TABLE OF CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
COPYRIGHT PAGE
‘Grawk!’ Charlie bellowed through the bush.
‘Grawk! We’ve got more sausages for you.’
‘Forget it, Charlie,’ said Amelia. ‘If Grawk wanted to come, he’d have come by now. Plus, I think he can tell we don’t have any sausages.’
‘Not with us,’ Charlie said to Amelia, then yelled again at the bush: ‘Obviously the sausages are in the fridge at the hotel, Grawk! You don’t expect us to trek around in the sun with raw meat, do you?’
Amelia kept walking, picking the least-spiky way through the undergrowth. ‘Maybe it’s sausages that made him sick in the first place.’
That would make sense. They’d last seen Grawk a week ago, when the hotel’s old chest freezer had conked out and all the contents went off. Dad had thrown the lot onto the lawn at the back of the kitchen, and Grawk had slunk around and gorged himself.
The little alien creature had been acting strangely for weeks by then. Instead of being his usual funny, affectionate self, he’d started ignoring Amelia, then avoiding her, and then finally once or twice growling when she tried to talk to him. He’d never actually snapped at her, but after seeing him bring down a Hykryk time-shifter and bite the holo-emitter off her neck, Amelia wasn’t about to push her luck.
Watching him wolf down three icy chickens, two legs of lamb, two catering packs of mince, and eight kilograms of organic sausages, though, Amelia had wondered: Maybe he was just hungry?
She’d never imagined that he might need to eat so much. Poor thing – this whole time he’d been living with her, she’d been starving him! No wonder he was angry with her.
But how was she meant to know what a grawk needed to stay healthy? None of them did, and there was nobody she could ask. Somebody at Gateway Control might have been able to help, but Amelia was too scared to find out – she was pretty sure that ‘help’ from Control would end up with Grawk being taken away and put down.
So maybe it was better for Grawk to stay out here in the bush. She missed him badly, but at least he was free.
Charlie wasn’t having it, though. ‘You’re being really slack, you know that, Grawk?’ he bellowed again. ‘It’s Amelia’s birthday today, you jerk!’
It was! Despite everything with Grawk, Amelia grinned to herself. Her actual birthday with an actual party at the hotel. She could hardly believe it – for the first time since arriving at Forgotten Bay, she was going to have her friends over.
‘We’d better go back to the hotel,’ she said to Charlie. ‘I don’t know how long we have before the Sophies get here.’
‘Oh, that’s OK. You go,’ said Charlie, politely. ‘I’ll just stay here in the bush a bit longer, getting bitten by bull ants and horseflies. Or maybe a red-bellied black snake. Or a funnel-web spider. Or a red-bellied black snake and a funnel-web spider.’
‘Charlie …’ Amelia said warningly.
‘I mean, I’m not saying I’d rather die of venomous animal bites out here alone than see Sophie T –’
‘Charlie …’
‘I’m just saying it’s a risk I’m willing to take.’
‘Charlie!’
‘Well, come on, Amelia! Are you for real? Both Sophies at your party is bad enough, but asking Sophie T to stay for a sleepover …’
‘Now who’s being slack? It’s my birthday, remember?’
‘Yeah, but Sophie T? Sophie T!’
They might have had a real argument then, but instead they both froze as a tremor shook the ground beneath them. A flock of crows flew from the trees, crying out to one another in shock and disgust, ‘Gah! Gaah! Gaaaah!’ The cicadas fell silent at once and the ants seemed to race along their trails twice as fast as usual.
Amelia and Charlie looked at each other and grinned before breaking into a sprint. Another arrival at the gateway! They crashed through the bush, scrambling over rocks and pushing through branches until they burst into the clearing around the groundskeeper’s cottage.
But as they neared Tom’s little house, Amelia felt the hair on the back of her neck prickle, and she slowed, approaching more nervously than usual. New alien guests were always interesting – educational, even – but that didn’t mean they were safe. And since that time-shifter had messed around rewinding time over and over again, the wormholes that brought new visitors to Earth were behaving more erratically than ever. The disruption to his schedule was driving Tom crazy.
‘I hope it’s another blowback,’ puffed Charlie. ‘A good one, I mean.’
‘You would.’
A blowback was when something accidentally slipped through a gateway – it happened now and then, when the wormholes were particularly unstable or stormy. Grawk was the first blowback Amelia and Charlie had come across, but he hadn’t been the last. Two days ago, Tom had found the whole stairwell from his cottage down to the gateway filled with strange jelly-like fruit. He’d got both kids to help him clear them out and dump them in the compost, and Charlie – against Tom’s strictest orders – had tried one and discovered they were delicious (like lychees in lemonade) and made your eyes turn pink for an hour after.
Some of the other blowbacks had been less pleasant (a puddle of alien sewage), less useful (nearly seventy books, no pictures, all unreadable), and far less simple to clean up (a cloud of sticky foam belched up all over the stairwell walls and steps).
