Aurora

by Julie Bertagna

  ‘Tuck!’ She rushes forward. ‘It’s me, Mara – Oreon, no!’

  Tuck’s head jerks towards her in the instant he falls hard to the ground. Oreon glances at Mara in confusion, then at the unfired weapon in his hand.

  Tuck lies face down in an awkwardly crumpled heap on the harbour rocks.

  ‘Get up,’ says Oreon, unnerved at the sight of the Pontifix of Ilira sprawled at his feet. ‘There’s no need to beg – your life will be spared. My brother doesn’t want you dead; but he won’t allow you to steal his power. Work with us, Tuck. A great man like you shouldn’t be my brother’s prisoner but that’s what will happen if we can’t agree.’ Oreon’s warrior facade breaks again to reveal an awestruck and eager young scholar. ‘I want to learn from you!’

  Mara struggles in the grip of a guard.

  ‘He’s not begging you for his life,’ she shouts at Oreon. ‘Can’t you see?’

  With a shaking hand Mara points to the blade that has ripped through Tuck’s windwrap and protrudes from his back like a silver fin.

  ‘He fell on his cutlass!’

  Mara tears free of the guard and runs over to Tuck.

  He lies with his face twisted towards her. His wide-open eyes are glassy as watch-faces and the flickering reflections of the burning ship seem to flash the hour, the minute, the very last seconds of his life. Mara pushes away the moon-pale hair from Tuck’s face, feels his neck for a pulse. She puts her mouth to his ear.

  ‘Hey, gypsea,’ she whispers.

  ‘Mara,’ Tuck murmurs. ‘Getting dark now.’

  And he is gone.

  Mara cannot believe it. All these years she thought he was dead, she couldn’t bear to think of him, though some nights he’d steal into her dreams and she’d wake full of desolation, plunged back into that searing moment of betrayal when he vanished into the mountain with her globe. Now, she lays her head against his, overcome once again by a furious sense of loss.

  ‘He always took whatever he wanted.’ Mara raises her head to look up at Oreon. ‘He took his life from you so he could keep it as his own.’

  Oreon’s shocked silence shatters. He drops down on his knees beside Mara with an anguished cry, transfixed by the deathly silver fin in Tuck’s back.

  ‘My brother wants him alive. I want him alive! There are things only he knows. The secrets of the globe . . .’

  He looks at Tuck in horror, as if he has let a precious relic slip through his fingers and smash on the ground.

  Shaking, Mara seizes her chance.

  ‘The globe is mine,’ she tells Oreon. ‘Tuck stole it from me years ago. I know all its secrets. I know who the Midnight Storyteller is. I know where he must be. I know about the sky cities too. I’ve been inside one.’

  Oreon drags his eyes from Tuck’s body to Mara.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll tell you everything,’ Mara persists. ‘Things a scholar of the world should know, secrets that can help your brother’s war – but only if you help me find my daughter. She’s being held here somewhere . . .’

  A hot wind blasts across the harbour as fire rips through the Great Skua’s masts. In the light of the blaze Mara finds what she seeks.

  The solitary figure of a girl is running along the deck of the ship.

  Mara screams. It’s a scream to kill the moment, to stop it happening, as a flaming branch of the masts droops, breaks and slowly tumbles towards the girl with fox-fire hair.

  SURGE

  I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars

  To earn you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house, that your eyes might be shining for me

  When we came.

  T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia)

  CREEP TO THE SKY

  ‘Pan!’

  Fox digs a paddle into the sludgy water of the netherworld sea and heads his canoe towards the broken bridge. The dark path left in his wake lasts a bare moment before the parted green slime slides back so seamlessly it might have lain undisturbed for a thousand years.

  Phosphorescence glimmers on the sky towers, sending a magical glow across the netherworld. Somehow everything seems possible at twilight.

  Pandora is skateboarding down the great severed arm of the bridge. She skids around a wrecked bus towards a rusted pile-up of traffic near the waterline where the bridge collapsed long ago. The ancient wreckage seems to come alive as she races towards it. A nest of baby swamp dragons, their coppery-green scales in camouflage with the slimy rust heaps, scuttle out. They raise snouts to the sky. Their jaws open. Hungry eyes gleam at Pandora’s approach.

