The cheer from the crowd was so loud it was like a push in the back, urging them onward to their destiny. They exchanged a glance. They stood there on the threshold of a life of indulgence and ease, up above the atmosphere. Are we really gonna do this?
She saw determination in Cassica’s eyes and took it for her own. She nodded, and it was decided.
Cassica reached out and snatched the microphone from the surprised Jenty. “Hoy! Dridley! Prua! Get out here!”
The crowd muttered in surprise as a middle-aged man and woman came out from backstage, one almost skipping with delight, the other sheepish and nervous. He was round and jolly, she angular and thin. They were dressed as if for an expensive dinner.
Jenty looked lost. A frown of anger drew a line between Dunbery Hasp’s eyes. This wasn’t how the ascension was supposed to go.
“Ladies and gentlemen, meet the Cussenses!” said Cassica to the crowd. A ripple of uncertain applause passed down the boulevard. Dridley bowed theatrically. His bald pate was shining with sweat and he couldn’t stop grinning.
Cassica took Shiara’s ticket from her and held them both up. “Mr. Hasp,” she said into the mic, for all to hear. “We’d like to thank you for this amazing opportunity to go to Olympus. But we’ve had a talk, Shiara and I, and we just don’t think it’s for us. So we figured we’d give it to someone who really wants it.” She turned to the crowd. “Everyone, meet your two newest Celestials: Dridley and Prua Cussens!”
The crowd was silent. Only a few lonely whoops rang out, dying quickly. Dridley’s face fell a little, and Prua looked pained. They glanced nervously at Dunbery Hasp, whose face had darkened with rage. He was being humiliated in front of the world, his most extravagant gift given away like a carnival ticket.
Yeah, now you care, thought Shiara with bitter satisfaction.
Cassica tossed the mic to the floor with an amplified thump and a squeal of feedback. She handed the tickets to the Cussenses. Dridley clutched her hands gratefully in his.
“I can’t tell you how much this means to us,” he breathed. “The money’s in an account for you, every cent of it. One billion dollars, like we agreed. Thank you! Thank you both!”
“Get going, before they work out how to stop you,” Cassica said. “Go on.”
He glanced again at Hasp, worry crossing his face, then took his wife’s hand and made for the elevator. In the covered wings of the stage, Cassica could see executives gabbling into walkie-talkies. Was this legal? Was there anything in the rules against it? How could they stop this from happening? Nobody had ever done it before. Nobody had given their tickets to someone else. Nobody ever said no to Olympus!
“Do something!” Hasp spluttered at them, pointing a withered hand toward the elevator. But there was nothing they could do—not with the eyes of the world upon them. Cheating behind the scenes was one thing, but if their viewers ever suspected the game wasn’t fair, it was all over. And there was nothing that said Cassica and Shiara couldn’t do whatever they wanted with their tickets.
Security guards waited helplessly for the order to storm the stage. But Hasp’s men dithered too long. The Cussenses slid the tickets into the slots on the black obelisk, and the doors to the space elevator began to rumble shut. After that, nobody dared cross the threshold. Dridley Cussens gave a cheery wave to the crowd; then he seized his wife and kissed her. The gates boomed shut, and the ring of lights began to ascend, carrying them up into the dark.
“They ain’t gonna last a year up there before they get voted out,” said Shiara.
“Not our problem,” said Cassica.
The spectators were stunned, unsure of what they’d seen. Was the elevator really leaving? Was it all a trick? Where was their celebration? They wanted to see their heroes ascend into legend, not these nobodies who they’d never heard of. They’d been cheated of their triumph.
Shiara began to feel uncomfortable. The security guards were watching them in angry confusion. Hasp had stormed offstage. Jenty Gane, awkward now that things had gone off script, picked up the mic and attempted to get things back on track.
“Well … er … how about that, folks?” he said, his voice echoing in the silence. “We certainly haven’t seen that before. One thing’s for sure, this Widowmaker is just full of surprises!”
Nobody responded.
Cassica motioned to Shiara. They couldn’t stay on the stage any longer. They didn’t dare go backstage—they’d just made a lot of enemies there—so they walked down the steps at the front of the stage and along the red carpet that ran down a fenced-off aisle that divided the crowd.
Shiara felt her throat becoming tight with nerves as they walked. She felt vulnerable in her stupid designer dress. The people to either side stared at them, not knowing what to make of them now. They hadn’t acted the way they were supposed to.
They hadn’t followed the story. What were their fans supposed to think? Some looked bewildered, some hurt and betrayed. Shiara began to wonder if they’d made a terrible mistake. She hadn’t wanted to be famous, but she hadn’t wanted to be hated either.
Then, to her surprise, she saw a face she knew. A weathered, seamed old face, but one that still held a shadow of the handsome man he’d been. A man who’d loomed large over her childhood in Coppermouth. A man who drank fazz.
She halted. Rutterby LaKeyne, the fallen Celestial she’d once bought a coffee in a cheap diner. He was here, standing up against the metal barriers that fenced off the red carpet, dressed in a shabby old suit and gazing at her with the confident steady stare of a man who’d once known what it was like to be treated as a god.
