by Susan Gates
Jay slipped on the slimy floor, and almost fell into a black rotting heap by one of the benches.
He sprang back, swallowed the sour bile rising in his throat. The heap was all that remained of a Cultivar.
Fighting nausea, Jay peered closer. It was the Immune Hunter, the one who’d crouched, waiting, underwater, when he and Toni had gone to the shipping container. Jay could tell by the sticky hairs, black now, on one outstretched hand.
The fungus had killed him.
Now he noticed there were blackened heaps here and there around the room. Other Immune Hunters?
Jay didn’t wait to find out. He yelled, ‘Toni? Are you here?’
Unbearable thoughts tormented him. If they’d made Toni Verdan, maybe she’d caught this fungus too.
He yelled again, ‘Toni, where are you?’
Then, from somewhere in the room, came a groan. Someone was still alive.
Jay saw something twitching by the door. He raced over. But it wasn’t Toni.
It was Viridian.
The Cultivar Commander’s massive body lay stretched out on the floor. Black mould covered his skin. He raised his crested head like a sick dinosaur. The fire in his eyes wasn’t as bright as before but it was still burning.
Jay crouched down beside him. He said, ‘Where’s Toni?’
‘It was the grafts,’ said Viridian. Black spores puffed out as he spoke.
‘I asked you about Toni!’
‘We used our carnivorous plants for grafts,’ said Viridian, coughing out spores like smoke. ‘The fungus spread through our bodies. We infected the other Cultivars. Then our best warriors started dying…’
He moved his great head from side to side. He almost seemed to be smiling in admiration, that such a powerful elite had been brought down by a humble fungus.
Black tears rolled down his face. He said, ‘I wanted to go further. Much further. But it’s too late for me…’ His voice trailed away.
Jay shook him angrily. ‘Don’t you die yet!’
Viridian had opened his eyes. He was smiling. ‘This has been the biggest adventure ever.’ He grasped Jay’s arm with one mouldy hand, as if they were friends. ‘The biggest adventure ever.’
Then Jay saw how Viridian had got the fungus. The Commander had a graft, surgically implanted into his wrist. It was a beautiful little Venus fly trap, too small to be a weapon. Had he had it put there like some kind of living jewellery? To feed it like a pet?
Jay shuddered. He couldn’t believe that once he’d thought they had something in common.
‘Where’s Toni,’ said Jay again. ‘Tell me!’
A new fire flamed deep in Viridian’s eyes. ‘Toni,’ he repeated. ‘She is our legacy. Our greatest creation. She is the Future.’
‘Where is she?’ Jay shouted. ‘What have you done to her?’ He reached out to shake the dying Commander’s shoulder, but then snatched back his hand as he remembered those stinging spines that bristled all over his chest and shoulders.
‘Toni’s an angel now,’ said Viridian.
‘You killed her!’ yelled Jay.
‘I can die happy,’ said Viridian, ‘knowing she’s an angel.’
Then, with a smile on his face, Viridian turned his head aside and closed his eyes.
‘I hope you’re dead, you sadistic freak!’ screamed Jay.
He sprang up from Viridian’s body and hardly knowing where he was going, raced out of the terrible room. He ran wildly, almost crashing into a wall. Instead of backing off he started hitting it, over and over again, howling out his grief for Toni. He stopped when he saw his knuckles were bleeding.
He wiped snot and tears from his face and walked on, very upright, eyes straight ahead.
He was in a corridor with a glass wall. On the other side of the glass was a science lab. Or was it an operating theatre? It didn’t seem important any more.
He shouldered his way through another set of doors, carefully keeping his mind numb, and saw he was in a little triangular outdoor courtyard between the three domes. Overhead the stars still sparkled, the moon still looked down.
There were three or four trees, bunched together in the courtyard. Jay heard a rustle behind them. Could it be an Immune Hunter, who’d somehow escaped the fungus infestation? Jay tried to make himself care. He looked wearily towards the trees.
An angel rose above the courtyard trees and hovered there, beating its great wings. Except it wasn’t a heavenly angel. It had green skin. And the wings on its back weren’t feathery white, but green, edged with spines like teeth and deep blood-red inside. They’d been grafted on from a giant Venus fly trap.
The Research Station’s scientists had performed the surgery. They’d called their latest creation Venus Angel.
The Venus Angel slowly flapped its beautiful, deadly wings. It gazed down at Jay. Its green eyes seemed totally alien – there was nothing human in them at all. Its green hair was spiky, hacked off.
