Older Kings Horses – Chris Drew Barker

BROKEN EARTH EPISODE ONE

OLDER KING’S HORSES

C H R I S D REW B A R K E R

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For Drew and Chloe

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Special thanks to Titus Chalk

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BROKEN EARTH EPISODE ONE

OLDER KING’S HORSES CHAPTER ONE A great fall

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CHAPTER TWO For to get out of the rain

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CHAPTER THREE To the top of the hill

CHAPTER FOUR The world so high

CHAPTER FIVE Fly away home 5

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CHAPTER ONE

“A great fall�

The rabbit blinked its amber eyes. Marcus fixed his prey with his gaze, hesitant as always to kill such a handsome animal. The boy could feel sweat tickling his palms. He tried to slow his breathing, crouched low to the ground. Then he dived for the rabbit, hands outstretched, his fingertips clutching at a furry foot, which shook itself free in panic. The rabbit leapt, its muscular rear legs propelling it several metres into the air, far higher than Marcus could reach or leap himself. Desperately searching for an escape, the rabbit launched itself at a small, rock that was floating past above them. It scrabbled at it, then pushed off, high into the chill air, leaving the boy 1

grasping at nothing. Marcus’ spirits sunk. He stood up and dusted himself down. His stomach was as empty as his hands and it growled as he fought off the frustration.

Below him in the distance, he could see the house, model-like when looked at from this height. He paused at the edge of the floating rock he had stalked the rabbit on. He had vowed not to go home empty handed. But his strength was fading. Hungry, exhausted, he jumped.

An eight metre descent. Higher than a house.

Higher than the house he could see way off ahead of him. The house he knew so well.

The boy landed softly on the mossy ground and headed towards the home he had once shared with his parents. The home he had lived in since he was a baby. The home that had remained constant, the same. The one constant 2

among the shifting reality around him these past seven years. * “Did you catch anything?” came the voice from the darkened room as he bolted the door behind him.

“Not this time Scarlett I’m sorry” Marcus sighed as he slumped in the chair. The comfy armchair his father would sit in as he took off his shoes and put on his slippers when he would come home from work so long ago. The soft cushions of the chair of the man of the house enveloped him. The chair was his now.

“I’ll go out again in the morning. It’s easier in the morning “ he said, trying to sound convincing. It had been three days since he and his little sister had eaten a substantial meal and 3

he knew it was getting a little desperate.

“It’s alright, I wasn’t really hungry” Scarlett said as she curled up next to him, resting her head on the comforting cushioned arm of the worn out chair, “We can wait till breakfast.”

They were both silent for a moment. Marcus got up and began to light the fire in the fireplace as his little sister picked up the magazine that was on the wooden table in front of them.

“Marcus, what does s... a... f... e... say?” she asked, pointing to the printed words on the crumpled page in front of her.

Marcus stopped tending the fire for a moment, trying to work out the best way to explain the meaning of a word this four year old could quite possibly have never heard before. Even at his young age he understood his role. He was her teacher, her guide through a confusing world.

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Everything he taught her she would believe without question.

“It says safe,” said the boy, “it means when it’s not dangerous any more. When you’re OK. That everything is alright. If you’re safe, you can get on with other things. Nothing can hurt you or harm you.”

He hoped that was enough. That she would understand what he meant. But it was hard.

Sometimes she misunderstood when he explained something. Sometimes he would upset her without meaning to. He was careful now.

Always thinking about everything he said before he said it. Every word.

Scarlett was silent for a minute. She was digesting the information, rolling it around in her mind to see what came out.

“Marcus,” she said, and then added softly in a 5

whisper, “Are we safe?”

Marcus didn’t hesitate. He knew this was important. He was all she had now and she needed to know that her brother would always be there for her, no matter what happened. Even if he didn’t believe it himself.

“Of course we are Scarbo” he said, ruffling her hair like he remembered his mum used to do to him, “I’ll always keep you safe.”

This seemed to reassure her. She curled up even more, pulling their blanket over the both of them.

“Always.” He said again as if to reassure her.

He stroked her soft hair as her breathing got deeper and she began to drift off to sleep. He knew her so well now. He knew that, shortly after her breathing deepened like this, she would twitch. That twitch you do just before you 6

descend into deep sleep and you feel like you’re falling. Then a few seconds later she would be away, so deeply in the land of dreams that he could carry her to the mattress that they shared as a bed by the fireplace.

He gently placed her head on the pillow and pulled the covers up over her.

But deep down, Marcus knew they weren’t safe. Not in the forest. Nobody was safe in the forest. Not these days. There was definitely something going wrong with the gravity in the rocky area at the edge of the trees. Things had never exactly been normal out there but the boy had noticed that it was definitely starting to spread and things were getting desperate. He was having to travel further and hunt harder and he was bringing back less and less. It meant he was having to leave Scarlett alone in the house for 7

“I’ll always keep you safe Scarlett.”

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long periods at a time and he didn’t like doing that at all. He didn’t like that one bit.

He took the magazine from his little sister’s sleeping hands and sank back into the comforting, familiar shape of his father’s chair.

The chair that had been dad’s back when Marcus was almost exactly the age his sister was now.

Back when they were safe.

Or at least back then he had thought that they were safe. But maybe they hadn’t been, even then? Maybe he had just believed that they were? Maybe his mum and his dad had just been reassuring him in the same way he had just reassured his sister?

Marcus slid open the drawer in the wooden table and pulled out his scrapbook and the pair of red handled scissors that lay on top of it. He sat down in the chair, hunched forwards with 9

the magazine in one hand and the scissors in the other. By the light of the fire he continued his work. It was late – very very late. He was tired – very very tired. But he knew that he didn’t have long now and that he was so close. So very close to finishing the puzzle. To finding out the answer.

Marcus had always liked puzzles. Even before he could read or write. Jigsaws, mazes, spot the difference; he had always had a talent for puzzles. That was how his mind worked.

Looking for patterns, solving problems, trying to find solutions. He was never happy till the job was done and the answer to the puzzle had been found.

And this, this was like the biggest, most important puzzle of them all. And the prize was life itself – his life, and his sister’s. And he would 10

stay up till morning if he had to. Not that there ever really were mornings any more. Not in the forest. * In the morning it gets brighter. You open your curtains or blinds and there it is; daylight.

It starts slowly as the first rays appear over the skyline. Then it blossoms as the sun rises higher in the sky, spreading its light and warmth on the people below. That’s how it had always, unquestionably, been and that was how it was always going to be. Why wouldn’t it be?

But not now. Now the mornings brought no warmth. No respite, no break from the darkness of the night. That was how it was now. Marcus and Scarlett didn’t really understand why the mornings were like this now any more than they had ever really known why they had been the 11

way they were before. But one thing was sure.

Now it was different.

Now the mornings were dark. And with the dark came cold. No sun’s rays warming the ground below. No golden beams flowing in from the window and lighting the smoke from last night’s fire as it lingered in the air above their sleeping heads. Now the days were different. And the children’s life patterns had needed to change with it. Now there were normally more hours of darkness than light. They didn’t fully understand why this was, but they had adjusted to the new ways. The seemingly random bursts of daylight that occurred with no warning at various times of the day and night. They’d had to learn to live this new way.

A day had used to be twenty-four hours. Sun comes up, sun goes down. In that time they 12

would sleep, wake, eat, go about daily business and then repeat. A day was twenty-four hours, a week was seven days, a month around four weeks, a year twelve months and so on. Humans lived their lives to that structure. That’s what humanity did. Guided by sunlight. It’s surprising how rarely we consider it, but our entire existence is completely controlled by the movement of a single star in the sky above us. As it has always been. But not how it was now.

Marcus remembered having been told once how in some northerly countries in the olden days, during the winter it would stay dark for pretty much twenty-four hours a day. For months at a time. All night and no day. Practically no sunlight. And how, in the middle of their summer, they would have almost twenty-four hours of daylight every single day. And how these 13

extremes sometimes made the people who lived there go slightly crazy. How in the winter some people would feel really sad because they weren’t getting enough sunlight. And in the longest days of the summer they would be so happy they would sometimes have parties that would last the whole day and night. And how this would send them slightly crazy too.

How Marcus wished that his life now was so structured. So orderly. Now he never knew when the daylight was going to come – or how long it would last. Sometimes he was jealous of the long crazy days and the endless sad nights of the people of the northern countries of old. He wished that his life had their sense of order. At least they knew what to expect. Marcus never knew if or when the sun would come. Or how long it would be there before suddenly plunging 14

them back to blackness while he was out foraging for food. Many’s the time he’d found himself up a tree or in the middle of a river with fishing spear in hand before the unforgiving curtain of night fell without warning leaving him to find his way home, unsure of the direction.

It was because of these memories, these tales of the people driven crazy in the northern countries of old that Marcus had decided it was important, essential even, to try to keep some structure in his sister’s life.

The alarm clock rang. Marcus awoke. He sat up immediately and flicked the little switch that stopped the tiny hammer from ringing between the two bells on the top. He didn’t want to wake Scarlett just yet. He liked to have a little time to himself at the start of the day before his sister awoke. He picked up the sturdy golden clock and 15

turned the little key in the back, winding it back up so it would ring again tomorrow. As he always did, every morning. Structure. Routine. Days.

Like before.

The clock was from the old days. His mother’s old days even. It had kept good time for over thirty years. Since his mother had been a little girl. Like clockwork. The key in the back that tightened the spring that turned the cogs that powered the hands that told the time. The stored kinetic energy powered the hammer that rang between the bells on the top every morning at nine o’ clock. Tick tock, tick tock. Every day.

Like clockwork.

Marcus arose and went over to poke the fire to get it going again. Like every morning, he took the long metal pole and poked and blew the embers of the fire back to life. A job he had 16

used to beg his parents to do when he was little.

It had used to seem exciting, fun, a grown up, responsible job. It was just one of the many jobs he had to do every day now. Every day. Just to keep things ticking over.

He filled the pan from the large water container and went to put it on the smouldering embers of the fire in the fireplace grate – like he did every day. He would make porridge for his sister, wake her gently for her breakfast and then open the curtains to see if the sun had risen. If there was daylight he would go out, tend to the animals, tend to the crops, fetch fire wood, fetch more drinking water and see if he could find anything else that they could eat. If it was still dark then he would start school.

Scarlett – being so young – needed to learn, Marcus had decided. She needed to understand 17

at least as much about the world as he did. Fouryear-olds think they know everything. They have a stubborn belief that they are right, and a lot of the time they are hard to teach. Marcus had needed to learn to be patient. To take all the time that his sister needed. He had to explain things to her in a way she would understand using words she knew the meaning of. She was a good learner. And sometimes she had made him question things that he had always taken for granted with a simple, unexpected “why?� Why do we need firewood? Why do we sneeze? What happens when we get older?

Marcus began dishing out the hot porridge.

His was the big blue bowl that he always had.

There had been three blue bowls once, but now there was only one. He could still remember exactly what had happened to each of the other 18

two bowls and how sad he had felt each time one had broken. Because of that he was extra careful now. He didn’t want to lose this one too.

