Aurora

by Julie Bertagna

  Lily wanted to rip through the virtual skin of the Weave, to reach out and touch her real, human father.

  The ether crackled and sparked around them as the man and the girl stood together on the broken bridge.

  She was a heart-wrenching mixture of Mara and himself. And there was even, Fox saw, a ghost of his own mother in Lily’s face. But there was something more, something beyond all that, which was her very own self.

  This is my daughter, thought Fox, amazed.

  ‘But Mara,’ he blurted out, ‘is she . . . ?’

  Lily sighed and his heart sank.

  Dead, he thought. She’s dead, after all.

  ‘She’s on the far side of the mountain,’ said Lily.

  ‘She’s alive?’ The throb of emotion in Fox made a violent ripple in the ether.

  Lily nodded. ‘But she doesn’t know where I am. I ran away to find you.’

  Fox studied his daughter’s face, lost for words.

  ‘I never knew you existed,’ she burst out. ‘I thought Rowan was my dad. The wizz globe was stolen before I was born so Mum lost contact with you. I came through the mountains to the ocean to search for you. I found the globe and now I’ve found you, but I’ve lost everything else.’ The girl’s face quivered. ‘My best friend is dead and I’m a prisoner in Tuck’s ship in the city of Ilira. He’s a brutal man, he –’ She gasped, glancing upwards at something Fox couldn’t see, frightened by something in her world. ‘I don’t know what’s happening. There’s shouting and screaming up on deck. Help me.’

  Fox stepped as close as he dared. The slightest touch would tear the ether and leave a gash like a wound in the skin of the Weave.

  ‘Lily, I’m an ocean away. You must help yourself.’

  Her eyes were desperate. ‘I had to see you, I had to. I was sure that snake-girl, Pandora, knew who you were. I told her you were my father but she chased me away.’

  Pandora found Lily here and never told him?

  Fox controlled a surge of rage at such betrayal. He felt he was furiously trying to fit together the lost pieces of a puzzle in the dark. The only parts of the puzzle that mattered were Mara and Lily. Mara was alive. But his daughter’s life was in danger because of him.

  And within hours his own life might end.

  Emotion whirled inside Fox as he thought of the coming cyclone he had stirred up around the world. Yet here they were, he and Lily. Somehow they’d found each other in the virtual universe. It was as unlikely as two bits of flotsam from a storm-wrecked ship coming together, years later, in the eye of another storm.

  His war was about to burst through the walls of the empire. Fox no longer had the power to stop it, even if he wanted to.

  ‘I don’t want to die here,’ Lily blurted. ‘I want to see you in the real world.’

  Fox would have ripped through the ether to get to her if he could. He saw her terror, felt her courage scattering.

  Somehow, he had to give her strength – and do so at cyberspeed.

  WIZZLOG TO THE WORLD

  Fox uttered a cybercode into his godgem – a Weave-spell he treasured years ago, found in the wreckage of a Weavesite and saved in the godgem’s memory banks in case Mara ever came back.

  On the Bridge to Nowhere a dark-haired young woman appeared like a genie from the ether.

  ‘Mum?’ Lily gasped.

  ‘It’s her grandmother,’ Fox told her. ‘Your great-grandmother, Mary Bell, when she was young.’

  ‘Granny Mary?’ Lily gaped in amazement.

  ‘A lumen image of her I found in a newsgram,’ Fox quickly explained. ‘She logged the plight of her islands when the seas first rose. Her wizzlogs once had a worldwide following.’ He started the lumen. ‘Watch.’

  ‘Wizzlog 47,’ said Mary Bell. ‘Last night the sea took one of our islands – whole families wiped out as they slept.’ Her voice broke. ‘Our land is vanishing around us. This is an SOS to the outside world.’

  Mary Bell raked dark hair from her face in a gesture that is now Lily’s and Mara’s. She gazed out across the years. ‘The people of our islands are survivors. Please help us. But if you don’t, we’ll find a way through this somehow.’

  Her defiant dark eyes widened and she cried out in sudden joy to someone in her world that they couldn’t see. ‘Tain! You’re safe!’

  Mary Bell vanished.

  Fox turned to her astonished great-granddaughter on the broken bridge.

  ‘Don’t give up. Do what Mary Bell and Mara did. Save yourself!’

