Concord Valley 2017 (version 1)

Prologue

Three thousand years ago, the world was silent. Not a blade of grass grew from its soils; not a fish swum in its seven seas; not a horse, nor a deer, nor a newborn lamb wandered its meadows and plains. All that was, and had always been, was the light of the sun and the dark of the night.

Seeing this deprived and barren world, the father of a goddess gestured to his child.

“What world is this, lacking as it does life and light and goodness? Why do people not build and live their lives on this world as they have done on our other? Why do forests not sprawl and grow across the land?”

The goddess thought for seven days and seven nights. Eventually she came up with a plan. She would make the planet lush, and green, and full of life.

First, she created air on this world. No longer would the skies be full of fumes unbreathable by man and animal and plant alike. Instead, the fresh air would blow in from the sea every morning, carrying rain and clouds to spread water and form rivers on the continents and islands of the world.

Lakes began to emerge. Rivers started to flow their courses from mountain to ocean. Ponds, and marshes, and fens, and swamps all began to grow steadily out of the ground.

The goddess was pleased. But there was still much more work to do.

The next day, she set to work once again. On this day, for the rains had wet the soils of the world, she sent down the smallest forms of life. Germs and insects grew and lived their short lives in plentitude. This world was theirs.

But there was a problem. The insects and germs had nothing to eat, but themselves and the soils. The goddess deliberated before coming up with an ingenious solution.

On the next day, she cast down seeds to the planet. Seeds for trees, for flowers, for bushes, for grass, for ferns. The land was laden with shrubs and plants; the oceans, algae and kelp. Now, the insects had something to eat. They could prosper and survive on the surface of the world.

But there was still something missing. The goddess thought deeply within herself before finding her next solution.

The next day, she set about populating the world with larger creatures. Fish, who swam in the oceans of the world. Birds, who claimed the sky for their own, and ruled the winds like no other creature. Mammals and reptiles, who walked regally upon the land, masters of the plains, deserts and mountains.

Now, the world was truly alive. The goddess spoke to her father.

“Father, I have worked my hardest to make this world safe for our people.”

He was impressed. “My daughter, you have succeeded greatly in your efforts. Our people will be able to prosper and succeed on this world, thanks to you.”

And so, the goddess created and cast forth people to the world. They landed from the sky, and immediately set about building and creating farms, mines, cities, boats and roads.

The goddess looked upon her creation and smiled. But there was something wrong. Not with her world; the world was certainly created perfectly. The problem was in herself.

“My daughter,” began the goddess’ father, “Your hard work has made you weary. You are most sick indeed. And I have not the medicines you require to regain your strength”

Fearing that his daughter might succumb to illness, the father of the goddess made a difficult decision.

“My daughter,” began the goddess’ father, “I have decided to freeze you in time. Thus, when our people have learned our story and know the medicines to heal you, weary as you are, you might be awoken from time by them, and restored to your full strength.”

And so, the father froze his daughter in time, so that she might wait until her people could heal her. He buried her frozen body in the ground so that she might never be found until it was the right time.

But without his daughter, the father grew weary himself, and lonesome too. And as time passed, he found himself bored by the antics of the people of the world, as they diligently worked and built a new future for themselves.

And lo, he too decided to freeze himself in time, so that when his daughter was cured, she might find him; then the family would be reunited once more. His body was buried deep under the ocean, where it could only be found if the people of the world turned to fish.

And so, the father and the daughter, frozen in time, slept.

Chapter 1 - The Sunhat

The dark-haired girl pulled out a chair from under the desk in column C, row 28, and sat down, disguising her yawn behind the noise of shuffling paper and pens from all over the hall. The morning sunlight streamed through the windows, giving the whole room an orange glow. Two shining silver moons sparkled through separate windows in the hall. The dust, kicked up by the moving of chairs as the other people in the room sat down, sparkled in the sunbeams like stars in the night sky. The sun shone through the windows onto the back of the dark-haired girl, and began to warm her gently in her seat.

But after a few minutes, the rays of light began to become more oppressive than relaxing, less like a gentle touch of warmth, and more like the piercing stare of a strict teacher - the very same strict teacher, a certain Mrs. Rogers who was slowly making her way down each individual row and column handing out booklets of paper to each student in the hall.

The girl, awaiting the delivery of her exam paper, tried to look around in the hall to see if the teacher was anywhere near her. Unwilling to look behind her, for fear of being told off for attempting to cheat, or of drawing the unwanted attention of any invigilators, her efforts were in vain.

Suddenly, and with a slap, the exam script was almost thrown onto the girl’s desk, slightly startling her. History, unit three. Thursday 22 May 6008. Time allowed: 2 hours. Do not attempt to communicate with other candidates during the exam - you will be disqualified. Glancing up for a brief moment, she heard Mrs. Rogers, who had returned to the front of the hall, begin to read out the instructions on the front of the paper. Unsure of the point, her mind whirled light years away before she’d even reached the end of the first sentence ‘Answer every question.’

Really, she thought, it was a kind of punishment. The teachers worked the students for three whole years, pressing their noses against the grindstone, stressing day after day that the exams that they would sit would make or break their futures. And after the stress of the revision period, when they were either completely confident in their abilities, or had resigned themselves to failure, both prepared for the reality of the paper in front of them, the teachers would read out exactly that which they had in front of them anyway. It put the students to sleep; the same rules and regulations that had been read out before every exam, boring them and killing their concentration at the last, most crucial moment. It was cruel, the girl thought.

Idly making a last check of her pockets to check that she had no forbidden materials on her, notes, phones, rail tickets which might for some unknown reason have the entire markscheme written on them, her mind flung itself in a totally different direction to whatever nonsense Mrs. Rogers was on about now; for this evening would be a very special and most important evening indeed, one which she’d been looking forward to for quite some time.

“You may now begin the test,” barked Mrs. Rogers. The girl’s brain suddenly snapped back into gear; she reached for a pen and a sheet of answer paper.

Please print
Surname: MARTIN
First name(s): NAOMI HARRIET
School: SOUTH ISIDIS GALLOWAY HIGH SCHOOL

Naomi Martin opened the front page of the exam paper, skipping quickly past “This page intentionally left blank”, and laid her eyes on the first question.

‘Explain the historical significance of the Shrine of the Arzine at Melbourne’s Landing.’

‘Oh, easy!’ Naomi thought, and her mind reeled back into the past two years of school to find the answer.

***

It was nearly a year prior, a hot June day. The kind of day where the sentinel sun glares down on the world, threatening anyone who dares to challenge it by stepping outside. The birds tweeted from atop the palm trees, as though they were trying to cool themselves down by blowing the air. A crowd of people were gathered by a stall selling ice creams, and a similar number near a vending machine advertising ‘Ice Cold Water’. Despite the oppressive heat, tourists certainly weren’t discouraged from making the trip out, preferring to fend off the sun with hats and sunglasses, shorts and t-shirts, and enough bottles of water to fill a small lake.

The coach pulled up into a car park on the outskirts of the city of Melbourne’s Landing, tires almost audibly sizzling on the tarmac. The midday sun beat down on it, threatening to melt it where it stood. The door of the vehicle opened, and one by one students jumped down onto the road. Each new student was met with a blast of hot air from the sky, followed by an immediate sigh of ‘Oh, it’s so hot!’

Naomi Martin stepped down from the coach onto the car park and into the oppressive heat. Trying to ignore the radiator below her feet, she opened her backpack, and pulled out a pair of sunglasses.

“Oh, aye, it’s boiling!” came a familiar voice behind her. Turning, she saw the flash of wavy brown hair, pushed back by a white sweatband, that signified a certain Anya Fielding.

“It sure is,” replied Naomi. She checked her phone. “It’s half eleven, and it’s already twenty-eight degrees!”

As if in response, a boy behind them placed his hand on the metal body of the coach, then immediately recoiled in pain from the heat.

“We’re going to die…” Anya said jokingly.

The pair followed the rest of the group, chatting idly about how hot it was, and how boring the rest of the day was, and ‘oh, have you seen how long this workbook is that we have to fill out?’

They passed a large, ornate, red sign, with text in golden calligraphy.

‘Shrine of the Arzine,’ Naomi read aloud.

Anya took a swig of water from a bottle. “Can you believe wars were fought over this place?” she asked, swallowing a mouthful. “What a dump! This isn’t the only place in the world it’s hot enough to fry eggs, you know!”

“It’s far too hot,” Naomi complained. “They should have cancelled the trip. Come another time or something,” she added.

Anya put on her best indignant face and began an interrogation in a sarcastic drawl. “Cancel this trip? The trip to the most important shrine in the country? Are you nuts?”

Two hours later, Naomi and Anya stood side-by-side at the railing surrounding the shrine itself. The centerpiece of the plaza was a spiralling helix, made of wood painted red like the sign and buildings that lined the square. In the center lay a marble statue, ornate as though it were sculpted by a master. The sun shone between the beams of wood, scattering light on the face, revealing it to be the figure of a sleeping woman, or young girl.

“There she is,” whispered Naomi.

“You know that’s not the real Elesa, don’t you, Nammy?”

Naomi shot Anya an indignant yet reproachful look. “Of course, I’m not that stupid. None of that stuff is true, anyway. I’m not a kid anymore.”

Anya apologised. “Hey, come look at this, Naomi!” She dashed off through the crowd.

Naomi waited a second to make sure she wasn’t going to come back, before awkwardly putting her hands together.

“Elesa,” her prayer began, “You above all know the importance of love. Why do I have no-one? Please, fulfil my heart’s desire and let me fall in-”

She stopped abruptly, having noticed something odd. From across the square, staring, was a girl with long blonde hair wearing the most enormous floppy sunhat Naomi had ever laid her eyes on. And instead of staring at the monument in the centre of the plaza, her eyes were fixed on Naomi.

The sun had began its slow descent towards the horizon when the group finally made their way back to the coach. The heat had decreased to a more bearable level, and whilst it was still warm, no longer were there hordes of people outside the ice cream stand, and the vending machine looked like it had a few minutes of peace to enjoy alone. The birds had begun to stop singing, as they took up roost for the night, and the sun shone only gently through the trees that lined the car park.

As the coach driver turned the ignition, Naomi scanned the masses of people leaving the temple complex. It seemed like all the people in the world had turned out today to visit the temple. School groups and old couples alike poured out of the gates like a river.

Suddenly her eyes went wide. “Anya! Anya! Look!”

“What, Nammy? What is it?”

“It’s that girl!” she replied frantically. “The one who was looking at me!”

“The one with the blonde hair and the hat?” Anya asked to confirm. “I know who she is.”

The cogs spinning in Naomi’s head ground to a sudden halt. “You do?”

“Yeah, sure I do,” Anya began. “She goes to Central College. You know, the one out near the shopping center? She works at that boat repair place on the promenade. I think her name’s Lia? Or Lily. Yeah, it’s Lily. Lily M-something.”

“Why was she looking at me?” Naomi demanded.

“I don’t know, Nams. Maybe because she noticed you look extra adorable today?” she teased.

Naomi stared out of the window so that Anya wouldn’t see her blush, overwhelmed at the possibility that someone might have been looking at her because she was cute.

***

“You have one hour remaining,” the teacher barked, making all the students in the hall jump. “That’s half your time remaining.”

Naomi’s reverie shattered, and she looked down at her script to realise she’d written three sides. But there were still another two questions to go; she’d have to speed up if she wanted to finish on time.

She turned the page gingerly and looked at the next question.

Section two: Local history.

Describe the importance of Isidis City during the Ribbon Wars.

Another easy one, thought Naomi. It was fortunate that they’d decided to set a question explicitly about the city she was in, the city she’d grown up in, and the city she’d been learning about in school since before she knew the meaning of the word ‘multiply’.

Once again, her mind whirled away in search of the answer.

***

The September rain lashed against the plate glass window of the Isidis Memorial Café as though trying to beat it to the ground. A small flock of umbrellas erratically floated past the window, turned inside out from the wind, which grumbled every thirty seconds or so against the building.

Today was just one of those days. The rainy season had come a little bit early this year, so the first week back at school had been unusually wet for the people of Isidis. The mornings would begin cloudless and pristine, cool like a spring day; but by lunchtime, the army of grey clouds would roll in, bringing with them wet, humid air, winds that threatened to blow you over if you were caught out in the open, and raindrops falling so fast that they almost hurt to land on your skin.

Naomi was sitting in a café just inside the shopping center listening to the cacophony of raindrops on the window when the day’s first grumble of thunder made itself heard in the turbulent skies above. She nervously checked her phone time -- 16:09 -- and looked up at Anya, who was deep in a newspaper puzzle.

“They’re late, aren’t they?” trying to mask her anxiety with annoyance. Storms always put her on edge, ever since she was a child. She would watch the family pets dash under the nearest bed or couch as soon as the first strike of lightning forced its way through the space between the clouds and earth. Their scared faces made her think -- why do they hide like that? And shouldn’t we, naive as we may be, follow their lead?

“Yeah, but can you blame them?” replied Anya. “Look outside. There’s no way they’ll be getting here in this weather on the surface. They’re gonna have to take the metro, and you know how long that takes.” She looked down at her newspaper and sighed. “I genuinely cannot do these Linkletter puzzles. How are you meant to do them? I mean come on. ‘What’s forty-three letters after “Q”?’ I don’t know! I thought we only had twenty-five letters. I should show my dad some of these. I’m sure he’d get it.”

Naomi glanced towards the metro sign. No sign of anyone she knew. Though, this would be the first time she’d met Anya’s friends from art class, so it wasn’t like she’d know anyone anyway. “‘H’, I think. And it’s twenty-six.”

“Oh, ‘H’ fits. Thanks.” Anya glanced up at Naomi, but soon noticed a small group of people coming over towards them from behind her. “Ah!” came her relieved sigh. “There they are.”

Naomi followed Anya’s finger towards a group of three people - a girl with freckles and hair like fire; a dark-skinned boy with a red and white waterproof; and a tall girl with straight blonde hair and a backpack that looked like it was about to burst.

“Everyone, this is Naomi. Naomi, this is Liam,” Anya said, gesturing to the boy with the waterproof. He nodded. “This is Jack,” she pointed at the girl with the red hair, who raised her hand in greeting, “and this is Lily.” She waved her hand towards the third girl, who had begun desperately fighting with her bag. Naomi caught a glimpse of something large, wide and straw-coloured inside.

Suddenly, memories came flooding back. The hot June day; the shrine; the girl in the sunhat - it was her! All those months ago… and here she was again, standing in front of her.

Naomi stood up. “It’s you,” she said, staring at Lily. “The girl at Melbourne’s Landing!”

Lily’s face flashed with recognition, and a slight blush. “Nice to meet you, Naomi Martin.”

***

Question three, Naomi thought to herself. The last one. Then I’m free.

She turned the exam script once more. So far, this paper had been pretty easy. No curveballs yet; though there was still the final question. The toughest one. The cultural history one.

Section three: Cultural history.

Explain how festivals such as the Fireflower Festival contributed to the development of modern religious traditions.

Naomi’s internal monologue could come up with no word more than ‘ouch’ to describe that monstrosity.

The Fireflower Festival, she thought, wracking her brains. What did we do for that this year?

And Naomi’s mind whooshed away for the third time.

***

The lake in the mountains was a secret for eleven months a year. Pristine and untouched, its waters slowly flowed from innumerable streams on the slopes of old Parley Fell. The birds tweeted as they nested in the trees that lined the lakeshore, the frogs croaked as they ran their errands, and the only soul that the lake ever saw was the odd couple ambling on the mountain track.

But come late March, the lake saw a different side of the world indeed. Where before were frogs and toads, were now tents and caravans. The trees were decorated with colourful lights, and the center of the lake had something rather curious in it: a small wooden structure, floating in the water. It was anchored to the bottom so that it could not move, and so it could only bob gently up and down with every eddy and ripple that came to disturb it.

The sunset cast glorious orange rays of light through the branches of the trees, onto the pebble beach, where Naomi, Anya and Lily sat, idly sizzling sausages on a camping stove. Tonight was the night of the Fireflower Festival; and this was the first time they’d spent it together.

At the head of the lake stood a man in a magnolia robe with purple seams. He held up a torch, which drew the eyes of everyone there as it burned.

“And now,” he shouted, “we will all experience what the Arzine did for our world so many millennia ago. We will watch as the seeds of light spread from our fire, giving life to the world. And whilst our small lake may not compare to the great oceans of our world, we hope that seeing the spectacle might help us understand what She did for our planet. How She brought life to this barren world.”

The lights hung from the trees dimmed, and the priest sunk to his knees.

“And thus, I shall light the Line of Beginnings, and the Arzine will be here with us once more!”

He dramatically raised the torch above his head, before bringing it down sharply onto a silver wire that was lain on the floor. Immediately, sparks flew out, which began to fizz their way down the line.

“How’s it supposed to get to the wooden thing?” Anya asked.

“Just watch,” Naomi replied, knowingly.

As if in response, the sparks jumped down from the lakeshore into the water itself, and began to almost swim towards the center of the lake as they burned down the line. Anya gasped.

“Lily, are you watching?” Naomi asked. “You don’t wanna miss this!”

Lily looked up at the sparkling wire on the lake surface. “Oh, wow.” Naomi looked at Lily. The orange light from the sparks shone onto her face and rippled gently as the sparks flew off in different directions and flickered into non-existence.

She looks amazing, Naomi thought.

Suddenly, there was an almighty flash of light and a whooshing sound as the sparks caught up to the floating platform. Fireworks went off in every direction, blasting up towards the sky, some on the platform spinning and whirling, and one shot up like a fountain above the platform, sending tiny dots of light all across the lake’s surface like fireflies.

The reflection of the light shone across everyone’s face, across the hillsides and the cliff above them. It shone in Anya’s eyes, and you could see her pupils widening to take in the beautiful sight. It shone in Lily’s eyes, who marvelled at the spectacle.

But it did not shine in Naomi’s eyes, for she was looking somewhere else. The colours of the fireworks shimmering across the corrie were nothing compared to the twinkling in the eyes of her new friend Lily. The reflection of the nova in the lake shone like glitter, and Naomi couldn’t help but stare.

“Wow, beautiful!” exclaimed Anya.

Yeah, she is, thought Naomi.

Over the next few days, Anya began to notice changes in Naomi’s demeanor. While she was never outgoing by any sane measure whatsoever, she was awfully shy, even compared to her normal introversion. Having her suspicions, she asked Naomi what was up.

“You know you can talk to me, don’t you?” she enquired. “Whatever’s on your mind, I’m here?”

Naomi sighed, avoiding looking directly at her. “I know, it’s nothing - I’m fine, really!” Anya couldn’t help her. After all, what would she know? The last time she’d liked anyone was when she was 12. Nowhere even remotely the same thing as liking someone at 17. But on the other hand, it might be good to have someone to talk to, just to let the feelings out.

“Is this about Lily?” Whoa, someone’s a mind-reader. Naomi looked up at Anya, meeting her gaze for the first time since she asked what was wrong. “It is, isn’t it! What’s happened? Have you fallen out?” Naomi shook her head. “She’s moving away?” Again, more head shaking. “She’s sick?” Third time, unlucky. “What on Earth is the matter?”

Naomi hesitated for a moment, pondering how best to say what it was she wanted to say. Deflated, she settled with the simplest. “I think… I think I love her.”

Breathing a sigh of relief, Anya laughed. “Well, of course you do! You’re her best friend!” Naomi wasn’t sure what to say. That wasn’t quite what she meant at all. And what’s more it felt like she was being patronized.

“No, you don’t… you don’t understand” she said, still quietly. “I mean, I love her.” Anya looked at her with a blank smile. Naomi looked back frustratedly. “You know. Like, love her.” Somehow this felt like it had been a bad idea. Anya wasn’t taking her seriously at all. Why she ever expected any understanding was beyond her.

“Oh, huh,” said Anya, smile fading rather quickly. A moment’s silence. Naomi’s heart was beating quickly, and she felt almost on the verge of tears. Then, just as quickly, a grin rushed back onto her face. “Well, then! Go out there, and get the girl!” Noticing Naomi’s tension, she quickly added, “Christ, Naomi! You look like you’ve seen a ghost! It’s not that big of a deal, jeez.”

Of course, she was right. It wasn’t that big of a deal. Naomi’s white face slowly changed into a normal colour, then to a deep red in embarrassment.

“You don’t need to get embarrassed, either! She’s gorgeous, and you guys are, well, like that!” She held up her two crossed fingers for emphasis. “It’s perfectly normal for you to feel this way about her. You know, I’d be quite surprised if she didn’t feel the same way about you too, the way she goes on about you.” Naomi looked up at Anya quizzically. “And what’s more, you guys would be so damn cute together!” That didn’t do much to help her embarrassment.

Over the next few weeks, as the trees began to regain their leaves, and every morning was a little warmer than the last, Naomi was on the verge of confessing her feelings to Lily almost every single time they saw each other. Anya began to push her to ask her out somewhere, in case Lily fell for someone else in the meantime. But every single time, she was too shy, and her nerves got the better of her. What if she said no? Then it would be really awkward and it might ruin their friendship in the worst case. And what if she said yes? What then? Naomi didn’t know - she’d never been in a relationship with anyone before. Anya hadn’t been in one that counted, and it would be really embarrassing to ask Lily without knowing what she was letting herself in for.

