Aurora

by Julie Bertagna

  Wing sits on the rock beside her.

  ‘I need my wolves, my mountain,’ he tells her.

  He leans forward and Lily sees in his eyes all the pain he is bearing. She wants to touch his face but links her arm through his instead.

  ‘Wing is Mara’s island,’ he says, referring to the name Mara gave him when she found him abandoned in the netherworld: the name of her island home. ‘Now I found my own name.’ He points to his face. ‘I am Wolfscar. See?’ he says proudly as Lily stares at the burns that warp the sleek down of his face like the markings of a wolf. ‘Like a true wolf now.’

  Wolfscar. Scarwell. Lily sees, and has no idea what she can do to keep him.

  ‘She doesn’t love you like I do,’ she says at last.

  He is struggling to use words as he never has before. ‘No one love Scar. No one ever. In nederwuld me and Scar was sea rats together, and now we are wolfkin.’

  ‘You’re not a wolf. They’re not your kin. Only half of you,’ Lily gently turns the unscarred side of his face towards her, ‘belongs to her.’

  ‘Wolf Mountain is my home,’ he insists.

  The way he says home forces Lily to accept what she knows, deep down. The mountain and the lake and the wolves are his element. Wing aches to be there with them. He doesn’t need words there, the human words he finds so clumsy, because he has the language of the Earth, the animal world. He would always be on the edges of the human world. On Wolf Mountain he has a language and a world that he can own.

  And Scarwell belongs to that world.

  ‘You’ll miss me,’ she tells him.

  Wing pulls the wolfskin tight around her like a hug.

  ‘I miss you like I miss the sea. I miss Lily all winter.’ He sighs. ‘But I am Wolfscar.’

  It’s no good, Lily sees. All she can do is let him go.

  ‘Wing Wolfscar then.’ Lily laughs to hide eyes filled with tears. ‘One day I’ll bring a fox to your wolf cave,’ Lily vows. ‘He’ll find me, won’t he, Wing? He won’t die?’

  ‘A fox is clever,’ Wing assures her. ‘Nederwuld foxes never drown. They hunt rats and mudcats and chew off paw to get out of fox trap. Fox not die.’

  Wing strokes the snout of the wolf head that lies on Lily’s shoulder and grunts a wolfish goodbye in its ear. Then he kisses her hard and is gone.

  THE MAGNIFICENT GIFT

  ‘Fire!’comes the order.

  Fox waits for the blast of obliteration to come.

  The fingers of the guards tremble on their guns.

  But people have crowded around Fox like a human wall. The young guards, he sees, can’t summon the will to fire on their own citizens, people they know, friends, loved ones.

  ‘Fire!’ The order comes again. ‘Refusal to fire is a crime against the empire.’

  Fox hears the frantic blast of Pan’s bugle behind him, alongside echoing screams from an elevator shaft. Heads turn this way and that in fright. The police squad is confused.

  Pan’s skateboard slams on the ground. He can’t see her, but Fox knows the rickety rattle of her skate wheels.

  ‘Pandora says go!’ she yells.

  Now he sees her. She shoots him a searing glance as she whizzes past and throws something. He catches it and watches her go. There is nothing else he can do. Speeding and swerving, Pan scatters the crowd, distracting the police, luring their lasers, dodging the blasts with her pangolin armour, bewildering them with all the daredevil tricks she learned on the netherworld bridge.

  With a gesture as careless as a wave goodbye, Pan lifts her gun and blasts the armed policewoman who is relentlessly seeking out Fox. Pan hits her target with a perfect, deadly fire.

  Screams break out. But it’s not Pan’s kill that sends the crowd scrambling.

  ‘Monster!’

  As the crowd parts, Fox sees the grunting creature. Its jaws creak and snap as it lunges across the rooftop at a speed that shouldn’t be possible for such a squat, ungainly beast. A small swamp dragon, sucked up by the spiregyres, has followed its snout and sniffed out this feast of flesh on the top of the tower. Fox remembers the screams in the tunnels and the elevator shaft.

  A hundred times Pan has outwitted a swamp dragon and she outwits this one too, flipping up the skateboard at the last second to leap over the beast. But the smooth solar sheet of the open rooftop is not the rubbly surface of the bridge. Here, in the gusting wind, speed goes a much longer way.