Scarlett’s bowl was the Winnie the Pooh bowl that she had always had since she was tiny. He vaguely remembered her learning to eat from this Winnie the Pooh bowl. Of course you couldn’t tell it was a Winnie the Pooh bowl any more because the picture had worn away. It was just a faded off-white bowl with a red rim. But it was the Winnie the Pooh bowl to them and it always would be. He left the steaming bowls on the side to cool and went over to open the curtains to see what the morning was going to bring them, if it was going to bring anything at all that is. * When two things happen at exactly the same 19

time but there’s no other reason or connection they call it a coincidence. Marcus knew this word. It had been purely a coincidence that his mother and father hadn’t been there the day when everything changed. There was nothing else to it. It wasn’t a sign, it wasn’t anything at all. It was just that. Nothing more than a coincidence. That was the way it was and there was nothing he could do about it.

But that morning, at the exact moment that Marcus pulled back the curtains, he was blinded by an astonishing bright light. A light brighter than any light he had seen in years. The days never got this bright any more. And as there was no longer electric light, the brightest day he had seen for as long as he could remember was no brighter than the kind of half light you get on a murky, overcast, Autumn day. The kind of 20

grey day where you can barely tell the difference between the sky and the clouds. But this was like the very air outside was suddenly, incredibly, alight. Burning brighter than the sun ever did now.

And the noise. The noise was enough to jolt Scarlett from her deep sleep. She sat upright in bed, mouth wide open, hair standing up, blinking as she shielded her eyes from the glare of the light with her hands. There was a howling screech the like of which she couldn’t remember having heard before. A howling screech that filled her ears and then her head.

She responded in kind. She screamed a scream louder than she had ever screamed before. But her scream just mixed with the screech becoming one, getting louder and louder until the screech completely drowned out the scream.

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In her just-woken state of confusion, Scarlett no longer knew if the sound was her, or if it was the sound outside that she had never heard before. Was she just sitting open-mouthed listening to this terrifying new noise or was she actually making the noise herself? Panicking, she looked to her brother for help and reassurance.

Marcus knew that sound though. He remembered hearing it before. Years and years ago. But at first he couldn’t quite place it. It was one of many sounds he had thought he would never hear again. One of the sounds that used to fill their normal sized days. The sort of sound that was just part of an everyday child’s life.

Like music, like television, like the sound of his parents’ laughing in the garden.

Yes. That was it. He’d remembered what it was. He knew that sound. It was like the 22

sound of a jet aircraft. But louder. Much louder.

Aeroplanes used to fly over their house a lot when he was little. He had used to find them very exciting. He would point at them and shout.

The memories were coming flooding back as he squinted through the light to try and make out where the howling screech was coming from.

But just as he was remembering the familiar sound, the sound from so long ago that reminded him of his childhood, it was replaced by another sound. A sound that he had never heard before.

A sound that he would never ever want to hear again.

The glass of the window shattered into a thousand pieces as Marcus dived for cover from the force of the blast. Scarlett pulled the blanket back over her head just in time as the tiny shards and splinters of glass scattered down on her like 23

frozen rain. The sound of the explosion echoed around the stone walls of the kitchen as the light faded away. It was the last sound Marcus heard as he passed out. He fell onto his sister to shield her as the fire in the grate was blown out and the room went completely black. His last conscious move as he slipped into darkness himself was to protect her from the fragments of glass and the bits of plaster and who knows what else that were showering down from the walls and the ceiling.

His last acts and his last thoughts as he lost consciousness were to keep his little sister safe.

But, unconscious as he was, he had no idea if he had been successful. * In Marcus’s dreams he knows how to fly. He knows exactly how to do it. He can pick up one 24

leg and then the other and then just fly. He’d always been able to do it. Most people think it would be great to be able to fly, the feeling of freedom, the excitement of discovery and the rush of the cold wind on your face.

But Marcus never really enjoyed flying in his dreams. He would always try to stop himself from flying, to try to force his feet to stay on the ground. He didn’t like the feeling of not being in control that he got when he was in a dreamflight – being pulled from side to side, or being unable to avoid hitting the treetops as he whizzed past them. But now, he was dreaming he was higher than the treetops, up above the wispy clouds, looking down on the forest below. He could see the lake that fed the river that ran through the forest, turning into a stream just by their house.

Way off in the distance he could just make out 25

the loose spots out near the rocks where the gravity was wild. Out there by the perimeter that he tried to avoid, apart from when he was hunting, because he didn’t know what was just over the edge, beyond the horizon.

He was soaring high, higher than he ever remembered soaring in dreamflight. Then suddenly he pitched to the left, as if pulled by some invisible force. Then again, he was fiercely pulled one way and then the other way. He started tumbling, hurtling down towards the hard roof of their house. This was why he hated dreamflights. They always ended like this.

One minute free as a bird looking out to the unknown and the next... But this time as he plummeted down from the clouds he heard a noise. That noise. That horrendous screech again.

Louder and louder and louder until...

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* Suddenly he was awake. He sat up. He was in his bed but it wasn’t where it normally was. He was, however, relieved to notice that it wasn’t covered in shards of glass. Maybe it had all been a dream? He looked around, trying to make some sense of it all.

“Oh hello,” said a voice. A voice that Marcus didn’t recognise. A woman’s voice. It wasn’t his sister. Scarlett’s was the only voice he was used to hearing when he awoke but this definitely wasn’t her. As he sat there, with his eyes barely able to see in the semi-darkness of the room, he could just make out the shape of the head of the woman sitting by his bed where the unidentifiable voice was coming from.

“What time is it?” Marcus said without thinking, “Where’s Scarlett?”

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Even through his confusion and disorientation he had spotted that he could no longer hear the familiar tick tick ticking of the clock. This panicked him. What had happened?

Where was his sister? And who was this lady?

“Shh, don’t worry ,” the lady with the voice said again, “You’ve been asleep for a long time.

Your sister’s safe, you’re fine, everything’s fine.”

Oh how he wished that the lady with the voice was his mum. He wanted the voice to be his mum so much. He wanted the voice lady to be his mum just waking him from a dream. A long dream. For none of this to have happened, for it all to fade away and be forgotten and for everything to be back how it was before it all changed. He hadn’t heard his mum’s voice for so long now, but, however hard he wanted this to be her, he knew that it wasn’t.

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His mum’s voice had never been this gruff.

His mum’s voice had been higher, softer, and this lady had a hint of an accent he couldn’t quite place... American? Australian? Something like that. And as he looked at the silhouette outline of the lady’s hair in the dark, he knew that, however desperately he wanted it to be her, it just wasn’t. This lady had shorter, curlier hair than his mother and a longer, more slender neck. His mum had a soft loving face while this lady’s face was sharp and pointy with a hard edge.

“Who are you?” Marcus stuttered, it had been a long time since he’d had to speak to someone new and he was finding it all a bit terrifying to be honest, “What are you doing here and where did you come from?”

“My name is Rain,” the voice replied calmly, “And Scarlett saved my life.”

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At that point, his little sister appeared, poking her head around from behind this new strange lady. Scarlett seemed very close to her, very relaxed around her, and Marcus didn’t really like this. How long had he been asleep that these two knew each other this well? That they were this comfortable in each other’s company?

“Marcus,” Scarlett said with a beaming smile, then with raised eyebrows she added, “she’s got sweets...”

The four year old nodded with her arms folded as if this was the best, most important thing she had ever said.

“Actual real sweets Marcus,” Scarlett said, barely able to contain her excitement, “I don’t just mean like a tomato or a strawberry; I mean actual sweets! In wrappers! Isn’t that amazing?

Isn’t that just the best thing ever?!”

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CHAPTER TWO

“For to get out of the rain”

Marcus stared at the gold-wrapped shape in the palm of his hand, feeling its weight.

“Thompson’s” it said on it, repeated over and over again in diagonal lines. “Thompson’s.” Like this was just an everyday normal object. Scarlett was eagerly staring at him, desperate for him to unwrap the glistening treat and experience the joy that she had first experienced hours earlier.

But Marcus was trying to listen to what the lady called Rain was saying. The words were going in and they were making sense but he was still having trouble believing this was actually happening. He hadn’t thought that 31

this day would ever happen. It had been such a normal week. While he had been making their porridge he had been thinking about the goats, and how their pen needed clearing out. He had been considering going fishing after breakfast and had been wondering whether or not he should continue reading The Magic Faraway Tree to Scarlett. She seemed to be finding the mild peril that Moonface and his friends were experiencing too scary. She was clearly worried that the children in the story were never going to make it back down the magical tree again and he wondered if that might be what had been causing her recent scary dreams.

Normal thoughts. Normal routine daily thoughts for normal days.

And now, suddenly, Rain had come and it had changed everything. Rain Parity was her 32

name, apparently. It was as if the Angel Gabriel had come down from heaven with news of how everything was about to change.

“You’re a wet rock,” Was a phrase he kept hearing Rain Parity say. Now that they had lit the fire in the grate and his eyes had adjusted to the light he could see her clearly. She had brown hair and she was wearing one of those all-inone zip-up suits. Marcus didn’t know what they were called. He wanted to call it a onesie but he knew that onesies were just for children and that this lady was older. Probably in her twenties or thirties or something, Marcus wasn’t sure. It’s hard to guess someone’s age when they’re older than you.

Rain was still talking, “I’m not going to be the only person to come here. You’ve got something very valuable. There’s a lot of dry rocks out there 33

and as soon as they spot you, they’ll be here too.

I’m just the first. The first of many. You’re lucky it’s me in a way...” Again Marcus was listening but he still wasn’t quite taking it all in. As he turned the golden sweet over and over in the palm of his hand, he was looking at her clothes again. They were a strange colour. Not quite brown and not quite green. He knew there was a name for this colour, people in the army wore it, but he couldn’t quite remember what it was. And on her belt buckle there was a horse. A horse rearing up on its back legs like a cowboy horse.

There were no horses in the forest but Marcus had seen them in the old days. Many’s the time he’d wished he’d had a horse so he could get to the other side of the forest to fish easier, rather than trudging the whole way on foot.

He suddenly realised she had stopped talking.

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He looked up. She was looking at him. Her mouth was smiling but her eyes were frowning.

As she continued to smile/frown she shook her head slightly and said, “My god you’re so young.

How have you survived out here on your own so long? It’s incredible.”

“You...” Marcus stuttered, still not totally comfortable with talking to, with sharing everything that had happened with, someone new, “you get used to it.”

“But your set-up, it’s so... so grown up,” Rain said pointing to the stove, the fire, the cold storage area, “How did you know how to do all this?”

Sitting beside Rain Parity, Scarlett unwrapped another “Thompson’s” – a pink one this time – and popped it in her mouth, saying, “My brother’s very clever. We’re doing times-by’s 35

next week. I can count to about a hundred and a thousand now.“ Marcus looked up at his sister, who was just as she always was. Scarlett was fine with all of this. The lady who literally smashed and crashed into their existence with her shiny-wrapped sweets and turned their lives upside-down. She had no problem with it. She trusted Rain Parity instinctively. As far as she was concerned this was just how things were now. Marcus wasn’t so sure. He wasn’t sure he was ready to open up completely and tell her everything. About Margaret. About the Westons. About mum and dad. Not sure he wanted to tell her everything just yet. But he was pretty sure he was ready to try the tempting golden treat he’d been turning over and over in his small hand for the last hour.

He was more than ready for that. Definitely.

