Budding Star

by Annie Dalton

  A v. disturbing theory was forming at the back of my mind. A theory which totally explained all the things that otherwise made absolutely no sense; for example, how Reubs and I were able to mash up an entire army without getting a teeny scratch ourselves.

  When I spotted the satchel hanging in the tree, I knew for sure my theory was right. I unhooked the new bag of Limbo goodies from the branch. This one was made from way better-quality leather. Without saying a word, I emptied the bag on to the ground. This is what was inside: one coil of rope with a useful hooky thing on the end, two star-shaped ninja weapons, small spiky objects for scaling high walls, one pristine new scroll.

  I waved it triumphantly. “Ta-daa! I knew they’d give us a new map!”

  Reuben gave me a severe look. “Mind telling me what’s going on?”

  “I’m not sure.” I took a breath. “This might sound mad, but I think we’re playing some kind of game.”

  “A game?” Reubs echoed.

  “You know those musical chords we heard a few minutes ago? That’s because we just went up a level. When we killed the Dark lord, we absorbed his powers, which is why we’ve got more energy. I have, anyway.”

  “Yep, that sounds mad,” he agreed.

  “Because you never lived on Earth, Reubs! And you’ve never been interested in computer games. You said yourself this is like a fairy tale. Well, computer games are like interactive fairy tales. If you defeat the baddies you go up to the next level. If not, you lose a life and have to start again—”

  My buddy held up his hand. “Stop! I’m lost. How can a world be a game?”

  I shrugged. “It’s just the only explanation that makes sense.”

  “To you,” Reuben said darkly.

  “Remember the way things happened in that first world? How that kid gave you the dagger after we’d killed the first demon. That’s exactly like a game. You always have to earn things in games.”

  “I still don’t—”

  “OK, OK, how about the way we took out those soldiers? Remember the sound effects?”

  He chuckled. “Biff-boff. I thought that was weird at the time.”

  “And those flying peach stones? Zoom-zoom!”

  Reuben gave me a sideways grin. “The peach stones were cool!”

  “Extremely cool,” I agreed. “But they weren’t normal.”

  “Not even for Limbo?” he asked wistfully.

  I shook my head. “Sorry.”

  I could see him gradually processing this new idea. “That would explain the birds,” he admitted. “And you’re right. I’ve got heaps more energy.”

  “That’s because we just went up a level. If you notice, everything is extra vibey.”

  “Extra vibey but still deeply sad,” Reuben commented.

  He unfurled our superior Level-Two scroll and I heard his sharp intake of breath. “Well, look who’s back,” he said huskily.

  When I saw that little blue butterfly, I almost burst into tears. Our unexpected upgrade hadn’t given me time to dwell on what the demon lord had done to Tsubomi. But she was OK, she was still OK!

  “I can’t believe it!” I said shakily. “She must have got upgraded with us after we killed the Dark lord. From how he was talking, I thought he’d done something hideous to her.”

  Reubs frowned. “If your game theory is right, who are we playing against?”

  I shook my head. “You’re really trying to outwit the actual game itself. Plus you’re trying to beat your own best efforts. I just hope we get to Tsubomi before the demon lord this time.”

  “The Dark lord on Level Two will be stronger, right?”

  “Yeah, but we’re stronger too, don’t forget! Plus we’ve probably got heaps of cunning ninja skills we don’t know about!” I grinned at him. “Ok, we’ve had a little rest, now these angel assassins had better hit the road!”

  He laughed. ‘“Angel Assassins’, sounds like the kind of hardcore stuff Brice listens to.”

  With Reuben improvising mad Angel-Assassin-type lyrics to make me laugh, we set off in the direction indicated by the butterfly.

  Level Two was mountain country, rocky and arid. Nothing seemed to grow there except cacti and scrub, and the occasional pine tree. I noticed that all the trees had been blasted by lightning along the exact same side. On Level Two peasant girls were clearing stones from parched red fields, passing filled baskets to each other in a never-ending chain gang, and the ladies who rode past in their creaky wicker carriages were fluttering their fans to actually keep cool, not just for coyness.

