The Man Who Crossed Worlds (Miles Franco #1)

Chapter Thirteen

My mouth was bone-dry by the time we finally came across something resembling a trail through the desert-like expanse of Suron. I was skeptical—anything less than a full-blown road in Heaven is notoriously prone to lead right off a cliff or into the lair of some strange and possibly violent animal, but we were running out of time. I put my concerns to Vivian, but she didn’t seem to grasp the potential danger of following it.

“It’s just a path,” she said. “It’s got to lead somewhere.”

I decided to strike off this decision and let her take responsibility for it when we found ourselves trying to make parachutes out of our jackets. If I was lucky I’d get the chance to say “I told you so” before we ceased to be in one piece.

So I had to admit I was a little peeved when the trail actually did lead to a full-sized road, stone-paved and everything. Vivian had the grace to not look too smug.

Decent roads were a fairly new addition to Heaven. Until they came into contact with humans, they didn’t have a single motorized vehicle. They still didn’t, technically, but within a few years of the first Vei to visit Earth bringing stories back to Heaven, strange new vehicles started appearing all over Heaven. The Vei refused to tell the human authorities where they’d got them, if they even knew themselves. Things had a way of just coming into existence in Heaven, so the Vei wouldn’t take any notice if one morning they woke up to find a brand-new car in their driveway.

Of course, they didn’t have driveways, and the cars weren’t really cars. For one thing, they had skin. Shiny skin, for sure, that looked almost like painted metal from a distance, but if you ran your hand along it you’d find it was warm, and soft, and moving in that special way that only animate things can pull off. We passed a couple on the way, their red muscles contracting and cranking the wheels as they trundled along. The look on Vivian’s face would’ve had me in hysterics on another day, but right then I was too sore and tired to muster so much as a chuckle.

The road turned into a hole in the ground, then a winding stairway, then it doubled back for a while. It would’ve been sure to take us in the wrong direction if this was a place where geography was fixed. As it was, it was exactly where we needed to go.

Time’s a hell of a thing to keep track of in Heaven, but after an hour or two we found the city I was looking for. Surei, the Vei called it. It acted as a sort of capital city of the Suron territory, and performed the neat trick of sitting on a huge plate of perfectly circular rock, floating in the middle of a giant hole in the earth.

Vivian gaped as it came into view. “Can’t anything just be normal here?”

“Here, this is normal.”

She paused, eyes sweeping the city. I could hear her brain smoking as it tried to work the place out.

I tapped my wrist. “I thought we were on a timer.”

She blinked a few times, shook her head, and started walking again without another word.

We followed the increasingly wide road toward the city. A ring of nothingness surrounded the floating city, like some sort of waterless moat, and several bridges stretched across the gap around the perimeter of the city. The bridge we crossed was actually disappointingly normal, resembling any number of suspension bridges from Earth cities. The city itself, though, that was something else entirely.

It was almost a parody of an Earth city. Skyscrapers littered the skyline, but instead of being built of concrete and steel, they were great bone skeletons, coated in muscle and sinew and skin. Several of them floated in the air, with only long stairways connecting them to the ground. The city looked to have grown straight out of the red stone, complete with criss-crossing streets and floating paths that disappeared up at impossible angles before dipping again and slipping out of sight behind buildings.