Chasing the Valley

by Skye Melki-Wegner

  I take a nervous breath. Then I twist around, offering Lukas the back of my neck.

  ‘You want me to check?’ he says.

  ‘Yes. I do.’

  He pulls my hair up gently, then he slides away my scarf. A little chill runs through my stomach; I haven’t exposed my spine to anyone in years.

  ‘What?’ I say nervously. ‘What is it?’

  Lukas hesitates.

  ‘It’s not Flame, is it?’

  ‘No, it’s not Flame,’ he says. ‘You’ve got a tattoo of the sky. There’s a moon, and stars . . .’ His voice trails away. ‘Danika, I think your proclivity is Night.’

  I wrench myself away. ‘What? No!’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with Night,’ Lukas says quickly. ‘It doesn’t mean –’

  My heart is thudding inside my chest. I almost want to throw up. This can’t be happening. People with Darkness or Shadow or Night . . . those people are outcasts. I think of old Walter in Rourton, and his lifetime of playing with shadows in dingy bars.

  ‘Danika, calm down,’ says Lukas. ‘This makes sense, you know. You’re an illusionist; you’re natur­ally attuned to –’

  ‘To hiding? To deception, to spying?’ I take a deep breath. ‘To lurking in the shadows? That’s not true, Lukas. Illusionism is just a freak ability – I bet there are illusionists with all sorts of proclivities, like Air or Beast or –’

  ‘Close your eyes.’

  ‘What?’

  Lukas touches the back of my neck. His fingers are gentle; they don’t flinch away from the markings of darkness. ‘Close your eyes, Danika. Please. Like when I gave you the rose charm.’

  I wait a moment, then close my eyes.

  Lukas pulls his fingers away, and I’m alone. ‘Now, what can you feel?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Try harder.’

  There is still nothing, but this time I remain silent. Stale air plays upon my skin, and for a moment I feel blindfolded again. I can’t see anything. I can’t connect with the world. There is only darkness, only emptiness. But no, wait! There is something at the edges of my mind. It laps like water. It tingles against my flesh. It tumbles down through the skylight, mingling with the moonlight.

  ‘Oh,’ I whisper.

  Because Lukas is right. My proclivity is right there, waiting for me to seize it. And it doesn’t feel evil or wrong or twisted. It calls for me to ride away, to slip into the night and share its form. It feels like I can fly.

  ‘Danika,’ says Lukas quietly. ‘Open your eyes.’

  I open them. For a second I’m completely dis­orientated. Lukas has moved, he has shifted away to the far side of the cell. Is he so disgusted by my proclivity that he . . . But no, it isn’t Lukas who has moved. It’s me. Metal bars dig into my back, keeping my powers constrained with their magnetic field.

  ‘What happened?’ I say.

  ‘You travelled inside your proclivity.’

  I glance across the cell floor. The shadows seem to call me back, tempting me to meld into their form. My gaze travels up to the magnet-barred skylight, and the streaks of night that lie visible beyond. And suddenly I know how Lukas feels when he connects with a bird, or Teddy when he communicates with the foxaries. For the first time in my life, I feel whole.

  And suddenly, I know how we’re going to escape.

  I fumble with the buttons of my stolen coat, trying to undo them as quickly as possible.

  ‘What are you doing?’ says Lukas.

  ‘The climbing picks!’ I look at him with wide eyes, then remember that Lukas didn’t witness my escape down the wall in Rourton. ‘Up on the guard turret, when I fired that flare, I stole some climbing picks. I think I can reach that skylight.’

  ‘You’ve got the picks here?’

  I dig through the layers beneath my coat. Sharr confiscated any obvious weapons while I was unconscious, so my cooking knife is gone. But the picks remain deep inside my jacket, cushioned in fabric to protect my ribs. I look up at the skylight. The magnetic bars will prevent me escaping through my proclivity, but not from slipping out as an underfed human girl. Those days of starvation might just save my life.

  But there’s no hope of Lukas fitting through.

