She was relieved to see the monkey was sleeping. She smiled. He didn’t look very dangerous. His bag of popcorn had spilled in his lap and his face was peaceful as if he too was dreaming of home. She took the bag, folded over the top and tucked it down the side of his seat.
‘Sweet dreams,’ she whispered, glad he didn’t know what was happening. His fingers twitched and she touched them gently.
What a miracle he was. So beautiful. Every time she looked at him she felt her heart swell with wonder. His brown face was framed by a mist of golden fur. His arms and legs were black to the elbow as if he’d dipped them in a bucket of ink. Over his body his fur was longer and a darker shade of gold and he had a black Mohican – a strip of tufty black fur over the top of his head – that suited him perfectly. He was Puck by name and puckish by nature, the most dreadful pet imaginable. But Ellie didn’t blame him. She knew Puck missed his family just as much as she did and the only way he could communicate his sadness was by being vicious and destructive. Poor Puck hadn’t been allowed out of his tiny room for six months. She tightened his harness.
‘They just didn’t understand you,’ she whispered. ‘But I do.’
She prepared to fly again. Her body felt weak just from the exertion of turning round in her seat and she realized how exhausted she was. She hadn’t been able to eat or sleep during the days leading up to her escape.
I need to be careful not to lose concentration, she thought, but not long now, half an hour, maybe less, and I’ll be home with my family.
She put her headset on and wriggled back in her seat so she was comfortable. She locked her harness, checked over the control panel and then fired up the engine, feeling waves of nervous energy ripple through her as it roared. The Pod Fighter rose vertically, and its power vibrated through her hands. The nearest Ghengis Borg turned and its red eyes watched as she flew over The Wall and crossed the strip of sea towards land. She reached Brighton in less than a minute, and like a swarm of black flies, Gorman’s men fell out of the clouds.
‘My welcome party,’ she whispered sarcastically. ‘How nice of you to meet me.’
She felt her stomach flip with fear, but she flew towards them with gritted teeth, and with a lightning quick twist and turn, shot sideways through a gap between two hotels with centimetres to spare.
‘Beat that!’ she yelled, as she came out the other side and banked quickly to avoid hitting a block of apartments.
She found herself in a narrow walkway behind the hotels on the seafront. It was lined with refuse containers and parked hover cars. There were two fighters waiting for her at the end, and above she could hear the rumble of a police freighter. She couldn’t go up and she couldn’t go forward, so she veered sharply to the left, narrowly missing the corner of a balcony as she shot into the lightless crack between another two buildings.
This is the only way, she thought, emerging in a shopping mall and immediately cutting between two stores to avoid the swarm of police pods coming towards her. She knew if she spent more than a second in an open space they would kill her. But she had played this game before in training, weaving through a lightless maze full of ravenous monsters in a flight simulator. The only difference being, when she played the maze game, she had three lives, but doing it for real she had only one.
* * *
‘She’s using the buildings for cover.’
‘Well, of course she is,’ Mal Gorman snapped, with a force that cracked his dry lips. ‘She’s not going to fly above them so you can all take turns at target practice! Which way is she heading?’
‘Towards London.’
‘She’s going to fly through The Shadows,’ Gorman predicted. ‘Try to force her up on to the second level where there’s more light. Get every man there, now!’
2
OR WE WILL DIE
By the time Ellie reached the outskirts of London, she wasn’t thinking, only reacting to the maze of concrete and dozens of monsters coming after her. She and the Pod Fighter had become one, like an experienced rider on a well-trained horse, and although she was mentally and physically exhausted, she was flying better than she had ever done before and gradually she gained a strong lead. They simply weren’t good enough to keep up with her.
London looked like a monstrous, two-tiered cake from a distance, the bottom layer dark and foreboding, and the top layer glittering with a frosting of gold and diamond light. She soon realized her path into The Shadows was blocked by a line of police freighters, so she banked up towards the second level. The Golden Turrets of the new city were a melt of organic curves and elegant spires with open spaces between them. She knew she would be very exposed among them and that the next few minutes as she tried to cross London would be the most dangerous.
