Aurora (7 page)

All-powerful the empire might be, but the rebels have said that its people are weakening. Lack of sunlight over generations is causing new deformities and diseases that the ingenuity of the sky scientists cannot seem to solve.

‘Some older citizens know what happened with the Amphibian Experiment,’ says Fox, ‘and there’s a spreading horror that it could happen again – and this time the experiment might be with their own descendants, their own flesh and blood.’

‘If the empire doesn’t like what the scientists make this time, they’ll kill them too?’ Pandora feels sick.

‘And maybe they won’t stop there,’ adds Fox. ‘Maybe they’ll get rid of the sun-sick ones. Or the old ones. Who knows? Those are the seeds of doubt I’ve sown in the Noos and there’s a – a
surge
of distrust,’ Fox’s troubled eyes lighten, ‘against the Guardians of the empire. I’ve never known it before. Their defences are weak and so is the trust of their people. This is our time. We have to break them, Pan.’ He glances at the city above. ‘And my father has to be broken – he’s behind so much of this.’

Fox has tracked the activities of his estranged father through the Noos. Mungo Stone, Caledon’s son, has lost the influence he thought was his birthright now that power in the empire has swung East and to younger cities in the southern hemisphere. The City Fathers who ruled the New World under Caledon’s leadership have been replaced by a new generation of Guardians ruthless in their rivalry for power in their sky empire. An early stake in the riches of the North would rekindle Mungo’s fire in his world.
My father,
says Fox,
is a desperate and dangerous man.

But there are good people in the sky cities too, thinks Pandora. People who didn’t want her kind killed and who don’t want anything like that to happen again.

Another whale-like darkness moves across the dusky netherworld and engulfs them in its shadow. Pandora shivers, reeling from all that Fox has told her, and he pulls her close.

‘It doesn’t change anything, Pan,’ he says, through the thunder of the airship. ‘You’re still you.’

But
everything
has changed. Now Pan thinks of the boat people with a wrench inside. Is she to risk her life and fight for people who would see her as a freak to be hunted down? People who drove away her desperate parents or did nothing as they were killed?

And now she begins to understand why she can never seem to break through Fox’s fond, brotherly affection. She used to think it was the coming war that worried him. Once their battles are all over, she thought,
then
she would be his true queen in a far greater realm.

But it wasn’t the risks of war or the netherworld, she now realizes. It was her own self that repelled him and the kind of child she might produce. How long has Fox suspected what she is? When he looks at her now, what does he really see? An alien creature? A freakish mistake? So he might be tender and close and tell her she is beautiful, but he will never love her as she wants.

Not now, not ever.

Pandora can no longer bear the hopping and slithering creatures on the bridge. Is that what she is? More amphibian than human? She pulls away from Fox so fiercely the tiara jolts from her head. The diamonds once worn by a queen of the drowned world sparkle in the gloom as they fall from the broken bridge and splash into the lagoon. Pandora could easily dive from the bridge and rescue it from the depths of the murky waters but, heartbroken, she lets go her crown.

What Fox once loved as her strange netherworld beauty is now a deformity, inflicted on her by the empire he hates. When he looks at her now all he sees, she is sure, are the sins of the past he yearns to escape.

A SCAR FROM OLD TIMES

Harpoon on her back, knife between her teeth, Mara climbs Wolf Mountain, filled with a murderous rage. Shadows chase her as the sun falls behind the western peaks and she moves fast to outpace them. Darkness is the realm of the wolves.

Lily hasn’t been seen all day, not since she ran off from the lakeside at dawn. She will have gone tracking with the hunters to cool her head, Mara told herself, trying to keep calm. But as the brief day dimmed and the hunters returned with a trussed deer and a clutch of wild rabbits, there was still no sign of Lily. Mara left the little ones with Rowan, saying she’d search once more around the lake, but knowing in her heart that hurt, headstrong Lily must be with Wing.

The thin moon is a sharpening blade as Mara climbs towards Scarwell’s cave. None of this would have happened if Scarwell had kept her mouth shut, thinks Mara, tucking herself into a rocky crevice to light the resin-soaked torch she has brought – and just in time too as a growl, almost too low for human ears, menaces the dusk.

Suddenly Scarwell appears above her, on a ledge.

Mara steadies her nerve. The eyes of the young wolfwoman watch her every move as she hauls herself up on to the ledge, sweating and breathless. Mara raises the torch and sees the wolves perched, still as statues, on the rocks all around.

‘What’s our fight this time, Scarwell?’ Mara demands. ‘What is it you want? Why hit out at Lily just to get at me? I know you did. Scar, if it wasn’t for me, you’d still be in the netherworld – maybe dead by now. Why such hate?’

Scarwell was a child still when Mara, barely older than Lily, found her in the netherworld – a ferocious urchin, abandoned by the world, fighting to survive among the rooftops and land scraps in the drowned city. Mara touches her cheek in an unconscious gesture, remembering the long-faded wound that Scarwell once gave her that, in turn, gave the wolfwoman her name.

Scarwell stares, the memory sparking in her eyes too.

