Aurora

by Julie Bertagna

  ‘His real name is David Stone,’ says Mara.

  ‘And he doesn’t even know I exist?’

  Lily scrubs away angry tears.

  ‘It was the last thing I told him,’ says Mara softly. ‘We lost all contact soon after.’

  ‘When Tuck stole the globe,’ Lily adds curtly. ‘Wing told me. But who was Tuck?’

  ‘A young gypsea pirate who landed up with us in Ilira, on the other side of the mountains. He was all alone in the world. I thought he was my friend. Ilira was a brutal place. We had to escape. He came through the mountains with us. There was a landslide. The mountain crashed down on Tuck and he had the globe . . .’ Mara pauses. ‘I – I’d caused a great wreckage in his life. I didn’t mean to. So maybe we’re quits.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’ Lily presses her. ‘What did you do?’

  Mara shakes her head, doesn’t answer that.

  ‘The globe,’ says Lily slowly, frowning, ‘is buried somewhere in the mountains.’

  ‘It’s gone, Lily.’

  ‘How did it work?’ Lily persists. ‘What did the globe do?’

  ‘It was my connection to the Weave – the virtual network of those old twenty-first-century computers.’

  ‘The stories you told me about the Weave when I was little – that was all real?’ Lily is amazed.

  ‘When the great floods came,’ Mara explains, ‘life changed all across the Earth. People abandoned the old technology – they were fighting to survive. The Weave was left forgotten in the ether, but it’s still there. The ruins of a cyber-universe . . . wrecked boulevards and Weave towers, crammed full of – oh, everything that ever existed in the drowned world. All sparking and glittering. So beautiful. I wish you could see it, Lily.’

  ‘The Fox you met in the Weave,’ Lily remembers. ‘Was that . . . him?’

  Mara’s eyes grow darker, softer.

  ‘See, I did tell you about him,’ she says, ‘in a way. The Weave was our special place. No one else went there any more,’ Mara’s face burns with the memory, ‘except Fox.’

  Lily feels shot with envy as she looks out at the emptiness of Lake Longhope, at the vast enclosure of mountains, and thinks of her small, suffocating life in the summer tree huts and winter earth burrows of Candlewood. What incredible adventures her mother has had . . .

  ‘So much happened, so fast,’ says Mara, unconsciously echoing Lily’s thoughts. ‘Every day was a fight to survive. All Fox knows is that we reached the top of the world. He doesn’t know if we survived.’ Mara hesitates. ‘I don’t know if he did. I’m sorry, Lily.’

  ‘You’re sorry?’

  Lily stands up. The whole world has turned on its head. Her father is not her real father. Ships are sailing across the sky.

  Now, the sky ships seem like a signal from the world of her unknown father.

  ‘What does he look like?’ Lily asks, needing to know about him, hungry for more.

  Mara meets her daughter’s untamed eyes, a fiery dreamer’s eyes, darkened now with hurt, in a soft, intense face amid a tousle of tawny hair.

  ‘You,’ says Mara simply.

  Lily feels like one of the steaming hot geysers that burst up between the rocks by the lake. She can’t contain the emotions boiling inside. She abandons Mara by the lakeside and races like a fury through Candlewood’s trees. Everyone has lied to her about who she really is.

  She will find her Fox father. Somehow she will.

  And they’ll all be sorry they’ve lied to her – once she’s gone.

  THE NETHERWORLD QUEEN

  The lagoon shudders. The rumbling of engines fills the netherworld and shadows loom in the waters as huge vessels pass overhead.

  For many days now, the tops of the sky towers have been busy with airships.

  Fox and Pandora paddle their canoe from its anchorage in the flooded undercroft below the museum, through waterlogged archways, to the broken bridge. Wading though a seaweed swamp that throbs with saltwater salamanders, newts and frogs, they clamber over the rusted shell of an ancient land vessel called a bus and scramble up the steep limb that reaches up out of the netherworld sea.

  At the top of the broken bridge Fox unhooks a telescope from his belt and focuses on the activity around an airship just landed on a tower above.

  ‘Building materials, equipment, crew,’ he murmurs.