  Lily began to cough.

  ‘Smoke,’ she gasped. Then, ‘I’m getting out.’

  Fox heard the defiant tone. He glimpsed the bold spirit that had taken Lily through a mountain to track him down.

  ‘I’ll find you,’ he promised.

  ‘Look for the shining bridges of Ilira,’ she cried, as she faded into the ether. ‘A mountain city, deep in a sea fjord . . . find me there . . . !’

  Then she was gone.

  Moments later came Kitsune’s call to arms.

  CREEPING INTO HISTORY

  ‘Will it hurt?’ asks Pan.

  She unhooks the metal helmet from her belt and pulls it on to her head.

  ‘Not as much as it did on the way down,’ Fox remembers. A wry smile breaks on his tense face.

  Excitement pulses in him now that he’s out of the netherworld, heading back up into the sky city he abandoned years ago. Back then, he almost drowned when he hurtled down these twisting air chutes and crashed into the netherworld sea.

  Pan’s green eyes glint at him through the visor slit. Clinging to the creeper, the helmet of a medieval knight on her head, skateboard strapped to the back of her pangolin-scale armour, she could be an exotic giant beetle among the jungle of leaves.

  Fox pockets his godgem. It wasn’t easy to Noosjump with creeper creatures fluttering and scuttling all around. But he just did. He shot a flare deep into the Noos. It’s the signal for Steerpike, a secret Surgent at the heart of the sky city above, to set New Mungo’s air systems to extreme power – in reverse.

  It starts like a welcome breeze in the muggy jungle of the air tunnel. Then wind fills the coiling chute as a great rush of damp air is sucked up from the netherworld. Creeper creatures sweep past them in a flurry of leaves.

  ‘Let go!’ Fox yells, when it feels impossible to cling on any longer.

  And up they surge, sucked higher and higher into the dark spiral of the chute. Pan screams like her crazy old self as they helter-skelter up towards the sky city in a blast of wind. Fox has forgotten the sheer joy of moving so fast that reality blurs. He doesn’t want it to end, but it will, any moment, in a great –

  CRASH!

  They blast in a spray of filthy water into unearthly light. Fox lies in a wet heap for a long, dizzying moment, insects and swamp creatures raining down on him.

  He sits up and looks around at an intersection of tunnels. He sees the movement of skaters at the distant end of one tunnel, feels the rumble of a sky train overhead.

  We’re in!

  Creeper debris keeps spouting from the opened air vent: swampwater choked with newts and salamanders, frogs and lizards, bats and beetles, water snakes and rats, a saltwater otter, a squabble of mudcats, blizzards of butterflies, mosquitos and moths, a hooting volley of owls. The invasion of netherworld creatures swarms into the tunnels. Fox staggers to his feet, remembering himself among a flock of youths, speeding across the city through these silver sky tunnels . . .

  A moan of pain brings him back to the moment. Pan is slumped awkwardly, crushed against a wall. He hurries over. Dazed green eyes blink at him through the helmet visor. Then she wriggles and jumps to her feet with a scream, tearing off the helmet, shaking out insects and lizards.

  ‘Dragon!’ she yells, and aims a brutal kick.

  A baby swamp dragon, sucked up from the netherworld, hurtles through the air.

  ‘You’re all right then?’ Fox judges, with a grin.

  Pan nods as the swamp dragon scampers
off. All of a sudden the blast of muddy debris from the air vent stops. Now they can hear terrified shouts and screams as bombs shake the sky city. Fox shoves his feet into the zapeedo boots that have been carefully placed beside the opened vent, as Pan unstraps the skateboard from her back.

  ‘Come on!’

  Impatient as ever, she is off.

  ‘It’s a while since I’ve done this,’ Fox shouts after her, unsteady at first as the zapeedos power up. Then the joy-rush of speed and momentum, missed for so long, consumes him again and he remembers how to skate.

  No longer is he creeping along the edges of history, now he’s hurtling towards the future, deep in the heartbeat of the world. He can hear it booming through the towers . . .

  All the stagnant years in the netherworld fall behind Fox as he races towards the centre of New Mungo, sparks crackling from the blades of his zapeedos as he zips round a bend.

  I am the storyteller, he is thinking. I can tell this tale any way I want. I will not die.