  The tiniest wrong move, a mistimed twitch of a muscle or a moment’s lapse of will and she is supper for a family of swamp dragons. Fox holds his breath, and his tongue.

  Pan flips the skateboard with a slam of her heel and somersaults over the heads of the reptiles to land neatly on her feet on the crushed shell of a car. She catches the skateboard deftly before slamming it down on a sly dragon snout that pokes from the car’s empty windscreen.

  ‘See me? See that!’

  Her yell of delight ricochets off the trunks of the sky towers and echoes across the netherworld.

  ‘Beautiful,’ Fox shouts back.

  And she is beautiful, standing on the wrecked car like a warrior queen on a battered chariot. Her armoured tunic, made from the bronze scales of an animal called a pangolin, belonged to a Japanese samurai of ages past. She is even wearing a golden crown. Pan has prepared for war as if it’s a game, practising daredevil tricks and weapon skills, forever rummaging in the museum for the perfect battle costume and weapons belt.

  ‘Kitsune says go,’ shouts Fox. ‘Right away. They’re about to blast the walls!’

  Pandora whoops and jumps back on to the skateboard, outwitting the swamp dragons again. At the edge of the broken bridge she skids to a halt to meet the canoe.

  Fox stares at her.

  ‘Where’s all your hair?’

  The soft crown on her head is a cluster of curls. The long, tangled mass is gone.

  ‘Chopped it off,’ says Pan. ‘Can’t go to war tripping over my hair.’

  She looks, thinks Fox, like the Botticelli angel in the painting he found caked in mud, as he once found Pan herself.

  The helmet and weapons hooked on to her belt clang against her pangolin armour as she jumps into the canoe and sits facing him, flushed and ready. Fox ruffles her sweaty curls – then remembers her betrayal and his hand stiffens on her head. His heart and his mind are burning. What he discovered last night in the Weave has changed the world for him.

  ‘Ready?’ he says, trying to focus on the moment.

  Pan straps the skateboard on her back and checks the lethal armoury of small weapons hooked on her belt. The little brass bugle is strung on a rope around her neck.

  ‘I was ready moons ago,’ she retorts, and points to a sinister ripple in the water. ‘Dragon!’

  Fox digs his paddle into the murky sea and speeds the canoe through the forest of towers that have begun to sparkle with lumenergy, as if the dusk has sprinkled them with frost. He stops at one of the spots where giant swamp creepers climb out of the water into the spiregyres – the air chutes that coil down the sides of the towers, expelling stale air from the sky city into the netherworld, like great lungs.

  Nature has forced its way up into the city and no one has noticed.

  Fox cranes his neck to map a path up the strongest limbs of the creeper then hauls himself on to the first branch.

  ‘Come on!’ he urges Pan, who is staring at the city walls.

  ‘I want to see the walls come down!’

  ‘It’s not a game, Pan. Climb!’

  Fox’s nerves are strained to breakpoint. He rains a ferocious stream of curses down on Pan’s head and she grips the creeper, staring up at him with a look that makes him take a steadying breath. She knows nothing of the world. Now that the world is bursting in, of course she wants to see.

  ‘Wait
till we get into the spiregyres,’ he urges.

  ‘Just one bomb,’ Pan pleads.

  Her wish is granted as light splashes across the dark water and a thunderous noise fills the netherworld.

  ‘Get above the waves!’ Fox yells.

  His ears pop. His heart booms. His skin prickles as the blast from explosion after explosion washes over him and bombs tear holes in the night. He takes a stunned second to look back down at the netherworld and sees ragged gaps in the city wall, as if giant fists have punched through.

  The ocean crashes in with a roar. Waves break against the towers, soaking him in great thrashes of sea. His eyes sting, he can’t see.

  Where’s Pan?

  Fox shakes saltwater from his face. But there she is, clinging to the creeper below. Is she high enough to be safe from the surge?

  ‘Hold tight!’ he yells down.

  She looks up, face dripping, eyes full of sea. The incoming ocean is too loud for him to hear the sobbed words on her mouth. She points across the water and in the flash of an explosion, he sees.