  ‘All heading North,’ Pandora adds, squinting up as a slat of sun breaks through the sky tunnels and the tiara she wears on her tangled head bursts into diamond fire.

  ‘The Arctic pirates were right,’ says Fox.

  Radio chatter on the soundwaves between the Arctic pirate ships say that the empire’s airships have begun to invade the Northlands.

  ‘My Surgents were right too,’ Pandora reminds him.

  In virtual gatherings in the electronic wastes of the Weave, Pandora relays Fox’s plans and readies the troops of secret Surgents – rebels within the sky cities, drawn to the revolution by lures planted all across the cyber-universe that draw in daredevil, questing minds. The secret Surgents have backed the Arctic pirates’ radio reports. The sky empire plans to conquer the Northlands, say the rebel insiders, once the long darkness of winter is at an end. The fleets of airships now loading up and taking off from the sky towers are heading to the new continent to build empire settlements there.

  Fox’s face darkened when Pandora told him what the empire means to call the land once known as Greenland, though it was, in past times, a vast whiteness of polar ice.

  Caledon.

  It’s the name of the grandfather who founded the world Fox has set his whole existence against.

  The vast island that’s emerged from the ice is now greening, with rich sweeps and plateaux of summer pastures, the Arctic pirates say; most of it undiscovered still by the small populations living in the North.

  Green, fertile farmland is what the sky empire seeks, as the numbers in the sky cities soar and the ocean food farms struggle to feed so many. The vast mountain ranges are rich in the metals, minerals and fuels the empire needs to launch its Stellarka project, a long-abandoned venture to the stars.

  With airships full of young empire builders and their guards headed for the new continent of Caledon, the sky cities of the northern hemisphere are now vulnerable to attack.

  It’s the moment of weakness the Surge has waited for.

  So why, Pandora wonders, is Fox so grim? All day he’s been avoiding her. Now he can’t seem to look her in the eye. Something is wrong.

  He glares up at the giant towers as if he’d like to tear them down with his bare hands. Yet he has always insisted that the cities will not be destroyed in the coming war. It’s the one part of his grandfather’s legacy that makes him proud. The empire must be broken but the towers will stand.

  Miracles of natural engineering, each city is powered by sun, wind and waves. Over the years Fox has tracked the changes in his erstwhile home, as the sky imagineers seemed to bring their city to life. The once-gleaming towers are now crusted with bacteria that’s fed dead matter and breathes in carbon and plankton to make the city a living, growing power source of lumenenergy.

  In the old books in the tower Fox found pictures of ancient standing stones, built by the earliest peoples of the Earth; uncanny images of the cities that now stud the world’s oceans. As daylight fades to night and the sky city glows with the same luminous phosphoresence as the underwater ruins, the great towers seem ever more like timeless monoliths of the Earth.

  Pandora reaches up to touch Fox’s face. He has shaved off the tawny beard that keeps him warm in winter. His bare face is much younger, though tiredness shadows his eyes. He was up all night again, checking out the radio links. He smiles absently at her touch, still avoiding her gaze.

  ‘You need to rest. Look.’ Pandora points to the draped fishing nets that hang from the edge of the bridge, down into the lagoon. ‘The nets are heaving – I’ll dive down and get us a feast!’

  Fox takes Pandora’s hand and strokes the memb
rane of webbing between her fingers with a look in his eyes so strange it sends a tremble through the girl.

  ‘I’m sorry, Pan,’ he murmurs.

  ‘Sorry? What for?’

  Fox has always touched her webbed fingers and feet and the delicate gills in the back of her neck with a gentle reverence and wonder. He’s envious of her water skills and of her sleek, downy skin that keeps her warm in winter. Now, there is something quite different in his face. Pity? Shame?

  Pandora draws her hand away.

  ‘There’s something I need to tell you. Something I’ve suspected for a while,’ says Fox. ‘Now I’ve found out for sure.’

  ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

  He scratches at an infected insect bite on his neck, nervy and grim.

  ‘The sky people made you,’ he says reluctantly. ‘The people of my grandfather’s time.’

  ‘Made me? What do you mean?’

