Lucy ran with a sense of freedom she had only felt in dreams of flight. She pushed off and flowed through air. In the long, floating pauses when, instead of landing, she kept on and on, everything seemed possible. The columns flashed past her, stride by stride. She reached the end of the hall, where the cloud creatures stood waiting.
‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ murmured Jovius. ‘There’s a column for every hundred years we Cloudians have lived in the clouds.’ He leant towards her, so close she could see the crystals in his skin. ‘They say it was built in a month. The Megaliths worked without stopping. When one of them died the rest kept working . . .’
Daniel stopped in front of Lucy. He was still holding his phone. He kept flicking glances at Wist and Jovius and then ducking his head to stare at the phone’s bright screen.
Wist fluttered one hand. ‘Ready?’
Daniel looked over his shoulder towards the trapdoor. He kept sucking little breaths through his nose; his lips looked stitched together with fishing wire. ‘You’re going with them?’
She nodded.
‘Alright,’ he whispered.
Wist brushed his fingers against the wall. A line of brightness darted from the floor to the ceiling. Then the wall slid apart, as smoothly as a wave returning to the sea. Where blank wall had been, there was a low arch. Beyond it, a spiral staircase rose out of view. The ceiling was low and the walls and stairs all shone with the same dull light. Bending double, Wist stepped beneath the arch and started climbing the stairs with Jovius close behind.
‘You’re sure?’ asked Daniel.
Lucy tried to smile but her cheeks felt stiff. Watching the cloud creatures pad up the stairs away from her, all the assurance she had felt, running across the hall, drained through her feet. She was held in a strange pause. Some inner mechanism propelled her forwards and, before she was ready, she saw her foot on the first stair. Daniel followed, stepping where she stepped.
‘The wall’s closed behind us,’ he breathed.
The staircase was so narrow Lucy had to run her hand along the wall to keep from falling. A great number of Cloudians must have done the same. There were hollows worn into it: one high enough for Wist, one low enough for Lucy, Daniel and Jovius. The sight of those two cloud creatures, stepping always away around the curve of the stairs, bit into Lucy’s mind. She was not afraid, exactly. Only the strangeness of this place, and so much light, pressed upon her eyes until she felt herself floating a little above her body.
‘What is this place?’ she shivered. The silence was so perfect, speaking felt like breaking something.
‘You are coming into the Great Palace of the Cloudians.’ Wist’s answer echoed down to her. ‘This palace is the ancient marvel of Cloudland. It would take more than your lifetime to find its many rooms.’
‘Then I hope you know where you’re going,’ she snapped.
The silence settled around them again. Wist led them past closed doors and empty rooms the size of wheat fields. One room had at its centre a soft form that rose, blossoming like a lung, and then sank back in the space of a single breath. They passed a room where the floor was a grid set over a hole as deep as a well – a white well filled with roars.
‘That’s the wind,’ said Jovius, ‘blowing into the palace.’ He told them there were rooms no-one had entered, hidden rooms that no-one had found. They climbed until Lucy was tired of wonder. Their footsteps made no sound on the stairs.
‘Is it always deserted?’
‘Usually, Weather Makers work in the high rooms. They’re all in hiding now, of course.’
‘Hiding from what?’ The silence, the still emptiness of this place, filled her with dread. It was so cold: a damp cold that made her bones ache.
There was a long pause. ‘We’re nearly there,’ was his only answer.
The next room they came to made Lucy forget her irritation. It was crowded with partly formed cloud creatures. She saw heads and shoulders, hands and arms, reaching out of the floor. The creatures’ eyes were closed but they kept moving, waving their arms to and fro with the slow sway of seaweed, so she couldn’t tell whether they were alive or caught in some air current.
‘The Life Garden,’ said Jovius. The room was filled with small, prickling sounds. ‘That’s the sound of them growing,’ he added.
‘Growing from what?’ Looking at those blind, striving creatures, Lucy thought of picking up her half-sister for the first time. Without opening her eyes, Lucy’s half-sister had arched back and wailed, stretching her toothless gob until her face disappeared in folds of skin. Now, looking into the Life Garden, Lucy felt the same twitch of pity and revulsion, the same weird sense that her hands were too big for her body.
‘Fragments,’ said Jovius. ‘Every decade, we come here for the Planting. We break off some piece of ourselves and plant it here. We Cumulus, I mean – the Cirrus have a Life Garden high in the palace. Of course, the Stratus plant on their own level.’
He pulled off his cloud boot and showed them the rough-edged stumps of three toes.
‘But doesn’t it hurt?’ asked Daniel, craning over Lucy’s shoulder.
‘Oh yes – yes, of course. It hurts dreadfully.’ Jovius looked almost curiously at his toes and pulled on his boot again.
