THE REASON THE wind blows is because the world is always spinning. It spins and spins and spins and never stops. When I was younger, I would spin with it, until it felt as if my head would fly off my shoulders. Even after I collapsed into the untilled fields, I could still feel the earth moving beneath me. My father said that if the planet ever stopped, everything would float away and disappear into the sky. He was grateful for the spinning ground below our feet, even if it kept us humans anchored and flightless. But I thought that one day, if I spun as fast as the world, I could leave the ground and find Heaven. If I could accomplish such a thing, then surely my father could, too. And then, he could stop searching for my mother.
I don’t remember her. I know that she was beautiful, resourceful, and clever. “The answer to a problem is never complicated,” my brother, Icarus, would quote her. “Just difficult to see.” She could make solutions out of nothing; paperclips and bits of twine became entire toolsets in her hands. It was a skill she taught my older brother and would have passed onto me had she gotten the chance – at least, that’s what I was told.
When I was still learning to speak, she was a teacher at Icarus’ school. He was a first-year primary student when the fire happened. Someone left a burner on in the science room and set the place aflame. Half the town showed up to help. My father was among them, searching for his family.
He found Icarus with the third years and thought my mother was safe. But she didn’t know my brother was with the older children and had gone back inside to save him. When they finally discovered my mother, the flames had transmuted her bones into char. My father refused to believe it was real and tried to hold her. She turned to ashes in his arms.
My brother and father were haunted, not by her ghost but by her absence. Icarus would talk constantly about how soft her amber hair was or how she always smelled like our flowering garden. Sometimes, he would dig his nails into his skin and then hide the crescent bruises beneath his sleeves.
Dad lived on, quiet and eerily vacant at times. Late at night, he would stare off into the skyline with his eyes focused on something I couldn’t see. It was as if his heart fled his chest in those moments.
Guiltily, I never really missed her because I could not recall the details that made her real. But sometimes – just sometimes – I would dream of someone warm. They would hum softly and hold me until it felt as if my ribs were breaking. I would wake from those dreams feeling ill. Half-conscious, I pondered the strange scent of roses that lingered in my room. It was in those moments that I felt an incurable loneliness.
•
MY FATHER WAS a brilliant engineer and inventor. Everyone wanted him to build machines for them. He excelled at designing airplanes, balloons, windmills – anything that captured the wind was his mastered craft. He said it was his dream to restore the world to what it once was, before the Final War.
I used to imagine that time as some advanced place filled with talking machines and wealthy cities. But when I read about it in history class, I was disappointed to learn things were scarcely different from what I saw around me. We had the same trains and the same cars. There were still taxes and charities. But borders had changed. Gasoline became scarce and almost outdated. Somewhere in my school’s hallway, I heard a teacher say the governments used to care more and fret less.
When I was seven, my father stopped working for his university and started building his contraptions at home. My brother refused to help, but I would trail in my father’s shadow, barraging him with questions. He was more than happy to oblige.
Whenever he finished one of his projects, Dad would test it himself. I would watch him disappear into the blue void, wishing I could follow. He told me on his returns what the world looked like from up high. To him, everything became small and easy to understand. He said our mother would whisper to him from the clouds and tell him to fly back home to the children he loved so much. Icarus told me Dad was a liar. I told Icarus to jump off a cliff.
Sometimes, my father would travel for work and be gone for days. Icarus would watch over me then. He tried to act grown up, making meals and berating me for not finishing my homework before bed.
Regardless, I always found a way to remind Icarus that he was still a child. We would make kites and run them through the hills of our country home. His could never stay airborne for more than a few minutes, but mine soared high above the tangled treetops. When we reached the very edge of our property, we would collapse into the grass and laugh uncontrollably.
Far from our father’s shadow, Icarus would tell me secrets about our family and himself. They melted into each other like an endless string of hidden thoughts. Our parents first met on a Ferris wheel. Mom ran away from home when she was sixteen. I look like Dad whenever I think too hard. Icarus is afraid of monsters, and heights, and falling. He thinks that Dad lies about loving him. Icarus is sad because he killed Mom.