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He gripped the shiny paper between the finger and thumb of each hand and with a pinch and a pull the golden circle span around three times and the toffee-coloured disc plopped out onto his lap. It was toffee coloured, of course, because it was a toffee.

“My favourite,” Marcus said with a smile. A real, genuine smile.

Marcus popped the whole sweet in his mouth at once. It wasn’t a disappointment. Marcus could feel taste-buds that had been hibernating for years springing back to life as the juices trickled down the back of his throat. He tried to stop himself but he couldn’t help but close his eyes as memories of Christmas days of old, of goodies buried in the toes of stockings in early morning bedrooms came flooding back.

“So I’m going to need your help Marcus,” said 37

Rain Parity as Marcus was clearly still in a state of toffee-related joy, “I need you to be my legs.”

Marcus stopped chewing for a second and looked up.

The lady pointed down below the edge of the bed, out of Marcus’s direct line of sight. For the first time he noticed her ankle, bandaged and with some kind of blue clamp around it.

“I can hardly walk, I can’t climb and I certainly can’t fly,” she said with a kind of shrug that seemed a little casual considering the news she had just shared.

“Fly?” Said Marcus, through the toffee, “Fly how?”

“Come and see...” Rain said, using a stick to help her stand, she turned and added, “...The Beast.”

Scarlett, hopping from one leg to the other 38

and clapping her hands sang, “You are going to loooove this!” as Marcus got up.

“Ouch!” There was a sharp pain in his side.

“Yeah, easy does it sonny,” Rain said, putting a hand on his shoulder, “you took quite a blast there. I’ve fixed you up as best I can and there’s nothing serious, but it might be a bit sore for a few days.”

Marcus pushed her away and took a step back.

“I’m not your son,” he hissed, “and you’re not my mum.”

There was a brief silence in the room as Scarlett looked from one to the other. She didn’t know what to make of it. The little girl had come to trust this lady while her brother had been asleep in bed the past few days. She had fed Scarlett well, she’d looked after Marcus and she’d assured her that everything was going to 39

be okay. She had even told her stories before she went to sleep. New stories. Stories she had never heard before about far away places she could only imagine. Cities in the stars full of people with buildings that touched the sky and cars that could fly. She had just imagined and hoped that Marcus and Rain would get on. That her brother would trust her as quickly as she had done. But here they were, staring each other in the face.

And they didn’t look happy. They didn’t look like they liked each other at all. Not one bit.

Scarlett decided it was up to her to make everybody happy again. If the big people weren’t happy it was her who had to make them happy as far as she was concerned.

“Marcus! Come and see the tree-house!” She shouted suddenly, then adding in a whisper, “It’s in a tree and... it’s a house...”

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“Tree-house?” Said Marcus to the lady, wanting to know more.

“Well,” said Rain with a laugh, “ It’s not strictly a house, but it is in a tree so she’s got that right!”

They both smiled at each other briefly, recognising Scarlett’s view of the world. How she took what was in front of her and made up her own reality. And how sometimes, even though she wasn’t technically right, it still made sense.

Scarlett’s attempt to break the tension had worked. If not quite in the way she had intended, she had managed to make the other two closer.

To find something that they had in common that would help make them at peace with each other. At least, for now anyway. * 41

The sun had decided to shine. As if to add a kind of extra air of importance to the moment.

They stepped out of the house, Marcus still holding his side where it was sore, Rain Parity using her stick for support and Scarlett hopping around like an excitable puppy.

The first thing Marcus noticed was the mess.

Everything was out of place. The composter had thrown its contents all over the front of the house and, looking at the house, he noticed several of the windows had been boarded up.

Plants had been uprooted and he could see that someone, presumably their new visitor, had clearly had to mend the fence around the goats’ pen. He hoped neither of them had escaped.

And then there, right down the middle of their front garden, was a huge channel as wide as a country lane where the earth itself had 42

been churned up. Like the kind of channel you make with a spade on the beach when you’re trying to get the sea to fill the moat around your sandcastle, but much, much bigger. It ran all the way across their garden and into the trees. And several of the trees, he noticed, were down. The outline of the forest he knew so well had been changed forever by this, this, whatever this was.

“It runs on carbon dioxide,” said Rain Parity as she led the children towards the trees, “which is why there wasn’t more destruction. If this baby ate petrol, you’d be looking at a lot more than just some blown-out windows and a few fallen trees. Your whole house would’ve gone up.”

Marcus knew what carbon dioxide was. It was what people breathed out and trees breathed in. The trees make the air that people breathe in, and, in return, the people give the trees back 43

“Wow,” said Marcus 44

carbon dioxide that they then turn back into oxygen. Like the circle of life. But now this strange visitor was telling him it had another use and that he should be thankful that it stopped his house from being blown up.

“Thanks,” he said, “ I think?”

As the soft daylight trickled down through the leaves of the trees that remained, silently breathing life to the people in the forest, Marcus’s eyes settled on the man-made shape lying in the clearing, right up against a large tree that had split in half making a gigantic V-shape pointing down to it. The channel that had been carved into the earth led right to it like a pathway. But even if it hadn’t, it was impossible to miss. It was huge.

“Wow,” said Marcus. He was quite overwhelmed. This was like nothing he’d ever 45

seen. He’d seen things in magazines that were a bit like this but he hadn’t realised how much bigger they might look in real life.

As well as looking huge it looked fast. Fast and powerful. Marcus knew that fast things had to be pointy to make them go faster and this definitely had that. It was styled like a cross between a racing car and one of those huge Winnebago camper vans. These were things that Marcus only knew from pictures but that’s what it reminded him of. It was the same light green/brown colour of the lady’s outfit and it had the same cowboy horse symbol on its tail. And on the back section in large bold capital letters it said “Manesh” – a word Marcus recognised but couldn’t quite remember why for the moment.

Scarlett was running ahead. She was the first to reach the mysterious object of wonder. Clearly 46

it wasn’t her first encounter with it though, she knew exactly what to do, which lever to pull and how the steps folded out on the inside of the door that opened downwards halfway along the vehicle’s body.

“The seats are so bouncy Marcus!” She shouted as she disappeared inside.

“I said don’t jump on them!” Rain yelled as she struggled to catch up with the excitable four year old, “What is it with little kids and bouncing?

Why can’t they just sit still for five minutes?”

Marcus ran his hand along the side of the vehicle, feeling the cool, smooth metal, as he made his way towards the hatch that Scarlett had opened. He couldn’t help but be impressed by its sturdy looking exterior. But this was nothing compared to how impressed he was when he saw the interior.

47

* Bounce bounce. Marcus climbed the steps of the mysterious craft. Bounce bounce. He could hear his sister’s joyful jumping in the darkness inside. Bounce bounce. She jumped on and on, like a wind-up toy. Bounce bounce. Inside was dark but with a slight red glow that felt alien to Marcus, unused to any form of light but firelight.

Bounce bounce. In the semi-darkness he could tell the ceiling was curved but that’s just about all he could make out. Bounce bounce bou - “Alright quit that bouncing for heaven’s sake!” Rain Parity entered the craft and suddenly everything changed. There was a whirring sound as machinery cranked into life.

There was a flickering and the entire capsule 48

was suddenly bathed in light.

Marcus turned around 360 degrees, blinking as he tried hard to take it all in. There were screens and machines everywhere he looked.

But unlike the useless screens on the tablets and phones and TVs he had become accustomed to, these were alive. Bursting with colours and displays. He noticed the horse symbol again, this time in full colour and rotating on the biggest screen in the centre of one wall that was almost completely covered with buttons and displays.

Along the other wall was a wide seat, like a sofa but with armrests and places to put your feet.

This was what Scarlett had been so frantically bouncing on. She had stopped now, looking to her brother for his reaction. But before he could speak, his sister took over. “Marcus, check this out,� she smiled and, 49

turning around, she held her arms out wide and announced, “Miranda, play Jingle Bells!”

Another woman’s voice from nowhere spoke: “Playing Jingle Bells from the Festive Motown party playlist.”

As the familiar Christmas tune suddenly burst to life from speakers all around him, Marcus turned to Rain Parity.

“She’s always loved this song,” he said, “She sings ‘oh what fun the crystal slide’, but I don’t want to correct her.”

“Yeah, I noticed, we’ve had this one quite a few times,” Rain said, with a smile that didn’t quite look like she meant it, “Do you want a warm drink?”

Without waiting for an answer she turned and popped a capsule into a machine, pressed a couple of buttons and then, a few seconds later, 50

handed Marcus a hot chocolate.

The intense labour that Marcus and Scarlett had to go through to eat or drink anything cannot be underemphasised. In order to make a hot drink it took hard work, planning and even a bit of luck. And that would just be some hot water with a bit of goats milk in it. So to be handed a fresh cup with froth on top and chocolate sprinkles at the touch of a couple of buttons was pretty mind blowing. The rich sweet chocolatey smell was like heaven as Marcus allowed the warm steam to drift into his nostrils.

He sat on the seat and stared into the cup.

Stared at the shapes in the patterns the sprinkles had made on the foam like some kind of weather formation on the surface of a planet. He took the stirrer and began to stir. He swirled and swirled until it became one bubbly, creamy, complete 51

circle. He looked up at Rain. He was so far out of his usual comfort zone he didn’t know what to make of any of this. The confusion clearly showed on his face.

Rain sat next to him. She could see he was troubled. It was a lot to take in.

“What do you want to know?” she asked, simply.

Marcus sipped his drink. It was good.

Everything Rain Parity had was good. He looked up from his cup and straight into her dark brown eyes. He needed to know. He needed to ask. He took a deep breath.

“Everything.” he said, “Tell me what happened to the world.”

The Christmas song came to an end and Rain Parity told Marcus everything.

52

CHAPTER THREE

“To the top of the hill”

That night Marcus had the other dream. The dream he hated even more than dreamflight. He hated this one because it was more of a memory than a dream. A story being retold where he could never change the ending. Even though he knew what was about to happen he could do nothing about it.

It is six months ago. They are standing at the edge of The Lake Where it Always Rains. The first thing that happens is he warns Scarlett to be careful jumping around on the wet stones in her boots that are slightly too big for her. She doesn’t listen. She never does. Luckily he grabs her just 53

before she falls in the water. But that’s where the luck ends.

“I just need to know for sure,” says Carl Weston, “You do understand don’t you? I need to know what’s out there. What’s beyond the horizon.”

Marcus can hear him but he doesn’t understand the words coming out of the man’s mouth, his thick beard damp with moisture from the rain. Marcus asks why things can’t just stay as they are? They’ve got everything they need, he tries to explain. Everything has just started working well. They’ve got a system. It works.

Carl’s wife Lydia tries to reassure Marcus, like she always does in this dream. But Marcus is never reassured. He never really gets why they feel the need to do what they’re about to do. He thinks he sees a tear roll down her long nose but, 54

again, it might just be the rain.

He never really understands why they push the boat out. He never really understands why they load their bags and say their goodbyes.

“We’ll be back before you know it Scarlett, I promise” Lydia says as she kisses them while Carl unties the boat, “Marcus is a big boy now and he’s going to look after you.”

But Marcus doesn’t feel like a big boy as they stand on the shore, Scarlett waving them off. In fact he’s never felt more like a little boy with too much pressure on his little boy shoulders as he listens to those last few words of advice that he can never quite remember.

