by Rayner Ye
“I looked for shade,” her carrier said. “But even the pyramid’s not casting any at this height of the day.”
“How about the pyramid itself?” Gus asked.
“Can’t you remember how baking hot it was in there when we came out?” Aedre asked. “That amethyst doesn’t cool it down as stone would.”
Gus nodded and sniffed, then wiped away his remaining tears with the heel of his hand.
“Been crying?” someone asked Gus.
Gus nodded and put an arm around his mum.
“What’s your story?”
Gus sighed and looked at his feet. “Someone told us my ba died in the eruption.” His mother broke down again. He squeezed her closer.
Aedre swallowed. Had Somare really died?
“Also,” Gus continued, “my fiancé died in the tsunami. I just talked to her brother. Said her room caved in from a tremor before the water came and drowned her.”
“I’m so sorry,” Aedre said.
The man who’d asked Gus patted Gus’s back. “Yeah, I’m sorry too, Bro.”
“Can we go back to the pyramid in Giok?” Gus asked Aedre. “Then we can do it again, but go to a different time in the future.”
“But there’s sky infrastructure,” Aedre said.
Gus followed her gaze to the sky. His jaw dropped. “So there is.”
Aedre’s carrier sat beside her and the elderly woman. “I don’t get why they want to live in the sky and not on land.”
“For the same reasons as Markaz and Nerthus,” Aedre said. “To sustain wildlife.”
Gus frowned at the horizon. “Can we try it? Just you and me and Ma?”
“Okay.”
Gus carried Aedre back into the pyramid, and his mum followed. He lowered Aedre in front of the altar, as Akachi had.
She blinked. Akachi. Did he survive? Or did his body lay in ashes?
She searched the memories Roobish had left her regarding how to enter a portal without a key to get back to the one she’d left. She and Bamdar had returned to the pyramid in central Rajanakki so many times from Eeporyo this way. “Put my hand over the empty keyhole.” Gus placed her hand on the amethyst block, its star indentation beneath her palm. “Please take us back the way we came.”
Her head pounded. She moaned. “It’s bad enough not being able to move or feel or touch. Someone must’ve taken the key out of the pyramid in Giok. Maybe Akachi.”
“Unless the reason's that you’re paralysed,” Gus said. “Let me try.” He leaned over her to repeat the process. Nothing.
“We must get up there.” His mum pointed to the pyramid’s ceiling.
“The sky structure?” Aedre asked.
She nodded.
“But if we do, and someone questions us, where will we say we’re from?”
“Down here.” She pointed to the forest through the pyramid’s entrance.
“Not the past?” Aedre asked
“No way.” Gus strained as he picked her up again. “You wouldn’t tell them that, would you, Ma?”
“Of course not. They’d put me in a mental hospital. I’d say I was born in a tribe.”
They carried Aedre out of the pyramid and into the bright light.
“They’d ask how you could speak the language,” Aedre said.
“I’d say my mother taught me,” Gus’s mum said. “Their own language has probably changed after two-hundred years. Expect they’d be fascinated by the reintroduction of an extinct language. We could say we’re the descendants of the survivors.”
A young man from a group sitting in a circle twisted around. “There are many incapable of travelling on foot. We don’t have roads or wheels, so we’ll set up camp first and make weapons for hunting and defending.”
Some people in the circle shuffled around to make space for the three of them, and they lowered Aedre down and sat propping her up from behind.
“So,” a fat woman said to Aedre, “you’re the Noctar.”
“I’d prefer not to be called that. It’s hurtful.”
She laughed. “Hurtful? I don’t mean it in a bad way. We have nothing against Noctars.”
“I don’t want to be called it, alright? I have a name, like everyone else. My name’s Aedre.”
The woman looked away and smiled a goofy grin at a few other hags, who made long faces and peered at her.
“As I was saying,” the young man continued. “Once camp is set up, wounds attended to, mouths fed, and water organised, then groups of us will search for lifts into the sky.”
“Even if I weren’t paralysed, I wouldn’t look for a lift,” Aedre said. “That sky structure seems to be pinned to the sky.”
“There might be lifts,” the man said.
“I have a quicker way of finding out,” Aedre said. “If anyone’s prepared to take me to Haunted River when it next rains.”
She glanced at the red gem on her ring. She could explore the sky city by river and rain travel. She could do a lot to help these people.
A group of men climbed onto the clearing with coconuts, bananas, bamboo shoots, and roots.
“Did you find water?” the mouthy fat woman hollered.
The men looked at one another, dread on their expressions.
“You won’t believe it when we tell you.” The man from the expedition approached the circle. “Haunted River has been blocked by Biluglass.”
Aedre went dizzy and took a shaky breath. “How?”
“There’s a tunnel of Biluglass encircling the entire river, all the way down.”
“Even the spring’s impossible to gather water from,” his friend said.
“Who did that?” someone asked.
Gus’s mum pointed up. “The people in the sky.”
The End
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