by Mike Revell
“That’s what this place is called, back where I’m from. It’s not called that here?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know what it’s called. Maybe it was part of the City once, but not anymore. We just call it the camp.”
Iris was quiet for a while. I looked around for any sign of adults, and there were a few, dotted here and there, but even the people behind the stalls were quite young, maybe eighteen or nineteen.
“They’re retired Stormwalkers,” she said, reading the expression on my face. The way she looked at me, I could tell she still didn’t believe me about not being Jack, but there was something else there too. Tiredness, maybe. If she thought I was playing a game, she’d got bored of it.
“Retired? They look like they should still be in school.”
“They are,” she said. “I mean, they still go to class with the Scholars. They just don’t go out into the storm anymore. It—” she hesitated, choosing the right words—“acts differently around younger kids. It feeds on fear, and I guess as you get older you’ve got more to be scared of. You can’t Stormwalk once you hit eighteen. You have to find other jobs. That’s why they use us—kids, I mean. I mean, yeah, we’re duplicates, so we’re expendable, I guess. But it’s safer for us out there, if you can call it safe at all.”
Nice, I thought. They took us away when we were eight, used us for the most dangerous job left on the planet, and then just like that we were supposed to sell weird Star Wars food to the rest of the camp. I wondered what life was like back in the City . . . could it really be so bad that they needed us to go through this?
“Are there bookshops?” Iris said suddenly.
“What?”
“Back in . . . what did you call it? Cambridge?”
“Loads. With walls piled high with books.” She stared off into the distance. Maybe she was finally starting to believe me! “Do . . . do you like reading?”
She scowled at me, and marched off again. I stood there for a moment, wondering what I’d done wrong, then quickly chased after her. I didn’t want to lose the only friend I had in this place. Well . . . I had Quinn, I guessed, but Iris was different. I felt like I’d known her all my life.
And I had, hadn’t I? If I was Jack . . . if Jack was me . . . I’d known her for years.
“Sorry! Iris, I’m sorry—I know that—of course I know that. It’s just, if I try to dive into the memories . . .” I trailed off. I couldn’t let her know it made me feel ill. It would only worry her more.
“Do you have any idea how ridiculous this is?” she said.
“I know. Just . . . please, don’t take me back to Cleansing, or . . . or any of that stuff. You don’t have to worry about me. Just . . . give me some time.”
With a pang, it dawned on me how similar to Dad I sounded. Did I say that on my own, or was it his writing that made it happen?
Iris turned on me, and I jumped back in case she thumped me again. “This is what I don’t get. If you were turning Dreamless, there would be physical signs by now. Quinn was right.”
“I’m still trying to figure this out too. But I’m telling you the truth.”
I couldn’t blame her for not believing me. If I were in her place, I’d probably be the same.
Her eyes locked onto mine, watering at the edges. Then she blinked and turned away.
She strode up to the nearest table, muttering and shaking her head. The man behind the stall had a grizzled, stubbly face and a gap in his teeth when he smiled. “What you got, love?”
Iris dropped the Slinky on the table.
She was giving it up after telling me how much all her collection meant to her?
“Iris—”
“It’s fine,” she said.
The man picked it up and eyeballed it, watching as flecks of rust crumbled off.
“Not much here. About two caps’ worth, I reckon.”
“Two caps?” Iris scoffed. She glanced at me quickly before saying, “It’s a pre-Dark weapon. Deadly in the right hands.”
“We don’t need weapons, love. Not this kind. Most I can do with this is melt it down. Two caps or nothing.”
She hesitated, her cheeks reddening, then held out her hand to catch the caps—basic, unmarked bottle tops, just like the ones that piled up on the counter when Dad drank his beers.
“Still here?” she said to me, as she walked round to the food stall.
“I don’t know what to say . . .”
But Iris wasn’t listening.
“Two caps,” she muttered under her breath. “We won’t be able to get much. What?” she said, noticing the look on my face.
