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  “We have to get Truth,” gasped Greg. “We’ll get Truth and then we make for Galgala. They won’t follow us across the desert.”

  Elijah didn’t argue. Any plan was better than nothing and at least his father’s plan involved surviving the night. Before they’d even reached the house, his father was bellowing for Truth.

  She stepped outside slowly, with a hand on her shoulder and a knife to her throat. Their neighbour Margaret wielded the blade. Densin’s mother. Her eyes were hard and her shoulders set. She had made up her mind about this. She knew how far she was willing to go.

  Elijah and his father skidded to a halt. Behind them, they could hear the roar of the crowd fast approaching.

  “The Seer for your daughter, Greg,” Margaret said, her hand shaking against Truth’s throat. Elijah didn’t know how Truth wasn’t crying. She was nine years old. Most other nine year olds with a knife put to their throat would be crying. Truth’s eyes flashed with defiance. Around her neck, his mother’s pendant glinted in the evening sunlight.

  Elijah looked at his father and saw true horror. In Greg’s eyes he could see a calculation being done. Elijah was as good as dead anyway. He should take the deal. But he wouldn’t. Elijah knew it. His father was a pillar, he would shatter before he bent to that kind of pressure. And behind them the crowd came ever closer. Elijah knew how this would end. It would end with both of Greg’s children bleeding on the ground, but if he was gone there was no reason to take Truth. If he was gone, they would be safe. It was then that he was blinded by light. The Wyvern landed inches from him, its reptilian head staring at him with huge, desperate eyes. Elijah didn’t know why it had come back. Maybe it was because it had sensed a kindred spirit. Maybe there was a sacred bond between Seer and Wyvern. Or maybe the box had damaged its wing and it had fallen out of the sky and this was all dumb luck. Well, beggars can’t be choosers. Elijah wasn’t going to wait for any smarter luck to show itself. He leapt atop the Wyvern. With one great beat of its wings it was in the air. Behind him, the thunder of the crowd reached them and Greg was consumed. Below him, he saw Margaret’s hand sag and the knife drop.

  That should have been how it all ended. But the mindless rage of the mob had taken hold below. If you were not with them you were against them. If you did not hate the Seers, you were Seers and if they would be denied their victim they would create for themselves a new one. The world spun away below and the details were lost to Elijah but still he saw everything as if he hovered just inches from the ground, his mind filling in the grisly details. His father was pulled to his feet, a man on either side of him, blood flowing down a ruined face. He heard Truth scream and he heard his own voice join hers. Pure hopelessness filled him. The wind pummelled his face, plucking tears from his eyes with ease. There was a flash of a dagger and a gurgle of ruby blood. Someone thought to cover Truth’s eyes. But the scene burned itself into Elijah’s retinas. The filth of the street below. The blood gushing from his father’s throat as his last few gasps left him. The terrible stillness of his body. He screamed then and deep inside him, in the depths of his soul, he felt something change. Then the scene disappeared, the people were gone and Elijah was standing in a vast green valley.

  Chapter 3 – The Skylands

  Elijah knew he wasn’t there. The grass was too green; the sky too blue. The sun shone soft rays over him, but he did not feel it. He did not feel much of anything. Below his feet, tiny blades of grass passed through him. In front of him, a man and a woman laughed and smiled and had that aura of joy that makes all passers-by think that they could stand to be a little less in love. Elijah had the intense feeling that he was intruding.

  The man’s face looked oddly familiar, but he couldn’t place him. His eyes were a dark brown, almost black and his hair a bright blonde. He had a strange hooked nose that twisted every smile into a sneer. The woman was unfamiliar to him and had brown hair and eyes that sparkled in the sun. They both wore old fashioned clothing. She in a long, silk gown; white, except for the grass stains. He wore smooth black trousers and a strangely cut jacket with bright badges pinned to his sleeves.

  “And where would you go?” the man was saying, his smile an ugly foreign thing upon his face.

  “Anywhere at all!” The woman said. “That would be the fun of it! We could put everything behind us and just go somewhere where no one knows us, somewhere where we can be anyone we want.”

