And All the Stars (14 page)

Tensed for the return of the oscillating song, Madeleine was
unprepared for a sudden chorus, louder and yet more distant than the encounter
at the beach. It wasn't coming from
anything in the school, was strangely pervasive, overwhelming. Ahead of her the group of boys stopped and
turned, orienting toward it.

"That's the Spire," Emily said, as Madeleine
reached the car.

Noi didn't pause, leaping into the driver's seat and starting
the engine. "Care later. Leave now."

Madeleine obediently climbed in back as Pan and Nash headed
for the white hatchback.

"Shaun?" Gavin, about to join them, darted back. "C'mon man, we've got to move."

Shaun didn't react, listening intently to the wordless,
fluctuating noise.

"He's got the keys," Pan said

With a swift, comprehensive glance at a dozen boys, all
Greens, all standing motionless staring in the same direction, Nash reversed
course, he and Pan climbing into the sports car. Fisher, who had stowed his bag in the boot,
took the front seat and a lap full of Emily.

"Gav! Come
on!"

Trying to shake some response out of Shaun, Gavin glanced
back and that was the worst of timing because he saw their horrified reaction
but not the deep blue kite shape which flowed down from the roof and settled in
an embrace around him.

Noi let the clutch out, then stamped immediately on the
brakes as the hidden boy erupted from the white hatchback and threw himself
across the sports car's back seat, heavy bag thumping against the car door until
Pan dragged it in.

The car leaped forward, engine rising from a purr to a roar,
and they left the school and a dozen unmoving boys behind them.

Staring back, Madeleine could see the lone strawberry blonde
boy who walked to the gate. Watching
them go.

"Gav! Bastard
things! We'll get them for
this!" Pan writhed under the weight
of bags and the boy lying across all three back seat occupants. "Shit. Fuck them all! Shit, shit,
shit. Damn it, I need better
words."

He took a deep breath, and boiled out with:

"
I will do such
things, what they are yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the
Earth! You think I'll weep. No, I'll not weep.
"

He was shouting, eyes bright and wet, punctuating the
sentences with thumps on the legs of the boy lying on top of him.

"
I have full cause
of weeping, but this heart will break into a hundred thousand fragments before
I'll weep! Oh Fool, I shall go mad!
"

Noi darted a glance back at him, then at Emily's gasp swore
herself and swerved around the three Greens who had left first, standing just
around a bend in the road. The boy lying
on top, a spiky-haired Asian kid, slid dangerously sideways, and Madeleine and
Nash grabbed to stop him zipping over the side.

"Be Shakespearian later," Nash told Pan. "Focus on the fact that he's not
dead. For all we know these things hop
from person to person, and there's a chance we can get Gav back."

Pan punched the inside of the nearest door, a thump to make
them all wince, but he stopped talking.

"We've been
terraformed
,"
said the boy in Madeleine's lap, his lightly-accented voice edged with a kind
of disbelieving, acid delight. "They made us habitable."

"It's what they've done to the Greens which concerns
me," Nash said. "There are so
many more Greens than Blues, and they seem to have all been impacted at
once. We had best not spend long at the
Wharf getting those cars."

"Get out of the city as soon as possible," Emily
muttered.

"No." "Perhaps not."

Noi and Fisher, speaking together.

"Why not?" Madeleine asked, startled. "Even if we get locked up, it's better
than...that."

"Because of the Greens. Because we don't know nearly enough about what's going on. How far does that sound carry? Is it going to tell them to do anything more
than stand gaping?" Noi roared down
a wider road. "There're Greens in
every direction, in all the surrounding towns."

"We need a solid plan on where to go, and how to get
there unseen," Fisher said. He had
been very quiet, uncertain, but now seemed to have rediscovered his drive. "The problem is finding a place where we
can wait safely and gather information."

"That's taken care of," Noi said. "We had a Plan B."

After the swiftest of trips they hurried up to Tyler's
apartment, squashing into one elevator, tensely searching for any sign of other
people, straining for an individual voice over the song of the Spire.

"Someone pack the edibles while we grab our stuff,"
Noi said, scooping up a line of keys.

