Stormwalker

by Mike Revell

  Up ahead, where the altar should have been, there was a desk and a high-backed chair. The Marshal was sitting in it, listening to someone whispering in his ear.

  His face . . . he didn’t look anything like the cheering, inspiring man who had encouraged everyone in the hall the other night. His sunken eyes looked too small for his head, and his skin was chalky and stretched too thin. He looked tired—and something else . . . He looked mad.

  “What is it?” he said, waving the first man away as Quinn approached.

  “There’s been contact on the radio.”

  “What?” The Marshal’s nostrils flared. “The radio tower’s supposed to be broken.”

  “It is. The main one, for communicating with the City. None of the guys on my team will ever be able to get through, just like you wanted. But the short-range beacons have always been active. The contact came from Icarus 1.”

  “What did they say?” the Marshal demanded.

  “That the City is dead. Only James heard it,” Quinn said quickly. “I managed to convince him it would be dangerous to talk to them without your permission.”

  “Good,” the Marshal said. “Very good. Has he been to Cleansing yet this week?”

  “I don’t think so . . .”

  “He can go today. Oversee the questioning. Make sure he knows we’ve only been here six months. The City is alive and well. There’s been no contact from the other Icarus projects, but we’re holding out hope. You know the drill.”

  Quinn turned, and I ducked down low, holding my breath. I didn’t dare look up. I strained my ears, listening for any footsteps on the flagstone floor. But none came. He must have still been over by the Marshal’s desk. Had he seen me? I glanced at Iris beside me. Her eyes were wide. If we got discovered . . . best not to think about that.

  “What is it?” said the Marshal. “What are you waiting for?”

  “It was Ryan,” Quinn said.

  “What?”

  “On the radio. It was Ryan. You told me he died with the others, back in the City. I’ve been looking after Jack, thinking his dad was dead, but all this time he’s been alive.”

  I couldn’t hide anymore. I had to look up. I had to see.

  Quinn was standing over the desk, towering over the Marshal. Even from here I could see he was shaking. Jack’s thoughts were going crazy. I tried to hold them at bay, so I could listen properly. I wanted to move closer, but I didn’t dare.

  “He hid that boy from us,” the Marshal said. “He hid a duplicate.”

  “So did thousands of others. Did you send them on a ship too?”

  “He was a Marshal—”

  “This is about the vote of no confidence, isn’t it? He was going to get you deposed as head of the council. You were going to be exiled, and you didn’t want any of it. You were hoping he’d die, weren’t you? Well how’s that plan looking now? He’s alive! We could unite with them. It’s what we have to do. What’s stopping me from getting him back on the line?”

  “The boy,” the Marshal said coldly. The silence that followed was the loudest I’d ever heard. “If you make one move—one move—the boy gets it. Do you understand?”

  22

  The Marshal’s words rang in my ears after we snuck back out into the quiet square. He’d acted as if hearing from Icarus 1 wasn’t big news, but it was massive, surely? They’d been waiting for word ever since they established camp.

  If you make one move, the boy gets it . . .

  For some reason, he was using me to manipulate Quinn. I thought the whole point of the Icarus projects was to find a new home for the people of the City, but if those people were dead, shouldn’t everyone know about it?

  “I didn’t know that was your dad on the radio,” Iris said, looking at me with obvious concern. “Are you all right? That can’t have been very nice to hear.”

  “We’ve got to stop him,” I said. “We’ve got to stop the Marshal.” I couldn’t piece it together yet, but something wasn’t right. About the whole camp. About everything. “There must be a way to get through to Icarus 1.”

  “The radio tower.” Iris’s eyes widened. The emptiness that had filled them when we heard the message about the City? It had disappeared—at least for the time being. “The Marshal said it was broken. Well, if we go over there when we Stormwalk tonight, maybe we can figure out a way to fix it.”

  We used the last of the daylight pocket to scavenge some Band-Aids, a few pieces of scrap metal, and another tank of gasoline from the back half of a broken motorbike. We traded the metal for four caps, which bought us a potato cake each and a bowl of seeds for dessert.