But he does remember watching them get smaller and smaller as they head towards the misty horizon. And, every time, he remembers the feeling in his stomach at what happens next.

55

The feeling like someone has just grabbed his insides and pulled them out as the boat reaches the hazy line that separates the water from the sky. As the little vessel with two dots on board that were the only remaining adults in his life suddenly shoots up in the air like a leaf getting caught in the breeze. He remembers being relieved that Scarlett had stopped paying attention a while ago and was jumping from rock to rock again as he watched the Westons get separated from the little vessel, thrown out and up, up high above the clouds then simply vanishing into the sky along with the boat and all their possessions. Gravity eating them up and spitting them out. Stealing them from him and launching them out into the unknown space above.

And then he always wakes up and remembers 56

that he and his sister are alone in the house again.

Except that now they’re not. They’re not alone any more. And they’re not in the house. * Jingle Bells, breakfast, hot shower, dressed. All done in under a quarter of an hour. This was not the usual morning routine. Before he knew it they were back outside working.

Marcus’s role was to literally roll. He was grabbing the rollers as they reached the back of the craft and then rushing them round to the front again. There he would place them back underneath the craft so it could roll onwards, under the power of Rain and Scarlett – who were pushing from behind. A small child and a woman who could hardly walk.

57

Despite this they had made good progress.

He couldn’t say how far they had travelled – Marcus wasn’t great at judging distances at the best of times. He’d never quite worked out why some books talked about metres and kilometres while others talked about feet and miles. What was the difference and how was he supposed to know which was right? But even if he could judge distance accurately, the route they had taken had been so twisty and winding and they’d had to avoid so many obstacles it would be impossible to work it out.

Rain Parity said they were about halfway there. But then again, she had said that yesterday morning too. Maybe it was just her way of keeping the group’s spirits up? Half way there.

Half way to the gravity shackle. The gravity shackle that up until the previous night, 58

Marcus hadn’t even known existed. A phrase he had never heard before but had to instantly understand and take in his stride.

In a life where Marcus had to make anything they needed himself, even the rollers had been a revelation. If Marcus had needed to roll something as big as the craft he would have had to find the right trees, chop them down, remove the branches and make them as smooth as he could before he even started. That would have taken days and then the sheer weight of the logs would have made it heavy-going, hard work. He would probably have only been able to move the thing a few metres at a time. It would’ve taken weeks to make as much progress as they’d made in just half a day. The flat-packed rollers were stowed on board the craft for just this sort of job.

They folded up in seconds, were light enough for 59

him to carry with little effort, yet strong enough to support the weight of the immense craft on its trundling journey through the woodland.

Carbon fibre she had called it. It might as well have been magic as far as Marcus was concerned.

In fact a lot of the science Rain Parity has described to Marcus had felt like magic. Gravity shackles holding land together within protective bubbles, gas-powered flying machines, the internet. It had taken a lot of explaining and a lot of explanatory videos. Scarlett had got bored very early on – as soon as she discovered cartoons – so she hadn’t been too much of a distraction. This meant Marcus could focus and try and absorb as much of it as possible. Like a sponge in the bath he was soaking up all the information he could.

What had happened to the world and exactly why things were so different now.

60

They continued like this all morning, roll, replace, repeat. The smell of leaf mould accompanying them as they trudged on up to the top of the hill. To their goal. It was late afternoon when they reached a slight clearing and Rain announced they should stop and have something to eat.

“What do you think she’s going to get us this time?” Scarlett excitedly asked Marcus as they sat on the rollers while Rain Parity prepared their lunch inside the craft, “I hope it’s cake!”

“Don’t be silly,” Marcus sighed, “Cake isn’t a lunch, it’s a pudding. A lunch is something like soup and a sandwich or, I don’t know, pizza.”

Marcus was having to think hard to remember what kind of meals they used to eat with their parents. They must have eaten three times a day, every single day, back when they lived with 61

mum and dad but he could only remember a tiny handful of meals. And the few meals he could remember were because he remembered he had complained about them in some way.

“Not avocado again mum!” he would say. If only he had known then what he knew now. He wouldn’t have complained. He would have eaten every scrap of every meal placed in front of him.

And he would’ve thanked his mum or his dad for the effort they had gone to just to feed him, just to keep him alive. He knew that there was no point wishing he’d done things differently, no point in regretting a thing from the past, but he still did. He still had regrets.

Suddenly, Marcus noticed something moving in the bushes just to the side of him. He had keen senses now. A hunter’s senses. When you have to hunt to eat to live, your eyes and ears become 62

more tuned in to the natural world around you.

He looked to Scarlett and raised his hand in a fist. It was something he remembered seeing somebody do in a film he had seen when he was little. Some men in the film were hunting something silently in a jungle and one of them had raised his fist. The others behind him had all stopped, completely still and silent. Marcus would copy this whenever they were out and he went into hunting mode so that Scarlett would know this meant it was serious time. Time to stop playing, to stop chatting and not to move until her brother said it was okay to move again.

Marcus slowly, silently stood but remained crouching, with one arm outstretched for balance as he removed his knife from his pocket.

It was what they used to call a Swiss Army knife in the old days. It had three different sized blades 63

that folded out and a couple of other tools that he didn’t really understand. He opened out the biggest blade as he took the first couple of steps towards his prey, silently stalking the unseen animal. It felt big, much bigger than the rabbits he would usually face, but he still couldn’t see it.

There was not a sound in the forest apart from the leaves rustling in the breeze.

But then without warning, the silence was broken, startling everyone. “I hope you’re not anti-soup!” Rain Parity blurted out as she appeared in the hatchway of the craft, holding a tray.

At the sudden sound a gigantic pair of gnarled, branch-like antlers unexpectedly popped up in front of Marcus as the animal in the undergrowth sensed danger. It raised to its full height, an enormous adult male deer. Matted 64

fur around its neck and steam coming from its nostrils as its hot breath met the cold woodland air. It was far bigger than any animals they would normally see in their part of the forest. Having no natural predators so deep in the woods, it had clearly grown to its full size and was afraid of nothing – certainty not two small children.

It was brave and bold and heading right towards them with the air of the king of the forest.

Fearless and fast.

Marcus panicked as the giant beast strode angrily in his direction. His first instinct, as always, was to protect Scarlett as he stood blocking the animal’s path, holding his knife in front of him. His knife that now seemed pretty pathetic. His knife that was good enough for rabbits and squirrels but would barely get through the thick mane around the deer’s giant 65

He wanted to run but he froze‌ 66

neck, let alone pierce its flesh.

He wanted to run but he froze, suddenly very aware of the danger they were in as the deer tipped its head forwards, pointing the sharpened antlers towards him and pawing the ground with its giant hooves. Earlier Scarlett had removed her shoes and had been warming her feet by the fire Rain Parity had started with her magical liquid and her incredible pocket torch. There was no way Scarlett could make a break for it now, he thought as the deer began to speed up. Heading straight towards them, huffing and snorting through the undergrowth, it suddenly leapt straight at him, Marcus had no idea what to do.

He closed his eyes, prayed for a miracle and...

BANG! The shot rang out in the clearing in the forest.

The deer slumped to the ground as the bowls of 67

soup that fell from the tray in Rain Parity’s hand clattered to the steps. Marcus turned to face her and saw the still smoking gun in her hand as she stood with arm outstretched pointing towards the fallen stag, a wisp of smoke curling from the end of the gun.

“Looks like soup’s off then,” she said calmly, as she put her weapon back in the pocket in her belt, “Anyone fancy venison?”

Marcus simply stared, open-mouthed, at Rain.

He had never seen an actual gun before. Never seen a life end so quickly, so abruptly, so matterof-factly. He had read about guns in books and in the news cuttings in his scrap book but had never been in the presence of such life-ending power before. He had read about all sorts of lifeimproving inventions that he had never actually seen before too. Machines that could help people 68

stay alive when they were sick like their friend Margaret had been, machines that could travel faster than sound and lasers that could cut through steel. But he’d never quite understood why somebody would invent something like a gun. Something that’s only purpose was to hurt, to kill, to end life instantly instead of prolonging it. That was until now. Now he was glad that someone had invented guns, and glad that Rain Parity had one. Very glad indeed. * The venison meat from the deer smelt good on the fire. It had meant they’d had to delay their journey while it was prepared but Rain Parity had felt the strength they would gain from eating a full fresh meal rather than her instant soup would be a good thing in the long run.

69

The three of them sat round the flames warming themselves, the wafts of the cooking meat making their mouths water as they chatted.

“You did a very professional job preparing that deer,” Rain said to the young boy, “I probably wouldn’t have known where to start.”

Marcus was quiet. Again, even though the lady had literally saved his life twice now, he still wasn’t completely prepared to tell her everything.

To completely open up to her. Unfortunately for him, his little sister didn’t seem to feel the same way. She totally trusted Rain Parity and was happy to tell her anything she wanted to know.

“Margaret taught us loads before she wasn’t alive any more,” she said in a very matter of fact way, “and before she went to Devon she wrote all her recipes down in Marcus’s book.”

“Devon eh?” Rain said, clearly intrigued, 70

“Who’s Margaret and can I see this book? I could do with learning some new kitchen skills!”

Marcus was just about to try and change the subject when Scarlett blurted our that it was in their bag so, slowly, reluctantly Marcus unzipped his backpack. Inside, Rain could see that, along with the rest of his stuff, were two books. One was a small but thick journal – black and red, a bit like a diary, it looked like it had been very well-read – while the other was a larger, even scruffier looking thing with bits of paper poking out like bookmarks. Marcus’s scrapbook. He tried to hide it from Rain but he could see she had seen it.

“Margaret used to live on the other side of the valley,” he said as he handed the red and black journal to Rain, “mum and dad used to help her out with jobs around the house in the old 71

days, shopping, fixing things, you know. When everything changed and it was just us, she said she saw it as her job, her responsibility, to look after me and Scarlett. She said we needed skills if we were going to be alright.”

Rain Parity flicked through the pages of the book. It was thorough. It had everything in it from how to boil an egg to how to stitch ripped clothes. This lady clearly wanted to pass on everything she knew. Her handwriting was neat, if a little old fashioned, and her instructions were super clear. This little book could keep you alive.

“But what about skinning the deer?” She asked, “Surely the lady who taught you how to make pastry didn’t teach you that?”

“No, that was the Westons,” Scarlett said, casually throwing another one of the children’s secrets out there, “they should be back soon.”

72

Marcus caught Rain’s eye and shook his head.

He knew they wouldn’t.

“The Westons used to live in a cabin in the woods,” he said, “They had always thought that the world was going to end so they were well prepared when it, you know, did. They showed us how to do stuff. To build, to hunt, to protect ourselves. And then they helped out a lot when Margaret started... started being poorly all the time.”

“So where did they go?” Rain asked.

“They wanted to know what it was like on the other side of the lake and...” he looked up to the dark sky and then back to Rain, “...and they said they’d be back soon.”

“Yeah,” agreed Scarlett, “they’ve been weeks and weeks now. I thought they’d be back by now” 73

Rain could work out what had happened from what Marcus had said. They had strayed too close to the perimeter, too far from the gravity shackle.

They’d have been launched out into the void and they wouldn’t be back. She closed the black and red book in her lap. She understood a lot more about the children now. Where they had come from, how they’d survived, how they kept going every day. She was amazed and incredibly impressed by their resolve, their guts and their ingenuity but something still intrigued her.

