Aurora (28 page)

Fox glimpses a tall, weather-tanned, bruisedly handsome warrior skating towards him through the crowd. His face is alight with adrenalin and the brown eyes that lock with his are flecked with a dangerous fire.
Who is he? Does he know me?
Fox’s heart quickens until he realizes he is looking at himself in the soaring wall of mirror outside the cybercath. In a flak-jacket made from the armoured leathers of an ancient soldier and his second skin of netherworld grime, he is unrecognizable as the young Noosdreamer who was David Stone.

He gives a husky laugh.

‘Don’t worry,’ he tells Kitsune, as the warrior in the minor gives a wry grin. ‘No one will
ever
know me.’

Workers rush from the cybercathedral into the city as the bombing of the walls shakes the very core of New Mungo.

‘Pan – here!’ Fox shouts through the oncoming crowd. She skids to a halt on her skateboard at the giant doors of the cybercath, her green eyes widening.

A lumen, a virtual door guard with hair and clothes like starlight, greets them with an enthusiastic ‘Hello!’

‘Hello,’ Fox responds brusquely to the tok-check, his hand on the gun in his pocket.

‘Hello!’ Pan echoes. ‘You’re beautiful!’

The lumen quivers as if delighted at the compliment – but it’s an electronic quake, anticipating the blast that now rips through the tunnels. A series of blows rocks the city, one after the other, as if a demented giant is chopping at the limbs of the empire with an axe.

The crowd stills in shock.

The lumen’s eyes beam like lasers – which, Fox knows, they are. They can’t duck or move or the tok-check will fail. They must stay in the lumen’s eyebeam. A failed voice recognition means an instant stun ray from its eyes.

Fox’s fingers grip his gun. Though what can his laser do to a girl made of lumenergy? Has the tok-check failed?

In a moment of searing stillness between explosions, the shimmering girl steps aside.

‘Work well and prosper!’ she urges, oblivious to the mayhem.

Pandora returns the lumen’s brilliant smile as they pass through the tall doors into a large, domed arena. A rabble of Noostraders are rooted to the spot, ignoring the mayhem in the world outside. They stare aghast at the flashing data on the huge walls – trading updates from sky cities all around the Earth. But the trade alerts have stuck in the moment the Noos connections were cut.

The traders seem to bellow into thin air but the godkins embedded in their skin are relaying to their Trade Lords a double catastrophe – not only are the businesses they sunk their wealth into still vanished from the ether, now the Noos itself has disappeared.

Fox grabs Pandora’s hand and they race through the crowded work pods towards a hidden door he remembers in the mirror walls.

‘Trillions of Noo$dollars!’ a purple-cheeked trader is hollering. ‘All gone – and now there’s no Noos!’

A woman stares aghast at the data walls. ‘But I – I can’t explain, Lord Edin. It’s just gone.’

The cacophony of disbelief almost drowns out the sound of the bombs outside.

‘Great work, Surgent Fox,’ Pandora whispers.

‘What,’ says an appalled voice, ‘is
that
?’

The smile dies on Pandora’s face as a group of young traders recoil from her as they might if they found a swamp dragon scuttling through their shining cathedral. A horrified woman looks her up and down and screams. Fox pulls Pandora away through the chaotic crowd until they are face to face with themselves in the mirrored wall.

Pan stares at her reflection with a shattered look.

The dead alerts of the trade screens spark in her eyes and on the scaly armour of her tunic. Amid the crystal brightness of New Mungo and its groomed sky citizens her sleek-haired skin, webbed feet and fingers, even the grimed features of her fiercely angelic face, are dangerously alien.

Get her out of here fast
, thinks Fox.

‘David Stone,’ he snaps at his reflection and sees the flicker of the eye-scanner behind the mirror.

Behind him, a young trader approaches, his eyes fixed on Pan, the blade of a skate boot aimed at her head. Fox sees the zapeedo blade flash as the concealed door slides open in the wall. He yanks Pan through. The door shuts and the tumult of the cybercath cuts dead.

They are safe. For the moment. Unless the violent young Noostrader has security clearance for the Nux.

Luckily, the private door in the mirrored wall stays sealed.

Steerpike couldn’t believe it. Though Fox vanished from New Mungo over fifteen years ago, his identity was never erased from the security systems. No one ever knew what happened to young David Stone. How could they have guessed? He was assumed dead, said Steerpike, though there was no body to be found. But instead of instant deletion, upon death, his identity has lingered in the system like an electronic ghost.

Did they forget to delete him? Or did his parents hope that one day he would return as mysteriously as he disappeared?

They have entered a softly lit inner corridor. Deep in this hidden area beyond the cybercath are the city Guardians’ chambers of power. Fox remembers it all as if he has never been away.

Pan hisses a warning. He sees a flash, like a red alert. A Nux guard has appeared among the mirrors. Out of the corner of his eye, Fox sees the pincer movement of yet more guards in the empire’s scarlet jackets.

The stun blast hits him like a giant’s punch. Too late, he realizes the mirrors have tricked him into seeing six guards where there’s only one – and that one was right behind him. His legs crumple; he slumps to the floor. With a groan of despair he sees that his ghost might have been left in the system as a trap, in case he ever dared to return.

The ancient armour in his flak-jacket has saved his upper body from the blast but his legs are dead. They might as well be chopped off.

‘Been stunned,’ he replies to Kitsune’s frantic query on the soundwave. ‘No legs. I need back-up, fast.’

‘Surgents are heading to the Nux but there are battles all over the city – hold on, Fox.’

‘Too late.’

