In Grained

Within a few months, life had settled down for them. Aila was receiving a stipend since her parents weren’t involved in her higher education, and Kuléo had found himself a job at a bakery downtown.

“A bakery?” Aila had asked him, trying to hide a twitch of a smile.

“Sure, why not?” he asked. “I could come home each day smelling like worse things than fresh bread, and I bet I can bring some home for us if it’s left over.”

And sure enough, he had. He brought home bread for them, both literally and figuratively, and many wonderful meals were eaten with it in their lofty apartment. It didn’t have a lot of ground footage, but they more than made up for it by doing a few building projects with the manager’s approval. The ceilings were about 16 feet tall, and they had built two small tiers of loft in one area. They weren’t permanently attached improvements, and they were fairly rough owing to the amount of time they had to spend on them, but they gave it a strong feeling of the nest that Aila had envisioned on that first day. Aila and Kuléo had received design suggestions from the other Na’aulele in the building, since some of them had built similar things. It was a comforting thing to her to be up high and looking down at the city through the windows, and down at their apartment from their bed.

Kuléo’s job had come to him completely out of the blue. He was walking along the streets downtown, bored, wondering if Aila hadn’t been right to suggest that he enroll himself somewhere right away to keep busy. And then he smelled the most heavenly smell...

The owner of the bakery was slightly dubious about having one of les volants working in his bakery, with it not being the largest space in the world, and with concern over health regulations and feathers. But in the end, the two of them worked out two very useful ways for Kuléo to help.

One was in the more traditional way: he had to wear not only a hair net, but a sheet over his wings to keep feathers from falling out into food. Between having a blanket over his already-insulated limbs and the heat of the ovens, it was not the most comfortable thing. Despite the heat, though, he found the work very relaxing, giving his body something to do while his mind wandered.

The second was slightly more interesting and suited to his anatomy. Being as it was an artisan bakery, and traditional baking techniques, including wood fires with cooking slates, were desirable, there was a strong need to keep the fires stoked at an even level. These ovens were a new thing for the owner, and he hadn’t had any sort of fans built to keep the right amount of air going in. Kuléo happened to be nearby when he heard the man discussing air flow issues with another employee.

“Like this?” he asked, and waved a wing lazily at the fire. It immediately stoked from the air he had moved. The owner had gotten an extremely speculative look on his face. A week later, Kuléo had an extra duty of fire stoking, and the owner had brought out a new line of bread that stated, dubiously, that it had been cooked by an angel, and had wings on the box. Customers saw Kuléo bringing new things from the back, and the meaning was immediately clear to them, even if they didn’t know how he was involved in that process, exactly. It wasn’t exactly a hit; les volants were still new to people, and a little bit alien. But some were excited by anything new, and Kuléo discovered that there was even a segment of the population that were, for lack of a better word, Ka’aulele groupies. They would buy anything related to les volants.

“You’re unpleasantly dusty,” Aila said, wrinkling her nose one day as she picked him up from work. She had landed near the bakery and waited for him outside; Na’aulele took up a lot of space in the small storefront.

“I was grinding flour again,” Kuléo replied.

“Oh,” she said vaguely, looking across the square. She waved at her shirt neck with her hand. “I still can’t quite get used to how warm it is here. It feels to me like it must still be summer. More dry, though.”

“I rather like it,” Kuléo replied. “It’s a nice change.”

They walked across the square and past a headless, armless statue of a winged woman. She looked somehow composed, and yet also as if she was being startled into flight.

“I’m still not sure what to make of that,” Aila said, gesturing at the statue. “We learned about it in one of my classes. Her wings are beautiful and it’s so detailed... but it has this sad feeling of helplessness, of being held back, with the missing pieces.”

Kuléo just regarded it in silence as they walked by. “I wonder,” he said after they’d passed it. “I wonder if the ancient Greeks had ever met Na’aulele. They sure had a lot of winged people in their mythology. So did other cultures, for that matter.”

Aila shrugged. “I don’t know how they could have,” she said. “Unless this isn’t the first time the universes have collided.”

Humanity had dreamed of having wings for ages. It was a strange and sobering thought to think that the two of them, and all those like them, represented some new turn of that spiral.

Aila felt bad that they hadn’t made it to any of the meetings of Téwai’s club, Hunéa Nakuléiulé. Friends of Hunéa. It had been quite a while since their first meeting, and Aila had stayed in touch with her over e-mail, but they hadn’t met up again. Finally there was a fortuitous time when Kuléo was off from work, Aila wasn’t in classes or needing to study right away, and a meeting was happening.

They weren’t sure what to expect–a solemn, formal meeting of the Na’aulele in the town, or a couple of friends getting together once in a while. What they found was somewhere in between. As they came near the room assigned to the meeting, they heard laughter and rapid Ka’aulele speech, as well as the occasional wing noise.

“Aila, Kuléo! Welcome!” Téwai said in French. She was on her feet in a moment. “Everyone, these are my new friends that I mentioned. They’ve moved here from Paris recently.”

Greetings were exchanged all around. It was a slightly motley group: some young, perhaps even born on Earth, some older, and clearly having flown to Earth under their own power. They had a small spread of food on the table, all vegetable-based by the look of it.

“Do you mind if we go on in Ka’aulele?” Téwai asked. “Part of what we do here is to make sure we don’t lose track of things like that.”