Muggy April came and muggy April went, carrying with it the usual morning fogs, the regular afternoon deluges and air so thick with moisture you could drink it, and the warm easterly wind from the inland mountains. In the first week of the month, the blossoms bloomed. The high street in Isidis was lined with cherry trees on both sides of the road, marking the path with beautiful clouds of pink and white, which rained down petals on anyone or anything below. Then, in the second week, in place of the river of pink petals, the streets of Isidis turned green with the leaves of the broad trees which too lined every street, waiting for their turn to show their stuff in the eternal procession of seasons, giving the city a wonderful forest green aura, speckled with the odd patch of red, or of yellow, or the occasional shade of blue.

May arrived, and with it the blistering summer. The sun beat down on Isidis for fourteen hours every day, scorching all those who dared to venture outside. It wasn’t even possible to use the sea to cool off - everyone else had the same idea as you and the competition for sunbeds on the beach, or even just an empty space for your towel, was practically brutal. But the sun sparkled off the side of the glass spires of Isidis’ skyscrapers, casting brilliant crystalline reflections for miles around. Naomi often sat on the balcony at her home and watched the sunset, which would send sunbeams of every colour from sky blue to deep gold dancing across the meadows.

But as the seasons came and went, Naomi was still stationary. She’d not managed to even come remotely close to confessing her feelings to Lily. Every time the moment seemed right, and she was on the verge of letting her heart out, her mind became suddenly full of a horrible tempest of worries and ‘what if?’s and any sort of confidence she had vanished into the wind.

Even Anya had given up at this point - and she was never one to give up easily. But after nearly three months of trying to convince Naomi to just go for it she was at the end of her will to help. Naomi herself, who once had great faith that Lily liked her back, felt that those days were long gone. The only thing which gave her even any hope was that Lily was still single. But for how much longer?

***

“Go on then, how was it?” asked Anya with her usual excited smile on her face as soon as Naomi came out of the exam hall.

“Have you really been waiting out here all this time?” she teased. Anya was still wearing her painter’s apron - she’d clearly been working on a new masterpiece and obviously hadn’t been here for a long time. She even had little splashes of blue and yellow paint on her hands.

“Man, I got here like five minutes ago, so, uh, no, not really,” she laughed. “I was working on a painting of this boat I saw on the lake the other day, but I noticed your exam was almost over and needed a break so I came up here to greet you when you left the exam hall! But forget about me; how was the exam?” Anya pressed the question a little harder this time.

“It was fine, y’know? Pretty easy actually. The third question was a bit tough, but I think I did alright.” It was always good to reassure Anya. She had a tendency to worry too much about school and exams.

“Oh good,” she glowed. “Listen, wanna go to the meadows this afternoon? It is a really nice day after all, and you deserve some rest. And what’s more, I may have made a picnic with jam sandwiches and cake…” she smiled coyly. Gosh, you’re far too nice, thought Naomi.

Seeing Naomi’s embarrassed blush, she teasingly hit her on the arm and laughed. “Oh, come on, you’ve just finished your final exams! You can finally stop studying every night and every day! We gotta make use of this summertime before you go to university,” she said pointedly.

And she was right, of course. At the end of the summer, Naomi would move a thousand miles away to the capital city. The next seven weeks would be full of tension - if she hadn’t made the grade in her exams, she’d be stuck with nowhere to go or study. If she passed them, then she’d be catching the first plane to Caracelmarket, a stylish university town in the far south, to start studying. And the real challenge was what she should study. It took her weeks to even begin to think about what she wanted to do with the next few years of her life. Eventually she decided on geography - her father was a manager for some mining corporation, and her mother worked as an engineer, and she definitely didn’t want to do either of those jobs - but there was a constant doubt in her mind as to whether this was truly the path for her.

“Thanks,” she responded quietly, then more excitedly, “come on then, let’s go!”, and she grabbed her bag with her left hand, and Anya’s hand with her right, and they triumphantly ran into the midday sun.

Chapter 3 - The Fell

Naomi lowered her bike to the floor, and sat down, feeling the grass between her fingers. The sun beat down on the hilltop, and a gentle breeze blew from the sea, though it was miles away.

From here, you could see everything in the county, from the ocean in the west to the mountains in the east. The great city of Isidis, and all its suburbs; the skyscrapers and spires reflected brilliant light across the countryside. Dotted around it were the innumerable small towns and villages, lining the rivers and lakes and giving texture to the fields. And then, like a web, were the networks of roads and pathways, forging connections between every house and every building. On the roads were a series of ants, no, wait, cars, that journeyed meaningfully to their various destinations. On a day like this, the roads almost seemed to melt into their surroundings, blending as the heat made the country seem to blur and shimmer.

And out in the bay, making the best use of the day’s good weather, were countless boats and ships, each one marking out its own path with its wake. High in the sky were the planes, shimmering tubes of silver who made the cloudless azure heavens their own. Far, far above that, the occasional glimmer of light reflected off satellites and spaceships and stations tethered in their orbits to the planet, staring down on the world from the endless void.

Naomi and Anya had come to their favourite place - a lone tree atop the hill which had suitable sunshine and shade for all times of the day. In fact, this tree could be seen for miles and miles around - when Naomi, as a child, saw it returning from a long trip on the motorway, it was a true sign that she was almost home.

She stood up, and slowly leaned back into the trunk of the tree, gazing over the edge of the bluff at the world down below. The sun, hovering high in the sky, shone into her eyes, but she didn’t mind. A gentle wind from the south rustled the leaves of the trees and softly warmed her back. She let out a deep sigh, and in her mind symbolically let go of all of the stress of the exams, casting it all off to the wind to be blown away and never seen again. The insects chirped. The birds sang. Naomi closed her eyes and began to sing, at first under her breath:

Now I am here, under the sky and the sun
I tell you not to worry; hard work is done.
Let your voice sound out, wherever you may be
Now I soar on the wind, and invite you with me.

After a while, Anya turned to listen. Naomi was always a good singer; her soft tones complimented the beautiful scene perfectly. In her mind she began to envision the whole world turning into a masterful painting, a work of art that she would almost certainly have to start that very evening! Moments of inspiration were rare, but when they came they were the best feeling in the world. Almost involuntarily, she found herself joining in Naomi’s song.

Through the winter, spring, the summer and fall
As long as you’re with me I can cope with it all.
Let your voice sound out, and you will surely see
That you’ll soar on the wind, up high here with me.

The sun will come up and the sun will go down
Over ev’ry last village and every last town.
And my light will shine over every last sea
For I am that golden sun and you’ll rise with me.

The two girls fell into a relaxed, tranquil silence. Anya sat under the branches of the tree, sheltered from the sunlight, lost again in a newspaper puzzle. Naomi lay in the sunshine, absorbing its warming rays. It felt like hours and hours, and Naomi was almost falling asleep before a brief rustle to her right and the sudden smell of jam sandwiches made with the freshest strawberries entered her nose.

“Sandwich?” Anya asked. Naomi slowly opened her eyes, turning towards the source of the smell.

“Yes, please!” she responded gingerly, before taking an enormous bite out of one sandwich. What sweet, delicious strawberries! What fresh, tasty bread! “Now this is what I call a jam sandwich. Did you make them yourself?”

Anya looked very pleased with herself. “Yeah, made it with strawberries from the garden and baked the bread earlier today. Made them for you! As a congratulations present for finishing your exams,” she added, seeing Naomi’s indignation that someone would go out of their way to make something for her.

“Aw no, you shouldn’t have!” she said with her mouth half full of sandwich. Anya sighed internally. Of course Naomi, of all people, would try and argue her way out of jam sandwiches she’d already half eaten. She swallowed her mouthful of sandwich, then half-jokingly added, “I don’t deserve this kind of treatment!”

Anya sighed exasperatedly, audibly this time. “Don’t be ridiculous - of course you do! You’ve had a tough time studying and worrying recently and it’s time to celebrate that it’s over, right? It’s the least I could do for you. Please, don’t try and argue your way out of a damn jam sandwich!” she smiled.

A bird nearby tweeted at Anya. It had noticed the smell of the jam sandwiches wafting from the picnic basket; she began to throw it crumbs and tiny pieces of crust that she didn’t want. Soon a crowd of small birds had gathered around them, squabbling over miniscule pieces of bread.

“You know, this gives me an idea.” Anya thought out loud. “How about a race from here to home, on our bikes?”

Naomi didn’t even bother to question how on earth pigeons were even remotely related to cycling down hills at stupidly fast speeds. Without even responding to Anya, she stood up, walked over to her bike, picked it up off the floor, and sat on it. She flashed a brief smirk at Anya before she realised what was going on. And with a push of her foot, she was off, streaking down the hillside.

“Hey, wait!” shouted a rapidly quieting voice from behind her. But the adrenaline rush had hit her and even if she could have heard it she would have paid no attention. The glorious sunshine beat down on her head as she quickly accelerated, the still, warm air now blasting through her hair like the gusts of a storm. Truly it was now just her and the wind, the world rushing past before she even knew what had come past her, and the trees and bushes and all manner of birds and whatever else might lie by the side of the path merged into one green blur as she soared past.

Before too long, she heard an ecstatic laugh getting slowly closer from behind. Turning her head back for as long as she dared, Naomi saw Anya getting closer from down the path. She was always a better cyclist than Naomi and it was only a short time until they were neck and neck on the mountain trail. Naomi had counted on her slightly unfair head start to have something of a chance against her, but no luck. Her hair trailed behind her in the wind, reaching almost as far back as it would go because of the wind on her face.

The two girls darted in between each other like a pair of dolphins swimming together in the ocean. It felt like they were the only things that existed in the world, just them and the trail blazing past beneath them. Eventually the trail turned to a track as they passed a farm, and the track to a road not long after. The roads were always quiet in the country, and they had them all to themselves, tearing down the slopes towards Concord Valley village.

Upon reaching the outskirts of the village, they were met with their first real obstacle - a car driving on the road. But the two had just rode the best part of a vertical mile downhill, and they tore past the car no problem. Soon, the brown houses of Concord Valley began to appear at the side of the road, at first gently peeking out from behind the odd tree or bush, or even just making themselves obvious from the driveways breaking away from the lane. But soon the hedgerows gave way to yellow-brown fences, and to pavements and parked cars.

Concord Valley was a small village, quite a distance from the city -- there were only a thousand or so people who lived there. Every house was built with a pale wood finish, made from the trees around, and completed with a gently sloped green roof to match the forests and fields. Every house had a small wind turbine poking out of their roofs, a graceful hand stretching up into the air to stroke the wind as it blew by, its blades slowly turning in the breeze.

It was a peaceful place, and it always had been; the kind of out-of-the-way town where not a lot actually happened ever. Most people who lived there were retired, or on the verge of retiring, and either had no kids, or their kids were so old they’d moved out long ago. Really, Naomi was lucky to have Anya as a friend; they’d been the only two teenagers in the village for the last few years. Without each other, they’d both have been very lonely when they weren’t at school. Despite that, the whole village had a community feel to it -- everyone knew each other well enough to say hello on the streets, and everyone turned out for the occasional fete. It was the kind of place where it was an almost weekly occurrence to knock on the neighbours’ house and ask to borrow an egg or some sugar for cooking.

This was out of necessity; the only shop in the village was closed more often than not, it seemed. Trips to the supermarket were out of the question too - it was so far from the city that it took a good hour to get there on the countryside train, which only ran a couple of times a day at the weekend. And besides, who wants to carry their shopping on the train all the way back from town?

Now barely cycling faster than running pace, Naomi and Anya turned the corner of the street leading to Naomi’s house, and stopped their bikes outside, laying them gently down onto the pavement. Naomi’s house stood with the top of a rather steep slope of the hill only a few yards from the side of the road, letting you see all the way out to Isidis City, twenty-five miles away, and all of the countryside between here and there. It was now late afternoon, and the sun began to reflect off the glass panes of the towering skyscrapers of the city, sending sunbeams miles across the countryside directly into the eyes of Naomi and Anya as they began their daily parade across the fells. Shielding her faces from the glare, Naomi pressed her hand to the keypad for a second, and then the house door slid open with a gentle gliding sound.

Naomi stepped across the threshold into the hallway, followed gingerly by Anya. As their eyes got used to the comparatively dimmer inside, the furnishings of the house began to seep into their vision with increasing clarity. Cabinets and cupboards lining the hall gave way to the cream walls, which were papered with a slight flowery motif, and punctuated by a strip of varnished maple wood. On the countertops were photo frames of every possible type: modern ones, where the pictures flashed past on the screens every minute or so, showing the family’s recent trips and fun; old-fashioned ones, with a paper picture inside; and an expensive antique frame in the shape of a heart the size of a dog, lined with polished metal bars and containing Naomi’s parents’ wedding day. Anya was there in some of these pictures, and she always made sure to check that Naomi hadn’t decided to replace any of them with embarrassing snaps from school or trips to town.

The door slid shut slowly behind Naomi with a faint yet unexpected creaky whine. Naomi turned round to the door, glanced at it with a concerned look on her face, then resolved herself to inform the one person who made it his life’s work to fix the front door.

“Dad!” she yelled. “The front door’s squeaking again!”

There was silence in the Martin household. Silence, except for the faint whine of the television from the back room.

“C’mon,” muttered Naomi to Anya as they walked through the house to the source of the noise.

But when they reached the back room, they found only the sunbeams shining through the plate glass patio door. Naomi glanced out to the back garden - he wasn’t in the shed, that was for sure; certainly not in the pool, which was completely visible from the back room; and craning her neck a little in the hopes of peering over the shrubs, she established that he wasn’t at the patio table either.

“Hey, look here,” started Anya. “There’s a note.”

Naomi walked over into the kitchen area and inspected the note on the countertop.

Naomi,

Just taken your mother to the airport. Took Tatty with me too. Will be back around half five-ish.

Love, Dad x

Naomi looked at her watch. 18:15, it said. Typical of him to be late.

“Where’s she going? Somewhere foreign?” asked Anya. She’d never left the country before, and the thought of people flying to different countries was still something amazing to her.

“She’s going to the capital, I think. Something to do with work. Some kind of climate summit, maybe,” Naomi explained. “I mean it usually is when she has to fly.”

“Portland?” Anya asked. “Why would you fly there? It’s like two hours away on the train…”

“No, silly,” Naomi giggled. “It’d take longer at the airport than it would to walk! Nah, she’s gone to Cova.”

Anya’s eyes lit up. “Cova? The world capital? Really?”

“Chill, An! It’s not that big of a deal,” Naomi replied. “I’ve been before -- you know that! I got you that little model of Striding Tower!”

“What’s it like?” Anya asked quietly.

“Oh, lordy. I’ve told you this so many times…” Naomi thought for a second before continuing. “It’s just like Isidis. But bigger. Sure, it’s the almighty all powerful amazing world capital but that doesn’t actually mean anything unless you happen to be running a capital of your own, right? It’s not like you and me get to see the kings and queens and presidents walking around there. Nah, they all get to stay on Striding Tower when they arrive. So for us lot, it’s just like a normal city! Shops, people, noise, screens, you know the drill.”

“But I heard they’ve got cars that can fly there now!” Anya exclaimed like an excited child.

Naomi opened her mouth to reply, but what seemed to come out was not the high pitched tone she was used to, but a gruff yet friendly voice, the voice of a grown man.

“It’ll never catch on, you know.”

Naomi jumped out of her skin before realising that it was her father.

“Hey, kiddo,” he said to Naomi.

“Hiya, dad!” she said in between panicked breaths. “When did you get back?”

“Oh, just now! Dropped her off no problem. Ran into some traffic on the way back though, so we’re back a little late. But, I brought you some pizza!”

***

Not ten minutes later were Naomi and Anya sat outside in the evening warmth at the patio table, complete with matching empty pizza boxes. As the sun set in the west, the sky to all of the other directions had become almost a rainbow of different shades; blue higher up, fading through green but never quite becoming green, to yellow and finally a beautiful burning vermillion.

A great black dog with messy fur lay on the patio next to Naomi, panting and wagging his tail as she pet him idly with her right hand. Tatty was only a young dog, and full of energy. It was surprising that he was managing to stay still for long enough. The tranquility of the sunset was enough to quell the instinct to run around madly after sticks and tennis balls, it seemed. In some ways, Tatty was a reflection of Naomi’s feelings - when she was relaxed, he’d calm down; when she was excited, he would dart around so fast he’d just be a blur. The only exception was when she was tired. Tatty didn’t get tired. In fact, when she was tired, Tatty seemed to be even more energetic and demanding than he normally was. But for now, Naomi felt blessed that he considered it a good time to be still for once.

Anya grabbed Naomi’s free hand. “Listen, you.” She stared purposefully at the older girl. “You finished your exams. So it’s high time I take you to the lake, yeah? The one up high Mount Alavant.” Seeing Naomi’s pained expression at the thought of serious exercise, she added in quick succession, “Hey, don’t you pull that face at me, lassie. You promised you’d let me take you. And besides, we need somewhere private” - she looked shiftily towards the house - “to talk about this date of yours.”

Naomi went red at the mention of her budding romance with the girl with the sunhat. “What do you mean, talk about it?”

“Well, listen,” she began. Anya always became something of a self-proclaimed expert when it came to matters of relationships. “It’s your first proper date. You’ve never been out with anyone at all before now. So you don’t know what to do. And also, we need to talk about the fact that you’re off to university this autumn! Whatever happens between you and L, it’s gonna get way more complicated when you’re off over there, yeah?”

“What are you trying to say, An?” Naomi asked dejectedly. “That it’s not worth even trying with her?”

Anya put her arm around Naomi. “No, no, absolutely not what I meant! It’s the beginning of summer, right, and it’s not over until it’s over. So what we gotta do is make sure you get the damn best date you possibly can with this woman and make this last summer count!” She looked triumphantly at Naomi for a few seconds, before adding in a crafty tone of voice, “And since we’re all about making this summer count, how about coming with me to Lake Alavant?”

Defeated, Naomi replied. “Yeah, okay. I’m in. But if we have to talk about Lily, we’re doing it here, not halfway up some godforsaken hill in the middle of nowhere.”

“Deal,” Anya agreed.

Chapter 3 - The Lake

It was barely half past nine in the morning, but Naomi’s legs were already aching from the strenuous hike. Every step was an effort, and slowly seeing Anya get further and further in front of her with every step wasn’t exactly helping. It wasn’t like she was unfit; she could certainly run a decent way on flat ground. But on a steep and crumbly path? No chance. Every step, the pebbles that made up the ground below slipped further back, so instead of walking at a normal pace, it felt like for every two steps she took forward, she slid back one.

The morning sun watched the two girls climb up the valley sides, shining through the pine trees and casting sparkling shadows on the floor. A gushing cascade of a stream rushed by at the side of the path, as though every bit of water that passed over the rocks and eddies had its own gossip to pass on. The mighty trees quivered slightly in the breeze, sending birds flying in a panic.

“An,” panted Naomi. “Wait up a second, yeah?”

Anya, thirty feet further along the path and eight feet further up the mountain, paused and looked down the slope at her companion. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” came a faint reply. “Just need a rest,” she added, between breaths. It was hard work, this hiking malarkey. Parley Fell was easy compared to this! She checked her phone’s altimeter. One thousand, five hundred feet. Already she was higher than the top of the hills closer to home. She looked out to the horizon, expecting to be able to see on top of Parley Fell a little Naomi of its own on top waving across the thirty miles or so between there and here.

But alas, such a figure wouldn’t be visible from all this way, even if somehow Naomi had managed to make a mountain-climbing clone of herself. All she was left with was her ever-bouncy best friend, and the prospect of another nearly three thousand feet of climbing before they reached the lake.

On the other hand, Anya had promised she’d buy Naomi an ice cream and a cola when they got there.

“C’mon, Nam! We’ve only been walking twenty minutes!” Anya waved down the path.

It certainly didn’t feel like twenty minutes. No, if you’d asked Naomi, she’d vehemently argue that it’d been at least a week since they got out of Anya’s mum’s car at the bottom of the path. A solid week of walking up this death-defying pathway, stones slipping under her feet… what if there was an earthquake? Or a landslide? They’d both go tumbling right back down to where they started, right back down to the car park, and they’d have to start again. Naomi looked back down the path. Well, it certainly didn’t look that far from here, but it had certainly taken all her strength to get this far.

Naomi sighed, looking back up the valley side to see Anya almost dancing on the spot waiting for her. She resolved herself, and praying that the promised ice cream and cola was going to be a good one, began to wearily trudge up the slope one more time.

An hour and six hundred vertical feet higher, Naomi caught the first sight of the lake. Or rather, the side of the lake, held back by a concrete barrier on the side of the fell. It had some kind of spinning turbine inside it, which she could just about make out through the grate on the front from which the babbling brook sprung forth. Even Anya was struggling at this point in the climb, and as she and Naomi trundled closer to the top of the slope, a faint whine could be heard from the dam.

And it wasn’t only the dam that was making a faint whine - Naomi too was about to break down once more into complaining.

Seeing this, Anya pre-empted her. “Naomi, look! The lake is right here! There’s benches and the shop and the little beach!” She pointed across the floor of the cwm. Sure enough, there was a tiny mountain lodge that looked like it wouldn’t have been difficult to make out of chocolate fingers, and next to it were five or six picnic benches, only one of which was occupied, by a solitary figure with blonde hair.