Kitsune groans now. The guard advances, his eyes flicking from Fox to Pan

‘What – what
are
you?’ he gasps, as if he has stumbled across creatures from another world

For a split second Fox’s heart leaps as the nervous young guard fumbles and drops the stun gun. But now he grips another gun, a laser, and takes aim at Fox’s head.

ROGUE SURGE

‘Run!’

Pan ignores Fox’s order.

She’s taken one of the medieval weapons from her belt and whirls the chain around her head. On the end of the chain is the Morning Star, a vicious little ball of spikes that can strangle a dragon, the deadly star embedding in the beast’s throat as the loaded chain wraps around its jaw.

A tornado of Morning Stars seems to fly around the corridor, the mirrors multiplying the spiked metal ball into a whirling storm. The guard panics, ducks and runs to escape the onslaught – but his confusion takes him right into Pan’s stun blast. He gives a strangled scream and drops to the ground as the spikes sink into his neck and the loaded chain lassoes around his throat.

Pan’s skateboard clatters on to the floor. She heaves Fox on to it and retrieves her spiked ball and chain from the unconscious guard. Fox lies on his stomach and grips the edges of the skateboard, his stunned legs a dead weight.

‘The lift,’ he gasps, pointing. ‘Over there! Red button . . .’

Shouts and footsteps resound in the corridors as Pan pushes him towards the lift. She slams her fist on the red crystal button. A door opens in the wall and Pan pushes Fox into the lift capsule. Then she rushes back out.

‘Get
in
,’ Fox yells.

She is dragging the unconscious guard towards the lift. She hauls him in and the lift doors slide shut as a flash of red-jacketed guards appear at the edge of the corridor.

‘How long till you get your legs back?’ Pan demands breathlessly.

Fox wiggles his toes. Feels a tingle as the lift speeds upward.

‘Not long – but the second I do, you’re going to use
your
legs and get to the top of the towers. Plans have changed,’ he responds, as she argues. ‘Get to a rooftop and wait for the ships. There’s something I have to do on my own.’

‘Ship? Since when was I going on a ship?’ Pan is searching the young guard’s jacket, having already pocketed his gun. She pulls a second gun from his belt and hands it to Fox. ‘You need me. I just saved you. We’re fighting for this city. You said we’d be king and queen of the empire once the Guardians were gone, that we’d change everything. How can we abandon all that?’

‘Not king and queen, Pan, I never said that. Not rulers. A different kind of guardian. But that was before I found Lily. What do you expect me to do? Abandon her?’ he retorts, torn between duty and desire; what he should do and what he must. ‘It’s not only our fight. Others can take over here. I can still be a global force once we’ve rebooted the Noos. We can still do what we said, make a new kind of world – just do it from the Northlands.’

He grinds to a halt, overwhelmed by guilt, by the enormity of abandoning the plan he has worked towards for years. Then Lily’s face flashes up in his mind’s eye and he hears her last, desperate cry and his decision becomes clear and pure. His daughter needs him. Nothing else matters more, nothing in the world.

‘Maybe I don’t want to go North,’ says Pan sullenly. ‘Maybe I want to do what we always
said
we’d do, right
here
.’

She works fast as she speaks, binding the guard’s hands with a rope from her weapons belt. The lift stops and the door slides open. Guns ready, they listen to brutal echoes from somewhere deeper in the Nux. But the corridor outside is clear.

‘Pan, what happened in the cybercath –’

Fox staggers to his feet, struggling to make his dead legs work. They tingle fiercely, as if embedded with spiky Morning Stars. The near-attack in the cybercath convinced him that Pan would not be safe here.

‘They looked at me like I was a – a
snake.
Maybe they’d think I was a freak in the Northlands too!’ Fox’s heart turns over as Pan’s voice breaks. ‘So where am I supposed to go?’

‘You’re coming North with me.’

Fox leans against a wall and pulls a folded paper from a pocket of his armoured jacket – the map of the city he has drawn in charcoal to show the network of sky tunnels with the cybercathedral and the Nux like a fat spider at the heart of a great web.

‘Look.’ Fox trails his finger across the map. ‘Each of the sky tunnels leads to a tower. Elevator shafts lead to the roofs. They all say
No Access
– ignore that. The tok-checks are all set up for you.’

In his mind’s eye Fox sees air fleets from the east surging across the globe, each one headed for a sky city.

‘I want to stay with you.’ Pandora’s mouth trembles. ‘Why can’t I come? What is it you’re going to do?’

‘I need to fix a broken bridge,’ says Fox. ‘I need to do it alone. Go and help the boat refugees find their way to the roofs. They should be battling up through the towers now. Keep yourself safe and head for the top of Aspen Tower.’ His grandfather named the first towers of his New World after the lost trees of the Earth; Fox only realized this when he explored the old books. He shows Pan the route to Aspen, the northernmost tower, on the map. ‘I’ll meet you there.’

Kitsune is muttering on the soundwave, asking him what’s happening, where is he, what’s he doing, why’s he heading for Aspen? Fox extinguishes his old friend with a tug on the earplug and gives the connector to Pandora.

‘Promise?’ Pan holds his gaze.

‘Promise. Kitsune will keep you right.’

‘Because you need me,’ Pan murmurs, doubtful still. ‘You do.’

Her green eyes burn into him. Then she slams her skateboard on the ground and speeds off.

The city sways and shakes in ocean-blasts and bombs. Fox staggers through pillared corridors, stamping the last numbness from his tingling legs, imagining the towers and sky tunnels as giant trees in a global storm.

The thunder of feet makes him halt. A gun in each hand, Fox flattens himself behind a pillar. Guards rush past. One trips and sprawls on the ground. Fox takes aim but the guard lies stunned. Another man crashes down, then another, and Fox sees the rogue guards at the tail end stun-blasting their comrades.