The highway cut across the landscape like an old wound, a raised, scarred line on a scale we could not understand and therefore simply lived with. We could not climb the walls that held it up, could not reach the road or the caravan that roared along it for days at a time, clanking and grinding and smoking, so our town was built beneath the overpass crossing the river. We burrowed into the walls and built our own tiny bridge over the river and listened to the endless churning din when the caravan was there and waited for it when it wasn’t.

We waited and longed for the caravan with constant, sickening hope for one reason: It protected us from the killing. The killing could never touch us under the overpass, and it did not strike anywhere when the caravan was near, so the caravan was our salvation. Some carried a sort of tortured adoration for it, though the caravan made the walls shake under its weight and left us blank and slow-witted with the noise. Some hated it, for the noise and the smoke, yes, but also for being so untouchable, for never stopping for us, its pitiful supplicants.

We weren’t sure they even knew we lived in their shadow. Some stories said that they had been human once, that they had built the machines of the caravan over the course of a thousand years, had taken all they could and left the rest of us behind. Others said they had come from the sky, like the killing did, that they traveled all over the world as quickly as they could, trying to protect everyone beneath them. We didn’t know if the caravan would ever stop, for us, or for anyone; we didn’t know if it even could. We had no answers at all, only fabricated reasons for bitterness, for resentment, for hope, and fear, and trust.

I have loved and hated the caravan for another reason entirely: It gave me my sister, and now it wants to take her back.

I was only seven the day I found her. I was scrambling between Henrietta’s old greenhouses, heading for the woods beyond the fields, to forage but mostly to play, when I heard the wail overhead. It was shrill, heartbroken, and it stopped me in my tracks even as the sound was carried away into the crush of the caravan. Just after that, one of the greenhouses shook, the taut ceiling sinking low.

I scrambled up a trellis on one side of the greenhouse to look at the bundle that had fallen there and saw a dark head of hair, smooth limbs—a toddler, crying, crying, crying. She lay on the top protective layer of soil and grass and worms, and her feet kicked at the dirt when I picked her up, but she quieted when I put my arms around her.

She was so light when I carried her back home, almost insubstantial. It didn’t seem odd to me then; instead, it made me feel strong.

That night was the first community meeting I went to. Henrietta carried the toddler, who slept peacefully after a visit to the healer. I kept stealing glances at her, at her round cheeks and dark eyelashes, at the tiny pale dots of her toes where she kept kicking free of the blanket Henrietta had wrapped around her.

“We’ll keep her, won’t we?” I whispered to Henrietta on the way there. “She can sleep in my bed. I’ll teach her about everything. She can be our other sister.”

Henrietta stopped. We were in view of the bonfire by then, and people were already standing in a loose circle around it. In the dark, I could only see her profile, lit by the fire beyond. Overhead, the caravan was leaving, the grinding din of it starting to fade. “Of course,” she told me, voice gentle. “If everyone agrees.”

There, the heat of the bonfire on my face, I told them how I had seen her, how she had landed on the flat greenhouse roof. She must have fallen, everyone agreed. She must have come from the caravan itself.

People spoke, before they took it to a vote. They asked if she was a gift or a curse. If she was human as we were human. Their faces flickered in the bonfire light, and I stood next to Henrietta, where she sat on the ground holding the toddler. I looked at the red-orange gleam of light on the child’s dark hair and put my index finger in the palm of her tiny soft hand. Her fingers curled around mine, and it felt like a tether, like for the first time in my short life I knew what I was meant to revolve around.

Someone asked what we should name her, and the space around the bonfire echoed with the first true silence we’d had for a week. I remember how my head hurt with it, how my heart jumped into my throat.

“Above,” I said. “Her name is Above, and she’s mine.”

Above grew into a thin, upright child with pale skin and dark hair I arranged into smooth, easy braids. She followed me everywhere and didn’t ask questions. She didn’t need to: I told her everything. I told her about the killing that came down from the sky, the way the air would shimmer and go deadly still in the minutes before it struck, how no one was truly safe unless they were tucked in under the overpass. I told her and taught her how to dig bugs and clumps of plants to hold over her head, that it might strike another living thing before it could reach her. And then I told her not to trust in that method because surely my mother must have done the same, and look at where that got her, dead barely beyond the fields, almost returned home.

