Moondust

by Gemma Fowler

  Aggie staggered after her, glancing up worriedly at the shaking dome above.

  At the centre back of the stage a raised platform was being constructed by a group of prisoners and mine ops. As the girls approached, Aggie heard a few whoops and hollers and she looked away, though she imagined most were directed at Mir.

  ‘The prisoners—’ she began.

  ‘They’re helping with the construction, yes,’ Mir snapped. ‘So, at the party the commander wants you appearing here. A lighting rig will be installed behind the platform, which means you’ll be in silhouette – that’s my idea, very dramatic, yes?’

  Mir nudged Aggie with her elbow, but Aggie wasn’t listening. Now she was looking up at the quivering masonry above their heads. It was really starting to jump about now.

  ‘I don’t like quakes . . .’ she muttered, trying to hold it together in front of Mir.

  ‘The vid screens will be playing a mixture of footage from the disaster,’ Mir continued, unaware that she’d lost Aggie’s attention again, ‘and obviously the footage of you in the wreckage. There’ll be a pause, and then as you come on there’ll be the company logo. I think a . . .’

  Aggie watched the mine ops throwing equipment up to the red-overalled inmates. They shouted to each other through their helmet comms. They chatted and laughed. They seemed just like the engineers and mine ops that worked around them.

  ‘What did they do?’ Aggie asked, interrupting Mir’s speech about lighting or something.

  Mir wrinkled her nose in disgust. ‘Them? Oh, you don’t want to know.’

  The ground lurched, sending a drill flying out of one of the prisoner’s hands and crashing to the stage a few metres away. Mir didn’t even flinch. Aggie wondered if she was actually a robot, a very convincing humanoid.

  ‘I do want to know,’ Aggie said, peering at Mir’s face, looking for an ‘on’ button or something. No, she was definitely human. Aggie was almost disappointed.

  Mir frowned up at the red overalls. ‘They’re FALL. Terrorist scum.’

  The change in her tone took Aggie aback.

  ‘They should never be allowed here,’ Mir snarled. ‘Let them rot in a real prison like the Pacific Pen with all the murderers. You can’t rehabilitate terrorists.’ She took a breath, then looked back at Aggie. ‘Sorry. Only, this is the intake from Tokyo. When you see the Forecast . . .’

  Aggie nodded. ‘Rix mentioned it, yeah.’

  ‘It’s OK, we’re safe. Celeste has special monitors on them, and the mine ops keep them too busy to think about anything but work. That’s why the lunar mines are such an effective method of rehabilitation.’

  Mir looked back down at her comms panel. The screen was jumping about so much that reading anything on it must have been impossible. ‘Now, yes, in fact, we’re having the stage repainted in midnight blue—’

  The ground lurched again, sending Mir sprawling to the floor.

  When Aggie pulled her up, her green eyes were wide. She grabbed Aggie’s arm. ‘What . . .’ she began, then the lights inside the giant dome flashed red then violet.

  ‘All personnel. High magnitude lunar quake in Mining Sector G,’ Celeste’s voice wobbled overhead. ‘All personnel brace, brace.’

  Mir cried out as the ground below them started to jump. The rickety half-finished stage heaved and swayed around them. It felt as if it was all going to come crashing down any second.

  Aggie stood rooted to the spot. G Face moved around her in slow motion, the foggy air turned red by the alarm light. As debris started to fall around them, she forced the images of the smoking reactor room out of her mind. Then Aggie’s survival instincts kicked in. She grabbed Mir’s hand and dragged her back in the direction of the steps. She’d never experienced a quake like this before, and it felt bad. The way the stage was shuddering, Aggie knew the first thing they had to do was get as far away from it as they could.

  Around them, the white-overalled mine ops were shouting at the prisoners to move as masonry and equipment started to rain down.

  ‘All personnel, please evacuate the G Face construction area,’ Celeste’s voice rattled. ‘Please evacuate G Face.’

  Aggie and Mir raced down the stairs, through the backstage area and out onto the face. They emerged just in time.

  With a long slow creak, the half-built black platform started to tilt and then collapse in on itself, sending a dense cloud of dust and debris pluming into the red air.