Naomi looked around the cwm. The whole area was like a depression in the side of the mountain, which you could see towering up at the back, peak disappearing out of view. To the left and the right were two enormous buttresses of bare rock; the left one marked by a winding path climbing ever higher. They were like the two arms on a comfy chair. The seat of the chair, on the other hand, was almost completely filled by a still, glassy lake. It was almost impossible to tell that there was even water in it; if someone had told Naomi it was a giant mirror, she’d have believed it. And the most striking thing about the cwm was the backrest of the armchair: a mighty, jagged cliff face made of rock so deep a grey you could lose yourself in it, punctuated every few dozen feet by a fault line running a slanted horizontal to the rock. The bottom of this face was a scree slope, a pile of thousands of rocks that had broken off the face and now poured like a pile of sand into the lake below.

“Whoa, hey,” started Anya, as they approached the picnic tables. “Is that…”

Naomi broke away from staring at the cwm and noticed something quite peculiar indeed. The figure sat at the picnic table was someone that she recognized - not someone that she knew by name, but a figure she’d certainly seen a few times at school before. Someone in one of the older years, who’d already graduated.

“Yeah, I know that guy. Who is it?” Naomi asked Anya. “Someone from school, right?”

“Yes, it is!” Anya nearly shouted. “It’s Scott B-something. Blackburn? He used to run the geology club at school, remember? He must have graduated like, I don’t know, four years ago now? Geology club went downhill after he left, to be honest. We should go and say hi.”

Geology club, thought Naomi. No wonder she never talked to him. It certainly wasn’t her type of thing. Rocks… what’s so interesting about a rock? Yet to her bewilderment Anya used to love it when they were both about thirteen or so. Every time club was on she’d disappear off for hours and come back with all sorts of ridiculous stories about geologists up to no good or getting lost or whatever.

Anya strolled over to the picnic table. “Scott?”

The blonde-haired figure at the table jumped. “Shit, man, can you-” His eyes widened when he recognized who it was. “An? Is that you?”

“Oh my god, it’s been so long! How have you been? Oh,” she added, remembering her best friend’s existence, “this is Naomi. I don’t think you guys used to know each other.”

Naomi gave a weak wave and a greeting, and the three of them sat down at the picnic table and began to eat their picnics. Anya was secretly glad to notice that Naomi had forgotten all about the ice cream promise.

***

“So, what brings you up here, Scott?” Naomi asked.

“It’s a long story,” he began. “I’m actually here as part of my degree. I’m doing archaeology at Portland U, right, and I came across a document the other week when I was doing some essay. The guy who wrote this reckons that this corrie,” - he waved his hands about to gesture at the cwm - “isn’t actually a proper corrie at all.”

“Well, what the hell is it then?” asked Anya.

“This guy reckons that it’s actually an impact crater. Not like an asteroid or whatever, but he reckons that it’s the place where Elesa’s buried.” Suddenly, his bag emitted a loud pinging sound. “Ignore that. Anyway, apparently there’s some kind of scorch marks under the ground that could only be caused by some kind of high-energy impact, and there’s none of the usual signs of mineral deposits that you’d associate with asteroid impacts.”

“That’s ridiculous! Is that it then, just a bit of burned shit under the ground? And that leads him to conclude that this is where the goddess is buried?”

“Nah, that’s not all. He goes on to say that not only is there these scorch marks, but the corrie is facing south instead of north.”

“Wait, what?” Anya said. She glanced at the midday sun, unmistakably to the south… and how it shone directly onto the back wall of the corrie. “Shit, you’re right. I never noticed that.”

“What does that mean?” asked Naomi. She had really no understanding of what a corrie even was before about ten minutes ago.

“Well, basically, a corrie is a hole in the side of the mountain that’s formed by ice,” Scott explained. “It rolls around on the bottom and gets compacted and eventually forms this big hole. But the catch is that in the northern hemisphere - where we are now - they only form facing north, because otherwise the sun catches on the ice and melts it before it has a chance to erode the rock away.” His bag pinged again.

“So how can this one be here, then?” Anya asked.

“Well, that’s the thing, innit,” Scott replied. “This guy reckons that this is, I don’t know, an impact crater, I guess, and that Elesa’s buried under here. He thinks that her, like, tomb is buried under this lake. This lake, might I add, isn’t natural - it was built here nearly two thousand years ago now. They just have to keep replacing the dam and reinforcing the hillside every few decades or so. So this guy’s theory is that the lake was created to hide where she’s buried. So basically, after this was published, a bunch of scientists came up here with some fancy equipment and discovered a really weird energy signature in this area in particular. It stretches up to the top of the mountain, but it’s concentrated in this basin. It’s like the energy signature of those medical nanobots they used to use, but like billions of them swarming all around here.

“At any rate, everyone decided he was a bit of a nutter in the end, but I decided to come up here and have a look myself, just out of curiosity. Besides, it’s on the way between Portland and home, and today was the day that I was driving back, so it was a no-brainer, really.”

Naomi stared, thinking about the possibility that Elesa Melbourne, the goddess of Arzin IV, the one who was said to have created this world, was sleeping mere metres below her feet….

Her thought bubble was punctured by a squeal of laughter. “That’s absolutely ridiculous! D’ya think this guy ever noticed the name of that city, right there? Melbourne’s Landing? What did he think Elesa’s surname was? Lordy,” Anya chortled at her own joke, then glared at Scott’s backpack, which had emitted yet another ping.

Naomi gazed over the side of the corrie, towards the south-east. Across the seemingly endless desert this side of the fells was the faint outline of a far-off city. Melbourne’s Landing. Between here and there was forty miles of inhospitable, hilly scrubland and desert, which seemed to wobble as the hot air above it rose.

“So, um, why can’t we, like, see if she’s here?” Naomi asked.

“Well, aside from the theory being complete rubbish, this whole area’s a national park. You’d have to start digging under the lake, I reckon, and if you even tried they’d take you to court before you’d even picked up your shovel.”

“Hello, Elesa!” Anya yelled as loud as she could, startling Naomi.

“Hello, Elesa!” replied the echo from the corrie wall, a second later.

Naomi put down her empty cola can on the table. “Alright. I get that this theory of this guy is ridiculous. But even if this place does have some kind of, I don’t know, weirdness to it, how come you’re up here on your own?”

“Good question, my friend.” Scott pulled out some weird kind of gizmo from his bag, a metallic, electrical device with a little screen and a radar dish. It looked quite happy sitting in his outstretched hand. As if in acknowledgement of its center stage, it emitted the same loud pinging noise that had been coming from the bag. “This here is, well, what used to be a nanobot controller. I found it in the physics labs at university, right, and after a bit of tinkering I managed to make it pulse when it received any unusual signals coming from nanobots in the air around us. Normally it just kinda emits this constant ringing noise, like what you get when you go to a rock concert. But up here… it’s strange. There’s nothing for ages, then, suddenly, there’ll be a random, really loud ping. It’s really odd. So what I’ve been doing is noting down the frequency and rates of all the pings. And what I get is just this seemingly random sequence of numbers. Four numbers, repeating, in seconds. The time between each pulse. Here, have a look.”

He passed over a sheet of squared graph paper, showing a squiggly diagram. But despite all the lines and data points and other confusing marks, one thing stood out. The sequence of numbers.

Fifty, thirty-three, thirty, forty-four, repeating on and on.

“Funny thing is, the sequence changes every day, from what it seems. Sometimes you can come up here and you’ll just get noise, or constant beeping. But occasionally you get days like this, where the same frequency gets repeated over and over again. And guess what -- it’s always these numbers. Every single time it’s a repeating day, it’s fifty, thirty-three, thirty, forty-four. And these days happen once a week, every Friday, without fail.. What happens between is anyone’s guess, but every Friday the signal changes to these repeating digits.”

“Okay, that’s quite freaky,” Anya whispered. “But what does it mean?”

“Well, the guy who wrote the paper tried loads of stuff to try and make sense of it, but he couldn’t come up with anything that made sense. I’m not so good at this kind of stuff either. Decrypting signals and all that. After all, I’m a geologist, not a technician. But I’m going to show this to one of my friends at uni who’s keen on this kind of stuff. I’m sure he’d get it.”

Naomi was hit with a sudden wave of déjà vu. She felt like she’d had this conversation before… a long time ago. She closed her eyes, and was transported back to an autumn afternoon many months before. The rain fell and soothed her as she thought, and in a flash she was back in a café in the city with Anya. The day she first met Lily properly…

Most of the details of that day had been rubbed out over time, but one thing she clearly remembered was sitting in the café, waiting for Lily and her friends to arrive. Anya was there too, she remembered -- Naomi had bought her a drink. She felt like what Anya had been doing was somehow important, but she couldn’t quite think how it could be.

“An,” she started. “You remember last September, when you and I were waiting for Lily and her lot?” Anya nodded, unsure of the direction this conversation thread was going. “What were you doing when we were in the café?”

“I was doing the puzzles in a paper, wasn’t I?” She looked puzzled.

It was if a lightbulb went off above Naomi’s head. “It’s a Linkletter.”

“What?” said Scott and Anya in unison.

“Look here, right. These numbers are just letters coded in a sequence. It’s four numbers, so it must be a four letter word. The second letter is fifty after the first letter, right, so you go around the whole alphabet once, for twenty-six, then you count the remaining twenty-four. Have you got a pen?” She wrote the alphabet out on a spare page of Scott’s notebook. “Okay, so we start at A, right, then go round, then count twenty-four more.” She did this, making sure to count each letter precisely. “X. I’ll write that down.”

She repeated this for each of the letters, then demonstrated that the whole sequence linked up and made the same word once again. With every letter that she counted, the word revealed itself to them.

A

AX

AXE

AXEI

“AXEI. Axei? What’s ‘axei’?” asked Scott. “Are you sure about this?”

Naomi was stumped. “Maybe it’s a different language. Whatever it is, I have no idea. Some kind of password, maybe?”

“This is how far the guy who wrote the paper got. He decided that it was some kind of ancient word for ‘shelter’ or ‘sanctuary’. But that obviously didn’t get him any further, except to conclude that this is where Elesa’s buried.”

“You know what this sounds like?” Anya asked. “Students. Lot of them coming up here from Isidis at the weekends with all sorts of gizmos, and gadgetry, and,” - she paused for a second to think - “their... science. They come up here with their science and set up a transmitter or an aerial or something like that, and here we are, sitting round this little picnic table trying to work out the meaning of a ‘word’ that just sounds like someone tried to say ‘ash-tray’ with a mouth full of biscuits.”

“You know what?” Naomi sighed with a sense of finality. “You’re probably right. Besides, you’d have thought that if she really is buried somewhere, it’d be, you know, at Melbourne’s Landing. That’s like fifty miles away from here across the scrub. She can’t be here, after all. Not a chance,” she added, trying to convince herself more than the other two.

The conversation moved on from the mysteries of Lake Alavant, and away from the possibility of a certain goddess sleeping beneath the soil. The sun slowly moved across the sky, tracking east to west over the heads of the three friends at the table.

“What are you doing next year, Naomi?” inquired Scott.

“Oh, man,” Naomi blushed. “Big question. I’ve applied to Caracel U to do geography. Start in September.”

“Hey, Caracel!” Scott smiled. “I’ve been there a few times. Nice city. Good uni,” he added with a knowing glance. “You’ll love it.”

And so, the three friends resumed their conversation, forgetting all about the puzzle of the mysterious signals. The sun began its slow descent across the afternoon sky, lengthening shadows across the ground of the corrie. In a moment of silence, it poked its head out from behind a distant tree, with glaring orange beams pointed directly into the groups’ eyes.

Anya’s brown hair flicked up and down a little as she glanced down at her phone in her lap. Then, she sat straight back up, and made a move to gather her various belongings that were on the table into her.

“C’mon, Nams. We gotta go else we’ll miss the last bus.”

***

The path to the village shrine was marked only by a rotten wooden sign clinging to a wooden post for dear life along the side of the main road through Concord Valley proper. The track itself was rough underfoot, an unpaved trail up the side of the hill through the forest. It was customary to bring walking shoes if you were to visit the shrine. The thick leaves of the forest kept the heat and moisture in; it was like walking in a greenhouse.

Colourful birds fluttered past, darting from tree to flower to rock and back, catching insects or sipping nectar for food. The right hand side of the path was marked by a babbling brook, from which the croak of frogs could be occasionally heard. The only sounds of humanity that could be heard up here, other than one’s own footsteps, came from the left side; they were the distant whirring of cars driving past, and occasionally the rush of sound that meant the train was passing through.

Naomi was used to this walk. The heat and moisture would stick to your clothes, but for someone who had walked this path hundreds of times, the air under the canopy was as normal as the walk itself. There was no wind under the trees; Naomi’s black bangs only moved in response to her footsteps, and in fact, this walk was one of the reasons that she kept her hair fairly short. It had been far too hot and difficult when she was younger and had much longer hair.

Heaven forbid she try to take Anya, with her thick waves, or Lily, with her waist-length hair, up here. They’d melt!

The brook at the right hand side of the path slowly transformed from a trickling stream into something decidedly more vertical. Naomi reached down, and grabbed a small but sharp stone from the ghyll. The waterfall marked the end of the path, and the rock it fell down had so many names of people who had come past carved into the stone. Naomi’s name was amongst them, three times - once at the age of two, on her first visit to the shrine, once at the age of fourteen, wishing for success at the beginning high school, and the third…

To write on the rock, you had to stand in the stream itself, with the waterfall brushing you from the side at waist level. But you’d get wet all over from attempting; the spray soaked you to the bone in mere seconds. That was no obstacle to Naomi, and the cool water was almost a blessing after the humidity of the forest around. She finished carving the rock, and tossed the stone back into the stream from whence it came. Then, she blew on her handiwork on the rock face, and rubbed it with her hand to be sure it had imprinted properly.

“Naomi M 05/08. Thanks,” she whispered, reading her message back.

A crumbling of stones from further down the path alerted her to the presence of another person; she turned her head to the right, down the slope, to see who it was. Normally, she would be passed by, or pass, people on the trail up to the shrine, but aside from the occasional nod of recognition, or a brief “hello”, conversation was rather limited. Not with the person approaching though.

The white robes, folded neatly over the left shoulder, with a band of forest green silk coming over the right; the wrinkled yet kind eyes, looking up at Naomi with fondness from down the slope; and the lengthy grey wizard-like beard were instant points of recognition - this was Ansu, the village priest.

Ever since Naomi was small, she’d been coming to the shrine of her own accord. She had felt something of an affinity with Elesa from a young age; and Ansu had been a kind of spiritual mentor. Indeed, he had been named fittingly; ‘Ansu’ was Otomodaino for ‘wise man’.

Without fail, Naomi would trundle up the hill once, or more, every week, and without fail, Ansu would do the same, to lead the service.

“Good evening, Naomi,” he greeted her in his deep, yet kind voice. “I see you’ve been in the falls,” he added, noticing her wet hair.

“Evening, Ansu,” she replied, brushing her soaked hair off her face. “I carved my name. It was my last day of school yesterday, and I wanted to thank Elesa for the help she’s given me throughout,”

“Ah, very good. The Arzine will be glad to hear your gratitude. Shall we?” he invited, gesturing around the corner of the path to the shrine itself.

“Thank you.” She did a slight, almost involuntary curtsey, and stepped under the wooden archway into the shrine courtyard.

The shrine was a circular clearing in the grove, mostly with a dirt floor, except for an area which had been covered with wooden floorboards, and had cushions placed on top of it. Several of the cushions were occupied by people Naomi knew from the village, cross-legged and eyes closed. Behind the cushions was a small shelter, where more cushions were piled up in case of need.

In the centre of the clearing was the shrine proper. It was a square channel of water, around eight feet wide and long, and in the middle was a wooden plinth made of the same ancient material as the sign to the shrine down by the road. On top of the plinth was a small statue of the goddess herself, sculpted in a sleeping pose, with elegant robes and a laurel wreath placed upon her head.

Naomi took her place upon a cushion and faced towards the shrine.

Ansu spoke, and roused the meditators from their peace. “Good evening, friends. It’s a nice evening tonight, isn’t it? Elesa’s sun shines upon our shrine, and we thank her for it. Tonight, we celebrate the graduation of our young Naomi Martin from her school,” - Naomi blushed - “and wish her luck for her results, and that Elesa is watching over her and her family. Now, may we all pray.”

***

“Ansu, can I ask you about something?” As the other shrine-goers made their way down the hillside at the end of the surface, Naomi stopped to talk to the leader of the ceremony. “Where do you think Elesa is now?”

Ansu stopped and turned to face her. “That’s a very interesting question, Naomi. I don’t think I’m qualified to guess about that. Why do you ask?”

“Well, I was out with Anya today, and we went to Lake Alavant, and-”

“Say no more. I have also heard the theory,” he whispered knowingly. “I knew you’d come asking about it at some point.”

“What do you think? Is she there?” she inquired. Ansu said nothing, but only smiled, inviting Naomi to explore the answer herself. “Well, probably not, right? You’d have thought she’d be at Melbourne’s Landing. Lake Alavant is pretty far from there… but it was so long ago. What if people got it wrong? What if they built Melbourne’s Landing in the wrong place?”

“Maybe they did,” replied Ansu sagely.

“But that wouldn’t make any sense. Surely they’d know they were in the wrong place? Or Elesa would have shown them where to build it, perhaps…” she thought aloud.

“Elesa the Arzine is buried deep underground, as we all know. But her spirit lives on above the surface,” he replied. “As to where her physical body is… nobody really knows. Melbourne’s Landing is our best guess. But something tells me that Elesa can’t be found until she wants us to find her. And since nobody’s found her yet, it’s clear that she wants to remain hidden for now. But could she be at Lake Alavant? I think it’s very possible,” he said with twinkling eyes and a smile.

Naomi smiled back, and paused for a few seconds, before replying. “That makes a lot of sense. Thank you,”

The orange sun shone onto their faces with the warmth of the tropical sunset, and the wise man and the young girl stared across the valley at the place they both called home. But as they looked, Naomi’s eyes slowly tracked across the landscape to the distant mountain range she had visited earlier in the day, trying to make out the silhouette of Mount Alavant against the darkening evening sky.

Chapter 4 - The Date

The next day, a very different Naomi Martin waited for the five o'clock maglev train in the village station. She’d ditched the camo tank top and jeans that she wore with Anya to the mountain with a light blue shirt and a white skirt, and she’d decided to wear her favourite necklace, a silver chain with a red gemstone in the shape of a heart. She’d even done her make-up for the first time in longer than she’d care to remember.

“Who are you trying to impress?” her dad had said. ‘Oh, if only you knew,’ Naomi had thought.

She sipped from a can of pop she’d bought from a vending machine nearby, idly watching the birds fly through the glass roof of the station. They didn’t have to worry about things like Naomi did; it wasn’t them that was finally going to confess to the girl they’d liked for absolutely ages! Naomi felt a little queasy just thinking about it… she’d never confessed to anyone before!

A whirring sound in the distance, getting closer every second, told Naomi that the train was about to arrive. She threw her now-empty can into the bin, and grabbed her handbag. She handed her ticket to the conductor, a feeble-looking man who probably didn’t have the strength to refuse someone even if they did have an invalid ticket. After he gave her the all-clear, she scanned the carriage for seats. The train was almost empty; no-one would be going into town at this time, especially not on a Wednesday.

She found a seat on the right hand side, so the sun wouldn’t shine through the window on her and make her too hot during the journey. The train started to move, turning the landscape outside into a green blur, that allowed Naomi’s eyes to unfocus, and almost make her a little drowsy…

Ding, dong! “We have now arrived at Isidis Central, where this train terminates.”

Naomi’s eyes snapped awake. She checked her watch. Five past six! She’d slept through the whole journey! Glancing out of the window she caught a glimpse of a blonde girl sat on a bench, wearing a particularly distinctive sun hat…

Lily Makino smiled and stood up when she saw the train pull into the station. ‘Finally,’ she thought! She’d only been waiting for ten minutes, but ten minutes is a long time when you’re waiting for someone, especially if you happen to be someone as impatient as Lily was.

Naomi disembarked from the train and walked over to Lily, trying not to look too shy or embarrassed, even though right now she’d rather do an entire round of exams again than have to do what she’d promised herself she’d do this evening.

“Hey, Nammy,” Lily said with a smile, pulling the girl who’d liked her for so long into a hug. “How was the exam?”

Naomi couldn’t be annoyed at the question, even though she’d heard it from about ten people so far that weekend, because it was Lily asking. “Hi, Lily,” she started. “It was, okay, I guess. Not too hard, not too easy. What’ve you been up to today?”

“Ah, well, you know… stuff… I helped my mum out at the boatyard. Some dumbass managed to fill his boat with so many fish that when he beached it, it split in two!” She laughed at the memory. “So we fixed it up for him, and that took most of the day, actually. Wasn’t quite as exciting as it sounds. Anyway, shall we...?”

Naomi took this as her cue to begin walking. As they walked, Naomi was burningly aware of Lily’s hand swinging gently by her side. How she longed to be able to hold it…

“What are we going to see, anyway?” Lily’s question washed away her thought momentarily. ‘That’s right,’ remembered Naomi. ‘We’re walking to the cinema.’

