They waited two days for Fracta to return. At night, they stood for an hour on the plain, huddling in the warmth of their coats, staring up at the night sky while the snow geese shuffled at their feet. Before sunrise, they crept back into the cave to sleep.
While they waited, Wist told them the history of the Arcarals. He taught them some words in the language of the albatross, and explained the complex laws of the weather council. All that time, Jovius and the Heir slept and ate, slept and ate. Some dullness in their eyes made Lucy think of her grandfather in the nursing home, mumbling and sucking on his false teeth; all the time, dazed cries from other rooms.
On the second night, Lucy heard a clack clack on the cave wall. Fear clutched at her. She sat up, half-dazed, her pulse drumming in her head. ‘Daniel?’ she whispered, fumbling for him in the shadows.
Outside, she heard the rasping cry of the albatross. The aftermath of panic washed like a grey tide through her body. She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she could make out Daniel’s dim shape, rolled against the wall on the far side of the cave. Wist was sleeping next to him with his head tipped to one side and his mouth hanging open.
The albatross called again. With her hands still shaking, Lucy cut a low door in the wall. In its beak, the albatross held a broken-ended antenna, so long the bird had to step sideways into the cave.
‘R-rar-ark,’ said Lucy, hoping it meant thanks. The albatross looked sidelong at her. Lucy thought she saw laughter in its cold eye. She used her ice-razor to cut some Comclo into pieces.
‘R-rar-ark,’ it said, flinging pieces up and catching them again in its beak as they fell. Its smell – old fish and salt wind – made Lucy homesick for summer holidays: sticky skin, and the sunburn headaches that coloured everything neon. The air was so blank here. She longed even for the smells that crowded cities: exhaust fumes and cooking; even the rotting smell of mud and floodwaters. The albatross had turned in a circle twice and tucked its head into its chest. Lucy stretched out on the floor again, and settled back into the tedium of waiting.
Fracta arrived the next morning. Lucy had been asleep when she heard a scraping sound. For a moment, before she opened her eyes, she thought it was her father coming home without his keys, but she woke to the close glare of the cave. A space opened in the wall beside her and daylight poured in, blinding Lucy for a moment. Then she saw Fracta’s face peering in at them.
‘We are ready,’ she said.
Cold fingers squeezed Lucy’s lungs. ‘This is it,’ she whispered. Daniel was staring at her, the skin stretched tight over his cheekbones.
She had to hold the ice-razor in two hands to keep it steady enough to cut through the wall. Her breath caught at the top of her throat as they stepped outside into wide daylight. Night had given Alkazia a floating quality. Now, its sheer weight pressed on Lucy. She imagined the Kazia waiting there like a spider in a web of cold.
Fracta’s troop of Stratus – perhaps sixty of them – hovered on cloud boards a foot above the plain. They didn’t look left or right. At a word from Fracta, they divided. About ten of them fanned out and lined up behind Daniel. The rest swung behind Lucy. Close overhead, the snow geese circled. The sound of their wings echoed strangely in Lucy’s ears. All those hours in the cave, she had been waiting, expecting this. Still, now, she could hardly believe it had started.
Daniel climbed onto a cloud board with one of his Stratus. ‘Have you all got the liquid?’ he called. The Stratus lined up behind him raised both hands in a silent salute. They each held two flasks. In response, Daniel raised the matches. They made a rattling sound. Lucy took a little comfort from the fact his hands were shaking, too. She felt as though she was about to throw up.
‘As soon as one of you runs out of fuel, the next takes over. No spills, no gaps,’ he ordered, and the first Stratus eased off, flying close to the plain. The line stretched out. Lucy watched them go, feeling strangely bereft.
Fracta pulled Lucy onto her cloud board. Lucy’s nerves were stretched so tight Fracta’s touch sent shivers over her skin. She looked across the still, watchful faces of the Stratus. The light glinted on the blades of their ice-razors.
‘No-one speak!’ she said. Her voice sounded loud and distant, with the reverb of someone speaking through a microphone. ‘Work in pairs. One cut the prisoners free, the other carry them to the entrance. Wist will use his carpet to ferry them out of Alkazia.’
They skimmed towards Alkazia. Lucy tasted blood in her mouth. She had dug her teeth into her lip. They swept through the entrance. Lucy and Fracta stopped in the middle of the hall. Immediately, the Stratus broke into pairs and spread out along the walls, where they worked steadily and without pause. The silence was strange. Lucy could hear only little clinks as the Stratus set ice rectangles on the floor and carried the prisoners to the entrance.