“Nothing—it’s just . . .”
I was going to say it was funny seeing a kid act like this. She’d have probably only been in Year 8 at school, but here she was haggling at market stalls like it was the easiest thing in the world.
A spark of hunger flickered inside me again, and I clutched my stomach. But as soon as I saw what was laid out on the table, any thought of devouring a massive meal vanished. There was no pizza or bacon or chicken. There weren’t even any sandwiches.
Set out in rows were . . .
Well, I wasn’t really sure what they were. They were round, like fishcakes, but bright yellow. They looked disgusting.
“Fresh corn rounds,” the vendor said. “One cap a pair.”
Iris handed over the caps, but even though my stomach felt as empty as it had ever been, the thought of eating those corn rounds almost made me gag.
“They’re not that bad,” Iris said, nibbling cautiously at the edge of hers. It crumbled like shortbread, and she had to eat the rest quickly before it fell apart.
Deciding that the best thing to do was get it over with as quickly as possible, I took a bite and chewed. The outside was crispy and peppery, but the inside tasted like powdered mashed potatoes. I thought back to all the fast food I’d eaten with Dad before that homemade burger the other day and promised never to moan about takeout again.
“Thanks,” I said, when I’d choked both of them down.
“You can buy dinner tomorrow,” she said.
“I . . . I don’t know how. I mean, I don’t have any caps or anything. I don’t even know how you get them.”
She gave me that look again, like I was an alien or something.
“What?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s like you are Jack, but you’re not.”
I was about to say that that was what I’d been trying to tell her all along, when a robot scooted by, its blue-white dome flashing like a TV screen again.
“All classes report to the . . . MAIN HALL,” it said. “The . . . STORMWALKING . . . is about to begin.”
15
Stormwalking!
I remembered seeing it in the video at Cleansing, and Iris had mentioned it since. It had been there in Jack’s memories too, when I was trying to find out more about him. I didn’t get to see much of it before the fog rose up, but just hearing the word made icicles of cold prod at my insides. After getting so close to the Darkness twice already, I wasn’t ready to go right back out into it.
Iris and I filed into the hall once more, joining the other Stormwalkers filling up the vast room. Most of the floor space was packed with kids, but there were a few grown-ups dotted around. I recognized the women who had quizzed me after Cleansing hanging around at the edge of the group and Mrs. Cloud whispering with a tall, gray-haired man. Quinn entered, and with him came other officers in the same uniform, lrp emblazoned on their chests. Beside them was someone I hadn’t seen before.
No—
I had seen him before.
He was the man from the video footage.
The man in the commercials.
The Marshal, came a thought in my head.
He had thin white hair, and a round belly pushed up against his shirt. His clothes were cleaner than the stuff everyone else wore. He stood before the group and when it looked as though everyone had gathered, he cleared his throat and held up
his hands.
You could feel the buzz in the room now. Questions erupted in my mind, but the crowd had separated me from Iris.
“Welcome, everyone, to another Stormwalking!”
A huge cheer rang out, echoing off the walls.
“Ever since we set off from the City, looking for a place to live, a place to expand, a place to thrive, we have been on a very important mission: to save the human race. Now that we have established camp, that mission has never been more important.
“Hope! That is what we set out to find. That is what we must protect. That is what we must relay to the City, to our families, our friends, to all those left behind. They have no space to live. We do. But that storm,” he said, wagging a finger at the ceiling, “is separating us from our loved ones.
“Every day, through your good work, the Lights, Radio, and Patrol team tries to send word to them. Every day they listen out for word from our brothers and sisters in Icarus 1 and 2, to see if they have had any luck breaking through.” He paused to shake his head, and sighed heavily. “Alas, there is still no response—from the other camps, or the City. It’s troubling, yes, of course it’s troubling, but now is not the time to dwell on misfortune. If the other Icarus teams have fallen to the Darkness, it only makes our job more important.