The TV went on while Madeleine was in Tyler's wardrobe, and
when she emerged the screen showed a couple of hundred people, all staring in
the same direction.

"All of the world," Nash said. "A simultaneous attack."

Madeleine turned to stick a large note on the fridge: "
T
– Don't stay here. They know it. – M
" She printed her mobile number at the bottom,
in case he'd lost it, then did a quick tour of the room, collecting stray
brushes and the bag of pads and pencils she'd put together while hunting
nappies and baby formula. Most of her
supplies were already in the bolthole, a piece of forethought she owed to
Emily.

"Right." Noi
emerged, two bags hooked over her shoulders. "We don't have far to go, but it's critical we go quick, quiet and
unseen. Let's head down to the central
hall."

They accomplished this without much difficulty, the cloak-and-dagger
peering about not even comical when they were all so sick and nervous.

"Good," Noi said, as they emerged from the
elevator. "Now–"

"Girls! Wait
there!"

Madeleine was not the only one who gasped at the sudden voice
from above. The elevator's doors closed
behind them and, exchanging glances, they watched it go up.

"Wait," Noi murmured. "If it's an attack, run out to the
visitor parking – through the big entryway on the driveway side. I've a key to one of those cars."

"But who is it?" Pan asked, eyeing the descending
figure.

"Not a clue," Noi said, as a beautifully-dressed
woman – all silk and pearls, her platinum hair perfectly coiffed – stepped out.

She was holding a gift-wrapped box, complete with
extravagant, curling bow. "Girls," she said, her voice cultured and assured, "I
wanted to give you a small thank you before I left." Smiling, she held out the box, which Noi
accepted blankly. "Take care of
yourselves."

Without another word she turned and walked back into the
elevator, her heels clicking.

"Hello
Twilight
Zone
," Pan said, as it descended.

"Have you seen her before?" Noi asked, and
Madeleine shook her head.

"Something you can discuss later–" Fisher began,
and stopped as Noi suddenly gaped.

"Take Him Away Lady! It has to be! Holy flipping
hell."

"You think so?" Madeleine stared at the elevator, but the woman was already out of
sight. Could that hoarse, frantic
whisper really have come from a person who looked like that?

"Has to be," Noi repeated. "And, yeah, now is not the time." She spun on her heel, craning to look in
every direction. "Total fail on
quick, quiet and unseen, but we're going to have to risk it. Come on."

They were already near the north end of the long central
hall, so it was a short trip to the aerial bridge joining the main building to
the smaller block at the very end of the wharf.

"This is called the North Building," Noi said,
after they had crossed, and the outside world was safely closed away once
again. "When we were doing our
check-the-neighbours shtick we didn't find anyone alive in here. Almost all the apartments on the east side
didn't have anyone in them at all." She paused as Madeleine unlocked the door of their chosen bolthole. "One advantage of this one is that with
the help of a ladder we prepared earlier you can jump the patio fences and dash
for either the cars, or the boat moorings. There's comparatively limited entry points, we can move through the
whole sub-building without risk of being seen, and there's a good hiding spot
if anyone actually comes this far."

"You don't think it too close to where you were
before?" Nash asked.

"I think that right now there's very few places where we
can get in and out without having an encounter like we just had with the Take
Him Away Lady, where there's no-one on the other side of a wall to hear us,
where there's no easy line of sight through the windows. We might want to move again, sure, but I'm
not driving madly through the city till I have a better idea of what's going
on."

"Makes sense," Fisher said.

"Why do you call her the Take Him Away Lady?" Pan
asked, and Noi explained as they dumped their bags just past the entry hall.

The apartment was enormous, taking up the eastern half of the
ground floor of the North Building, with a spiral staircase leading up to
another quarter floor on the level above. Sliding doors led to an expansive patio bordered by potted hedges and a
glass safety fence which looked directly out into the harbour. The sprawling lounge, dining and kitchen area
which backed on to this was full of sunlight, and the room was dotted with
touches which showed that this was a family home: children's drawings stuck to
the fridge, clusters of photos, and a stuffed unicorn arranged in one of the
chairs. The warm comfort of the place
seemed to make the day's losses all the crueller, and they collapsed onto the
wide lounges, suddenly depleted.