As she leaned to replace the journal in Marcus’s backpack she casually took hold of the other book.

“And what’s this?” She asked, trying to take it from the bag.

“That’s private,” Marcus said firmly, putting his hand on her forearm to stop her, “That’s 74

mine.”

Scarlett looked from one to the other again, her young mind once more trying to think of a way to break this tense moment. But luckily Rain backed down. She apologised. She respected Marcus’s boundaries – or at least she appeared to – then she said she thought the meat was probably cooked by now and that they should eat. Marcus agreed. He closed his backpack, but made sure to keep it where he could see it as they ate. That night he slept with it too. He was grateful for everything the lady had done for them so far, but he still didn’t want her to know everything just yet. He didn’t want her to know what he had worked out, what he had pieced together from his dad’s newspapers and magazines. Or how he planned to save the planet. To fix this broken Earth.

75

CHAPTER FOUR

“The world so high”

Marcus still hadn’t got used to there being the sound of other voices in his life. For so long now it had been just Marcus and Scarlett. If he wasn’t talking to her, or she wasn’t talking to him, there was silence, apart from maybe the birds in the trees. As he awoke to the feeling of the fresh, clean, almost crinkly, new sheets of the capsule’s fold-down bed against his skin for the third morning of their journey he listened to the chattering female voices coming from the craft’s kitchenette area.

Rain was laughing. She was really laughing.

Not a pretend nervous laugh like she sometimes 76

did, but a real, natural laugh. It was a pleasant sound and sounded strange coming from Rain Parity, who normally sounded so guarded.

Marcus had suspected for a while that his little sister was a funny girl. Sometimes the things she said and did made him chuckle; made him forget about real life for a few moments. She would put on silly voices, pull silly faces, say things wrong on purpose just to make him smile. He couldn’t recall a time in her life when she hadn’t played the fool, even when she was tiny. It seemed to come naturally to her, like she had been born with the clown gene.

“But why?” Rain was laughing, “What makes you think he’s an egg? It doesn’t say he’s an egg in the song?”

“Because...” Scarlett said in a pretend serious tone, “I have seen the pictures. He’s an egg with 77

legs. He’s a leggy egg with arms. An army leggy egg-head with checked trousers and braces.”

The grown up was still laughing. Marcus decided to just lie there and listen for a bit, staring at the curve of the ceiling just above him.

Although he did find it slightly unsettling that the two of them got on so well together and had developed a bond that he didn’t feel a part of, he could still see that it was providing Scarlett with something that he could not give her. Something she’d not had since Margaret died. He could teach his sister, protect her and comfort her as best he could, but he could never come close to being her mother. A mother-like figure is important for a little girl, he told himself, and the evidence was there for him to hear as they munched on their cereal, drank their juice and just chatted about silly things. In one way he felt 78

threatened by Rain Parity’s arrival, like she was replacing him. But in another way it was a relief.

It was giving him a breather. For the last year she had been his priority, his life, his number one concern. Every day. He wouldn’t do anything without thinking about the impact on his sister.

He couldn’t leave her alone for any length of time and if he was ever in a dangerous situation he would always act with caution, knowing that if he didn’t make it back home in one piece then she would suffer too. Having a third person around definitely made it easier. And it had been so long since anything had felt easy that he was genuinely grateful for that, even if he still wasn’t one hundred per cent convinced by the woman and what her plan was.

“But how did the person who drew the pictures know he was an egg?” Rain came back 79

with, “How do you know it wasn’t just because the artist could only draw eggs?”

Scarlett had paused to think about this.

Marcus could hear her saying “hmmm...” and he knew exactly what face she would be pulling, “And horses.” Scarlett said with a tone that sounded like she thought she’d proved her point.

“Of course,” said Rain Parity slightly sarcastically, “The ‘older king’s horses,’ let’s not forget them. Maybe the artist could only draw eggs and horses? Although personally I think if you can draw a horse you can draw pretty much anything.”

She had stressed the words ‘older king’s’ when she said them and Marcus didn’t quite know why.

“Well, it’s like anything isn’t it, you know,” said Scarlett, who had clearly been thinking, “It’s 80

like my brother says, how do we know our world is round? It’s probably science or something. I believe it is. I believe Marcus. He’s very clever.”

Marcus noticed there was a silence. An awkward silence. The sort of silence that usually only happens when he and Rain are talking, not when the two girls are talking. It was an uneasy silence. Marcus listened very carefully, trying to work out what had happened to break the mood.

Quietly Rain Parity muttered, barely above a whisper, but Marcus could hear it, “It was round.

I saw it.”

Marcus decided it was probably time to get up and get on with the day. They were going up the hill. The big meal last night would’ve given them enough energy for the final push today and he knew that they should just get on with it if that’s what they were going to do.

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* As Marcus trudged on through the blustery breezy morning, his legs felt heavier and heavier.

He felt the way he might feel the morning after a long strenuous trek. Legs like lead weights.

And his arms felt like he had been chopping wood, but as if he’d chopped down half the forest. He was very strong for a small boy – he had to be. He had to do far more than a normal child his age. There was no lounging around in his lifestyle. If he was lazy, they didn’t eat, they couldn’t cook and they had no heat. Every day he worked hard. He was used to his limbs feeling tired but this was different. It was a real struggle to lift the rollers they were using to propel the craft through the woodland. He wasn’t short of breath, but everything felt heavy. His legs, his 82

arms, his whole body. He sat down, exhausted, on the musty ground, the piled fallen leaves providing a cushion – the comfort of nature.

“I’m sorry,” he said with the palms of his hands raised, “I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t understand why I’m finding this so hard going. I must be ill.”

Rain Parity put the wedge behind the rollers and secured the craft to stop it from rolling back down the hill. She brushed away the hair that the wind had blown over her face and slumped down next to Marcus on the leaves.

“It’s not you,” she said, “it’s the shackle. The closer we get to the epicentre, the stronger the gravitational pull. There’s something wrong with it. That’s why the weak spots around the edge of the forest have been spreading. That’s why you’ve been finding those damn rabbits so difficult to 83

catch. They leap like kangaroos in the weak stuff.

There must be something wrong with the pylon itself. It’s not pumping properly, you know?”

Scarlett was stood between them and suddenly piped up. Her two elders looked up, expecting some silly comment, some misunderstanding of the situation, some confusion about how gravity works. Some light relief.

“Is that why there’s no leaves on the trees here then?”

Marcus looked up, she was right, the trees were indeed bare. He was impressed. Rain shrugged, smiled and nodded.

“Well spotted,” she said, “in fact, that could help us with the rest of our route. We are so close now we can follow the barest trees. That’s very clever Scarlett, well done. Do you think you’re ready go on Marcus? Do you think you can 84

climb when we get there?”

“I like climbing,” Scarlett said with a smile, “Marcus is actually a little bit scared of heights but I love climbing” “No,” Marcus said abruptly, not happy that his sister had revealed his weakness, “I’ll do it. It’s important.”

“Why’s it so important?” Scarlett asked, staring Rain Parity right in the eye, holding her gaze, demanding an answer, “I don’t understand?

It’s just climbing.”

Rain held Scarlett’s shoulders gently. She felt she needed to explain the importance of the situation. The pouting girl was clearly very clever. She could connect the dots just like her older brother. She could handle facts. It was often tempting to treat her like a child and make something up, make it like some kind of game 85

so she could cope with it better, but Rain felt she deserved the truth.

“If we don’t fix the shackle,” she said seriously, looking straight into the little girl’s emerald green eyes, “Then everything you see around you, everything you know...” She said, gesturing up at the naked branches of the trees. Then picking up a handful of dried leaves from the ground below, she crushed them into dust and then let the breeze blow them from her hand. “There’s no nice way to say this,” she continued, “It’s all just going to be sucked out into space and this’ll all be left a lifeless rock. No trees, no lake, no animals, no... nothing.”

Nobody spoke for a moment. There was no sound apart from the wind, which was really howling now.

“No...” Scarlett uttered, “...us?”

86

“No nothing,” Marcus said gently, also placing his hands on her shoulder. There was another moment of silence while Scarlett digested the news. The news that life as she knew it could be snuffed out just like that, like a candle on a birthday cake.

“And that’s why you came here?” she asked her new best friend directly, “To make us safe?”

“Well, I didn’t actually know you specifically were here but pretty much, yeah... ” Rain said, then suddenly, abruptly, she stood and turned back towards the craft, “So we’d better get on with it eh?”

She brushed the remnants of the crushed leaves from her hands and symbolically wiped them on her thighs.

The children stood and followed, but the mood had changed. It was no longer a fun 87

adventure for Scarlett. The last half a mile was a sombre, serious affair. She wasn’t laughing and joking as she had been, as if she had suddenly realised the importance of their quest. That life itself, like the leaves Rain had picked up, was in their hands and that they didn’t have long before the winds of time could simply blow them all away.

Marcus pushed on. He summoned every last atom of energy in his body to get the job done.

They kept going until early evening when they reached a high wire fence. This was it. Like Jack and Jill and the Grand Old Duke of York they had marched themselves to the top of the hill.

They sturdied the craft and approached the fence. “T. M. Fracking Compound,” it said on a battered sign attached by wires, “This area is patrolled by armed guards at all times.”

88

“I seriously doubt that...� said Rain as they reached the perimeter of the compound.

The children curled their fingers around the criss-crossed cold wire mesh and pressed their faces up to it, peering through the gaps to see what lay inside.

Through the semi darkness they could make out some large structures and what looked like around a dozen small, plain metal buildings with no windows.

Then right there in the centre, reaching up to the sky, a huge steel tower, far higher than anything else in the forest. Like a gigantic manmade metal tree trunk, far higher than any of the trees that surrounded the fenced-off compound.

It reminded Marcus of an oil rig that he had seen in one of his father’s newspapers. Suddenly the idea that he had to scale up this structure on his 89

own, in this wind, with gravity behaving the way it was, felt very real indeed. Something that he had tucked away in a corner of his mind, tried to pretend was no big deal, was now actually about to happen, and very imminently. Scarlett was right, he did find heights scary. It wasn’t so bad out in the loose spots where the failing gravity was very forgiving and he knew he was always guaranteed a soft landing. But here, where even the leaves were being mercilessly ripped from the trees and sucked to the ground, if he made one small mistake, one wrong foot, he would plummet like a stone.

Rain Parity said they would camp here for the night and Marcus, his palms already sweating with the thought of what was to come, felt sure before they even boarded the craft that he had an uneasy night’s sleep ahead of him.

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Suddenly it felt very real indeed 91

* As it turned out he slept like a log. Marcus briefly wondered if maybe the increased gravity had made his eyelids heavier in the night, as he showered and got ready for the terrifying task ahead.

There was a bit of grey daylight as he emerged from the craft. Rain Parity was over by the fence with Scarlett with some kind of cutting device and was creating a gap they could squeeze through. But there was no laughing this morning, no fun chit-chat over orange juice and Coco Pops. In the soft daylight the enormous tower of the gravity shackle was slightly less mysterious but it still looked very high and just as daunting. It would still be a very long drop if he made even one slip.

