* * *
Quetzal gazed out the window at the ocean of space they were submarining their way through. He hadn’t moved in over an hour; there were things weighing upon his mind.
He was tall, over eight feet when he wore his headdress. His skin was the colour of autumn leaves and his arms - extending from brief black sleeves of leather - were vined with innumerable hieroglyphs, one for each battle he had won.
His hair was like gleaming black beetles that had been crushed into thread, and it flowed like a cape across his back. He wore a long golden robe embroidered with ancient symbols that only the most educated among their race could understand. His eyes were long and narrow, angled up at the outer corners, and heavily lined in black, drawing out the fire of his irises. There were rumours that he could burn you with a single look, if he wanted.
The most defining thing about him was his long nose, which was reminiscent of a bird. In fact, everything about him gave the impression of a golden eagle, soaring proudly through an endless sky.
He wasn’t happy, just now. Not that he ever gave off an impression of jubilance, on the best of days. But today, there was something particularly sombre about his angular face. It lay in the way his eyes sat still, seeing through the stars and seeking what he knew waited for them in the dark beyond. It showed in his stance, his hulking legs slightly apart and no piece of him moving.
He had his great hands clasped behind his back, his long fingers mixing with the velvet of his robe. His eyes were fixed on a point in space where Earth would soon be appearing. The last time he’d been on that small blue world was two thousand years ago. It hadn’t ended well. Something told him this would not go as expected, either.
There was a noise, the sound of the door opening behind him, and someone entered his quarters.
Quetzal didn’t turn around. He already knew who he would find if he did.
‘How many times have I told you to knock, first?’ he said in that deep, quiet voice of his that sent a thrill of fear through most people.
But Horace was not most people.
‘You’re wanted,’ Horace said.
Quetzal finally turned to face him, slowly, almost disinterestedly, his hands still behind his back. ‘I said I didn’t wish to be disturbed. Whoever it is can wait.’
Horace held his eyes defiantly. Horace, too, was very tall and broad of chest. His arms were snaked with hieroglyphs - almost as many as Quetzal’s. His hair was also black, thick and long, his skin a shimmering gold. And he had the same slanted eyes - but his stare was less fire and more like ash falling from the sky in the aftermath of a volcanic eruption.
He wore his own robe of velvet, but his was the colour of tar and woven with gold thread. The symbols on Quetzal’s robe spoke of triumph and strength; Horace’s told a story of domination. And while Horace, too, looked bird-like, his nose was more hooked, giving the impression of an angry parrot.
‘I thought you’d say that,’ Horace commented as he stepped further into the room. They stood six feet apart, surrounded by Quetzal’s array of instruments, strange devices of metal, glass and imagination.
‘Then you should have saved yourself the time and stayed away,’ Quetzal remarked coolly.
Horace smiled. It made his face look crooked and untrustworthy. ‘I didn’t say I would accept your reply.’
Quetzal gave him a crushing look before turning on his heel and gazing out the window again. It was huge, more like a cinema screen than a window, covering the entire wall of his living quarters on the ship.
Horace walked across the room, his thick black boots making a heavy clanking sound as each step shook the metal clips bolting them around his large feet. He stood beside his partner and stared out the window with him.
‘Why are you so fascinated with that insignificant speck of dust?’ Horace wondered. His voice was just as deep at Quetzal’s, but had none of the natural presence.
Quetzal made a noise that might have been a derisive laugh. ‘Insignificant?’ he echoed. ‘You would call your birth home insignificant?’
Horace bristled visibly. Quetzal knew he didn’t like being reminded that he’d been born on Earth.
‘Sometimes,’ Horace philosophised, ‘the past is best left where it is: in the past.’
‘Be that as it may,’ said Quetzal, ‘the only way to embrace the future is to understand our history.’
‘Is that what you think this is?’ Horace wondered. ‘Is it your way of reaching the future?’
‘We’re dying,’ Quetzal stated. He had a way of doing that, of taking the most dramatic, terrible realities and speaking about them as casually as if he were remarking upon the weather. It was one of the many things about him that made him so formidable; he didn’t seem bothered by anything.
‘And you think the child can save us,’ Horace summed up.
‘Perhaps,’ said Quetzal. ‘It was a mistake, leaving the Wisdom behind.’
Horace shrugged his enormous shoulders, making his robe rustle on the marble floor of the room. ‘Accidents happen,’ he said.
‘Hm.’
‘Besides,’ Horace noted, ‘we don’t know for certain that we left the Wisdom there.’
‘I do,’ Quetzal spoke with finality. ‘I’ve seen it on my sensors. It’s out there.’