“Now that we have found somewhere for our families to live and breathe and expand, we must make contact with the City. The storm makes it tough to communicate. You’ve seen how short the daylight pockets are, and they’re different across the country. But you, dear Stormwalkers, are stronger than the storm—I know you are. The City needs us. We cannot fail. We are Icarus 3, and we will save them. Seth?” the Marshal called, and the crowd parted, leaving a lone figure standing in the middle of the crowd. “Let the Stormwalking commence!”
I stepped back, standing on tiptoes, trying to see what was happening. A booming rumble echoed round the cellar and a circle of green lights flashed in the shadows at the back of the room, behind the Marshal. There was a hiss and a clunk, and the lights rotated. A door opened where the lights had been, revealing a tunnel that stretched out into the distance and disappeared in shadow.
A circle of space had opened up in the crowd now, and standing there was a boy unlike anyone I’d seen in camp so far. He wasn’t dressed in dirty old clothes, like the rest of us. He wore a jet-black top with matching trousers. On his shoulders and chest gleamed neon-bright lights, like reflectors on a bike, but much brighter.
Seth stared round at us, the lights dancing like fire in his eyes.
“We’ll be going in groups of four,” he said. “As I call your name, come and collect your equipment. There are fresh meadows near the top of tower hill, the whispering rock, and the scarlands. Start there, and fan out, just like normal. Okay, Cora! You’re up.”
A tall, dark-haired girl moved through the crowd. Seth grabbed a handful of jackets from the tunnel, each of them riddled with lights, like the top he was wearing, and handed one of them to her.
“Anja!”
I tried to move in for a closer look as the next girl collected her gear, but the hall was thick with bodies. I ducked elbows and shimmied between shoulders. Bright lights gleamed along Anja’s shoulders, arms and body as she fastened the jacket over her clothes.
“Luke,” called Seth, “Tyler . . . Dillon . . . Iris . . . Jack.”
I stared around the room. People clapped my shoulders, shoved me forward, buffeted me toward the open gap. I felt the Marshal’s eyes burning into me as I made my way to the center of the ring and took the suit from Seth.
Up close, the lights were so bright that purple splotches smudged across my vision when I blinked. There was a slimline compartment on the back of the jacket, with a zipper that ran all around it.
“For the glowroot,” Iris whispered, when she saw me looking. “It protects it. Keeps it safe.”
“Glowroot,” I whispered. I remembered seeing it in Jack’s thoughts, back in Cleansing.
“It’s this weed that grows only in Darkness,” she explained. “It glows.”
“I sort of guessed that much.”
“Nothing can grow in the Darkness. You’ve seen the food we have to eat. But somehow the glowroot does. The Darkness can’t get close to it. We’ve studied it for years, even back in the City, trying to understand it. The Marshals figured out how to turn it into energy. That’s how the generators run. The illuminators too,” she added, tapping the lights on her suit. “They run out pretty quickly though, so we have to keep reloading them.”
“What does it look like?”
“You’ll know when you see it,” she said, smirking.
The jackets were skintight, like the cold gear you could get for sport back in the real world. I slipped mine over my clothes, then turned to Iris. But before I could ask her anything, Seth strode over. He’d handed out all the equipment.
“You three are with me,” he said to Iris, me, and the boy called Tyler, who looked older than a lot of the others. He had a square jaw and short, dark hair. If they’d had rugby here, he’d totally be a rugby player. “There’s a new route I’d like to try out.”
Cold. That was the first thing that hit me.
Cutting through the fabric of my clothes—
Biting down to my bones—
As the door boomed shut behind us and the noise of camp cut off, screeches and shrieks rang out in the distance. I didn’t have to be an A-star student to know what we were going to find at the end of the tunnel . . .
“Stay close,” Seth said.
He stepped forward, and a light hummed on above us.