I taught her how to gather sticks for firewood and not get lost in the hills and trees beyond the fields even when she, by some strange unconscious trick, left no footprints for herself to follow. I taught her how to orient herself against the constant line of the highway and where to look for wild mushrooms. I taught her songs to sing in the morning, doing laundry, and stories to tell herself in between her lessons.

I taught her games, too, but only the kind two people could play. People were polite enough at community meetings, and no one was turning away the vegetables that Henrietta grew, but there was more distance around us at the bonfire than there had been before.

The summer I turned fifteen, the caravan didn’t come. It had been nearly six months, and Henrietta had been caught out in her greenhouse for three killings in a row with no time to dive for a sod-roofed shelter. We’d swept dead grass and dead worms off the top of the greenhouse with shaking hands and replaced them with fresh soil and living bugs immediately, knowing all too well what would happen if we didn’t, if we got lazy. I was wearing the jacket of a woman—Laura—whose greenhouse roof hadn’t been thick enough, alive enough, to stop the killing from coming down on her.

Things compounded. Above was growing through all my old clothes, the one man decent enough to court Henrietta got caught and killed just after he took over from the old healer, and I had to choose my apprenticeship.

Everything felt unfair. The caravan, the lack of the caravan, the way people passed by Above when she went to fetch water. The stories they told about the caravan grew darker, more resentful. I understood it, but I hated it all the same.

Above was growing quieter, too, more withdrawn. She didn’t take my hand when we went outside anymore, just walked beside me, standing straight and silent when someone from the village turned a cold shoulder to us. Worst of all, she wouldn’t talk to me about it. All her life, I was the one person she would whisper her secrets to—who had snuck her a piece of cake at the bonfire party, the night she had crept out to look at the stars, the boys who pushed her down and left her in the mud—and now I didn’t even have that.

I wanted to run and run and run, and I wanted to always come back. I wanted to curl in a ball and not let Henrietta look at me. She sighed most times she saw me, those days, and pointedly didn’t ask me about my apprenticeship. Everybody thought I would be a traveler like my mother, and I knew I wouldn’t, but I didn’t know what I was going to do instead.

I was combing Above’s hair when the sound of the caravan started, moments only from a faint rumble to a full-on roar.

“There,” I said, hearing it, “finally. I was almost missing being too distracted by noise to think.”

Above’s shoulders were always very straight, but they straightened more under my hand as I worked on a tangle near the nape of her neck. Her voice was quiet. “I always sleep better when it comes. I wish I didn’t.”

I hummed and stayed very still. Maybe this was an opening.

“The people of the caravan must be selfish,” she said finally. “To go and go away from the killing and never stop for anyone. Maybe that’s why they threw me away.”

My hand tightened in her hair, and she yelped.

“Who told you they threw you away?”

Above shrugged with one shoulder. She and Henrietta didn’t want me starting any more fights.

I put the brush down. I should have started to braid her hair, but my hands were shaking; I didn’t trust myself to be gentle. I wrapped my arms around her shoulders instead. I put my mouth to her ear to be sure she could hear me even as the sound of the caravan grew. “They didn’t throw you away. You were lost. It was an accident.” I swallowed. “I heard a scream.”

She didn’t move. “When?”

“As you fell. I was only seven, and it broke my heart.” It broke my heart again now to tell it to her, to have to convince her that losing her could only ever be a tragedy. “Whoever dropped you didn’t mean to, darling. I’m sure of it.”

That night, the sound of the caravan kept me awake, but Above fell asleep immediately. Her face was solemn in daylight, but with the mechanical din of the caravan around her as she slept, it relaxed into a smile.

Henrietta snuck into our room just as my eyelids started to grow heavy. We would walk out into the fields at night sometimes when the caravan came, just the two of us, just because we could. She had a blanket over her shoulder, and I nodded in response to her silent question.

I was halfway to the door when Above started to float.