  The old tower has crumpled and fallen to its knees. The huge cone of the spire tilts forward then breaks off the tower with a death-moan. The spire splinters into pieces and crashes into the water as if made of twigs, not ancient stone.

  Sea rushes upon the fallen tower and raids it. A torrent of books spills into the netherworld. The surge reaches deeper into the museum halls and drags out a motley wreckage of paintings, an exodus of stuffed animals, suits of armour and dinosaur bones. The bright tunics from the Chinese room swirl like water lilies on the seething waves.

  Pandora begins to climb furiously now, rushing away from the terrible wreckage of their home. Fox lets her go ahead. Her face tells him what’s wrong. Her imagined fantasy of war has been trashed by ferocious reality.

  They climb until Fox’s head crunches into Pandora’s feet. She has come to a sudden halt above him.

  Fox reaches out and touches the only part of her he can reach – her foot.

  ‘Steady now, Pan. We’ve got allies in the city, remember. We’ll get through. There’s a new life ahead.’

  ‘Where?’ Pan demands. ‘With me or with her?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You know who,’ Pan hisses. ‘The Lily girl.’

  Fox stares at Pan’s long, webbed toes as they curl around the creeper stem. What happened last night in the Weave still seems like a dream. There’s been barely a moment to think about it but there will be time a-plenty in the long climb ahead.

  Pan is scrambling up the creeper again.

  ‘You said they were dead,’ she cries over her shoulder. ‘But I saw you in the Weave. I followed you. I saw you on the bridge with her and I heard what you said. You’re going to dump me in the city and go North for them.’

  Fox slips on a slimy limb of creeper. He clutches at the sinewy branches with a yell, unable to get a grip. Pan’s heel juts in his face and he grasps hold of it, steadying himself as he looks up at the girl’s hurt, furious face.

  ‘I said our connection was dead. I thought they might be. There’s been no time to talk since –’ He secures himself on the creeper. ‘But you’ve had time, Pan. When were you going to tell me? You found my daughter, Lily, in the Weave, didn’t you? My daughter. Yet you never breathed a word.’

  Sirens scream. Flashlights sweep the sea below them. Sky patrols are swarming down from the towers. Gunners on skybikes let rip on the mass of vessels from the boat camp that are now surging through the bombed walls.

  Light strikes their tower. An angry buzz fills the night as sky patrols drop from above.

  ‘Into the spiregyres!’ Fox yells. ‘Quick!’

  Startled owls flap in their faces. A dark rush of bats and reptiles scatter in fright as he and Pan scramble up into the shelter of the air chute. Once out of the reach of the searchlights, they pause for breath. Fox wipes the sweat from his face, emotions colliding as he watches the invasion of the netherworld.

  Leaves shred and scatter as Pan slithers past him. Horrified, he sees she’s let go of the creeper.

  ‘No!’

  Fox lunges for her. Clinging to the creeper with one arm, he grabs her round the waist. The pangolin scales cut into his hands but he grips her tight.

  ‘You don’t love me,’ she whispers. ‘You lied. You want Mara and the Lily girl.’

  ‘We’ve come this far together, Pan,’ he says gently, feeling all her hurt and fear as she trembles against him. Whatever she did, what does it matter now? ‘Don’t give up when we’re so close.’

  She buries her head in his neck. ‘I want to stay close.’

  He meant so close to our goal, but never mind.

  ‘Come on then,’ Fox urges. ‘Let’s go.’

  The world below explodes into war as they climb inside the dark jungle that tunnels up to the city in the sky.

  DISTURBING THE ETHER

  Just hours before, escaping the seething panic of the Noos, Fox had surfed across the empty blue static of the Nowhere to the forlorn edges of the electronic universe where the virtual ruins of the Weave lie.

  It was to be his last-ever visit to the place he’d bequeathed to Pandora. Since she’d taken over Surgent meetings in the Weave, freeing him to fire up revolution in the Noos and the world’s soundwaves, he’d had no reason or desire to go there. A final gathering of the avatars of Surgent leaders from all across the Earth had brought him back, at last.

