Aurora (31 page)

Sarah has wrestled one of the stunned guards from his red jacket.

‘Put this on, quick.’ She helps ease the jacket over his injured shoulder. If anyone asks, you are my personal guard.’

They rush through endless corridors that are strangely still. The Guardians would have fled the Nux for their penthouse sky castles and will be trying to restore order by diktat from behind personal guard patrols and barricades.

‘Come with me,’ Fox urges. ‘Leave and come North with me.’

His mother doesn’t answer. Glancing at her as they hurry on, Fox sees anguish on her face.

‘Help me find your granddaughter,’ he persists.

‘What’s her name?’ asks Sarah, as they leave the eery emptiness of the Nux at the hidden heart of the city and enter the ringing panic of the sky tunnels.

‘Lily,’ Fox replies.

Sarah’s eyes warm and soften; the same deep brown as her son’s, full of the same amber fire. She touches the dark lily on Fox’s scarlet guard’s jacket. ‘The emblem of the empire. How strange.’

‘A girl needs a strong grandmother in a broken world,’ says Fox, thinking of his cybergift to Lily of a virtual grandmother. But if he could bring her a grandmother for real . . .

Sarah bites her lip as if to stop herself uttering an impulsive ‘yes’.

‘That,’ she says, ‘is exactly what I mean to be.’

‘You’ll come?’

His heart leaps. Is a happy-ever-after ending possible after all?

‘If I come,’ says his mother slowly, ‘then I can’t be the grandmother she needs, I can’t do everything that is within my power to get you to her. And you must find her.’ Sarah turns her face to the wall and speaks into a tok-check. Next to Fox a door springs open in the tunnel wall. ‘A service entrance,’ Sarah tells him, ‘a safe shortcut to Aspen. You’ll avoid the patrols. The stairs will take you to the roof.’

Gunfire cracks in the tunnels. Not the zip of lasers but the sound made by the old-style guns and bullets he and Pan practised with in the museum. The boat Surgents must have made it up through the towers. There is no time to waste; he must go.

He grabs his mother’s hand. ‘But what else can you do here?’

‘I am at the heart of things,’ says Sarah. ‘I am trusted. I can confuse the orders of the Guardians, I can redirect sky patrols, send out false communications from the high command. I can give you the best chance you have of getting out of here alive. I can help give the right ending to your story.’

She holds his gaze.

‘I was hardly a mother to you. I was never really there. I thought other things were more important and I’ve had years to regret that. But I’m here now and I will do this.’

Streams erupt further down the tunnel. Sarah pushes Fox through the door into the service shaft. Mother and son look at each other one last time.

‘What about Dad? He won’t let you get away with this. You won’t be safe.’

‘Your father’s weaker than you think. He’s ill and he needs me. He might not live long. The invasion of the North was his last venture. So you must continue it for him,’ Sarah smiles, ‘in your own way.’

‘The Midnight Story isn’t finished,’ he reminds her. ‘Listen out for me. You haven’t heard the end of the story yet.’ A wondrous idea strikes him. ‘Far beyond the Noos, across the empty seas of static, is the Weave, the virtual world people used before the floods. On the edges of the Weave is a broken bridge. Your granddaughter knows it. We’ll meet you there.’

Sarah’s eyes turn to molten amber. The door closes between them and his mother is gone.

WARRIORS OF A WOKEN WORLD

Earth spins, hurling the sky city towards the dawn.

Fox steps out on to the top of Aspen Tower as first light streaks across the eastern sky, revealing the awed and stricken faces of the people amassed on the roof.

People from the sky city have walked out into the first real morning they have ever known and take their first-ever breaths of the world’s wind. Curious citizens have joined the rebel Surgents on the roof and now gaze like woken sleepwalkers at the spectacle of the outside world. Weather-ragged boat people stand dazed and exhausted among them. All across the city Fox sees the gatherings on every tower roof, the people tense and still like solemn wraiths in the misty dawn.

Dark against the dawn is a strange swarm. As it draws closer, Fox sees it’s an air fleet. The deep scarlet emblems of the empire’s lilies glow on the tails of each ship. The golden names of the eastern sky cities glow on the whale-like bodies. Kitsune has been as good as his word.

Fox imagines all the unknown masses he reached out to on the Zenith radio and in the Noos breaking out in wonder on to sky city towers all over the Earth: the warriors for the future he appealed for in his last broadcast to the global Surge.

Air turbulence blasts the vast open space of the rooftop as the giant fleet spreads across the sky. The spiregyres at the edges of the tower whirl and whoop in the sudden wind. People cling to each other against the gale.

The wind rips at Fox, tearing his makeshift bandage. The blast of air burns like fire on the raw shoulder wound. The fire seeps, warm as honey, across his chest. Faces stare at him in alarm. Glancing down, Fox sees why. His upper body is soaked in blood. It spreads in the shape of a huge dark lily all across the scarlet jacket stolen from the guard Suddenly, he feels dizzy. Nooworlders surround him; faces young and old, full of awe.

‘Fox!’ a voice is calling.

A bugle call sounds. Fox turns towards the voice and the urgent, musical blast.

‘Pan!’ he calls back, but his voice is weak with pain.

Is this the Fox?
people whisper. Hands reach out to help him; he is given a sip of water from a flask. He is among friends, he realizes, with a stab of shock.