  The man laughed easily and kissed the woman’s cheek. “And why would you want to do that Isabel?”

  Elijah shifted uncomfortably. He felt like he should be looking away. He also had the very uncomfortable feeling that he was forgetting something.

  “It’s just your job, I feel like I never see you.”

  “I know, but it is important work. You remember what it was like during the War on Time, the death, the poverty, the utter confusion of it all. We all agreed to the Silence and someone has to implement it.” He shrugged. “That person just happens to be me.”

  “It must be such an awful job though!” Isabel insisted. “Taking someone’s tongue! It’s just so brutal. There has to be another way, if only for your sake.” She laid her hand on his, squeezing slightly.

  “There is, but it is far worse.”

  Isabel cupped her lover’s face in her hands. “Would you take my tongue if I was a Seer too?”

  Elijah stared at the ground uneasily.

  The man grinned. “Well, if I did that what would I kiss you with?”

  He leaned in to emphasise the point, but Isabel put her hands on his shoulders separating them, a small smile playing across her lips.

  From the grass in front of her, she plucked a daisy, not yet in bloom. She closed her eyes and whispered something and just for a second a rainbow of colours surrounded her. Then the daisy bloomed.

  The man’s reaction was immediate. He pushed her away, staggering to his feet. “You’re a… a…!” He stuttered, his eyes disbelieving, his arms hanging limply at his sides. The newly bloomed daisy fluttered to the ground. Elijah hated him for that. He hated him for turning on her so quickly.

  “It’s ok Tommen,” Isabel said, looking up at him. “I can control it, there’s no danger.”

  “You’ve been lying to me this whole time,” Tommen gasped.

  “Please, sit down with me…”

  “You’re a liar!” Tommen shouted, spinning on his heels.

  Elijah followed him, a large part of himself hoping the man tripped on a tree root and cracked his head open on a stray rock. Then the ground began to shake. Elijah didn’t feel it, but he smiled with a certain dark delight as Tommen was thrown to the ground. But it wasn’t just Tommen. The trees fell too and the dirt itself cracked and tore, leaving scars of soil across the valley. The roar of the earthquake screamed in Elijah’s ears. The birds flew high, screaming cries of panic as they shot away from the shaking ground.

  But the ground followed them. Far in the distance, further than the mind can easily imagine, huge towers of rock and earth began to rise out of the ground. They rose slowly, but inexorably, as if gravity was fighting back but not doing a very good job. They were massive, even at this distance, miles long and at least half a mile in depth, huge obelisks of crumbling stone and dirt, frozen as they rose but leaving a long trail of rocks and stone plummeting to the ground in their wake. The wind picked up, as if eager to contribute to the chaos, whipping Tommen’s jacket wide. Behind them, Isabel had started screaming, but Tommen was laughing hysterically, uncontrollably.

  “There you are my love!” he roared. “Somewhere where no one will ever know you!”

  The valley fell away and Elijah was flying again. It was like he had just blinked. Nothing had changed. Below him, the people were the same tiny, angry ants. He gasped in shock and despair as the memories came back to him. His father was dead. Far below him, he could still see his body as a shock of crimson in the ruined city of Prazna. He felt like being sick. Within an hour, his entire life had been rip
ped away from him. His family were gone, his home was gone and now he was to be a fugitive for the rest of his, in all probability, very short life. And he had looked into the past which meant that now he really was a Seer. There was no denying that. It’s not every day that chunks of the earth decide to pick up and move their home to somewhere more elevated. There was no avoiding the power now, its hold on him would only grow stronger. His status as an outcast would only worsen. Like that even mattered now.

  Around him, the wind whipped itself into a frenzy and Elijah clung to the smooth crystal of the Wyvern’s skin as it swooped and soared through the sky. Below him the inhospitable desert that was the Earthlands began to spread out, slowly colonising the horizon. But Elijah wasn’t interested in what lay below him. He craned his head upwards to stare at the colossal floating islands of the Skylands. Vast monoliths of stone and dirt and rock stretched above him, miles across. That was where he was going. His father was dead and he would cut out his own eyes before he saw the Skylanders hurt Truth. They would have taken her to their Testing Centre, to see if she was a Seer. That’s where he would find her.