  In its own way, Level Two was fabulously scenic. At intervals we’d glimpse fairy-tale castles perched on rocky ledges high above the track.

  “Have you noticed how every castle comes with an identical pine tree?” Reuben commented.

  “Yeah, yeah and the birds always fly in sevens!”

  “They don’t actually. Those are eagles,” he said with a grin. “Eagles tend to fly solo.”

  I looked up and sure enough there was exactly one fierce golden-brown eagle soaring on a current of hot air. “Boy, you really notice every tiny thing!” I marvelled.

  We were practically jogging by this time, easily overtaking yet another travelling harp player.

  “Hi,” we said in medieval Japanese.

  “Hi,” he answered politely.

  On Level Two, the musicians wore scarves tied over their mouths, bandit-style, to keep out the dust. We passed so many harp players, not to mention woodcutters and travelling monks, that I had a strong suspicion some of them were ninjas in disguise.

  I was starting to think like a ninja by this time! I’m serious! My mind was suddenly humming with devious strategies; scanning the mountainside for caves to hide out in, bushes to skulk behind, castles to raid. I had no intention of raiding a castle for real, obviously, but if I HAD wanted to, I had all the relevant ninja skills at my fingertips.

  “See that castle?” I called to my ninja angel buddy, as we jogged on under glowing skies. “If we crawled through those bushes, we’d find a secret ninja path that would lead us right into the lord’s private chamber, without the soldiers even seeing!”

  “Yeah, but the lord of the castle would be expecting us,” Reuben pointed out. “He’ll have spent a fortune making it ninja-proof; secret entrances, hidden stairways, floors that sing like canaries when you step on the wrong board!”

  I grinned. “It’s cool knowing all this stuff isn’t it!”

  “It is actually,” he agreed.

  We had gradually increased our pace, until we were literally running. I’m not a great fan of running as a rule, but on Level Two it felt natural.

  The landscape was becoming increasingly otherworldly. Lone lightning-struck trees were replaced by strange Martian-looking rocks.

  “Some of this rock looks volcanic,” Reuben said when we stopped to check the map.

  “I haven’t seen any volcanoes!”

  My buddy pointed wordlessly into the distance.

  Me and my big mouth, I thought.

  An ominous cone-shaped mountain loomed on the horizon. Plumes of smoke belched out, in that unsubtle way you see in cartoons. Of course, when you are a complete wuss, even a cartoon volcano is enough to scare you silly. I swallowed, and for the second time that day, I heard a wolf howl close by.

  Reuben saw my freaked expression. “Wolves don’t hurt people,” he reassured me. “That’s just a myth.”

  He went back to studying the map. “This butterfly is zigzagging all over the place!” he complained. “Last time I looked it was off to the side. Now it’s behind us.” He tugged at one of his dreads in frustration. “Mel, I hate to say this, but I think Tsubomi’s stalking us.”

  I gasped. “You’re kidding!”

  Neither of us had the least idea what you did if the lost soul reversed cosmic protocol and started following you!

  I blew a dusty strand of hair out of my eyes. “The first challenge was to do with earth,” I said slowly. “This level has to be about
fire, so presumably our second-level challenge is to do with fire too.”

  Reuben gestured to the smoking mountain. “Things don’t get much more fiery than that.”

  “I suppose we could head in that direction for a while, and see if Tsubomi follows? Unless you’ve got a better idea?” I said hopefully.

  He hadn’t. Luckily I didn’t seem able to worry and run simultaneously, possibly because running in this world felt SO exhilarating. At times it felt like we were standing still and it was the landscape that was flying past!

  This is how a leopard feels, I thought, racing across the savannah, with the wind rushing through its fur.

  From time to time I heard a wolf give that lonely full-throated howl. Like, “YAROO!” At times it seemed worryingly close. Other times it sounded echoey and far away.

  The sun was low on the horizon when we both skidded to a halt. We stared down at the fresh paw prints in the dust.

  Reuben shook his head. “That wolf is following us!”

  Everyone was following us, if you asked me. Lost souls, wolves. There was probably an entire army of ninja assassins trailing us through the undergrowth at this moment.

  “I thought you said wolves were harmless.”