For a moment, it was just her arms, reaching for the ceiling, smooth and pale and unnatural in the low light of Henrietta’s shuttered lamp. Still looking at Above, I took the last few steps to the door and clutched at Henrietta. Her hand found my shoulder, warm and strong, and we watched as Above’s shoulders started to lift as well. Then it was her torso, then her legs, so that she seemed almost to be diving upward into the air. Her blanket slipped off her legs, past her toes, into a heap on the bed. For a moment, just looking at her, she was an oddity, beautiful and strange, a nightgown and pale limbs, dark hair floating artfully around her neck and face.

But Henrietta’s nails dug into my shoulder, and my breath caught in my throat, and I realized my hands were clenched into fists at my side. This was my sister. Something horrible was happening to her, and I didn’t know what it was or how to stop it.

Henrietta gently pushed me back into the room and sat next to me on my bed, blanket and stars forgotten. She wrapped an arm around me.

“We can’t tell anyone,” she told me, lips brushing against my ear, words still barely discernible above the rush of the caravan.

I nodded, eyes still on Above. I needed to heal her, to fix her, to stop this. There must be something or someone who could help. I would find it.

The sound of the caravan continued, unrelenting and all-consuming, and Above’s body reached toward it. Henrietta and I fell asleep watching her, too afraid to touch her and bring everything crashing down.

The next day I apprenticed to the chemist, Blondel. He knew things no one else in the town did. More importantly, he had never avoided Above.

The first day, I spent half an hour just staring at the chemist’s shelves, the vials and boxes and packets of compounds that had been the cause of more than one cure beyond the reach of the healer. They would simply have to cure Above too.

I must have opened my mouth a dozen times that day to ask Blondel if he had some combination of powders to stop someone from floating, if he’d ever heard of it, but I shut my mouth before the words could get out every time. I knew he hadn’t heard of it. I knew he’d know I was talking about Above. I would have to figure out a cure on my own.

I was an indifferent apprentice, but Blondel never reproached me for my lapses of attention or for the way I was always bouncing my leg or tapping my fingers against the weighing station. I didn’t like to be away from Above for so long, though I knew she was as safe as she could be helping Henrietta in the field.

Parts of the apprenticeship were interesting. On days we judged to be relatively safe, usually directly after a killing had come, we would venture out from under the overpass and collect all sorts of things—bat guano, tree bark, roots and leaves of various plants. Back under the overpass, we dried these things and strained them or powdered them or liquefied them, and Blondel told me in his quiet, precise way what each powder or mixture would be called. Seeing the powders and vials, having a name for them and the knowledge of their uses—it captivated me. Blondel would tell me what a powder did, and it felt like the close of a perfect story around the bonfire at night, a neat twist, a precise unfolding of something perfectly complex. It felt like I was approaching something like an ending.

Time passed. Above kept floating.

The first caravan week of the year I turned seventeen, Blondel took a few men and me to the mines, a day’s walk from the overpass. We planned to camp for two days. It was a sign of my progress in the apprenticeship, but in my contrary way I burned with indignation the whole walk there. To be gone from Above for so long was one thing, but on a caravan day! I would miss the bonfire and the picnics, and who knew how many of those I had left with her. That morning she’d had to concentrate to keep her feet on the ground when hugging me goodbye. But that was why I was there, after all, and maybe something in the mines would be the key to helping Above, so I kept my complaints to myself as the ground turned slightly rockier, as the plants receded. Another few days in the same direction would lead us to scrubby hills and, eventually, mountains.

The men dug various rocks and brought them to Blondel, who would identify them for me. Some of them we would have to crush to a powder, others we would have to burn or purify. Blondel let me label them, correcting my markings where I erred with gentle comments. He would pat me on the shoulder when I identified and labeled something without direction, an absent-minded touch. He kept saying he would put me in charge of the inventory one of these days.

There were many free moments, those few days by the mine, and I often found myself staring back in the direction of the overpass, looking at the caravan. It was a constantly moving mass, dark vehicles of all sizes pressed against each other. By the mines, we were far enough not to be surrounded by the sound, but even its image carried with it a sense of something grinding and all-consuming, a massive, ongoing rush.