“Oh- um… ‘Pencil Rose’. It’s about two poets who fall in love.” Anya had suggested it a few weeks back as a ‘date’ idea for Naomi and Lily after they got together. Whilst they weren’t yet together, Naomi hoped that Lily would take the hint.

“Ooh, a romance film! What are you trying to tell me, Nammy?” Lily joked. Naomi tried and failed to hide her deep red blush. Fortunately, Lily didn’t seem to have noticed. “I bet it’s cheesy as anything. Like that time we went to see that stupid film with the submarines, remember?” She chuckled.

Pulling herself together, Naomi agreed. “Yeah… they always are though, these romance films? Still, you can’t not love them. Psh, life would be so much easier if it were a romance film! No matter what happened, there’d always be a happy ending!”

They arrived at the cinema building, off the side of the high street in Isidis. It wasn’t very busy, surprisingly. Everywhere was quiet tonight. Naomi wondered why, and then she remembered the news broadcast she watched earlier at home. Maybe everyone was scared and leaving the big cities or something?

“Did you see the news this evening?” she asked Lily, then turned to the cashier and requested “Two for ‘Pencil Rose’, please!”

Lily replied, “Ah, no. I don’t tend to watch it. It gets me down, you feel? What’s going on?”

“There’s a storm forecast. Orange warning for the county. It might get a bit wild out here later. I’m glad I brought my coat,” replied Naomi.

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry. It won’t be any different from any other rain cloud. They reckon everything’s a storm these days, don’t they?”

Naomi trusted her. Lily had studied meteorology at school. If any one of her friends knew what would happen, it was her.

“Listen, you go get a pair of seats in the cinema,” she said, handing her a ticket. “I’ll go buy us some popcorn.”

Two and a half hours later, Lily and Naomi walked out of the cinema front door, chatting about the ending to the film.

“You were right, you know. It was cheesy as all hell.” Naomi stated. “But having said that, it sure was damn cute! Especially the part when she read the one in the bookshop!”

“Yes, oh my God, it was so adorable! I’m glad you brought me to see this film, I wouldn’t have gone otherwise, and I’d hate to have missed out on something this great,” Lily laughed.

“Do you wanna go and get cocktails at that new beach bar?” Naomi asked, slightly emboldened by their high spirits. She could do it. She was going to do it. She was going to confess to Lily tonight.

“Sure thing! Damn, it’s nice out tonight.” It really was; the sun had gone down, having disappeared over the western horizon whilst they were in the cinema. The stars weren’t visible tonight. It seemed like they’d been covered by a blanket of cloud.

A gentle breeze blew down the highstreet from the direction of the sea. It was refreshingly cool, in the warm air, and smelled vaguely of sea salt. It blew past them, making the forest green trees that lined the pavements rustle, like they were being shaken by some mysterious force. It lifted fallen leaves from the pavement and sent them scuttling past the girls’ feet, dancing in invisible eddies and vortices over the ground.

It blew onto Lily’s face, carefully lifting her hair from her shoulders, which gracefully flew behind her. She took off her sunhat, because the wind was causing it to slowly shift itself off her head, and carefully folded it and put it in her bag. Naomi couldn’t stop looking at her hair flowing in the wind…

“Lily… you know, you look really good tonight. I mean, you always look really good,” - she felt herself going red - “but tonight you look really really good.” She smiled through her blush.

“Aw, thanks, Nammy! And you look cute as ever, of course!” Lily winked. Naomi blushed more. “Seriously, though, you always look freakin’ adorable. How do you manage it? You gotta give me some tips!” Naomi blushed even more.

“No… you don’t need tips from me, I promise! Hey, look,” she quickly added, desperate now to change the subject - if she got any redder, she’d surely explode! “We’re at the beach! I… um… I don’t know where the cocktail bar is.” Being embarrassed because she didn’t know something was preferable to being embarrassed because she liked Lily.

“Ahh… it’s not far from here. Few hundred yards. It’s near that guitar shop, you know the one? The one that old stoner woman runs?” Lily reassured Naomi. “Gosh, what are you so nervous about tonight?”

‘Oh, Lily, you’ll find out soon enough,’ she thought. “Nothing; do I seem nervous? I’m not trying to be nervous,” she laughed, trying to answer the question without really responding to it properly.

“No, it’s just… oh, never mind. Hey, look, we’re here.” Lily gestured to a blue flashing neon sign that read ‘The Beach Bar’. “Imaginative name, huh?” she snarked.

Five minutes later, after they’d gotten their ‘Isidis Scarlet’ cocktails, they lay down on the soft sand, listening to the sound of the waves gently lap on the shore. The stars bathed them both in a gentle light, twinkling in the void of space. Suddenly, for a fraction of a second, Naomi saw a bright streak of light shoot across the sky -- a shooting star.That was right; there was a meteor shower this week.

No sooner had she noticed the meteor, she spotted the rather alarming looking grey cloud out to sea, vaguely in the direction the meteor had come from. The turrets and billows of the cloud looked angry, like they had a vendetta against the land, and were coming to seek their revenge. Below the clouds was simply a grey veil separating sky from sea; the rain was so thick that she couldn’t see anything below the base of the cloud.

“Well, there’s the storm,” she commented dryly.

“Fancy getting a coffee?” asked Lily. She knew a nice café by the beach, a tiny establishment named The Cove. It was an old building; its once-pristine white facade had faded into a more beigey colour over the years, stained by the rain, smog and spray from the waves, and now looked as dated as its architecture, with bold and sharp plates and more windows than yearly customers. Despite that, the café was both Lily and Naomi’s favourite; Lily’s mum knew the owner, and Naomi had been converted from a tea person to a coffee person there.

“I’d love one,” replied Naomi.

The two girls began to stroll down towards the beach, against the flow of tourists heading away from the beach to their various hotels. The hot summers drew people from all over the world to Isidis County, and most of the city’s population during the summer was comprised of people who’d come from other nations to take in the warmth.

At a crossroads, a befuddled-looking lady carrying a folded up red parasol like a walking stick and holding a map at a funny angle stopped and began speaking to Lily.

“Niné lokibano Grand Maple Hotel nenetre ej?” she asked.

“Sycamore Streetorro, peyamgal dellarro u kepi tzesdava u kei ej,” replied Lily fluently in the foreign tongue.

“Hekek!” she replied gratefully, and scurried off down a different street out of sight.

“You know, that’s always so impressive,” Naomi complimented Lily. “I’m no good at Otomodaino.”

“Well, you know, you pick it up when you live here. You kinda have to, everyone who comes here speaks it and not English, so if you want to be useful at all you have to know how to say some things at least,” she explained.

“I mean, I know a bit. I guess I never had a reason to learn it. Nobody speaks it near the school, it’s only in downtown, right? What did she want, anyway?”

“She wanted to know where the Grand Maple was. I told her it was number thirty-five down Sycamore.”

“That’s all? It’s like right around the corner! Couldn’t she use her map?” Naomi replied incredulously.

“Apparently not,” Lily laughed.

The two of them carried on walking down the boulevard towards the sea. The grey clouds over the water were growing closer, but both girls had their coats and umbrellas for if they got caught in it. But the café was open until midnight, so unless the rain didn’t let up for five hours, they’d at least have somewhere warm to stay.

The two girls turned the corner onto the promenade and were immediately hit with a gust of salty air. Naomi took a deep breath, and sighed contentedly. The seaside air was one of her favourite things in the world. It relaxed her, and made her feel like she was far away from home. She’d longed to travel since she was a child, but she’d never had the time or the money to do it. Perhaps this summer she might finally be able to see the world, to escape the county, to see a world far away...

Suddenly, she experienced something rather unusual. A something, watery and wet, had come into contact with her cheek. Then another thing, but instead on her forehead.

“Is it raining?” Naomi asked.

“Yeah, must be. Maybe we should hurry up a little bit.”

They changed pace from a stroll to a half-walk, half-jog, running against the inevitable towards the distant purple flash of the café sign. With every step, the rain seemed stronger; above the girls, a wall of cloud was about to push its way over the city.

They reached the front door of the café, wrenched the door open, and darted inside. Inside turned out to be the right place to be, because no sooner had the door swung shut behind them had the heavens opened and the streets of Isidis turned to a river. There was water everywhere, running down every road all towards the river.

Naomi sat in her favourite seat, the one facing the ocean, with a view as far as the horizon. During the day you could often see yachts near to shore, and further out, cargo ships the size of cities, transporting more containers than you could count in a lifetime. The ocean would shine a deep blue, and the sun would shine through the windows from the azure sky.

But now, the ocean was dark and frothy with rage. The waves crashed against the breakwater further out to sea, taking their anger out on the rocks, and hurling themselves dozens of feet into the air.

Lily came over with two coffees, one black for her, and one milky with lots of sugar for Naomi. “Here you go,” she offered.

After about five minutes or so of sitting in the café complaining to each other about the weather, Lily asked a passing cleaner if she’d seen the weather forecast, and if it was going to get any better.

“Gonna be like this all night, love. Proper flood weather, I heard. Best get home now before it’s too dangerous.”

As if in answer, a gust of wind shook the sides of the building, and the two girls felt the rumbling beneath their feet as the structure strained against the blast.

Naomi’s mind strayed to the whole reason why she was out here with Lily. She was here to confess. Just the thought of it made her heart jump a little in her chest; but it was now or never, and just looking at Lily’s beautiful face, her sleek blonde hair, her electric eyes, made her mind up for her instantly. It was time to spill her heart to Lily, drinking coffee in the storm sat above the ocean.

“Lily, there’s… there’s something I need to tell you,” stuttered Naomi. “It’s about, well, it’s about us, and-”

CRACK!

There was a sudden bolt of lightning quite close by the shore, making both of the girls jump. The light radiated from the bolt for a fraction of a second, and in that time, Naomi could have sworn she saw some kind of face in the clouds. A face that almost looked like Elesa...

“Did you see that?” she asked frantically. “That face?”

“What face? Are you alright?” Lily replied with a question and a puzzled look. “What are you looking at?”

“The ocean,” the smaller girl replied. “But never mind, I guess.”

‘Goddamn it,’ Naomi thought. Her heart sank. It felt as though nature itself was telling Naomi that she shouldn’t tell Lily how she felt. That face in the clouds… it must have been Elesa, telling her that she and Lily wouldn’t ever work, and that she disapproved. Naomi couldn’t look at the other girl at the table.

They sat in silence for a few seconds before Naomi noticed something else that was unusual. The cloud above the bay flashed. This was happening a lot at the time, what with all the lightning, but this was something different. It was like a blue circle, and it lasted for quite a few seconds before fading away. Suddenly, a white pill-shaped object came hurtling out of the cloud from where the blue circle had faded. As though in slow motion, it flew almost inevitably straight towards the ocean. It looked like it would hit about sixty feet from the beach, no, maybe fifty; and then, with a colossal splash, dwarfing the waves from the storm, it broke the surface of the bay.

Naomi stood up, knocking her chair over to the ground behind her with a clatter.

“What the hell was THAT?”

Chapter 5 - The Sparrow

Somewhere, orbiting far, far above the surface of the planet, a small, yet sleek and modern spaceship with the words ‘LEO Sparrow’ inscribed on the hull was broadcasting a radio station from a large satellite dish on its underside.

“The time is currently twenty past twelve in the afternoon, universal! I’m Charlotte de Vita and this is Skylink Radio! Finally, from me, is one of my all time favourites… ‘Satellite Three’ by Jackie and the Starslayers!” Charlotte de Vita flicked a switch to her right with a deliberate motion, then pushed a green button on the desk in front. Immediately, a funky dance number began to play:

Show me your moves, we’re on Satellite Three
We’re dancing, and floating and grooving
We’re so far from home we’re in zero-G
Oh, baby, please, won’t you dance with me?

Charlotte spun around on her chair and spoke into a second microphone. “Chloe, what time are we meant to be landing again?”

A calm, ethereal, female voice came out of the speaker on the console. “Arrival time at Stadium Sakaba Spaceport in one hour and fourteen minutes. Local time will be eleven thirty-five on landing.”

“Right. How many more songs can I play before we’re transferring to the next presenter?”

“One. If it’s a short one.” the computer snarked. “You should be aware that a shipping incident has occurred in higher orbit, and there’s a lot of debris floating around up there at the moment. The Nation Collective has issued a yellow alert for civilian ships in orbit, and recommends you deorbit as soon as possible.”

“Alright. Thanks for the heads up, babe.” Charlotte winked into the webcam. The AI sighed exasperatedly.

Charlotte lay back in her chair and gazed idly around the room. It was a small room, with dark metal walls, and two chairs. She was sat in one; the other lay propped up against the wall, with no-one to sit on it. Charlotte was sat at a console, with lots of flashing lights and buttons and dials, all with their own special label and function. Behind the console was a set of windows, each tinted slightly pink, which supposedly helped to keep out the glare from the sunlight. On the top of the console were a set of puzzle blocks she was given as a child. Although she’d only brought them with her as something to play with when she didn’t have to do anything, she’d quickly grown attached to them, as she had to her job here, in the two years she’d been working in orbit.

Two years… had it really been that long already? Straight out of university, after completing a degree in astrophysics, she’d been signed on as a singer for Skylink Records, had released one album, and then quit, deciding that the life of an idol was not the one for her. Too glamorous and too glitzy for Charlotte de Vita. Through a stroke of coincidence she met the woman who’d got her signed in the first place in a bar three weeks later, who got her interested in radio presenting. She applied, and a further fortnight later, she was in orbit in her own radio satellite. Long term, she didn’t particularly want a career in radio; she was here more because she wanted to do something interesting. Sure, studying astrophysics was useful and all, but it lacked a certain spark, a certain life. She didn’t really want to spend her life staring at calculators.

Instead, she’d quite like to spend her life staring at the green sign above her head which read ‘ON AIR’, floating round twelve hundred miles above Arzin. Unfortunately, she was only signed for a two year contract. And that was probably good, too. They say that if you spend too long in orbit, then the radiation from the sun starts to affect you. And she’d rather not go down that route. But even so, there was nowhere Charlotte would rather be than up here with her broadcasting room, her witty AI computer Chloe, the stars shining down on her, and a certain special someone she’d met at a space station a few weeks after signing on...

Footsteps on the metal floor of the spaceship made Charlotte turn around once more - there, leaning against the doorframe of the entrance to the studio, was a young woman with long blonde hair wearing a nightgown, looking slightly disheveled, with messy hair and a tired expression on her face. Her name was Lisa Blake, and she was the pilot of the Sparrow. Not to say that Charlotte couldn’t pilot the ship; it was just that Lisa was far more proficient behind the proverbial wheel. When Lisa was in control, she could make any ship, no matter how big or small, pirouette through the sky like a graceful ballerina. Charlotte’s style was slightly more akin to a sumo wrestler trying the same ballet moves. But, to Charlotte, she was more than just the pilot of the Sparrow. She was her fiancée!

“Morning, gorgeous.” Charlotte greeted Lisa with a smile and a question: “Did you only just wake up?”

Lisa responded quite groggily, “Yeah,” pausing for a second before adding, “Chloe woke me up. Said we needed to deorbit soon. Also, I don’t know if you’ve heard, there’s a yellow alert-”

“I’ve heard. We’ll be okay though, it’s apparently on a higher track. Nothing to do with us.” Charlotte responded.

“Yeah… okay. I don’t see anything going on around here, at least.” She gestured out of the window.

She was right. There was nothing out of the window out of the ordinary. Just the same old stars, twinkling their hearts out in the blackness, and the same old azure planet, rolling slowly below, reflecting light onto Charlotte’s face and turning her skin as blue as her eyes. “We’ll be ‘right,” she remarked.

“Yeah, probably. Are you still on the air?” Lisa asked. “It’s just… I’d kill for some boiled eggs, and no-one makes them as well as you.”

The flattery was surprisingly effective given the circumstances. “Sure, I’ll make you some. I’ve gotta pass this over to Dan in a second, after...” She didn’t need to say any more. Dan was the presenter in the next spaceship along, ready to take over from Charlotte after the Sparrow moved out of range in its orbit, and in this case, ready to take over for the final time.

The song playing through the speakers entered its coda. “It is time,” she announced, in a dramatic voice. She held down a blue, glowing button, and spoke enthusiastically into the microphone: “That was ‘Satellite Three’ by Jackie and the Starslayers. Now it’s time for me to pass you over to Dan Harvey in the LEO Cormorant! I’m sure you’re all aware that this is my final broadcast. I’m not allowed to stay up here any longer! So, for the final time, and from the bottom of my heart, thank you all for listening, and please, have a great day! This is Charlotte de Vita, signing off.” She flicked another switch. “Dan? I’m passing broadcast to you now. Have a good show, and thanks for everything!”

She turned to Lisa. “And that, is that!” Then, she pushed her chair away from the console, stood up, and with a sense of finality, closed her eyes and flicked the ‘power’ switch to the off position. She stood there for a few seconds, almost unable to decide if she was sad or happy or even neither, until she opened her eyes again, grinned at Lisa, and laughed. “Now, let’s see about that breakfast of yours!”

Charlotte walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. She took out two eggs, and, making sure they were in date first, cracked them on the side of a pan, and turned the hob on. Then, she filled the kettle with water from the tap to make a cup of tea, and waited for it to boil.

That was it then. Two years of shows, and music, and fans, and callers, and just like that… it was over. Time to go home. In forty-eight hours time she’d be back at home in the Diamond Federation. Safe and sound. What was it all for, really, when it was always going to end like this?

‘Crap, I’m getting sentimental,’ she thought, and quickly started tapping away at one of the computer screens in the kitchen counter. What had caused that yellow warning, anyway? Something to do with a cargo shipment? Why did that mean they had put an alert on low Arzine orbit? It couldn’t have been that bad, surely.

She felt a sinking feeling in her chest as she opened the ‘news’ software. ‘Christ,’ she thought, ‘this is serious. Maybe we should actually land early.’

PING! went the kettle and the cooker almost simultaneously. “Hey, Lise? Your cup of tea’s ready!” Lisa came into the kitchen to get her breakfast. “Listen, I’m thinking we land early, right? I dunno if you’ve seen the news, but it looks pretty serious. Like, the whole track above us is just full of debris and crap, now. Looks like a couple techies got killed too... I’m surprised there’s only a yellow alert, honestly. I’d have put it to at least orange, if I were in charge.”

Lisa sipped her tea, and spoke with a concerned tone of voice, “If the debris decays we’re gonna get nailed. Where’s the closest viable landing site? If we’re over Kathelbia now… that’s gonna be what, an hour and a half until we reach somewhere that speaks English? Got it -- Caspamouth, Suttland.” She pushed a button on the wall of the room. “Chloe? Plot a course for Caspamouth International. We’re landing.”

“Consider it done,” said the same ethereal voice from before. “But be warned, there are some nasty weather conditions moving in over the region at the moment. A large subtropical storm is tracking over the Westford Territories, and may intersect our flight path. Landing may be difficult.”

“Don’t worry, Chloe. I can do it, we don’t need the autopilot.” Lisa stood up, having finished her breakfast, and put the mug and plate in the washer. “I’ve deorbited and landed in the worst conditions Arzin has to offer. Some tiny little storm? Easy peasy.”

Chloe argued, “But two of the atmospheric engines are currently offline and non-functioning; it would be madness to attempt landing without computer guidance. I suggest you transfer control to me.”

“Alright, fine, you spoilsport.” Lisa gave in. There was no point arguing really; the computerized voice was right. Even Lisa couldn’t land a craft with only one working engine.

“I’ll go pack, then.” Charlotte left the room, leaving Lisa to begin planning their route.

Twenty-six minutes later, Charlotte and Lisa strapped themselves into the cockpit of the Sparrow, and flicked on the autopilot switch.

“Take us down, Chloe.” ordered Lisa.

“Proposed landing sequence: Begin retro burn in three hundred seconds, atmospheric entry over the Shona Islands, reach cruising altitude of twenty-three kilometres over Costa Ventoso, thirty-four minute flight at Mach 6 over the Westford Territories, then slow down and land at Caspamouth at twenty-two fifty-six local time.”

“Sounds good to me, Chloe.”

“Understood. Landing sequence confirmed. Please fasten your seatbelt, and keep all arms and legs inside the spacecraft.” The two women laughed, and began their final safety checks for the deorbit burn.

Before too long, Chloe’s artificial voice came out of the speaker again. “Deorbiting in five… four… three… two… one… commencing deorbit burn.”

Charlotte and Lisa were pushed back in their seat as the rocket engines began to fire, with a terrifying roar, like a cry of a wild beast that never seemed to end. The whole ship shook violently, as though it would fall apart any moment. The teeth-rattling vibrations went on for another minute or two, and then suddenly, as suddenly as it started, everything returned to its tranquil, normal state.

“Deorbit burn complete. The seatbelt sign has been turned off in the cabin,” reported Chloe, “and you are free to move around the cockpit.”

But neither of them got out of their seats, for in just a few minutes, Lisa noticed the ‘external temperature’ gauge starting to rise on the control panel. “It’s starting!” she announced.