  ‘I can squeeze through those bars,’ I say. ‘I know I can. And it’s night-time, Lukas. Once I’m clear of the magnets, I can use my proclivity if I have to. I’ll get back into the corridor and open the cell to let you out.’

  He grips my arm. ‘You have to be careful, Danika. If there’s any danger of being caught, just use your proclivity to escape. Get away, forget about me.’

  ‘That’s not going to happen, Lukas,’ I say. ‘I can do this.’

  He takes a deep breath, and releases me. ‘Good luck. I . . .’

  I want to kiss him again, but I’m scared that if I do then I’ll never let go. So I just give a firm nod, yank my boot back on and thrust my climbing picks into the wall. ‘See you soon.’

  Neither of us speaks as I climb the wall. It feels almost like being back in Rourton, scaling an alleyway or the side of a richie’s house when I’ve been caught sleeping in their doorway. I strike each pick into the mortar between the stones: one, two, one, two . . . It’s simple to work up a rhythm between my hands and feet. And with every strike, the shadows seem to float across my skin. They give me courage; if I slip, I can meld my body into the dark. Even so, I’m breathing heavily by the time I reach the roof. The shoulder that I dislocated in Rourton is throbbing again, but it holds steady in its socket.

  The skylight bars are welded into the stone. I poke a tentative hand between them, and my sense of the shadows vanishes with a jolt. The magnetic field’s power is almost frightening; it tears my proclivity as easily as I might rip a sheet of newspaper. No wonder Sharr Morrigan is confident this cell will hold us.

  ‘Can you fit through?’ says Lukas.

  I glance down at him. The floor suddenly looks very far away. ‘Yeah, I think so.’

  I shift my weight to my good arm for a moment, and shove the other hand’s climbing pick back into my pocket. With a gasp, I manage to swing across to the skylight. My hands grip the bars, cold beneath my palms. I brace my good arm to take my weight again, before reaching back to snatch my second climbing pick from the mortar.

  With both picks pocketed, I dangle from the bars for a moment. My fingers are sweaty but I grip the metal and grit my teeth. I kick my feet up to brace against the bars from below. Then, little by little, I contort my upper body to squeeze through the gap. It’s an awkward angle, and my shoulder protests with a stab of pain.

  But then my head is through, and my chest. A rush of wind hits my face and I grin, utterly elated. I suck in my stomach and squeeze up higher. My hips become stuck, but a few moments of wriggling and huffing are enough to squish through. I fish my legs up after me and suddenly my entire body is on the roof.

  ‘Lukas, I’m out!’

  I peer back down through the bars to the cell below. Lukas grins up at me, practically bouncing on the balls of his feet. I’m not sure whether it’s excitement or anxiety – either way, he waves me onward. ‘Go, go!’

  The roof is flat and bare, but high. I can see the wastelands all around me, stretching to the horizon in all directions but one. To the north lie the Central Mountains, snowcaps lit up eerily in the light of the moon. It’s surreal to think that we stood there less than twenty-four hours ago.

  I hurry to the edge of the roof, drop to my knees and peer down across the fortress. A large metal silo squats near the base of the tower – is this where the Curiefer is stored? Railway tracks run across the ground. There is a bulk in the shadows on the far side of the silo, where the track bends out of sight. It must be a train carriage, ready to be unloaded.

  The courtyard lies below, filled with rows of neatly parked biplanes. The sight fills me with a sudden hatred
that clashes with the joy of my escape. Those planes killed my family. They are probably loaded with alchemy bombs, ready to attack another innocent city. Soon they will be filled with enough Curiefer to start a war. If only we had managed to destroy them . . .

  But this isn’t the time to worry about the war. I must find a way to free Lukas and find the rest of my crew. We had our chance to attack this fortress and we failed. Now we can only hope to escape with our lives.

  I double-check that no one is below to see me. Nothing. All I can see in the yard is machinery. Heart pattering, I pull out my climbing picks and slide over the edge of the roof.

  It’s so tempting to sink into the shadows, to travel weightlessly through the night itself. But my proclivity has only just matured and I don’t trust my ability to control it. If I lose myself now, there’s no one here to call me back. It’s not unheard of for teenagers with Air or Daylight proclivities to dis­integrate forever on the breeze. And I can’t risk that. Not when Lukas and my friends are still in danger. For now, I must treat my Night proclivity as a last resort.