When I wasn’t looking at the caravan, the openness of the sky pressed on me, a reminder of what could happen. There were some people, I knew, who preferred the open air and the freedom that came with it, who braved the risk of the killing just to marvel at the beauty of the sky. I wasn’t one of them. Even with the sound of the caravan diminished, with clear skies and the closest thing to perfect safety I could have, I found myself turning back to look at it, listening for it behind the sound of crickets at night.

Maybe it was the distance; maybe it was the natural conclusion of something that had been building my whole life. The last morning we were there, I looked at the line of highway running across the landscape, at the relentless movement of the caravan, which protected us and didn’t care for us, which had left Above behind and never stopped, and I asked Blondel about explosives.

He was kind, refusing me, but firm. He knew of such things being done, he said, but it was of no use to us. I would do better to forget it.

I hid my disappointment well. I told him I would forget it. I didn’t.

It’s not that I wanted to destroy the caravan, or the overpass, or the entire framework of our lives. It wasn’t that I was unhappy, not really.

But every time the caravan came, Above floated a little higher when she slept. Her toes barely held any sort of connection with the ground even when she was awake, and that seemed to be through sheer force of will. She had taken to avoiding the common areas of our little town, fearing that others would notice, and stayed mostly in the house or in the fields with Henrietta. As soon as I came back at night, she would follow my every move with her eyes. She was so young, and so lonely, and so hurt, and it pulled at me constantly, a perpetual ache.

Something had to be done.

The overpass, and the highway, with its impossible height and unclimbable walls, seemed the best thing to hurl my anger against. The caravan was full of people, people who understood things we did not and moved in ways we could only dream of. They did not live in fear of the killing. We built our existence around the scraps of theirs.

And Above belonged to them, and they had lost her, and they had not stopped. Perhaps they were not truly people after all.

There was a shack built into a low hill beyond most of the fields, with a sod roof for protection, and I took my experiments there after dark. Blondel had given me the responsibility of the inventory after all, and I recorded what I took in a separate notebook next to my notes and hoped it would not be missed. I didn’t know what I was looking for, exactly, but I knew I hadn’t found it yet. I wanted spectacle. I wanted violence.

I had moved from two chemicals to three, my notes an increasing series of tallies and Xs, and that night I mixed saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur in a dry paper cone and lit it.

The explosion was bright and loud, and it burned a hole in the floor of that wooden shack and covered my hands in black powder. For a brief, burning moment, it reminded me of the grind of the caravan, the spark of something bigger than me. It was new and familiar both. With development, it promised destruction. It wasn’t hope I felt as I wrote down my findings, as I measured out the chemicals again; it was something like power.

I would be ready the next time the caravan came, I promised myself. While we waited, I would see how much damage my chemicals could do. And then I would take that damage and danger away from the overpass, to some other point in the highway wall, and make a new gap in the highway. I would make them stop. I would make them think of us. I would make them regret what they had lost in Above.

The caravan came again, arriving in the early hours of the morning like a nightmare made real. In daylight I sat over my oatmeal and thought about my chemical stockpile, when it would be best to set the explosion, and when I could sneak away without being missed.

I was thinking so intently that I didn’t notice Above’s presence in the room until she touched my wrist. Instinctively, I looked at the floor—she was floating a handsbreadth above it. She leaned close to me to speak.

“Do you think if I gave way and let the air take me that I’d float right back up to the caravan? That a door would open somewhere up there and let me back in?” There was a wistful quality to her words discernible even underneath the din of the caravan. I pulled back to look at her face; she looked resigned, not hopeful.

“You’re not thinking of letting go?” I asked her.

She hesitated. “Would it be so bad to try? To see what happens?”

“What if you fall?” I swallowed down my follow-up. What if you don’t? What if you leave me forever, for people who don’t know you like I do? Who don’t love you like I do?

Above smiled at me. “Then you’ll catch me.”

I stared back at her, stunned, and grabbed her hand. “You know I will,” I said. I couldn’t help but add the obvious question. “Are you unhappy here?”

She shook her head. “Not unhappy, but…” She waved her hand, taking in and seeming to reject the small room. “I don’t belong here.” She smiled but didn’t meet my eye. “You know it too. I can’t keep my feet on the ground.”

“You could stay anyway.”

“Not forever.” She squared her shoulders, a movement that should have looked more awkward on her teenage frame than it did. “I don’t want to try it tomorrow, but we can do it the day after.”