"Damn it," Pan muttered again.

Nash dropped a hand to his shoulder, but he shrugged it
off. The taller boy looked worried, but
turned his attention to the room. "This is Min," he said belatedly, while Fisher sorted through
a collection of remotes.

"Pleased to escape with you," the younger boy said.

"Welcome, welcome." Noi gestured vaguely around the room, then paused and pulled out her
phone, answering it as Fisher managed to turn on the wall-mounted television.

Images of silently-standing Greens were interspersed with
scenes of unfurling stars, of fleeing Blues embraced to become abruptly
composed and purposeful. The stars had
found large groups of Blues everywhere, whether gathered to test their powers,
or in the survival communities which had begun to form: swooping into
dormitories, share-homes, repurposed hospital wards. One group of stars had even travelled far out
beyond the fringes of their city, to a quarantine facility outside the dust
zone.

"Hiding mightn't be a plan after all," Pan said
restively. "They don't seem to have
any problem finding Blues."

"The one at the school passed right by us and didn't
stop," Emily said.

"None of these places have been hidden," Fisher
pointed out. "Most are Safe Zone
sites whose locations have been broadcast. And we could hardly have been more noisy about the testing sessions."

"Aliens who surf the internet." Pan shook his head. "Great."

Noi's
fragmentary conversation
reminded Madeleine to hunt out her own phone, and she was not surprised to see
a half-dozen missed calls from home. The
spectacle of Madeleine Cost being thrown to the sands of Bondi Beach had already
flashed up twice among the stream of TV images.

Moving to sit on the spiral stair, she tried her home number

"Hi Mum."

"Oh, thank God!" A pause. "It – it is you,
isn't it?"

A tiny snort of laughter escaped Madeleine, and then her eyes
stung and she felt ill and exhausted. "I don't think the 'phone home' stuff applies to all aliens,"
she said unevenly.

"Are you safe? Are you hurt?"

"Just a little shaken up. I'm with friends. We'll try to leave the city as soon as we
figure out a safe way to do it. Mum, I
think you and Dad should go now. Go to
Gran's."

"
Maddie
, we're not leaving
without you."

"Please Mum." Her voice had gone tight and high and she struggled to bring it back
under control.

There came the sound of the receiver being passed, then:
"
Maddie
."

"Dad, make her go. It'll be... Please. If I know you're out of reach of this, it'll
help."

"Where are you?"

"Well hidden. Plenty of food. We haven't
decided yet what to do long-term, but for the moment we're set to wait and
listen."

Silence, then: "We were so proud of you today,
Maddie
. When you
stopped to help that boy, I could see how afraid you were, and I–" He broke off, and Madeleine had to stand
abruptly and go upstairs. Their
conversation after that was fractured and full, and she broke down when it was
done, and wept for the first time since she'd woken lying in dust.

After some time, Noi came up and handed Madeleine a steaming
mug.

"There's a few thousand
spoonfuls
of sugar in this," she said. "We're all pretty
shocky
."

"Thanks," Madeleine mumbled, and sipped until her
throat had opened, watching Noi as she wandered around the room.

The triple-wide landing at the top of the staircase had been
fitted out as a spacious library, with floor to ceiling shelving on all walls,
and even above the window seat which looked out over the navy base side of the
bay. Most of the shelves were a riotous
jumble of spines of all colours and sizes, but one bookcase held nothing but
two-tone Penguin classics, and on another serried ranks of leather gleamed. The only furniture beside the window seat was
a heavy coffee table, a curve-footed floor globe, and two vivid stained glass
lamps. It was perhaps the nicest room
Madeleine had ever been in, and she wished she was in a state to appreciate it.

"Who called?" she asked eventually.

"
Faliha
. They went straight south, didn't come back
here for anything. And then, well, her
Mum...stopped. Is just sitting in the
car, turned toward the Spire.
Faliha
wanted to ask if we had any information – and to
check if we were okay."