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He decided he was just going to think of it like a tree. When he was a young boy, about four or five, he would climb trees for fun. He had felt fearless, free, like a wild animal doing what came naturally. He often shuddered now to think of the dangerous situations he had put himself in, the risks he’d taken for no reason at all except fun. It was only as he’d got older he’d started to feel more nervous, more cautious about heights. He’d looked this feeling up in a book to see if it was normal and he had discovered the word vertigo, the fear of heights. Now that this feeling had a name, vertigo, it almost made it worse. Now he automatically thought “vertigo” whenever he went up to any height. He always worried he might fall and break his leg. That he’d be unable to make it back to the house and that Scarlett would be sitting there waiting 93

for him, hungry and without a clue whether he would ever return. Now the thought of being up high always made the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet sweat, he didn’t know why. He wondered if maybe it was some kind of evolutionary throwback? Maybe the monkeys in the trees had evolved sweaty palms and feet to help them stick to branches as they climbed and this had been passed on through the centuries to human beings? He’d looked this theory up in books too but had found nothing.

The group said their good mornings flatly to each other and with little other conversation they made their way through the fence, Rain Parity parting the metal mesh with her walking stick as the children ducked through the gap she had created.

As they approached the central pylon Marcus 94

couldn’t help but notice that underneath the moss and the piles of leaves it was a concrete floor. He would hit that hard if he had a fall and his head would crack like an egg.

“I think I see our problem,” Rain said shortly, with her binoculars focused on the monstrous steel structure, “There’s something there in one of the dishes just about two thirds of the way up.

It looks like something’s made a home there and that must be what’s blocking the signal that the dish is supposed to be transmitting.”

Marcus lifted the binoculars to his eyes but he couldn’t see what she was talking about. He’d never really understood how you were supposed to use binoculars. He’d always found the eyepieces really awkward and uncomfortable, he could never really get his eyes lined up with them and even when he could he had trouble making 95

any sense of the two grey circles that appeared inside the metal tubes. Weren’t they supposed to join up into some kind of figure of eight shape on its side like they did in comic books? Well they never did that when he looked through them.

So he just pretended he could see something and then handed them back to her, nodding his head.

He put his gloves on. There were holes in the end of three of the fingers and one of the thumbs now. He tended to swap the gloves around from hand to hand to spread the chill when he was out hunting, but the middle finger on each hand was one of the ones with holes so they would still both get cold unless he doubled up two in one finger, which he did do on occasion. But he thought it best not to use that technique when he was climbing. When his life depended on his grip being firm and solid he would be best 96

off having all his fingers available to grasp the ladder-like metal rungs of the pylon.

Margaret had knitted the gloves for him.

Margaret, who had done so much for him in his short life. She had never had any children of her own and had become a bit like an aunt to the two children, she was so close. Her husband had died when she was about fifty and she had never met anyone else. There weren’t many opportunities to meet new people where they had lived so she’d quite enjoyed the responsibility of helping out with Marcus and Scarlett when they were little. The feeling of being needed.

She’d cook for them a lot and mum and dad had treated her like part of the family. She often looked after the children when their parents were away covering a story with work. So when they never came back, after everything changed, 97

it seemed like the most natural thing in the world for her to help them out even more and to pass on all the information she thought that they would need. Her red and black book had been a lifesaver. A constant source of reference.

It had everything in it. Well, almost everything.

The one thing it didn’t have, and Marcus had searched every single page for it more than once so he was absolutely sure of this, was how to repair holes in the fingers and thumbs of a pair of gloves.

Rain had attached a carabiner and a kind of harness to Marcus and was busy threading a really long rope through it. Marcus had climbed before so he knew what a carabiner was. He’d gone away with cub scouts when he was much younger for an activity weekend and he remembered the rope being attached to the 98

metal clamp called a carabiner on his belt. The weekend was supposed to have been fun but it was freezing cold and had rained solidly the whole time so it had ended up being a bit of a disappointment. The dry ski slope was closed because it was too wet and the food was terrible.

But the thing that really stood out in Marcus’s memory was when he had been doing rock climbing and had got stuck about half way up and started to cry. The instructor had needed to climb up and help him down again. He never did make it to the top of that climb and all the other boys had teased him relentlessly about his crying for the rest of the weekend. He was so relieved to get back home at the end of it and he remembered telling his mum he never ever wanted to go back to cubs again.

Rain got another of her special devices from 99

her back pack. She folded down a trigger on the bottom of it which she pressed, making crossbow like arms fold out at the sides. She knotted the rope firmly around a kind of harpoon and loaded it up into what Marcus logically concluded must have been a launching device. She told the children to stand back and then fired. The hook shot out of the launcher and whizzed up into the air, the rope snaking behind it like the tail of a kite.

“Wow,” Scarlett said as the hook magnetically attached itself to the steel frame of the pylon, “Can I have a go?”

Rain Parity ignored her, giving a firm tug on both ends of the rope, which was trailing down to the ground suspended in the middle by the hook. It was secure. It was sturdy. It was time for Marcus to commence climbing.

“Ok kid,” she said, sounding particularly 100

American, “time to get up there and destroy whatever that thing is.” * Scarlett watched as Rain Parity double checked the end of the rope that was attached to the harness Marcus was wearing and tied the other end around herself. Scarlett still wasn’t quite sure how this was going to work but it was all very exciting. She watched him reach up for his first handhold.

Marcus always got to do the exciting things, Scarlett thought. She always asked him if she could go with him on his hunting trips but he always said it would be too dangerous. That she was too little. She hoped that one day she would be big enough to go with him. That one day she would catch a rabbit herself instead of waiting at 101

home in the dark for her brother to return with or without something for their dinner.

As Marcus climbed hand over hand up the steel structure and Rain Parity fed the rope behind her to take up the slack, Scarlett felt pretty useless. She was just there watching as her brother slowly edged his way up the tower towards the dish that something had chosen to make its home in, the wind buffeting him from side to side. One day, when she was just a bit bigger, she would be the hero. She would be the girl who saved the day. But for now she stood, holding Rain Parity’s bag and doing what she was told as she watched her brother get smaller and smaller in the grey above her. * Marcus could hear Rain shouting words of 102

encouragement from the ground but he didn’t dare look down. In everything he had ever read about vertigo they always said it was the looking down that got you. So he ignored her positive shouts, her suggestions to go to the left or reach just a bit higher above his head, and just got on with it.

The wind was so much louder as he got higher too. So loud he could barely make out her words anyway. He felt alone. High up above the trees like when he was flying in a dream.

Hand over hand he made progress towards the outcrop on the fifth dish up. Whatever it was had made its home in the structure had chosen to go very high up. “Life always finds a way” was what Margaret had used to say. Wherever you were in the world, however extreme and harsh the environment, something would always find 103

a way to survive. Marcus had read in a magazine about tiny microscopic creatures that were as equally capable of making their home in molten volcanic rock as the sub zero temperatures of the arctic tundra. They could send their bodies into a state of suspended animation, a kind of hibernation, a deep sleep where their bodies were barely functioning, for years at a time – decades even – until conditions improved. This way they could survive anything from being boiled alive to being frozen in a block of ice. He had read about a city in Japan at the base of a volcano where the air was so poisonous that the people who lived there had to wear gas masks all day every day.

He had seen wedding photos where the bride, the groom and the whole family including the children were wearing their best clothes as if it was a special occasion but then had masks 104

covering their faces. Two round eye holes and a tube like a trunk hanging down. He’d tried to imagine how bad the air must have been, how normalised the wearing of gas masks had become, for them to have not even removed the masks for the most important family photo of their lives. He had read that the air had become so bad at one point that the entire city had been ordered to evacuate by the government for their own safety. But they had returned to their homes five years later, happily continuing their bizarre elephant-faced lives in the smoggy cloudy air of the poisoned city. Life finds a way.

He had read about people making their homes on snowy ledges high up mountains, in cities built on abandoned oil rigs in the middle of oceans, people whose houses were on stilts in the middle of lakes and even a place in Egypt where 105

people lived in a rubbish tip. Where they made their living by searching through the things other people threw away to try and find anything of value. Rubbish would pile on the pavements, on the roofs of their makeshift huts and even spread out on the floors of their rooms as the children would sift through the mess trying to find bottle tops, metal, anything that might be worth something, that they could sell to buy the things they needed to live.

Life always finds a way.

He and his sister had found a way to survive in the forest. They grew the vegetables and crops that the limited sunlight would allow. They hunted the animals it was possible to catch. And their diet, their lifestyle had evolved based on what was available to them. His sister waiting at home, in the dark, to see what Marcus would 106

bring for her. * Marcus reached the fifth dish. He pulled himself up so he could see what was inside. There in the corner of the large metal dish, the size of a large frying pan, twigs and leaves had been woven into an almost perfectly circular nest.

Feathers and discarded plastic rubbish knitted in among the sticks. Anything that whatever this creature was could find to make a home. Life finding a way. As it always did.

He peered over the edge, nervous at what he might find. Would it be threatening? Would it leap up and attack him as he poked his head over? He was ready to jump back and grab it at the first sign of any danger, throwing the whole nest over the edge and freeing up the gravity 107

shackle so that things could get back to normal – or at least to whatever it was that passed for normal in the forest.

But as he reached the nest and poked his head over the edge he found to his pleasant surprise that there was no danger. Looking over the rim all he saw was two tiny helpless faces looking up at him. Two tiny faces and one egg.

As soon as the little birds saw Marcus they began squawking, their eyes almost as wide as their beaks. As they stared at him begging for food he was reminded of the eager look on Scarlett’s face whenever he would return from a hunting trip, desperate to know if he had managed to bring her something for her supper.

Search. And destroy. That was his mission.

Find what was causing the obstruction, and dispose of it. But as he looked into the eyes of 108

the hungry little creatures in front of him, so trusting, so innocent, waiting for their mum to return with something for them to eat, he couldn’t bring himself to launch them off into the oblivion below. And the thought of the birds’ mother and father returning from their mission, wherever they had been, and finding their home destroyed and their children missing was too much for Marcus. He couldn’t do it. There was no way he could destroy the lives of this young family who were just struggling to survive, to find a way, in this harshest of environments. * From down on the ground Scarlett was straining her young eyes to see the tiny figure of the most important person in her life, silhouetted like a dot against the sky. She gasped 109

as she saw him suddenly take one hand off the scaffold.

“What are you doing?” Rain yelled into the wind, knowing it was highly unlikely that the boy could still hear her at that height, “Oh my god I can’t watch!”

But she did carry on watching as she tightened her grip on the rope that was effectively his lifeline. Rain and Scarlett watched as he removed one strap of his rucksack, then swapped grip hands and removed the other. Scarlett held her breath as he grasped the bag between his teeth and opened the zip. She gasped as she saw things come flying out of the bag and get whisked away on the wind. A few items of clothing and then a book. One of Marcus’s sacred books flew off into the grey sky never to be seen again. She couldn’t tell which book it was but to her it felt like a 110

huge chunk of their life had just been wrenched away like a chunk of ice separating itself from an iceberg.

Then Marcus slipped. He had tried to grab the book as it flew away and he had lost his footing.

Rain Parity was yanked forwards violently as the rope tightened. She struggled to keep her footing on the loose-leafed ground below, skidding and sliding a metre closer to the base of the structure.

Scarlett grabbed her around the waist, got down low and pulled with all her might. It was enough.

