“Damn,” Tamara said. “It’s a nest.”

CHAPTER FORTY FIVE:

Nests?!

“I didn’t realize the Children were nesting up here,” Lantern-Eyes said. “They must’ve moved here after my team came through.”

“The Children make nests?” I tried to picture one of them sitting there, squatting like a pigeon, grinning too many teeth. “That’s a bird thing, though, right? Did they make the Children out of birds too? Are there immortal birds?”

“Humans make nests,” Indigo said. “What do you think you sleep in?”

“Beds? What do Ministers sleep in?”

“They’re not birds and this is a bad sign,” Tamara said. “There’s about to be a lot of Children ahead, maybe enough that they’ll come at us. We have to be quick.”

“We can fight them off,” Indigo said.

“I’d prefer not to crush a kid’s skull in, Indigo.”

“I thought they didn’t bother you,” I said.

“They bother me, Sean,” Tamara said, and started climbing the steps again, more quickly than before.

The padded lattices of metal and sticks grew more densely packed as we travelled up. I remembered seeing those little girls in the farmlands, the ones who had looked so like Brigid and Liza, and wondered if those Children had been gathering twigs there to bring them back here and make nests with. Now that Indigo had pointed it out, those nests did kind of look like woven mattresses.

I wasn’t giving up on the bird angle, though. “There was this cliff right outside the city where I grew up,” I said. “Sheer rock, but one of the first colonists built stairs right into the cliff. He put his house up top.”

Every step I got a little bit lighter. Like I was floating up. Or my head was floating off. I kept leaning to one side without realizing, and catching myself wobbling only when my shoulder bumped the wall or my hip hit the railing. That would be the spinny-force.

I shouldn’t be fooled by the light gravity up here; if I fell over that edge, the gravity would get heavy again further down.

“Made it a national park after he died,” I said. The metal mesh underfoot was sparser here, wires missing. I wondered if the Children had taken pieces from the stairs to make their mattress-nests. It hardly mattered to me: I could leap right over those gaps, no trouble at all. “You could climb up all those stairs and see the ernes nesting on the cliffside. I climbed over the railing once with my sister and made it into an erne’s nest. It was huge. We could sit in the middle and be comfortable and have space to spare. The ernes had already left the nest so we weren’t bothering their babies.”

“Sean,” said Tamara, “the Children already know we’re here, so there’s no reason to be quiet. That said, shouldn’t you save your breath for climbing?”

“I’m climbing,” I said. It was getting a little hard to catch my breath; with the dizzy nausea and the fact that the strut had narrowed to the point that there were no more platforms, only a spiral staircase turning ever more and more tightly in on itself. I bet you felt weightless when you were buried, too. No falling. Just dirt packed in tight against every inch of you. Maybe a little bit of a lean to one side, like I was leaning now, the spinny-force pushing me inexorably to one side.