My chin snaps up, seeing the roiling storm brewing inside the glass capsule. A deep wound has begun to open in the sky above it. The murky cloud cover has pushed aside. It’s too late now.
I can’t stop this.
Chapter Forty-Five
Eyelet
Urlick rides toward ME, wind racing through his hair, energy snapping all around him, the great Illuminator’s rustic frame shaking at his back. He slides from his elephant and scoops me up in his arms. “We’ve got to go.” He pulls me up. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“No,” I whisper.
“What?” He strokes the hair from my eyes and kisses my cheeks.
I feel cold—so cold—and drained, like my blood is somehow evaporating.
“Come on now. You can do this.” Urlick cradles me against his chest and tries to lift me to my legs—
“I can’t,” I rasp, searching his bewildered gaze with my tear-filled eyes. My lips are numb. My chest aches as though it’s collapsing. “This is the end, Urlick. I can’t go on.”
“Yes, you can.” He shakes his head. “Don’t talk like that.” He tries to lift me again.
I grab his arm, stopping his motion. “It is,” I whisper, and pull back my jacket, revealing the wound. Blood gushes from a hole just below my heart, where I’ve been hit. “It’s over.” My lips tremble. “There is nothing left you can do. You must go on without me.”
“No, I-I-I won’t. I-I can’t.” He shakes his head furiously.
“You must.” I touch his lips. “And take the rest with you.”
An eerie green glow lights the sky above our heads. Urlick’s gaze shoots up.
The rent in the cloud cover spreads larger, opens wider. A flock of ravens swoop through the rip in the sky. They funnel downward, cawing, calling, and circling, winging toward us amid the crackling chaos of the giant machine, soaring in and out of this world and the one above us. I finally understand.
That’s where the ravens have always gone.
That’s how Mother knew it was true.
“Do you see them?” I smile, watching them weave in and out of the tear.
Urlick tracks my gaze.
My breath is but a whisper. It is all I can do to force it out. “That is the way. It is the answer. It has always been.”
“What are you talking about?” Urlick frowns.
“The ravens have always known the way.” I sputter, blood seeping up my throat and flooding my teeth. “You must follow them. Follow the ravens. They will lead you back to me.”
“What are you saying? You’re making no sense.”
“Don’t you see it?” I grow desperate for him to understand, my teeth chattering, the cold growing deep. “Tell me you see it, Urlick? Tell me you see what I see.” I gaze up at the rent in the sky, my vision glazing over. Smrt’s dream. My father’s quest. My destiny. I shift my dimming gaze to Urlick. “It’s just as the steammap in your study promised it would be.”
Urlick’s eyes shoot up again. He squints. A floating plot of land pulls into view, backlit by a golden sky. The bottom of his chin quavers.
The countdown on the machine barks.
Eleven,
Ten,
I reach up with what little strength I have left and cup Urlick’s beautiful, marred face in my hands. His cheeks are warm and glorious to the touch. His eyes are wet and pleading. “Get on Clementine and go.” I stare deep into his soul. “Take the rest and leave me. Escape to Limpidious. Before we both run out of time.”
“I could never—” His brow creases and his eyes fill. “I could never leave you—”
“You must, Urlick,” I rasp. “It’s the only way. Now go. Please. For me. Go there—”
“No. I go nowhere without you.” He crushes me in my arms. “You’re coming with me. I won’t leave without you.”
His mouth quivers. His brave mask falls apart. He glances back over his shoulder at the roaring, crackling, out of control machine. “There must be a way—”
“There isn’t.”
“Then I die here with you. I lie down and we die here together.” There’s a grave longing in his eyes.
“No. Urlick. Please…you don’t understand. You must live in order for us to be together. Now, go please, leave me here, and go.”
His breath hitches, catching in his throat. He sinks back onto his haunches and sobs uncontrollably, the machine at our backs, counting.
Seven,
Six,
Through the rip in the sky Pan swoops in. She tunnels toward us, landing next to me, pressing her head to my cheek. Tears flood her eyes. “Do as she says,” she squawks, struggling to find her human voice.