‘Which of them did you . . .’ Lucy couldn’t think of the word. She pointed into the room. ‘Which are yours?’
‘Oh! We can’t know! It wouldn’t do to feel attached! The Cumulus belong equally to each other, you understand.’ Jovius nodded into the room. ‘These are half-grown.’
‘Aren’t they cold?’ whispered Lucy, unable to look away. Something in the creatures’ helplessness made her queasy. She was almost relieved when Wist ordered them on.
‘Disgusting,’ muttered Daniel, gesturing at the room. ‘What’s he talking about, anyway – Cumulus and Cirrus?’ He pronounced Cumulus and Cirrus with the hiss that Jovius added to the end of every word, so Lucy knew he’d never heard the cloud names before.
‘They’re different kinds of cloud,’ she answered. ‘Cirrus are those thin clouds you see high up, before a change in weather. Cumulus are fat –’ She stopped. Daniel was watching her with one side of his mouth pulled back in a sneer.
‘So you got an A for that project?’
‘Have you ever even looked at clouds?’
He shrugged. ‘They all look the same.’
She opened her mouth to argue.
‘Enough talking,’ called Wist. ‘Leave those rooms alone.’
Lucy looked one last time at the Life Garden and started climbing again.
The next room they came to was full of glittering light. A long, plain, narrow room, it had on its far wall two windows open to the sky. After the eeriness of the Life Garden, Lucy was relieved to see the free air. She paused by the door. The windows showed yellow masses of cloud, rising one upon another to a blue horizon.
‘Can you see Earth?’ Daniel shoved past her and ran into the room.
At once, the walls seemed to break into pieces, filling the room with white beating light. Panic exploded in Lucy’s head. It was the noise: blundering thuds and wails. She had a confused impression the cloud they were standing on had given way. The next instant, she saw the room was full of birds: wide-winged, snake-necked creatures, all swooping on Daniel. They had piled onto his head and shoulders; they were clapping their wings against his face, their wings rising and falling like colourless flames. He staggered under the weight of them.
‘Wait!’ Lucy flung herself into the room. The birds rose around her, shaking out light. She couldn’t tell where Daniel was, or the door. She flailed her arms. Their wings buffeted her chest. It was like fighting a stormy sea.
A whistling cry cut through the room. At once, the air stilled, and the room formed itself around Lucy again. She heard an echo of those beating wings in the blood thudding through her head. She was standing next to Daniel in a small, clear space. He was trembling, clutching his scratched hands to his chest. Around the two of them, covering the floor, the white birds waited, heads tilted, each of them watching Lucy and Daniel out of one pale, cold-looking eye.
‘Slowly.’ Facing the room, Lucy and Daniel inched back. Behind them, the birds cleared a narrow path. In front of them, the birds closed over the place where they had been.
They stepped back through the door and huddled behind Wist and Jovius, breathing fast. Lucy’s hands started shaking, and her knees went wobbly with relief.
‘It is bad luck to wake the snow geese,’ said Wist.
‘Why?’
Jovius puckered his lips and shook his head, setting all his chins shaking. ‘They have such a distance to go. If they set off now . . .’
‘Wait here to see if they sleep again,’ said Wist.
‘It’s hardly our fault,’ said Daniel. ‘They should have warned us. Stupid birds.’
‘You’re covered in feathers.’ Lucy picked one off his jumper.
‘Well, you’ve got some in your hair.’
In the room, the birds shifted restlessly. One of them started up, clapping its wings, and ran over the other geese in long, awkward strides. A bird cried out – the sound tore at Lucy’s chest – and swooped out the window. One after another, the birds followed. All the noise and unrest in the room unravelled into sky, until the room was bare and full of light again.
‘Bad omen.’ Wist pushed past Lucy and continued climbing, his face a mask. Jovius threw Lucy one pleading look and followed him.
‘It’s not our fault,’ said Daniel again to the empty room.
Lucy thought of those birds beating across the sky, throwing their cry into its silence. Suddenly, she imagined the air around her ringing out one continuous note above the pitch of hearing. The skin on her arms tightened, thinking of those birds beating through emptiness, seeing Earth spread out beneath them like a map. She remembered their eyes, as cold and unfeeling as all they saw.
‘They fly from Siberia, don’t they?’
Daniel shrugged. ‘How should I know?’
After that, they climbed for a long time without speaking. The panic drained out of Lucy and left her weary. Her bones felt heavy. She climbed, one step after another, without thinking.
At last, Wist led them into a room the shape of an elevator.
‘Where are you taking us?’ demanded Lucy.
Instead of answering, he shuffled her forwards to face the wall and pushed Daniel after her. Daniel stood rubbing his shoulder where Wist’s hand had touched him. Glancing back, Lucy saw Wist scrabbling in the floor with his long toes. All at once, the floor reached up to grab them.