  The Stormwalking was announced after we finished eating, and the camp filed into the hall as one big group. I stood next to Iris and Dillon at the back of the room, beside the generator.

  A hush descended as the Marshal walked in. Was I imagining it, or did he look straight at me? He started talking about the day’s Hunting haul and the importance of attending lessons to “safeguard our country’s history.” I choked down a laugh when he said that. I mean, they weren’t exactly safeguarding it, were they? They thought a Slinky was a weapon.

  “We are the City’s only hope,” he said, and this time he definitely looked right at me. But the City was dead. I believed that one hundred percent. Otherwise, why wouldn’t Quinn question it? What I didn’t get was why the Marshal was so keen to cover it up. “Our families are out there, desperate to find us. Restock our glowroot, and we will make contact. We will reunite with them. We will save them.”

  Seth split us up into teams again, and handed out the gear. As I threw mine on, I walked over to him, trying to act casually in case the Marshal was watching. Ever since that incident with Quinn, he was really creeping me out.

  “Send me to the tower,” I said. “Please.”

  “Me too,” Iris said, appearing beside me.

  “What?” Seth’s eyebrows shooting up in surprise. “Why?”

  “Just—,” I began, but Iris interrupted me.

  “There’s something I want to check,” she said. “I was reading about it in Ten Secrets of the Pre-Dark World.”

  “We’ll bring back more glowroot than you can shake a corn round at,” I added, smiling.

  Seth snorted. “I was going to send you to the foot of the barren caves, but I can send Eddie, Sian, and Tyler there instead. You’ll need a third, though. You know you can’t go out in pairs.”

  “I’ll go with them,” said Dillon. He shrugged when I looked at him. “May as well—it’s as good a place as any.”

  I wondered who he had left at the City. Would he be so eager to run out into the Darkness if he knew it was all for nothing? Of course not. None of them would. No wonder the Marshal was so keen to keep it a secret.

  As we jogged toward the tunnel, our illuminators glowing brighter in the shadows, the Marshal boomed: “I will leave you now with this thought. The pre-Darks believed in legendary lights, called stars. In the histories, they are described as shrines, high in the sky, where the greatest heroes lived on after death, shining for eternity. You may well be duplicates, but you are far from unnecessary. Help bring proof of our safe camp back to the City, and you will take your place among the greatest heroes to ever walk this earth.”

  The radio tower stood on top of a lump of jagged rock, higher than any other point around camp. Each of the Icarus projects had a communication device built into its airship. It only had two simple messages: either they’d set up a safe haven, or they hadn’t.

  But since Icarus 3 crashed, the device shattered, and they’d had to build their own way of getting through to the City. It worked through glowroot, just like all the other technology in camp, and was powerful enough to reach through the Darkness.

  That was the theory, anyway.

  I was looking forward to seeing what it actually looked like, after hearing the Marshal talking with Quinn. But before we could take any glowroot over there, we had to stockpile some back at camp—and that meant having a smooth
run, without facing off against any Dreamless.

  The Darkness was waiting for us at the broken section of the tunnel. It hissed all around us, and I could hear Mum’s voice again already, as if she was right there beside me, as if she was everywhere at once.

  “I’m sorry,” Mum said, and I could see her now, the tears trickling down her face—

  “I’m so sorry, Owen.”

  “It’s playing on your fears,” Iris called. “Don’t let it in. Don’t let it close.”

  The storm pulled at me like a giant magnet. I wrenched myself back, shaking my head to clear Mum out of it. I focused on happy thoughts, from before she told me, from before she got so weak. Painting together and walking on the beach and picnics in the park, the real park with fresh green grass and waddling ducks and circling, singing birds.

  And after a while, my legs felt less heavy.

  The illuminators cast only enough light to see a few feet ahead of us. Every now and then I slipped and stumbled, but we kept going, following the curve of the river, away from the distant glow of the camp.