But from the noise up ahead, it didn’t sound like a blowback this time. As they reached the front door – Charlie sniffing his way forward, in case it was sewage again – Amelia heard raised voices.
‘Go ahead,’ Tom said loudly. ‘Call Control – ask them yourself, but I’m telling you, there are no exceptions.’
A mangled chirping came in reply, but by now Amelia was so used to listening to non-human versions of English, she could make out the words quite easily.
‘But I’m a scientist! An exobiologist. Look at my papers – I’m here to study local Earthling wildlife and how it interacts with a gateway. I need my equipment.’
Amelia and Charlie peeped through the open doorway and saw Tom, his hands on his hips, standing his ground before a thin, orangey-grey creature that looked something like a centaur, with four legs on the ground and then an upright body with two arms. If, that is, centaurs weren’t huge, noble horsepeople, but extremely scrawny little fox-people.
James, Amelia’s older brother, was keeping his head down, getting on with packing the alien’s equipment into a storage box.
‘That belongs to my university,’ the alien yipped. ‘It’s highly sensitive, state-of-the-art – aaaargh! Don’t tip that one upside down!’
‘Sorry,’ muttered James, turning the o
bject the right way up again.
‘Give it to me,’ the alien snapped.
‘No way,’ said Tom. ‘Nothing leaves this cottage that hasn’t been registered ahead of time with Gateway Control. Since the Guild –’
‘Do I look like Guild?’ he shrieked.
‘Since the Guild started rearing their heads again,’ Tom went on stubbornly, ‘all alien technology must either be registered with and approved by Control before leaving your home world, or left secure with us for the duration of your stay.’
‘Secure?!’
James taped up the lid of the box and offered the alien a clipboard and a pen. ‘Sign here, here and … here, and keep this receipt here with you as proof of ownership.’
Amelia watched as the alien signed over his equipment, clearly fuming. Then it tucked its hand into its fur, into what must have been some sort of pouch like a kangaroo’s, and pulled out a small bronze cylinder.
‘I have no idea what you expect me to do now,’ he seethed, attaching the cylinder to his neck. ‘Just remember the animals I see? Draw a sketch of them in the dirt with a stick? Perhaps I should –’
‘I’ll need to take that holo-emitter, too,’ said Tom, holding out his hand.
‘What? You don’t expect me to believe Control will let me stroll about on a non-stellar planet without a holo-emitter.’
‘You will need to wear one of our holo-emitters. All our images have been registered with Control, whereas yours …’
‘Fine!’ The alien snatched off his holo-emitter and slapped it onto Tom’s palm. ‘I’ll wear yours. But if you think I’ll submit to any more of Control’s outrageous abuses of my liberty – an honest academic!’
Tom sighed heavily. ‘I’m going to need you to turn out the contents of that pouch …’
The alien shrieked again, scandalised. He grabbed a holo-emitter from Tom’s desk, fixed it to his neck and switched it on before Tom could finish his sentence. Immediately, the scrawny fox-centaur disappeared a scrawny, ginger-bearded man in a shabby corduroy suit appeared.
‘I’ve never been so insulted in my life,’ the man snapped, his voice human now, but still high and furious. ‘Is there no courtesy at all in this wretched star system?’ He walked past Amelia and Charlie, out the door, and up to the hotel.
‘Another satisfied customer, Tom!’ said Charlie.
Tom glowered at them both, but said nothing (it was Amelia’s birthday, after all).
‘Is it really Control’s orders?’ asked Amelia. ‘I mean, they don’t even know about the canister the Guild tried to steal from –’
‘And they don’t need to,’ said Tom, glancing warily through his still-open front door. ‘They know the Guild were here, and that’s more than enough for anybody to tighten border security.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Amelia, ‘but –’
‘Don’t you have a party to go to?’ Tom made party sound like it was a form of torture.
‘Ugh, that’s right,’ said Charlie. ‘Come on, then, Amelia. Let’s get it over with.’
‘Oh, thanks a lot, Charlie. Happy birthday to me, huh?’
Amelia and Charlie had only made it halfway up the hill when Mrs Flood’s car crunched along the gravel driveway. Amelia waved at them from across the lawn and began to run, but neither Sophie F nor Sophie T noticed her. Through the car windows, Amelia could see that they were staring, white-faced, at the hotel.
‘Ha! Look at them – they’re totally freaking out!’ Charlie grinned.
Amelia stopped and turned on him. ‘Don’t you dare, Charlie Floros. I know you can’t stand them, but the Sophies are my friends. And,’ she fixed him with a look, ‘It. Is. My. Birthday.’
‘Relax,’ said Charlie. ‘Everything will be great.’
‘I mean it, Charlie.’
‘So do I.’
‘Be nice,’ said Amelia. ‘Just until the party’s over. Please?’
‘I’ll be better than nice.’ He smiled what he thought was his charming smile. ‘I’ll be adorable.’