  ‘Visors!’ Aggie cried as a cliff of grey dust enveloped them. Just as Aggie’s visor snapped down, the cloud hit. She stumbled blindly forwards. Mir’s hand slipped out of her grip. ‘Hey!’ she shouted, ‘Mir!’ But when she looked back, all she saw were red and black ghosts running in the dust.

  ‘Mir!’ she yelled, ‘MIR!’ She flailed around in the smoky air, desperately looking for a blue overall. Her head was spinning, her blood hammering in her ears.

  Footsteps beat against the ground, voices shouted back and forth over the comms, the overload made the comms system distort and feedback. It all added to Aggie’s disorientation. She turned on the spot, blind and deafened, desperately trying to find a way out of the dust cloud.

  Which way was out? It was impossible to tell. ‘Celeste?’ she shouted into her helmet.

  ‘Please evacuate the face,’ the computer replied uselessly.

  ‘I’m trying!’ Aggie cried, stumbling forwards and tripping over a boulder. The visibility was so bad, Aggie felt completely alone. She could sense the panic rising deep in her chest. A pure, potent kind of panic, one she hadn’t experienced for a long time.

  ‘Hey!’ a voice shook over her comms. A male voice. Close. A guard.

  ‘Over here!’ Aggie cried, then felt something launch into her back, knocking her to the floor. An instant later, a great crashing noise ripped through her ears as a lighting rig smashed into the ground beside her head.

  Aggie lay on the ground, panting. The bouncing stopped, and finally, she felt the rock beneath her start to go still.

  ‘What are you doing?’ the voice said.

  Aggie stared at the ruined rig on the ground beside her. She couldn’t find any words. She’d be nothing but mush if she hadn’t been pushed out of the way.

  A figure crouched in the dust beside her.

  ‘You need to get out of here,’ he panted, his number, 209, lighting him up in the dust.

  His inmate number.

  Aggie gasped and pulled back. A prisoner.

  ‘Hey, wait. Here.’ To Aggie’s surprise, the prisoner held out his arm.

  Aggie hesitated, then took his arm and stood.

  She winced. Despite the exo in her overall, her shoulder pulsed with pain from her impact with the ground.

  ‘You OK?’

  Aggie looked up into his face.

  ‘Thank—’ she began, then stopped.

  The prisoner was staring at her.

  The way he looked at her made a shiver run through her whole body. She knew that look – it was the look people had given her before she’d gone into hiding. Before she’d transformed back into Aggie.

  The prisoner stood as still as if he were made of rock.

  ‘A—’ he started to say, then hesitated.

  Red dust swirled between them.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he asked again, his voice wavering.

  ‘I’m . . .’ Aggie started to speak, but the words dried up. She couldn’t take her eyes away from his. It was impossible. It had to be, but the air around them hummed with it.

  He knew who she was. Oh frag, oh frag, he knew who she was. And now he was about to walk away.

  ‘Wait!’ Aggie cried, struggling to run after him on the still-shivering ground. ‘How did you know? Wait!’

  ‘AGGIE!’ a shrill voice pierced the cloud.

  Mir staggered into view, her visor glowing red with pressure alarms. ‘Earth below, Aggie! Are you hurt? Are you OK?’ She stopped when she saw the red overall. ‘Who are you?’

  The prisoner turned and ran.

/>   Mir pulled on Aggie’s arm, her eyes were wide behind her visor. ‘Aggie? It’s OK, he’s gone. Did he hurt you?’

  Aggie shook her head, watching the prisoner’s red overall fade away into the dust.

  Her head felt like it was going to explode.

  A prisoner knew she was the Angel.

  A prisoner from FALL.

  Day-Cycle 04

  Aggie sat in her pod quietly, a used lumite cell in her hands. She peeled back the rubbery connective casing and held the crystal up to the window. It sparkled in the sunlight like treasure.

  It was a kind of treasure, really. The most expensive commodity in the United Earth. Where would the Earth be without it? Dark, the voice inside her head answered. Dark and dead.

  Aggie was too young to remember the age before the discovery. A time when a world built on technology was pulled into a new dark age by a lack of power, and countries fought a constant war from behind giant invisible walls. Before Lunar Inc.’s scientists had found lumite hidden deep beneath the Moon’s surface.