I wondered why he thought the things he thought, but I never dared to ask. If I repeated his words back to him, it felt as if I had betrayed my brother and let his secrets slip into the open world. So, I kept quiet and allowed Icarus to bury his secrets deep inside his mangled heart– somewhere even my beloved father could never reach.
From where we sat, I could see the distant outline of a windmill farm. The bladed silhouettes would blur together, standing out like half-transparent dandelions against the tremendous sky. Icarus told me that the windmill company took in orphaned children and gave them homes. The children would live inside the older mills and help the adults maintain the newer ones. Once they grew up, the Keepers would join the company and help raise the younger wards.
I often thought of them, those strange and distant children, who kept our cities powered and our homes awash with light. I believed they were lucky. No longer were they discarded, left dreaming of a family. They were now little squares of cloth, sewn into a fantastical patchwork clan, and living in a town founded on the virtues of charity and selflessness.
I always felt a pang of jealousy when I looked at their far-off kingdom. They had a dozen fathers who looked after them every day and a dozen brothers who didn’t gaze at dusty portraits or empty kitchen chairs. They were far away, where fires and ghosts and loneliness could never touch them. They loved it there so much, they never left.
•
THE WINDSOR MILLER Corporation was one of the “giants” my father talked about. It was the first of the two windmill companies that powered the world. I knew about them from the conversations I overheard at school. Sometimes I wished I listened more closely. But how could any normal person have known the truth? The corporation crumpled the evidence into paper wads and stuffed them into the coffins of the propagandists.
I only knew that, years after the end of the Final War but long before I was born, there were hundreds of windmill companies. They were started on struggling farms and atop bustling cities. Their wires ran deep into the ground, beneath the silos and skyscrapers and into the base of the power lines. With these monstrous contraptions, we bled the wind dry.
From the slums of the southwest to the metropolis of the east, stolen power pulsed through spinning blades and copper threads. But there were accidents, and the upkeep was too hard for some. Ordinary people could only repair so many broken turbines before they gave up and left their machines to rust and rot.
A wealthy man named Benjamin Windsor saw those abandoned skeletons decaying in their vacant homes and thought of something brilliant. Instead of letting them fall, he bought them from their owners for pennies and pocket change. He owned dozens and dozens and then hundreds and hundreds of broken mills, turning their lifeless shells back into veins of electricity and heat. He made them better than they were before, filling their hollowed insides with coils and wires. In the end, the turbines’ swiveling heads were welded in place, no longer needing or able to chase the shifting winds.
The world burned with Windsor’s power. By the time he was an old man bent with age, the other millers thought he would rule the world. He owned all of Africa and Europe and was moving rapidly towards the rising sun as if to claim its golden rays for his own.
But Asia and the Americas rejected him. Despite their differences, they vowed to work together in retaliation of Windsor’s oligarchy. The fight seemed impossible, but somehow, they survived. More than that, they cornered him.
Through the three continents was born Airpower Incorporated, or API, the Miller Corporation’s only true enemy. Fueled by a desire to stop Windsor’s domination, API began funding development firms meant to expand the world’s windmill technology. New farms began appearing even within the borders of Windsor’s empire.
The two companies hated one another. They hated each other the moment the other was born and even more so when one business could no longer expand without encroaching upon the other. They hated each other when Belfast sank into the Irish Sea and when the Miller Corporation agreed to take in all its orphaned children. They still hated each other, even after three generations. But I think my father hated Windsor’s company the most.
The year before I turned ten, the Windsor Miller Corporation hired him to design a new mill. I remember how happy he was when he first got the job. He took Icarus and me out to dinner at the town’s nicest restaurant. He said it was in celebration of his newest contract. He was going to build the world’s greatest windmill. The blades would be sharper and longer, and the rotor would spin faster and give out twice as much power as API’s mills ever did. He swore that it would change the world and make us rich. We could buy anything we ever wanted – even the souls from Heaven.
Dad locked himself in his office, pouring over blueprints and sheets filled with strange numbers. He would forget to come down for meals or even sleep. I tried to get him to stop for dinner once, but he snapped at me for ruining his concentration. I stayed away after that but left him food by the door. One morning, I found a handmade pinwheel next to my window. Dad had a strange way of apologizing.