Rain Parity regained her balance and Marcus stabilised high above them, getting hold of the tower once again to the enormous relief of the two below. He still had the bag between his teeth and Rain yelled at him to get on with it and stop messing about.

But high above them Marcus had other ideas.

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CHAPTER FIVE

“Fly away home�

Scarlett had never seen Rain like this. She was manic, frantically typing on one of the computers in the front part of the ship where all the main controls were - the cockpit she called it. And as she typed, she was shouting. Ranting about how dangerous what Marcus had done when he was up the tower earlier had been.

Scarlett had barely heard her new friend raise her voice before, even when she had accidentally slightly broken the bed a bit by jumping on it too much. So to hear the grown-up she had learned to trust behaving like this was very upsetting for her.

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“How could you?” Rain was shouting, “You risked everything for a couple of dumb, stupid birds! I mean, what were you thinking?”

She was typing lots of numbers and letters into a keyboard. Scarlett had never seen anyone’s fingers move so quickly. She couldn’t help wondering how she could possibly know if she was pressing the right buttons when she wasn’t even looking at them? The display on the big screen in front of her changed. Where previously there had been words there was now a map. It looked like a map of an island. But it was no land mass that Scarlett recognised. Marcus had taught her all about maps. They used to study the atlas a lot of an evening. Marcus had taught her to recognise all the continents, Europe, North America, Australasia... She could recognise the shapes of all of them - although she would sometimes get confused between Africa and 113

South America, they did look quite similar in shape - and she would also tend to get a bit muddled up around South East Asia and the Middle East - they were both so fiddly. But for a girl her age, she had a pretty good grasp of earth’s main land masses and all of the islands of the British Isles and this definitely didn’t look like anything she’d ever seen before.

The display changed from a flat map to a more three dimensional rendering, kind of like a little model on the screen. Now she could see more details she was getting more of an idea of the scale. She could see there was a large body of water - a sea or a lake or something - some small mountains down one edge of the island, or whatever it was, and then right in the middle there was a huge forest. In the centre of the forest were some buildings of some sort surrounding a tower. It was then Scarlett realised that it was 114

their tower, from outside, the gravity shackle.

With yellow circles radiating out from it. So that meant it must also be their forest and their lake. And she assumed the yellow circle graphics probably meant that the tower was working properly again. It felt strange to her to see the enormity of her whole life, her whole existence, everything she had ever known, shrunk down so small on the screen like this. Everything she knew miniaturised to look like a model, or a toy she might play with at home.

Rain was still ranting as she typed, “We only had one shot at this, Marcus. The CO2 reserves are low. If you’d fallen and died, that would’ve been it! Do you understand me?” Rain turned around, a deep furious line had formed on her forehead. Scarlett didn’t like it, it made her look angry - and not at all pretty. It scared her.

Looking up for the first time, Rain Parity 115

suddenly realised that Marcus wasn’t actually there. He was nowhere to be seen in the craft.

She looked from left to right as she realised her fury had been directed at the wrong child.

“Well where in the hell is he?” She shouted at Scarlett, her face still red with anger.

Scarlett could hold back the tears no longer.

She hated being shouted at. When Marcus lost his temper with her it was the worst feeling in the world. She loved him with all her heart and she hated that sometimes the things she did wrong made him angry. But, in a way, this was worse. In the whole time she had known her, Rain had only ever been nice to her. All they ever did was laugh and sing and joke together.

She had never seen this side of her before and she really didn’t like it.

“He’s outside looking at the tree,” she trembled pointing at the open hatch.

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Rain stopped. She realised she had gone too far.

“Oh sweetie I’m sorry,” Rain said, her mood changing again as she went over to Scarlett, “I’m sorry. It’s OK. I was just worried that’s all. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

She wrapped her arms around Scarlett and gave her a big hug. But the hug didn’t feel quite as warm as it ought to. Scarlett had got used to cuddles from Rain Parity. She liked them.

They made her feel safe. But this didn’t quite feel right. She couldn’t quite say why, but there was definitely something different. She held the hug even though Rain’s collar stud was digging uncomfortably into her left cheek. Scarlett patted Rain on the back a little, like Marcus sometimes did to her to make her feel better. But she was secretly quite glad when Rain’s embrace finally loosened and she eventually let go.

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“Of course he’s looking at the tree,” said Rain, wiping a slight tear from her eye, “Of course he is, the sentimental, sensitive little soul.” * Marcus heard the tap tap of feet emerging onto the metal steps behind him. He’d heard the raised voices from inside the craft, but he’d chosen to ignore them as he sat hunched on the bottom step of the craft’s ladder with the binoculars. He’d finally figured out how to use binoculars. The trick, he’d found, was to relax your eyes and pretend they weren’t there. To let the binoculars become your eyes. To allow your eyes to refocus and to see in a different way. There weren’t two small grey circles any more, there was one large circle, not a figure of eight like in the comics at all. And once he had got used to this new viewpoint, this new way of 118

seeing, suddenly everything pulled into focus.

Suddenly everything was clear to him.

He had focused his eyes on the tree where he had housed his rescued birds - his refugees from the gravity shackle dish so high in the sky - and he’d waited. Even though he’d found them purely by accident, and he’d only known them a short time, he felt these helpless tiny baby chicks were his responsibility now. If their parents never returned, or if they returned but couldn’t find the nest in its new location, then he would simply have to raise them himself. And he’d have to help their future feathered brother or sister, currently still in its shell, to be born too. So he had positioned himself with a clear view of the nest, and waited.

“Hello,” he said, casually to the girls behind him without turning around.

“Seen anything?” Rain Parity gently asked as 119

she sat down on the step next to him.

Scarlett was pleased that Rain wasn’t shouting any more. The line on her forehead had almost completely disappeared now and she looked pretty and friendly again.

“No, they’re not back yet,” Marcus said, handing the binoculars to Rain.

Rain lifted the lenses to her eyes and looked to the tree. She focused on the trunk and then moved her gaze up to the second branch where Marcus had insisted on housing the nest he had carefully rescued in his bag. The nest that had nearly jeopardised her whole mission. Nearly ruined six months’ worth of planning. Nearly meant she would have to return empty handed and explain what had gone wrong. For the sake of two little chicks. And an egg.

“I’ve read that some species of birds don’t recognise the calls of their own young,” Marcus 120

said as Rain looked closer at the nest, she could just make out the little screeching beaks as they poked out over the rim, “If they’ve been away and they come back they might sometimes go to the wrong nest, feed the wrong chicks. But other type of birds, they’ll recognise their own children, no matter how long they’ve been away.

They have like a special sense that means they can always tell their own young, even though they all just sound the same to us.”

“Look,” Scarlett suddenly shouted pointing up into the sky near the gravity shackle, “Sea girls!”

Sure enough, up above them, circling near the pylon, were two adult gulls, their white bodies picked out like stars against the grey sky above.

They circled lower, the larger one squawking louder and louder as they descended. And then, as if by a miracle, they suddenly swooped majestically down towards Marcus’s tree.

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Rain watched in amazement through the binoculars as the smaller of the two adult gulls settled neatly on the branch Marcus had chosen, beating its giant grey wings as it balanced. Then the mother gull, as Rain assumed the slightly smaller one was, lowered her beak gently towards the excitable chicks, and began feeding them the fish she had returned with in her beak. The first chick gulped down the fishy goodness and then she moved on to the second chick and then... the third.

“The little one’s hatched, Marcus!” Said Rain, quickly handing the binoculars back to the boy, “There’s three of them now!”

“They’re going to feed them, and nurture them,” Marcus said in wonder, training his eyes on the nest once more. Sure enough he could see there were now three little mouths to feed, “And, before you know it, they’ll learn to fly themselves 122

and then eventually they’ll leave the nest as adults and go off and live their own lives. Raise their own families.”

Scarlett sat down on the step next to Rain.

The grown-up put her arm around her little friend once more. Scarlett felt safe again.

The three of them sat silently and took turns watching the birds get on with their normal daily routine, clearly having forgotten already that their circumstances had completely changed.

No longer caring that their nest had moved, that their little world had suddenly been turned upside down. Because they were all together again.

“Life,” said Marcus, turning to Rain and his little sister, “It really does always find a way, doesn’t it?” * 123

Eventually they went inside. It was getting cold and they needed to eat.

Rain prepared a simple meal, soup and a sandwich, and they all three sat down together in the kitchenette.

“So what are you going to do now, Rain Parity?” Scarlett said, mentioning the unmentionable as she slurped on the tomato soup from her Winnie the Pooh bowl, “Are you going to stay here with us or are you going back to the city in the stars?”

Marcus looked up at her, his spoon raised to his lips, waiting for an answer. He’d often wondered this. What was she going to do now that they’d fixed the shackle? Sure, they’d be fine, him and Scarlett. He knew that the loose spots near the perimeter would calm down now and that life would become slightly easier again.

They could go back to their old life, just him and 124

his sister and the crops and goats and chickens.

But he had learned so much more now. The information he had got from reading the internet archives, combined with everything in his scrap book that he already knew from his parents’ journalist work - the sink-holes, the fracking, the conspiracy theories, the names - had made everything fit into place so much better. As if he had suddenly found a missing jigsaw piece behind the sofa that meant he could finally fill in that gap in the puzzle sky, he had figured out what his mum and dad had been working on when they went away. What they had been investigating and where they must have gone. He also had a pretty good theory about what had happened to the world, and who was responsible.

And he was fairly confident that his big hunch was correct.

How could he possibly go back to porridge 125

and fishing and sleeping in the kitchen when he felt he could do so much more? He might be the king of the forest, but what good is being king when there are no men to rule? And no horses to ride? A tiny prince on a useless rock floating in space.

Rain put her spoon down. She wiped her mouth with her napkin.

“I was thinking of bringing you with me actually,” she paused and smiled as the children stared from one to another, “Back to Alpha Central. There’s enough space in the craft and frankly, as I said, with my leg still in this cast I can’t actually fly properly on my own anyway. I can’t operate the pedals!”

The children’s reactions to her announcement were almost completely opposite from each other. Marcus remained motionless and silent.

Scarlett, on the other hand, screamed and 126

jumped up from her seat, once more wrapping her arms around Rain Parity.

“Can we?” She excitedly shouted, “Can we really come with you to see Alf Essential?”

“Alpha Central...” Rain corrected her, “And yes, of course you can! There’s loads of people I want you to meet. And I want them to see what you’ve done with the place, how you’ve survived on your own all this time all the way out here.”

“Oh Rain Parity, you’re the best!” Scarlett said, kissing her on the cheek.

Rain stood up and whirled her around and around, both laughing. Scarlett was glad they were both laughing again. It was so much better than the shouting. She hadn’t liked that at all.

But Marcus remained seated. And silent.

Something was bothering him. Something Rain has just said had not gone unnoticed by him. He coughed, and spoke up.

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“What do you mean by ‘see what we’ve done with the place’?” He asked, “If we’re leaving the forest and coming with you, how can they see what we’ve done with the place?”

Rain turned to him, still holding Scarlett high up off the ground, “Leaving the forest? Whoever said we were leaving the forest?” She said with a laugh, “We’re going to bring the forest with us!

Now that the gravity is fixed I can change the polarity on the shackle and we can tow the whole place behind us. Tumbling after us all the way.”