  The Wyvern seemed to read his mind, flying higher and higher towards the islands, as if eager to get back to the home of its masters. Elijah clung to the beast, his knuckles white, his stomach twisted in pain and his father’s face hovering before his eyes. He couldn’t believe he was gone. He couldn’t believe they’d taken Truth. None of this felt real, as if he was living a nightmare. Clouds flew past as below him the earth receded into the distance. The wind whipped around him, becoming fiercer as they climbed higher and higher into the purple evening sky. His mouth was dry and he could smell the sweat on the Wyvern. Its smooth crystal scales glowed beneath his arms as he clung desperately to the creature’s serpentine neck.

  Abruptly, the Wyvern pulled up, almost flinging Elijah off its back as it stopped, hovering in mid-air. Elijah lifted his head an inch from where he’d had it buried in the creature’s smooth back. Its wings beat slowly in mid-air as it hung there. It appeared to have plateaued. Elijah breathed a sigh of relief, relaxing for a moment. Then suddenly it darted leftwards, almost throwing him off again, moving faster than ever before and causing the wind to howl even louder around them. Suddenly it stopped, almost as soon as it had started. Elijah scrambled for grip aboard the creature’s slippery back, trying desperately to cling on. But the crazed creature didn’t seem so concerned. It began stalking around the place, shaking as it went, each shake threatening to throw Elijah off.

  ‘Wait a minute.’ Elijah thought suddenly. ‘It’s walking.’

  With a sigh of relief, he slid off the Wyvern’s back on to the soft grass below. He lay down on it, spread-eagled, feeling the blades of grass run through his hands. He rolled around, trying to reassure his stomach that he really was on solid ground again – and almost fell to his death as his legs met air. He scrambled back from the edge of the island, breathing hard. Slowly, he approached the edge, belly to the ground, and looked down. Below him, Prazna seemed like just another grain of sand in the desert. Albeit, a big, clumpy looking grain of sand. The people moved around the city like insects, infesting it. He breathed hard, edging back. Then the Wyvern was there, nudging him insistently.

  “There’s not a chance,” Elijah gasped, clinging all the harder to the ground. “I’m never getting on top of you again.” But the Wyvern didn’t stop and finally Elijah looked up, just in time to see a group of children staring at him. They gazed at the two of them from the third storey building of a skyscraper which loomed about a hundred feet away. Their skin was pale and their mouths hung open in a grotesque expression of curiosity and fear. But worst of all were their eyes. Those terrible eyes could see him shining.

  And now it was his turn to push the Wyvern.

  “Shoo!” he shouted. “Get away!”

  The Wyvern didn’t need to be told twice. With a beat of its great, flowing wings, it launched itself from the edge of the island, careering down like a stone before swooping up again to rise even higher than the Skylands. Elijah didn’t watch it go. Seer or no Seer, ever since the Skylands’ population had swelled into the millions entering it had been banned. Breaking that law was punishable by slavery in the mines. He needed to get out of there, fast. Running towards the almost solid wall of skyscrapers, he had no time to look where he was going as he darted between the huge buildings, trying to get away from the searching gaze of the children. His feet hit a red brick road as he entered the city and suddenly the world went dim. He started, pulling himself into an alley, staring. The sun was gone.

  ‘It was the skyscrapers’, he realised abruptly.

  He gazed all around himself, marvelling at the thousands of hundred storey buildings that threatened to block out the sun. All around him they stretched, like a thousand porcupine quills, every window lit, stretching up for miles into the distance. Elijah leaned against the wall of the alley, staring at the perfectly smooth towers all around him- and almost fell into it. Beneath his body, he felt the wall flex and bend as he leaned into it. He stared in wonder, putting his hand against it and feeling it pulse beneath his palm. It was alive.

  He looked up and saw yet another skyscraper towering above him. Then he realised. There were no walls up here. There were only gaps between the buildings. Every square inch of space was consumed by the skyscrapers. Where the Wyvern had landed must have been the only square of open space for miles. He guessed even the Skylanders must be nervous about building right on the edge of a floating island. He looked up at the buildings. Each one was a uniform greenish grey, almost all of them square at the bottom while slowly becoming rounder and tapering to a spike at the top. Although there were a few exceptions, for the most part they were all the same. Obviously no sense of originality up here.