‘Always you
take
,’ Scarwell spits out. ‘Once, my urchins all mine. Wing all
mine
. Then
you
come to netherworld, take us all away on ships. Take
my
urchins to Candlewood.’ Scarwell bares her blackened teeth. ‘World is
not
all Mara’s. Wolf Mountain
mine
.’ Scarwell stamps her foot on the ground. ‘Girl is like you,’ she mutters. ‘She
takes
.’

‘Lily? Takes what?’

But the instant she asks, Mara knows. Lily takes Wing. She takes him whenever she can. All summer long, Wing comes down to live by the lake close to Lily. Now that Lily is no longer a child but a striking, fiery young woman, she threatens Scarwell’s bond with Wing.

‘Is Lily here, Scar? Is she with Wing?’

Desolation flits across the wild beauty of Scarwell’s dirty, battle-scarred face.

‘Gone.’

‘Gone?’ Mara repeats.

‘Gone away.
Gone
.’

The lake and its mountains seem to swoon out around them in a vast emptiness. In that moment Mara feels the world as Scarwell must, as a place of constant loss.

‘Help me, Scar,’ she pleads. ‘You want Wing back. I want Lily. Tell me where they’ve gone.’

The dread Mara has been keeping at arm’s length wraps around her now, cold as a ghost.

‘To find Fox,’ Scarwell hisses. ‘Gone to sea!’

PHANTOMS AND LEGENDS

Mara gusts cold air into the burrow as she bounds down the steps. Rowan stares as she grabs her old backpack from the bottom of a large store cupboard dug deep into the curving wall of the burrow.

‘Didn’t you find her? Mara, where have you been? It’s been dark for hours. The kids have been wanting you . . . wait, what are you doing?’

Rowan prises the backpack from Mara’s freezing fingers and holds her close until he feels her shuddering panic soothe.

‘Pollock and I will search Wolf Mountain the second it’s light,’ he says.

‘I’ve already been.’

‘To Wolf Mountain? Alone?’ Rowan breaks his embrace, exasperated. ‘Mara—’

‘I
had
to. But she’s not there.’

Mara sees the scrap of wood-pulp parchment on the table covered in Lily’s angry charcoal scrawl and seizes it.

‘I found it on her bed,’ says Rowan. ‘Can’t make much sense of it, but at least she’s with Wing.’ Yet his doubts about the wolf boy are clear on his face. ‘There’s nothing we can do tonight.’

‘Wing is wild and she’s still a child and—’

‘I know, Mara, but think of what you did at Lily’s age.’

‘That’s exactly what I’m thinking of! Lily’s just as headstrong as I was.’

‘Still,’ Rowan retorts, as Mara takes up her backpack once again and begins to stuff it with provisions: a leather water flask, a pack of dried fish, a chunk of nut loaf.

‘Some pine spirit for wounds,’ she murmurs. ‘She could be lost in the mountains, injured . . .’

‘Stop
panicking
.’

Mara isn’t listening. She digs deep into the bag, unzipping its inner compartment. Rowan watches her rummaging, his face darkening.

‘What is it you’re looking for? That cyber-whatsit?’

‘It’s gone,’ Mara cries. ‘Granny Mary’s wooden box – it’s where I keep the halo from the cyberwizz. They’re both gone. Lily must have taken them. But the halo is useless without the globe.’

‘What does it matter?’ Rowan slumps down in a chair.

The cyberwizz always annoyed him when they were young because it took Mara to a place he couldn’t follow: into the Weave, a mysterious virtual world she never let him see. There were too many secrets to do with the wizz that she always kept to herself. Mara knows Rowan was secretly relieved once the globe was lost.

‘Wait a while,’ Rowan urges in a gentler tone. ‘Give her time.’ He pulls Mara towards him. ‘Let her have her own adventure, Mara. Let her
be
. We don’t know where she is, anyway. She’ll come back.’

‘Her
own
adventure?’ Mara’s smooth brow crinkles in bewilderment.

‘Have you never thought,’ Rowan challenges her, ‘what it’s like for her, growing up surrounded by tales of the legendary Mara? It’s bad enough for me.’ He breaks into a grin that softens his face into the boy Mara grew up with on their drowned island. ‘Maybe she just needs to escape your shadow for a while.’

‘She’s not in my shadow. She’s far too bright for that.’ Mara pauses. ‘Though I remember Mum felt like that about Granny Mary.’ She rakes her long, dark hair back from her face in a fretful gesture of old. ‘But that’s not why she’s gone.’ She falters, swallows hard, ‘Scarwell told Lily about . . . about . . .’

Mara stops, the name freezing on her lips. She has barely spoken it in all the years Lily has been alive. She’s not quite sure why, although she knows something in Rowan flinches from the very thought of that other presence, the one who is part of Lily and flutters like a tree-ghost at the edges of their lives.

‘The legendary Fox.’

Rowan finishes the hanging sentence in a flat voice.

Mara wants to escape his piercing blue eyes but they pin her to the moment, as always.

‘You’ve had all the time in the world to tell her.
Years,
Mara. She should have heard it from you. You should have told her the truth in the beginning.’

‘I tried . . . I . . .’

‘Once. You tried
once
.’

‘She wanted
you
to be her dad. You love each other. I couldn’t bear to spoil that.’

‘Maybe what you couldn’t bear is to talk about
him
. You can’t even speak his name.’