Amelia groaned, but didn’t waste any more time arguing with him. Instead, she hurried to the hotel, little bubbles of excitement making her skip up the steps to the big double doors. Her birthday was today, and she was having a party, and the Sophies were finally visiting her place for a change. OK, it would have been even better if Shani could’ve come. And sure, it was a pity that Sophie F couldn’t stay for the sleepover. And no, she wasn’t confident about what Charlie’s idea of ‘adorable’ might be – but still, it was her birthday!
She let herself into the lobby, Charlie only a step behind, and saw Mrs Flood standing under the old chandelier, looking around in wonder. The two Sophies were whispering together.
‘Hi, guys,’ Amelia called. Not too loudly: Mum was busy at the reception desk, checking in the cranky alien in the corduroy suit, and several other guests (the usual mixture of holo-emitter-disguised aliens and unsuspecting humans) were milling about, wandering out from the dining hall or into the library or up the broad marble staircase on the right to the guest rooms.
Sophie F turned at the sound of Amelia’s voice and smiled back. ‘Happy birthday!’
Sophie T smiled too, but then her eyebrows rose in surprise. ‘Are we early?’
‘No,’ said Amelia. ‘Right on time. Thanks for coming.’
‘Oh, OK.’ Sophie T frowned slightly. ‘Only – did we dress right?
‘What? Oh!’ Amelia realised that both Sophies were wearing their good clothes: Sophie F was in her new purple jeans and high-top sneakers, and Sophie T was in a floaty, sky-blue sundress with a matching Alice hairband, whereas Amelia …
Amelia put a hand to her hair and felt a sort of bird’s nest of knots and tangles and bits of leaf and twig. She looked down and saw the rip in her T-shirt, the scratches and dirt on her legs, and the hundreds of grass seeds on her socks. It was how she always looked after a day playing on the headland, but now –
‘Cookie,’ said Mum, coming out from behind the reception desk and crossing the lobby. ‘Why don’t you hurry and get changed while I take the Sophies through to tea?’
Amelia nodded gratefully and sprinted up the left-hand staircase to the family wing of the hotel, determined to have the quickest wash and change in the history of parties. She dragged a brush through her hair, scrubbed her face and hands and knees with a boiling hot flannel, and pulled on the first dress she found in her drawer. The whole lot took less than ten minutes.
Ten minutes too long, though. As she pattered down the stairs and across the lobby to the dining room, she saw three things straight away.
One: that Mrs Flood was laughing and talking happily with Mum.
Two: that Mary and Dad had done a beautiful job setting up her birthday tea – a five-tier cake stand rose in the middle of the table, each level crowded with a different type of afternoon snack: tiny sandwiches on the bottom, tiny pink-and-chocolate fairy cakes at the top, and scones and macaroons and sausage rolls in between.
And three: that Charlie was, from the looks on the Sophies’ faces, being totally Charlie. She went over in time to hear him saying, ‘No, she’s great. Seriously. I th
ink all girls should be more like her. She has these awesome black leather hiking boots, because she spends all day out in the bush working, and she has this amazing scar from her shoulder all the way down her arm, and –’
‘Hello, Charlie,’ said Amelia quietly. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Oh, hey, Amelia.’ Charlie grabbed three tiny sandwiches in one go and shoved them all in his mouth. ‘I’s jus’ tellin’ the Soph’s abou’ –’
‘About some ridiculous imaginary person he calls Lady Naomi,’ Sophie T spoke over the top of Charlie’s disgusting mumbling, and slanted him a withering look. ‘As if any lady would have a scar and work in the bush. What is she, a lumberjack?’
Amelia shook her head at Charlie, who raised his hands helplessly. ‘What did I do?’ he asked, swallowing his mouthful. ‘They were getting spooked about maybe seeing Tom tonight, and all I said was that apart from his missing eye, missing finger, gold tooth, limp and foul temper, he’s basically a really nice guy, and they said this sounded like a horrible place to live –’
Sophie F blushed, but Sophie T held her chin high.
‘And I was just trying to tell them all the other great things about living here –’
‘– so you told them about Lady Naomi,’ Amelia finished for him.
‘And every word was true.’ Charlie crammed two fairy cakes in his mouth.
Sophie T rolled her eyes, then decided to ignore him. As Amelia sat down beside her, Sophie T said, ‘Well, you do have a lot of room here, anyway. You could easily get a rabbit and guinea pigs, if you wanted to.’
‘It’s true,’ Amelia said. ‘But then I got a dog instead, remember? And I don’t know if Grawk would get on very well with a rabbit.’
‘Yes, where is he?’ asked Sophie F. ‘I want to see some of his tricks.’
‘Oh, uh …’ Amelia gulped and stalled for time by pouring a glass of vanilla milkshake from the jug on the table. ‘He’s …’ She felt her friends watching her, concerned. ‘He’s lost, actually.’
The Dark Giants Page 1
