Aurora (2 page)

Over the years she and Fox have listened to the crackling voices on the soundwaves: flood refugees telling desperate stones of then survival on the oceans. They are
her
people, thinks Pandora, because her lost family must have been boat refugees. Fox chose his netherworld exile; he fled his home in the sky city above to launch the revolution that will soon shake the world. But how did
she
come to be here? Pandora has no memory of family or a life beyond the wall.

For now, the boat people cling in wretched anchorage around the Earth’s sky cities, barricaded under gun shields, crafting weapons from sea junk for the battle ahead. At least, Pandora hopes so. Their communications with the boat camps died in the mighty winter storms. Searching the hissing desolation of the soundwaves, listening for a pulsebeat of the outside world, Pandora has imagined the boat people all swept away.

Step by trembling step, she now begins to climb up the precarious, twisting stairway towards Fox – who takes a sudden leap across empty space and vanishes through an archway.

Pandora searches the darkness. A tiny parapet encircles the top of the spire.
Is that where he went?
The wind pounds her, fear drums inside, but she climbs on.

‘Here.’

His voice is suddenly close. Sheet lightning turns the sky as bright as the moon and Pandora glimpses his ghostly figure in an archway, just above. One last heart-stopping twist of the stairway . . . a few more terrifying steps . . .

‘Take my hand,’ shouts Fox. Rain streams from his outstretched arm. Sweat steams from his skin.

If she misjudges the jump, Pandora will follow her lost sword down into the netherworld sea. But she grabs Fox’s hand, leaps through the archway – and lands on the narrow parapet at the top of the spire, safe in his grasp.

Lightning flickers across their drowned kingdom, illuminating the cathedral that seems to float as an ark in the netherworld sea and the broken bridge that lunges from the water like a lagoon monster, draped in seaweed and barnacled with ancient rust-heaps. All around the old steeple tower and the water-glugged museum, scattered among the massive trunks of the sky towers, lie the last scraps of a city lost to the sea: tiny mud-banked land-scraps, crammed with trees and ruins, teeming with animal life. Enclosing it all is the vast city wall.

‘Look,’ urges Fox.

Beyond the wall, as far as she can see, is an immense heaving darkness.

The world
’
s ocean!

And out on that violent ocean are the jostling shadows of the boats. Lightning turns their metal gun shields into the scales of slumbering sea dragons.

‘So many!’

A smile breaks on Fox’s drenched face. ‘Not just here. Outside every sky city in the world . . .’

A silver pathway stretches out across the ocean and ends abruptly in the darkness.

‘The eastern sea bridge,’ murmurs Pandora. Fox has schooled her well in the workings of the sky empire.

The bridge project to link the sky cities of Eurosea was abandoned after the slave breakout of 2100 that brought Fox to the netherworld. That was when the gates in the city wall were sealed. No ship or refugee has breached the walls since. Now, food supplies from the vast ocean farms and floating greenhouses and all trade between cities comes by the airships that land on the roofs of the sky towers.

‘I heard whispers on the soundwaves,’ says Fox, his voice a warm huskiness in her ear. ‘Voices so faint they might have come from the stars. It was our boat people. I had to see them, just once, with my own eyes.’

Pandora looks up at the billowing darkness that has smothered all the stars. Never have they known a winter so wild. Barricaded in the tower, she couldn’t see how the boat people out on the wild ocean could survive.

Somehow, they have.

Fox grips her hand as they gaze out at the seething black ocean.‘Whatever happens now, whatever we have to do, Pan, remember this moment.
This
is what we’re fighting for, all those people out there.’ He pauses for a heartbeat. ‘And for the others, wherever they are.’

His last words are almost lost in the howl of the storm. But Pandora hears the break in his voice and knows he’s thinking not only of the refugees around the sky cities of the world, but of those who fled in the 2100 exodus of ships that went North. The memory of that day is burned into Pandora, as it is also in Fox.

She remembers swimming towards the fleet of white ships, too small to keep up with the other urchins. Seaweed clung to her, clamping her legs. She couldn’t break free. The netherworld would not let her go. By the time she crawled on to a mudbank, choking on seawater, the ships were surging out through the gates in the wall. And she was left behind, a lone little urchin, grubbing around in the mud and ruins. But then Fox, with the soft face of a man-boy and eyes full of fire and broken dreams, found her and brought her to live in the crumbling tower with the wise old woman, Candleriggs, who mothered Pandora and guided Fox in his revolution, until she died.

Pandora drags her gaze from the mass of boats to Fox’s handsome, rain-streamed face. Her heart leaps as she understands why he has smashed his way up into the spire and why he speaks, now, of the ones who fled North.

Fox is as charged as the electric wind.

‘Is this it? Is it all beginning, Fox? Now, at last?’

Excitement jolts through her, as if a bolt of lightning has hit the tip of the spire.

‘As soon as the storms settle and the soundwaves clear. Once the radios are back up and running . . .’ Fox pulls her close in a rare, fierce embrace that Pandora yearns for more than anything in the world. ‘Then the global Surge begins.’

THE HOME OF THE WIND

A scream tears across the great lake at the top of the world.

The North Wind hurls the sound upon the ancient faces of the mountains, scattering echoes into the forest of Candlewood. The scream is neither animal nor human. Yet as they settle for the night in their earthy burrows under the forest floor, the people of Candlewood greet it like the voice of a long-awaited friend.

Pine needles crackle like excitement under Lily’s deerskin boots. Beyond the tree lamps the forest is a dense darkness, the cold as fierce as fire, and the wind is everywhere.

‘Lily!’