  He won’t think of his promise to the Surgents, now at war in every sky city across the planet, in the rebellion that’s taken him half his life to plan – the promise that he is ready to sacrifice himself, as they are, to break the empire’s hold on the world and reclaim the Earth for all its people. For the first time in years Fox is not thinking of the rest of the world. He is thinking of himself, of Lily, the daughter he must reach, and of Mara.

  He must create the right end for his own story. Now.

  THE GHOST TRAP

  Every sky city of the New World is under attack. The walls that make every city a sea fortress, the spiregyres of the vast sky towers, the Noos, the trade empire and, most crucially of all, the imaginations of the Nooworlders – the Surgents have invaded it all.

  There is an added shock that Fox means to detonate: his own return from the dead.

  His parents have always been strangers to him. Their work as empire builders meant constant travelling among the cities, so the bonds between parents and son were already stretched over thousands of ocean miles before Fox made the final break.

  The vanishing of David Stone, grandson of Caledon and son of two of the empire’s most powerful Guardians, is a mystery that has never been solved. Fox means to solve that mystery today.

  The original plan was for the boat-camp Surgents now crashing through the city walls into the towers of New Mungo to band together with rebels inside the city to seize the Guardians and wrench power from their hands. With the Guardians under arrest Fox would take control of the city as Caledon’s genuine heir, and reveal himself through the Noos as the beloved global superstar of the Midnight tales. Fox’s great hope is that the sky people, thrust into chaos, but with hearts and minds newly opened through the stories he has told, will seize the moment as a chance to re-imagine what they can be, what kind of world they want, and how it might be remade for all its people.

  Second by second as he speeds through the sky tunnels Fox is redrafting his plans. Finding Lily has changed everything.

  Skaters zip up the sides of the tunnels, looping overhead, whizzing in cascades of fear. The thunder of the bombs and the invasion of netherworld creatures allow Fox and Pandora to skate through the mounting panic unchallenged while the Nooworlders, desperate to find out what is happening to their world, try to Noos-connect on the move.

  ‘Look, look!’ Pan yells, as they zap past bright, airy arcades full of shops and entertainments that seem a universe away from the harsh gloomy grime of the netherworld below. ‘You never told me it was all so beautiful. Ow!’ Pan’s quick reflexes send her looping up the tunnel wall to avoid a skater who has skidded to a halt.

  ‘What’s up?’ Fox asks, skating around the bewildered youth.

  ‘Something’s wrong with my godkin. My Noos connection’s gone.’

  ‘Mine too!’ a passing girl shrieks.

  ‘And mine!’

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘All the godkins are dead . . .’

  ‘The Noos has crashed!’

  Fox and Pandora exchange glances. It’s as they’d hoped. Under attack from all fronts across the world, the empire has panicked and blocked connections to the Noos. Now the sky citizens are disorientated and at the mercy of the Surge.

  ‘Junction 237.’ Fox glances at an overhead sign. ‘Steerpike’s package should be here.’

  ‘There!’ Pandora points to a green litter bin on the wall.

  Fox rummages among a mush of litter and finds a bento box. Wrapped in seaweed rolls inside the edible box is the equipment he needs: a soundwave connector and a sharp sliver of metal the size of a baby’s fingernail. Fox inserts the earplug that will connect him on a soundwave to Kitsune at the helm of the global Surge. He looks at the tiny blade in disgust.

  This is what a godgem has become. A godkin. A bland metal chip. Not voice-controlled as his trusty old godgem is but by thought, sensation and mood. Fox’s Noos-trawls have kept him up to date with a technology that’s now a world away from what it was in his youth. Each Nooworlder is a dynamo of sensor chips and connectors embedded in skin and clothes; a human techno-hub tuned in, even in sleep, to the pandemonium of the Noos. Sudden disconnection must feel like amputation, as shocking as if Fox had sliced his sword through the ankles of skaters as they zip past.

  It’s a miracle so many were ensnared by his Midnight broadcasts. Fox’s secret was to awaken a buried need, one embedded even deeper in then circuitry – the hunger for a good story, told by a human voice.

  In the absence of a Noos doctor, Kitsune has told him how to implant the godkin – by slicing it into the skin behind his ear. Then, when the Noos is reconnected, Fox will be ready to lead.

