Aurora

by Julie Bertagna

  ‘Your Surgents? We are your people. In the name of Caledon!’ The words burst like a curse and Mungo sweeps his arm around the room in a grand gesture, as if he stands on a mountain top with all the world before him. ‘This was yours to inherit – why do you want to destroy it? And me?’

  ‘I don’t want to destroy,’ says Fox. ‘I want the sea-broken people to reclaim their share of the world. The empire blocks us. You block us. You can choose to stand aside and we’ll call off our Surge. Listen to me, Dad. There isn’t much time.’

  A SON DEAD AND FOUND

  ‘You’re declaring war on the empire your own grandfather created?’ Mungo paces the room. ‘These cities saved a generation from the floods. We house millions of happy, productive citizens. We can’t look after everyone. You would ruin all those lives just to share out the misery? Wreck the future of our innocent children? Kill your own people?’

  ‘There are millions of innocents abandoned in the world outside,’ Fox counters. ‘Aren’t they our people too? I don’t want to wreck or ruin or kill. I want—’

  ‘You’re bombing us!’

  ‘We’re bombing the walls and the entrances to the towers. Not the people.’ Make war on places not people: a crucial pillar of wisdom for the Surge. ‘I’m not asking you to house the refugees,’ he tells his father. ‘Just let them have the high lands of the world. Let them live.’

  ‘It took two generations of the best human minds to create this empire,’ Mungo rages. ‘Blow it all up then – let’s all live in boats!’

  He never could listen, Fox remembers. His temper always got in the way.

  Mungo stops his furious pacing. ‘You ran away from your destiny, David.’

  ‘I’ll decide what my destiny is,’ Fox growls back.

  ‘So tell me about that? What land of future will there be after you ruin our world?’

  ‘The planet does not belong to the empire,’ says Fox. ‘It belongs to all the people of the Earth. Share it with us, Dad.’ He pauses, feels a bead of sweat trickle down his neck. ‘It belongs to your granddaughter too.’

  Mungo Stone blinks. ‘Granddaughter?’

  Fox hears a soft cry behind him. He spins around. An elegant woman dressed in the silken finery only afforded by the ruling powers of the empire stands just inside the doorway with a guard on either side. Her face is a faded version of the image Fox has burrowed away in his memory.

  ‘Security – at last,’ Mungo rasps. ‘This intruder is armed – deal with him fast. Sarah, my love, stand back.’ He glares at the unresponsive guards. ‘What are you waiting for? Stun him!’

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ the female guard replies, ‘but we will stun you if necessary.’

  The male guard turns to Fox with an awestruck expression. ‘Steerpike sent us. The Surge has broken all across the city and the Guardians don’t know which citizens and guards are loyal and which are not. The boat people are now in the towers . . .’ He pauses breathlessly as Fox – his eyes fixed on the silver-haired woman brought by the guards – does not reply. ‘Er, what do you want us to do here, Surgent Fox?’

  ‘Take my wife away,’ Mungo Stone cuts in, but his voice has lost power. ‘Sarah, go back to the apartment. I’ll deal with this.’

  ‘They said my son was here,’ says Sarah. Her hands are clasped together, the knuckles white.

  Her eyes meet Fox’s across the space of the room. It feels to him as if they stare at each other down a long tunnel of time.

  ‘David,’ she whispers. ‘Is it really you?’

  DREAMERS OF THE DAY

  ‘It’s me,’ he replies softly.

  His mother takes three quick steps towards him then stops an arm’s length away. She studies his face, a world of emotion in her eyes. She takes another step as if to embrace him then stops, shaking her head in disbelief, glancing from son to husband and back.

  ‘What’s happening? I don’t understand.’

  ‘There isn’t much time . . .’ Fox begins.

  ‘You won’t upset her with your madness,’ says Mungo. ‘Sarah, we don’t even know if it’s really him.’

  ‘I know my own son,’ Sarah retorts. ‘Let him speak.’

  In the gaze of her fiery, commanding eyes Fox tries to spill out the story of his missing years. Yet as he speaks he is overcome by despair. Coming here was all wrong. What is he trying to do? Make them see the world as he sees it? His father is a lost cause and his mother seems to look at him through a haze of bewildered anger and hurt. How can he make her understand the enormity of things in a few, rushed moments, amid this welter of pain?

  He has been so stupid. This was never part of the original plan. He has risked his chance to escape because of a ridiculous fantasy of a happy-ever-after ending to the wreckage of his own life. Finding Lily brought a sudden urge to mend his broken family, just as he is trying to fix a sea-broken world.