  ‘The empire made you what you are.’

  At last he faces her and Pandora tries to read the strange darkness in his eyes. She has never understood what she is. She has raked through the books in the tower, peered into all the aged biological freaks and experiments that float like ghouls in glass bottles in one of the museum halls, yet nowhere has she found a hint of another human like herself.

  ‘What am I?’ she asks blankly.

  ‘You’re beautiful,’ says Fox.

  Pandora looks down at her hands and spans her fingers wide. The membrane of webbing is like the waxy wings of a moonmoth. Her skin is velvety in the netherlight, the gills on the back of her neck soft as feathers.

  ‘Am I the only one?’

  But there were others; of course there were. The netherworld urchins who escaped North in the ships had the same seaworthy skin, the same webbed fingers and feet.

  Fox turns away with a murmur she can’t catch but Pandora glimpsed his shamed expression, saw in it the awful truth he is trying to hide: what was once beautiful to him is now tainted, forever changed.

  Pandora grabs Fox’s hand, feels it warm and clammy in her cool-blooded fingers. All of a sudden she is acutely aware of all the amphibian life at their feet; it makes a moving carpet of the seaweedy bridge.

  ‘Tell me what I am,’ she pleads.

  Fox looks into her distraught green eyes. Deliberately, gently, as if to erase his shameful feelings, he raises her hand to his mouth and kisses it.

  ‘You are a wonder. A new kind of human made to survive in a flooded world. But the world didn’t like what the scientists created.’

  The sun slips behind a sky tower and the netherworld plunges into gloom.

  ‘Go on,’ whispers Pandora.

  ‘So the empire decided to erase its Amphibian Experiment.’

  Pandora absorbs the brutal meaning of it all.

  ‘I am an experiment they didn’t like. What do you mean, erase . . . ? Kill us all?’

  Fox nods.

  ‘But there were renegade scientists,’ he continues, ‘who couldn’t bring themselves to destroy the life they’d made. Your parents must have been among the ones those rebel scientists set free. But the outside world drove them away too. They were hunted down, but they hid their children wherever they could. Under the bridges, in the netherworld . . .’

  ‘Then they didn’t abandon me?’

  Fox squeezes her hand. ‘Somehow, they saved you. They did all they could to make sure you lived. There’s no greater love than that, Pan.’

  Pandora’s world seems to turn inside out.

  ‘So the boat people,’ she sees, ‘are not my people? They – they hunted my parents? Killed them.’

  ‘Some of the older ones did. The world was full of fear, Pan. The great floods had struck and people were trying to survive. Desperate people can do terrible things.’

  Devastated, Pandora clings to Fox’s hand. And yet, he has gifted her two things she has always longed for: to know who she is and to be truly beloved.

  ‘All this is true? How do you know?’

  ‘I trust the outlaw pockets of the Noos,’ says Fox. ‘The truth of things is hidden there, as it is in the Weave. And this truth came from the renegade scientists, that older generation who never forgot and joined our Surge.’

  Pandora’s mind reels as she tries to take it all in. The Noos – the virtual universe of the empire – is the sizzling energy of millions of computers and human brains. As mysterious to Pandora as the inside of a sky city, the Noos is where the citizens of the empire work and play and dream. She can only try to imagine the wonders of the cities and then stunning cyber-universe from what Fox has told. The twenty-first-century cyber-Weave is hers to roam but he won’t let her near the Noos. Far too much is at stake, he insists, to risk her discovery there.

  The trusty old computer godgem of his youth still connects Fox to his beloved Noos. He slips through its wild undergrowth, teeming virtual jungles of frenetic brilliance, sneaking into renegade pockets where rebels uncover the truths he has set free in the cyber-universe; shameful truths the empire has tried to erase.

  But now she, Pandora, is one of those ugly truths.

  ‘The empire wants to experiment again.’ Fox’s voice is leaden. ‘It wants to engineer humans designed for life in the Far North, for colonizing space – humans who are better engineered for life in the sky cities too.’

  All-powerful the empire might be, but the rebels have said that its people are weakening. Lack of sunlight over generations is causing new deformities and diseases that the ingenuity of the sky scientists cannot seem to solve.

