Description: See him glide into the blue dance. Watch him soar on thermal swells. Feel the crosswind skew him sideways through drenching Arctic clouds, and he steers, banks, treads the shining air, till down down down the eternal spiral curve he falls 1 AAD. Automatic activation device, opens parachute in emergencies. Orrpaaj Sitka lay stretched on his back, visualizing his skydive. Light gray eyes. Windburned skin. Stinky gym socks. Clean soap in his ears. High up in a geodesic dome, he rested on an I-beam and squinted through the glass at Alaska's winter sky. Forty meters above the concrete, one leg dangling free, his body made small twitches as he practiced the moves in his mind. Twenty-two years old, and how he could narrow his focus. The sun, the clouds, the shaping forces of the universe all centered on one event: his skydive that day. No other notion could stick in his head. Not on that day, surely not. He swore to himself that nothing else mattered, but he was lying. Squirming on his steel beam, he wadded his gloves for a pillow. Mentally, he sorted his gear. Yet his girlfriend's voice repeated, Why do you throw yourself away for nothing? Last night, because he couldn't list his reasons, everything between them ended. Today while Orr braved the stratosphere, Dyce would leave for Seattle to take a library job. He sat up and straddled the I-beam, plagued by the memory of her hair. Last night while she packed, her long braid came loose, and her hair smelled of candle smoke. He'd never been with anyone else. He'd never wanted any other girl. Seattle was a myth to him. All his hopes lay in completing this stratosphere dive. He sat in his high dome chanting an old Aleut prayer. He hadn't yet learned what vapor dreams were made of. Smog rolled around the base of the dome. Noxious fumes had buried the long chain of Aleutian Islands where he lived. Only the highest volcanic peaks emerged above the haze, and from space, the ancient land bridge resembled the broken spine of some great fallen bird. Acid storms immersed the cliffs as predictably as tides, and the rivers ran so yellow, any possible salmon had long since expired. Who can say how the Aleut people endured those islands for nine thousand years? Yet endure they did, even to the day in 2068 when Dyce left for Seattle. Orr loosened his collar. The glass dome focused the sun like a lens. Built at the summit of Mount Shishaldin, the seedy old Unimak Air Base had long since been abandoned by the United States government and taken over by the tribe. Still, its dome rose above the smog right into the blue January sky, and Orr ached to be up there. Up in the stratosphere. On the launchpad below, loud sirens blared the ten-minute warning, and he refocused. He got to his feet, drew on his frayed gloves and whispered the Aleut war cry. " Yio'kwa . Let's do it." From the I-beam, he dropped into the gantry tower, then slid down the metal ladder, skimming his gloves along the rails, barely touching the rungs with his feet. His limbs seemed to flow like music. At the capsule level, his quadriceps pulsed and contracted. He felt so ready for this dive. The air in the dome seemed to crackle with static. The usual loiterers lounged by the hangar doors, trading friendly insults and passing around a sack of fry bread. Orr waved to them, breathing in the heady smell of grease and engine oil. Then he spotted his cousin, Gabe Lermontov, crouching over their gear bag like a chubby bear. Orr snuck up and goosed Gabe in the ribs. Gabe's shaggy eyebrows merged into one. "Do you realize what time it is?" "No worries. We've got plenty of time." Orr twirled his electronic helmet on his fingertip, dodging back and forth to keep it in balance. Gabe unzipped the gear bag. "You're worse than my five-year-old." Ah, but what tenderness the two young men displayed toward their gear bag. They reached in and lifted out their Celestia Sky Wing. Most of their gear was patched and faded, but the Celestia was new, virginal. It dazzled them. They glanced at each other and grinned. "Today we do it," Orr whispered. "Don't push." Gabe wiped his damp hands down his beard. "You've gotta see how this Wing behaves." Orr clamped on his helmet and visualized the stratosphere, thirty kilometers above the Earth. Lots of people jumped from that height, but Orr never had. Eight years he'd been working part-time at the tribal seafarm, collecting equipment, practicing, saving his money. He wanted to earn his instructor license. And today, he would do it. He felt feathers tickling his insides. He had to stamp his boots to keep from singing out loud. Warm winter sun