  Reuben pulled a face. “In Limbo, who knows? We should probably camp here. It’ll be freezing, because there’s absolutely no shelter, but if anything IS trying to creep up on us, we’d see it for miles.”

  Reuben was thinking like a ninja too, I noticed impressed.

  We lit a fire, in case the lone wolf turned out to be an advance scout for a huge, ravening pack. Then we wrapped ourselves in our cloaks and watched the sunset. Level Two sunsets are totally fabulous. When nightfall finally came the darkness had a faint red glow.

  My stomach gave a long low rumble.

  “Hungry?” asked Reuben.

  “I’d even eat trail mix,” I said gloomily.

  I unrolled the map to check on Tsubomi’s position.

  The butterfly had vanished.

  “That’s impossible!” said Reuben in dismay. “I looked ten minutes ago and she was right here!”

  “Are you looking for me?” A ninja girl stepped out from the shadows. She wore a shabby cloak over her baggy fighting clothes, and there was a stringed instrument slung over her shoulder. Like me and Reubs, Tsubomi’s soul had put on a Limbo disguise, but I recognised her instantly.

  “We found you!” I gasped.

  “Excuse me!” she said, laughing. “It was actually me who found you!”

  Tsubomi sounded just like she did in the Agency documentary. Cool, sassy, yet oddly grown-up. “I’ve been hoping we’d hook up eventually. I wanted to thank you for taking out that Dark lord!” She flashed us a mischievous grin.

  “You knew about that?” Reuben looked amazed.

  Tsubomi seemed surprised. “Of course! You both did a brilliant job!”

  “Only because you left that note,” I said modestly. “It was really a team effort.”

  Tsubomi shuddered. “Can you imagine anything so gross! Actually giving someone your heart in a locket!”

  “If you think about it, it was a HUGE compliment!” I told her quickly. “The Dark lord must have liked you a lot. He was literally putting his life in your hands.”

  Stop babbling, babe, I told myself. It was partly stage fright at finding myself chatting to a teenage pop star. But mostly it was because I’d always imagined that this would be the easy part of our mission, and I’d just realised that having finally found our human, we didn’t have a clue what to do next!

  “Well,” I said brightly. “I guess we should get you back to your—”

  But I couldn’t finish my sentence. I had a chilling flash of that dying girl wired up to those machines and, I’m sorry, I just could NOT bring myself to say the word, “body”.

  “- back home,” I finished huskily. “We’ll get you back home, in a trice. You probably won’t even know you’ve been away.”

  Tsubomi laughed. “That would be lovely - if I had a home to go back to! Sadly I don’t. For now this world is my home, and I have a really difficult task to carry out.”

  Jessica had told us that lost souls often have the strangest delusions about why they’re in Limbo.

  “Gosh! What kind of task?” I asked, to humour her. “Like a quest you mean?”

  “Maybe I’ll tell you tomorrow,” she said evasively. “Is it OK if I stay with you guys till morning?”

  “We’d like that, wouldn’t we Mel?” Reuben suddenly looked hopeful. “Any chance I can have a strum on that - is it a lute?”

  “It’s called a koto,” I corrected.

  Tsubomi laughed. “Actually a koto would be way too big and bulky to carry around. You call this a ‘biwa’. Reuben’s right, it’s a sort of lute. Play it by all means.” She added carelessly, “I don’t even know why I’m lugging it around. It’s not like I’m a musician or anything.”

  “So you don’t play yourself?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Everyone plays a bit, don’t they?”

  “Not really,” I began.

  Reuben gave me a look, and, remembering the sacred rules of soul-retrieval: we wait, we watch, we keep our gobs shut, I hastily shut mine.

  Be patient, I told myself. Maybe that miracle will happen like Jessica said, and Tsubomi will remember who she is.

  Level Two might be a simmering dust bowl during the day, but it gets FREEZING when the sun goes down. I was really grateful for that campfire.

  Tsubomi was holding out her hands to the flames. Suddenly she cleared her throat. “You’ve both been so kind and I kind of feel like I owe it to you to tell you the truth. The problem is, I’m scared it’s going to change the way you feel about me.”

