by Chris Ward
Benjamin Forrest and the Bay of Paper Dragons
Endinfinium #2
Chris Ward
Contents
About the Author
Also by Chris Ward
Contact
I. New Arrival
1. Birthday celebrations
2. New Arrival
3. River Source
4. Rescued Friend
5. Library
6. Cleat
7. Date
8. Theatre
9. Spy Camera
10. Shifting Intentions
11. Basil
12. Spying
13. Family
14. Mistakes
15. Discovery
16. Captive
17. Punishment
18. Final Words
19. Departure
II. The Bay of Paper Dragons
20. Breeding Pond
21. Barnacle
22. Absence
23. Hopeless
24. Cleaning Time
25. Secrets
26. Dragon
27. Broken Wheels
28. Excursion
29. Dreams and Hopes
30. Hopes and Fears
31. Dark Happenings
32. Search Parties
33. Source Mountain
34. Conspiracy
35. Wilhelm’s Surprise
36. The Beginning
37. Shivers
38. Secret Doorway
39. Shenlong
40. Reunion
41. Attack
42. Water Ride
43. Overboard
44. Battle Charge
45. Firestarter
46. Rescue Mission
47. Battle
48. Revival
49. Recognition
Coming Soon
Contact
About the Author
A proud and noble Cornishman (and to a lesser extent British), Chris Ward ran off to live and work in Japan back in 2004. There he got married, got a decent job, and got a cat. He remains pure to his Cornish/British roots while enjoying the inspiration of living in a foreign country.
He is the author of the The Tube Riders series, the Tales of Crow series, and the Endinfinium YA fantasy series, as well as numerous other well-received stand alone novels and various side projects under different pen names.
Chris would love to hear from you:
www.amillionmilesfromanywhere.net
Also by Chris Ward
Novels
Head of Words
The Man Who Built the World
Fire Fight
The Endinfinium Series
Benjamin Forrest and the School at the End of the World
Benjamin Forrest and the Bay of Paper Dragons
The Tube Riders series
Underground
Exile
Revenge
In the Shadow of London
The Tales of Crow series
The Eyes in the Dark
The Castle of Nightmares
The Puppeteer King
The Circus of Machinations
“Benjamin Forrest and the Bay of Paper Dragons (Endinfinium #2)”
Copyright © Chris Ward 2018
The right of Chris Ward to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the Author.
This story is a work of fiction and is a product of the Author’s imagination. All resemblances to actual locations or to persons living or dead are entirely coincidental.
Thank you for your interest in my work.
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Thank you for reading!
Part I
New Arrival
1
Birthday celebrations
In a land with two suns instead of one, it was not so easy to predict how the seasons might change, but across the rolling hills and forests of Endinfinium, there was definitely a feeling of spring in the air. Flowers that neither Benjamin nor Miranda had ever seen poked their heads out of the springy turf—wide, orange-headed ones, and big, yellow ones the size of dinner plates. Then there were the ones characteristic of this world, in which everything seemed backward: waist-high flowers with purple leaves and great green heads that swung back and forth—depending on the time of day—as if unsure which sun to charm, the larger yellow one that followed a conventional path across the sky from west to east, or the smaller orange one that made a complete circuit of the horizon during the course of the day, never rising high above it, yet never quite dipping beneath it, either.
Today was what the teachers at Endinfinium High referred to as Sunday, because it was the one designated day off during the week. No one was quite sure what day it might have been, but long ago, a routine had been established to keep the school’s pupils familiar with what they had known back in their old lives before abruptly waking up in a land where the rules weren’t quite as they remembered.
The days, measured on recovered clocks whose trustworthiness depended entirely on the extent of their reanimation, lasted for just over twenty-five hours. For five successive days, classes took up eight of those, followed by clubs for those pupils who wished to join. Saturdays were for trips and excursions, while Sundays were free—provided certain rules were followed.
Even after a history stretching back several hundred known years, the teachers and the pupils weren’t sure what to do with themselves on their day off.
Miranda liked to walk on the cliffs, so Benjamin inevitably went with her. Miranda, crimson-haired, athletically built, and pretty enough that both Benjamin and Wilhelm had taken note—although her recent growth spurt meant poor Wilhelm had to take note from below her eyeline—was by regular years thirteen years old. Benjamin was—at least, he thought—still twelve, but birthdays had ceased to exist upon their arrival into Endinfinium, and now they counted additional years by the cycle of four school semesters—because any kind of summer vacation was hardly practical—since the date of their first arrival.