* * *
‘You might see her soon,’ said the man. ‘She’s over level two, heading directly towards you.’
‘Is she?’ Gorman replied grimly.
He moved towards the glass wall of his hotel room and searched the sky over the city. It was almost four in the morning and the thousands of luxury apartments were dark, with only a few air cabs buzzing lazily around them.
Good thing, he thought, imagining the outcry if civilians were killed while his men were chasing Ellie.
The glass began to vibrate. He touched it with his bony fingertips and moments later a blistering roar ripped through the clouds above his head. He looked up and saw nothing but a few trails of agitated mist running in a line away from him.
‘I just heard you over me,’ Gorman said.
‘Yep, that’s us,’ the man shouted. ‘When she reached the outskirts of the city, she flew up into the cloud cover, but we’re on to her, she’s not getting away this time.’
The noise faded into the distance and Gorman stared up at the sky, wishing he could see more. Eventually, he heard them turn and come back again, and a second later a two-pronged spearhead of curved black metal and glass erupted from the clouds and flew straight at him at several hundred kilometres per hour. Instinctively he took a step back and watched the raindrops on the window perform panicky star jumps as Ellie banked sharply, metres from his face, up the front of the hotel. There were five fighters on her tail, and they split to the left and right rather than attempt to copy her. Gorman covered his ears with his hands as the scream of their engines pierced his head.
‘Can you still see her?’ he shouted, when the noise had subsided.
‘Yes, sir, we’re driving her down.’
‘Good, get her into the Turrets and force her down to ground level.’
‘Yes, sir.’
The Golden Turrets began to light up as residents awoken by the noise turned on their lights and opened their curtains to see what was happening outside.
‘Looks like we have an audience,’ Gorman said. ‘Don’t mess it up.’
‘We won’t, sir, I’ve a feeling we’ve got her this time. She won’t stand a chance.’
Moments later, Gorman watched them drop out of the clouds, Ellie in front, with a whole squadron of fighters on her tail. He watched with his heart in his mouth as she flew a masterly corkscrew through the middle of the Turrets and then began a game of cat and mouse around them, giving a breathtaking display of acrobatic twists and turns as she threw off the pack on her heels. Gorman couldn’t help but smile as he watched his men trying to catch her; time after time she slipped away, like a fish from their hands, to leave them flying off in the wrong direction or swerving to avoid the Turrets. They couldn’t keep her in their sights long enough to fire a single shot. She flew so tight a loop around the golden dome at the top of one the Turrets, the cleaner borgs dropped off. Then a second later, she stopped dead and the men were taken by surprise and overshot her. Gorman saw it all before it happened and inhaled sharply as two fighters collided with another coming the other way, which spiralled out of control and crashed into a building. Then the first two exploded in a ball of flame so intense, it burned Gorman’s retinas, while the force of the blast shattered t
he glass in front of him and hurled him back on the bed. His com fell off. Still in his pyjamas and slippers he groped around for it with a shaking hand and pushed it over his ear where it lit up again.
‘Was that you?’ he shouted, and his question was answered by silence. All he could hear was screaming from the streets below. He got off the bed and walked over the carpet of broken glass towards the gaping hole where the window had been. He knelt down and peered over the edge, feeling a swoon of vertigo as he looked at the street hundreds of metres below. The fighters had broken apart on impact and were scattered in burning heaps down the length of New Marble Arch. Every window he could see was shattered, people were pouring out of the buildings and the sky was filling with the sound of sirens.
He tried to contact another man, ‘It’s Mal Gorman, where is she?’
‘We don’t know, sir.’
‘She’ll be in The Shadows. Send half the men down there and the rest to wait at her home in Barford North. We may need to kill her family, so make sure the men are careful not to be seen.’
* * *
In the chaos of the explosion, Ellie fled, devastated by the shock of what had just happened. She realized she probably knew some of the men chasing her – they had given her sweets or those little cakes she liked with iced flowers on the top, or holopics of her favourite animals, or just kind words when she was doing well in training. And she’d just watched some of them go up in a ball of flames and crash into a turret full of sleeping people.