Beside Lucy, Fracta kept twitching. She’s afraid, thought Lucy. Then she noticed how the Stratus kept flicking glances at her – Fracta was directing them all with tiny hand signals. Wist swept from Alkazia with the first prisoners stacked on his carpet. A moment later, he swept back through the entrance and started piling on more. Lucy thought of Daniel, working around Alkazia, spreading the clear liquid that would explode soon in colour and light. Only she was useless. The Protector! she thought, and hollowness spread through her. All the others were connected, held together by their tasks as by an invisible thread. Only she was floating.
Minute by minute, she became more conscious of the stairs, rising behind her. Soon they were all she could see. She slipped from the cloud board and crept across the hall. At first, she meant just to look at them. Then she thought she would stand on the first step. It was slippery; the stairs had no railing. She concentrated on the next step, and the next. The cold drew her irresistibly on. It made no sense, what she was doing. She knew that. Still, she kept climbing. She felt all those lost afternoons at home, waiting in her armchair, gather in her chest until she ached with longing – not to be useless, not to be alone.
At the top of the stairs, she looked back across the hall. The Stratus had gathered at the entrance. They must have finished cutting the prisoners out. Now they were passing them along a line, out of Alkazia. They had not noticed she had gone. In front of her, there was a grey door. It had no handle. I’ll just look, she thought, and then turn, climb back down the stairs.
The door opened. In front of Lucy, a room glittered so brightly it hurt her eyes. In the middle of the room, there rose a chair as big as a throne. On it sat a creature made entirely of ice, so still and radiant the light itself looked frozen in her depths.
Lucy’s blood drained through her feet. She was emptied out, unable to move. Even the Kazia’s hair was made of ice. It hung down her back in fine strands, each as sharp as a nail. Where her fingers should have been, she had icicles. She was holding her hands to a blaze of coldness, a fire of ice, with blue-white flames that did not flicker, though they hissed and spat. Beside the blaze, a Megalith crouched, shivering miserably, with a stack of blue-grey shards at its side.
‘More ice,’ said the Kazia. The Megalith flicked some shards onto the blaze. Cold poured off it, heavier than smoke. It struck Lucy, making her gasp. Fine cracks ran across the Kazia’s ice flesh, the surface of her shoulders and neck. The ice strands of her hair clattered against each other as she turned her head.
The Kazia’s face was massive and perfect. Her lips and cheeks were made of ice with blue depths behind its surface reflections. Her eyes were white, but deep in each eye there shone a light that was pure cold. As Lucy watched, flakes spread across the Kazia’s cheeks. The surface of her face cracked and froze into a new shape; her lips pulled back to reveal sharp-edged, translucent teeth.
‘The Earth one! The one they name Protector? When they see me, they cry out for you. This Megalith holds you as its last hope.’ The Kazia laughed with a sound of shattering glass.
Her laugh formed a white vapour, an ice-wraith, that drifted into Lucy’s face and bit like acid. Everything turned white for a moment. Lucy heard the sound of wind trapped in pine trees. A moment later, she recognised her own voice, crying out. Flinging up her hand, she scattered the air in front of her. The ice-wraith broke into wisps that faded to nothing.
‘Run!’ The Megalith lunged forwards, scattering shards across the floor. ‘If you are the Protector, run!’ Stopping between Lucy and the Kazia, it reared up on its hind paws and beat at the Kazia’s face.
The Kazia’s cry struck the Megalith full in the face. In the midst of its movement, the Megalith stopped. Ice spread across its flesh. It struggled for a moment, its muscles rippling like the tide beneath a frozen lake. Then, with a hissing sound, the ice sank into its flesh. The Megalith was frozen as though it had never lived.
Lucy heard the sound of something breaking. The Kazia was standing up. Her chair split. One armrest hit the floor in a smash of light. The Kazia’s foot swung up. A chunk of floor broke away and shattered. She was stepping around the Megalith. Her torso was a column of ice, formed around the twisted bodies of three Cloudians: Stratus, forced upright with their heads dragged back. They stared blindly, their faces distorted with pain.
The Kazia towered over Lucy. Cracks ran across her cheeks as she drew back her lips. Lucy saw the smooth grey hollow of her throat. It was impossible to breathe. She was falling down a black tunnel, her ears filled with roaring. At the end of that tunnel was the Kazia’s face.
Lucy clutched her ice-razor. All her awareness gathered at the edge of its blade. Automatically, her arm swung back. All the terror of the past days, the floating loneliness of the last year, drew together in her mind as her muscles tightened. A pause, as the Kazia’s ice-face printed itself on Lucy’s mind. Then with all her force, she catapulted her ice-razor at the Kazia’s face.