“I can’t.” Urlick trembles. “I can’t leave her alone—”
“She will not be alone.” Pan spreads her wings. “I will stay with her.” She looks at him, her green-blue flecked eyes glassy with sorrow. “Go. Before you can’t.”
Urlick’s head jerks around.
Four,
Three,
“Look at me.” I reach out, taking his hands and squeezing them. “Listen to me.” I stare hard in his eyes. “You are the key to the future. Everyone’s future. Run. Ride. Live!”
Masheck gallops in aboard Clementine, Iris and Livinea riding at his back. They clamour to a grinding, chaotic halt in front of us. “We have to go,” Masheck shouts. He twists toward the capsule and back again. “Get Eyelet. We have to go. Now!”
The machine at our backs rumbles hard, shimming and rippling the earth.
“She’s not coming,” Urlick shakes his head, dazed.
“What?”
“Take him!” I shout, with what little strength I have left.
“But—”
“Take him and RIDE!” I glare at Masheck.
I push Urlick away from me and he scrambles backward, reluctant to take to his feet. “Go!” I shout at him. “Get out of here!”
Urlick rises awkwardly, looking hurt, stunned, dazed. The expression on his face, like a knife cutting through me.
Urlick’s gaze snaps from me to the rattling Illuminator and back. “How much do you trust me,” I say.
He looks at the machine as its snaggled wires twitch and jump, preparing to fire.
One.
I stare hard at Masheck, praying he can read my eyes. “Go!” I shout. “Get him out of here!”
The machine surges and snaps. Count down complete.
Masheck leans down, strong-arming Urlick onto Clementine’s back, flinging him in behind Livinea and Iris, then whirls around and thunders away. Clementine bows her majestic head, spreads her wings and gallops, loping her way toward flight.
I close my eyes and concentrate on the sound of her hooves pounding the earth, the swoop of her wings as she lifts off. The force of the Illuminator shakes the ground under my back as Mother’s voice coos in my ear. She nuzzles in tight against my cheek and I close my eyes and think of Urlick, all our days together—the happiest days of my life.
Engage.
Chapter Forty-Six
Urlick
MASHECK STEERS CLEMENTINE THROUGH the rim of the green glowing light, up, up, up, winding through the center of the wild, roaring, rattling Illuminator, pushing hard toward the flickering, sun-drenched rent in the sky.
I don’t look back.
I can’t look back.
I can’t bear to.
I bury my face in Iris’ back. The machine snaps and screeches. Bolts of green lightning snake about our heads. The mighty rotating metal plates inside the structure creak and clang. The storm inside the capsule roils. It is all Clementine can do to keep us aboard, there’s so much friction. The closer we get to the top of the sky, the more the draft winds of the machine draw us down.
Clementine battles the pull, her head bent to the wind, galloping, grunting, groaning in a strained and rhythmic pulse. Froth beads her coat. Foam forms at her mouth.
“We need to pick up speed,” Masheck shouts. He looks frantically back over his shoulder, his he
ad backlit by the fiery storm going on below us. His eyes are like burning suns. His voice is lost to the ever-increasing Vapourized-winds that churn about us.
The pump on the ventilator slurs as our gasmasks strain. Warning signals flash and beep on the sides of them, alerting us that the atmosphere is growing dangerously thin.
The air inside the masks grows too dense to pump properly. I gasp and gulp and toss mine away, my throat feeling as though it’s burning inside out.
“What are you doing?” Masheck shouts, his expression wired.
“Just keep going,” I shout back to him. “Come on, Clementine!” I dig my heels into her sides and strike her from behind. “Hiyah!”
I’ve never struck her before.
She obeys, stretching her legs wider, lurching, lunging, increasing the breadth of her stride, working hard to lift us up. Her wings flap at double speed.
“Higher!” Masheck shouts, standing in the stirrups and leaning out, trying to assist her with the climb. Iris shinnies forward, jutting out her neck.