For a long moment, they just looked at each other. Then he began to clap his hands. Slowly at first, a heavy slap of his palms, ringing out into the silence. Then faster, louder, putting his arms into it. The people around him were uncertain at first, but his clapping was relentless and it infected them, and one by one they started clapping too. Out into the crowd it spread, a rising wave of sound; and when the others saw what was happening on their screens, they joined in as well. As the clapping got louder, cheers broke out.
Jenty Gane caught the mood and seized the advantage. “Viewers, friends, and guests, I give you the girls who looked up to Olympus and said no!—Cassica Hayle and Shiara DuCal!”
The crowd went crazy. Shiara and Cassica were pummeled with the sound of their joy. It was overwhelming, incredible, fantastic. The adoration of millions, won on their own terms. Won for being themselves, not what they were expected to be.
Spontaneously, Shiara hugged her friend, who’d given up her dreams of Olympus for Shiara’s sake. Because they wanted to stay together; because they were a team. She’d never felt so lucky or so happy. The crowd roared its approval as they watched them embrace on their screens.
“You wanna get out of here?” Cassica said.
“Sure,” said Shiara. She cast a grateful smile over Cassica’s shoulder at Rutterby LaKeyne, who acknowledged it with a nod. “Let’s go home.”
Music pulsed and meat sizzled on the grill: haunch of goat, snake fillet, chicken wings searing to the break beat in the warm evening. Wielding the tongs was Blane, belly pressing against his T-shirt and flames reflected in his shades, the grinning master of the barbecue.
The party had been going on since morning up on the Point. It was Pacifica Day, the day of their nation’s founding, and the folks of Coppermouth knew how to cut loose when they got the chance. Overstimulated children, made hyperactive by sugar and fazz, screamed and chased one another round the tables. Grannies cackled drunkenly together in plastic chairs. The older kids flirted as best they could while their parents cracked one another up with out-of-date jokes and got up unsteadily to dance whenever a song they knew came on the radio.
This Pacifica Day, there were newcomers to the party. Men and women whom the people of Coppermouth made a fuss of. They were never without a plate of food, a glass of fazz or something stronger; but they were careful not to overindulge. They had a job to do, a
fter all, and they were still in uniform. As Coppermouth’s first official Justices for thirty years or more, they were as keen to make a good impression as the townsfolk were.
There was new bunting strung between the poles, and colored lights, which were turned on as the sky reddened and dusk approached. The crowd on the Point thinned out a little as people made their way back to town for the parade, but plenty stayed who were not interested or were too drunk to bother moving.
Cassica and Shiara leaned against the metal safety barrier that ran round the cliff edge, and looked down on to the town. The main street was all lit up and strung with lamps in preparation. In the harbor, five dredging vessels rested at anchor. They were quiet today, their crews ashore, but in the morning they’d resume their work of sucking up silt from the harbor.
Already the docks had been reopened to medium-sized vessels. In six months they’d have cleared the channel enough that barges would be able to make their way from Division Lake up the Copper River again. Plans were in place to fix up the docks and restore the main street in preparation for the trade and passengers they’d bring. The whole town was abuzz with talk of it. Grandparents told stories of how things used to be when Coppermouth was thriving, and people began to imagine how it might be again.
“Ain’t so bad, is it?” Shiara said contentedly.
“No,” said Cassica. “Ain’t so bad at all.”
She’d never thought she’d find herself back here. Once, this place had been a trap to her. But she’d been out in the world since then and knew she could do so again if she wanted. She was no longer afraid of home, now that it had no power to hold her. She chose to stay; that was the difference.
This whole thing was Shiara’s idea, of course. She was always the planner, always the one Cassica relied on to help her do what was right. She was the one who suggested they sell the tickets and use the money to fix up Coppermouth.
“You gotta help them who helped you get where you are,” she said. “And no matter where we go, Coppermouth’s always gonna be where we’re from.” At the time, Cassica hadn’t really got what she was saying. She’d agreed because it was what Shiara wanted, and because she didn’t have any better ideas. She knew her friend would have withered on Olympus, and she didn’t want to go without her. She was sick of Anchor City and that whole corrupt scene. Home seemed a good idea, at least for a while.
But now they’d been back a few months, now they’d started to see the effects of Shiara’s plan, Cassica understood. Coppermouth was a different place these days. People wore hope on their faces; she heard it in their talk. That was a gift Cassica and Shiara had given them, and it provided her with a deep sense of well-being, more profound and long-lasting than any victory on the racetrack. It made her happy.
Sometimes she thought of what might have been, how she could have been a Celestial. But she knew now that it was an illusion she hungered for, and she didn’t think on it long. Real life was good enough.
Shiara’s plan had gone further than dredging the harbor and installing Justices to protect the townsfolk from the highway gangs. A new water-processing plant was on its way, so the kids wouldn’t have to drink fazz every day. One of the old warehouses was being converted into a small hospital, with doctors and specialist equipment to treat respiratory diseases. Coppermouth was one of the worst places in Pacifica for dust lung, but soon they’d have the best survival rate too.
