Read Online Cloudland by Lisa Gorton - Free Book Online Page B

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 triedto remember her friends’ faces, all she saw was a soft blur, which spread and filled her mind until, finally, she slept.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Waking
    Lucy heard a scrabbling sound and sprang awake. For a moment, forgetting where she was, she thought it was a mouse burrowing through newspaper. Then a match caught and Daniel’s face floated from the dark.
    He touched her shoulder. ‘I saw a city. Through these binoculars. Istanbul, maybe. All the squares were flooded. There were people on rooftops, cooking on smoky fires.’ For a moment, Lucy tasted the smoke of cooking fires: a bitter taste of longing. ‘They were fighting – fights all over the city. They had rigged up searchlights. I saw this man in the water, trying to swim to a boat. A raft, really, loadedwith people. He was holding a child, trying to keep it above the water.’
    Daniel pressed his fingers against his eyes. ‘They shot him. I saw this curl of blood in the water, black under the lights.’ He glared at Lucy. ‘They could have saved the child. They didn’t need to leave the child.’
    The match died. Daniel stretched and staggered sideways. Lucy guessed he’d been sitting up all night, watching Earth in a haze of rain. He kept speaking without looking at her, mumbling so she could hardly catch the words. ‘I thought you were making it up. When you said there wasn’t anywhere safe.’
    She heard him stumble across the room. He lit another match. He was facing her. Behind him, his shadow leapt up the door.
    â€˜Well?’ he whispered as the match died. ‘Do we go?’
    As the light of the flame faded, Lucy saw it was almost morning: the room was filling with grey-blue light. She pictured pushing the door open and stepping into an immensity of sky. Her heart bumped against her throat. ‘What about the Varactor?’
    He nodded. ‘But it’s the first chance we’ve had.’
    Wist’s head slipped sideways. He made a snuffling sound. Lucy and Daniel waited, watching each other.
    â€˜That morning in the Citadel, when you thought I’d disappeared? I went into the kitchen. Those servants trapped me; they were going to keep me. And then one of them, Fracta, said she’d help us fight the Kazia. But she said if we tried to run …’ Lucy drew in a breath.
    â€˜So where is she?’ Daniel darted looks around the room as if he expected to see Fracta creeping from the shadows.
    â€˜I think we left her behind when we went on the Arcarals.’
    â€˜So we should leave now, before she finds us.’ Daniel slid the latch across and eased the door open.
    Lucy glanced at Wist and Jovius, asleep still in the shadow of the door. ‘I don’t know,’ she whispered. She looked through the door at a sky so vast she pictured it emptying overhead into the whole universe. Daniel had stepped outside. The light glazed his hair. He slid down the side of the valley onto a path sunk in steel-coloured shadow. Loneliness tugged at Lucy’s chest. She imagined herself left behind, fading into nothingness. In a daze, she followed Daniel. The cloud was icy underfoot. At the bottom of the valley, the air felt heavy and damp.
    â€˜You can see where the Varactor hit.’ Danielpointed at a gash across the path. They both looked in the same instant at the sky: a pale green stretch of silk, decorated by a few rags of cloud. They had to string their conversation across their strange, floating strides.
    â€˜Where are we