  Aggie was a child of the Lumite Age, too young to remember the dark, but she did remember the stories, the films from the archives at the Academy that were so hard to watch, the pictures of poor people driven to desperation while the rich cowered inside their illuminated compounds. In the darkness of the blackouts nobody was safe. A shiver ran down Aggie’s spine.

  ‘Saviour of the world,’ she muttered, turning the crystal slowly, making spots of light dance over her face. She pressed the cool, polished mineral to her forehead and let out a long sigh.

  In the last few days the base that had become her home had started to contract in on her, suffocating her so much that just the idea walking down a corridor was terrifying. The accident on G Face hadn’t helped. Her mind drifted to the prisoner who had saved her. Mir had written down his number as soon as they’d escaped the dust cloud. Aggie had mixed feelings about him – terrified and intrigued in equal measure. He’d saved her life, after all. Was she in danger? Probably. But the one thing she was sure of was that she didn’t want to tell Rix. Not yet.

  Aggie sighed. It was as if the surface itself didn’t want the Angel there, and was throwing everything it could at her to make her go away.

  Aggie dropped the lumite to the floor with a thud. The quake on G Face was the last straw. She’d tried to accept the idea of being the Angel again, she really had, but she just couldn’t do it. She wanted out, and there was only one way she could make that happen.

  ‘Celeste?’ Aggie said.

  ‘Hey Agatha.’

  ‘Could you call him again, please?’

  ‘OK Agatha. One moment please . . . the Earth channels are very busy this evening.’

  Aggie breathed out loudly. ‘OK.’

  There was a moment of silence, then the Ether screen beside her bed buzzed to life.

  ‘Moon to Earth connection established.’

  Aggie sat up and watched as the Ether particles spun and settled to show a shaking view of the grand, perfectly maintained roof gardens of the United Government headquarters in Tokyo. Blurry, grey-suited figures moved in and out of the video as the camera bounced up and down.

  ‘Adam?’ she said, tilting her head to try and make out where her godfather’s comms feed was coming from.

  ‘What was that?’ Adam Faulkner’s voice drifted over the noise. ‘What did you say, Massimo?’

  ‘Nothing, sir.’

  ‘Adam. It’s Aggie.’

  The camera spun around wildly.

  ‘I’m on your sleeve!’ She groaned loudly. Then to herself, ‘You’ve had the comms unit for months and you still do this every time!’

  ‘I can hear something!’ she heard her godfather say again. ‘Hello?’

  ‘On your sleeve!’

  ‘Steve? Do I know a Steve?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘IT’S AGGIE!’

  ‘Oh! Aggie!’

  Aggie laughed and slammed her head into her hands. When she looked up, Adam Faulkner’s smiling face was staring back at her. The bodyguard, who must have been Massimo, was standing guard over his shoulder.

  ‘Finally!’ Aggie smiled. ‘I think that was a record.’

  Her godfather rolled his eyes. Deep grey, like the surface beyond Aggie’s window.

  ‘Ahh, ridiculous place to put a comms unit. Whoever thought it was natural to talk to your elbow?’

  ‘I think you did, when you designed the overall.’

  ‘Well, no one should have listened to me.’

  ‘Everyone listens to you.’

  Her godfather took a step back, revealing a sliver of bright blue sky. Aggie’s breath caught in her throat. It was so beautiful. She instantly felt sick of the dull black of space.

  ‘Well, they’re all just black holes, then.’

  ‘Adam, you can’t call the whole of the United Government a black hole.’

  Her godfather huffed, and then said hello to someone Aggie couldn’t see. It might be the United Leader himself, for all she knew. After Rix had forced him into taking retirement from his position as CEO of Lunar Inc., Adam Faulkner had become a space resource consultant for the United Government. Aggie couldn’t really imagine it, but her godfather was more powerful now than he’d ever been, only he was now based on Earth, not on the Moon. She missed him on the base.

  ‘Speaking of black holes –’ her godfather grinned – ‘how’s our old friend Roger?’

  ‘Terrifying,’ she said, nervously running a hand through her hair, then took a deep breath. She hated asking Adam for anything, he’d done so much for her already, but, well, she was desperate.

