Aurora (29 page)

His spirit leaps. It’s really happening! The Surge is bursting into the cities and now the secret Surgents inside the empire are breaking loose. Maybe this
is
his true legacy – to break the grip of the Guardians for the new imagineers. There must be other young dreamers in these cities who will rise from all this with a new sense of the world, of what might be possible, what could be . . .

Adrenalin speeds him round a last bend in the corridor towards the private chambers that were once his grandfather’s and now belong to his father, Mungo Stone.

The last time he entered these chambers he was with Mara. Hours later, she escaped on a ship and he crashed down into the netherworld, a teenage dreamer who planned to change the world. How could he have known how many hard years it would take, how much he must lose before he returned?

Fox stuns the two guards on duty outside the chamber and steps over the crumpled bodies.

He pulls out his laser gun to disable the tok-check and his eyes fall upon the blood-red jackets of the guards with the dark lilies, the emblem of the empire, emblazoned at their hearts. A bolt of emotion hits like the gentlest stun-blast at the memory of the old woman who lived in a tree, the ancient guardian who showed Fox how to survive in the netherworld and guided him as he sowed the first seeds of his revolution: the Lily his grandfather once cast down into the netherworld and years later, ridden by guilt, enshrined as the emblem of the empire; the same Lily remembered by Mara in their daughter’s name.

The door to his father’s chamber slides open with barely a whisper and Fox steps inside.

THE GHOST OF CALEDON

An enormous blue globe floats in the middle of the room.

Inside the slow-spinning lumen stands a man, engulfed by a storm of newsflashes from a hundred points within the globe’s oceanic skin. Fox watches, mesmerized by the computerized lumen of the planet and the sky cities.

Fox peers through the flashing alerts and watches the elderly man select news with his fingertips from around the globe, absorbing it all into his personal circuitry. The man sighs and rubs his hands together as if cold, though the room is hot.

Fox knows the gesture is his father’s – but this man could, almost, be his grandfather, Caledon. The smooth-as-glass dome of the head, edged with a frost of hair. Stooped shoulders. Papery, pale skin. Smooth white hands. An elderly yet unnaturally ageless man.

Fox looks at the dark, callused skin of his own hands and remembers how soft and unweathered they once were. When he lifts his gaze to the older man in the ghostly light of the globe his father seems to be a phantom of the man Fox will never now become.

Fox remembers his father as a robust presence who wore his hard-edged energy like armour, forever travelling the planet’s sky cities, a dynamic knight in Caledon’s realm. Age has shrunk and stilled Mungo Stone. Now he travels the planet by cyberspace, Fox sees, troubleshooting from within his globe. His power base, once the steel axis of the empire, has been stolen by younger, stronger rivals across the world. The invasion of the Northlands is Mungo’s last, desperate gamble for lost power.

Fox steps closer. At last his father sees him. Mungo’s shocked eyes meet his son’s.

‘What are you doing here? How did you get in?’ Mungo Stone emerges from the globe. ‘Security!’

There is no recognition on his father’s face. So the tok-check didn’t alert him? Was his identity just left there, forgotten?

‘No guards. No security,’ says Fox softly. ‘Dad, it’s me.’

The young man holds the shocked gaze of the older one. Mungo Stone gives another useless shout to the disabled circuitry of his personal Noosguard.

‘It’s me, David,’ says Fox.

His father’s eyes widen a fraction and there’s a tremor of the papery eyelids.

‘I don’t care who you are,’ he says.
‘No one
enters my chambers without—’

‘I’m your son.’

‘My son,’ says Mungo Stone, and now his voice shakes, ‘is dead.’

Fox watches his father’s right hand slide into a pocket. He pulls out a gun.

‘I’m not dead,’ says Fox.
Not yet.

He looks at the gun in his own hand. Slowly he slips it back into his belt and faces his father with bare hands. All his nervousness has gone. For once in his life, Fox intends to be the most important thing in his father’s world. And for the first time, Mungo will know who his son really is.

‘My son,’ says Mungo Stone, the gun still in his hand, ‘was killed in the 2100 Uprising.’

‘You saw his body?’ says Fox. ‘But you couldn’t have, you weren’t here. You were at the other side of the world.’

Mungo’s pale face bleaches to white. ‘My father, Caledon—’

‘– lied, if he told you I was dead. I vanished in the slave breakout but I didn’t die. No body was ever found.’

Mungo Stone brushes his hand across his brow, wiping away beads of sweat. The atmosphere is stifling, though the city air should be mellow and fresh – another sign that all systems are in breakdown, even the air con. All of a sudden Fox longs to be standing at the top of the old tower with the North Wind in his face.

‘Who are you?’ demands Mungo Stone.

‘The last time we met in the Noos,’ says Fox, ‘we had a row because you forgot my seventeenth birthday.’

‘I never forgot, I . . .’ Mungo stumbles to a confused halt. The gun droops in his hand.

‘You had important business in New Jing.’

Mungo Stone takes a stumbling step backwards. Flashing alerts on the globe spike all around his head like a silent lightning storm. He makes a fumbling gesture as if to brush the planet aside.

‘End,’ he orders.

The lumen fades and disappears.