  ‘But I know this story!’ His mother puts a quivering hand on his arm. ‘It’s what happened to Mara in Exodus.’

  ‘You listen to the Midnight Storyteller?’ Fox is stunned because that’s the only way she can possibly know.

  ‘That was outlawed,’ Mungo interjects. ‘Years ago.’

  His mother, Fox realizes, is grasping towards understanding while his father has shut down his mind.

  ‘You are the Midnight Storyteller who lives in the crumbling tower?’ Sarah is now oblivious to the bombs and her blustering husband. ‘I thought he was just a Nooscreation. I never imagined he was real.’

  Fox nods as his amazed mother tries to absorb the reality of her resurrected son.

  ‘Beowulf, Brave New World, The Time Machine, Gormenghast, Wuthering Heights, The Tempest, Frankenstein, Gulliver’s Travels, The Grapes of Wrath, War and Peace.’ She reels off so many of the magnificent stories he has told. ‘But the story of Mara,’ she remembers, ‘has no ending. You said that the ending is to be made by the people of the world – by us?’

  Fox nods again, holding his mother’s searching gaze.

  ‘It’s all true? Then Exodus is your story too. And this Mara,’ she whispers, full of wonder, ‘is the mother of – of my own grandchild? She set sail on the oceans to search for a new home for her child and her people at the top of the world, while Fox . . .’ She pauses, understanding now.

  ‘You,’ Fox urges his mother, ‘can decide the ending for your granddaughter, right now.’ He looks up at the lumen star constellations in the domed ceiling above. ‘You people, you own the oceans, you want to colonize the stars, everything. Can’t you spare the Northlands for your granddaughter? Let that be a land for all the people. Leave the high lands of the world for the flood refugees – help them settle there.’

  ‘If there is a granddaughter, she should be here safe with us,’ Mungo declares.

  ‘Safe?’ Sarah replies scornfully as yet another explosion rocks the city. ‘Does this feel safe?’

  ‘Put a stop to this, David,’ Mungo persists. ‘We’ll bring the child and her mother here. The colonization of the North is necessary. You can’t stop us, so why not work with us?’ he cajoles. ‘Let’s see what we can do together! This world can still be yours.’

  It was his original plan. Take control of the city and transform the empire from within. And a chance to do that is being offered to him by his father. But as he looks into Mungo’s cunning eyes and hears the slippery promise his father is trying to bribe him with, Fox seems to see his future self when his bold dreams have been fretted and frayed and diminished, his one chance to unlock the future held hostage in this moment. He doesn’t trust a word.

  ‘I don’t want your world,’ Fox decides. ‘Not this way. I want something better.’

  ‘I won’t let you destroy us,’ his father warns.

  Something is unravelling in Mungo. Fox sees it in a pulsing vein at his temple, in a spasm of his face. His father’s whole existence has been built on a blind madness for power. It’s all he knows, thinks Fox, and he will not let anything or anyone stand in his way.

 
; ‘My true son,’ Mungo Stone mutters, ‘is dead.’

  The shot comes before Fox can react. A sword of light that blasts the young guards then knocks him flat on his back as his hand reaches for his gun. He hears his mother scream.

  He is in agony. The shoulder of his armoured jacket is melted and warped. The flesh underneath is a burned and bloodied mess. But the ancient armour has absorbed the worst of the laser blast. He’d be dead otherwise.

  He raises his dazed head from the ground. Mungo stares down at him, a man lost in his own nightmare.

  He aimed for my heart, thinks Fox.

  In the blaze of pain that engulfs him, Fox seems to feel all that his father and the empire have cost him. It’s the emptiest, most searing moment of his life. Fox has no thoughts at all as he draws his own gun . . .

  Only to find it blasted out of his hand – by his mother, who in the same smooth second turns her gun on her husband.

  Mungo falls to the ground.

  ‘On your feet.’

  Sarah pulls Fox upright. All her gentleness is gone.

  ‘What kind of people are you?’ he says through gritted teeth. His shoulder feels on fire, his hand and mind are numb.

  ‘Not the kind who would let my husband and son kill each other,’ his mother replies in a voice as harsh as his own.

  Fox looks down at the gun she blasted from his hand. Not a stun gun but a laser. He would have killed his father had he shot back.

  Sarah drops to her knees beside Mungo.

