The Tinkerer's Daughter by Jamie Sedgwick

was officially named Kantraya. Commonly, it was known as the Badlands. The men who lived there were wild, nomadic barbarians who worshipped dark gods and practiced a strange, mystical religion. There was little solid information regarding these peoples, but plenty of conjecture.
    It was said they used black magic, and that they practiced human sacrifice and cannibalism. The stories said the Kantrayans, or Kanters, were descended from giants, and that the smallest of them were twice the size of the largest humans.
    They conducted raids along the borders from time to time, but they seemed to have little use for logic or organization. The only thing that saved the northern lands from the Kanters invading was the fact that they were too unorganized to form a real army. As a result, they were generally presumed to be too stupid to teach and too powerful to train as slaves.
    I found the lack of good information about the Kanters to be troubling. Humans had determined that Kanters were too stupid to be a threat, and therefore simply ignored them. I shouldn’t have been too surprised by this. The humans focused their attention on the greater danger, the Tal’mar. Ultimately, this complacency could have destroyed us all.
     

Chapter 16
     
     
     
    Tinker’s project moved steadily forward. I helped him when time allowed, but not nearly so much as I had before school started. The new fuselage was larger and sturdier than the first, and Tinker asked me to see to the shaping of the wood. I did what I could. The thing was little more than a hollow shell.
    It was three weeks after the crash that this new glider, now called an “airplane” by Tinker, had its virgin flight. I walked around the aircraft the night before, searching it with my mind. There was no doubt that this vehicle was superior in every way to its predecessor. The wood and steel were meshed, acting as one. The wings were flexible to allow for increased lift and changes in wind resistance, but they had spines like bones to keep them from breaking. In all, I was quite proud of the job we had done.
    “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Tinker stood behind me. He was smoking a cigar, as he did on rare occasions, and the bittersweet smell of tobacco drifted through the air around us, drowning out the aromas of lilac and grease that defined our homestead.
    “I don’t think you should fly it,” I said. I turned to face him, gauging his reaction. He immediately became defensive.
    “It won’t crash this time!” he insisted. “I’ve got it right now. You can see that, can’t you? It’s a hundred times better than the first one.”
    “I know, Tinker,” I said calmly. “I didn’t say it wouldn’t fly. I just said you shouldn’t fly it. Your leg is still healing, and I’m afraid it might not be as strong as it used to be.”
    “You want to fly it?” he said. I heard so many things in his voice: disbelief, reluctance, fear. Everything except the acceptance I wanted. “Absolutely not! I won’t even think of it. I won’t allow you to risk your neck on this crazy thing.”
    I grinned. “And yet I should let you?”
    His eyes were wide and they searched for an answer in the night around us. “Breeze, that’s crazy. You don’t know what you’re asking.”
    “I do know, Tinker. I know exactly. I’m asking you to let me do this. Imagine what would happen if something happened to you. I’d be as good as dead. I would have nowhere to go. On the other hand, if anything happened to me, nobody would even care.”
    “That’s not true.”
    “Besides you, I mean. Not only that, but the truth is I want to do it. I want to go up there in the sky, to feel the freedom that you felt when you flew. Do you know what that would be like for me? All I’ve ever seen of this world is this valley, and I can barely hope to see more. But up there, up in the sky…”
    I could see my words affecting him. A change came over his face. He’d been worried and defensive, but he was