The intense friction caused when the ship entered the atmosphere and slowed down would cause the temperature outside to reach thousands of degrees. But the Sparrow had some of the latest heat shielding technology, and so the inside would remain the exact same temperature, despite the inferno outside.

Right on cue, the ‘g-force’ dial began to slowly climb up too as the ship began to decelerate, pushing the two women back into their seat once more. The front window glowed red with heat, giving the world below an orange tint as it edged ever closer. The spacecraft shook violently again, wobbling and vibrating as it dived into the sea of air below.

Now, they could get a good view of the tempest above the Westford Territories on the radar screens. A huge, slowly revolving cloud, with a pinprick eye at the centre, staring at the plummeting spacecraft, almost daring them to enter its windy depths. Lisa silently was glad she let the computer fly this. She didn’t want to risk the landing in that storm by herself. And it sure wasn’t going to be a fun flight in, either. But the sky before that was remarkably clear; all the way from the towns below them, to the distant spires of great cities, clamoring to reach ever higher into the black sky above them, all glittering with lights in the night.

Eventually, the shuddering stopped, and the tint on the window slowly changed from a fiery orange, to red, to purple and finally to pink.

“Re-entry complete. Engaging atmospheric engine.” A whirring behind them let them know it was successful. This engine would have to carry them four thousand kilometres, sailing through the atmosphere to their destination.

Charlotte put her head back on the seat, and began to relax. There really was nothing better than cruising through the sky at this speed, watching the world zoom past you as you blasted through every wispy cirrus cloud, and every contrail, just blurs of white in the corner of your eye. The whirring of the engine was relaxing, reassuring, and Charlotte could do nothing but lie back and chill out.

“Information: Landing permission refused from Caspamouth ATC. Redirecting to Boudicca Landing Strip, Westford Territories. Expected time of arrival: twenty-one thirty-nine local time. Please be aware there may be some turbulence as we adjust our course.” Well, at least they wouldn’t have to go through that hurricane. But surely they were too late to land at Boudicca? They were still twenty kilometres up, and it was so close, she could make the runway lights out in the distance.

“Lisa, how are we going to land there? Aren’t we too close by now?” Charlotte nervously asked.

As if in response, the computer replied, “Unable to land at target destination. Attempting to retry approach.” And then, only a few seconds later, “Unable to retry approach. Insufficient fuel.”

Lisa and Charlotte looked at each other for what seemed like forever, but in reality was only a fraction of a second, before the blonde girl leapt into action, flicking the autopilot off, before pressing a myriad of buttons all over the cockpit. “Shit!” she yelled. “Looks like I am going to have to try and land this stupid thing after all!” She seized the control and turned the craft into a steep dive. Leaving it as late as she dared, she pulled the craft up again to fly horizontally. “I need the thicker atmosphere to slow us down. There’s no chance we can land otherwise.”

Charlotte smirked. She had faith in Lisa to be able to land the craft safely. Maybe not at the right place, sure, but safely? She wouldn’t trust anyone more. She looked at her fiancée, leaned forward, and pressed a couple buttons on the console. Then, she spoke into a microphone. “Chloe, play us a song, won’t you?”

“Absolutely,” responded the cool voice of the computer.

Immediately, an upbeat dance number started playing out of the speakers on the console. Charlotte began bobbing up and down in her seat to the beat.

Lisa looked over at Charlotte’s dancing and smiled. “Look, I think we can still make it from here. That city there, if the navicom is right, is Isidis. Boudicca is about two hundred kilometres beyond that. We’ll get there in about five minutes if I’ve timed this right. So long as we have enough fuel…” She glanced at the fuel meter, and her heart skipped a beat. It read ‘3m04s fuel remaining at current usage level’.

“Crap.” was her only response. Thinking quickly, she added, “I… uhm… I’m gonna have to try and bring this down safely in the ocean. It’s the only way. We don’t have enough fuel to make it. If I try and bring us down as close to the shore as possible, we can get to land easily. We’ll take the lifeboat. It’s not a problem. Right, don’t disturb me, I need to concentrate.” She switched the engine to ‘off’, and moved the joystick in such a way that the spaceship flipped one hundred and eighty degrees. Then, she flipped the engine on again, and throttled up to full.

The two women were jolted upwards as the ship began a steeper descent. Like a bullet, it blasted through the top of the storm cloud, which almost instantly began to buffet the ship with eighty-knot gales. The ship shuddered violently as it plunged further into the cyclone, straining against forces pulling it from every side.

Charlotte was glad she was wearing her seatbelt. The winds of the storm, coupled with Lily’s acrobatic flying and the engines firing full throttle in reverse, would have thrown her all over the deck if she’d been untethered. For now, the grumbling and vibrating just served to make her feel rather nauseous.

Suddenly, the ship broke through the bottom of the cloud into the rainy layer between it and the surface. A few lights appeared in the side windows, faded and distorted through the fog, rain drops and the windows of the craft.

Charlotte glanced at the rear-view camera. A tall, thin, silver shape, delineated by lights in the darkness, tapering up out of view was getting closer and closer. She glanced at the altimeter. One hundred and forty metres above sea level. “Oh no… we’re gonna hit that tower!”

“Not if I have any bloody say in it, we’re not! Christ, Charlie! Have more faith in me, won’t you!” Lisa laughed through gritted teeth. “Alright, here we go! Brace yourself!”

The fuel gauge reached ‘zero’. The engine cut out.

There was a second of deathly silence as the ship dropped like a stone through the last few metres of descent. Then, with an almighty shuddering jolt of deceleration…

SPLASH!

The spacecraft impacted the ocean at significant speed, despite Lisa’s attempts to slow them down. There was a tense moment where the two women expected the whole ship to collapse around them, and let in cold seawater. Fortunately, the hull seemed to have held. It rocked and shook as it tried to balance in the rough waters of the bay.

“Bloody hell, Lisa! Good job!” shouted Charlotte, after a moment of silence.

“Status report: Hull integrity at seventy-four percent. Engine integrity at thirty-two percent. Engine collapse in eight minutes and thirteen seconds,” announced the computer. The music playing out of the speakers faded away to static.

“Cheers, Chloe. Well, we’re not sinking,” announced Lisa, tapping away at the console. After a minute or two, the motion subsided, and Charlotte considered it safe to go and poke her head out of the hatch on top.

“Go on, Charlie. How far have we got to sail?” shouted Lisa, dreading the answer.

“Well, I hope you’re ready for a lot of rowing… we’re a whopping thirty metres or so from the shoreline. How the hell you managed that landing I’ll never know. This is why you’re the pilot - I’m gonna be shaking for weeks,” she joked.

“Damn, that close? That makes me almost uncomfortable. I’d prefer it if you’d told me we were further out! Is there anyone on the beach?” she asked, eager to know if there was help available.

“It’s pretty quiet out there.” She wiped the rain off her face. “There’s a couple of girls stood around on the beach over there, some bloke in a beach bar, and a few people further down the promenade. Does that answer your question?”

“I mean,” Lisa responded exasperatedly, “anyone who can help. I don’t mean just any schmuck who happens to witness a twenty ton spacecraft fall out of the sky. Someone who might have fuel. Or another set of engines,” she added, pointedly.

“Oh, yeah, definitely! That girl’s got a toolbox open already! Look, she’s waving a spanner at us!” Charlotte called out, sarcastically.

“Really?”

“No, you dumbass,” Charlotte laughed. “Just looks like a bunch of kids from here. Drop the lifeboat, won’t you? Oh, and grab two coats. It’s lashing it down out here!”

Lisa grumbled, feeling silly for having fallen for Charlotte’s obvious sarcasm. She flicked a switch on the roof labeled ‘Lifeboat’. A small orange rubber dinghy popped out of a compartment on the side of the craft, and began to inflate itself. It was only about eight feet long, and didn’t look like it could hold more than about four or five people. Charlotte was unimpressed. “That’s it?” Nevertheless, she grabbed a few items from the ship -- their suitcases, and some identity documents -- and scrambled down the side into the dinghy.

Lisa flicked a few more switches to lock down the control panel, lest anyone get in and start fiddling with it. She pulled a small device out of the panel, labeled ‘Emergency AI Projection Unit’, telling as she did, “Come on, Chloe. We’re not leaving you here.” She climbed out of the hatch in the roof, and into the lifeboat.

After a few minutes of treacherous paddling against the waves, the dinghy scraped sand as it hit the beach. A tall blonde girl and a short black-haired girl came running down the beach. “Look,” said Charlotte sarcastically. “It’s the rescue party.” She put her hands behind her head, looked up to the sky, and laughed. “Some last day at work, huh. Let me handle them.”

“Holy crap, are you alright?” shouted the tall blonde one. “We just saw you crash!”

“Yiná paskaija tré cu otomodaino?” replied Charlotte hysterically.

“Charlie, she’s speaking English...” began Lisa.

“What the hell happened?” called the short black-haired one.

“Ta sesu ie letkuno na o kitbina?” yelled Charlotte frantically.

Lisa’s patience wore thin. This situation was difficult enough without having to deal with Charlotte’s lack of… well, paying attention to what language other people were speaking. “Charlie, for the love of God, they’re speaking English! Where the hell do you think we are?”

“Oh, huh. Aw, gimme a break. I can’t hear them over the sound of the waves, and this blasted wind!” She fell over slightly to illustrate the point, but still went pink. Lisa knew Charlotte well enough to know that she hadn’t misheard them at all.

“What happened?” repeated the tall blonde one. “We were sat up there in the café, and then you guys… are you okay?” She spoke in a frantic voice, fearful someone had been injured, or worse.

“Calm down,” laughed Lisa. “No-one’s been hurt. We’re alright. Ran out of fuel is all. No big deal. Any of you two know where we can get some kerosene around here? And some new engines, as well, if you can get them here.”

KABOOM!

There was an almighty explosion behind them. Turning around, they saw the LEO Sparrow explode into hundreds of tiny pieces, which rained down on the bay, lighting up the water as they slowly smoldered.

“Having said that, I think a new ship would be pretty useful too,” Charlotte joked. It was lucky she’d grabbed their things.

The short, black-haired girl replied, “Well, I don’t know anyone personally… but my dad works at an asteroid mining company. He might be able to help, but he’s not going to be at home until tomorrow evening. You ought to come back with me really...” She turned to the taller girl. “Lily, you can come too if you want…”

“Yeah, I’m there.” She looked cautious about Naomi inviting the two women back to her house on a whim like this.

“There’s a hotel in the village. I know the owner, he’s a lovely Shonai man called Ledony. I’m sure he’ll put you up for a night or two,” suggested Naomi.

An ethereal voice came out of Charlotte’s pocket. “Unable to establish connection to financial servers. No credit available.”

“What’s that?” asked Lily, trying to peer quizzically into Charlotte’s trouser pocket.

“Oh,” started Charlotte, “that’s my AI. Her name is Ch-”

“Chloe. I am a ninth generation virtual assistant. I might be old, but I’m still living lavish!” The computer chuckled to itself wildly.

“She’s gone a bit strange,” Charlotte explained to the girls. “She’s real good at computer-ing and that, but if you try and have some kind of normal conversation with her, she goes a bit loopy. Anyway, we, er, don’t have any money,” she added sheepishly.

“Well, hmm. Maybe I could lend you some… actually, you know what? Ledony owes me. I helped his daughter out at school last autumn.” Lily looked satisfied.

Lisa looked a bit confused. “Shouldn’t we, you know, tell the police, or something?”

“Trust me, you don’t want to.” Lily began. “I work in fishing. I see shipwrecks. Granted they’re not spaceships, but I’m sure the principle’s the same. You call them up after something like this, and instead of being in and out and on the next shuttle to the middle of anywhere in thirty minutes, they keep you up for forty eight hours asking you the same questions over and over again. Then you have to wait for a slot to open up in the emergency system, and then you have to spend another twelve hours on the slowest plane ever invented just to get out of the damn county, and ugh. And besides, that’s only for domestic incidents. Never mind how long it would take if you’re not from the Wests. Not worth it, at all. We see it all the time at my mum’s shop, people being shipwrecked and such in the bay when they’ve got no right to be there. It’s just easier for everyone to pretend nothing happened. This lot,” she waved at the rubble littering the shore, “will be cleaned up by tomorrow by the waves and wind. Nothing to worry about.”

Lisa seemed happier with the explanation. “Well, all right then. You seem to know what you’re talking about, so…”

Charlotte shook the two girls’ hands. “It’s Charlotte. Charlotte de Vita. And this is my fiancée Lisa! Thank you, seriously. You’re a lifesaver.”

“Oh, it’s no problem,” the shorter one said cautiously. “It’s Naomi, by the way. Naomi Martin. And this is my friend Lily.”

And so, Naomi Martin led Lily Makino and the two women who had just dropped out of the sky running to the station through the rainstorm to catch the next train to Concord Valley.

***

It was already eleven o’clock when the doors of the Hotel Concorde swung inwards, and admitted the two women from space and the two locals to the swanky interior.

Leather seats were dotted around a simulation of a fire, and tables low to the ground were home to abandoned empty glasses, left by the bar’s patrons from earlier in the evening. A few men were left behind, and were intently watching a screen in the corner of the room, which displayed some kind of ball sports game. Below the screen was a counter, and behind this was a rather rotund man with a dark moustache and a focused grimace, fiddling with a stereo.

The stereo cut out, pausing the swingy background music in the room. “Damn this stupid thing,” grumbled the man, and lightly thwacked it on its side.

“You alright there, Ledz?” Naomi said loudly to get his attention.

“Aah! What? Who…” He spun around. “Oh, it’s you, Naomi,” he sighed in relief. “Hey, Naomi!” His grimace turned into a grin almost unnervingly quickly, and the others noticed for the first time his sparkly nutty brown eyes. “What can I do for you lot?”

“Well,” began Naomi in a strained voice. “You remember how last year, I tutored Kiz? And you said you’d make good on that? I’m claiming it now.”

Ledony looked concerned. “What d’ya need from me? I hope it’s not somethin’ big.”

“Nah,” said Naomi. “Well, maybe. I dunno. These two crashed their spaceship in front of me and Lily. They don’t have any money or anywhere to stay,” she explained.

“Why d’ya wanna use me for this? D’ya even know ‘em?” asked Ledony.

“Nope.” She debated whether or not to explain that she thought she saw a goddess in the clouds and thought it might have been a sign, before deciding it was probably a bad idea. “I just can’t stand by and not help out, right? They need somewhere to stay for a couple nights until they can get a ride out of here.”

“Where’re they off ta?”

Naomi blanked, and Lisa stepped in. “Caspamouth. Crashed our craft due to the storm.” There was a gust of wind from the outside that rattled the windows of the lobby, almost like it heard.

“Spooky,” laughed Ledony. “Alright, I’ll do it. What’re your names?”

The short blonde spacewoman spoke first. “Lisa. Lisa Blake,” she added, when he looked at her expectantly for the rest of her name.

“Charlotte de Vita,” said Charlotte de Vita.

Ledony’s eyes lit up. “Hey, I know you! You’re on the radio!” He laughed to himself. “Wow, look at what the cat brought home!” he chuckled.

“Was on the radio,” Charlotte stressed. “Today was my last show,” she sighed.

“I heard it! I heard your last show! Ha-ha! Wait, that’s no good… I’m gonna miss it. Thank you for your work.” He saluted in a rather out of place fashion.

“No problem,” replied Charlotte, in a tired voice. She yawned and looked longingly around at the couches around the room.

“Hey, got a room for ya. Second floor, room three. Stairs are on the right,” - he pointed to the right of the room - “and you can stay until Wednesday. I’m sailin’ out to the Shona Islands to visit my family for the festival.”

Charlotte’s eyes lit up. “The Shona Islands? Ta sesu ie let-”

“Don’t,” smiled Ledony. “I haven’t spoken Letcune since I was a child. Have to take me dad out with me if I go anywhere in the Shonas,” he laughed.

“Ledz,” Naomi began. “Thank you so much.” She shook his hand, before wishing him, Charlotte and Lily a good night.

Chapter 6 - The Premonition

It was midday, and Naomi was walking along the side of the country lane out of Concord Valley. She’d decided to visit Steven, a friend who lived in Lakeside, the next town over, and they had planned to go to Ellismere, the lake after which it was named, and go fishing. You never caught any fish in Ellismere, but sitting by the lakeshore with a can of pop and some picnic food was something that Naomi had done most weekends in middle school.

Her most prized catch was a boot as long as her entire arm. To this day, none of her friends had figured out what kind of a person might require a boot that large, nor what it was doing in Ellismere. It made a conversation topic for years.

But now, older, Naomi only took trips to the lake once every few months. Truth be told, they were much too old to be laughing at large boots now. And besides, her friends had other commitments - work, school, working at school, in one case… there was always something in the way of their fishing trips.

Today, however, was special. It was a Saturday - that meant at least one of her friends was free, and had agreed to fish with her. What’s more, the sun was shining brightly through the clear sky, and there was a pleasant breeze that made the warming rays bearable. Truly, it was the perfect day to go fishing. After all, most of her friends would be leaving for university soon, and so would she - when would her next chance be, if ever?

She turned the corner of Concord Lane onto the main road down towards the city, and began to run over the directions in her head, as though they’d make the journey quicker; as if thinking about the abandoned barn that you had to cross the road and turn left at would make it more likely to appear over the next crest in the asphalt. But somehow she grew to savour it. The walk along this road was only about twenty minutes or so, but she found herself wishing that it would last forever; when would the next time she had reason to do it be?

A lone ruddy-coloured car whizzed past from behind her, two bicycles strapped to the top and rocking back and forth slightly with every pothole. She followed the car with her eyes, watching it shrink and slowly disappear over the next hill; and there, in its place, was the barn. Even though it would take her five minutes to reach, and that all she had to do was cross the road, she began preparing herself for the odyssey across the tarmac.

Five minutes of walking later, and Naomi found herself opposite the barn. A motorbike passed heading uphill, and Naomi crossed in its wake. The barn had been there as long as she could remember, at the corner of a maize field, but over the years it had grown even more dilapidated. Bits of the roof had collapsed inwards, the fence around the outside had crumbled with time. The walls had become decorated with graffiti over the years, that nobody was willing to clean off; and in one notable incident, the double doors at the front of the door had collapsed during a windstorm and caused a passing car to drive through the hedge in surprise. Before, it was used to keep cows and farm equipment safe; now, it was merely the home of many birds and mice. Naomi tuned into the birdsong, a cacophony of debate expressed through tweeting and whistling from inside the barn.

It was a kind of unnerving sight, really. This old building, falling to pieces through the passing eons, and further down the straight road, a clear shot to the city, with all its gleaming towers and spires.

Naomi stopped on the corner of Ellis Lane and stared out to sea from her vantage point. The blue sea sparkled with sunlight, and you could just make out the waves breaking further out to sea - or were those boats? There was a cargo ship the size of a city further out, with enough containers to build a castle. Where the sea met the land turned to a shining blue; the city, and snaking out of it were a maze of roads and train tracks. The city was flanked by yellow-green buttresses of the fell range, which formed a broad horseshoe with Isidis in the gap between the wings. The motorway snuck out of view behind the fells to the treacherous cliffs of the eastern bay. And leading right to where Naomi stood, the country lane, undulating as it grew larger in its approach.

A pair of birds flew silently over the road between a tree and into the barn. Another car passed without so much as a whisper. The faint rumble of the breeze in Naomi’s ears fell silent. The birds in the barn had stopped tweeting.

Naomi froze in place. She immediately noticed there was something wrong. The world was making no sounds at all. She could still hear; her breathing was the only sound in a now eerily silent world.

“Na...omi…” came a hoarse, yet faint and high-pitched whisper from somewhere nearby.

Naomi felt the flood of adrenaline rush through her body. Her ears perked up, and she stared wildly around for the source of the sound.

“In here…” came the voice again.

“It’s just a prank. It’s just Anya. Or Steven,” she whispered to herself, trying to quell the primal fear that had taken over her. She steeled herself, and turned around, away from the view of the city, spinning on the spot to see whatever friend, or monster, was making the sound.

Instead she saw nothing. There was nobody there. She was alone. Except… no, she wasn’t alone. There was someone moving inside the barn.

“Hello!” shouted Naomi timidly. Her loud voice gave her the courage for her next sentence. “Who’s there?” And another. “Are you okay?”

“It is I, Naomi… come here....” came the mysterious voice.

Naomi looked around quickly before settling on a broken stick to take with her as a weapon. She bent over and picked it up, always making sure to never take her eyes off the barn.

Then, she steeled herself, and slowly opened the creaky wooden gate to the yard. She edged closer towards the barn with baby steps through the silence, every step bringing her closer to the figure she could see through the gaps in the wooden structure, a figure that seemed to be almost glowing?

Finally, she reached the hole that used to be the door. She peered around the corner, and her eyes widened.

In the center of the barn, positively radiant with light, stood the figure of a young girl. She had her eyes closed, but Naomi could tell she was, somehow, staring at her through her gold-shadowed eyelids. She was wearing a white, toga-like costume, complete with purple and green embroidery. Upon her dark, plaited hair was a silver diadem, with a lustrous, viridian jade stone inset into the center. She lowered her hands from her chest to her sides.

“Naomi…” she whispered, and opened her eyelids to reveal irises almost glowing with forest green.

