by Mike Revell
I knew it wasn’t exactly the truth, but it wasn’t the worst lie in the world, was it? I didn’t know if Mrs. Willoughby was Dad’s biggest fan, but if everything went well, she’d act like it. At least a bit. That was what I was hoping, anyway.
After a few minutes Dad emerged from the bathroom in a clean shirt and trousers, smelling of aftershave. It was loads better than the unwashed old clothes he usually wore around the house. He had bags under his eyes and his skin was still as white as chalk, but at least he was making the effort.
“Right,” he said. “Let’s get this over with, eh?”
The car park outside school was packed. Mums and dads and kids were filing out. The inky sky was crisp and clear and pinpricked with sparkling stars. I spotted Orion, hunting high above us, and thought about what I’d heard back in the story, about the stars being gods and heroes. I hoped it was a good omen, but I crossed my fingers for luck anyway.
“This way,” I said to Dad, leading him through the tall glass doors. The receptionists had gone home, but there was a big board that said year 7 parents’ evening and underneath it was an arrow pointing through a door to the big hall on the right.
I wished I could relax. The closer I got to the hall, the more nervous I became. My hands were sweaty, and I could feel my T-shirt sticking to my back.
There’s nothing to worry about.
Mrs. Willoughby would help.
When we got to the door, I didn’t know where to look first. All these tables were set out across the floor with teachers sitting behind them and kids coming or going or standing around talking to their parents. There was no space to move.
“Which one is your teacher?” Dad said.
I stood on tiptoes, squinting. At first I couldn’t see her, then I caught something in the corner of my eye. She was waving from the far side of the room.
“There she is!”
When we got to the table, Mrs. Willoughby stood up and smiled at us. She shook Dad’s hand and said it was lovely to meet him, and as we were sitting down she gave me a secret wink.
“I must say,” she said, leaning in, “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. I’ve only known Owen for a short while, but he’s a very bright boy.”
“He is,” Dad said. My stomach was doing nervous backflips. So far, so good. “He takes after his . . . after his mother.”
The last word dropped like a weight.
Silence.
No.
This can’t be happening, I thought desperately.
I glanced at Mrs. Willoughby and made a face at her that said, Do something! because I could already feel the energy leaking out of Dad.
“Oh, but he must take after you as well,” Mrs. Willoughby said. “I’m sorry—it’s a little embarrassing to admit it to the parent of one of my pupils—but I’m a huge fan of your novel, Mr. Smith.”
“You . . . you are?” Dad said.
“Oh, yes. Time’s Child was one of my favorite books of the last decade. The underlying tones of hope and light, the accurate representation of social change . . .”
I didn’t know what any of that meant. Maybe it was like the art thing, and Mrs. Willoughby knew how to find the hidden meaning. Or maybe she was just a brilliant actor, because whatever she was saying, Dad was lapping it up. He sat up straighter, leaning closer, nodding his head like one of those dogs you got for the backs of cars.
And then came the magic words.
“I can’t wait for your next book,” she said, staring him straight in the eyes. “What are you writing next?”
“Oh,” Dad said. He paused. Come on, Dad. Tell her! “I’m wrestling with something at the moment, actually. It’s inspired by quite a . . . dark time in my life. I wanted to write about fear and death and show how you can defeat it. But to be honest, I’m struggling a bit. I don’t really know where to go next.”
“Ah.” Mrs. Willoughby smirked. “You’re at that part of the book.”
“What do you mean?” Dad said.
“Oh, one of my friends is an author. She got to the middle of her book and suddenly ran out of steam. She didn’t know what happened next.”
“And . . . and how did they get past it?” Dad said.
Mrs. Willoughby’s eyes flicked to me, then focused back on Dad. “She just wrote,” she said. “She wrote on the good days and then wrote on the bad days. Wrote even when it felt terrible. After that, she looked back and found that, actually, it was pretty good after all.”
