She was made of star-born metals, her thoughts running in colour. She was arms and legs, muscles and a beating heart. She was nothing but spirit, the lightest of all.
Human, ghost, alien.
I feel like I’m stretching too far, holding all this together.
Whose thought was that? Hers, the human girl? Or hers, the vast alien? Or hers, the little ghost?
Don’t worry about it, my dear. A Mandeville thought.
There’s no time! Was that Gray?
No time! Not human time, not alien time. The explosion would be quicker than either. She had to move, fast as a heartbeat, fast as a human thought. Rise up, fly up, right now.
Now now now NOW!
The shaking rattled her eyelids open.
Blazing, teary light. A blurry shape. Gray was shaking her, trying to get her standing.
“We have to get out of here!” He was shouting, his words almost lost in the loud, relentless pattering, like a hailstorm. He pulled her by her arm. “Come on!”
Strange, unfathomable images filled her thoughts, and whatever part of her mind had been stretched when holding the ghosts and alien together, now it had ripped apart. Her legs were stiff, and the ground… it wasn’t Gray who was shaking her – everything was moving. A downward dance of pebbles was falling from every slope in the quarry; a boulder shook, high in the rock face above them, then tumbled out of place, crashing and cracking as it fell. Gray yanked Isis backwards as the boulder thudded into the dirt where they’d been standing.
Without warning the ground beneath her foot dropped away. She staggered, her ankle twisting sideways, and someone else grabbed her. Dreadlocks and a beard. Merlin.
“What’s happening?” Her words were a croak.
“They’ve set off the blast!” Gray shouted.
Merlin was clutching his dreadlocks. “But they know we’re in here, I told Dr Harcourt!”
“She’d do it anyway,” screamed Gray. “She’s one of them!”
“One of who?”
Another rock crashed out of the quarry face, spinning and splintering as it fell.
“Out!”
Isis ran, following Gray and Merlin, trying to reach the track, as the ground shuddered and shifted with every step, quaking so hard she could barely stay upright. Dust filled the air as an avalanche of rocks and boulders collapsed out of the quarry wall.
She ran faster. Don’t fall don’t fall don’t fall! A thunderous, cracking sound roared through the quarry, and Gray stumbled backwards, crying out. A deep gully had opened in front of them, the ground plummeting away.
“Look out!” screamed Merlin as a gaping rent appeared, just to their right. They scrambled sideways, the solid dirt they’d been standing on collapsing into a deep hole. Isis held onto Gray, onto Merlin, as the ground shook and shook beneath them, shuddering in every direction. A deep rumble filled the air, punctuated by loud popping sounds. Thick dust coated their throats and stung their eyes. Through the haze, up on the hillside, Isis saw trees lean and topple sideways.
“This isn’t mining!” yelled Merlin, his hair white with dust. “They only put charges over there.” He pointed to where rocks were rattling and spinning out of the quarry walls. “This is everywhere!”
With another thunder-crack, the gully in front of them widened, the ground pouring into it. They staggered and Gray’s foot slipped off.
“Get down!” cried Merlin, hauling Gray backwards. “It’ll be safest sitting!”
Angel caught up with them, drifting up as if all this were normal. “The effelant baby!” she shouted happily.
By her hand, Isis saw a pebble vibrate so fiercely it slowly began rising off the ground. Another vibrated itself upwards, also defying gravity, then another and another.
“Oh man!” cried Merlin. “Look at that!”
Isis tore her gaze from the floating pebbles, and saw a stream of dirt and rocks pouring straight up into the air from the chasm that had opened in front of them.
“What…?” said Gray.
With a deafening crash, a huge boulder tore itself out of the quarry face, but instead of falling it drifted upwards.
“Look what the effelant’s doing!” cried Angel, spinning in circles on her bottom.
“What’s going on?” yelled Merlin.