It was the Arzine.

Naomi stepped backwards, and felt her heel collide with something solid and probably wooden, and as soon as she had processed that, she was falling. She fell for what felt like an eternity, the ground slowly approaching beneath her… and just as she would hit the ground....

Naomi jerked awake in a panic. Her heart was racing, and her breath quick. She stared wildly around in the darkness of her room to establish her surroundings.

“Calm down, Nams, just a dream,” she repeated in her mind. “Everything’s okay.”

As her heart returned to normal, and her breathing relaxed, she became aware of the sound of the raindrops hitting the window of her bedroom, a constant pummeling, yet relaxing when safely behind the glass.

“Just a dream,” she repeated.

She rubbed her eyes groggily, and stared out of the gap in the blinds. It looked like it would be a grey day. The sky was dull, partly because of the clouds that trailed in the sky, but also because it was too early for the sun to have risen properly yet - the clock read 5:48. The rain was falling in sheets, the small kind of drops that inexplicably seemed to soak through any kind of coat or jacket.

In the rain, the foliage that stretched across the endless countryside seemed less vivid, less bright; but also richer in tone, a deeper, more confident green, as though the sustenance the water provided made the trees seem stronger just from looking at them. Closer to home, the tiny drops of water slowly flowing down the window made Naomi think that she might be missing something. Or rather, forgetting something. Something quite important. Something to do with Lily. And someone else? Or was that just another dream?

Naomi worked up the resolve to get out from under the warm covers on her bed and swung her legs over the side. It was only when she began to slide onto the floor that she realised that something was a bit unusual. For one thing, the floor was about a foot higher up than it should be. Secondly, it was very warm. And most importantly, it was soft, and seemed to be moving!

“Aah, what the hell!” shouted the warm soft object on the floor. “Nammy, what gives?”

Naomi jumped back onto the bed, startled. She grabbed her glasses, and as she put them on, a figure with light hair came into view on the bedroom floor. Then, realising who it was, the events of the night before came rushing back to her.

“Oh jeez, Lily; I’m sorry!” Naomi apologised. “I forgot you were there,” she added, sheepishly.

“Oh, it’s fine, don’t worry,” Lily said in a jokingly sarcastic voice. “First two astronauts land on us, and now I have to put up with Naomi Martin herself jumping on me whilst I sleep? What a life, right?” She laughed at her own joke, but stopped when she noticed Naomi’s scared expression. “Man, what’s up with you? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

Naomi sighed. “No, I’m fine, it’s nothing.” She then caught Lily’s pointed stare. “Alright, I had a… a bad dream. That’s all, I’m fine.”

“Alright, if you say so.” Lily got up off the mattress on the floor and sat next to Naomi on the edge of the bed. She put her arm around Naomi’s shoulders. Naomi blushed. “You can talk to me, if you want, you know.”

Naomi sighed. Talking to Lily about her dream about Elesa was the last thing she wanted to do. She’d think she was silly for believing in her, or childish, or maybe she’d think she was weird, and not want to hang out with her anymore. On the other hand, maybe it was important to know what your friends think about these kind of things. Religion, and that. Anya thought it was all a load of tosh… was Lily different? And besides, she really appreciated the hug.

“I had a dream that I was walking somewhere. To the lake, I think. And there’s this creepy old barn on the way, and I had a dream that… that Elesa was in there, and she was calling me, and then I got really scared and fell over and woke up,” she said as quickly and in as few breaths as possible.

“Aw, Nammy! It’s okay, though. It was only a dream,” said Lily. She held Naomi tight around her shoulders. “Listen, it’s not even six yet. We should get some more sleep, right?”

“Yeah,” Naomi mumbled, nodding.

“Wake me up if you have any more bad dreams, yeah?” Lily spoke softly. “Preferably without standing on me next time.” She laughed, then slipped off the bed and to the spare mattress on the floor.

An hour later, Naomi slipped out of bed as quietly as she could. She leaned slowly over the side of the bed to where Lily was sleeping; her eyes were closed in a deep sleep. She snuck into the bathroom with a t-shirt and a pair of loose jeans, and got changed as fast as she could.

The house was silent apart from the pattering of her feet on the carpet as she purposefully snuck around the house, looking for a pair of shoes, and the keys to the back door. Eventually she found them, and picking them up as slowly and carefully as a cat burglar might steal a precious artefact, she made her way to the back room of the house. She twisted the key in the lock until it clicked, opened the door, slipped out silently and pushed it closed.

And then she was running, below the grey skies, through the curtains of rain pouring down relentlessly from the sky above. She ran out of the gate, to the end of the street, and down the main road of Concord Valley, ignoring the splashing on her ankles of the puddles she jumped through as she ran. There was a small river of water running downhill at the side of the street, runoff from the hillside, taking the path of least resistance back to the ocean from whence it came. Naomi ran faster than the stream, striding towards the familiar wooden sign on a post. She ran up the muddy path as fast as she could, though she was struggling to catch her breath as she ran back uphill again. She turned the final corner of the path, and ran past the waterfall, which gushed so much faster than it had two days ago, as though the water was as urgent as she herself.

“Ansu!” Naomi yelled at the top of the slope. “Ansu, are you here?” she gasped, and looked around wildly to find her answer.

A figure in white robes, sat cross legged in front of the shrine, grey hair and beard soaked through, stood up and turned to look at her. “Naomi? To what do I owe this early pleasure?”

Naomi shivered in the cold and rain. “It’s her. She’s calling me,” she spluttered. “I saw her face, and she was in my dream, and weird things have been happening, and I don’t know what to do!”

“Whoa, slow down, Naomi! What happened?” the wise man said. “Come under the canopy. I’ll get you a towel for your hair.”

A minute later, Naomi and Ansu sat down under the little shelter at the back of the shrine clearing. She rubbed her hair half-heartedly with the towel, before settling to use it as a blanket. She sighed, and stared out of the shelter at the wispy drizzle blanketing the shrine in water.

“It started yesterday night. Me and Lily - she’s my… my friend from town - well, we were out in Isidis when the storm hit. We were in this little coffee place on the front, and there was a, well, I guess it was a bolt of lightning. Except when it flashed on the clouds, it flashed with her face. It was definitely her. I don’t think I could have mistaken it. And then, suddenly, a spaceship crashed right out of where the face was… some radio presenters or something were in it. We got them a room at the hotel in the village. What are the chances, right? Then, last night, I dreamt that I was walking to the lake… not the lake we were at for Fireflower, the big lake. Ellismere. And basically I saw Elesa in this barn along the way. She called my name,” Naomi rambled.

“That’s very interesting. It doesn’t sound like coincidence to me,” Ansu remarked with a concerned voice. “It sounds like she really is calling for you.”

“What do I do?” asked Naomi, wide-eyed, not expecting an affirmative. “What can I do for her that she could possibly want?”

Ansu’s eyes flashed with a warmth of understanding. “Maybe you should ask her yourself,” he suggested.

“But where would I find her? How would I know what to say?” The cogs were already beginning to turn in her head.

“Where do you think, Naomi?” Ansu hinted.

Naomi’s eyes widened even more. “Do you think… you think she’s there? At the barn? What do you think I should do?”

“What are you going to do?” asked Ansu with a knowing smile. He knew from the start what Naomi’s plan would be. She’d been to near enough every single one of his weekly services since she was a kid. She wasn’t going to let the Arzine down now. He gestured at the sky. “Look, it’s starting to brighten up.”

Sure enough, the rain was thinning out; blue patches were visible in the distance, moving slowly closer, and the sky seemed brighter, less dismally grey.

Naomi knew what she had to do.

As Naomi got back to the house, she was debating internally the best way to deliver the news of the day’s adventure to Lily. Perhaps it would be a better idea to get her up and on the move before telling her what they were actually up to; on the other hand, maybe she’d get mad and turn around and never go anywhere with her ever again.

But eventually she came to the conclusion that it was probably better to tell her upfront where they were going. Whilst she wanted more than anything for Lily to know quite how she felt about her, it seemed that life was getting in the way - and if Lily couldn’t respect what was important to Naomi, what was the point in potentially being together with her?

By ten o’clock, the grey clouds had mostly moved past the village. The falling rain had been replaced by the rising smell from the ground that rain leaves behind, and the sun poked its head out from behind the clouds in the aftermath of the storm. The streets were littered with leaves and sticks from trees that had been blown off, and the plants were reverting to their normal shade of green.

Naomi leant against the back door of the house, steeling herself for the conversation she was going to have with Lily. Why did life have to be so difficult? Why did Elesa have to want to talk with her? Why did she have to worry that Lily wouldn’t laugh at her for clinging onto what she was probably going to think were “childish” beliefs? And more importantly, why did she have to be so shy?

This would be so easier if she cared less about what people thought. After all, she was going to go to the old barn regardless of what Lily said. But it’d be nice for someone to go with her, for moral support. Especially someone like Lily. Sure, she might be terrified of admitting her feelings for her, but she was strong and tough, so if anything scary happened, it’d be nice to have someone there for her.

It would have been nice if Lily had been there in her dream, she thought. Instead of falling backwards when she was startled, perhaps Lily would have been there to catch her, holding out her hand in support…

Naomi snapped out of the daydream. That was silly talk. It was just a dream, after all. But for sure, she wished that Lily would come with her today. What was the alternative? Bringing Anya? Oh, she could imagine that. It’d be laughing all the way down. Not only would she find it silly that Naomi was listening to a dream, much less a dream about a childhood story. Anya was a good friend, but she really did have a habit of teasing Naomi where it hurt. Even though she didn’t know that Naomi was that sensitive about her beliefs, it still hurt when she teased her.

The final option was even scarier. Naomi Martin, going by herself? What if something awful happened? What if Elesa was really there, and Naomi was too scared to talk to her properly? Or too awkward? It was a choice between the unknown with Lily, being teased by Anya, or being terrified on her own.

The best solution right now seemed to be to hope that Lily was on board with her idea. After all, if she thought Naomi was silly, or stupid, or whatever, it was a sign that maybe it was a good thing that she didn’t get to confess the night before.

A train whooshed past through the village; the sound of its engines echoed through the quiet Sunday morning streets. Naomi turned around, twisted the key in the lock, and stepped over the threshold.

The first thing she noticed on entering the house was the strong smell of coffee mixed with frying bacon wafting through the kitchen. The second was her father sat at the breakfast counter in a dressing gown watching the television, eating a hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs, and drinking from a large white mug. Upon seeing his daughter, he put the mug down with a clatter.

“Nams!” he greeted her. “What were you doing outside?” He looked puzzled.

“I just went for a walk,” she replied evasively. He took a sip of his coffee. “Did you make any more of that?” She gestured at the bacon on his plate.

Ignoring the question, he replied, “But it was chucking it down outside? Didn’t you get wet?” He stared pointedly at her hair, still dripping slightly.

“Yeah, well,” Naomi mumbled. “Bacon?” He shook his head. “Oh, I don’t have time for this,” she grumbled, and marched up the staircase to her bedroom.

“Lily,” she spoke softly. “There’s something I need to talk to you about. Something important.”

Lily finished throwing on her t-shirt and sat down slowly on the bed, looking at Naomi with a confused and concerned expression. Lily’s questions came in a fusillade. “What? What is it? Are you alright?” she asked.

“Yeah, it’s just-” Naomi began.

“Why are you all wet?” she asked, staring at Naomi’s damp black hair. “Here, use this towel,” she offered, and handed her a brown towel from the radiator.

“I’m getting there,” stated Naomi, impatiently. She rubbed her hair with the towel, and took a deep breath before continuing. “Listen, you know when we were out last night? And those two women, what were their names… Charlotte and Lisa, right?”

Lily nodded. “Yeah, they crashed on the beach. But just before that I saw a face in the sky on the storm cloud. It was her face,” she continued, making sure to stress the word ‘her’. She stared at Lily expecting some kind of recognition.

“Whose face?” she asked, puzzled.

“Elesa’s,” said Naomi confidently. “I really think it was her face.” She gave the towel to Lily, having finished drying her hair.

“Er-” Lily began, even more confused than before. She stared at Naomi, trying not to notice that her hair had devolved into a black fuzzy mess.

“Hear me out here, okay?” Naomi said firmly. “I know you’re going to think I’m silly, or ridiculous, or whatever… but I believe she’s real. I think she’s real, I always have done, I always will do. And I know you’re probably going to say that oh it’s just a fairytale, or it’s a kid’s story, or whatever. But people still believe those old stories. They’re old for a reason, I think. They’ve survived all this time because they’re true.”

“Naomi, I don’t-” Lily tried to begin a sentence, but was cut off by the younger girl.

“Let me finish,” Naomi grumbled. “Honestly! Ever since I was a kid I’ve been going to shrine in the village. And sure, I watched my friends stop going one by one as I got older. But not me.” She thought back to Friday’s expedition. “Me and Anya went to Mount Alavant the other day. You know, the one in the Sharpened Range with the lake.”

“I know it, yeah…” Lily agreed. “With the ice cream bar?”

“The very same. We went there on Friday, and this guy that Anya used to know was there. He told us about this crazy theory that Elesa’s buried there. And there was this signal, a repeating signal, over and over again… the word ‘axei’. Any ideas?”

She thought for a second. “Nope. It’s not Otomodaino at least. Might be Letcune, perhaps. I’m not sure.”

“Whatever it is, it’s there, and it’s weird.” She began speaking quickly, as if determined to get everything she had to say out in one breath. “And last night, I saw a face in the sky. It was her face, I’m sure of it. I can feel it. And then I had this dream, well, a nightmare almost I guess. There’s this little barn on the way from here to Lakeside. That little fishing village at the side of Ellismere? It’s a crappy old abandoned piece of junk. But I dreamt that she was in there, calling out to me, and I went in there and there she was. I was so startled that I woke up.” Naomi exhaled deeply. One breath was enough for that story. “This morning, remember? You asked if I was okay.”

“So what do you want to do about it?” quizzed Lily, beginning to understand where Naomi was going with this.

“I want to go to the barn. Just for my own peace of mind. To see what’s there, if anything,” Naomi concluded, trying to justify her choice of plan, more to herself than to Lily. It seemed kind of silly saying it all out loud again.

“Alright. But why are you so wet? Your hair’s still damp.” Lily demanded, shoving the towel back into her hands.

“I went to see the village priest, before you woke up. Before the rain stopped,” she added in response to Lily’s pointed stare. “He reckons I should go there and see. If she’s there, I mean.”

“And you want me to come with you?” Lily finished the story for her, having realised the logical conclusion to this conversation. “Because-”

“Oh, you really don’t have to, honestly,” Naomi began rapidly, hearing the second half of Lily’s sentence begin.

“No, not at all,” said Lily in a reassuring voice. She put her arm around Naomi’s shoulders, and looked into her glistening green eyes. “What’s important to you is important to me. I’ll come with you.”

Naomi felt tears welling up in her eyes with relief. Lily had accepted her beliefs. “Thank you so much,” she began, before choking up and starting to cry.

Lily put her other arm around Naomi. “Hey, it’s okay. I promise. Everything’s gonna be fine,” she comforted. “Listen, I’m gonna grab my hat and my shoes? Then let’s go. What’s the point in delaying?”

Naomi looked up at the blonde girl and felt her heart jump a little bit in her chest. Strong, beautiful, brave; now, and most importantly, accepting. That was who Lily was to Naomi now. She realised that she’d just fallen a little bit more for Lily Makino.

Naomi took her hood down again as she felt yet another brief shower come to a close. The clouds had come back again, this time as a low mist that obscured the road and made it impossible to see more than half a mile or so ahead. It almost looked like she and Lily were in a bubble, and outside the bubble was just an endless void of grey.

Lily walked behind Naomi, unsure of where the girls’ destination was. It was hard to tell in the fog; they could be walking to the ends of the world for all she knew. Naomi’s legs in front of her made it quite hard to tell where the puddles that littered the pavement were. After the previous eighteen hours of deluge, half the road seemed to be submerged in an inch or so of water, slowly running down the hill in the direction that the two girls were walking.

A car drove past, splashing water into the hedgerow ahead of them, and startling a bird, which flew out of the bush in a fright. The normal sounds of the birds were quiet, almost silent; the distant and occasional sound of the train rushing along the tracks was almost an annoyance rather than something that reminded of home; the mist seemed to cast a sombre mood on all the world. A second car drove past, this time up the hill towards the fells, towards Concord Valley. It looked like it was fleeing the mist, almost, or perhaps trying to find somewhere to shelter before the midday sun inevitably managed to burn through the clouds that blanketed the land.

And indeed, by the time the silhouette of the barn appeared over the final crest in the road, the mist was beginning to lift. Naomi could see further across the rolling plains; the air was clearer, and the torturous humidity that was beginning to become unbearable was slowly starting to relax its grip on the fields of Isidis County.

Naomi opened the gate to the yard outside the barn, which creaked in protest. She held it open for Lily, who hurried through. Her eyes were wide, and her heart was beating quickly with nerves, or fear, or maybe both? Was anybody here? Was she here? If she was, what would she say?

Her eyes caught a particularly sturdy looking piece of wood on the floor. She glanced around and picked it up. Now everything was the same as in her dream. Except Lily, of course. Would her being here make it different? Maybe Elesa would be afraid to show up if it wasn’t just Naomi on her own. But the thought of going in there by herself was too scary.

“Did you hear that?” asked Lily suddenly, breaking the silence with a question that was almost scarier than the quiet.

“No,” whispered Naomi shakily. “What did you hear?”

“Like, someone muttering, I guess. And stepping on things,” she added. Lily daren’t admit it, but she was feeling more than a little bit scared after that. “We don’t have to go in if you don’t want to,” she said to Naomi, hoping she’d change her mind.

Naomi didn’t reply, but instead continued edging forward towards the collapsed door, towards the way into the rickety barn. Splintered wood cracked under her feet. Other than the sound of her footsteps, there was a chilling, absolute silence, just like there was in her dream…

‘It’s all coming true,’ thought Naomi in a panic. She stopped, and after a second or two, turned to face Lily.

“It’s just like my dream…” she whispered. “She’s here, she’s got to be… I’m scared, Lily,” she said, looking into her eyes.

Lily tried to pull herself together, resisting the fear inside her. “Look, there’s no way she can be here, right? It was just a dream, after all. There’s nobody here, look,” she said, more confidently.

Her words gave her strength, and she stepped forward around the rotten door frame. Inside the barn was a few bales of damp hay; a collapsed table and chair, lying pathetically in the corner; a coil of rope hanging off a hook on the wall; half a piece of paper which seemed to be a flyer for cow feed; and a small wooden stool.

“Look,” she said. “Nothing here.”

Naomi stepped inside the rotten barn, and breathed in the damp, unpleasant smell of the rotting wood. As she walked, she looked around; at the roof, with its many holes and collapsing wooden planks; at the walls, with a ladder leading up to a higher level, which itself was missing a few rungs; and at the floor, which had over the years become a brown muddy mess of dirt and straw.

She turned back at Lily, then ran towards her out of the barn. Something about it gave her the creeps, like she was being watched. She wanted to be out of there as soon as possible. She stopped in front of Lily, and said in a quavering voice, “I want to go.”

“Alright,” replied Lily. “Let’s go home.” She held out her hand in support. Naomi grabbed it, and held tight to the girl she loved.

As they walked away from the empty barn towards the main road, a familiar looking brown bundle of hair trundled past, barely visible over the hedgerow at the side of the lot.

“Is that…” Naomi started, forgetting the whole reason why the two of them had come in a flash. “Hey!” she shouted. “Anya!”

The brown bundle stopped, and turned around, presumably to face the source of the shout. It moved closer to the gate, before peeking over to indeed reveal the face of Anya Fielding.

She peered over at Naomi and Lily, who were briskly walking towards her from the ruins of the barn. ‘What are they doing here?’ she thought. ‘Naomi and Lily together in a secluded place… did Naomi confess? Oh my God, I think she did!’

“Hey, Anya, what are you doing here?” asked Naomi, reaching the gate at last.

“I could ask you the same question,” said Anya, pointedly and with a smirk. “What’re two upstanding young women such as yourselves doing in a place like this?” she joked.

“She asked first,” said Lily.

“Alright, fair enough. I’m on my way back from Lakeside. It’s my aunt’s birthday and I baked her some cakes,” explained Anya.

Lily looked around expectantly. “Where are they?” she asked in a confused voice.

“I gave them to her, dumbass!” Anya laughed. “Anyway, what are you two doing here? Alone?”

“Well, it’s a long story,” Naomi hesitated.

“Ooh, is it? Did you do it, Nams? Did you?” she asked excitedly.

“Do what?” came Lily’s voice again, suspicious.

“No, I didn’t. Listen, something really odd happened.”

And so Naomi told for yet another time the story of the two women who’d crashed their spaceship on the beach in Isidis, and the dream that she’d had the night before, and what the priest of Concord Valley had had to say about it.

“So you came out here because of your dream? Oh, Nams, you are a good one, you know?” she said after Naomi finished her story. She swung the gate all the way open, and strode forward across the debris towards the old door frame of the barn.

“We checked, you know,” shouted Naomi. “There’s nothing there.”

Anya reached what was once the threshold, made a cursory glance around the wreckage, then spun around on the spot. “Nope! You’re right. There’s no sign of any kind of goddess here. Not even Elesa,” she laughed.