  I clamber down until I reach a window. It’s not barred; it’s probably a pilots’ dormitory rather than a prison cell. The glass pane is slightly ajar, letting a trickle of air inside to refresh the room. I stick my fingers through the gap and slide the window open.

  Inside, I bang my shins against an empty bed. This is clearly the room of an important richie. The bedknobs and door handles are laced in gold. A vast picture frame hangs above the bed, containing a portrait of the king, his wife and an infant boy. Lukas. Even in the feeble moonlight I recognise the arch of his cheekbones, the shape of his eyes. His parents are not touching each other. They stand a foot apart, glaring regally into the distance. Lukas’s mother holds him like a loaf of bread, not a beloved son. It’s the coldest excuse for a family portrait I’ve seen.

  On the far side of the room, I spot another picture. This one is a bird, silhouetted against the moon.

  ‘Lukas,’ I whisper. This must have been his bedroom during his service as a biplane pilot.

  There’s no time to examine the room in any more detail. Every minute I waste is a minute we could be using to flee. I hurry to the bedroom door and open it with a cautious nudge. It creaks and I wince. But the corridor outside is empty, so I risk stepping out onto the tiles.

  I round several corners before I find a staircase that leads back up towards the prison cell. My footsteps slap loudly, so I force myself to slow down. For each stride, I peel up my feet and then gently place them on the step above. It takes a painfully long time to move, but at least it’s quiet. So long as Sharr keeps her word and stays away until dawn, we should be okay.

  Finally, I reach the top of the stairs. ‘Lukas?’

  When my eyes adjust to the shadows, my gut clenches. I have miscalculated. This is not the top floor of the tower; this is not Lukas’s prison cell. It’s an unfamiliar stretch of corridor – and at the far end, a hunter stares out the window into the night. I spit out an illusion on instinct, in the very second that it takes him to spin around.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  My illusion will only last seconds as I have no magnets on hand to prolong it. The guard steps towards me, squinting into the stairwell. I have only one chance: my new proclivity.

  I close my eyes and welcome the dark.

  Everything falls away. I melt down into the shadows of the corridor. No, I am the shadows of the corridor. I slip past the hunter, as insubstantial as his own shadow. The window calls me, summons me out to join the night. That is my home: the darkness, the emptiness, the treacle-coloured sky . . .

  No!

  I’m not sure whether the shout is real or just inside my head, but it’s so sharp and desperate that I jerk to a halt. Then I realise. It’s my own voice. I’m about to lose myself.

  I force my eyes open. I have reached the far end of the corridor. The hunter stands a good ten metres away, gazing down at the stairs. Before he can turn back this way, I scuttle sideways around another corner. Then I drop to my knees and crawl, holding my breath, keeping as silent as possible. My knees throb from clambering on the stones, but I refuse to sink back into my proclivity. I know, now, that I cannot trust myself to travel that way. Five more seconds and I’d have been lost forever, just another wisp of darkness in the night.

  I force myself to breathe softly, even though my lungs nag for deeper gasps. I must be silent, no matter what.

  Another staircase lies ahead, narrow and crooked. I rise to my feet and grip the handrail as I climb. Did I come this way when I was blindfolded?

  ‘Danika?’

  The voice echoes from up ahead, just beyond the top of the stairs. I hurry towards it. The top step opens into a short corridor, steeped in shadow. At the end lies our prison cell, with Lukas waiting at the barred door. I race forward to meet him.

  He reaches through the bars. ‘You did it! You did it, Danika.’

  I smile. ‘Ready to get out of here?’

  Then I crank the lever and the bars swing open.

  We hurry back down the stairs. It’s harder to keep quiet with two of us and we can’t afford to run for it – as tempting as it may be. ‘Where would Sharr keep the others?’

  Lukas shakes his head. ‘There are no other prison cells here. She must have locked them in the silo.’

  ‘With the Curiefer?’

