Prologue
My name is Naomi Martin. You might have heard of me.
Six years ago, my eldest daughter’s daughter had a son. He was born on the last day of summer -- three weeks early, mind you -- but completely healthy in every respect. He’s a bonny child by the name of Zay, and is growing up to be quite a smart young man indeed. On his third birthday, the whole family gathered at my house for a special dinner. It’s just a little custom we’ve got in our family. My father, bless his soul, would always cook for me on my birthday, and on my mother’s too, when she was still with us. On his birthday, I’d try my hardest to cook for him, but I’m not the most adept in the kitchen and my roast beef ended up looking rather more like a hunk of leather than a tender steak.
We were sat at the dinner table tucking into our starters when little Zay asked me what I did when I was young. Usually, I avoid this topic altogether. Everybody already knows my story, right? There’s not a soul in Arzin that doesn’t know my name. Why should I spend more time dwelling on the past which has so defined my entire existence, when everybody knows what happened anyway?
But that afternoon was different. Maybe it was the way the sun was shining through the leaves of the oak trees, just daring to turn yellow at the first sign of autumn, as they had done on that fateful day; maybe it was sixty years worth of pretending I hadn’t been one of the most important people in human history; or maybe, and most probably, it was just that I’d had too much expensive, mature Silvaeni wine, but I decided to tell that small segment of my family about what I did when I was a child. What I did the day the revolution started.
Regardless of the reasons, I told my family the story of the first day of autumn, in the year six thousand and eight. And seeing their faces and reactions to the tale inspired me to put pen to paper and write the way I saw what happened. Of course, my entire life I’ve watched people describe, and question, and spin the events of that week or two of my life, be they newsreaders, or analysts, or eventually historians, but before now I’d never felt compelled to tell my side of the story.
Writing this, I actually feel rather indignant. Indignant that the realities of those few days at the beginning of the revolution have been spun beyond even recognition. Indignant that the sacrifices made to save people all over the world were forgotten about by people too busy focused on the so-called “big picture”. Indignant that the value of strength and hope and love in even the most difficult of times were glossed over as simply a romanticisation of the events of those brief days.
Because that’s all the revolution was. The love of people in their homelands, their friends and their families. The hope of seeing a better, stable tomorrow. And the strength of those who dared to fight and to stand against the darkness.
But my story in particular is not one of love, of hope, or of strength. My story is a story of faith.
Concord Valley 2017, Chapter 1 (unfinished)
The town where I grew up was a suburb of a large city in Korman State in the Westford Territories. It was nestled snugly between a range of rocky mountains as far as the eye could see, and the great expanse of the Undaric Ocean. Through the city ran a major rail route, and you could hear the rumbles of the freight trains and the far off whirring of the passenger express services all over the city.
We also had a spaceport. Every day there’d be countless shuttles and spaceplanes landing, taking off, landing again, taking off again… it wouldn’t stop even in the dead of night. But there was something pretty about those stark white blobs zipping around in the sky all day. As a child, I would sit in the back garden of my childhood home and watch them all afternoon. I thought they looked rather like angels.
It was pretty warm all year round in Concord Valley. The walls of the mountains kept the heat from escaping, be it the depths of winter or a late summer heatwave. Even during a particularly cold snap, it would never get so chilly that you had to wear anything more than a jumper outside. In fact, most of the year, the standard attire was a t-shirt or vest, and a pair of shorts. All this meant that the weather was really nice. Not so much in the way that it was warm and dry, no, it was hot and muggy most of the year round; the beauty of it was in how simple it was. There was no surprise storms, or unexpected cold patches, or anything like that. You’d have a cool winter, then pretty much as soon as February rolled round, the temperature would shoot up about eighteen degrees and the trees’ leaves would pop in in about a week. In September, there would be a week of rain, and then a week of sun, and at the end of the week of sun, the trees would all turn into a glorious crescendo of yellows and oranges and reds. It was so predictable that the weather service could forecast the change of seasons down to less than three days.
And it was during that September sun that my final year of school was coming to an end.
It was about half past ten on the morning of my final exam. A whopper of a test on religious history was my treat for the afternoon. Everybody knows it’s a bad idea to cram revise the day of an exam; you end up forgetting more than you knew in the first place as new things from the textbook, probably wrong, because you’ve read them in a hurry, pop into place in your mind and force out two things you already knew. Which is why I found myself on top of Parley Fell, the mountain on the east side of Concord Valley.