Suddenly, Anya froze on the spot, wide-eyed. Her peals of laughter stopped almost instantly. Something had spooked her. Something that Naomi and Lily couldn’t see from the rusty gate.

Anya slowly turned around to face the inside of the barn. Naomi and Anya started running towards her to see whatever it was inside the barn, crunching the planks and bits of wood beneath their feet with every step. They caught up to her, standing behind her, and stared into the darkness inside the barn.

“Hello, everyone,” said a ghostly, ephemeral figure stood in the center of the barn, and looking directly at them.

She stood there almost radiating white light, shining on the three of them. She wore a long cream dress, with green and purple stitching, and a tiara on her head inset with a glowing green jade. Even her dark hair seemed to be glowing with some kind of mystical white light, emanating from what seemed to be her skin itself. It lit up the walls of the barn gently, and reflected on the three girls’ faces.

The ghost continued talking. “My name is Elesa Melbourne. You might have heard of me,” she said with a slight smile.

None of the three girls said anything. Lily reached up with her arm behind her back and pinched Naomi on the arm, in the hope that pinching her would wake her up from what was clearly her dream. How she was there, she’d have to work out later. But alas, Naomi Martin didn’t wake up. This was the real deal.

“Y-yes, we have,” said Anya in a quavering, petrified voice, stood at the front of the group.

“Oh, there’s no need to be so scared!” laughed the ghostly Elesa. “Besides, I’m not even here! Look at me! Do I look real?”

Naomi had to admit, she really didn’t look like she was real. She looked like a spirit, or some kind of spectre. ‘Or,’ she thought, catching sight of some distortion and artefacts around the edge of her image, ‘she’s some kind of, I don’t know-’

“I’m a hologram, sillies!” laughed the goddess. “One of your mates left her phone on the table over there. Thought I’d do a little bit of hacking-” she twirled her fingers in a comical typing motion- “and see if I couldn’t say hello. So,” she yelled, “hello!”

“Hello,” said the three girls, looking over to the rotten table. Indeed, there was a silvery looking rectangle there, hidden behind a book of some description. They simply hadn’t noticed it when they had checked before. Or it wasn’t there.

“So, basically, I need you guys’ help,” Elesa said. “I’m in a bit of a pickle, really. Can’t really explain it right now. Anyway, I need you guys to go find my pod,” she requested.

“Your… what?” asked Naomi. “Pod? What’s that?”

“Ahh, I’ve already said too much. Look, just come to Mount Alavant. The summit, not

the lake. I saw you two there the other day,” she recalled, gesturing at Naomi and Anya. Her gaze strayed to Lily. “I didn’t see you, though. Who are you?”

“Um, Lily. Lily Makino,” she stuttered. Was she in trouble? She wasn’t invited to the lake! It wasn’t her fault!

“Nice to meet you, Lily Makino,” giggled Elesa, doing a small curtsey.

Naomi noticed just how small she was. She couldn’t have been more than four foot ten. Naomi was short - she was five feet two, but Elesa was really tiny indeed. Especially compared to Lily, who was pushing five foot nine.

“But,” said Anya, “how do we know this is the real deal? How do we know you’re really Elesa?”

“Why do you ask?” smirked the ghost. “Are there impersonators?” She laughed at her own joke. “Seriously though, Naomi, what was the word you heard at Lake Alavant? That, um, Scott, was it? That he showed you.”

“‘Axei’, right? None of us could work out what it means,” Naomi admitted.

“Well, that’s okay,” comforted the goddess. “None of you three could know anyway. Try asking your friend, though.”

“Which friend?” asked Anya.

“I think she’s on her way back. I’d better go. This is her phone, after all. Tell her I said hi, yeah? Now, if I just-”

The ghostly figure in front of them immediately vanished with a small blip. There was silence for a few seconds, until suddenly a voice came out of the phone in the corner. A clear, ethereal voice.

“Systems rebooting. Error log saved. Initializing operating systems- complete. Hello, my name is Chloe, and I’ll be your personal assistant today.”

Suddenly, a dark figure appeared in one of the storage rooms at the back of the barn. A tall, female dark figure, with a long ponytail snaking down her back…

Charlotte de Vita walked into the main room of the barn and was immediately startled by three shell-shocked looking teenage girls stood staring at her with mouths open. She was further startled upon realising that she’d nearly crashed into two of them the night before.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Her shout echoed in the empty barn. “Jeez, are you alright? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

“Charlotte,” started Lily. “What does ‘axei’ mean?” she asked cautiously, almost physically bracing herself for the response.

“Huh. It’s Letcune. It’s a really old-fashioned way of saying ‘here I am’. It’s what kids say when they’re playing hide-and-seek or whatever. Listen, have you seen my phone? I put it down a few minutes ago and can’t remember where. We’re investigating some weird energy spike here. Well, I say investigating. I mean we had nothing to do, so we decided to go for a walk, and saw some weird blips, so we thought we’d have a poke around. Hey,” she abruptly yelled. “Lisa? You around here?”

“It’s over there,” replied Anya. “On the table.”

Naomi Martin sat down on the remains of the barn door. They were going back to Mount Alavant. And, for heaven’s sake, it was a longer climb. As though the lake wasn’t hard enough! She’d collapse and roll all the way down the mountain again into the next county! She rolled her head back, and stared up into the sky.

Chapter 7 - The Trek

“Hey, mind the carpet, yeah?” Naomi’s father fretted. “Don’t be getting any mud trodden in, okay? That stuff doesn’t come out, you know.” The other people in the room mostly ignored his worrying.

The next day had dawned, and it was met with a flurry of activity at the Martin household. No less than five people were standing around in the hallway with backpacks and hiking boots on, kitted out for a day’s hike.

The plan - Anya’s idea - was to take a trek of three, maybe four days if necessary, from the foothills of the Sharpened Range, climbing first Mount Alavant - “Again?” Naomi had groaned - then three other peaks along the same line, before descending into Melbourne’s Landing in the middle of next week. It was a distance of around forty-five miles, with around ten thousand feet of climbing in total. Not only that, but they had to take the dog.

Needless to say Naomi had been opposed to this idea.

“Forty-five miles?” she’d yelled at the maps sprawled across the patio table. “You’re gonna kill us, An!”

“Oh, come on. It’s mostly flat,” Anya tried to justify. “And besides, you’ve already been up Alavant. It’s the biggest peak on the route! It wasn’t that hard, remember.”

“We walked up half of Mount Alavant, Anya.”

But here she was, sixteen hours later, stood in her hallway, with hiking boots slightly too small for her feet, a stick strapped to her belt, and a bag bursting at the seams with a tent, changes of clothes, snacks for the next few days and more bottles of sunscreen than she’d cared to count. Everyone had decided to use their own bottle, and it was Naomi’s responsibility to look after the sunscreen.

She looked over at Lily, who, despite her muscles, was seemingly struggling with carrying her delegated item.

‘At least I’m not carrying that,’ Naomi thought.

Lily opened her bag and took out a bottle of water from the top. She glanced at the label, grimaced, opened the bottle and had a drink.

“Everyone got everything?” she said, swallowing her water. There was a chorus of yeses from the group. “Well, then, let’s be off!”

Naomi gave her father a hug, tightened her grip on the leash, and stepped out of the house into the sunshine. And thus, the group began their expedition.

Leg one was the easiest by any metric. Take a couple of right turns out of Naomi’s house, cross the street, take a left, and walk thirty yards into the station. Then, cross the bridge over to the other platform, sit, and wait for the train to whisk them away to the beginning of the trek. It wasn’t fair to call it leg one, really.

They weren’t waiting too long at the station before the train whirred in and the doors opened. This time on a Sunday? Nobody about. It was a good time to travel; and indeed the five of them, and Tatty too, got to sit together.

Lily normally hated trains. She was paranoid that she’d somehow fall asleep and miss her stop. That would have been quite a mistake, because whenever she got a train on her own, she was heading home, and her station was the terminus of the line. Nevertheless, she preferred to avoid them if she could. And then there was the stupid announcers. Always so loud, startling you even if you were awake. Why they had to make them so-

“THIS TRAIN IS FOR MELBOURNE’S LANDING, CALLING AT PASSIDE TOWER…”

Lily jumped. ‘There it is,’ she thought. Every single time, she’d jump out of her skin. ‘Only another four times,’ she thought, trying to reassure herself that she’d still have a functioning heart by the end of the journey.

“CAICU ZUMANGAO MELBOURNE’S LANDINGORRO EJ, S’UPAD PASSIDE TOWERORRO…”

The automated voice repeated the same message in Otomodaino, as it would for the next four times the train stopped. Why these local services broadcast the stations in Otomodaino was beyond Lily. Nobody out here even spoke it. ‘What a waste of money,’ she thought.

Still, at least that was it from the announcer for at least another ten minutes or so. Her heart would have plenty of time to relax before the next announcement.

“PASSENGERS ARE REMINDED” - Lily jumped yet again - “THAT ALL LUGGAGE MUST BE STORED IN THE OVERHEAD COMPARTMENTS.”

Perhaps not then. Perhaps by the time they got off the train, her nervous system would simply have ceased to be. And that was okay, of course. It’d have to be, if she had any plans of completing this trek with everyone.

‘What a strange bunch,’ she mused. Her, the fisherwoman’s daughter, who was mostly uncomfortable with being more than a few miles from the ocean; Charlotte, the astronaut radio presenter, whom Naomi and Anya somehow seemed to know; her Covan fiancée, Lisa; Anya the painter and apparently an avid hiker - news to Lily - who was leading the damn trip; and Naomi.

She glanced at Naomi, expecting to see her nattering away with Anya about something silly, or maybe faffing with that shaggy dog. She was staring out of the window through her glasses, eyes flickering left and right, watching the world go by. The sun flickered through the leaves of the trees at the side of the railway, casting fractal shadows across her tanned skin. Occasionally, it flickered into her eyes, showing Lily the deep emerald tone of her irises.

They all had those eyes, Lily reflected. Westford folks. Not just the emerald, but the way they refracted the sun. Eyes used to the light, the blues and oranges of the ocean and the scrubland. Eyes a product of what they saw.

But there was something different about Naomi’s eyes. They were shy eyes, but eyes which showed so much more. The ocean, the sky, the fells, the fields, the plains. Staring into Naomi’s eyes sent her spiralling into a daydream…

She was on the side of a hill, near the ocean. The top of the hill was behind her, and it was covered with a thick forest. It stretched below where she was, too, and down all the way to the beachfront and the waves lapping gently on the shore. The area she was in was almost like a clearing, a brief respite from the dense woodland around her.

Naomi was there, too. She approached Lily, and sat down beside her on the hillside, staring out across the water at the tiny little boats in the distance.

“I wish I could sail,” she said, gazing at the sea.

“I can teach you, you know,” Lily replied. “We can go out one weekend, when it’s nice. Feel the wind in your sails, and the waves rocking the boat below you. I’ll bring snorkels and flippers, too, maybe.”

“That’d be nice, yeah,” she smiled.

Lily looked her in the eyes. It was nice to see Naomi’s smile. “Let’s do it.”

There was a moment of silence, and Lily listened into the wind. There was the sound of distant music, guitars, maybe. Singing, perhaps. Wherever it was, she couldn’t work it out.

Naomi brushed her hair out of the way of her face, and blushed slightly.

Lily’s heart leapt for reasons she wasn’t entirely sure of. She had a sudden urge to say something, but she didn’t know quite what it was. The air was electric, and she felt like she had to do something about it.

“Naomi,” she began.

“I know,” she replied, and leant in towards Lily.

“Lily? You still with us?” worried Anya, prodding her in the side with her fingers.

Lily snapped back to reality and immediately realised she was staring directly into the eyes of a blushing Naomi. She darted her eyes down as fast as lightning and tried to conceal her blush by pretending to faff around with her bag.

She pulled out a bottle of water, took a swig a bit too quickly and looked back up at Naomi and Anya. “Yeah, I’m fine…” she coughed. “I just zoned out, is all.”

But Lily could tell from Naomi’s eyes that her blush concealed a little more than that.

“WE ARE NOW APPROACHING PASSIDE TOWER. PLEASE MAKE SURE YOU TAKE ALL OF YOUR PERSONAL BELONGINGS WITH YOU.”

She jumped again. Between those announcements and whatever that daydream was, Lily was convinced her heart wouldn’t survive the train ride, let alone the trek.

After a further grueling hour of public transport, the group finally disembarked the train in the foothills of the Sharpened Range. Forested peaks stood sentinel above them, watching down almost with a sneer at these five and their canine companion, wagging his tail in anticipation of a good long walk. Anya checked the altimeter on her phone. One hundred and twelve feet. The lake was at four thousand two hundred feet. It would be a solid few hours before they managed to reach it.

And with a fastening of straps, it was Naomi who made the first step into the wilds. The train whirred away from behind them, and they were on their own, challenging Mount Alavant for the second time in the last few days in Naomi and Anya’s case.

The path was fairly gentle, up some countryside roads, before the asphalt gave way to gravel, and then finally to the dirt track up to the lake. The plan was to get up there, and camp for the night - it’d be another three hours or so before they got there, and the sun was already beginning to descend across the afternoon sky.

Somehow, Naomi was confident. Sure, last time she’d attempted this climb, she’d been tired and exhausted. But she’d had practice now. She knew the way, how far it was, and so on. And she always reckoned that when you do things for the second time, they take way less time.

But that wasn’t the main reason why she felt capable right now. That was because she was distracted. She’d noticed Lily staring at her. Not a scary stare, or an intimidating stare, or anything like that. More of, well, a gaze, she thought.

This was something she needed to talk to Anya about. After all, who better to discuss these things with than Naomi’s self-appointed ambassador to the world of romance.

“I need to, uh,” she said, perhaps a bit too loudly. “I need to talk to you, An.” She looked around shiftily. Lily was in conversation with Charlotte and Lisa. No need to worry about her.

“Yeah? What’s up?” came the chipper reply.

“So, um, right, well,” stuttered Naomi, staring down at the ground as though it had offended her gravely. “When we were on the train… um, I think Lily was looking at me…”

Anya looked Naomi in the eyes. “Yeah? Well, duh, she was sat across from you. Where else was she supposed to look? At the roof?”

Naomi blushed. “Not like that, dumbass… like she was staring at me. Proper looking, you feel?”

“Ohh,” realised Anya, eyes widening. “Like she”- she looked around at Lily, then dropped her voice to almost a whisper -”like she was looking at you? Like you reckon she likes you kind of looking at you?”

“I dunno,” Naomi said unconfidently. “I guess so.” She contemplated for a second, then added, “Or maybe she just zoned out with her eyes in my, I don’t know, general direction, I guess.”

“Was she looking you in the eyes?” inquired Anya.

“She was,” Naomi said. “Does that mean anything?”

“Well, sure! It’s how you can tell, isn’t it?” she explained. “How you can tell that she’s looking at you because of you, and not just because you happen to be in the place where she was staring.”

“You reckon she likes me, then?” Naomi gasped.

“Well, sure! Besides, she already went on a date with you, remember? Or had you forgotten after all this excitement?”

That, at least, was true. Truth be told, she had kind of forgotten that she and Lily had been on a date - to the cinema, no less. Everything that had happened since then, the storm, the spaceship crash, Charlotte… it had displaced her memory of the date, in a way. It certainly didn’t feel like the other day. Maybe a week ago?

Actually, now she thought about it, it made her a little frustrated. It certainly took something special to get her to go out to town usually; to have actually had the courage to ask the girl she liked out on a date? Unheard of for Naomi. And to think she was even on the verge of confessing to her! Outrageous!

And yet somehow the most ridiculous thing possible put a stop to it. Oh, it was clear that heaven truly had forbidden that she come out of her shell. I mean, come on, a spacecraft falling out of the sky right in front of her? And much less that, one with her physics tutor onboard. Who just happens to now be a radio presenter that everybody knows. She thought that it was completely typical. Something good happens, something ridiculous has to follow to restore balance.

Except, it wasn’t typical, was it? When was the last time something like this happened to someone she knew? Never! On a planet of nine billion people, the one beach that Charlotte de Vita had to crash on was the beach Naomi Martin was stood on. What are the chances? She didn’t like to think.

At any rate, it felt like more than coincidence. Something else was afoot. Or was it someone else…

“She’s playing with me,” stated Naomi, seemingly out of the blue.

Anya was a little startled. “Who is? Lily?” she queried. “Who, Naomi?” But Naomi had already slinked off to the back of the group.

“So. How tall actually is this mountain?” asked Lisa. “Because, and I don’t know about you, but it looks pretty damn big from here to me. We don’t have to scramble, do we?”

“God, Lisa, really? You can fly around in outer space, no less, with no problems whatsoever, but a little hill scares you now?” teased Charlotte.

“There’s no dirt in space… and besides, you can’t fall off up there,” she retorted. “Seriously, though, how tall is it?”

Lily chipped in after consulting her phone. “Six thousand feet, apparently. Not the highest peak around here, but certainly not trivial.”

Lisa groaned.

“Hey, it’s not that bad. We set off plenty early enough. And those two already went up the other day. They seemed to managed fine enough,” she said.

“Yeah, fair enough. How did the skinny one manage to climb all the way up here? She doesn’t look like she’s got any muscle on her.” she stated bluntly.

Lily looked at her with a pointed expression. “She’s small, but tough, Naomi is. She seems to spend half her time halfway up hillsides. I’m not even sure why, to be honest. She doesn’t even like hiking.”

Charlotte thought back to when she was still living in Concord Valley. It would have been, what, the spring of 6002? Total washout, she thought. They didn’t get one nice day all spring, just constant storms and other various nonsense. And yet she noticed, throughout the downpours, one little black-haired figure walking up that muddy path on the side of the hill to the shrine every day. And even when she was at her house yesterday, she’d noticed that her boots, piled up by the front door, were caked in mud.

“It’s from going to the shrine, I bet.” Charlotte said knowingly. “Up the side of the hill in the village,” she added, noticing Lily and Lisa’s fairly blank looks. “Look, she walks to the shrine often, right? It’s up a hill, yeah?”

“Shrine?” asked Lily. “Like, uh, an Arzine shrine?”

“Yeah, sure,” laughed Charlotte. “There’s one in Concord Valley. Oh, come on, it’s not so small it wouldn’t have a shrine!” she giggled, looking at the other two’s confused faces.

“No, it’s not that,” said Lily. “She just didn’t strike me as the type to still believe in that stuff. I mean, she’s never mentioned it to me. Not that it’s a problem, or weird, or whatever,” she added. “She did Fireflower with me and Anya in March, but, I mean, everyone does Fireflower.”

“Well, I guess everyone has surprises,” Charlotte said in an attempt to be poignant. “I still can’t believe you didn’t know that, though. I thought you and her were supposed to be together?”

Lily blushed faster than Charlotte could blink. “What? Who told you that? That's not true," she said sheepishly, pulling the sides of her sunhat down to conceal her blush.

"Looks like there might be some truth to it to me, red-face," teased Charlotte. "Nah," she added more seriously, "that's fair. I just kinda assumed because you two don't ever seem to be apart. And the way she looks at you sometimes... there's something there, I think. Plus a certain someone may have hinted it rather heavily," she whispered pointedly, thrusting her index finger in the general direction of Anya.

"Ugh. Don't listen to her, yeah? She's the absolute worst for just making rumours and that up about people," Lily explained, still in a rather reproachful tone.

"Do you think she likes you?" asked Charlotte.

"Well... I doubt it. I really don't think I'm her type. I mean, you know, she's smart and all intelligent and that. She's going to university in two months time, for goodness' sake. Me, on the other hand? I'm just a boat mechanic. And that's probably all I'll ever be." Lily sighed.

"I don't think that her going to university would be something that could get in the way of anything you two may or may not have. There's boats to fix all over the planet, I'm sure you could find some old bangers in Caracelmarket to fix up and make shiny again or whatever you boat people do. And you're pretty smart too you know -- you can speak Otomodaino fluently! That's something that Naomi sure can't say about herself."

"Well, yeah, but speaking another language isn't really that hard... I mean you can speak Letcune, right?"

"Only because my family is Letcune. It doesn't count if you learn it when you're a baby. You learning Otomodaino, though? Most people around here can't complete a damn sentence let alone speak with the finesse that you can."

Lily stopped on the path, breathing heavily. "Ugh, I need a break." She sat down on a boulder by the side of the path and began pulling out bits of grass idly from the floor.

"You alright?" asked Charlotte, stopping beside her. "Go on ahead, we'll catch up, Lise," she instructed Lisa.

"Yeah, I'm just out of breath, you know? This path is right steep, you know," she explained.

Charlotte wasn't convinced, and sat down next to her on another rock. "It's alright, you can talk to me if you want. Is there something going on?"

"Well, it's just... I'm so not sure about this, but... well... I think... I think I like her."

Charlotte's eyes lit up with realisation and the contented feeling of finding out something you suspect to be true is indeed that. "Are you going to tell her?"

"Do you think I should?" Lily gasped. "How? When?"

Charlotte winked. "When you feel ready. You'll know when."