  ‘According to his pulse he’s alive. Though I’m not sure,’ she says, harsh and dry, ‘that he has a heart. He’s badly stunned but otherwise conscious. He will survive. But will you?’ She glances at her son with an unreadable expression and motions to the door with her gun. ‘Come with me.’

  She walks towards the door of the chamber, stopping to check the rogue guards.

  ‘Dead.’ She turns again to her husband with a furious cry. ‘That was not necessary, Mungo,’ she exclaims. ‘Like so much that you do.’

  ‘Am I your prisoner?’ Fox asks his mother, as she hurries him out of the chamber and along the corridors of the Nux, her gun poised to fire. Bewildered, the pain in his shoulder searing, he does as she bids him. If she meant to kill him, surely she would have by now?

  ‘You are only bound to me by blood,’ she responds.

  ‘My shoulder.’ Fox staggers, hit by a spasm of pain.

  Sarah pulls a handkerchief from a pocket to staunch the bleeding, but the cloth is soaked right away.

  ‘What’s your plan?’ she asks, ripping at the sleeves of her graceful clothing and bandaging his wound, firmly, gently, as best she can. ‘To break us – then what?’

  ‘To break your stranglehold on the world,’ Fox corrects. ‘You know that your city wall is thirty boats deep in refugees? You’re a Guardian of the empire – surely you know.’

  ‘The wall is down,’ Sarah corrects him, avoiding the question. ‘The boat people have invaded the towers. The city guards are overwhelmed. Cities all across the world are in crisis too. So what happens now, David?’

  ‘The refugee boats are junk heaps, they’d never make it across the Atlantic.’ He gasps as she loops the silken material over his shoulder and under his arm, bandaging the wound tight. ‘There are sky fleets heading to every city to take boat refugees to the Northlands and other high lands. Surgent leaders all across the Earth are in charge of local forces that will fight for the high lands of South America, the Tibetan plateaux, Siberia . . . and more. The empire can’t take us all on. The guard forces you have in these high lands are not enough to overcome an organized Surge. The refugees are focused and desperate. They’ll fight to the death. This is their only chance for a foothold on the Earth. We will break the empire.’

  Machine-gun fire from the sky patrols batters the world outside. The zip of lasers flashes deep in the corridor. Sarah pulls her son to his feet.

  ‘My daughter, she’s in trouble.’ Fox clutches his bandaged shoulder and tries to run. ‘Her life is in danger. I must reach her. She’s in Ilira, in the North. Mara too. It’s where I need to be. I planned to reclaim the cities . . . start here, change the empire from within . . . help the flood refugees . . . now people’s eyes are opened to the world . . . but Lily needs me . . . I must go North . . .’

  He trails off, weak with pain and blood loss. His head reels. The strangeness of being reunited in the most critical moment of his life with the intense, commanding woman who is his estranged mother, and his longing for something that is surely unreachable now, overwhelms Fox. He wanted to break down a world but he is breaking down instead.

  A guard patrol thunders along the corridor towards them.

  Sarah raises her gun to his head. ‘Do as I say or you’re dead.’

  THE MOST SECRET SURGENT OF ALL

  The guard patrol halts. Seeing Fox’s blasted, bloodied armour and the ripped clothes of their revered city Guardian, Sarah Stone, with her gun pointed at her prisoner’s head, the entire patrol aims their guns at Fox.

  ‘Commander Stone wants this man for questioning,’ Sarah says briskly. ‘He is one of the lead rebels. You two,’ she tells the patrol leaders, ‘take him to the cells. The rest of you head for the cybercathedral and secure it. They need reinforcements there.’

  Fox cannot catch his mother’s eye. He must trust her. There is nothing else he can do.

  As the patrol turns and heads for the cybercath, the guards at either side of him drop to the ground, stunned by the gun of Guardian Stone. Fox grins through his pain.

  Never in his wilder dreams did he imagine his own mother as the rogue Guardian at the heart of the empire who would be his greatest ally in his moment of need.

  ‘What do you need from me?’ she asks him. ‘Tell me, quick. What can I do?’

  ‘I must get to the top of Aspen Tower,’ he says, thinking of the other ally he has had to place blind faith in: Kitsune, the sly trickster, who has always refused to disclose how he will organize the fleet that Fox trusts is flying towards the sky cities of the world.

  In a moment of pain-flooded disorientation, Fox wonders how wise he has been to trust a sly trickster he has never met with such an immense task, a seeming impossibility. Is this the moment where his grand plan comes crashing down around him? He can only hope not.

  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 t
urns 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.’