Tomorrow was, therefore, Miranda’s birthday, and while loneliness and longing was something all of Endinfinium’s inhabitants had needed to come to terms with, for Miranda, it was more acute than most. Unlike Benjamin and Wilhelm, both of whom had left behind some kind of family, Miranda had come from a future neither of them had ever known.
‘We used to get a cake in the Growth Centre,’ she said. ‘It was decorated with the number of candles of your age and red icing, because that was our cloning group.’ She smiled, but Benjamin could sense her resentment. ‘They always put a message in red icing, and it was always the same message: “Happy birthday, Red-37!”’ She shrugged. ‘I used to eat it, you know, but I never liked the taste.’
‘What was it?’
‘Strawberry.’ She smiled again. ‘I always wished I’d been part of the blonde group, because they got banana. I always liked bananas.’
‘What did the brown group get?’ Benjamin grinned. ‘Potato?’
Miranda
sighed. ‘Chocolate.’
‘Did you get a present?’
She shook her long, crimson hair, and it shimmered in the sunlight. Although he was a boy, Benjamin wished he could grow his hair more than a finger length without it curling up into a matted mess of little whirlpools. If he didn’t get it cut at least every four months, it looked almost as bad as Ms. Ito’s. Miranda, he remembered, had been created genetically perfect; she could grow her hair down to her feet and it would fall in two neat lines like a waterfall from the top of her head.
‘No presents,’ she said. ‘We had no material possessions at all. I didn’t even know what they were until I turned up here and found … stuff … everywhere.’
‘What about clothes?’
She narrowed her eyes. ‘My hair used to be a lot longer,’ she said.
‘So you all walked around naked? All fifty of you?’
‘Don’t even go there, Benjamin Forrest.’
They had trekked as far as a lookout point, two headlands down-coast from the towering post-modern mess of walls and buttresses of Endinfinium’s only known school, aptly but rarely affectionately nicknamed ‘The School at the End of the World.’ It wasn’t quite, but a couple of miles offshore, the sea dropped away into nothingness and an empty expanse of sky, so it was certainly close. Benjamin wasn’t keen to get any closer.
‘What did they do with you after you grew up?’ Benjamin asked.
Miranda shrugged again. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps they sent us off to work. I never got to find out because one day I went to bed, and the next time I woke up I was here.’
‘Strange isn’t it? What year did you say you came from again?’
‘2887.’
‘And I came from 2015, yet you got here first.’
Miranda smiled. ‘Hanging out with you and Wilhelm is like hanging around with a pair of antiques.’ She punched him on the arm, slightly harder than was comfortable. ‘Come on, let’s go down to the beach and see if we can’t find me an early birthday present among all the junk.’
Benjamin shook his head. ‘You know we’re not allowed. We’ll get a thousand cleans if the teachers find out.’
‘There’s only the two of us here. Who’s going to dob us in?’
‘But it’s dangerous.’
‘Everywhere’s dangerous. Don’t you just like to push the line a little bit?’ She winked at him. ‘What, are you scared? I bet Wilhelm would come. He’d be halfway down to the beach by now.’
Benjamin scowled. ‘All right, race you. Whoever loses has to carry back anything we find.’
He jumped up, but as he turned to the top of the steep path leading down to the beach, Miranda stuck out a foot and he went facedown in the grass. As he got up and brushed himself off, he caught a glimpse of red hair before Miranda descended out of sight. He groaned. On the steep, treacherous cliff path he had no chance of catching up. It would be just his luck if Miranda found a big, heavy table that she liked, washed up on the shore.
It was her birthday, he supposed, and if he was sneaky about it, he could use a little of his magic to take the weight off of his shoulders.
With Miranda’s victory dance already visible in his head, he raced after her, determined that, while losing was inevitable, he could at least be close enough to not embarrass himself.
2
New Arrival
Not all beaches were off limits without the presence of a teacher, but after new rules had been agreed upon a few months before when several people—including Benjamin and Miranda—had gotten into trouble after the Dark Man’s army had attacked the school, many unsheltered beaches open to the sea or without adequate access paths had been decreed too dangerous. The sand was too soft, allowing for vicious reanimates to hide, and the waters themselves teemed with many creatures that would eat the pupils up without a second thought.
