Read Call Forth the Waves for Free Online

made for a young girl flapped off the edge of a blue one like misplaced fringe. Rattan baskets hung empty from most of the smaller floats, but others had been woven together, shaping organic dwellings that were connected to the city’s central platforms like fungus sprouting off the rim.
    Here there were no gyro-rings like those that powered the Center and kept it aloft. This place was solely dependent on air and engines.
    “Where are we?” Jermay asked.
    “Home,” Winnie said. “Welcome to the Golden Mile.”

CHAPTER 4
    For generations, the Golden Mile had been a lightning rod of commerce for the entire nation. It wasn’t actually made of gold, but the name made people want to go there. Someone could ask for directions and feel like they’d been let in on some great secret when they found it. Once upon a time, metallic banners hung from the streetlights, and the roads were painted yellow with black stripes instead of the usual yellow stripes on asphalt, just so people would know they’d arrived. But that was a quarter century ago, before they came.
    Often shortened to simply “the Mile,” it was a network of shops, stalls, and stands all centered around Brick Street, where exotic foods and textiles were traded or sold like common sugar and sundresses. It had an online marketplace, of course, where all the shops were linked together in a virtual bazaar, but the real draw was going there in person. Folks said there was nothing in existence that couldn’t be found for a price along the Mile. It was where Nagendra’s family had worked before the disaster on Brick Street, but that’s all he ever said about them. I got the impression that they weren’t among the survivors that day. Maybe that was why he turned on the Commission.
    Ideas became the Mile’s hottest commodity, but unlike a bolt of silk or fancy bread made of imported grain, they couldn’t be contained or bartered, and they wouldn’t stay hidden in the pantry. After the year-long Great Illusion, when waves of Medusae turned our skies from blue to shades of violet and pink, people wanted truthful answers to their questions about what had happened to their children— like how those children had been touched when our visitors supposedly never made contact . That demand spread out, drifting from mouth to mouth and whispered from ear to ear. Infecting one mind then another as the most contagious of conditions, fanned by new voices from all over the world as more and more people added to the chorus. Their voices got too loud to ignore.
    No longer were people satisfied with empty promises from a Commission that was supposed to find them answers, and no longer were they tolerant of the midnight disappearances of touched children that so many blamed on the wardens who were supposed to protect them. They wanted more than toss-away excuses about the Medusae that never admitted the jellyfish creatures were not of this Earth, or double-talk repeating the same meaningless statistics over and over and over.
    It took almost seven years, but that fevered drive for something more and the desire to understand the impossible became a common delirium, leading to the Brick Street uprising.
    When the dust settled, all those ideas and demands were buried among the rubble, and Brick Street was a wasteland. The Mile was assumed lost with it. Homes and businesses there were never rebuilt, existing only as the relics of a forgotten time, flattened by the lies told to spin the riots into something more manageable and flattering for the wardens involved. The truth of the day was lost, except to people who had seen it firsthand—like Nagendra, with his drunken recitations of the violence and what it took to quell it. Most people refused to even mention what had happened. They didn’t want their thoughts to stray to places they couldn’t pull back from.
    But if Winnie was right . . .
    If she was a child of the Mile, then at least some of the people in attendance that day had