A shadow detaches itself from the trees and moves into the clearing before the cliff. The shielded light dances at hip-height, then sweeps cautiously around the clearing. She cannot see who holds it. But she hears the murmur of voices, and more lights advance. The one who came forward first is silhouetted in their glow, tall but oddly ill-defined. Details emerge slowly, as he comes closer and her eyes adjust: shaggy brown hair and beard, a long, shapeless coat. Boots wrapped in cloth, muffled. A worried squinting into the darkness, an uncertainty that mirrors her own as he peers past her along the overgrown access road that runs at the base of the cliff.
And then startled oaths and a general scramble backwards, torchlight flickering madly, as she kicks away from the cliff wall and spreads and flaps her aching wings. Her landing is clumsy and she stumbles, catching herself on both hands and one knee, feeling the scrape of gravel. Then she is upright and facing them, arms and wings wrapped around her shivering torso, hoping desperately that her calculations will prove right just one more time.
A long, long, long moment as she stands in the joined beams of the torches, while the shadows behind them gasp and exclaim and call on gods she does not know. She had not realised how much she would shock them. She is down to the last shreds of her composure when the tall man steps forward again. He holds two torches now, one on her and one to illuminate himself.
‘Aryel?’
She nods, finds herself barely able to speak. She licks dry lips, swallows, pulls herself together.
‘Yes. Are – are you Reginald?’
The man nods in his turn. It occurs to her that he may be as tongue-tied as she is, and the thought gives her comfort. The lines of his mouth are firm, grim, but there is a kindness in his eyes and his voice, when he finds it.
‘We were delayed. I’m sorry. Are you all right? No, wait, let’s get under cover.’ He is ushering her beneath the canopy of trees. She is surrounded by them now, still indistinct in the night murk, still muttering imprecations, and she bites back a surge of fear. The decision to trust these people has already been made. She has no choice but to follow it through.
‘I’m sorry we’re so late,’ Reginald is saying again. ‘We were having a time avoiding the retrieval teams, we had to cut inside them. We were closest when it happened … we had to go and see if there was anyone we could help …’
‘When what happened?’ she says, feeling as she once did, as though something crucial is just beyond her grasp. ‘Help who?’
‘Whoever we could. But the only ones we found alive were these two.’
He turns, the beam of his torch swinging onto a woman who crouches at the base of a tree, looking up at them. Her mouth is a tight line and her arms curve around a large, lobed bundle. It moves under the light. Sleepy eyes, blue-black as the deepening sky, peek out over folds of blanket; first two to the left, then two to the right. There is a ruby shimmer to the soft curls that cover their heads. The tiny, soot-smudged faces are more alike than any two faces she has ever seen, but instinct tells her the more solemn-faced of the pair is a boy, and the one who purses her little lips doubtfully is a girl. The children stare at her, and cuddle closer together.
Reginald clears his throat.
‘They seem to be the only ones who got out. Besides you, of course.’
‘No,’ she says stupidly. ‘Everyone got out. I knew we wouldn’t all get away, but I made sure everyone was outside before I left.’
The men and women shift and glance at each other, and the murmurs rise again. The children whimper and squirm, and for the first time she notices the smell of smoke pouring off them, hanging heavy on the people around her, drifting through the trees like a fog. And she realises, with a mounting sense of dread, that something has happened, something more than she knows, more than she planned.
They explain it to her gently, as gently as they can, and she knows the tears that prick against her eyelids are as much a reaction to their kindness as grief for the unknown siblings that she has lost.
That she has killed.
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Reginald says, over and over again. ‘You mustn’t blame yourself.’
But she knows he is wrong.
The knowledge pins her mind into a stunned immobility during the forced march through the forest to where the vehicles have been hidden. She is numb with it, sick with it. Whenever she looks up at Reginald’s broad back leading the way she sees the baby boy’s eyes blinking back at her over his shoulder, silent, accusing.
It is on the long, jolting journey in the back of an ancient open-backed transport, with the twins clinging silently to each other and only for the barest of moments to her, that a thread of the song that sang her free returns; gossamer-thin and trembling, but a thing to hold on to through the cold and tear-soaked night. She clutches tight and listens hard, and watches the little ones, and thinks of what they flee and what they face, and the part she has had in it, and the part she must have in it. The stars burn down on her, and she asks them questions, and they answer.
By the time they reach their destination she knows who she is, and what the price of her freedom must be.
She goes to Reginald, walking unchallenged through the mountaintop camp. Together they watch the sun rise through a mist tinged pink and gold, and she tells him. And he listens gravely, and nods agreement, and gives her a new name.
Morningstar.
THE END
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Binary lived up to all the clichés about writing the ‘difficult second novel’ and I owe a debt of gratitude to all the people who supported me while I struggled through it. Jo Fletcher and Ian Drury, editor-agent power couple extraordinaire, were chief cheerleaders while I wrote and candid critics when they read, and I’m very grateful to them on both counts.
I will here confess that I’ve rarely been so nervous as when I sent that first full draft to my core crew, and that I was a bit of a wreck while waiting for feedback. While the rigour of their reviewing did indeed have a marked effect on the final manuscript, I needn’t have worried. Nicola Budd’s text message, sent far too early on a Monday morning after sitting up late at night with the draft, reduced me to tears – of joy. The other (R)Evolution Readers this time around were Joady Brennan, who said I’d not only got the complex psychology of my characters right but had made her cry; and Peter Brennan, who approved the infotech, and whose mention of the authors he’d set aside in order to spend more time in my world made me blush.
And of course, Anna Eagar and Alison Masterman, who sorted out Aryel and stuck up for Herran, and without whom none of us would be here.
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