Another flickered into life with every step—motion-sensitive lamps, lighting the path ahead. The tunnel walls dripped as we passed. The air was thick and damp. We shuffled forward, feet scuffing on the flagstones, and I realized I was holding my breath. Other Stormwalkers rushed past, eager to get out into the Darkness, or maybe eager to get back into the safety of the light.
“What is it?” Iris said, dropping back to walk with me. “Your face is all scrunched up. You’re not going to have to touch it, if that’s what you’re worried about. Hopefully, anyway.”
“I’m not worried about that,” I said, even though I was, I definitely was, because I’d felt what happened if it got too close, and even though we had illuminators this time, it felt way too dangerous going out like this.
Seth and Tyler were walking quickly ahead of us. The Darkness was so loud now that I didn’t think they’d be able to hear us.
“Keep up,” Seth barked. “We can’t afford to separate here.”
Ahead of us now was a pile of rubble where the roof had caved in, blocking the route ahead. There was a ragged hole above us, and a few yards above that . . .
I stepped back instinctively.
It flashed past in a whirling rush, as black as midnight and shot through with crackling purple, bubbling up and bursting in the shape of a hundred sneering faces . . .
The Darkness.
“Everyone ready?” Seth said. “Tyler, watch our backs. Keep an eye out for anything I miss. I know the tower’s not that far, but we don’t know how different the route is yet. Iris, Jack—follow me.” He darted out, sending shards of stone tinkling back down into the light.
I thought the screeching in camp was loud, but it wasn’t. Not compared to this. The second Seth’s illuminators hit the open air, the Darkness peeled back as if in agony and the noise was unbearable.
Tyler had already scrambled up one way. Iris clambered out the other, following Seth. I took a deep breath and chased after them. As soon as I emerged, the Darkness bolted down from the heavens. Long tendrils lashed out, whipping at my face.
It’s just a storm, I told myself, hammering the thought home.
It’s just a storm and this is just a story and soon enough you’ll be home, chatting with Dad and Danny and—
The Darkness screamed again and I ducked as it whooshed over my head.
All around me clicks rang out, like thousand
s of insects snapping their pincers at once. I gulped the cold air, looking desperately for Iris and Seth, every breath full of white-hot needles stabbing my insides.
There!
In the distance, the swirl of illuminators. I bolted after them, not daring to look back. A drawn-out scream split the air, sending electric tingles up and down the back of my neck.
“Jack!” Iris called. “Come on!”
I raced on and caught them as they skidded down the muddy bank to the river. The water trickled peacefully alongside us, untouched by the storm. Our illuminators reflected and shimmered on the surface.
“Where now?” I yelled, trying to make myself heard above the ear-splitting noise.
“There! I can see one.” Seth followed the curve of the river with his finger. In the distance, I could just make out a pool of ethereal light, like luminescent jellyfish sunbathing on the bank.
“A meadow,” Iris said, squinting through the gloom.
We walked together along the river’s edge—the Darkness raging above us, but never getting too close. But before we even got to the glowing green carpet of light, it was clear that something was wrong.
“No,” Seth said, barely audible above the noise.
Petals and plants were strewn across the mud, trodden in and crumpled. The ghostly green light came off their leaves, and pooled around them like blood on the earth.
I didn’t know what it was meant to look like, but I guessed not this.
“What’s happened?” Tyler wheezed.
“The whole meadow’s crushed,” Iris said, crouching over the flowers. She picked up a petal and rubbed it between her fingers. The green light spread over her skin. She looked as if she’d dipped her hand in glow-in-the-dark paint.
I squinted into the distance. The meadow stretched off into the blackness, but nearly every flower was dead.
“What did this?” I said. “I thought glowroot was safe from the storm.”
Tyler nudged an upturned plant with the toe of his shoe. “It wasn’t the storm . . .”
As if to reinforce his point, a noise rumbled to the west—deep, low, growling.
“What was that?” Iris said.