  ‘Some older citizens know what happened with the Amphibian Experiment,’ says Fox, ‘and there’s a spreading horror that it could happen again – and this time the experiment might be with their own descendants, their own flesh and blood.’

  ‘If the empire doesn’t like what the scientists make this time, they’ll kill them too?’ Pandora feels sick.

  ‘And maybe they won’t stop there,’ adds Fox. ‘Maybe they’ll get rid of the sun-sick ones. Or the old ones. Who knows? Those are the seeds of doubt I’ve sown in the Noos and there’s a – a surge of distrust,’ Fox’s troubled eyes lighten, ‘against the Guardians of the empire. I’ve never known it before. Their defences are weak and so is the trust of their people. This is our time. We have to break them, Pan.’ He glances at the city above. ‘And my father has to be broken – he’s behind so much of this.’

  Fox has tracked the activities of his estranged father through the Noos. Mungo Stone, Caledon’s son, has lost the influence he thought was his birthright now that power in the empire has swung East and to younger cities in the southern hemisphere. The City Fathers who ruled the New World under Caledon’s leadership have been replaced by a new generation of Guardians ruthless in their rivalry for power in their sky empire. An early stake in the riches of the North would rekindle Mungo’s fire in his world. My father, says Fox, is a desperate and dangerous man.

  But there are good people in the sky cities too, thinks Pandora. People who didn’t want her kind killed and who don’t want anything like that to happen again.

  Another whale-like darkness moves across the dusky netherworld and engulfs them in its shadow. Pandora shivers, reeling from all that Fox has told her, and he pulls her close.

  ‘It doesn’t change anything, Pan,’ he says, through the thunder of the airship. ‘You’re still you.’

  But everything has changed. Now Pan thinks of the boat people with a wrench inside. Is she to risk her life and fight for people who would see her as a freak to be hunted down? People who drove away her desperate parents or did nothing as they were killed?

  And now she begins to understand why she can never seem to break through Fox’s fond, brotherly affection. She used to think it was the coming war that worried him. Once their battles are all over, she thought, then she would be his true queen in a far greater realm.

  But it wasn’t the risks of war or the netherworld, she now realizes. It was her own self that repelled him and the kin
d of child she might produce. How long has Fox suspected what she is? When he looks at her now, what does he really see? An alien creature? A freakish mistake? So he might be tender and close and tell her she is beautiful, but he will never love her as she wants.

  Not now, not ever.

  Pandora can no longer bear the hopping and slithering creatures on the bridge. Is that what she is? More amphibian than human? She pulls away from Fox so fiercely the tiara jolts from her head. The diamonds once worn by a queen of the drowned world sparkle in the gloom as they fall from the broken bridge and splash into the lagoon. Pandora could easily dive from the bridge and rescue it from the depths of the murky waters but, heartbroken, she lets go her crown.

  What Fox once loved as her strange netherworld beauty is now a deformity, inflicted on her by the empire he hates. When he looks at her now all he sees, she is sure, are the sins of the past he yearns to escape.

  A SCAR FROM OLD TIMES

  Harpoon on her back, knife between her teeth, Mara climbs Wolf Mountain, filled with a murderous rage. Shadows chase her as the sun falls behind the western peaks and she moves fast to outpace them. Darkness is the realm of the wolves.

  Lily hasn’t been seen all day, not since she ran off from the lakeside at dawn. She will have gone tracking with the hunters to cool her head, Mara told herself, trying to keep calm. But as the brief day dimmed and the hunters returned with a trussed deer and a clutch of wild rabbits, there was still no sign of Lily. Mara left the little ones with Rowan, saying she’d search once more around the lake, but knowing in her heart that hurt, headstrong Lily must be with Wing.

  The thin moon is a sharpening blade as Mara climbs towards Scarwell’s cave. None of this would have happened if Scarwell had kept her mouth shut, thinks Mara, tucking herself into a rocky crevice to light the resin-soaked torch she has brought – and just in time too as a growl, almost too low for human ears, menaces the dusk.