  Finally we reached a lamp, and slowed down to catch our breath.

  There was a clunk and a groan above us as the motion-sensitive light flared on. The Darkness peeled back, higher and higher into the sky. The first meadow was only a hundred yards away.

  “There’s another lamp ahead of us,” Iris said. “About twenty yards.”

  She grabbed a stone and loaded it in her slingshot. She took aim and fired, sending it soaring into the distance. The Darkness gobbled it up, then it scuffed the rough ground ahead of us. There was a brief hum, and a light appeared, about thirty yards away.

  “It’s there,” she said. “You just have to trust it.”

  The light flickered and died. A shiver ran down my arms, making the hairs stand on end.

  We were going to have to be fast . . .

  Iris gave the signal and Dillon bolted after her. I ran, adrenaline coursing through me as the Darkness raged. The illuminators gave off a bright glow, but it wasn’t big enough to keep the storm at bay completely, and every time the clouds got close a stabbing pain lanced through me.

  We made it to a second lamp, and a third, but after that the lights ran out. Maybe it was too hard to keep them powered this far from the generator, or maybe the storm had broken them. Either way, we had to rely on our illuminators as our sole protection.

  Thankfully the glowroot wasn’t far away. We pulled up, panting hard. The air out here was colder than in camp, and there was a bitter taste to it. It smelled a bit like those beans Dad had burned the other day.

  I followed Iris’s lead, carefully plucking the flowers and storing them in the special compartment on the back of my jacket. Each piece of glowroot had its own individual container, where it would be protected from the light. These could detach from the bag, and be stored for whenever they were needed.

  Seth passed us in midharvest, running off in the opposite direction with his group. We joined up with Anja and the others on our first trip back to the tunnel. Then Dillon, Iris, and I ran back, clambering over mounds of rubble, working our way to the distant tower. Using tufts of long-dead black grass, I hauled myself up, my feet skidding on loose chunks of rock. The tower was easy to see, even though the Darkness shrouded it, because the power station below it gave off an ethereal green glow.

  “Let’s see what we find, shall we?” Iris said.

  There was another meadow just outside the glowing, block-shaped building. As we approached, the Darkness slammed down, screeching madly at us, as if it knew it wouldn’t stand a chance when we got close.

  I was so determined to fight off the memories of my parents that I must have let my guard down, because the next thing I knew, Jack’s dad flew to the surface of my mind.

  “No,” he said, a whimpering tone to his voice as he dug through broken bricks and splintered wood. “It can’t be gone. It can’t be . . .”

  He was in the City—the remains of it, anyway—the light of his airship blasting away the Darkness in a small bubble, but even that was enough to see the destruction.

  “Come on,” Dillon said, grabbing my arm. “We can’t stop.”

  I gritted my teeth, swatting the image away. We ran together, the three of us, over to the next meadow, and as we reached it, the storm pulled back angrily.

  We gathered as much glowroot as we could. Then Iris stood, and turned to face the doorway to the power station. The tower loomed over us, surrounded by swirling clouds of Darkness.

  “I’m going in,” she said.

  “What?” Dillon spluttered. “We can’t—we’ve got to take this back to the camp.”

  But Iris wasn’t listening. She was already striding off, toward a shrouded door. As she approached, a light hummed on, one of those motion-sensitive ones I’d seen on the first Stormwalking, leading the way inside.

  “If the Marshal finds out—”

  “He won’t,” I said, although how I knew that, I couldn’t say. I just knew I had to do something. Without waiting for Dillon, I followed Iris into the power station. It wasn’t long before I heard Dillon’s footsteps behind me.

  “Hey!” he called. “Wait up!”

  More lights hummed into life before us, until the entranceway opened up into a large room, bigger than our entire house back home. In the middle of the room was a circular metal stand, and on top of it was some kind of container—a shimmering silver lantern of glass, with an ethereal orb inside it, drifting and pulsing. At its very center, the light was pure white, but its edges glowed green and blue. It hung in a sort of mist. On each of the lantern’s four corners, a metal rod shot up into the ceiling. Up to where the radio tower loomed in the storm.