radiated through the glass dome. Gabe climbed onto a step stool to drape the new Celestia over Orr's body like a tent. Light as air, its transparent micromesh could withstand a nuclear explosion, but Gabe coddled it like wedding lace. He hunkered underneath its folds and jacked its control leads into Orr's helmet. Then he climbed down off the stool, stepped back, and pretended to beat a drumroll. "The moment of truth." Orr chinned a toggle in his helmet, and the Sky Wing came alive. Energy sang through its gauzy folds, and from inside, Orr watched the veil shimmer when he touched it. He felt like dancing. But every eye on the launchpad was trained on him, so he stood a little straighter, and his baritone dropped to bass. "Let's see if she'll furl." He nudged his toggle, and a mandate surged through the mesh. Within its warp and weft, billions of microscopic sacs released spiraling polymer chains of nano-resins which combined and reacted. The Wing's material memory realigned, and with a waffling snap, the mesh rolled up into a tight cowl around Orr's helmet, so thin it might have been a wreath of glitter. Despite Orr's resolve, a note of involuntary bliss hummed out of him. The final minutes were speeding by, so he strapped on his parachute rig. The Celestia would sail him aloft, but he would need his parachute to land. He couldn't stop grinning. Fully geared up, he felt almost too excited to breathe, so he circled their rented rocket, eyeing the new seams he and Gabe had welded. He'd sold many things of value to make this day happen. His health card. His transit pass. The one good shirt Dyce bought him for job interviews. Along the rocket's flank in runny yellow spray paint, some previous owner had scrawled a name, Mister Missile . Drone rockets like this were easy to retrofit for sport diving. They were cheap, too, since the U.S. liquidated its arsenal. Gabe got out his wrench and retightened the mosquito cameras mounted under the fins. His pride, those cameras. Gabe claimed his videos of Orr's skydives would earn mind-boggling sums of money one day. Both cousins had a gift for pipe dreams. When the two-minute warning blared, adrenaline hammered Orr's rib cage. He ran up the tower steps, fondling his silvery cowl to make sure it was really there. Then he swung into the tiny cockpit, snapped a salute to Gabe and closed the hatch. But an ache rippled through his mind. Dyce. He rolled his shoulders to shake off the gloom. Dyce wouldn't leave him. Not today. After the dive, he would smooth things over. He always knew how to make her smile. But as the prelaunch sequence began, misgivings rose through his blood like bubbles. A leisurely Montana drawl rumbled over the radio com link in his helmet. It was Pete Hogue, the fixed-base operator. "Aye, Orr. I'm showing high pressure in your fuel tank. Could be a glitch." Orr checked the heads-up display in his helmet visor. "My readout looks good." Screwy indicators were common at the air base. Pete leased the operation from the Aleut Tribal Council, and his control tower gauges were nearly as obsolete as his rust-colored rental rocket. For today's launch, he'd let Orr and Gabe install an oversized fuel tank scavenged from a junkyard. No one but Pete Hogue would allow the old buzz bomb to take off. The flight was illegal. But Pete used to be a skydiver himself, so he understood their need. "It's nothing," Orr said after a pause. "Don't mention it to Gabe. I think he's having his period today." Pete chuckled. "When is he not?" Orr squinted out his side portal to make sure Gabe was safe inside the hangar. Gabe's three little sons were pressing against the plate-glass window, throwing him good luck signs. Ilya, Nick, and Yanny, his fan club. He waved to them, then switched on the air supply in his pressurized jumpsuit as the final pulsing siren announced the opening of the dome. With a loud boom, the dome split across the middle, and metal squealed against metal as its two halves retracted. Alaska's toxic smog gushed in like a dozen yellow wind-devils, warmer than it should have been for January, though the temperature seemed to go higher every year. Orr watched the smog spiral around the tower and mushroom against the sealed hangar doors till the whole dome filled with unbreathable haze. Inside his pressure suit, he gulped recycled air. Sure, tonight, he would convince Dyce to stay. But now he needed to focus. Pete was calling the countdown. "Five four three" At the mark, Orr ignited the main engine, and fire exploded through the aft nozzle. Thunderous vibrations rocked the

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