A Kiss Before the Sky Falls Up

How it begins

The kiss lifted the fish market forty feet.

Cressa learned this from the screams.

She had meant only to distract the magistrate long enough for Olan to move the stolen telescope beneath the table. It had been an efficient plan, if one ignored the astronomer's expression of total, offensive surprise.

Then the floor moved.

Outside the window, a woman selling silver eels rose past the council balcony with both hands clamped around her stall. Mooring ropes snapped in a neat sequence across the eastern quarter.

Cressa let go of Olan.

The market stopped.

For one terrible second, every eel hung in the air above a city that had forgotten which way to fall.

Olan looked through the window. His hand remained at her waist, careful now, as though touching a dangerous instrument.

"How often," he asked, "do you do that?"

"Steal telescopes?"

"Kiss people."

"Rarely with measurable consequences."

Below them, emergency bells began to ring.

Cressa knew the sound of an ascending district. She had spent fourteen years retrieving things from places the city could no longer afford to keep. Roof tiles. Family silver. Once, a man's entire orchard, with the apples still attached.

The eastern quarter was not abandoned.

Her crew lived there.

Olan took a pencil from his sleeve and marked the time on the tablecloth.

She wanted to dislike that. She almost succeeded.

"The first movement," he said, "occurred when you touched my mouth."

"Very poetic."

"The second occurred when you pulled away."

Cressa watched the eel seller reach toward a balcony that had been level with her stall five minutes earlier.

Olan withdrew his hand.

The council chamber tilted.

They both caught the edge of the table.

On the magistrate's wall, behind a framed declaration of the city's eternal stability, a crack opened into a line of old gold lettering.

Cressa read the first word.

SEPARATE.

Beside her, Olan stopped writing.