“Yes,” Dad said. “Yes, perhaps.”
“For what it’s worth, I hope you do keep writing. It sounds brilliant.”
“Er, thank you,” Dad said, his cheeks reddening. “Thanks a lot.”
Mrs. Willoughby opened her file. “Now I suppose we’d better get to this young man, eh? There’s nothing to worry about, I assure you . . .”
I wasn’t listening anymore. I was just trying to keep the grin off my face. My insides were jumping for joy, because it had worked. I knew it had worked.
A sudden shiver of fear crept in, interrupting my thoughts. I was going back to Stormwalker. I was going back to face the Darkness. And, if I was lucky, I was going to get through to Jack’s dad.
32
I was ready for the swirling colors.
My head rang and my vision blurred, but I rubbed it away as the familiar fog filled my mind and Jack’s thoughts trickled and mingled with my own.
Relief flooded through me, mingling with the sick feeling in my stomach.
I was back! It had worked!
Mrs. Cloud was going on about stars, but the words weren’t sticking.
“. . . they even drew patterns through the stars, to help envision them. You see the great Taurus, here? Of course, the night sky has been lost to us for years. It’s impossible to say whether the stars themselves are real, or if they were simply part of the myth . . .”
A plan was forming in the back of my mind, but if it was going to work, I needed to find the plane. If anyone knew where the wreck was, it was him. I had to get to Quinn.
“Can I help you, Jack?” Mrs. Cloud said, as I stood up.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” I said. “Just . . . er . . . nipping to the bathroom.”
I rushed out of the room and into the grayness of the day. The barrier of lights had been shut down. The Darkness was nowhere to be seen. The camp was so quiet. I guessed everyone was either out patrolling or in class.
Where’s Quinn?
There! I spotted his truck. It was parked on the road, beside the half-destroyed Regent Street sign. I saw an LRP officer inside and ran over—
But it was James. His eyebrows knotted together as he looked up.
“I’m looking for Quinn,” I panted. “Have you seen him? I—”
I stopped, because the look he gave me sent spiders scurrying over my back.
“Quinn’s gone,” he said.
“What do you mean? When’s he getting back?”
“He’s not. He left,” James said. I blinked, shaking my head. I must have misheard him. Why would he leave? How could he leave? Unless . . . “Even LRP officers have to be held accountable,” James added.
What did that mean?
I thought back to the last time I saw him—the panicked expression on his face.
I backed away, shaking my head. This couldn’t be happening. I was imagining it, that was all. Maybe I wasn’t in the story at all. Maybe I was just dreaming I was here.
I turned around and ran, glancing quickly over my shoulder. James was still watching me. I pumped my legs faster, working my way back to the cellar—
“Jack!” Iris said, crashing into me on the stairs. “Why did you leave like that?”
“Iris. Thank God. I was just asking James about Quinn and . . .”
I checked over my shoulder again, but the stairway was clear, at least for now.
“Yeah?” she said. “What did he say? Is he okay?”
Footsteps. Somewhere behind me.
I grabbed Iris by the hand and walked
quickly into the hall, ducking into the shadows at the edge of the room.
“He said he’s gone,” I whispered.
“Gone? What do you mean ‘gone’? They didn’t take him to the Chamber, did they?”
“All I know is, Quinn knew about the plane. He made me promise not to check it out. Iris, he said something about the Marshal . . . he’s been drugging you with lemon balm, to make you forget about things he doesn’t want you to know. To make everyone forget.”
“What?”
“Trust me, I’m telling the truth. I’ll swear it on anything.”
“The Marshal couldn’t be drugging the whole camp,” she said. “Someone would know about it. Someone would have seen.”
“It’s true,” I told her, growing frustrated now. “Icarus 1 contacted us the other day, and he covered it up. But I think I’ve got a way to get back in touch with them.”
“If the Marshal is drugging the camp, then how do you remember all this?”
