Tuesday
Day Three started with a discovery that changed my entire outlook on the floating island situation, at least temporarily.
There was better food somewhere.
I figured this out because Rowley came back from an early morning walk with the blue-gray wing kid, whose name I had been mentally spelling as "Feyn" because that was my best attempt at the sound of it, and Rowley was holding something that looked like a small round cake covered in something dark and glossy. He was eating it with the expression people get when they are trying not to make sounds but the food is too good.
"Where did you get that," I said immediately.
"Feyn took me to this place near the big bridge," Rowley said between bites. "There is a whole building with food in it. Like a food hall kind of thing. Greg, it is SO good."
"Why did you not bring me one."
Rowley looked at the cake and then at me. "I did not think about it," he said honestly.
This is the thing about Rowley. He is not mean. He would never deliberately leave me out of a good food situation. He just does not think ahead very far and let be honest a bit stupid. His brain operates entirely in the present moment and is on the slower end, which in normal life is a minor inconvenience but in this situation meant I had spent two days eating oversized mangoes while he discovered the floating island equivalent of a bakery.
I told him to take me there immediately.
The food building was near the stone bridge that connected our island to the next one over. It was open on three sides and had a long flat counter made from a single piece of smooth pale wood that had to have come from one of the giant trees. Behind the counter were shelves with different things on them, some in woven containers, some just stacked, some hanging from cords.
The person behind the counter was an older winged man with deep brown wings that were mostly folded but shifted slightly when he moved, the way a person adjusts their shoulders. He had the kind of face that looks like it has seen everything twice and found it only slightly interesting the second time.
He looked at me when I walked in. I did the wing greeting gesture that Feyn had sort of indirectly taught me, which I had been hoping I never needed to do again until this exact moment because I felt like a person doing an impression of a person doing a gesture. But I needed that cake.
The man's expression did not change, but he did a small version of the gesture back.
I pointed at the cake Rowley had. Then I pointed at myself.
The man reached under the counter and put one on the flat surface in front of me.
It tasted like chocolate and also like honey and also like something warm I did not have a name for. It was the best thing I had eaten since we arrived, and also possibly the best thing I had eaten in several months, which was a little insulting to every meal Mom had made recently but I was not going to say that out loud.
I pointed at the cake again. And at myself. And held up two fingers.
The man put two more on the counter.
Okay. So food was going to be fine. That was one thing.
I want to explain something about social systems, because it is relevant to what happened next.
Every group of people, no matter where they are, no matter how many wings they have, operates on a social food chain. There are people at the top who everyone knows and likes and who get the good seats at lunch. There are people in the middle who are fine. And there are people at the bottom who are not fine.
In my regular life I am somewhere in the middle, trending upward on my best days. I have a clear plan for getting to the top eventually. It involves a series of social moves that I have been executing for the last few years with mixed results. While Rowley is still at the lowest end.
The point is: I understand social systems. I study them. I have spent significant time thinking about how they work.
So when I walked around the village on Day Three and paid attention, I noticed something.
Rowley was already near the top of the floating island social food chain.
It had been two days. TWO DAYS. And Rowley, who at home does not even have that many friends besides me, had somehow become the most popular person our family had brought to this dimension.
It started with Feyn. But Feyn had friends, and those friends had come over to look at Rowley the day before, and Rowley had done the greeting gesture correctly and learned two words in their language and laughed at the right moments and now there was a whole group of village kids who lit up when they saw him coming.
Rowley does not understand social strategy. He does not think about what to say before he says it. He does not calculate. He just walks up to people and acts like he already likes them, and for reasons that genuinely baffle me, people respond to that.
It is not fair. I want to be clear about that. It is not a fair system.
I sat on a platform with my third cake of the morning and watched Rowley and a group of village kids attempt to teach each other hand games and I thought about what my angle was going to be.
There is always an angle. You just have to find it.
Mom found me around midmorning, which I should have seen coming because she had that organized-activity expression on her face.
"Greg," she said, "I want you to come with me."
"Where."
"The other islands. Feyn's father offered to take us across the bridge to the next island over. He says there is more of the village there, and some kind of gathering space."
I thought about this. On one hand, supervised family activity. On the other hand, I had been sitting on the same platform for an hour and my strategy was still zero percent developed.
"Fine," I said.
Feyn's father turned out to be the winged man from the food building, which I had not put together before. He was taller than I had realized behind the counter and his brown wings were wide and carried a little when he walked, the way a coat does in wind. He had the same mostly-unimpressed face as behind the counter but he moved through the village with the kind of ease that told me he was someone people paid attention to.
I filed that information away.
The bridge between the first island and the second was the wide stone one, which I was grateful for because the rope bridges were still not something I was prepared to use. The stone was smooth and warm under my feet, because I still in socks and my situation in the footwear department had not improved. The wind across the bridge was steady and strong and smelled like the almost-ocean smell.
I made the mistake of looking over the edge of the bridge about halfway across.
There was nothing down there. I mean there was cloud, and through gaps in the cloud there was the top of another island below us, smaller, dense with dark green trees, and below that more cloud and then nothing visible. The scale of it was wrong. My brain kept trying to calculate a ground level that did not exist.
I moved back to the exact center of the bridge and looked straight ahead until we were across.