“Yes, certainly!” Aila replied in that language. “I’m glad for the chance to keep it up, myself.”

“Awesome. Well, these are provided by the club. One of the little perks of being officially registered.” Téwai pointed at the table. “So, feel free. We don’t really have much of a formal structure. Sometimes we have topics we want to discuss, and sometimes we’re just hanging out.”

“As much as anything,” one of them said, a very dark-skinned young man with striking green and blue wings that put Aila in mind of a parrot, “it’s just wonderful to hear our language and feel like we’re with our people. We all have different backgrounds, and we all have different cultural differences and accents... but when you’re in a foreign place, it’s sometimes good to have a piece of home.”

Everyone nodded and murmured agreement to that.

“So is there a topic today?” Aila asked them.

“Well...” Téwai started slowly. “Actually, yes, there is. There’s been some discussion of starting a school of alchemy somewhere at one of the universities in town.”

“Really?” Kuléo asked excitedly. “That’s great!”

“Yes and no,” Téwai said. “The discussion is great, yes. The outcome so far, no. The universities are playing Hot Lava, throwing it from one to the next and hoping it doesn’t harden around them. The group who has been pushing for it can’t decide where they would like it to be. Almost everyone who’s not Ka’aulele is not taking it seriously, which is why they’re afraid to take it at their universities.” Her wings flapped a little in agitation. “It’s a mess!”

“We’ve both studied a bit,” Aila said tentatively. “I wonder if there’s some way we could help.”

“Really? Who did you study under?” one of the others asked her.

Aila hesitated for a moment. Should she reveal her connection to Dr. Halalo yet? There were Na’aulele from Hunéa working with him, too, but it could raise uncomfortable questions.

“It’s fine,” the woman said. “I understand. Sometimes you can’t talk about the secrets even to another seeker. I’m Alafi,” she said.

Aila sighed a little mental sigh of relief. “Hello, Alafi. Yeah, I don’t think I can right now. But I studied casually for about five years.”

“Casually! For five years, she says!” Alafi laughed, and so did several others.

“We both did,” Aila replied, feeling a little defensive.

Téwai laughed. “No, don’t mistake us. It’s just that I doubt any of us have had more than a tiny dusting of study compared to you two. You ought to look into it! Maybe they’d want your help. I’ll send you the info when I get home.”

Aila had picked Kuléo up at the bakery again. They were walking home, since their apartment was not terribly far away, and the walks were often pleasant and grounding.

They’d been walking in silence for several minutes, which was not entirely unusual for them. They were comfortable with silence, the way close couples often are. What was unusual was that Kuléo was fidgeting with something in his pocket, and he seemed to be extremely nervous about something.

“We’ve been together for a while now,” he started out. Aila looked over at him, but he continued to stare ahead and not meet her gaze. “And we’ve been through so much together.”

Aila nodded.

“And,” Kuléo continued in what he felt was a most reasonable and level tone, “when you’ve lived that long with someone and been through so much with someone...”

He stopped because Aila’s cell phone had started ringing. She shot him an apologetic look and said, “Just a sec, na?”

“Hello? Oh my gosh, Irène! What? You’re here?”

Kuléo felt deflated. He had worked himself up to it finally, but he had lost his nerve at the interruption. Perhaps it wasn’t the time yet.

Despite Kuléo’s annoyance at the interruption, they were both genuinely glad to see Aila’s childhood friend.

“This is tres cool, mon amie,” Irène said to her. She was spinning in circles, bobbing her head all around to take it all in: the kitchen, the open floor-planned living area, the large arch into their sleeping area with the lofts.

“Thanks!” Aila replied with a smile for her friend. “So what are you up to these days, anyhow?”

“I’m helping my dad with the family business right now, actually,” Irène said. Aila wrinkled her nose. “No really,” Irène continued, “it’s not that bad. We own a bakery back in Paris.”

Kuléo’s ears perked up at that. “Really? I work at a bakery here, too.”

The two of them started into a discussion that was surprisingly technical, and Aila tuned them out a little bit. “Flours,” she heard one time, and “rising agents,” another. But she was trying to recall something that she’d forgotten. Sometimes she did this, but she was usually good at remembering it eventually, replaying the relevant conversations in her mind. Kuléo had been trying to tell her something on the way here. Why was he so nervous?

“Sweetheart?” she said, interrupting their conversation. “What were you trying to tell me on the way home before Irène called?”

Kuléo suddenly turned a shade pinker, and said “Uhh, it’s nothing, let’s talk about it another time.”

Aila shrugged.

They forewent their normal dinner with the leftover bread and took Irène instead to a hip diner near campus, Oiseau Libre. They had a good selection of vegetarian food without eggs for Na’aulele. It was only after Kuléo and Aila had been eating there for a while that they learned that it had been named (and its menu had been chosen) partly in response to les volants arriving from Hunéa.

“That’s so cool, you guys,” Irène said when she’d heard all their news. She had given Aila all the gossip from their friends back home, but it really wasn’t much compared to what “the dynamic duo”, as she’d started calling them, had been up to. “Maybe I should come here when I can get away from the bakery,” she mused.

“Yes, yes,” Aila said, “and also maybe yes?”

They both broke down in giggles, and suddenly they were Agent Daylight and Agent Midnight again.