Lily pushes on through the scaly trunks of the pine trees and pretends not to hear

The icebergs are dying. Far out on the lake, the scream of rupturing ice climaxes with a
crack
that seems to split the night apart. Winter’s harsh reign is ending. At last.

‘Lily Longhope, come back
right
now – or else!’

Lily hesitates. She’s in trouble if she doesn’t turn back. A quick glance over her shoulder shows the slim, dark-haired figure of Mara, her mother, haloed by the light of a tree lamp.

‘I just want to
see
,’ Lily yells back.

It’s all right for
her
, Lily sighs, kicking a tree. She’s had all the adventures anyone could ever want. Her mother has no idea what it’s like to be cooped up in the family burrow for the fifteenth winter of her life, aching to be out in the world again and pent up with a restlessness that makes her feel ready to explode like a pine cone in a flame. She is desperate for some excitement. The icebergs crashing into the lake will do.

‘Take a tree lamp, at least. Lily, the
wolves
!’

Lily smiles to herself. She knows all about the wolves. There’s a boy in wolf’s clothing she’s hoping to find. Nevertheless, she runs back and grabs a flickering tree lamp from a branch.

‘Just to keep you happy.’ She gives her mother a cheeky grin.

‘I’ll only be happy once you’re back safe and sound in the burrow,’ says Mara, fastening a wind-shield around the lamp, ‘so don’t be long. Stay on the shore and don’t dare go looking for Wing in the dark’

Oh, shutupshutup
, Lily thinks as she plants a kiss on her mother’s cheek to pretend that she’ll do as she says.

Soon the trees crowd so densely that Lily must push her way through the scratchy pine trunks and branches like big, icy feathers. It’s easy to lose yourself in this patch of the forest, but the trees will help her. Lily casts the lamp around to seek out the glinting eyes of the forest: amber firestones set in the trunks to mark pathways through the trees. She swings the lamp up and follows the firestone trail.

Time is against her. Any moment now the icebergs might disappear with an almighty crash into the lake. It often happens like this: a sudden meltdown, a tumultuous mass death, soon after the best day of the year when the forest dwellers rush from their winter burrows to greet the new sun as it clambers on to the shoulders of the eastern mountains after months of polar darkness.

Lily pushes forward, then stops. She cannot find the next firestone. But there’s another kind of fire that can guide her through the night. She throws her head back and gazes up beyond the wavering tips of the pines.

A lone star glistens; a cool blue light.

Lily scrapes and squeezes through tree trunks, keeping her eyes on the blue light. Now she can see a sprinkle of stars. She pushes on. And there, right above her head, is the star crown of Queen Cass. Lily lowers her gaze, lifts the lamp. The trees are thinning out. Just a few more trunks and branches to push past . . .

All at once the night opens up. Lily steps out of the forest, dazzled by a sky of hot stars. The North Wind shakes them until they fall from the heavens and gust down to sizzle upon the icy lake.

Far out on Lake Longhope, the world is changing fast. Great pillars and towers tumble as the huge ice cathedrals crumble into thundering whiteness. Lily blinks, eyes tingling in the blast of ice-wind. Ice crystals land in the waves of tawny hair that frame her soft, bright-eyed face. She puffs out a cloud of a sigh. Winter is ending, yet it’s impossible not to feel a stab of sadness at such a spectacular death. Icy shock-waves crash all along the shore. Slowly, slowly, the lake settles into stillness. Lily blinks again. Apart from chunks of icy debris, it’s as if the armada of icebergs had never been.

A wolf howl makes the girl’s skin prickle. She listens intently, chewing her lip. Her heartbeat quickens as she crunches across an expanse of frosted ferns and runs on to the rocky lake shore. That howl, Lily is sure, does not belong to a true wolf.

‘Wing!’

She swings the lamp to cast its light across the rocky shore. A second howl fills the night. But this one is not Wing. There is something awful in this wolf cry, as if it carries all the loneliness of the world.

The cry tears at Lily’s insides. Some animal part of her understands the wolf’s dread song. She calls for Wing once again, as loud as she dares, scanning the dark shore, hearing her own cry roam across Lake Longhope.

On Candlewood Spire, a huge spike of granite resembling a giant finger fossilized in rock, a wolfish figure leaps from a perch and lands, on all fours, on the shore. Starlight glistens on its long snout and coat of silvery fur. The figure stands upright. Brash echoes of its heavy tread on the pebble shore clatter across the lake as it runs towards her.

The smell of Wing’s wolf coat, musky and rank, reaches her before he does. The head of his dead wolf brother lolls on one shoulder, still attached to the thick fur he wears like a second skin. The wolf’s eyes have been replaced by amber firestones; Wing’s own eyes burn with the blue fire of the stars.

‘I’ve missed you,’ Lily bursts out. ‘Winter felt like forever!’

She wants to bury herself in his wolfskin as she would when she was small. Something stops her now. But Wing laughs away her awkwardness, hugging her tight in the deep fur of his wolf coat and it’s as if he has never been away.

‘Mountain thunder!’ he gasps, his breath hot in her hair.

Lily looks up at a face chiselled by winter. His lean, strong features and sleek-haired skin make Wing seem more wolfish than ever. He is more man than boy now.
A wolfman
, thinks Lily, though no wolf has webbed hands and feet and soft neck gills and swims all summer long in the lake, like a fish. Wolfman or human fish? Lily has no idea what he is and she doesn’t care. He is Wing.

She breaks free of a hug that’s full of the new strength she sensed in him as he ran towards her. The strange shyness sweeps through Lily once again as she absorbs all his subtle changes and huddles into her deerskin parka, sharply aware of the bewildering body she has grown during her winter hibernation; all the curves and softnesses where there had been skinny straight lines.