The dust had been the one thing that Cassica had really balked at. She didn’t want to come home to a town that might kill her in thirty years. She didn’t want to end up like her momma.
Shiara, as ever, had an answer. They hired engineers, geologists, environmentalists. They looked into this and that. In the end, they planted a forest up on the ridge: a whole new forest, a barrier miles thick, populated by hardy trees that could survive the harsh conditions. They were only saplings now, but in fifteen years they’d be catching almost seventy percent of the killing dust that blew off the Rust Bowl into Coppermouth. In thirty years, they’d be catching almost all of it.
Even that wasn’t enough for Cassica; she needed something that would work right now. So they installed, at great expense, a system of magnetic poles along the ridge, which drew the invisible metal-eating nanobots from the air as they blew past and fried them with electricity. Without the nanobots, the dust was only dust. It wasn’t the perfect defense, but it would do until the trees grew.
Thirty years, they said. In thirty years dust lung would be just a memory in Coppermouth.
Once, Cassica had dreamed of writing herself into legend. But legends like Rutterby LaKeyne were soon replaced, and no matter how bright they burned, they faded fast as soon as they were out of sight. What they’d done here, this was something better. Children would survive who wouldn’t have otherwise. The elderly would live long enough to know their grandkids. Coppermouth would grow and prosper, and its people would prosper with it, generation after generation. Families would spread into the future that wouldn’t have even started if Cassica and Shiara had gone to Olympus.
In time, they’d be forgotten, and their names would slip from history. By then, it wouldn’t matter. Even if the distant descendants of Coppermouth never knew or cared who Cassica Hayle and Shiara DuCal were, they’d remember them by every breath in their lungs.
Cassica and Shiara watched Celestial Hour now and then. Dridley and Prua Cussens were proving surprisingly popular, though only as figures of fun. Still, as long as the viewers’ eyes were upon them, it didn’t matter why. Perhaps they’d make it on Olympus after all. Shiara liked that thought. “Everyone tryin’ to give the people what they want all the time, and nobody knows what the hell it is!”
Of Harlan, they never heard another thing. They didn’t know what that meant, and didn’t much care.
Life at the auto shop had continued pretty much as before, after they got back. Blane refused to accept a cent from his fantastically rich daughter, being a man who liked to earn what he had. The only difference was that nowadays people didn’t mind having their cars worked on by a girl. This particular girl, at least. The world wouldn’t shift its attitudes overnight, but if a few minds got changed because of their success, that was a start as far as Shiara was concerned. And if one day she decided she wanted to take over the family business and run it herself, that was fine by everybody, including Creek, who’d rather be in the mountains anyway.
They left Maisie just as she was, in the corner of the auto shop where she’d always been. Shiara hadn’t even touched her. They’d been too busy to drive her since their return, and they’d never be let near Maximum Racing again after what they’d done to Dunbery Hasp. Some private collectors offered vast sums of money to take her off their hands, but they refused. They could afford to be sentimental. Maybe someday they’d go racing again, but Cassica was surprised to find she really didn’t miss it all that much. Perhaps she didn’t need it like she once had.
“Parade’s startin’ soon,” Shiara said distantly.
“You got time,” said Cassica.
They made themselves plates of food and sat at a table while the party swirled around them. Shiara picked at hers without appetite.
“You’re fretting,” said Cassica through a mouthful of chicken.
Shiara shrugged.
“He’s coming, don’t worry.”
“How d’you know?”
“ ’Cause he’d be a fool if he didn’t,” she said. She pointed over Shiara’s shoulder with a half-eaten chicken leg. “Besides, I see him over there.”
Shiara jerked around in her seat. At the edge of the party, just by the road, Sammis Rye was standing by his car, searching the crowd. She raised a hand; he saw her and raised his own in greeting.
“I’m just gonna—”
Cassica waved her off. “Go see your boy. I got chicken.”
“You gonna be alright without me?”
Cassica gave her a look.
“I’ll catch you later, alright?” Shiara said.
/> Cassica pulled Shiara’s plate toward her and winked. “I’ll be here.”
She watched her friend make her way over to Sammis. They kissed as they met, then got into the car and drove off, taking the road down to the town, where the parade would soon begin. Cassica smiled to herself and quietly ate her meal.
As they left, they passed beneath a billboard, lovingly restored and lit up against the gathering night. On it, pristine and new, a man out of legend raised a bottle to the town below, eternally young and eternally handsome.
In Coppermouth, at least, Rutterby LaKeyne was still drinking fazz.
This book, like any book, is the work of many hands, but I’d like to extend special thanks to Cressida Godding, for technical advice on race cars and the science of driving really, really fast. Any inaccuracies are likely due to the author’s tendency to pick dramatic license over precision.
Chris Wooding is the author of twenty-four books, which have been translated into twenty languages. His books have won the Nestlé Smarties Silver Award and the Bram Stoker Award, among others, and have been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the CILIP Carnegie Medal. He also writes for TV and film. Visit him at www.chriswooding.com.
Copyright © 2015 by Chris Wooding
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