‘It can’t be you,’ Mungo murmurs. But recognition sparks at last in the stricken eyes that study Fox’s face. Where could you have hidden all these years? How could you do this to your mother – no, this is
outrageous
, impossible.’ He shakes his head, takes another step backwards.

‘You left my identity in the system,’ Fox reminds his father. ‘Why do that if you believed I was dead?’

‘That would have been your mother,’ Mungo says, after a pause. ‘She never accepted your death.’

Fox hears pain in his father’s voice. They seem to stare at each other across a gulf of time.

‘If –
if
it’s you – where have you
been
?’ his father demands. ‘Which city? Why did you disappear?’

‘I’ve been living in the drowned ruins at the foot of
this
city.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous! No one could survive there.’

‘Look.’ Fox holds out his begrimed hands. ‘This is dirt. Earth.’ He pulls open the leather collar of his jacket to show his father patches of infected skin on his neck and chest. ‘Insect bites. You know there are flood refugees surviving outside the wall. You
know
what’s outside. I survived – just as they do. Some of them.’

‘David,’ murmurs his father. ‘What are you? What have you become?’

Fox looks into his father’s bewildered face. Mungo’s power struggles in the empire have fascinated his son as he tracked all his doings, stealthily, in the news stations of the Noos. With a clench of his heart Fox now sees in his father a glimmer of his own self: the same dream-chasing spirit that drove Caledon to create the sky empire is behind Mungo’s plots and schemes, and drives Fox now. That spirit lives on in Lily, who chased her dream through a mountain, risking her young life to find him.

The dreamers of the day are the dangerous men, his book of rebel wisdom said. They are the ones who act with eyes wide open to make their dreams come true.

A family of dreamers, all of us,
Fox sees;
for good and for bad.

‘Your David
did
die,’ he tells his father, ‘but I lived on. I am Fox and I lead the Surge – the last survivors of the Great Floods. War is on your doorstep, Dad. My Surgents have amassed all across the world. We are breaking through your walls. We are outside and inside every city. We are in the Noos. We are
here
,’ he says as the tremor of an explosion vibrates in the room. ‘There are Surgent fleets in the Northlands and other high lands of the Earth, all ready to fight the invasions of your empire. How many fighters do you have? How many thousands? Do you know how many flood refugees there are in the world? Millions, Dad. And I have roused them. The empire will ultimately lose.’

‘
Your
Surgents?
We
are your people. In the name of Caledon!’ The words burst like a curse and Mungo sweeps his arm around the room in a grand gesture, as if he stands on a mountain top with all the world before him. ‘This was yours to inherit – why do you want to destroy it? And me?’

‘I don’t want to destroy,’ says Fox. ‘I want the sea-broken people to reclaim their share of the world. The empire blocks us.
You
block us. You can choose to stand aside and we’ll call off our Surge. Listen to me, Dad. There isn’t much time.’

A SON DEAD AND FOUND

‘You’re declaring war on the empire your own grandfather created?’ Mungo paces the room. ‘These cities saved a generation from the floods. We house millions of happy, productive citizens. We can’t look after everyone. You would ruin all those lives just to share out the misery? Wreck the future of our innocent children? Kill your own people?’

‘There are millions of innocents abandoned in the world outside,’ Fox counters. ‘Aren’t they our people too? I don’t want to wreck or ruin or kill. I want—’

‘You’re bombing us!’

‘We’re bombing the walls and the entrances to the towers. Not the people.’
Make war on places not people
: a crucial pillar of wisdom for the Surge. ‘I’m not asking you to house the refugees,’ he tells his father. ‘Just let them have the high lands of the world. Let them
live
.’

‘It took two generations of the best human minds to create this empire,’ Mungo rages. ‘Blow it all up then – let’s
all
live in boats!’

He never could listen, Fox remembers. His temper always got in the way.

Mungo stops his furious pacing. ‘You ran away from your destiny, David.’

‘I’ll decide what my destiny is,’ Fox growls back.

‘So tell me about that? What land of future will there be after you ruin our world?’

‘The planet does not belong to the empire,’ says Fox. ‘It belongs to all the people of the Earth. Share it with us, Dad.’ He pauses, feels a bead of sweat trickle down his neck. ‘It belongs to your granddaughter too.’

Mungo Stone blinks. ‘Granddaughter?’

Fox hears a soft cry behind him. He spins around. An elegant woman dressed in the silken finery only afforded by the ruling powers of the empire stands just inside the doorway with a guard on either side. Her face is a faded version of the image Fox has burrowed away in his memory.

‘Security – at
last
,’ Mungo rasps. ‘This intruder is armed – deal with him fast. Sarah, my love, stand back.’ He glares at the unresponsive guards. ‘What are you waiting for? Stun him!’

‘Sorry, sir,’ the female guard replies, ‘but we will stun
you
if necessary.’

The male guard turns to Fox with an awestruck expression. ‘Steerpike sent us. The Surge has broken all across the city and the Guardians don’t know which citizens and guards are loyal and which are not. The boat people are now in the towers . . .’ He pauses breathlessly as Fox – his eyes fixed on the silver-haired woman brought by the guards – does not reply. ‘Er, what do you want us to do here, Surgent Fox?’