‘Toni!’ gasped Jay
They’d made her Verdan. They’d put wings onto her back. But she was alive. A rush of joy took Jay’s breath away. He scrabbled in his hoodie pocket for the vaccine bottle. He couldn’t find it. Feverishly, he searched again. It was definitely gone. He’d dropped it somewhere, in his frantic rush through the dome.
The magnificent, mutant creature came closer. She swooped down from the tree tops until she was right in front of Jay. She snapped her main wings shut. Smaller Venus fly trap wings on her wrists and ankles were beating fast like hummingbird wings, keeping her centimetres above the ground.
Now her eyes were on a level with Jay’s. She looked at him curiously, but totally without fear. Like you’d look at some weird caterpillar that had suddenly wriggled across your path.
‘Toni?’ said Jay. He thought he saw a gleam of recognition suddenly flash across her face. ‘Toni, it’s me, Jay.’
The Angel said, ‘Jay?’ They stared at each other without speaking. She opened her mouth to say something more.
A door crashed behind Jay. Dr Moran came racing out into the courtyard. He stopped for a moment, astonished, as he recognised his daughter.
Then he came running up. ‘Toni!’ he cried. ‘It’s all right. I’ve found a cure. We can make you human again. We can take those horrible things off your back…’
He held out a bottle of vaccine. ‘Just open your mouth. And this nightmare will all be over.’
Toni raised an arm, her wrist wings vibrating in a crimson-green blur. Contemptuously, she dashed the bottle out of his hand. It went rolling away across the courtyard.
‘Toni!’ yelled Dr Moran. He went racing after the bottle. Toni opened her main wings. With one last look at Jay, she rose into the air.
‘Wait!’ shouted Dr Moran.
But a Venus Angel doesn’t obey human commands. In all her terrible splendour, Toni rose above the domes.
‘I’ll come and find you!’ yelled Jay. ‘I promise!’
He had no idea whether she heard or not. For seconds Toni hovered, the moonlight shining through her wings. Then she soared higher into the night sky until she was lost among the stars.
Chapter 20
Dr Moran and Jay walked back through the domes in silence.
Dr Moran spoke first. ‘I’ll find her,’ he said. ‘It’s not too late to make her human again.’
‘I’ll find her,’ Jay said.
He felt clear-headed and full of purpose. He didn’t know yet how he was going to find Toni. But he knew he would never give up until he did.
Then a terrible thought struck him, ‘What if she’s infected with the black spot fungus?’ he asked.
‘She isn’t,’ replied the doctor with certainty.
‘How can you be so sure?’ Jay demanded. ‘She got grafted, and Viridian said the fungus spread through grafts. Viridian’s dying,’ he added. ‘He’s probably dead by now.’
Dr Moran looked at Jay, astonished. ‘Are you sure?’
‘I’ve just seen him,’ said Jay. But he wasn’t inte
rested in Viridian any more. All he cared about was Toni.
He challenged Dr Moran again. ‘How’d you know Toni’s not infected?’
‘Once the Cultivar scientists found out about the black spot, they made their labs sterile, used plants that were fungus free. They kept Toni in quarantine after surgery. So she never caught it.’
‘Who told you all this?’ Jay asked him.
‘That Immune Hunter who ran out of the dome. I refused to give her the vaccine until she did. She was one of my colleagues once,’ added Dr Moran. ‘A very good scientist.’
They were passing the labs behind the glass walls. ‘See?’ said Dr Moran.
‘See what?’ said Jay, his eyes sweeping over the gleaming stainless steel surfaces, the white walls. Then he caught on. ‘There’s no fungus in there.’
Dr Moran nodded. ‘That’s why I think there’s still hope for Toni. If I can find her.’
‘I’ll find her,’ said Jay again. Nothing on earth was going to stop him.
‘So where’s Viridian?’ asked Dr Moran. ‘I’ve never seen him. I’d like to take a look at him.’
‘He’s in here,’ said Jay, steeling himself, as they entered the black, stinking room full of slimy heaps that had once been Immune Hunters. ‘Over there.’ Jay pointed. He couldn’t bear to look. ‘He doesn’t look anything like he did before,’ he added.
No one seeing Viridian now could imagine him as he’d been at the rally burning, like a fiery green comet, with such fierce and brilliant energy. On that balcony he’d seemed indestructible. Franklin was far too small for all that power. You just knew he wouldn’t stop until he ruled the planet.
Dr Moran said, ‘There’s nothing here. He’s gone.’
‘He can’t have,’ said Jay. ‘He was dead when I left him. Or nearly.’