A blue dot appeared in their view. It wasn’t much, not yet, but it would grow and grow until it was close enough, and then they would -
‘It’s Charon who wants you,’ said Horace. ‘Come with me, now.’
Quetzal tore his gaze away from the window with great difficulty. If it was Charon…well, he had no choice but to obey. And he supposed he couldn’t stall any longer. The enormity of their mission fell on him like a large meteorite - and he knew just how heavy that was, because it had actually happened to him, once.
He turned and headed for the door, and Horace followed him.
‘What do you hope to do with all this stuff, anyway?’ Horace asked as he paused at one of the instruments. It was comprised of a set of small metallic balls caught in a whirlwind of energy, endlessly spinning in the air, suspended from nothing.
Quetzal approached him and pulled Horace’s hand away before it could disrupt the balls, his face like a father exercising tremendous patience with a disobedient child. ‘Do you know what that does?’ he asked quietly.
Horace smiled. ‘What do you think?’
Quetzal smiled back. ‘Then don’t touch it.’ His tone left no room for argument.
They exited the room and walked heavily down the long winding corridor that sloped the interior of the ship, making their way to the lift. It hummed as it zipped up to their floor and yawned open for them. It was made of translucent glass; as they stepped inside, they could see its workings surrounding them, and they could see how far up they were.
Horace pushed a series of steel buttons and sent them plummeting down 463 decks of ship, to the Director’s quarters.
The Director was not a woman to be trifled with. She did not respond well to Horace’s efforts at flattery when he bowed at her with forced graciousness and commented upon the good state of her health. She was unpaired and had never been known to take a lover. But she offered Quetzal a begrudging degree of respect for what she once referred to as strength of character. She was a woman impressed by power, rather than pretty words.
When they arrived at her door, Horace remembered to knock. It was a politeness he seemed only able to afford the Director. There was a low beep as the door opened for them and they were permitted entrance.
Director Charon sat behind a fat desk made entirely of glass, like the lift. It was a common theme of Nibiru, the design of the brilliant architects whose genius it had been to build underground, under the surface of the planet, and harness its energy - in short, to transform a whole world into a spaceship.
Behind her was another enormous window. It made her look like she was flying amongst the stars. Through the trans
lucence of the desk, it could be seen that Charon was dressed in a velvet dress the violet of royalty, which was so long it seemed to sink into the floor beneath her, obscuring her feet. It flowed out from her waist, but the bodice was tight across her chest. The sleeves hugged her upper arms, before waterfalling down at the elbows. Her hair, the colour of straw glinting in the sunlight, cascaded in tempestuous waves, giving the impression of a statuesque lioness.
‘My lady Charon,’ Horace greeted her with an awkward bow. ‘May I say how well you look today.’
Beside him, Quetzal merely dipped his terrifying head in acknowledgment of the meeting and retained a degree of disinterest.
She’d been writing something, but now she looked up at them. She sat very straight, her posture untouchable. ‘Horace,’ she said. ‘Quetzal.’ Her eyes lingered on him for just a second. ‘Sit,’ she ordered.
They each did as they were told and sat on the glass chairs across from her.
‘You wanted to see us,’ Quetzal began things. There were no niceties about him; he was strictly business.
‘I did,’ she said. ‘We’re almost there.’
‘Yes, my lady,’ Horace agreed.
Charon spun around in her chair and looked out the window. The blue dot had grown to the size of an orange.
‘Earth,’ she announced. ‘It’s been a long time. Perhaps too long. And now we shall make one of our occasional visits.’ She turned back around to her guests and added, ‘Well. At least, you will.’
She eyed Quetzal, who was deeply discomfited.
‘Are you ready?’ she asked him in what was the gentlest tone possible for her. She folded her arms over each other on the table, lifting the edges of her sleeves and revealing her own battle marks on the skin beneath.
‘Yes,’ he said after a time.
He hoped he sounded convincing. After all, the whole project had been his idea. He had devised everything, nineteen years ago. The trouble was Quetzal had privately developed not a fear, but an anxiety about the results of what everyone had deemed his greatest ever experiment. He had the uncanny sensation it was now out of his hands, and he was unsure what might become of it.
‘Why do you look so restless?’ Charon asked him. Her stare missed nothing, not one crease in his forehead, not one lick of his lips.
‘My tracking devices have lost their target,’ he said, again in that simple way of his. ‘How could that not make me restless?’
Charon’s mouth bent into the closest thing she had to a smile and her long eyes narrowed yet further. Like Quetzal’s, they were lined in charcoal and burned like fire. Against the backdrop of her golden hair, they made her look like a star.
‘You worry you won’t find him?’ she surmised from Quetzal’s expression.
