Read Online This New and Poisonous Air by Adam McOmber - Free Book Online Page A

taking small steps, intending to make my way to your window, and then I caught a glimpse of something different. There were tears in my eyes from the cold wind. Maybe they were enough for me to see—”
    “See what?”
    “Our fathers are correct, Roddy, though neither one of the old men knows how right they actually are. There is a pattern. But it isn’t one of myth or science. I caught a glimpse of it in the air. Something beyond our fathers’ imaginings, a glittering and navigable geometry that covers everything and passes through everything. Cords of light, braces of gold. I learned to make use of them last night. I actually flew, Roddy. No more toddling along like a baby. And the faster I flew, the brighter the pattern appeared to
me, until I realized there were animals with me in the sky, making use of the pattern—not birds or bats, but bright bodies with tremendous faces—things that might have once been mistaken for gods. I almost mistook them for that at first, but then I realized they were like me. Beings who’d recognized the great geometry.”
    “You flew with these things ? ” I said, trying to picture the monsters.
    “I’ll take you,” he said. “Tonight, I’ll take you.”
    “I don’t want to go, Amon.”
    He burst into laughter. “Don’t want to go?” he said, grabbing me roughly by the arm as he used to. “We’ll speak to them together. I was waiting for you. Maybe they can tell us how to stay permanently in the sky. To live there as they do. We wouldn’t have to worry about hiding ourselves.”
    “You can’t fly,” I said.
    His god-face broke with surprise. “What?”
    “I don’t believe you,” I said. “I don’t have to believe you. I think you just went off and did what you wanted. Maybe you went spying on girls in town, and now you’re making up a story to frighten me. There are no things with tremendous faces that live in the sky. Come on, Amon. I’ve been educated.”
    As if to prove me wrong, Amon reached into the air, grabbed hold of some object I couldn’t see, and lifted himself off the ground, floating effortlessly up for a moment and then dropping gently back to his feet. I shut my eyes. I would not see a thing like that. Not anymore. Storming away, heedless of the holes in the road, I left him to his madness. For it was madness, and I knew the moment that either of our fathers saw him, he’d be immediately diagnosed. He could not conceal it any longer, not when his eyes looked as they did, so full of nauseating space. He’d be taken to the clinic and studied. When our fathers
spoke of underlying patterns, they didn’t mean glittering architectures. They simply meant underlying principles of organization. But nothing Amon said was organized or logical. Did I believe him about the events of the previous night? I suppose on some level, I did, yet my mind continued its attempts at rationalization. I didn’t want his truths.
    That night when he came tapping, I hid beneath my covers and forced him to call through the thick glass, begging me to unlock the window. I should have gone to him when he said he was afraid to travel again in the night alone, but I didn’t. Eventually, he left, and I wish that I’d at least looked out to see him strong and mad one last time. I wish I’d memorized him, laid him out in a high garden somewhere in my mind.
    Should I say it came as a surprise when I descended from my room the next morning and found my mother and father sitting at our formal table with Helmer Garrik and his wife, dressed in dark clothes, a bowl of yellow flowers from the hill between them. I immediately believed that Amon and I had been found out, that we were being officially labeled by our fathers as inverts. We’d be separated and given the talking cure for months. I went to my mother and put my face on her shoulder.
    “The Garriks are here,” my father began, “because of a terrible event that befell their son, Amon, on our property last