The second island was different from the first in ways that took me a minute to process. It was larger, for one thing. The trees here were even bigger, with root systems that arched out of the ground in wide curves before going back in, like the island itself was being held up from below by roots instead of just hovering in the sky.
There were more buildings here, or at least more gathering-type structures. Open platforms built between the root arches. Long low buildings with wide doorways. And near the center, something that took me a moment to understand.
It was a flat circular space, wide open, made of the same smooth dark wood as the floor of our building but much larger and worn smooth from use. Around the edges were raised platforms, some with seating, some just open space. Above it the trees formed a natural roof with gaps that let the golden light through in shafts.
"Oh, this is wonderful," Mom said.
Feyn's father made a gesture toward the space and said something.
"It looks like a gathering place," Mom said, to no one in particular, in the tone she uses when she is narrating a situation because she enjoys the sound of her own observations.
I walked to the edge of the circular space and looked at it. It was big. Big enough for a lot of people at once. And the raised platforms around the edge had a clear sightline to the center, which meant whatever happened in the middle, everyone could see it.
I thought about the social food chain again.
If you wanted people to know who you were in a new place, you needed visibility. You needed a moment. And this looked like a place where moments happened.
Here is where I have to report something that was both exciting and immediately complicated.
On the way back across the stone bridge, Feyn's father stopped and pointed at something. Out to the right of the bridge, not far, there was a smaller island connected to ours by one of the rope bridges that Dad had banned us from. It was dense with something that I could not identify from distance, some kind of plant or vine covering everything in an uneven layer.
Feyn's father said a word and pointed at it. Then he shook his head and made a gesture I did not recognize but that looked cautionary. Like "no" but more specific than no.
I asked Mom what she thought that meant.
"I think that island might be off limits for some reason," Mom said.
"Or maybe it is just not great," I said.
"Greg, if he is telling us not to go there, we are not going there."
I stored this information for later.
Here is the thing about being told not to go somewhere. I am not saying I immediately started planning how to go there. I am just saying that something becomes a lot more interesting when someone tells you it is off limits. That is basic human psychology. Probably wing-person psychology too, if I had to guess.
In the afternoon, Rodrick finally made his presence known as a full participant in the floating island situation.
I had not mentioned Rodrick much because he had spent most of the first two days either asleep or sitting against the outside wall of our building making noises that were approximately music but not quite. He had found a couple of long hollow sticks somewhere and had been tapping them against each other in rhythms that ranged from interesting to deeply annoying.
On Day Three he brought the sticks to the main platform of the village and started doing it there.
Within about twenty minutes he had an audience.
Three village kids sat down nearby and watched him. Rodrick, being Rodrick, immediately showed off, which involved longer stick-tapping sequences and at one point doing the whole thing behind his back. The village kids watched with the intense focus of people who had never seen this exact type of chaos before.
Then one of them picked up two sticks of their own.
And Rodrick, for the first time since we arrived, looked genuinely pleased.
I watched this from across the platform. Rodrick, who at home is the person most likely to embarrass me in front of people who matter, was now becoming some kind of cultural ambassador through the power of hitting things together rhythmically.
Manny was sitting nearby watching too, with the same calm expression he had been wearing since Day One. He looked at Rodrick and the village kids. Then he looked at me.
"What?" I said.
Manny did not answer. He never answers. He just looked at me for another second and then looked away, and I had the specific uncomfortable feeling I sometimes get around Manny where I cannot tell if he understands something I do not or if he just has a weird face.
Probably the weird face thing. Manny is three. He does not understand things I do not understand.
Probably.
At the end of the day I sat in the open arch of our building again and thought about my situation.
Facts: We were on a floating island. We did not know how to get home. The people here were friendly but we could not talk to them in any real way yet. Rowley had a full social life. Rodrick had a percussion section. Mom had a language exchange program. Dad had his safety concerns.
I had three cakes I had brought back from the food building.
I ate one of them and thought harder.
Here is what I came up with: the angle I needed was knowledge. Not physical knowledge, not language knowledge, but strategic knowledge. I needed to understand how this place worked. Who mattered and why. What the rules were. What the gathering space on the second island was for and when it was used.
Because if there was going to be a moment, a visibility moment, I needed to be the one standing in the middle of that circular space when it happened.
I did not have a specific plan yet. But I had a direction.
The direction was: figure out what the most important thing that happens around here is, and then be part of it. See I am the smartest in my family.
I ate the second cake and felt better about things.
Tomorrow I was going to start actually paying attention to this place.
One more thing.
Right before I fell asleep, I heard something outside that I could not explain. Not an animal sound, not a villager sound. More like a low hum that seemed to come from the island itself, from somewhere below the ground, and lasted for about ten seconds before stopping.
I lay still and waited for it to come back.
It did not.
I told myself it was wind through the stone bridges or something normal like that. Because if it was wind through the stone bridges, it had an explanation, and I like things that have explanations.
I went to sleep.
Day Three: better food identified, second island explored, theoretical plan direction achieved. Still in cheese pajamas.
Progress.
[SKETCH: Greg standing at the exact center of the stone bridge, looking rigidly forward while wind blows his hair sideways. Below the bridge, visible through a gap in the clouds, the top of another tiny island is barely visible. Greg's socked feet are planted firmly on the very middle line of the bridge.]