  “Well, the energy capsule’s still on,” said Iris.

  I couldn’t see any controls. The rest of the room was bare—just plain white walls. No TV screens, like the main hall in camp, no noticeboard, no nothing.

  Iris took out her glowroot and dropped it in the hole at the top of the capsule.

  There was a clink and a sudden crackle, the orb of light blossomed, its ghostly edges twining, pressing up against the glass, then it settled once more.

  “Why did you want to come here?” Dillon asked. “What’s wrong?”

  Iris dropped some more glowroot inside the capsule. “Nothing,” Iris said. “That’s the problem. It’s just like it’s always been. I don’t understand. Unless . . .”

  She shot me a look, and I knew right away what she was thinking. It was just like being with Danny. Unless it never worked in the first place.

  23

  My mind spun.

  A wave of grogginess washed over me, and I steadied myself, trying not to fall over. When the rushing settled, I opened my eyes slowly, hardly daring to look. I knew these walls. I . . . I was inside my house. My real house, back in my life.

  The smell of food filled my nostrils. Dad must have been cooking dinner. I closed my eyes again, waiting for Jack’s thoughts to drift away. It was so hard to think . . .

  If the tower had never worked, then the whole camp had been risking their lives for nothing. What was the Marshal playing at? I knew we were duplicates, but surely he wasn’t that crazy?

  Dad called me from the kitchen, but his voice was buried in the clattering and banging.

  When I felt sure-footed enough to stand properly, I walked toward the doorway, thinking about last time—how he couldn’t remember where I’d been. I hesitated. How much time had I missed now? It was Thursday when I jumped. It must have been, because it was the day after the Westfield game.

  Holding my breath, I dug inside my pocket for my phone. The date flashed up: Saturday.

  Another day gone! Just completely vanished. I remembered playing FIFA on Thursday night, and then nothing—nothing except the story. The Dreamless. The radio call. The tower . . .

  Surely this time Dad would have realized?

  “Thought I’d get started on dinner,” he said, when I opened the door. “Got s
omething big planned. Something nice.”

  He winked at me and even managed a full smile again. It made his face crinkle up around the edges. He looked so much older now than he did last year. I guessed the Longest Day changed him on the outside as well as on the inside.

  “Dad?” I said, the worried thoughts still bouncing around in my head. I kept thinking about the missing days. What happened to me in real life while I was inside the story? Was I still here? Did I pass out somewhere? I needed to find a way to word it, so he wouldn’t get freaked out.

  “Yeah?”

  “I really enjoyed kicking the ball around with you yesterday.”

  “Kicking the ball?” he said. He looked up from the pan he was stirring on the hob and frowned.

  “Yeah, after school. At the park.”

  I knew we wouldn’t have played football at the park. We used to do it all the time, but we haven’t been for ages.

  “Oh . . . um . . . yeah. Yeah,” he said slowly. “How could I have forgotten that?” He looked at me, his face creasing. “But I suppose we must have . . .”

  I could tell he was struggling to put it all together. He knew we didn’t kick the ball around, just like I did. I wanted to text Danny, but we hadn’t spoken since I missed the match. So I quickly sent a message to Slogger, without caring how odd it sounded.

  Was I at school yesterday?

  His reply came back in a few seconds.

  What are you on about? Course you were.

  Then another:

  Er, now you mention it, I’m not sure. Why?

  Dad couldn’t remember what we did yesterday, and Slogger didn’t know I if I was at school or not. But if I had been around, they’d remember. And surely if I was unconscious, someone would see. Was it possible that . . .

  That when I jumped into the story, I stopped existing in the real world?

  The hairs on the back of my neck prickled.

  Dad turned back to the stove. He switched the exhaust fan on and opened the window. When he moved, he didn’t shuffle in the way I’d got used to. There was life in his steps. He was humming to himself.