  ‘Well, it’s the most secure place I can think of.’

  At the edge of the corridor, I grab Lukas’s arm to make him wait. I peer around the corner, expecting to see the hunter back in place by the window. But the corridor is empty. Has he ventured downstairs, searching for the source of the noise? Or has he gone to find Sharr, to tell her that he suspects an intruder?

  ‘What’s wrong?’ whispers Lukas.

  ‘There was a hunter here before.’

  We exchange glances, then hurry onward. Perhaps the guard has gone to warn Sharr, but we can’t stop him by worrying about it. All we can do is move faster. ‘Do you know the way down?’

  Lukas nods. ‘I’ve lived here since I became a pilot. Just follow me.’

  We tiptoe down the stairs and into another corridor, then another. It’s lucky that Lukas is here because I’m completely lost. This seems more of a labyrinth than a tower. We scamper around corners, duck through passageways, and even sneak across an ornately painted dining room. I imagine Lukas sitting here for dinner, feasting on gourmet bread and desserts with his fellow pilots.

  I wonder whether they feast before they bomb cities or afterwards. Perhaps there is a celebration, a banquet in the aftermath of each mission, while families in the bombed-out cities burn. The thought sends a furious spasm through my body.

  ‘Are you all right?’ says Lukas.

  I clench my fists. ‘Let’s just get out of here.’

  We reach the ground floor without spotting any signs of human life. I’m starting to worry now; this entire escape has been too easy. Where is everyone? What could have drawn them all outside into the night?

  ‘We’d better avoid the front door,’ says Lukas quietly.

  He chooses a window in one of the corridors. It gives a horrible creak when we hoist it open, but the bluster of wind outside is enough to hide the sound. I clamber through and drop onto the cobblestones, with Lukas a second behind me.

  The yard is dimly lit by a series of lanterns, spaced along the inside wall. There is still no sign of human life. In fact, the only living creatures are foxaries. They are chained to a post on the far side of the yard, but lie asleep on the cobblestones. Their chests rise and fall gently in the moonlight. ‘Where is everyone?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Lukas. ‘Unless . . .’

  ‘Unless what?’

  I’m answered by the shriek of a whistle. The sound makes me jump – for a terrible second, I think someone has spotted us. But the whistle is the cr
y of an incoming train, blasting along the tracks to cross from the wasteland into the fortress.

  ‘Must be a load of Curiefer coming in,’ says Lukas. ‘There are protocols; everyone in the fortress has to help get it into the silo as quickly as possible.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Curiefer’s too volatile. It’s like an oil, designed to burn. The silo’s spells keep the vats cool and wet, to stop any chance of a fire. But out in the open air, there’s always a risk that something might go wrong.’

  I gasp. ‘Lukas, this is our chance! If the others are locked inside the silo, and they’re about to open the doors to bring in a new load of Curiefer . . .’

  He nods. ‘Come on, let’s go.’

  We dart between the biplanes, ducking beneath their wings and around their tails to cross the yard. The silo squats on the far side of the yard, pressing against the back wall of the fortress. As we edge around the yard, human figures finally come into view: hunters and pilots, standing beside the bulk of a train. There is another whistle and the train’s wheels stop spinning.

  ‘Unloading protocol, now, now, now!’ comes Sharr Morrigan’s voice from somewhere in the darkness ahead.

  I crouch with Lukas behind a biplane’s wheels. The train doors open and people pour into the baggage compartment. A moment later, they emerge with massive crimson vats. Another hunter cranks a lever on the silo door; as soon as it opens, a blast of cold air rushes out. I don’t want to imagine what it must be like for my crewmates trapped inside.

  ‘Go!’ shouts the hunter.

  More people rush forward with trolleys and start to load the vats. The troops’ actions are perfectly rehearsed. The scene reminds me of factories in Rourton, with their strictly maintained production lines. As soon as the first vats are loaded, troops push them from the train across the yard and into the silo. Then they re-emerge, running back to the train to reload their trolleys. I spot Sharr Morrigan among the throng, her back to us as she supervises the reloading.