Endworlds - Nicholas Read [3]
Unless the storm kept them awake. But the Captain had just announced that they would soon be leaving behind the worst of it. Raef peered out of his cabin window at the darkening azure sky and performed a ritual he had long observed on every flight.
Letting his eyes relax just out of focus he looked for the shapes that floated lazily across his iris, silhouetted against the backdrop of blue. Soon came the dust motes, those perfect rings and strings, and as he tuned his focus ever so slightly more inwards, so came the almost imperceptible flickerings. Whether they were on the surface of his eye, between the layers of plate glass, or skimming across the airliner’s hull he didn’t know. But for years now he had been aware that if he could ratchet his lens by the tiniest of degrees and hold his stare, he could see something else in the air, something he could never seem to spy at ground level.
Slowly at first just a single will-o’-the wisp stirred in the center of sight, taunting him. Then, if he looked without looking, stared without staring, the window would shimmer as if through a heat haze, and the one was joined by another, then another, until he could discern a thousand vague shapes, moving across the flat membrane of air like skaters on a pond.
His silent companions were there now, the window awash with motion, and as he brought his eyes inward in one final degree of cross-eyed concentration, everything attained the clarity of a sunburst. A thousand pinpricks of brilliant white light rapidly spun and winked, coming and going busily in and out of this micro-thin layer, this slice of the universe that only came to him at high altitude.
He had once been convinced it must be a trick of the cornea, the shapes attached to his eye. But then why, when he looked just to the sides of the window, could he not see them inside the cabin? Whatever they were, they were benign; they weren’t static electricity, weren’t sparks, and posed no threat. But they were such a curiosity. Sometimes he found himself thinking they were curious about him. Nobody else he had mentioned them to seemed to know what he was talking about. Maybe he alone had special sight?
These musings were interrupted as Paige appeared at his side. Her gleeful smile warmed him.
Just turned ten, she had already travelled more than most adults manage in a lifetime, bemusing the staff at numerous frequent flyer lounges as she strode through their sliding glass doors and waved her membership card with the confidence of a business scion attending their home away from home. A small army of nannies saw to it that she ate correctly, exercised properly, and was educated in a dense curriculum of home schooling made possible by the Internet, though she was made to wear a twee little school uniform to delineate school time from cool time.
Paige had the singular advantage of seeing first-hand the cultures, geography, and history she read about online; juggling exchange rates between currencies for math studies and grasping the common roots of foreign words for language. Paige Eisman was gaining a classical education the rival of any preparatory school, with the perspective of world affairs that only travel across cultures can really provide, even to a child.
Oval-faced with eyebrows that jaunted upwards as if laughing at a private joke, she shared her father’s cloven chin but her mother’s shoulder length chocolate-hued hair, and those same umber eyes. The other physical reminder of Jade Eisman was the twined metal knot-within-a-knot that Paige forever wore around her neck, once the mother’s favorite necklace, now the daughter’s priceless heirloom.
Extending an arm, Paige proffered a brightly colored sheet