Lucy staggered up. Her legs were broken stilts. Daniel and Jovius lay in a tangle at her feet.
‘Run!’ Wist shoved Lucy in the back. Everything looked weirdly bright. Dragging Daniel, she followed Wist and Jovius up the steep side of the valley. Wist pounded the valley wall and a door swung open. Lucy pushed Daniel in front of her and fell in after him. Wist slammed the door behind them.
‘Safe,’ he said. ‘It can’t get in.’
Crouched on the floor, Lucy pressed her face into her knees. Alone in the sound of her breathing, she sat without moving and watched red wheels and sparks inside her eyelids until her breathing steadied.
‘I’m alright.’ He was sitting on the floor with his sleeve pulled back and his bare arm held out in front of him. Lucy saw a blue welt – smooth like plastic – in the soft skin under his wrist, and another near his elbow.
‘It’s numb,’ he said, watching his fingers clench and straighten. ‘I can’t feel anything there …’ He traced a finger down his forearm. ‘Is anyone else cold?’
‘Whole cloud’s frozen,’ said Wist. ‘Another stop on the Kazia’s touring schedule.’
‘They say she leaves Alkazia at night,’ Jovius whispered. ‘No-one knows how. But wherever she goes, the cloud freezes. No Cloudian survives it …’
‘That thing out there,’ said Lucy, ‘that’s the Kazia’s?’
Wist grunted. ‘Looks like it. Don’t usually see Varactors this far down. They need cold to live. Usually hunt in the high skies, the stratosphere.’
‘So it will tell the Kazia where we are?’
‘It’ll wait out there a while, I’d say. You saw it with the Nimbus. It delights in slaughter. It won’t be happy we got away.’
‘Those poor Nimbus.’ Jovius settled back into a more comfortable position, with his back against the wall. Lucy saw the Nimbus again, spinning down into emptiness, and cold sliced down her spine. She imagined the Varactor hovering over the cloud outside: that nauseous light everywhere.
‘It’s cold, alright,’ said Daniel.
For the first time, Lucy looked around her at their refuge. They were sitting in a room carved out of cloud. Its wall curved, forming a circle; its ceiling arched from a central pillar. The floor was hard ice where tiny crystals gleamed. It was so cold the air cut into Lucy’s hands. She had a feeling ice would creep over her skin if she stayed still too long.
‘Did you bring food?’ demanded Daniel. He had dropped his arm into his lap, and as he spoke he kept tracing his fingers over the welts.
‘Just Comclo.’ Wist pulled a box from his pocket, close-packed with white squares. Lucy saw again the Stratus in the kitchen, beating swathes of cloud into ribbons. She had forgotten Fracta. Now she imagined her, in the Citadel, watching the Arcarals carry Lucy into blue distance …
The Comclo was hard and sweet. It reminded Lucy of the barley sugar her father kept in the glove box to hand out on long car trips. Sucking on Comclo, she remembered all those summer drives when the car seat stuck to the back of her thighs and the day extended, hour after hour, endless as the paddocks they drove past, her mother dozing in the front seat while her father fixed his eyes on that place, far off, where the road rose into the sky.
All at once, that memory of carsickness and boredom made Lucy ache with nostalgia. To distract herself, she started roaming around the room, running her hands over the strange maps carved into the central pillar: the flight paths of migrating birds. She recognised snow geese and albatross, drawn from above with their wings outstretched. Two carved seats faced the pillar.
‘Why would anyone sit here?’ she wondered aloud. Sitting down on one of the seats, she saw a contraption, like a pair of binoculars, set into the pillar in front of her. It was hard at first to understand what she was seeing: colours, a flickering sheen over a shifting green-grey mass. The sea! Seagulls were scattered over it. Lucy imagined their hollow shrieks and the sound of waves, so like the shaking-out of sheets.
‘Daniel, look at this!’ she called.
Without lifting her eyes, she heard him stand up, sigh, and settle beside her. She heard his raw gasp: ‘Which ocean do you think it is?’ There was no way of telling but she understood why he had asked. It was strange to think they could be anywhere, like someone spinning a plastic globe and stopping it with a finger on the Pacific, the Atlantic, the North Sea, the Southern Ocean …
It was impossible to imagine where she lived from this distance. She kept picturing a toy-sized house surrounded by a plastic forest. The picture made her lonely, as if she was shrinking too. She sat back and rubbed the skin around her eyes.
‘Daniel? Where do you live?’
She thought he wasn’t going to answer. He was hunched over the binoculars as though he could pour himself through them. ‘Boarding school, really,’ he said at last. ‘My parents keep a place in the Cotswolds but they loathe it, they’re hardly ever there. Except my father says it gives us pedigree. Like horses.’
‘Where do they go?’
He shrugged. ‘Wherever it’s summer. My mother claims the heat’s good for my father’s lungs. Really, she likes to prove she can still carry off a bikini.’ He blew air through his nose. ‘She wears one to lunch.’
‘But there’s no summer left.’
He nodded. ‘And the government’s cancelled their travel credits. They’re in the Cotswolds now, no doubt working their way through a crate of whiskey.’
‘What did you do, anyway? To get kicked out of school?’
He sat back and smirked down at his hands. ‘I set fire to a hedge.’
‘A hedge!’ The answer took her by surprise. She had to keep herself from laughing. She thought back to the first time she had seen him: in the bus stop, with rain sliding down the walls and an envelope burning in his hands. ‘Why would anyone set fire to a hedge?’
Daniel was still watching his hands, folding the fingers in and out. ‘There was this one boy, Peter Watson. He had these pointy little teeth with gaps between them, like a cat. His family had been going to this school for five generations. Everyone thought that was fantastic – that his family had never managed one original idea.’
‘What’s that got to do with the hedge?’
He shrugged. ‘And the sports songs! They hardly even won a game. Everyone went round pretending they thought the school was so great when really they just thought they were great because they went there.’
‘No-one likes school.’ When Lucy looked around the room again, she was surprised to see how small it seemed. Outside, the wind made a hollow sound as it blew across the valley. Night was falling. The wall facing the valley glowed, orange and crimson, in the sun’s last rays. Was the Varactor still waiting out there, she wondered, in the dark? She shrank into her cloud coat.
Wist and Jovius were slumped against the wall, asleep. Their faces gleamed in the dark. Asleep, they looked more alien, sunk in their strangeness. Daniel was still crouched over the binoculars. She settled on the floor next to him, with her back to the pillar, and closed her eyes.
At once, she remembered waking at home, the morning after her mother left – how the silence had spread through the house. She had been aware of it even in the far rooms: armchairs and tables floating on it like ships in deep water. That morning, she and her father had faced each other in the kitchen, feeling an almost social awkwardness. At last he had said, ‘Toast?’ and she had nodded. After that, all their conversations had been single words. She had minded at first, she remembered. She had thought of the gap between school and sleep as a desert space she had to cross, but in the end she had grown used to silence. She had lost hours sitting in her armchair with a book on her lap. None of her friends at school knew that her mother had left. Now, when she tried to remember her friends’ faces, all she saw was a soft blur, which spread and filled her mind until, finally, she slept.