Livinea and I do the same.
“We’re not gonna make it!” Livinea hollers, her voice a soggy mess. “She can’t do this. She can’t. It’s too much to ask!”
Electricity lashes like whips about our heads. Heat coils out from the structure, raising and rippling the skin off our bones.
The hair on Clementine’s hide begins to fizzle and singe. It curls back, revealing deep gouges of weeping skin. She throws her head side to side, writhing in pain. Her face is burning, the skin melting away.
She whines and kicks on under Masheck’s relentless insistence.
I don’t know how much more of this she can stand.
How much more I can stand.
Livinea cries out, holding out an arm. Her flesh ripples over her bone like liquid.
“Higher! Higher!” Masheck pushes Clementine.
Her metal wings begin to melt and curl. The heat is too intense.
The monster machine crackles.
I lift my eyes and see the promise of the future through the tear.
A future without Eyelet.
“We’re too heavy!” I shout ahead to Masheck. “We’re not gonna make it!”
I look down.
The ground is inviting.
Eyelet is there.
I close my eyes and dream of her that first day she hijacked my carriage—the warmth of her smile, the light in her eyes…that cheeky expression on her face. I think of how her unexpected presence turned my whole life around.
A life no longer worth living without her.
“I see it!” Livinea shouts, pointing to the sky. “I see it! I see it! We’re nearly there! Just a little bit further.” She pushes up with her knees, as if helping Clementine reach for it, angling her chin. Her skin glistens in the vibrant glow of the sunlight streaming in.
Iris curls her limbs inward, pressing tight to Livinea’s back, making herself less resistant to the wind. She utters something prayer-like as the structure trembles around us. Fissures tear apart the ground.
Behind my lids, Eyelet’s sweet face comes to me,her creamy, caramel eyes, staring back at me longingly. I push thoughts to her across the universe—hoping, praying, she hears these final declarations of love for her—and that somehow, somewhere, we will see each other again.
I release my grasp on Iris and lean back.
“What are you doing?” Masheck shouts over his shoulder.
Iris lunges back and grabs me by the scruff, letting out a warrior-sized cry as she hauls me back in. She anchors me into position behind her, locking me there in a deadly stare, as Masheck demands the last resources out of Clementine.
The capsule shatters.
Shards of glass pelt our skin, rupturing into spiralling circles.
Sparks fly and radium jumps through the air. Arcs of snake-like energy leap the length of the structure. Clementine draws in her neck and bursts for the rent.
I duck my head and beg for mercy.
To the side, I witness a flash so big, so bright, it fills my head, the forest, the entire Commonwealth. A growling roar of an explosion follows. I gaze back as a strange, mushroom-shaped cloud of noxious gasses billows up from the earth, engulfing the sky.
The energy within the capsule has struck its chord.
Bitter, pungent, radium toxifies the air.
I hold my breath and look away as we’re thrust forward on the shockwave of the flash, up through the rent in the sky at a staggering speed.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Urlick
“Urlick? Urlick!” Something shakes me. “Urlick, yuh all right?”
Livinea’s bug-sized eyes hover over top of me. Though a seriously blurry version of them. Her long, lashes flutter with worry. She fans my face with a piece of metal from Clementine’s wing.
Clementine.
What’s happened?
My mind wheels shakily backward. A blurry fast-track of the crash comes to me. The pop through the rent. The awe in my heart. The sudden suck of gravity, and then the fall.
My head hurts where I must have thumped it. I reach up, rubbing the spot. “How long have I been out?”
“Quite a while,” Livinea says, her voice a considerate whisper. “Nearly a day, we think.”
Masheck’s bleary, oversized face pulls into view next. Both of them look colossally distorted.
“That was quite the crack you took.” He smiles down at me, his golden locks aflutter next to his brawny cheeks. His voice sounds as though he swims beneath water. Come to think of it, so do the birds in the trees.
“Got some boulder for a noggin, you do.” Masheck lightly taps my head, his face streaming in and out of focus. “Shoulda split open like a melon considerin’ ’ow ’ard you landed.”