‘It’s possible,’ said Quetzal. He crossed one of his legs over the other in his chair and tried not to notice the way Horace watched him out of the corners of his eyes.
‘It’s not,’ Charon returned. ‘That’s why I chose you to do this. Perhaps the child is missing, for now. But you will retrieve him. And when you do -’
She didn’t have to finish. They all knew how that sentence ended. It had been their mission statement ever since Quetzal had decided to share one of his ‘brilliant’ ideas with the Council after he’d had too much Saturnian wine:
Track the boy, find the Wisdom. The boy didn’t know it, but he would lead them right to the very thing they had all been searching for.
If everything went according to plan, that was. And Quetzal had a bad feeling about that little proviso.
In the distance, the orange had grown to the size of a football, and it was still getting closer.
‘Time for you to go, then,’ Charon said as she rose to her feet.
Her dress fell in heavy pleats down her sides. Everything about her spoke of majesty. Which it should have, bearing in mind she’d been the Director for ten thousand years, and she’d lived yet longer.
Her guests stood too, putting their right hands over their waists and bowing at perfect 45-degree angles, before straightening.
‘Good luck,’ she told them. Her eyes again lingered on Quetzal.
‘Thank you, my lady,’ Horace answered for the both of them.
They took their leave of her and doubled back down the corridor, making for the lift one final time. This time, Horace rocketed them up 312 floors, to the Deck of Descent.
Others on that deck, busy with their own tasks, stopped and stared as the godlike pair made their way past. Everyone knew what they were about to do.
They pushed a button on the far wall, revealing a doorway, through which they stepped. The door closed behind them, so it was just they two, as it would be from now on. They stopped at another expansive window, the largest on the ship, and gazed out at what was now very clearly Earth.
‘Are you ready?’ Horace asked his companion.
‘No,’ Quetzal confessed, ‘but that doesn’t matter.’
He reached under his robe and patted one of the deep pockets woven into his clothing. He felt a hard cube and pulled it out. It was black, shiny and reflective. He cast one of his hands over it and activated an invisible bubble around both him and his companion, their answer to the spacesuit.
They walked up to the edge of the window and outspread their arms.
‘Open,’ Horace instructed the ship.
In obedience, the window slid up, the oxygenless air striking them and sucking them out into space.
Their robes ballooned above them like parachutes as they made their descent to Earth.
About the Author
Vrinda Pendred originally grew up in Arizona, but moved to England in 1999, where she now lives with her husband and their very energetic son. She is the author of the YA fantasy series The Descendants. Her first novel was The Ladder, a story about two friends learning to grow through their difficult childhoods and find the light that lies inside themselves.
Vrinda also runs a publishing house for writers with neurological conditions, called Conditional Publications. Their first book, Check Mates: A Collection of Fiction, Poetry and Artwork about Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, by People with OCD, was released in 2010 (Kindle and paperback), with future books in the pipeline.
In addition to her writing, Vrinda also does freelance proofreading and editing, and tutors GCSE / A-Level English. In her free time, she loves music, languages, dance, singing and scouring Amazon for other great indie books.
Favourite Genres: YA / NA, Science-Fiction, Fantasy, Paranormal, Horror
Influential Authors: Stephen King, Michael Grant, Graham Joyce, Neal Shusterman, Cassandra Clare, Brigid Kemmerer, Lauren Oliver, James Dashner, Amanda Hocking, George R.R. Martin, Margaret Atwood
Also by Vrinda Pendred:
The Ladder
‘Ansel has no idea what might lie at the top of that ladder, but he knows he has to get on it.’
Ansel Hilliard doesn’t need anyone. He doesn’t need friends. He doesn’t need family. At least, that’s what he’s always told himself.
But when the troubled boy moves in next-door, Ansel finds himself drawn into a lifelong friendship he never thought possible. As they grow together and dare to allow others into their hearts, they find that the turbulence of life doesn’t always have to destroy you.
Inspired by the author’s background of living with bipolar disorder, The Ladder is a story of self-discovery, and learning to face - and embrace - the darkness we are all afraid to admit lies inside of us.
What Others Are Saying
‘I don’t feel like I’ve read such an important story since the first time I read The Catcher in the Rye.’
‘This book was absolutely beautiful in its realness. So often throughout the book I was left speechless.’
‘This is a profoundly affecting story that needs to be told again, and again.’
Table of Contents
Prologue
ITZY
Ch
apter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
AIDAN
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
A Note from the Author
Sneak Preview of Second Coming (The Descendants, #2)
About the Author
Also by Vrinda Pendred
Mythos (The Descendants, #1) Page 29