“Oh. What. Fun.” Said Scarlett. * Mirror, signal, manoeuvre. Marcus remembered this phrase so clearly from when his mum was teaching his dad to drive. Every time they would set off she would say “mirror, signal, manoeuvre” to him. This went on for years.

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Driving didn’t come naturally to dad, as Marcus recalled. He didn’t really like it and he didn’t really want to do it. But after they had moved from London, mum had insisted that they both needed to be able to drive to stop them feeling so isolated and alone out in the middle of the forest and he had to learn. So Marcus had heard the phrase “mirror, signal, manoeuvre” for month after month after month as dad had struggled with the basics of learning to drive a car, even though the boy had never really understand what it meant. Dad used to say he found it so difficult to learn to drive because he had left it until he was too old to take on board new information. Mum had started driving when she was a teenager so she found it easy. It was second nature to her now. She could probably do it with her eyes closed, if that wasn’t such a dangerous idea. She could do other things while 129

she was driving; talk, look around, open packets of crisps, anything. She called it multi-tasking and she used to say women were better at it than men. Whereas dad had to focus his entire mind on the job in hand when he was driving, hunched over the wheel, frowning, staring straight ahead and nervously whistling with his hands gripped tight to the steering wheel.

And Marcus knew better than to try and get an answer to a question out of his dad when he was driving, he was concentrating too hard on the road. He got there in the end but dad had always said he wished he’d learned to drive when he was much younger, as the information would’ve gone in a lot quicker. Which seemed to make sense to Marcus now, because he had been absorbing all the instructions Rain Parity had been giving him about piloting her craft with no problem at all.

They had been using a simulation programme 130

to practice flight. It was like a computer game but sitting in the actual pilot seat of the actual craft. Rain had suggested it was wise to use the simulator until he was used to the controls, until they came completely naturally to him, rather than risk flying the actual craft itself. Marcus had found it surprisingly easy. Pulling back to go higher, pushing forward to go lower. Using the right pedal to go faster with the thrusters, the left pedal to slow down with the pulse brake. It was fairly simple really. They had put cushions in the pilot seat so that Marcus could reach all the main controls and everything else would be controlled by Rain from the other seat. The guidance system, the power, the safety displays, all the really crucial important stuff would be controlled by Rain. He was just there to be her arms and legs and do what he was told. Little more than a puppet.

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She was plotting a course to Alpha Central.

Where she lived. Right in the middle of the action, slap bang in the centre of the chart.

Almost all of Marcus’s theories had turned out to be correct. All the details he had carefully pieced together from all the newspapers and magazines that had published his parents’ investigative work.

Something had indeed happened to planet Earth. Something big.

It had ended.

The world as everyone knew it had ceased to exist. It had not ended with a bang, but with a series of cracks. Great chunks, detaching themselves over time, like melting icebergs. And each chunk had floated off into space, some large, some small. But only the chunks of land with gravity shackles had survived. Some smaller, fragmented land masses had simply ceased to 132

exist, the populations, the people, the families who lived on them, wiped from their surfaces like dust. Massive, senseless, instant loss of life.

People, animals, plant life, oceans, everything, gone. Leaving a barren, lifeless rock, tumbling through space into nothingness.

Marcus appreciated how lucky they had been, randomly living so close to a major gravity shackle. He suddenly wondered if, perhaps, it hadn’t been random at all. If his parents, with their insider knowledge from their investigations, had specifically chosen the forest because of its proximity to the shackle. The more he thought about it, the more he thought that this might be the case. That they must have specifically chosen to be so close to the tower and the protection it would provide in case the worst happened. The good fortune they had to have been born to some of the few people on Earth 133

who had known, had understood, had believed that this terrible catastrophic tragedy could potentially occur.

As he stared at the star chart that Rain Parity was using to plot their course into the guidance computer he wondered how many children on the other rocks had been less fortunate than he and Scarlett had been. The enormous rock closest to them, seemingly called Amex, how many children were alive on there? How many children on Chinoz? On Nord? These places were gigantic compared to the forest, or “7B� as it seemed to be called on the chart. Sector 7B. Such a simple, boring name. He was surprised anyone had noticed them at all. They were a tiny insignificant speck, like a crumb that had accidentally been dropped on the map.

Rain said she was going to pass on the plotted coordinates of their planned route to her people 134

on Alpha Central so they could track their journey and keep an eye out for any unforeseen dangers. She had been mailing them with regular updates so they were aware of her movements, but now she was going to video call them and that was the first time she had suggested this. She put her earphone headset on and started trying to connect to Alpha C. Marcus watched as rainbow coloured horizontal lines scrolled across the screen. He couldn’t hear what Rain could hear because of the headphones, but he could see what she could see.

As he waited for the call to connect on the screen in front of him, he checked his controls once more. The pedals were easily reachable and the steering device felt comfortable in his hands. He knew now not to rest his thumbs on the buttons on the top of the controller, instead 135

allowing them to slip loosely to the lower down grips on the handle pieces. She had been clear about that. About as clear as his mum had been about ‘mirror, signal, manoeuvre’ so long ago.

“Don’t ever touch those red buttons. Not unless I tell you to,” she had said. A lot.

The rainbow lines on the screen finally stopped and Rain began to speak into her headset. There was a woman on the screen but Marcus could only hear Rain’s half of the conversation. It was as if she was talking to someone in another room who was out of his earshot so he was having to guess what the person on the other end’s replies were.

“Yes, all good thanks. How are you?” she said, Marcus guessed this was presumably in reply to the lady asking her how she was, “ A little bit touch and go for a while but it’s locked in now.

Tanyen Manesh please.”

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Tanyen Manesh. Marcus gasped, but tried to hide his reaction from Rain. Tanyen Manesh.

That was a name Marcus knew. A name he knew well. He suddenly realised that ‘Manesh’ was the word written on the back of the very craft they were sitting in. A word that had looked familiar when he first saw the huge bold letters right there next to the horse logo on the tail of the craft. He hadn’t really recognised it on its own but combined with ‘Tanyen’ it was suddenly very familiar. Very familiar indeed.

Tanyen Manesh was a name he had read a lot but never heard said aloud. The newspaper articles in his scrap book mentioned this name all the time. This mysterious exotic name had stuck in his mind. One of those phrases you read but having never heard anyone speak it, you’re never quite sure how to pronounce it.

But it had come up a lot in Marcus’s book. If 137

he had pinned all the scraps of articles to the wall and linked everything that related to Tanyen Manesh together with string he would’ve been right in the middle. Like a spider sitting in the middle of a mysterious stringy web. Everything came back to Tanyen Manesh and the Corusca.

And he recognised the face that appeared on the screen as well. Those sleepy looking eyes, the face that looked ever so slightly too small for his head and the hair that looked like it needed a good brush. That was him. That was the man his parents had gone to investigate. There he was, alive, and speaking to Rain Parity. Although Marcus couldn’t actually hear what he was saying.

“Prince Manesh,” Rain Parity said into her headset, with a very serious tone that Marcus wasn’t used to hearing from her, “We launch in one hour. Sector 7B is secured and ready for 138

transit. I should be with you in 72 hours if all goes to plan. Peace be with the Corusca. Over and out.”

Marcus sat in disbelief as the face on the screen vanished and the rainbow lines appeared once more. If what Rain Parity had just said was correct, they were basically heading into the dragon’s den. Where the key player in the whole series of unfolding events was sitting, waiting.

As they made their final preparations, the final flight checks before take-off, Marcus was deep in thought. As Scarlett leaped around the cockpit, and excitedly tried her seatbelt on for the eighth time, Marcus couldn’t help but think about what may lie at the end of their sparkling journey through the stars. At the end of their intergalactic crystal slide might they, could they possibly, be about to meet up once again with the very people he wanted to see more than anything 139

in the whole wide universe? The two people he had not seen since he was a little boy younger than Scarlett was now?

Mum and dad.

Marcus and Scarlett will return in Broken Earth Episode Two: The Crystal Slide.

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About this book I’ve had the idea for this story floating around in my head for almost eight years.

The last holiday Mrs Chris and I went on before the kids were born was to Santorini.

An amazing, incredible place. I was marvelling at how people had chosen to make their homes on a dead volcanic crust in the middle of the sea - carving into it and building out onto it as far as gravity would allow. At how people adapt to whatever nature throws at them. How life finds a way. I didn’t know how I was going to tell it yet but I knew I had an idea for a story brewing that I wanted to share with people.

I’ve written songs before, I’ve had magazine articles published and written blogs.

I’ve enjoyed being interviewed and asked for my opinion on things after the Sgt Pepper dead celebrity montage meme blew up but I didn’t know how best to tell this story. I’ve written and drawn comics before but this didn’t feel quite right for that. And I wasn’t quite ready to have another film script ignored so I thought why not see if it works as a book? Why read a book when you can write a book, right?

I thought about the plot for a long time. I knew somebody had to be separated from somebody. It’s a massive concept I’m trying to explain so it has to have real human emotion at the centre of it. Originally I was going to tell it from the perspective of a parent who has been separated from their child. But then I realised it might be more powerful the other way around. Reveal the entire universe from one small boy’s perspective. A bit like the droids in Star Wars telling the massive space opera from their tiny tinny perspective. Obviously my C3PO needed an R2D2, hence the sister, who evolved into a pretty strong character in her own right.

For months I was ready to start. I had the opening scene planned in my mind. What’s even smaller than the boy? The rabbit he’s chasing. But then to go smaller still, right into the rabbits eye, to the twinkle in his eye. Shrink down from the entire universe to the twinkle in the eye of a small animal running for its life. But the thought of sitting in front of a computer and starting was too intimidating so I kept putting it off. And off. Months more passed until one night, I’d had two beers I think and it was definitely after midnight, I started tapping it out with my thumb on my phone. It started well, names came to me instantly that felt right, so I continued. I think I wrote half of chapter one that first night. I asked my wife to read it and she said literally, “it’s good.” So I carried on writing. On my phone. Normally just before bedtime.

I thought I’d keep it short. I thought I’d punctuate it with action. And most importantly I would only use words my son knew and concepts he would be familiar with. As a parent reader I hate it when I have to stop and explain some reference that a child couldn’t possibly be expected to understand. Oh, and I try to avoid saying people “cried” instead of said and “strode” instead of walked. I just find that really annoying.

When I’d finished it I read it to my son as a bedtime story, not knowing what to expect.

He loved it. Honestly. I couldn’t have wanted more from his reactions. He understood exactly what he was supposed to understand, laughed in the right places and was shocked and excited in the right places. And he wanted to read on. He wanted to know what happened next. I couldn’t have asked for more. Now I want to read it to my daughter when she’s old enough. And I want to know what happens next.

Sent from my iPhone

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Something strange has happened to our world.

Marcus and Scarlett fight to survive alone in a forest where day can sometimes be night, and what goes up... doesn’t always come down.

When a mysterious visitor falls from the sky, she has a mission they can choose to accept.

Can the stranger be trusted? Will they survive?

Can they solve the riddle of the forest and find out exactly what happened to break the world?

And will Earth ever be put back together again?

Two children’s epic journey into the unknown.

BROKEN EARTH EPISODE ONE

OLDER KING’S HORSES

OLDER KING’S HORSES

CHRIS DREW BARKER