I lift my head up and see what he means. The world takes a nasty dip. “Yeah, well, what can I say.” I rub the bump again. “Must be good genes.” I rest my head in the grass again.
Wait a minute. Grass.
I turn my head, noticing the sprawling blanket of green. It extends as far as my eyes can see.
Iris pops into view next. Her long face, levitating over me, is even more distorted in my dizzy state. Great droplets of water spring from her sad-dog eyes and pelt my chest. She’s getting me miserably wet.
“Stop, now, please, before you drown me.” I reach up and pat her hand. “I’m perfectly all right. It’s just a bump.” I turn to Masheck. “Help me up?”
He offers me a hand, and then jerks me up to my feet.
I don’t know whether to thank him or not.
I’ve no sooner stood up than Iris accosts me, swooping me into a chest-crushing hug. She sobs in my ear, and my brain does a full spiral in my skull.
“You ’ad us mighty worr-ied.” Livinea twists her hands, waiting her turn. Iris clears out of her way, and she leaps at me, squashing me hard against her billowy chest. “It wouldn’t be paradise withoutchu.” She sniffs.
Paradise? That’s right, we’ve landed in paradise.
Or some form of it.
Minus Eyelet.
My heart pulls in my chest.
I gaze past Livinea’s shoulder out over the lawn, beyond the white picket fences, and it all floods back to me: the blue skies, the golden sun, the endless green grass.
Limpidious.
It’s truly as grand as Eyelet always insisted it would be.
It’s then that I remember everything—the full extent of the tragedy, the battle, the explosion…the loss of my precious Eyelet.
I burn inside.
For a flash, I yearn to be dead.
A floating plot of land meanders past, magically suspended in the air like some marvellous, unexplained carnival ride. I blink as the people on it stare, waving from behind white picket fences. Behind them, the most glorious little thatch-roofed cottages sit, painted colourfully in canary yellow, Baltic blue, lime green.
The people shimmer.
I gaze around me.
Everything’s ash
immer here. The trees. The sky. The people.
I grimace.
But only some of the people.
I twist my head, noting the dull sheen of some people walking next to the shimmering ones.
That’s strange.
I look out past the plot of land on which we stand, at the grandeur that is Limpidious—a world made up of floating islands of dirt, all suspended mid-air like hot air balloons, tethered together by long, swinging plank and rope bridges. Some of the bridges stretch out for leagues. And all of this is set against a never-ending backdrop of sea-blue sky dotted with rambling cotton-white clouds, and drenched in golden sunlight.
We are certainly not in Brethren anymore.
Other floating plots of land dot the sky around us, each equipped with a paddlewheel affixed to its underside. The paddlewheels act like engines, cupping the air, catching hold of the airstreams within the troposphere, and keeping the plot afloat—just like I read when I was a boy. I squint as they pass, raising a hand to shield my eyes. And here I thought it was all just a fairy tale—some madman’s musings, copied down in book form to amuse a child.
To think, all this time,The Chronicles of Hannibal Atticus were real.
I turn my eyes to the horizon and gasp aloud, my hands shaking.
If only I’d known.
If only I’d believed.
If only Eyelet had made it here.
Every lawn has a white picket fence. Every house, a chimney. Every chimney pours clear smoke.
There is not a smudge of toxin in this world.
I breathe in deep, revelling in the sensation of air devoid of Vapour.
Perhaps if Eyelet had made it here, her lungs would have cleared.
I raise a hand to my eye and steer away a tear.
Some of the flying plots feature waterfalls, trickling down over jagged rocks. Others carry azure pool-like ponds, fat with fish that jump in the heat of the day.
And above it all, shines a golden sun.
An honest to goodness, golden sun.
Eyelet was right. It was hiding just beyond the cloud cover.
I turn my face upward and bask in its warmth. I’d long forgotten how that felt. Against the sun’s golden hue, the ravens play, filling the air with their voices.
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