“I . . . don’t know,” I said, though I thought I did. If there was something in the food, it might have affected Jack, but they couldn’t do anything about me. “But I’ve got a plan. It involves the plane. I know,” I said, holding up my hands to stop her protest, “you don’t remember that, either. But I do. And if we can get the black box out of it, we might be able to use it to get through to Icarus 1.”
Her eyes widened, and I looked round in time to see James striding through the cellar. Was he looking for me, or was I just being paranoid?
“Come on,” Iris whispered. “We should get Farming, or we’ll be gone too.”
When it came to Hunting that afternoon, I didn’t follow Seth’s orders. Instead, I skirted around the edge of the camp, looking for anywhere they could have hidden the wreckage of the plane. On the edge of the north road, twenty yards away from the riverbank, an LRP officer was standing next to the door of a half-collapsed shop. He watched as we walked past, and I felt his gaze on me even as we rounded the corner and scanned along a nearby footpath.
“You don’t have to help,” I said to Iris, as we crept out of the way of a patrolling robot. “I’ll just get you in trouble.”
“How can I not help? Wouldn’t be much of a friend then, would I? What are we looking for, anyway?”
“Just something out of the ordinary,” I said. “Lumpy ground that wasn’t there before. Anything that looks different or wrong. They couldn’t have hidden it too far away.”
We did two laps of the camp, exploring farther and farther into the wasteland, pretending to scavenge important items. But there was no hole in the ground, no cover-up.
It was as if the plane just disappeared.
“Maybe they dumped it out in the storm,” I said. “If they did, who knows where it’ll be. It could be anywhere. The Darkness might have turned it to dust.”
I was just about to give up, when Iris stopped by the north road, twirling her slingshot between forefinger and thumb.
“What if we’re looking for the wrong kind of weird?”
I followed her gaze. She was squinting over to the ruins of a nearby building. Behind them, the LRP officer was still standing by that same shop doorway.
“He hasn’t moved for ages,” she said.
Slowly, my brain clunked into gear and caught up.
If LRP’s job was to patrol, to keep the camp safe, why would one of them be standing around like—
Like he was guarding something.
“I’ll distract him,” Iris said. “You take a look. I’ll meet you in the cellar later.”
And just like that, she ran off, scampering east through the rubble and skirting around the outside of camp.
I held my breath, wondering what to do.
I didn’t want to risk going closer until she acted, but how would I know when to go?
Suddenly there was a shout. “Dreamless!” she cried, sprinting back through the ruins, kicking up swirls of dust.
The LRP officer looked up. He glanced around, seeming to weigh his options, then darted toward her. This was it. If I was going to move, I needed to do it now. I’d probably only have a few minutes, and if I got caught . . .
I crunched out of the shadows, tiptoeing through a canopied alleyway and out across the road. The door the man had been guarding was no different from any others in camp: blackened, like an old fireplace, the bricks all crumbling away.
But through the door—
I saw it right away. Charred and twisted metal. Smashed-up wings.
It was piled up in a corner at the back of the room, pieces strewn across the floor. And on its side, just visible in the shadows, faded black letters: icarus 1.
So it had been them! They must have been investigating after the radio call. I clambered over the wreckage, and dug my way through to what was left of the cockpit, careful not to slice my fingers on the broken glass.
Where is it? I thought. It’s got to be here, surely. I tried to think back to that documentary I watched with Dad, the one about the plane crash, but I couldn’t remember where the black box was kept. Panicking now, I reached farther into the foot space, feeling under the seat, and finally my fingers touched cold metal.
I gripped and tugged, and the box slid out. It was so big! There was no way I’d be able to get it out of there. Which bit was the location device? I held it up to the light. There were two main sections: a big square one, and a small cylinder. I pulled and twisted, but it wouldn’t budge.
Footsteps, somewhere nearby, crunching on the gravel.
If I had to have guessed, I’d choose the cylinder over the box itself. I seemed to remember them mentioning that specifically on the show. I yanked harder. There was a sharp crack, and the cylinder snapped off.