She was so matter-of-fact about it I could almost forget whatever happened was going to break my heart.

That afternoon I went back to my chemicals, scrambling for the notes I had made in my months of experimentation. There had been a few chemicals and elements that, when added, had added color to my explosions, diversion instead of destruction. I had discarded them at the time, but perhaps I could use them now.

Above wanted to go back to where she came from, if she could.

I didn’t understand it. I couldn’t understand it. The caravan was literally a level above us, moving and moving—maybe fleeing the killing, maybe chasing after it—and our lives meant nothing to them. But I had to acknowledge, too, that Above had come from the caravan.

I thought again of the wail I had heard before I found her. It was possible that someone up there had felt the pain of losing Above, that someone up there had something in common with me.

So I went back to my notes and my packets of chemicals. I added strontium chloride, which would be red, and tied up my powders in cylinders with fuses. I made fourteen of them, one for each year Above was with me, and nearly ran out of Blondel’s sulfur. He would forgive me, I knew. My hands shook, tying the fuses. My eyes burned. I couldn’t seem to swallow down my tears. Blondel would be kind to me, after Above was gone.

This last morning, Above woke early, settling back onto her bed with a gentle thump before the dawn. I walked with her and Henrietta through the fields in the morning, trying to notice everything and hold onto it. Above wanted to eat one of everything still growing, wanted to see the spot where I found her and hear the story over. I demonstrated the way her tiny hand had curled around my finger, and I cried. She had been my tether then and would be still. I wondered, nonsensically, if once she was gone I would start floating too.

For lunch, I made her favorite meal, eggs and sturdy bread and garlic paste with roasted vegetables, and she smiled at me across the table when I served it to her. She knew I did not want her to go.

And now it is twilight, and my arm is around her. We’re standing beyond the fields, watching the sun sink below the horizon. The sky is awash with color, beautiful and slipping away even as we look at it. A minute ago, I snuck off to light the long fuses of my packets of powders, arranged in groups of three or four. It should be a few minutes before they ignite.

It feels as though I should have more to say to Above in these last few moments, but the caravan roars above us and turns the edges of my thoughts to dust. My words crumble away when I open my mouth. The caravan grinds and crushes and moves ever forward, and I love her that much, I love her in an endless, pressing, mind-numbing way, so I cling to her instead of speaking.

Above turns and wipes my cheek with her sleeve.

“Don’t cry,” she tells me, leaning close. “It might not work. I might yet return to you.” She laughs, an unsteady exhalation that I see as much as hear.

“But you don’t want to,” I say, sniffing again, trying to stop my stupid, useless tears.

She frowns. “Not that,” she says. She floats a good half a foot above the ground, and my arm around her shoulders aches from holding her down. “It’s just that we can’t continue on this way. Things have to change.”

I press a kiss to her temple. She hugs Henrietta and then comes back once more for me.

Darkness has fallen around us, and the caravan is a steady stream overhead. Above winds her arms around me so that I feel her flinch when the first set of fireworks explodes in bursts of red, stars written on the air.

“Oh,” she says, knowing they’re for her. “They’re lovely. Thank you.”

Above steps away, exchanging her grip around my shoulders for her fingers around my wrist. The image of it, or the feeling, makes me think of her tiny toddler hand curled around my pinky finger all those years ago. I don’t have time to think about the parallel. She lets go.

The second set of fireworks goes off as she rises through the air. She rises slowly, inevitably, and seems always to be in the middle of the light, arms out, head tilted up. Henrietta’s hand tightens around my wrist, but I keep looking up at Above. I hope she is smiling, but I can’t tell.

Around and above us, the gnashing sound of the caravan quiets. The red lights illuminate Above from every angle, a constant, shifting spotlight. Overhead, I hear a shout, a high-pitched, joyous cry that trails and echoes above and around the grinding, clanking, moving din.

I see nothing in this moment, feel nothing but the cold trail of tears on my cheeks and Henrietta’s grip on my arm, but I take a deep breath and hear the caravan slow and quiet and stop.

(Editors’ Note: “The Caravan” is read by Erika Ensign on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 66A.)

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