  He glanced around the corner of the building he was leaning against, expecting to see a thousand Guardians racing towards the spot where he hid, but none came. The kids had probably never seen a Seer before. He was safe, for now. He looked back at the streets and then noticed something. They were completely bare. He couldn’t see the sun, but he guessed it must be almost mid-evening at this point. In Prazna, people would be long out of work. But here, there was nobody. It was completely deserted. He shuddered unconsciously. It was unnatural. But there could hardly be a better time for a Seer to visit the Skylands. Moving quickly, he slipped around the corner and began racing down a long straight road, created by a uniform four meter gap between the spiked buildings. He had no idea where he was going but he was perfectly prepared to search this whole damn island if that’s what it took to find Truth. He knew that the Skylanders had only one centralised Testing Centre and that it was on this island. Everyone knew that, parents told their children horror stories about it. Don’t do anything bad or they’ll take you to the Testing Centre. Don’t get in fights or they’ll take you to the Testing Centre. Eat your vegetables or they’ll take you to the Testing Centre. Parents were cruel that way.

  But nutritional values aside, it was true that anyone arrested for even the most minor crime was brought to the Testing Centre. Nobody wanted to accidently send a Seer to prison without cutting out their tongue first. Of course it wasn’t that the Testing Centre itself was particularly grim, although the rumours didn’t exactly paint a pretty picture of it. It was the fact that it was there that you were most likely to meet a Seer. Well, at least he didn’t have to be afraid of that. Just everything else.

  The city was silent except for a steady thrum of sound which seemed to come from the buildings themselves. There was nothing else. Not a bird in the sky, or even a breath of wind dared to enter its urban depths. So Elijah was surprised when he turned a corner and saw a girl walking towards him. She was his own age and had brown hair. She also wore grey and had a streak of blood on her upper lip. Her eyes widened as she saw Elijah. Elijah looked down at himself and cursed. He wore a brown robe around the upper half of his body, with grubby white woollen trousers covering him from the w
aist down. And they did not wear robes in the Skylands. For a second, the beat of the buildings seemed to rise and then he was thrown against one of them. His head hit the strange living rock with an unnatural squelch. His last thought before darkness took him was that being killed by a building was the last thing he’d expected to happen today.

  Chapter 4 – The Drum

  Twelve hours earlier.

  Sybil woke to the sound of the Siren howling through the morning air. She did not understand why they had to use the same sound for everything. There were nicer ways to wake up in the morning. Stumbling out of bed, she listened briefly for the ever familiar beat of the Pulse. Allowing it to get louder within her mind, she pushed the sound towards the walls, twisting it around them with a thought, effectively soundproofing the room. That was better.

  She showered and changed quickly into her uniform, grey trousers with an equally grey shirt, and stopped briefly to examine herself in the mirror. She smoothed her short, brown hair and wiped a drop of blood from her upper lip. The nosebleeds were getting more frequent. She wasn’t sure what it meant, which made it worse. Her forehead creased with concern, she strode towards the door. It receded into the floor with a familiar shloop as she approached, revealing the long flight of stairs below. Someday, they had to invent something that meant she didn’t have to go up and down thirty three flights of stairs every day. Either that or she would end up with bloody feet to match her bloody nose.

  She leapt quickly down the spiral staircase. She was sixteen, so she lived alone on the thirty third floor, her Raisers having long since completed their job assignment. It was good, it meant no unnecessary attachments, nothing to distract her from her work in the Drum. She exited the building and joined the throngs of people flooding the main street. It was brighter than normal this morning and she squinted against the glare of the sun. Her friends in the Guardians had told her that beyond the Skylands, the sun shone so brightly you could hardly see, although she was not ready to believe them. The Pulse in her mind skipped a beat and before her ears even heard it she knew news was coming. Above her, the air crackled as a voice reverberated through it, bouncing off the skyscrapers on either side of the wide street.