  She’s going far too fast!

  Fox shouts her name so hard the cry seems to rip apart his wound.

  Pan makes a wobbly landing on the skateboard and veers into a deep swerve. Fox holds his breath. Even now, at the lethal edge of a moment, she can regain control. He’s seen her do it a hundred times.

  A blizzard swirls out of the elevator shaft. The blizzard dances above the heads of the crowd and gusts around Pan. It’s a great cloud of moths, drawn to the first flame of the sun, but it seems to Fox that the spirit of the nether-world has sent its creatures up through the spiregyres to the top of the tower to reclaim Pan, who keeps skidding, arms flailing, out of control . . .

  Fox moves. He will catch her, somehow. He must.

  The wind catches her instead. Pan hurtles through the moth cloud, still on her skateboard, free right to the last, right to the edge of the roof.

  And beyond.

  Fox turns his head away, eyes shut tight, as Pandora falls from the tower.

  Her name tears through him again and again. His heart feels like a gaping wound. What he just saw could not have happened. It cannot be real. Fox wants to stop time, to replay the moment, to see Pan spin in the air and land safely back on the tower roof.

  He opens his eyes. The moth cloud quivers like a ghost above the spot where Pan fell. For a stricken moment they tremble there then flock towards the dawn. Now, a tremendous energy ignites the crowd as people turn on the nervous and outnumbered guards.

  Fox can’t fight his way through the wave of anger. He doesn’t want tins awful, magnificent gift Pan has hurled at him – his own life for hers – but the heaving crowd forces him backwards until he is under the hovering ship where the air chute seizes him like a force of fate.

  Fox is sucked up on a cushion of air into the belly of the ship.

  He lands in a scarlet spray of his own blood on the entry ramp inside.

  ‘He’s in!’ someone shouts, and hauls him to the side as people continue to burst into the airship.

  ‘Anyone else?’ yells a commanding voice when the flow of refugees stop. ‘Last chance to board!’

  Fox looks down through the transparent window on the floor of the airship and sees ragged boat refugees still among the Nooworlders on the roof. Some refugees are choosing to stay behind. There will be a whole new blend of citizens, he realizes, to imagineer a new city from the ruins of the old. And here on board Fox sees, looking around, are excited young sky citizens with their clean skins and clothes, and red-jacketed guards, crammed side by side with the boat refugees.

  The future has just been shaken up into a brand-new mix before his very eyes.

  The whoosh of air stops; the doors on the underside of the ship slide shut. Fox feels a rapid surge upward as the ship rises in a hail of gunfire from a new rush of guards. But against the impenetrable shell of the airship, it’s as useless as a handful of stones.

  Strangers stare. A woman leans forward and touches his arm. A face he knows. Someone he hasn’t seen since his days as a young Noosrunner.

  ‘Fox, it’s me. Steerpike.’

  The years fall away as Fox remembers a girl with wispy blonde hair and faraway eyes who was a demon in the Noos.

  ‘You’re Steerpike?’

  Steerpike grasps his hand, her eyes full of tears.

  ‘You remember me? Dolores Dane.’

  ‘I remember you.’

  Fox grips the hand of his old friend, Dol, as the ship swerves violently, dodging a swarm of police skybikers. But the buzzing swarm cannot match the speed and power of the airship. Fox slumps
against a window and watches the towers of the city spin away from him, as the great ship turns northward.

  Far below, sea crashes through the bombed walls of the city and swirls around the netherworld where his brave, wild Pan has fallen. Fox grips the memento she flung at him, her jade frog good luck charm, tight in the palm of his hand. If anyone could survive such a fall it’s Pandora, the warrior queen of the netherworld, who would dive from the great arm of the broken bridge and swim down through the drowned ruins with her webbed feet and feathery gills, dreaming of the lost cities and vanished centuries.

  Fox sees her there in his mind’s eye. He needs to believe she survived. Otherwise he must live tormented by the grief that she loved him so fiercely she’d die to give him the future he craved.

  But already Pandora and the netherworld is behind him as they hit full speed. The sky city recedes until it seems to Fox to be no more than a monolithic rock crop amid the waves, and all he sees before him is the world’s ocean and neverending sky.