Pan finds him at last, pushing through the crowd.

‘You came!’

She is about to grab him in a hug when she sees his wound and stops, placing her hand tenderly over the dark stain.

Her relief shames him. He can hardly meet the blaze of love in her eyes.

‘Who tried to kill you?’ she whispers. ‘Your father? You went to find him, didn’t you? Did – did you kill him?’

Fox gives a shaky smile. ‘My mother saved us both.’

The question on her lips is lost. Pan’s mouth drops open and her head falls back, her green eyes widening, as one of the airships pauses overhead. The turbulence calms now as the vessel drops towards the rooftop, quiet and gentle as a cloud. It doesn’t land, but hovers just above the tower on a cushion of air.

‘The soundwave,’ Fox gasps through a spike of pain.

Pan pulls the connector from a pocket and puts it in his ear. ‘I unplugged. Got fed up with Kitsune yelling about you going off-plan.’

‘Kitsune?’ Fox cries, hoping the connection is still live.

‘At last!’ the voice in the earphone erupts. ‘We’ve been frantic – get on the ship!’

A pulse of adrenalin overrides the pain of his wound. Fox takes a deep, reviving breath of air and begins directing the exodus of people to the air chute that will suck them up into the huge round belly of the ship.

The soundwave crackles.

‘Never mind the rest of the world now,’ Kitsune insists, as if he knows Fox will be herding people on board before himself. ‘
You
get on the ship! Move!’

Dazed Nooworlders and refugees keep pouring from the elevator shafts. They stand blinking like newborns in the grey dawn. Pan weaves her way among them, ignited by their stunned excitement as they look at the wide sky and the mass of airships. They barely notice Pandora. She might be a chattering ghost wafting among them. She touches their arms, their hair, a stunned face or two, as if they are statues from the museum.

‘You can still see a few stars. Look! The bright one is Venus, the morning star,’ she tells a throng of excited children. She might be a guide introducing them all to the world. ‘That was the city wall down there. It wrapped around the towers and stopped the outside getting in. See how it’s all bombed now and the boat people poured in. See all the boats and the ocean!’

‘Empire guards advancing up the towers,’ Kitsune warns Fox. ‘Everyone on board, now!’

‘They’re alive, Kitsune,’ Fox shouts into the soundwave connector, still herding frantic refugees. ‘Mara and my daughter . . .’

He stumbles over the word.

‘Your daughter!’ Kitsune exclaims. ‘But you thought they were dead. Fox, your
daughter
!’

‘I found her in the Weave,’ says Fox. ‘Lily, Mara’s child. She’s in a mountain city in the North with shining bridges, deep in a sea fjord . . .’

‘In the Northlands?’ Kitsune breaks into his soft laugh. ‘Well, what do you know – that’s just where we’re headed! So can I assure Steerpike,’ he adds in a dry tone, ‘that it’s not all pirates up there?’

The Arctic pirates on the radio waves have told all about the burgeoning trade ports of the North. But the propaganda of the empire tells the sky people that the land at the top of the world is empty, just a handful of savage tribes to reorganize, resettle, or where necessary, reduce – the empire’s code words for exile, enslavement, extermination.

‘But you have a daughter!’ Kitsune cries again and a smile breaks on Fox’s face as he hears his friend’s astonished delight.

‘I have a daughter,’ Fox repeats. It’s still such an unbelievable thought. ‘I have to find them, Kitsune. They matter more than anything now.’

He motions to Pan to get on the airship. She doesn’t move.

‘You go,’ she says bluntly. ‘Go and find them.’

‘What?’ Fox snaps at her impatiently. He is trying to hear Kitsune and organize an exodus of people; this is no time for Pan to be awkward and childish. Then he sees the flash of tears in her eyes and, stricken, recalls the words she just heard him say.

‘I said get on this airship now!’ Kitsune sounds just as he did when they were young wizzers, racing through glittering speedlinks of the Noos, breathless, on the edge of time. ‘Move, Noosrunner! There’s a gun patrol on its way to the roof. Your battle’s done here, Fox.’

An electric sizzle cuts through the soundwave. Kitsune’s voice is snapped off. He is gone. Fox is on his own.

‘Hurry!’ he roars, and begins pushing people two and three at a time up into the airship’s entry chute. ‘Pan! Come on! Get in.’

Someone screams. Fox spins around and sees armed guards rushing from an elevator shaft.

‘Do not move!’ a voice commands. ‘Do not board the airships. Anyone attempting to board the airships will be shot.’

Time seems to freeze as the crowd stills. A mass of instant calculations are made. Chaos breaks out as some obey the order and others rush for the ships. Warning shots fire overhead. The police scan the crowd. They are looking for him, Fox knows. His father’s stunned state will have worn off and an order will have been given to stun or shoot him on sight. Though Fox still wears the scarlet jacket, his weather-rugged face stands out like a barnacle among the fine, indoor skins of the empire’s guards. He ducks, glancing around for Pan. The sudden movement attracts a policewoman’s glare.

‘Here!’ she shouts. ‘I’ve got him!’

Her gun points straight at him through a gap in the crowd. She’s too close to miss. He is pinned to the spot, his chance to escape lost.

It’s all over now,
thinks Fox.

CANDLE COMMANDS