Skyborn The Divine

1: Girl

Everyone dreams about falling, but I don't, and I think I know why...

The wind was an impatient child tugging at Alice's shirt. The shirt was old, soft, and steadily becoming grayer than pink with every wash. The movement of the night air made it billow around her like a parachute. It would have been funny if she weren't balanced on the rail surrounding the balcony of her new apartment.

She started when her foot slipped, nearly causing her to tumble headfirst off the rail. When her heart came down from her own throat, she shook her head at herself. If she wasn't crazy, if she was still the girl she had been years ago, then slipping off was no danger to her, not even from this height. The chilly metal of the rail under her feet made her wish she'd worn shoes, but she wouldn't need them where she was going.

Frank Sinatra's voice was warm honey that poured from her ear buds into her head, and Alice stole a glance at the crescent moon peeking from behind the clouds with a cold light. Alice listened to "Fly Me to the Moon", trying to imagine what it really would be like to drift up there beyond the clouds. It was old, but it was a really good song, she thought. Why don't more people listen to Sinatra? she asked herself. Normally, listening to music, especially her father's music, was the way she calmed herself, the way she found a quiet place inside, but nothing could settle her thumping heart or the roaring of her breath in her own ears tonight. Not when she was about to do something like this.

She tried to focus on the song, the way it seemed to be written especially for her. "This is an all-about-me song," she said out loud, though no one was around to hear her. She did not normally say the things she wanted to say to her father out loud, but the habit of the game they'd played together was too strong. The words came out on their own, whether he was there to hear them or not.

The game was simple. She would listen to music, whether it was old or new, popular or not. If it was a song that reminded her of herself, something that seemed to be written about her, she would say, "all-about-me song," and offer an explanation. Her father would do the same for songs that reminded him of himself, and sometimes the two of them would even suggest songs for each other. It had begun when they were on a long car trip together when she was only six years old. He'd taken all three of them on a road trip to Alaska, and it had been a game they invented to pass the time as they skipped from one radio station to the next. Soon it was less a game than it was an obsession, and the two of them had logged over fifty songs, her father adding all of them to a swiftly growing "All About Me" playlist they could listen to over and over again. By the time he was gone, the two of them had added hundreds more to the list.

Of all the things he'd left behind, she was sure this was something that made her think of him the most. She loved photos of him, but the songs on the playlist seemed to make him seem alive again, and sometimes she thought she could still hear him singing along.

Alice tried to keep her eyes off of her feet, where her toes flexed and curled, trying to grip the thin rail. Instead, she looked out over the tops of the trees. Everything in Virginia was so green. It was a humid, warm, wet place in the summer, and it seemed every inch of it was overflowing with unchecked plant life. It was so different from the places where she'd lived before. Everything there was so dry, and the only trees had been those purposefully planted and painstakingly maintained to keep them alive against the desert heat.

She'd lived in this place once before, when she was a little girl, but after her father passed, her mother had taken them around the world, taking positions as a nurse in American compounds in foreign countries. But now Alice was older. She had graduated from an overseas academy, and life for Americans was steadily becoming more dangerous abroad. Her mother decided it was time for them to finally go back home, though things had changed and moved on in the decade since they'd been away.