‘Come and look.’
Reluctantly, Jay went over. Viridian’s body was gone, only a sooty spoor print on the ground to show where it had been.
‘Look,’ said Dr Moran, grim-faced. There were smudgy hand prints, knee prints dragging across the floor.
‘He can’t be still alive,’ whispered Jay. ‘I mean, he was eaten away by fungus, he was breathing out spores.’
‘In that case, he’s finished,’ said Dr Moran. ‘He’s crawled away to die somewhere.’
‘Yeah,’ agreed Jay, reassured. ‘Yeah. That’s what must have happened.’
* * *
It was dawn when Toni, scanning the ground from the sky, found a suitable place to land. It was a swampy wilderness, perfect for carnivorous plants. She was exhausted and starving. A black-backed gull flew too close. It hardly had time to squawk before Toni’s main wings snapped shut on it.
She drifted down to the swamp but landed clumsily: she still had a great deal to learn about flying.
Toni crouched on the boggy ground, on bright green cushions of moss. In each direction stretched fields of ghostly white pitcher plants, a metre high. Tiny sundew plants glistened in between them like rubies, with gnats struggling in their sticky tentacles.
A picture came into her mind. It was of a human boy called Jay shouting, ‘I’ll come and find you!’ and getting smaller and smaller as she soared away into the sky. The image disturbed her, she didn’t know why. She felt a stab of intense loneliness and longing. The pain was so sharp, it made her clutch at her heart. But then it passed and she forgot it.
An hour later, Toni had finished digesting the soft tissue of the seagull. She let the bones, beak, feet and feathers fall out of her gorgeous wings and stared around, surveying her new kingdom.
THE STORY CONTINUES
Coming in October 2013
VIRIDIAN:
VENUS ANGEL
Read on…
Viridian: Venus Angel
Toni was in the swamplands, south of Franklin. Since she’d flown away from Jay and Dr Moran, she hadn’t seen a single human. No-one, not even Verdans, came to these quaking bogs, where carnivorous plants thrived. But, to a Venus Angel, it felt like coming home.
Toni crouched among pitcher plants, rising around her, a metre high. From inside their traps, tall slender trumpets, she could hear the frantic whine of flies. They’d crawled in and couldn’t climb back up the slippery walls. Now they were being digested, slowly.
All the predator plants had caught something. Tiny sundews had gnats struggling in their sticky tentacles. Venus fly traps had their leaves clamped shut, like clam shells. Inside them insects were being slowly drained of body fluids.
Toni watched them fondly, as if they were subjects in her own personal kingdom.
‘Good hunting,’ she told them, smiling.
She still used English to think and talk to herself, sometimes. But her human speech was getting rusty. It belonged to that other world she’d lived in before she became a Venus Angel and had to learn a whole new set of skills to survive.
She still thought about that boy sometimes. What was his name?
‘Jay,’ Toni said out loud. Her voice seemed strange, as if it belonged to someone else. She said ‘Jay,’ again, to reassure herself that the sound was coming out of her own mouth.
In her mind, she suddenly saw him, far below her, heard his frantic cry: ‘I’ll come and find you. I promise!’
Then a screech came from above her. Toni looked up. She forgot about Jay. A hawk came streaking in from the west. Bam! It hit a pigeon in the air above her. There was an explosion of feathers and the hawk spiralled off, the pigeon grasped in its talons. Its harsh wild cries faded into the distance.
Toni’s green lips curved into a grin. She’d learned a lot from hawks.
‘You were useless at flying before,’ she told herself.
But now she was getting better. Better at flying and hunting. Like the hawk, she snatched birds to eat out of the air now, sometimes squirrels from trees. Her wings snapped shut in a tenth of a second.
She opened her glossy, green wings. Bones and grey fur fell out in a neat, dry package. Her wings were blood red inside, rich with nutrients from the squirrel she’d just finished digesting. She took all her meals through her wings now. She’d stopped eating by mouth completely. It was like she’d forgotten how.
She spread her gorgeous wings wide, to soak up the sun. Her green neck twisted, like a plant stem, so her face could bask in its rays. She stayed like that, totally still, for ages, half gargoyle, half beautiful stone angel.
‘Time to fly,’ Toni told herself.
First published 2012 by A & C Black,
an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square
London WC1B 3DP
This electronic edition published in October 2012
www.bloomsbury.com
Copyright © 2012 A & C Black
Text copyright © 2012 Susan Gates
The right of Susan Gates to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
eISBN 978-1-40817-627-6
A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved
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