Xyla Veridian's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Xyla Veridian pressed her three-fingered hand against the alley wall and counted the crowd on the street. Twenty people, maybe more. Too many. Somewhere past that crowd, her homeworld's fallen star had buried a shard in Zanthorburg, and she had until nightfall to find it before the trail cooled. She was green-skinned, gold-eyed, and taller than any human here. She could not walk down a street without stopping traffic. Her serpent shifted on her shoulders, wings folded tight, scales cool against her neck. At her boots, the small violet creature she'd raised from a kit pressed close, antennae twitching. Both animals knew the smell of the shard. Neither could search without her. She had tried the main square yesterday. A child screamed. A man dropped a crate of fruit. Two constables followed her for six blocks before she lost them in a stairwell. If she was cornered, she was finished. The shard would stay lost, and she would stay stranded. She needed cover. Not a disguise — nothing hid her height or her hands. She needed a route people would not use. Xyla looked up. Above the rooftops, blue foliage spilled over a courtyard wall — the crown of an alien tree, white limbs glowing faint against the brick. The tree was hers. Or her people's. It meant the shard had already changed things here. It meant the ground under it was foreign ground, and foreign ground had foreign paths. She climbed. The serpent flew ahead in short bursts, scouting ledges. The six-legged creature scrambled up drainpipes and waited on sills. Xyla pulled herself onto a slate roof and stayed low. From here she could see the whole quarter. Blue leaves crowned three more courtyards. Between them, curtains of glowing vines hung from balcony to balcony, thick enough to hide a body her size. She moved along the vine line, hand over hand where the roof pitched, ducking behind hanging blossoms when voices rose below. The vines glowed soft enough that no one looked up. Twice she froze while a window opened beneath her. Twice the window closed. At the far end of the quarter, the vines ended above a cracked marble roof. She recognized the shape at once — columns, a pediment, the bones of an old Greek hall, wrapped now in the same blue growth that marked her tree. Something from her world had settled here long before she arrived. The shard's pull sharpened in her chest. She could feel it through the stone. Xyla dropped to the pediment and crouched. The serpent landed beside her. The small creature squeezed through a gap in the vines and disappeared inside. She had found a way to move through the city unseen. She had also found that she was not the first of her kind to reach Zanthorburg. Someone had been here before her, and they had left a door.