“She’s leaving,” answered Isis, but her voice was lost in the noise. Dust and rock poured up around the group, creating an upward draft that lifted Isis’s hair and pulled at her clothes. Everywhere the ground was funnelling into the air, in an impossible avalanche.
She heard words in the roaring wind. I won the race.
And every pebble, every rock, every particle of dust was suddenly dancing with rainbows.
Gray let out a yell of delight: “They’re back! My mes are back!”
Beautiful place, whispered the brightly coloured dust, flickering and darkening. Tilting her head, Isis saw that the rocks pouring upwards were spinning now. Faster and faster, beginning to glow, first red, then orange, then into white-hot droplets. The heat of it warmed her face, like standing in front of a fire.
Make my baby well, hissed the burning air.
“Bye!” shouted Gray, waving madly with both hands at people only he could see. “Bye!”
Let him love me, said the rising pebbles.
“Bring warmer weather,” Isis whispered back.
“Oh man,” breathed Merlin. “Oh man.”
The ground flowed upwards; only the spot they were sitting on stayed solid. Pebbles, dust and boulders spun over their heads, melting into lava droplets. And now the molten drops were forging together into incandescent lines, hardening almost instantly into a softly gleaming metal, thin as wire. Each one joined to another, building a shape in the air above them.
“Is that its body?” asked Gray, eyes huge in his dirt-caked face.
Dust and rock cascaded into the air, melting together and drawing more of the glimmering wires. Fractal patterns began dividing, like the veins in a leaf or the crystals of a snowflake, as the strange metallic lines filled the sky with a vast outline, impossibly big, city-sized, yet so finely wrought it should not have been able to hold its own huge form.
In places the wires welded into extra structures, poking out from the main body.
“Are those… fins?” asked Gray, shielding his eyes with his hand.
“Wings?” suggested Isis. It was hard to tell, hard to get the scale or understand what anything might be.
“Antennae?” said Gray, puzzling out the shapes. “A sail?”
Green light flickered along one of the lines. Another flashed into blue; somewhere else it was yellow.
“Oh maaaan,” sighed Merlin.
More and more of the lines above them picked up a colour, the alien drawing itself in the sky above. Red, orange, mauves and greens, a dart of silver, the pinks and gold of dawn. The colours drifted and shifted, getting faster until thousands of wires were flashing through multiple shades. They bled together, filling in the huge spreading shape of the star-beast with a hypnotic, spangled pulse. The colours began to cycle, aligning themselves into spirals and waves playing across its flanks.
Isis sat staring; next to her Gray and Merlin were open-mouthed. The wind picked up as the creature drifted higher. The rushing of the ground began to slacken; the upward avalanche faded to a trickle, then stopped. The last molten wires jointed into the alien’s body, and with a ripple of never-ending colour it started to move, more like a cloud than any kind of star-ship. They couldn’t look away, caught by its beauty, as it floated into the real clouds, tinting them with colours of storm and sunset.
While they watched, the dust slowly cleared from the air and the rest of the world became visible again. Isis glanced down for a moment and froze. She nudged Gray. “Look.”
Gray gasped, staring down. So far down.
Merlin tore his gaze from the sky. “Oh man!” He grabbed hold of Isis and Gray, gripping tightly to their arms.
They were sitting on top of a sheer column of rock, only just wide enough for the three of them. Everywhere else the ground level had dropped, and was now thirty metres below, leaving them perched high above a wide plain. The trees in this new land were standing drunkenly, leaning at odd angles. The grass and vegetation was ridged into long low mounds, like wrinkled skin. The alien had pulled itself from the ground, leaving only the coverings of soil and vegetation, which it no longer needed.
They stared, speechless, at the altered landscape. Dotted through the plain were other tall columns, and on the closest Isis could see the tiny shapes of people. Where the gates of the mining company had been, there was something like a vertically sided hill. On top of it a crowd of stunned protestors were still holding their banners.
“She kept all the people safe,” said Isis.
“And after everything we did to him,” said Gray.
Their smiles answered each other, cracking the dirt on their faces.