But they were trying to kill me! she cried inside. They’re not being nice now. If they hadn’t died then it would have been us. And I don’t want Puck to die like this and I don’t want to kill people! I want to go home!
She flew recklessly in her desperation to get away from them, and at the edge of the second level of London, she dipped sharply, turned and flew into the darkness of The Shadows.
She was six when they built the second level on London and she remembered sitting on the floor in her pyjamas with her twin brother, Mika, watching the pillars go up on television. She was eating strawberry Stir and Serve from a bowl with bears dancing around the rim, and Mika was eating toast and jam with the crusts cut off, close to each other, legs crossed, in a rare moment of companionable silence. The pillars grew before their eyes into the legs of giants with their feet in the city parks and their heads in the sky. They were hailed a marvel of modern engineering by lots of politicians.
‘We considered all the options,’ the Prime Minister said, ‘and decided that building a second level on London is the only way to cope with the flooding and overcrowding. Since we’ve been living behind The Wall, there simply isn’t enough space for everyone.’
‘Mum! Dad! Look at this!’ Ellie shouted, her eyes glowing with excitement. ‘They’re going to build a fairy palace on top of London!’
Her mother turned to the television and dropped her muffin on the floor.
‘Oh my odd,’ she said. ‘What are they doing?’
‘I told you,’ Ellie insisted. ‘They’re building a fairy palace!’
‘Not for everyone,’ her mother muttered, forgetting the muffin and sitting down to watch a model of the new city rotate on the screen. ‘It’s only the rich who’ll live on the second level in the fairy palace, Ellie. The poor people like us will be left in the darkness below.’
Ellie hadn’t understood what her mother meant at the time, and had been upset that they were disagreeing again, like they did about animals, but as she flew through The Shadows and saw it with her own eyes, she was beset by gloom and realized her mother had been right. She wove around the giant pillars with the noise of her engine ricocheting like a cannonball off the metal ceiling overhead, and thought of the millions of people who lived in that slice of watery darkness with no sky, in overcrowded damp buildings, some of them ankle-deep in flood water, whilst overhead the rich were living in their golden-turreted fairy palace. She knew the poor people lived that way because they believed they had no choice, and she also knew they’d been told a lie, and that the world they lived in was not what they thought it was.
‘I’m going to tell you the truth,’ she said. ‘And Mal Gorman is going to wish he was never born.’
She needed a break. She didn’t want to stop in this nightmare place, but her hands were shaking so much she could barely control them and she was forced to land the Pod Fighter on top of a mouldy apartment block with hundreds of broken windows. She turned off the engine, yanked off her headset, and for a minute sat in silence, listening to babies crying in the damp apartments below her.
She turned to comfort Puck. He looked as if he’d been through the spin cycle in a washing machine and bared his teeth at her aggressively, his black Mohican extra tufty and his bright eyes full of fear.
‘I’m sorry, Puck,’ she said, remorsefully. She didn’t try to pet him, knowing he wouldn’t want to be touched; instead she searched for one of the bags of food. They’d broken open and scattered all over the floor of the Pod Fighter, popcorn and nuts, monkey chow and pieces of dried fruit. She scooped up a handful in the darkness and dropped it into his lap. She watched him pick through the monkey chow until he found a nut. ‘Better now?’ she asked as he inspected it with his quick brown eyes. He sniffed the nut sus piciously, but ate it. ‘Good,’ Ellie said. ‘Not feeling too bad then.’
She was about to get out of the fighter so she could stretch her legs when she heard the roar of engines from the south. She hadn’t expected them to find her so quickly and she was gripped by a fear that melted her into her seat. She didn’t feel ready and for the first time since she’d escaped, panic overwhelmed her. She breathed deeply, trying to control her emotions, but tears ran down her face and her chin wobbled as she fumbled with her harness and jammed her headset over her sweaty hair.