  No one knew if they’d survive what lay ahead. As they gathered in the wasteland behind the Boulevard of Dreams, a scream tore through the ether like an omen of the battle to come. Fox saw what looked like a flame of his own fox tail streaking through the Weave-sky. No sooner had he glimpsed it than it was gone. The boulevards were checked but no threat or snooping presences were found. Fox urged his Surgents to keep strong and true in their hearts and the meeting broke up in a sombre, determined mood.

  His life might end in a matter of days or hours. So Fox reckoned it was time to say goodbye to the past, once and for all. In the guise of the very same fox avatar of his youth, he roamed old haunts in the electronic boulevards, his wanderings ending where they always did, once upon a time.

  But when he padded on to the broken Bridge to Nowhere his cybersenses tingled. Someone else had been here, recently. The disturbance left in the ether was like fresh footprints in dust.

  Pan liked to snoop, he knew that, but her snaky presence left barely a trace. These were not Pan’s slithering Weave-tracks nor the furtive stalkings of a rogue presence. Neither was there the litter of rotting data the creatures of the junk heaps always left in their wake. These cybertracks were frantic, circling and back-tracking, treading this way and that across the broken bridge. Yet the guard he’d left here years ago, a fox twin on a neverending bridge-watch waiting for Mara if she ever came back, had not sounded its alarm.

  He found the fox guard muzzled and useless, hidden under ether dust so thick he knew the creature hadn’t stirred in years. Who had muzzled it and put it to sleep? Pan? A rogue Surgent? How long had it been silenced? How many years . . . ? If Mara had ever come here looking for him, he realized with a sick jolt, he’d never know now.

  Fox unmuzzled his fox twin and awakened it from its enforced slumber. Back in realworld, suddenly exhausted in body and mind, Fox flopped down on his pulpy bed in the tower room and fell into a blank sleep of his own.

  Jolted awake into throbbing darkness he couldn’t tell if he’d slept minutes or months. He’d fallen asleep with his godgem on and woke up still on the Bridge to Nowhere at the edges of the Weave. The fox guard was on its feet yipping and yapping at the avatar of a girl scrambling across the rubble to clamber up on to the broken bridge arm. As she spied the two foxes on the bridge she stumbled to a halt.

  Fox silenced his yapping bridge-guard. In realworld, he could barely breathe. The skin of his human body prickled with shock. The name formed on his lips but it couldn’t be . . .

  ‘Mara?’

  The girl
was trembling so hard the ether rippled around her.

  ‘I – I’m not Mara.’

  Her voice was as incredulous as his own.

  It was not Mara. He saw that after the first shock passed. Yet, there was something about the girl’s intense gaze and burning presence, that was . . .

  ‘Who are you?’ Fox demanded, all his Weave-senses super-charged.

  ‘I’m Lily,’ she replied with a gasping cry. ‘I thought I’d never find you.’

  Fox stared harder and padded towards her until they were a footstep apart. She watched his every move with wide, fiery eyes.

  ‘Once upon a time there was a fox,’ she said, quick and breathless, ‘who liked to sneak through the ruins of a beautiful, broken world on to the Bridge to Nowhere. My mother used to tell this tale when I was small.’

  ‘Who,’ Fox whispered, ‘is your mother?’

  ‘Mara,’ said the girl.

  Reality seemed to bend and crumple. The eyes that stared back at him were, he now saw, a mirror of his own.

  ‘You are Fox?’ It was a desperate plea. ‘My mother’s Fox?’

  ‘I am Fox,’ he replied.

  ‘Then – then you’re my father,’ she said, her tentative young voice reaching out to him across a footstep of cyberspace, an ocean of lost time.

  It was the violent tug of her voice on his heart that made him believe beyond doubt.

  Back in realworld, Fox whispered a Weave spell into the godgem, while on the broken bridge . . .

  A tiny tornado began to whirl around the cyberfox. He was breaking up, vanishing before Lily’s horrified eyes.

  ‘No!’ A cry tore from her. ‘Please don’t go!’

  Unable to breathe, she could only watch as the cyberswirl slowed and the electronic matter rearranged and settled into the shape of . . . a man. A man who was a stranger – yet he belonged to her, she knew that right away. His face was so like the one she has studied in the cracked mirror inside the lid of Granny Mary’s wooden box: her own.