzy with twigs, leaned over my head. Branches blocked out the sky, like a roof; the place we’d come through had already closed over. It was so black up there that, where the layers of leaves happened to thin, a few unexpected edges of yellow, or a single warm patch suggesting green, shone out lovelier than any flowers. The only threads of light that managed to pierce straight through the foliage were needle-thin, hanging in the darkness like solitary, glowing white hairs.
    Sangris bent his head down until it hovered over my shoulder. I didn’t notice at first, because I was too busy gazing around the dimness, moving my hands through the needles of light, watching them splice between my fingers. Then I felt feathers brushing my cheek and jumped.
    “Can I turn human now?” he asked.
    “Have you got clothes?”
    “No.”
    “Then no.”
    Sangris rolled his eyes and shrank into a cat somewhere around my feet. Then I relaxed.
    “Where are we?” I said.
    “Somewhere completely different,” he said. “This isn’t any country you could name. The people who live here call it Ae.”
    “Ae?”
    “It means ‘everything.’ They’re a bit limited—they don’t know that anywhere else exists.”
    “And you speak their language?”
    “I speak all languages,” he said, flicking his tail. “Anything I choose. I’m a Free person, remember.” He paused, then added, “I lived here when I was small. I liked it because it would be hard for anybody to find me in the forest. There are too many trees, branches, nooks, crannies . . . hiding places, basically. Ae is notorious for that. The people who
don’t
live here call it Gans’ves, which means something like ‘barely there,’ or ‘a place where things are lost.’”
    “And you wanted to be lost?”
    He didn’t answer. “This place, here—I don’t know what