  ‘He told you, then?’

  Aggie’s head snapped up, ‘You knew?’

  ‘Well, yes. I had to know, really. He neglected to tell me when he was telling you, though.’

  ‘Oh.’ Aggie had had no idea that her godfather and Rix still spoke at all. She guessed they had to: although Adam Faulkner had very little to do with the base these days, he was the world’s foremost expert on lumite power. Rix just knew how to smile at the right times, or so her godfather said.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Aggie.’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t sound OK to me.’

  Her godfather shuffled to the side and sat down. A manicured flowerbed appeared over his shoulders, broad leaves and bright flowers swaying in the breeze. Aggie could almost smell the pollen in the air. She wished she could be there, in that garden, under that perfect blue sky.

  ‘How do you feel?’

  Aggie hesitated. She hated talking about feelings, even to the man who’d brought her up as a daughter. ‘I don’t want it,’ she said in a small voice. ‘Adam, I don’t want that again. I can’t . . .’

  Adam pulled the camera nearer, so close that Aggie could make out the wrinkles at the sides of his eyes.

  ‘Aggie,’ he sighed, ‘you’re made of graphene. I’ve always said it. You might look fragile but no one can break you. And Earth forbid the people who try.’

  Aggie shook her head. She was made of jelly right now, not graphene.

  ‘I . . .’ she faltered.

  ‘Aggie, darling. Adrianne might have taken our families away, but we have each other, and each other is all we have, remember? I will do anything to protect you, you know that don’t you?’

  Aggie nodded, blinking away tears.

  ‘But the Angel of Adrianne stopped a war all those years ago. When darkness threatened the edges of our United Earth, the Angel was their light. A tiny, broken little girl trying so desperately to save the lives of others, when her own life hung in the balance. What you did, it gave the people a reason to keep going, to believe. Now, isn’t that a wonderful, powerful thing?’

  ‘I was scared. I was looking for my dad. I wasn’t trying to save anyone else.’

  Her godfather looked away, gathering his words. Talking about Aggie’s father made them both hurt.

  ‘The Earth will believe what it wants.’

&
nbsp; Aggie sighed. The Earth believed what they were told, more accurately. Her godfather had always had a gift for spin.

  ‘I’m not ready, Adam. I can’t,’ she continued stiffly. ‘Maybe Rix can find someone, someone that looks like me—’

  ‘Oh Aggie!’ Adam Faulkner gave a sad smile. ‘The Angel isn’t just about a pair of violet eyes. She’s an icon! You did that, Aggie, with that glittering grit you have. You inspired people. You brought out the good in people, made them believe in something.’

  Aggie clenched her teeth. ‘I don’t want all that – the people and the staring and the speeches and the vids.’

  ‘I know you don’t.’ Pain crept into his voice. ‘I know you don’t, little one.’

  He shook his head and looked up to the sky. ‘I hate asking you, Aggie, really I do. But we can’t go back, no matter what it takes. You and I, I’m afraid, have as much choice in what we do as those prisoners up there with you. Only difference is we didn’t do anything to deserve our sentences.’

  A sombre expression passed over her godfather’s usually happy face. Aggie suddenly felt terrible. She wasn’t the only one who’d lost everything at Adrianne. Her godfather had lost his whole family. His wife and son had been in the crowds at Switch On Day – out in the open they never stood a chance. Adam hadn’t been the same since they’d died. There was a sadness in him that showed itself sometimes, when he was tired or stressed. It made Aggie’s skin crawl; her own father had killed them. She closed her eyes tight and fought the spread of guilt she felt for just being alive.

  ‘Aggie?’

  Tears had started to roll down her face. She hadn’t noticed.

  She’d hoped her powerful godfather would help her, tell her Rix was wrong and he’d sort it out. That she could kiss goodbye to the cameras and perfect Mir and everything. Now she suddenly felt like the most selfish human being in the world.

  In the Ether screen, Adam Faulkner’s grey eyes stared out at her. He was right. They were in this together. They were what they were, and nothing could change that. Plus, how could Aggie live with herself if FALL kept killing people while she could prevent it by bringing back the Angel, with her buzzwords and infectious positivity and unyielding commitment to lumite? She couldn’t.