  HOMECOMING TIDE

  The sun keeps Tuck company. The red globe slips loose from its night anchor and sails the dark tide of the mountains, trailblazing the path of the fjord for the burning gondola that carries Tuck’s body out to the open sea.

  News of Tuck’s death has blown like a wind through the rockways, up into the mountain caves and halls, and the people of Ilira have gathered in shock on the great bridge that is his masterpiece. Mara has come too.

  She pushes through the funeral crowds on the Culpy Bridge and finds a space between the cramped shops. The metal signs above the diamond-dealers and metal-mongers creak and wail and the bridge wires hum against the drum of Ilira’s waterfalls, accompanying the windpipers’ haunting laments.

  The sun climbs into the sky and as a new day breaks over the top of the world Tuck’s glass palace becomes a temple of light. It was his beacon, thinks Mara, in a world growing dark to his fading eyes. The burning gondola seems to pass through a cascading green curtain of aurora and, for the first time since he landed in Ilira as a ragged gypsea, Tuck launches back out on to the ocean. A shiver creeps over Mara as the salt wind stings her face and she remembers the awkward kiss of a gypsea boy in a chill mountain cave, years ago.

  A soft hand slips into hers. Mara turns and buries her face in the cold hair of the fiery head that leans, heavy and exhausted, on her shoulder.

  ‘I thought you stayed with the others at the palace,’ says Mara.

  ‘I was worried about you,’ says Lily, and Mara sees how her daughter has grown up all of a sudden, able to understand pain besides her own.

  ‘I’m all right. Go with Clay, I won’t be long,’ Mara reassures her, and Lily turns back to the tall youth who watches her, tense as a hunter, absorbing Lily as if he must learn her by heart.

  As the bridge empties, Mara stands alone and feels a strange pause that she recalls from her island life. It’s the lull between the changing tides when the world seems to stand still. The ocean becomes glass. The wind holds its breath. Mara looks down at the stilled water and sees that the bridge and its reflection have joined to make an enormous shining ring in the sea. Silver fish swim up the fjord, nosing towards the ring.

  The sea gives a great sigh. Far out, the muscles of the deep oceans begin to heave the waves back to the land. The glassy sea shatters and the shining ring breaks as tide turns and the waves surge up the fjord.

  The homecoming tide tugs at Mara. The vast pull of the ocean is unsettling something deeper than memory, like a fragment of glass shifting in an old wound. She reaches into the pocket of her parka, touches the cool sphere of the globe. And suddenly knows what she must do. She will put this to rest forever, here, now, on a seabed cluttered with so many other relics of the past.

  When Tuck stole the globe she would have given almost anything to get it back – and that, Mara decides, is why she must get rid of it once and for all. She must never let anyone or anything have such devastating power over her, or Lily, ever again.

  Mara searches the shore until she picks out her daughter’s tawny head, close to Clay’s dark one, in the receding crowd. Lily’s future might be here in this lively new metropolis that reaches out to the world. Mara cannot bear the thought of a mountain between herself and Lily . . . and yet . . .

  She remembers her earlier vision.

  The world can be changed.

  Mara looks at the steam gondolas puffing in the fjord, at the buzz of the market shops opening up all along the Culpy bridge, at the rickety cable trains that creep up the mountain in between the thundering waterfalls, a mighty energy that Broom dreams of using to power the city with light and heat through the long Arctic night of winter. If Ilira can transform from the brutal, inward-looking place she once knew to all this, in the space of Lily’s short life, what else is possible?

  A door swings open in Mara’s mind and she seems to glimpse a time beyond whatever battles lie ahead when this vast island that has emerged from aeons of ice has become a pulsing heartland of the Earth.

  Is that how it all happened for Tuck? A sudden vision of what could be? Tuck made good on his vision, whatever his demons were. He revolutionized and reinvented Ilira. The city opened up and discovered its power.

  Just as Fox and his revolution wants to open up the world.

  Is the key to the future really to hide away in Candlewood? Or to fight for that future and build on the best of Tuck’s dreams? If rickety trains can climb mountains . . . the way to the interior can surely be opened up. The Earth’s soundwaves have reconnected its people. Candlewood and Lake Longhope must become part of the world too.