I’d done it!
But I had to move . . .
Breathing quickly, I tucked the rest of the box back inside the cockpit. Then I dashed out, around the side of the building, and back toward the square.
“You were brilliant!” I said, when I found Iris in the cellar that evening. I didn’t want to meet up with her right away, just in case anyone had seen us. If anyone found the location device, the whole plan would shatter just like that.
She smiled at me, and I beamed back, laughter bubbling up inside me. Someone had tried to hide the evidence of the plane, and the Marshal wanted us to forget about it—but we’d tracked it down. Now I just had to hope I could get the pinger to work.
When I was sure no one was looking, I held the cylinder out for Iris to see.
“What’s it do?” she said.
“I . . . don’t really know,” I admitted. “Somehow it can be used to track crashed planes, though. I remember seeing a show on it once.”
“You mean we went to all that trouble for nothing?”
“No,” I said. “They went to all that trouble to hide it, which means it must be important. We just need to find a way to work it. I reckon it needs high ground, and daylight. It must be hard for it to work through the Darkness.”
Her eyes flashed mischievously, the same way Danny’s did back in the real world when we played games behind a teacher’s back. “The radio tower. We go there so often that no one will suspect what you’re doing. Except . . .”
“Except what?” I said.
“Well, you’ll have to convince Seth. He’s the one who tells us where to go, and the tower’s quite far for a Hunting trip.”
“Yeah,” I said, suddenly nervous. “Yeah, you’re right. But it’s now or never. We’ve got to do it before the next Cleansing.”
It wasn’t going to be easy. We’d be out there without our illuminators. But I had to do something. Even though this was a story and that meant it was all in Dad’s head and none of it was even real, it felt so much more than just words. It was so much more than just words.
Because I was right. I knew I was. I was here for a reason. I had to show everyone what the Marshal was doing. If Jack’s dad was with Icarus 1, then I had to get to him.
I thought back to my real dad
, smashing up all those paintings. If I could do this, maybe it would help. It had to help.
I kept the black box cylinder in my Hunting bag all through the next day. It might have been safe in the dorms, but I didn’t want to risk it. Ever since Quinn’s disappearance, I’d been checking and double-checking over my shoulder, just to make sure no one was watching.
After class, I walked quickly round the millet patch, avoiding the rough ground where the potatoes had just been planted, and only slowed down when I got toward the edge of the farm.
Seth was there again, running sprints.
He saw me when he turned back round, rubbing sweat from his forehead.
“What do you want?” he panted, jogging over.
I couldn’t afford to mess this up. But now I was here, I couldn’t think of the right words.
“I need to go to the tower,” I said. “In the next daylight window.”
Seth barked a quick laugh, then turned and ran again—short, sharp sprints, into the distance and back. When he swung back a third time, I tensed my legs, ready to run.
He spun and pelted off—and I bolted after him.
“What are you doing?” Seth growled, but his voice was snatched by the wind rushing past us.
I was beside him now, running parallel.
He skidded to a stop as I ran by, and leaned over, breathing heavily.
“Okay,” he said. “You’ve got some pace, I’ll give you that. But it’s a long way to go. The illuminators won’t be ready until this evening. What if you get caught out?”
“Just give me a chance. I . . . I’ve got an idea. I really think it’ll work.”
“We don’t take ideas, Jack. We take orders. That’s what we’re trained for. That’s why we’re here. And we’re under strict orders not to go too far in daylight windows, because you never know how long they’re going to last. What’s so important that it can’t wait till later? Our priority’s got to be contacting the City.”
“What if I told you the City was dead?”
He stared at me. I held my breath, my heart pounding. It was a risk. I knew it was. But I had to get out there, and if that meant chancing a run-in with the Marshal again, then so be it.
Seth snorted. “I’d say you’re going mad. Have you been to Cleansing lately?”