  But Steerpike and Kitsune don’t know that Fox has shredded that part of the plan.

  Fox stuffs the godkin back inside the sushi. He unwraps another seaweed roll and finds two sleek weapons. With his back to the skaters, he slips Pan the stun gun and keeps the laser for himself.

  ‘Just point and press with your thumb here.’

  He shows her; she nod.

  Fox chucks the bento box in the bin. He checks the tiny godbox pinned to the leather collar of his armoured vest then feels for the green gem in his pocket. Fiddly it might be, but he’ll stick with his old godgem.

  The soundwave crackles in his ear.

  ‘Kitsune?’

  ‘The Noos is down. Walls breached in thirty-eight cities, Fox – and more to go. Where are you?’

  ‘Junction 237. Tell Steerpike thanks for the godkin, but no thanks.’

  Kitsune chuckles. ‘Thought so. Remember the way to the Nux?’

  ‘I remember.’ Fox has travelled these tunnels endlessly in his dreams. ‘Steerpike still safe?’

  He hopes so. So much depends on Steerpike, his unknown guardian angel. Over the years, Fox has learned to trust this mysterious friend whose Noosname is stolen from a Midnight tale. All communications are passed through Kitsune and his accomplices in the Far East. Direct messages between Steerpike, a traitor at the heart of New Mungo, and Fox in the netherworld ruins at the feet of the city, was too risky in case police rooks in the Noos ever tracked the message trail.

  ‘All safe, so far,’ Kitsune whispers in his ear, as Fox zips through chaotic throngs of skaters towards the great hub at the centre of the towers where all the sky tunnels meet.

  And there it is! Fox’s heart gives a nostalgic leap as he sees the majestic doors of the cybercathedral, the hive of business and industry where he once worked.

  ‘Approaching the cybercath,’ he tells Kitsune. ‘Where exactly are you?’

  ‘Never mind me. Watch out, Fox. There’ll be traders in the cybercath who knew you before. Steerspike’s set up the tok-check. Head straight for the Guardians’ main chamber. Armed Surgents will meet you there.’

  Fox glimpses a tall, weather-tanned, bruisedly handsome warrior skating towards him through the crowd. His face is alight with adrenalin and the brown eyes that lock with his are flecked with a dangerous
fire. Who is he? Does he know me? Fox’s heart quickens until he realizes he is looking at himself in the soaring wall of mirror outside the cybercath. In a flak-jacket made from the armoured leathers of an ancient soldier and his second skin of netherworld grime, he is unrecognizable as the young Noosdreamer who was David Stone.

  He gives a husky laugh.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he tells Kitsune, as the warrior in the minor gives a wry grin. ‘No one will ever know me.’

  Workers rush from the cybercathedral into the city as the bombing of the walls shakes the very core of New Mungo.

  ‘Pan – here!’ Fox shouts through the oncoming crowd. She skids to a halt on her skateboard at the giant doors of the cybercath, her green eyes widening.

  A lumen, a virtual door guard with hair and clothes like starlight, greets them with an enthusiastic ‘Hello!’

  ‘Hello,’ Fox responds brusquely to the tok-check, his hand on the gun in his pocket.

  ‘Hello!’ Pan echoes. ‘You’re beautiful!’

  The lumen quivers as if delighted at the compliment – but it’s an electronic quake, anticipating the blast that now rips through the tunnels. A series of blows rocks the city, one after the other, as if a demented giant is chopping at the limbs of the empire with an axe.

  The crowd stills in shock.

  The lumen’s eyes beam like lasers – which, Fox knows, they are. They can’t duck or move or the tok-check will fail. They must stay in the lumen’s eyebeam. A failed voice recognition means an instant stun ray from its eyes.

  Fox’s fingers grip his gun. Though what can his laser do to a girl made of lumenergy? Has the tok-check failed?

  In a moment of searing stillness between explosions, the shimmering girl steps aside.

  ‘Work well and prosper!’ she urges, oblivious to the mayhem.

  Pandora returns the lumen’s brilliant smile as they pass through the tall doors into a large, domed arena. A rabble of Noostraders are rooted to the spot, ignoring the mayhem in the world outside. They stare aghast at the flashing data on the huge walls – trading updates from sky cities all around the Earth. But the trade alerts have stuck in the moment the Noos connections were cut.