His first deadline was approaching, but my father just wasn’t satisfied. He would work for hours on one print only to crumple it up and throw it aside. He told me he couldn’t make the output worth the risk. The blade length was necessary, but it took too long to stop. The dangers of working on the mill were just too great. It would take hours to shut the mill down and send workers topside for maintenance. The company wouldn’t want to lose so much time to repairs, and no sane employee would ever work on an active mill.
He looked defeated the day he explained this to his employers. But they didn’t seem worried at all. They smiled and shook his hand. They invited him to the London farm to see why his fears were unnecessary. “His plan would work,” they promised him. “Everything was going to turn out just fine.”
•
I HAD NEVER seen my father so shaken. He seemed dazed when he staggered into our house. For a moment, I thought he was sick. His face was pale and streaked in a cold sweat. Icarus called his name, almost questioningly so. Was this really our father who had left for the windmill farm just that morning? Dad said nothing, so we called to him a little louder. When his eyes fell upon us, he took on a horrified expression as if he had stumbled upon our corpses.
He told us to go to our rooms. Neither of us moved. But then my father screamed at us. His voice was louder and angrier than I could ever remember. I scrambled after my brother as we ran up the stairs. Dad was still yelling after us, his voice almost hysterical by the time we slammed Icarus’ bedroom door.
My brother hid us in his wardrobe. Below us, our father broke things and cursed God for creating such a world. Icarus cupped my ears in his hands so that I would not have to hear our father rage. When it finally stopped, we pressed our heads to the floorboards and listened to my father sob. I had never heard him cry before, but I could not believe he had ever mourned anything so deeply. Not when his parents died. Not when Belfast sank. Not even when my mother’s ashes escaped through his fingers and into the blazing heavens.
It was later than I had ever stayed up when we finally had the courage to emerge. Dad sat upon the floor with the remains of his torn contract. He looked up as we crept towards him. The blue of his irises were strange and vivid against his bloodshot eyes. I thought the company might have fired him or told him his mill was impossible to build. Maybe he thought he had let us down. I told him it was okay and that we didn’t need him to build a mill for us.
My father hugged both of us painfully tight as though we were wisps of smoke that would slip through his arms. He said that he needed to. He was going to build everyone a windmill, and it was going to be the greatest, safest mill anyone had ever built.
•
MY FATHER FELL. He fell from the very top of the Windsor Miller Corporation’s headquarters. It was disquieting to realize that he was dead for hours before I learned he had left this world. It bothered me that I was doing so many normal things while my father’s body was bleeding out onto the cold earth. I was trying to finish my math homework while he was being photographed by police officers. I was reading in our school’s library while he was being wrapped in sheets. I was wondering what he would make for dinner while a doctor tried to figure out which torn organ or broken bone had been the one to kill him. How could I not feel him leaving?
I couldn’t even imagine my father dying. I could see him falling, his arms spread out and still reaching for the ledge. I could imagine the look of shock upon his face and see him tumbling through the air. But I could not see him hitting the ground. Even in my nightmares, his bones never snapped against the weight of the Earth. I wanted to believe that if he never landed, he would never really die. He would fall forever and ever, waiting for Icarus and me to grow up so we could catch him safely in our arms.
A set of lawyers took the deed to Dad’s house and put it away in a bank – the one where my father kept all of his important plans and papers. They sealed it in a box and told Icarus he could have it in four years when he turned eighteen. Until then, we were just a burden on society. Before the dirt could even settle in my father’s grave, we were on a train being carried away from our home.
We passed through a half dozen small towns and gloomy hills. I watched miserably from the window as the Scottish border came and went. The Windsor Miller Corporation led us to a valley outside of Glasgow, far from everyone and everything we knew. The windmill farm was surrounded by steep hills and looming walls. Up close, it looked nothing like the magical kingdom I had imagined.
Icarus held my hand as we walked through the gated entry as if he knew we were never going to walk out together. I turned my head as the doors closed behind us. The rippling fields and fiery sky served as my last glimpse of the outside world. Framed between the shutting doors, the image burned itself into my memory.
And it was here they fed us to the windmills.