You have to be ready, she told herself. Or we will die.
She fired up her engines and threw the Pod Fighter down towards the body of black water that used to be the river Thames, twisting west towards her home.
She began to realize that flying through The Shadows was a mistake; the buildings were much smaller, most of them built during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when there weren’t so many people. She had no cover apart from the monstrous pillars and the darkness and within seconds she had a squadron of fighters on her tail again and the air around her blistered and flared as bolts of laser fire narrowly missed her, blinding her so she could barely see where she was going. She could sense their grim determination now; their mood had changed since she’d killed their colleagues and they were baying for blood. She heard Puck shriek with fear as she ducked and twisted, throwing the fighter into impossible manoeuvres around the pillars. The faces of her family danced in her flare-blinded eyes as she tried to shut out the screams of the terrified monkey behind her. She fought for Puck in the last moments, but there were too many of them and she was too tired.
‘No!’ she screamed, as she felt the fighter take a direct hit. The control panel in front of her sputtered light, then died, and suddenly they were in total darkness, falling like a dead bird towards an undulating mass of cold, black water.
* * *
Since Ellie had disappeared, her twin brother, Mika, had slept in her bed. Their room was tiny; the two bunks hollowed out of the plastic moulding on one wall, with a narrow strip dividing them from the cupboards in which they stored their clothes and toys. They’d fought constantly over the small space since they were toddlers, especially over the bunks. Mika had insisted on sleeping at the top and this drove Ellie crazy.
‘It’s not fair!’ she yelled in his face. ‘You always sleep at the top!’
‘That’s because I want to more than you do,’ he replied, turning his back on her.
‘No you don’t!’
‘Stop yelling at me, Ellie. You’re being a perp.’
Then Ellie would grab the edge of his cover and try to yank it off him in a frenzy of rage, and he would hold fast, still with his back to her, both of the
m determined not to give in.
‘I hate you!’ she’d scream.
‘No you don’t,’ he’d reply quietly, which made her even angrier. ‘You love me.’
‘Don’t flatter yourself! You stink!’
‘And by the way, Ellie, I’m the oldest, so the bunk is mine by birthright.’
‘Only by ten minutes, you selfish PIG!’
It was only the intervention of their parents that broke up their fights. If they hadn’t been threatened with starvation, sleeping on the floor and never seeing the light of day again, Ellie and Mika would have argued from dawn to dusk because they were so similar. Both shared the same mix of Italian and Indian blood, both had the same dark eyes, intense with passion and intelligence. As they grew, they became long-limbed and languid, by turns stubborn and moody, sulking in bed, then spirited and funny and bouncing off the walls with energy. ‘A right handful,’ said their tutor, Mrs Fowler, with a withering look. ‘I don’t know how you cope.’
Ellie’s disappearance had shaken Mika so badly that even a year later he was gripped by the desolation he’d felt the night it happened. But the worst aspect, as far as his parents were concerned, was his refusal to accept she was dead. Mika refused to attend the funeral, despite his parents’ desperate pleas, and he stayed at home brooding in Ellie’s bed. And from that day onwards, he became so angry when her death was mentioned that they didn’t dare talk to him about it. He wouldn’t let them wash her bedding because it smelled of her. She hung in the air like a ghost between them and they felt as if when Ellie died, so had a part of Mika, so they grieved for both of them. It was a terrible time, when it seemed like the sun had been plucked from their world and replaced by a black hole.
Mika was certain Ellie wasn’t dead. The police had told them just after she disappeared that she must have fallen off the walk-way and drowned in the floodwater. But he couldn’t imagine Ellie ‘falling’ off the walkway – she wasn’t that stupid. To accidentally ‘fall’, she would have had to climb over the barriers at the sides, and what’s more, she was wearing brand new sneakers she’d just been given for Christmas. She was so proud of them she’d yelled at him for kicking one by mistake when they were on the floor in their bedroom. There was no way she would have been climbing over barriers wearing them, more likely avoiding the puddles so she didn’t get them wet.