Rainbird by Rabia Gale

gone.
    Rainbird closed her mouth, which had been hanging open. She jumped to her feet—or tried to. Firstly, her leg muscles protested against the ill use. And secondly, her wings were still pinned to the wall and she almost fell over.
    Lovely. Could I be any less graceful? At least the snooty eiree wasn’t there to turn up his nose at her. Rainbird massaged her limbs, then worked her wings free from the wall.
    If she could only do what the eiree had, they’d have been justified pinning them.
    But she couldn’t, so Rainbird forced herself up and hobbled across the room. This was a disused warehouse, close to bone, and as expected, a maze of piping ran across the wall. Rainbird noted that one vent cover was open. Thanking the eiree, she slid in and started the long crawl up the rib bone and to the sunway.
    She hoped Sanders was still waiting. She hoped the plan would still work, even without all the supplies.
    She hoped there was still time.
     
    Rainbird had never been this deep into the Hub before. Here, the bone was so heavily encased in metal scaffolding that it was barely visible. The sunway passed over this metal structure, and Rainbird had had little occasion to visit it. The Hub was ruled over by bureaucrats, techs and wizzes, a perfect place for Turnworth to hide Petrus in. This, and the Perch, were the two places on the sunway Rainbird was least eager to go to.
    If she were lucky, she’d visit both of them today.
    Rainbird took a lift down into the Hub, staring out of the glass as the small cage was swallowed into darkness, as sky and supports and track and chains gave way to a boxy blackness. Rainbird caught her breath, then remembered to let it out again. She braced against the lurch as the lift came to a stop, then swept out with the rest of the passengers.
    She didn’t dare stop, didn’t dare look confused, or uncertain, or lost. She was a repair tech, she’d been here a hundred times already, she knew the way to the boiler rooms. Rainbird changed her grip on the handle of the toolbox, blinked as she took in the vast high-ceilinged lobby, echoing with machinery and footsteps, and strode forward. Sanders’ instructions played in her head.
    Left at the coffee shop—if one can call it that, it serves a poor brew—then into the service corridor to your left, right next to the advertisement for Sigurd’s Cigars and the shoeshine station that’s always empty. No one should be there to bother you.
    Ah, but there was someone there—a sweeper with a bucket of soapy water and a mop which he ran in half-hearted circles on the thin layer of stone that covered the metal struts as a floor.
    She nodded at him as she passed, then stumbled as a muscle in her left leg cramped. He stared at her, and prickles ran up and down her back. A sentry, watching out for her? Had he relayed to his supervisors that she was on her way? Was she walking into a trap?
    No. Even if she were, she had to try this. Had to get Petrus out, see him safe.
    Her life was already over, regardless.
    Now she was in the back ways of the Hub where bare metal grill rang with every step and high walkways crisscrossed in vast spaces. Sanders’ instructions were precise, and she soon made her way down more steps and into a short corridor blocked by a man at a desk.
    “You called for a boiler repair tech?” Rainbird slapped a badly-typed repair order on the desk. Sanders had typed it up on another pilfered device, hunched over in a nook in the spinal column from whence he masterminded the opening of doors and the sending of messages and the breakdown of machines by directing too much steam into them.
    Maybe after this incident the Company would replace its mishmash of typewriters and plethora of redundant forms with a more streamlined, standardized system. For now, it worked that one could expect repair orders with missing e's and off-center m's.
    The man at the desk gave the order a cursory look. “Early today, ain’t you. Wasn’t expecting one of