This, of course, only made the beaches more popular. Benjamin had barely had a taste of school life before being thrown into battle with the Dark Man, his giant, reanimated war machines, and his armies of ghouls and wraith-hounds. But now that life had settled down, he had discovered that scavenging cool stuff washed up onto the beaches was a popular pastime. Several of the pupils had secret games consoles, while others collected more mundane items like books and music, or kept tiny robots hidden under their beds. Wilhelm was the owner of a short-wave radio with which he often tried to pick up a signal from the world—or worlds, if some pupils were to be believed—beyond theirs.
As of yet, he’d had no luck, managing to catch only the pre-recorded broadcasts of other radios, still powered by solar panels suddenly inundated by the light of twin suns, as they floated down the great river that split the land in two.
Miranda waited for Benjamin at the bottom of the path, at the back of the foreshore where most of the objects around them were made of rock. Heaps of junk didn’t start accumulating until farther down the beach, at the highest tide line.
Where they did, though, they were impressive—great mounds of old appliances and furniture, cars and bicycles, even one or two huge industrial objects half-buried in the sand.
Farther up the beach, a couple of turtle-cars ambled along the shorefront, wheels half-reformed into stumpy legs, bumpers bent into pincers to snap up food into mouths where their radiator grills had been. While easy to avoid when you could see them, they were a different proposition if you woke up and found one burrowing up out of the sand right beside you.
Miranda climbed up over a pile of junk, pulling away broken toasters and computer printers and other seaweed-choked, water-damaged items Benjamin couldn’t identify. He shouted at her to be careful, but she had been on Endinfinium longer than he, of course, and as a Channeler—someone who could use small amounts of animation magic at will—she was well capable of looking after herself.
Benjamin followed her tentatively, picking his way through the piles of junk, careful to put his hands only on flat, smooth surfaces where reanimated mouths were less likely to snap at him. The first rule of reanimation always applied—if something was warm to the touch, keep away from it. But apart from a few pens and pencils that danced along the sand like little birds, most of the items were from the long-dead depths in the silt at the bottom of the sea, unearthed and washed up in a recent spring storm. They would reanimate eventually, but even then a little bit of heat in their components might be as far as they got.
‘Look!’
Miranda held something up, standing right up on top of a pile of junk with the red sun at her back so the circular object in her hands appeared to Benjamin like an eclipsed moon.
‘What is it?’
‘Fool, it’s a clock, what does it look like?’
Before he could reply that it looked very much like a circular black shadow, she had tossed it down toward him. It was about the size of a dinner plate, and he turned it over in his hands, looking at the intricate designs behind the glass face that had been chipped and damaged by the water.
‘It’ll look great on my dorm room wall when Gubbledon’s not looking,’ she said with a grin, referring to their housemaster—a reanimated corpse of a racehorse. Gubbledon Longface—a name secret to the pupils—didn’t have the greatest of memories, and if Miranda could make a convincing argument that the clock had been on her wall all along, the housemaster would eventually forget about it. She would need to clean it up first, remove the water damage, but the general way among pupils was to keep it somewhere safe and let it reanimate for a while, repairing itself. Then they would secretly sneak it past the Sin Keeper into the Lockers for a clean with the chamomile lotion to keep it from altering its form into something that might cause trouble.
It sounded like a nightmare to pull off, but as Benjamin had found out, pupils were as resourceful in Endinfinium as they were in any other boarding school. Sneaking past the teachers and school staff—human, once-human, and reanimated alike—had been refined into a fine science.
‘Oh, and look at this!’
Miranda kick
ed aside a heap of televisions and held up a square box whose front had once been painted white, with the outline of a hand drawn on the side, like the residue of its former owner.
‘What on earth is that?’
‘It’s a beatbox. Kind of like a drum machine or a tom. You hit it with your hands and it makes a rhythm. We could use it at secret parties so people can dance. You remember that old electric organ that Gus and Melody found? Perhaps we can start a band.’ She gave it a solid slap, but it just made a gurgling sound as though full of water. Miranda shrugged. ‘I guess we’ll have to let it dry out first.’
She tossed it down to Benjamin, who, right at the last second, realised just how heavy it was and jumped out of the way. It struck the rocks at his feet and the back broke off. He heard Miranda gasp, and he looked up with a guilty grin on his face.