"Come on," he said. "We're almost there."
The platform was different from anything else in Ukai.
Steel-plated, reinforced, bolted to a cluster of trunks at the city's eastern edge with industrial brackets that looked imported rather than grown. The surface was flat and hard underfoot - no wood grain, no bark texture, no sign that a tree had been involved in the construction beyond the biological columns that held it aloft. It looked like a piece of a different world had been attached to Ukai's canopy, a metal island in a wooden sea.
Raizen set the spoon down against a railing and looked around. The platform extended outward past the canopy's edge, its far end unsupported, extending over the open air. Below, the forest floor was visible for once - the morning mist that usually filled the base of the trunks had mostly cleared, revealing the dark, mossy ground hundreds of meters below. The direct sunlight from the hole reached even here, warming the steel surface and giving the platform the feel of a rooftop on a clear day.
They waited.
Eiden stood near the platform's centre, hands in his pockets, right one still gloved. Wearing a sleeveless elegant shirt, he now changed the patience of someone who'd spent years waiting for things and had learned to do it without wasting energy or thoughts.
"So," Eiden said. Conversational. Light. The tone of a colleague making small talk, if the small talk concerned the trajectory of the rest of someone's life. "What happens to me now?"
Kenzo didn't look at him immediately. His eyes stayed on the horizon - the eastern plains, visible as a golden-green strip beyond the forest's edge, glowing under the direct sunlight.
"Well, you attended the summit meetings," Kenzo said. "That's on record. The Echelon will vouch for your research contributions."
"And the… Mountain?"
The word settled between them with a weight that the morning sun couldn't warm. The mountain. The expedition - years ago, the staff, the moment everything changed. The deaths. Kenzo's pupil - someone young, someone trained, someone who'd stood beside Kenzo on an operation and been unalived in a fraction of a second by the same staff that now lived in an Echelon vault.
Kenzo's face went dark. Not angry - dark. The specific shade that arrived when a memory surfaced that had teeth, a memory that you didn't want to touch again.
"You'll probably be held for a while," he said. His voice had lost its warmth. "Formal inquiry. The deaths need to be somehow addressed by that stupid Council. It's always the institution that needs a process, and the process needs a person to judge… You know how these things work, Eiden."
Eiden nodded. The nod was small, but you could figure that he was ready. For years, he probably turned this problem around and searched for any plausible solution. Now, this one seemed the best.
Then Kenzo nudged him. A shoulder bump - casual, physical, the same language he used for everything less-important. His face was still dark, but the darkness had thinned a tiny bit.
"Don't worry, smartypants" Kenzo said. "I'll make sure they get you nerdy stuff you can play with in there. Books. Papers. Maybe one of those little puzzles where you slide the tiles around."
Eiden looked at him. The professor's composure cracked - just a fraction, just enough for something genuine to show through. Not a smile, exactly. The precursor to a smile, the way dawn is the precursor to sunrise.
"Mhh… I'd prefer research journals, thanks" Eiden said.
"I'll see what I can do."
They stood together at the railing - the professor who played with something he didn't understand and the veteran who'd lost someone because of it - and the silence between them was complicated and old and somehow, despite everything, not hostile.
Raizen stepped to the platform's edge. The cantilevered section extended past the last trunk, and from here the view was unobstructed - the forest canopy down below, the plains southward, the distant suggestion of the coastline, the sky wide and blue through the hole and grey-white everywhere else.
Saffi appeared beside him. Quiet, but present. Like she used to do about a year ago, when they barely talked. "She needs time" Raizen thought.
A few minutes passed. The sun climbed. The platform warmed.
Nothing happened.
"What're we even waiting for?" Raizen asked, after struggling with the silence for a few minutes.
Kenzo smiled. "Any second now…"
Raizen looked at the horizon. At first, nothing - just the golden-green strip of the southern plains, flat and still. Then, at the very edge of visibility, a dot. Small, dark, moving. It could have been a bird, if birds moved that fast and that straight and that low to the ground.
The dot grew. Bird became shape. Shape became silhouette - angular, metallic, catching the sunlight in bright flashes as it banked slightly and corrected its heading. It was flying below the cloud ceiling, well below, hugging an altitude that kept it barely above the ground. Maybe 10 meters, if Raizen saw correctly.
It was fast.
Extremely fast.
The sound arrived before the actual thing did - a deep, building roar that pressed against Raizen's eardrums and grew louder with each second, the air itself vibrating as the aircraft displaced it at a speed that compressed the atmosphere into a visible cone around the vehicle's nose. Subsonic, maybe. Or close to it. Fast enough that the distance between "dot on the horizon" and "object the size of a truck filling his entire field of vision" collapsed in a matter of seconds.
The aircraft climbed. Angling upward, aiming for Ukai's canopy level, its trajectory converging on the steel platform with a precision that suggested either an exceptional pilot, an exceptional navigation system or both. Suddenly, the back of the aircraft split open - a wide panel hinged upward, and a parachute deployed. Enormous, billowing, catching the air in a sudden, violent deceleration that slowed the vehicle from near-sonic to hovering in a distance that should have been physically impossible.
It stopped. Right at the platform's edge. Hovering, the thrusters adjusting in micro-corrections that held the aircraft's position with millimetric precision.
Then the wind hit.
A cone of displaced air slammed into the platform and everything on it - a concentrated gust that bent the nearby branches backward and sent loose objects skittering across the steel surface. Saffi's hat - a small, practical thing she'd worn against the morning sun - lifted from her head and launched into the air.
Raizen's hand snatched it. Reflexive, fast, his fingers closing around the brim before it cleared his reach. He held it out to her without looking, his eyes still on the aircraft.
It was compact. Smaller than the Echelon's stealth transport, roughly the size of a large truck, its hull a pale grey that caught the sunlight and turned it silver. The wings were in the back - extendable, folded now, their surfaces showing now multi-colored, steel vibrant from the high-speed flight. Four thrusters faced backward. Three more pointed downward, controlling the vertical hover, their output producing the low, continuous hum that vibrated through the platform's steel surface.
The side door opened. Gull-wing, hinged at the top, rising upward and outward in a single smooth motion that was simultaneously practical and theatrical, like an opera raising its curtains.
Leaning on the door frame, one arm draped over the rising panel, hip cocked, sunglasses catching the direct light from the hole in the sky -
Alteea.