  If there were a way to zip through the mountains, right now, Mara would. She aches for the little ones. They’ll be crawling out of bed just now with hot, soft, just-wakened bodies and crotchety cries. Her own body cries out for them, but deeper still is the need to unlock their future too. If war is coming, the people of the North must stand together or all will be lost.

  And there is Rowan, of course. Rowan, who loves each of the children just as deeply as she does. He longs for the ocean world too. Descended from fisherfolk since time out of mind, his deep calms and sudden swells of temper are like the ocean’s moods. She and Rowan grew up like a pair of squabbling barn cats on the island and bonded together in Candlewood, each needing someone to cling to when their lives cracked apart. But there’s a deep restlessness in both of them, a longing for the outside world they were forced to abandon so young What do they each want and need now? The safe haven of Candlewood? Or the risky possibilities of a fast-changing world beyond?

  Mara leans on the swaying bridge and stares down at the water where the silver fish glint then disappear under the shadow of the bridge. Who knows what might happen? Who ever knew how their life would unfold?

  We must hold the hands of the children yet walk free into the future, she decides. We mustn’t be trapped by a past we didn’t create.

  Yet Lily is already trapped, she fears, fixated on the father she has never known. Fox is not coming, Mara tells herself. How could he, even for Lily, if he is steering a global war?

  She must not let Lily be bound to a hopeless longing. Mara can kill that impossible hope now – if she throws the cyberwizz and its globe into the sea. Lily might never forgive her; but, Mara vows, her daughter’s future will be open and free.

  The globe in her hand catches the morning light and glows as if it’s a tiny planet fallen to Earth. A tremor runs up Mara’s arm as the globe gives an electric tingle, powering up in the sun. Vivid colours swirl around its surface like a tiny aurora storm. She watches, as if in a dream.

  Let it go! Now!

  Trembling, Mara leans over the bridge to drop the globe into the sea.

  ALL THE WORLD’S TOMORROWS

  The airship Wistar surfs the world’s winds, following the frail morning fire of the North Star. Fox is moving too fast for hope or regret, surrendered to the sensation of speed. He’s hurtling through a haze of electric blue on the rays of the morni
ng sun.

  Here, in the nose of the airship, windows curve all around. Up ahead, the aurora is a sizzling green storm. Far below are hills and valleys of restless sea.

  Mountains rise from the horizon, sudden and shocking, as if the huge hull of a sunken ship has heaved up from the ocean deeps. Fox hears cries of wonder from the refugees crammed in the huge belly of the ship as they sight the vast land mass of the North. The Wistar heads toward it and Fox is filled with a strange ache of homecoming for a place he has never known. He cannot see an end to the tide of jagged peaks.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Fox, about Pan,’ says Steerpike. She has carefully tended to his shoulder wound. Fox relaxes into a haze of painkillers from a medical kit as the sharp edges of agony fade.

  ‘I’d never have made it if it wasn’t for her. Pan and my mother, they both saved me,’ he says, seeing how they each hurled him free into the future with gifts of searing rebel kindness.

  Fox’s composure deserts him. Steerpike grips his hand.

  ‘Steerpike,’ he begins, once he’s steadied himself. ‘I mean, Dol.’

  ‘I’m Dolores these days,’ she smiles. ‘But you can call me Steerpike, Surgent Fox.’

  ‘Steerpike it is,’ he smiles back, then remembers. ‘What happened to Kitsune? The soundwave cut dead and I lost him. Have you heard anything? Is he all right?’

  ‘I hope so,’ says Steerpike. ‘He’s flying this ship.’

  ‘Kitsune!’

  ‘Our wily trickster fox.’ Steerpike laughs. ‘He can’t wait to see you. Can you walk to the flight deck? Here, lean on me.’

  She leads him to the flight deck, an elevated cabin at the nose tip of the airship. Fox follows in disbelief. In all these years he has never met Kitsune in the flesh, only as a bundle of electrons in the Noos and a voice on the soundwave.

  ‘I’d get up and hug you, my friend,’ cries a voice Fox seems to have known forever, ‘but we’re hitting turbulence and one of our engines took a hit from the sky patrol, so it’s all hands on deck. Hold tight!’