  I felt like such a pro! We’d only been with her ten minutes, yet already Tsubomi trusted us enough to spill the beans about the stresses and strains that had driven her to take her accidental overdose.

  “Don’t tell us unless you really want to,” I said in my gentlest voice.

  She swallowed. “It’s about the demon lord.”

  My smile froze on my face. “Oh, right.”

  “He told you he couldn’t bring himself to kill me. What he didn’t tell you, is that when I ate the fruit I immediately fell under an evil curse.”

  “No way!” I gasped. “You poor thing! What kind of curse?”

  “I’m only a girl by night,” Tsubomi said earnestly. “But when the sun rises, I have to take on the shape of a wolf.”

  “You’re kidding!” I breathed.

  She giggled. “How do you think I crept up on you earlier? Ninja skills? Yeah right! Wolves can outsmart ninjas every time!”

  “But that’s so awful,” I said in horror. “How can you joke about it?”

  Tsubomi shook her head. “It’s not so bad. It’s taught me a lot actually.”

  She seemed surprisingly eager to talk about her wolf experiences. After several extremely detailed descriptions of fascinating smells (fascinating to a wolf that is), Reubs and I started getting restless. We tactfully tried to bring the conversation round to Tsubomi’s real life in Japan; her home, her studies, parents and friends. But we just hit this total wall.

  To hear her talk, you’d have thought she’d been born inside this game. I can see why. It might be weird and scary but it was also extremely simple. Inside the game, Tsubomi didn’t have to stress about her mother, or her agent, her fans or promoters. She didn’t have to jump on and off planes, zooming from one city to another, meeting ridiculous schedules. She was as free as, well, a wolf.

  Reuben was still softly tinkering with the harp. He asked Tsubomi to show him the proper way to tune it. I watched her lively laughing face as she corrected his fingering, then quickly shut my eyes to banish the chilling image of that pale, blank girl in a hospital bed.

  I could literally feel the minutes ticking, ticking. For souls who’ve left their bodies for keeps, time obviously doesn’t present a problem. But each minute, each second, that T
subomi Hoshi’s soul spent in Limbo made it increasingly unlikely that she’d ever be able to return to life on Earth.

  Reuben seemed totally oblivious to all these concerns. He’d started playing a funky old-style Japanese version of one of his own songs. I could see that Tsubomi was having some kind of internal struggle until finally, she couldn’t resist any longer, and started to sing along. The evening turned into an impromptu jam session. Sometimes Tsubomi sang, sometimes Reuben, sometimes they sang together. Like I said, Reubs doesn’t have what you’d call a great voice, but their voices harmonised beautifully.

  It’s not unusual for me to have at least two Melanies squabbling in my head at any one time, but suddenly there was an entire football team! Mel Number One was stressing about how we were going to save Tsubomi. Mel Number Two, I’m ashamed to say, was hopping with jealousy! Reuben was my friend. And Tsubomi and I had a special soul connection from who knows where. So how come I was the cosmic gooseberry here?

  Mel Number Three ached with pure envy. If I could only open my mouth and hear a wonderful sound come out, instead of a tuneless squeak. Mel Number Four on the other hand…

  I eventually ran out of Melanies, and fell into an uneasy doze.

  I woke to the sound of Reuben stamping on the remains of our camp fire. The sun was coming up over the mountains like a huge gold beach ball. My angel buddy gave me a beaming smile. “You’re awake! Great evening wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah. Great!” I agreed.

  He looked worried. “Do you think I was wrong, getting her to play? I was hoping it might help her remember. But she’s got such a huge block about it. It’s like she wants to play, but she thinks she shouldn’t. Now I’m worried that I’ve just made her even more confused.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you haven’t -” I started.

  But Reuben was still fretting. “She just kept bringing everything back to her task, or quest, or whatever, like she’s some character in a fairy tale.”

  “You noticed that too.” I was brushing red dust off my ninja clothes. I felt like such a child. Reuben hadn’t been trying to leave me out. He’d been doing his job. Like you should have been doing, Mel, I scolded myself.

  “Where is she anyway?” I asked guiltily.