When the group arrived at the corrie lake, they were greeted by the smiling face of none other than Scott Blackburn and an assembled archaeological team. The base of the corrie, or at least the parts not occupied by tarn, were covered in an array of stark white marquees, each populated by a smattering of scientists poking away at beeping machines of some geological function or another.

"Scott!" exclaimed Anya without a hint of irony. "Fancy seeing you here!"

Naomi rolled her eyes. "I see you brought the troops up here. Did you find her yet? Elesa, I mean?" she asked.

"No, but we've made some progress! Look over there at the back of the corrie. You see that tent with the red stripes? That's the Dig Tent."

"And what do you do in that tent, Scott?" asked Charlotte in a sarcastic voice.

Scott laughed. "Why, I don't believe we've met! Scott Blackburn," he said, holding his hand out for Charlotte and Lisa to shake.

"So what have you found in your Dig Tent?" asked Anya, exaggerating the last two words.

"Well, it's funny you asked. You remember that secret message that was coming out of here? AXEI? I worked out what it means! It means-"

"It's Letcune for I am here," interrupted Anya.

"Yeah, that's right," he said, rather deflatedly. "Anyway, I relayed that to my friends at Portland U, and they pulled a few favours and kissed a few arses, and basically eventually they all decided to make a thing of it. So they all carted out here with all this crap, and I wasn't expecting them to find anything at all, but guess what they found!" he jabbered, excited once more.

"Ooh, I don't know," said Anya. "Treasure? Are there gemstones?"

"Nope, it's better than that!"

"Better than treasure?" Anya looked well and truly stumped. Nobody else had any better ideas by the sounds of it, because they all stared blankly at him, waiting for him to reveal the mysterious secrets of the Dig Tent.

"Well... we don't know! There's some kind of forcefield! We can't get any further than ten feet down."

The group of girls stood in stunned silence for a few seconds. Nobody really had anything to say to this revelation that they hadn't actually managed to dig up anything at all.

And Charlotte had other ideas. "Are you sure it's a forcefield? That sounds kinda outlandish. I'd be more suspect that your pickaxes aren't just a bit crap."

"Well, see, that's what I thought, right? But then we got some folks in to check it out and turns out it's not our drills. It's a genuine forcefield, which is quite weird because nobody really knows why there might be a forcefield underneath the mountain. Anyway, do you want a drink from the shop? You must be pretty exhausted."

"I could definitely go for a lemonade, I must say," Naomi said.

Naomi sat on a picnic rug, sipping the last few mouthfuls out of the bottom of her lemonade can, thinking about the supposed forcefield. The sun was beating down on the back of her head, giving her a bit of a headache and making her a bit annoyed. Why would there be a forcefield there? It was obvious now, to her, that Elesa was definitely under this mountain. There was no other reason that was clear to her why there would be some kind of forcefield here. For one, forcefields were incredibly expensive to maintain. It wasn't like just anybody had one. And another problem -- the technology to make forcefields was only supposed to be available to national security agencies, because if criminals got their hands on it they could use it to prevent the police from arresting them and putting an end to their nefarious acts.

All of which pointed to one of three things: a, that Mount Alavant was a secret nuclear fusion power plant; b, that it was a secret national security facility; or c, that it was the resting place of the goddess Elesa.

Naomi certainly favoured the third one. And after a brief discussion, the others agreed that it was not very likely that the mountain was home to a secret spy laboratory or a classified electricity generator. Having said that, they didn't much think that it being the secret spaceship bunker of a two thousand year old goddess was very likely either.

"You know what? Why not let's just climb up to the top and see if we can work it out from there," argued Naomi heatedly. "Maybe if we get an overview of the whole situation, we'll be able to figure out whatever is going on here. And besides, it's only another thousand feet. We can totally do that!"

"Nuh-uh. I'm out," said Charlotte. "I'm rather enjoying lying here in the sun, and, after all, we're not even supposed to be climbing to the summit of any of these mountains. That's too much energy expended."

"I'm going to stay here with Charlotte, if that's alright with you," agreed Lisa, nodding her head. That left only Naomi's classmates.

"I'm coming. No question," said Anya. "I'm invested in this mystery now. How about you, Lily? You get to spend time with Naomi..." she teased. She was promptly introcduced to a wad of grass launched into her face from the blonde girl.

"Of course I'm coming. I won't miss an adventure." she snapped. "I'd come no matter whether Naomi was or not."

"All right. We'll be back in an hour or two, probably," Naomi explained. "Stay here and be good," she laughed.

Lisa bid them farewell. "Have fun! Don't push yourself too hard."

"Okay, this is a lot-" she panted, "-steeper than-" she panted again, "-the way up to the lake," Naomi struggled.

"Regretting your decision now?" asked Anya, pulling a waterproof tightly around her. The wind had rather picked up now, and was making them shiver a little bit despite the fact that they were extremely hot from the whole climbing thing they were up to. There was a bit of a mist that seemed to just be appearing from nowhere descending on them slowly too.

"No," puffed Naomi. "We have to get to the top. We just have to."

"Well, I'm glad we brought coats," Lily said. "It looks like we're just about to walk into a cloud! I like your coat, Naomi. The colours really match with your... with your eyes," she added, before realising what she'd said and began blushing like a tomato.

"Oh, thanks, Lily," Naomi mumbled embarrassedly, also blushing.

'Jeez, get a room,' thought Anya.

The fog was thickening with every step towards the summit of Mount Alavant they got. However, it didn't appear to be raining, so this cloud certainly did have a silver lining. An eerie silence had fallen upon them as well -- the rumbling of the gusts of wind had died down, yet somehow was still there, a rumbling that sounded far away now, instead of right inside their ears. It made the three of them rather nervous, as though they should be preparing for a massive gust of wind to come through any second now.

The silence was getting to Naomi. In situations like this, it was best that someone kept talking and joking to distract the rest of the group from the almost scary weather conditions that had taken time out of their day to harass the three of them. But Naomi was looking at the path ahead with disdain and regret. It was just a gravelly stony path leading up the side of the mountain, flanked by fields of short green grass. No sign of anything up here of note in solving the mystery. And what's more, they couldn't even use the time to look down on the corrie from above and see if they could work something out from there. All of this just seemed like something of a waste of time and energy. Maybe Charlotte was right. Maybe they should have just stayed in the corrie, sipping lemonade.

Every step further forward made Naomi even more like a fool for having come up here. She almost felt like the universe was tricking her... no, Elesa was tricking her, and this shook her to her core.

All of a sudden she felt a wet patch on her right cheek, and instinctively raised her hand up to wipe it away. 'Rain?' she thought, and stopped and looked up into the sky. But no drops landed on her face; the cloud that had descended so snugly upon them had nothing to say in the way of a shower. Instead it was... a tear?

And just like that she was crying, there on the side of the mountain, tears streaming down her face, tears of a sheer unwillingness to face reality, that she'd led them up the side of this mountain all for nothing, and now they were going to get rained on or blown over or blown off the side...

And then she felt the warmth of someone else holding her in a hug, pulling her in tight and telling her it was alright, and whatever she was upset about was almost certainly not a problem, and that she could talk to her if she needed to, and that everything was going to be fine.

Naomi pulled away for a second, rubbed her eyes and breathed deeply with her eyes closed for a few seconds.

"I'm alright, I'm alright. Thank you, Anya," she sniffled, and opened her eyes.

It wasn't Anya who had hugged her. It was Lily.

Naomi immediately stopped crying and went as red as a tomato. "Sorry..." she mumbled. "Thanks, Lily," she added, in a small voice.

"That's quite alright. Anything to make my friend feel better, yeah?" said Lily. "What's on your mind, eh?"

"This is pointless," said Naomi. "It's just pointless. We're not going to find anything up there. It's so dark because of this damn cloud I can barely see what's ten feet in front of me. We're going to get absolutely soaked, and it's all my fault!"

"You know what, Naomi? That's nonsense. We're not even at the top yet. We don't know what will be up there. I thought you truly believed in Elesa?"

"I do, but..."

"But what? So long as you believe, it's not pointless, right? You're doing it for her!" roused Lily.

"I suppose..." Naomi pulled herself together and shook her arms around, trying to cast off the overflow of emotions. She pulled her bag straps tight around her shoulders, held her head high, and announced, "Okay. I'm going now. I'm going to solve this mystery. For myself, and for her. Are you coming?"

"We sure are," said Lily and Anya.

And the three of them continued their march up the summit ridge of Mount Alavant, pushing deeper and deeper into the fog.

"Nicely done," Anya said quietly to Lily.

“So, Scott,” began Lisa. “How do you know it’s a forcefield, anyway? If I were to encounter one, in the wild, as it were… how would I know what I’d found?”

“Well, it really does depend,” he explained. “Forcefields can let things through, and just catalogue what they’ve let pass, or they can act completely solid, or, they can simply annihilate all matter that attempts to pass through them. Have a look at this.” He stood up, walked over to one of the tents, and disappeared for a few seconds, before re-emerging carrying a power drill.

Or rather, what was left of one. The drill bit was completely gone, and presumably what it was once made of had melted and dripped down onto the body of the drill, which had a gaping hole in it, through which all sorts of wiring and metal components were poking out.

Scott pulled the trigger, and instead of a pleasant whirring sound and the drill bit revving up, they were greeted by a screeching sound for a second or two, which faded out pathetically. Then, a pair of sparks flew out of the end of the drill.

“As you can see, it didn’t much like our drills.” he stated dryly.

They continued talking about the disadvantages of having an interdimensional forcefield destroy your mining equipment, until Charlotte cast her eyes away from the picnic mat up to the angry face of Mount Alavant behind them, and noticed something rather odd indeed. "Hey. Look up there," she said. "At the summit."

Lisa turned around on the mat and stared the last twelve hundred feet of mountain in the face -- only to find that half of that face had disappeared into a slowly revolving band of mist that seemed to be rotating around the summit. It looked almost like a tornado of sorts, only much slower and without the cloud above that they clamber down to the ground from. What's more, the cloud almost had a greenish tinge to it.

"What the hell is that?" she exclaimed.

Scott turned to look, and his heart stopped. “It’s getting bigger. The forcefield’s getting bigger! I have to get my people out of the dig site!” He got up and sprinted towards the spinning green cloud.

"The others are up there! They’re gonna get killed!" Charlotte panicked. "I'm going to ring them," she added, frantically pushing buttons on her phone. She raised her phone to her ear, and anxiously awaited Naomi's voice on the other end of the line.

But there was nothing.

"Crap. No signal!" she yelled. “We’ve got to get them out of there! You coming?"

Thirty minutes later, the trio had climbed even higher up the side of the mountain. The summit was almost in reach, according to Lily's altimeter. They were only a hundred and fifty feet away. But, given the hellish fog that had descended upon them, it could have been ten thousand, and they would have had absolutely no way of knowing.

But at least the path was reasonably clear. They could see where they were going, and from where they had come. And what's more, it hadn't started raining yet. That was also something to be proud of.

"Hey, what's that?" asked Anya. "Down there, on the floor."

On the ground, about ten feet in front of Naomi, were a series of small eddies of what looked like steam, or smoke maybe. They seemed to be crashing into the side of something, something invisible, like waves crashing into a sea wall during a storm. They would move in towards the whatever it was, then they would suddenly hit it and create a sharp looking line, and then all the mist would rush upwards about two feet or so, before dissipating and making way for the next one. The invisible wall seemed to run as far as she could see, off to the left and right of her and over the cliffs on the side of the ridge.

"Wow. That's pretty cool," said Naomi. "There must be some weird wind currents up here for that to be able to happen."

"I can't hear any wind," said Lily. "In fact, I can't hear anything at all."

Naomi looked up the path. "Hey, is that the summit?" she asked, pointing at a concrete post about thirty yards away from them.

"Why, I think it might be, as a matter of fact," replied Anya.

"Sweet! Dibs on being the first at the top," yelled Naomi, started running up the slope, and leaped right over the weird eddies on the ground.

Suddenly, a lot of things happened all at once. From behind the group came a petrified scream of "STOOOOOOOOP!". A small 'vworp' sound seemed to emit itself from Naomi as she stepped over the eddies. And suddenly, she found herself lying on the ground in the mud, as though having tripped over something.

And then, Charlotte de Vita ran past Anya and Lily, followed shortly by Lisa. They stopped just short of the eddies on the ground and yelled to Naomi.

“Are you alright, Naomi? Talk to me, Naomi!” they panicked, waving their arms in the air at her.

She rolled over on the floor, and sat up. “Yeah, I’m okay. I just tripped, I think,” she explained. “What’s all the screaming about?”

“The forcefield is getting bigger. And it melts things that touch it. It’s going to get here soon,” said Charlotte gravely.

Anya started, “I- uh, I think it might be here already. Look at the mist down there.” She walked over and pointed at the strange mist patterns on the ground. Sure enough, the wall preventing the mist from moving towards the summit was ever so slowly creeping away from the higher parts of the ridge.

“And I managed to get over it, and I’m okay, evidently,” said Naomi from the other side of the forcefield.

Anya clenched her fists, squeezed her eyes as tightly closed as they could go, and stepped gingerly forward over the eddies towards Naomi. The forcefield made a small ‘vworp’ sound.

“All good, guys! Come on over,” invited Anya.

And so, the other three adventurers stepped over the barrier too. The forcefield made three more ‘vworp’ sounds. They carried on walking further and further up the mountain to the summit plinth, almost within touching distance.

Then, through the mist, came a faint, melodic sound, almost like singing. It didn’t seem to come from anywhere in particular; it was an ephemeral sound, whirling and floating its way through the air around them, like a fairy fluttering around in the breeze. It was almost inaudible at times, then it got louder and more clear, and then it would fade back into the mist again, its source ever hidden.

At that moment, the mist revolving around the forcefield saw fit to begin raining massive great drops of water. But they simply bounced off the top of the forcefield, almost rhythmically, like a thousand massive drums being hit by a thousand skilled players. And the rain came in bands, or waves, almost, which seemed to coincide with the strange voice, still flittering around in the background.

And then came the wind, suddenly audible and gusting so hard it was whistling, threatening and trying to blow the five off the side of the mountain.

“I don’t like this, Naomi,” said Lily. “This doesn’t feel safe anymore.”

Naomi seemed to have almost gone into a trance-like state, so transfixed she was on attaining the summit of Mount Alavant. “It’s safe, I promise you. Listen,” she said, turning around, “the mountain is singing to us.” Her eyes were glistening as though she was on the brink of tears.

Lily listened to the wind, and the rain, and the whirling voice moving around them. The whistling of the wind suddenly didn’t seem to be random gusts anymore -- it was… the harmony to the voice? And why did the song -- because that was clearly what it was -- seem so familiar? Even their footsteps seemed to be part of the song now, a constant beat, coupled with the sound of the wind and the ghostly wail moving through the mist, building the song up with every step forward they took.

Naomi felt her emotions welling up in her chest as she stepped forward towards the summit. She knew the voice in the wind was Elesa, she knew that this had all been planned, and she knew that this was the right thing to do, the right place to be, the right mountain and the right day at the right time and the right people.

And as the music got more and more obvious to her as she walked, so did her tears start to pour down the sides of her face, running like rivers down her cheeks, listening to the voice in the wind and the pouring rain sing the song that felt so so familiar but which she could not place. Yet despite the tears falling from her eyes, there was another feeling in her heart. A positive, powerful feeling, that just wanted to be let out, to be free amongst the otherworldly sounds around her -- the urge to sing, to sing the song of the wind and the rain.

It started just under her breath as she walked, a whispering, then a muttering. But the closer and closer she got to the highest point on the mountain, barely twenty feet in front of her now, the louder and more intense the music of the wind and the voice and the rain falling atop the forcefield above them got, and so Naomi simply had to sing louder to be heard, and louder and louder with every step, and with every vertical foot she gained towards the final objective of the climb, the music approached a climax, until Naomi was singing at the top of her lungs, battling her own lack of breath from climbing, and the roaring of the wind, lurking as it was behind the whistling, until she lifted her feet higher for the last time just as the music reached its glorious crescendo, swirling around in the mist and fog, coming from everywhere and somehow nowhere at the same time, and she stretched her arms out as wide as they would go, leant out over the void above the corrie, and sang as loudly as she could into the nothingness:

Now I am here, under the sky and the sun
I tell you not to worry; hard work is done.
Let your voice sound out, wherever you may be
Now I soar on the wind, and invite you with me.

And then Lily caught up, and held her arms out too, holding onto Naomi’s, and joined in with the last verse of the song, yelling it over the valley below, tears streaming down both their faces for reasons neither of them could completely fathom.

Through the winter, spring, the summer and fall
As long as you’re with me I can cope with it all.
Let your voice sound out, and you will surely see
That you’ll soar on the wind, up high here with me.

And it was in the pause just after this verse that Naomi, overcome with unknown yet powerful emotions, looked up at the taller blonde girl singing into the abyss, who turned to face her through her tears, looked into her eyes, leant in and kissed her. And then they sang, looking into each other’s faces:

The sun will come up and the sun will go down
Over ev’ry last village and every last town.
And my light will shine over every last sea
For I am that golden sun and you’ll rise with me.

Immediately, the song completely stopped. There was silence on the top of Mount Alavant. Tears still falling, Naomi collapsed to her knees, overcome with emotions of confusion, and yet power and determination.

From behind them came a clunking sound, then a grinding and a rumbling; Lily turned around and saw that from the rock had emerged some form of metal hatch.

“What happened here?” asked Anya, finally caught up to them, and seeing the rather strange sight of her two friends kneeling on the edge of a cliff as if in prayer, facing away from a mysterious titanium trapdoor that was still shimmying and shaking its way up through the ground.

“I think we might have just met her,” said Lily cryptically.

“Not yet, you haven’t!” said a strange voice.

Naomi felt compelled to turn around for the first time and see whose voice that was, because it definitely wasn’t the voice of Anya, or Charlotte, or Lisa. And there, stood on top of the hatch, almost seeming to flicker in the light, was the image of a girl, posing almost defiantly. It was Elesa.

Or, at least, an image of her.

“I’m impressed you made it this far. I thought you would have turned around at the part with the forcefield,” she said.

“You… planned this?” asked Naomi, wiping away tears.

“Sure I did, Naomi!” The goddess laughed. “I wanted to see if you were capable. Capable and confident, and strong, too. And -- good news -- you are!”

“But what about the music? The song?”

“Yep, that was me, too. I’ve been practicing recently. I’m glad I finally got to show someone what I’ve achieved. Now, uhm, let’s see, the last thing that we need to see before I can open this hatch is, hang on,” she paused for a second to think, “an act of true love.”

Naomi and Lily looked at each other a bit sheepishly.

“But I think you’ve already got that part covered, right? I mean that seemed like a real act of true love to me.”

“What act of true love?” Anya whispered to Lisa. She shrugged.

“Anyway, before I open this hatch, because I won’t be able to hijack Charlotte’s phone like this anymore once you’re inside -- I’m in section D-48-A. Come quickly, yeah? We don’t have much time. And, uh, good luck!” And with a small ‘zip’, the ghostly spectre of Elesa disappeared from vision.

Naomi stood up, rubbed her eyes, and walked over to the hatch. They all peered down at it, and suddenly, with a small click, it began to swing open, revealing a darkened, vertical shaft that seemed to go on forever.

And then some lights flickered on, and they could see a ladder, and a room far below, and some text, stencilled in military style red writing onto the wall.

‘RMSC Niamh A,’ read Naomi. However it had got here, of all places, she had no idea. But somehow, she had a strong feeling about its purpose.

It was a spaceship.

Chapter 8 - The Spaceship (unfinished)

With a soft clanging sound, Naomi jumped off the last rung of the ladder onto the floor of the room below, followed by the others.

She rubbed her eyes in an attempt to get them used to the darkness, to survey the dimly lit space around her.

The room was around the same size as her living room; but there were no couches and no footstools in here. The walls were dark, made of grey-black sheet metal pinned with rivets. Occasionally, there was a flickering white light instead of a panel; the lights were clearly tired and struggling to put out the light that they were. There was, however, a large screen with various controls below it, buttons and dials with labelling written in some language that Naomi didn’t understand. The screen itself simply displayed grey static.

On the other side of the room was a large reinforced door with more writing on, this time in stark yellow lettering. Whatever it said, it was clearly something worth paying attention to.

“Caution: airlock,” read Lily. “It’s old Otomodaino,” she explained. “All of this is old Otomodaino. Like, two thousand years old, old Otomodaino. Maybe three.”

“But what does it mean?” asked Lisa.

“It means that whoever built this place, they did it an extremely long time ago. It’s surprising it still even works, to be honest.”

Suddenly, there was a sparking sound from near the airlock door. With a hiss, the airlock seals broke, and air came rushing down the access chute through the now-open threshold.

“It doesn’t. The whole thing is completely shot,” Charlotte laughed. “C’mon.” She walked through the airlock compartment and into the next room. “Oh, now this is more like it!”

In the next room were a myriad of computers and terminals and screens all flashing lights and numbers and words and symbols and all sorts of cryptic data and information was scrolling on the screens. On the other side of the room was another airlock; next to that a door labeled with a warning symbol that looked suspiciously similar to the symbol for radioactivity. Naomi eyed it warily, as though staring it down would convince any radiation that was there to back off.

Charlotte and Lily dashed up to the largest screen, at the very front of the room, and began to hammer away at buttons on the console.