Free Cloudland by Lisa Gorton Page B

Lucy the impression they were falling in silence – falling through a gap in time, even.
    Daniel inched forwards hand by hand, digging his fingers into the Megalith’s skin. He peered over its shoulder and his face tightened.
    â€˜Hold on!’ he called as the Megalith’s paws swept back and the wind roared. They thumped down; the shock of landing sent waves across the Megalith’sback. Lucy half-fell, half-scrambled down to the ice-hard cloud plain and collapsed onto her back, staring at the sky, where Altovia floated like one of those oversized cruise ships on a still sea.
We’re safe!
she thought, and wondered what had happened to Wist and Jovius. Had they escaped the Varactor?
    The wind tossed a flurry of rain against her cheek – from Altovia, she realised, and its frozen Cloudians. She jerked to her feet and plunged her face into her sleeve, wiping it dry.
    â€˜Are you alright?’ Daniel was bent double, clutching his chest, winded from the fall. She pressed one hand against his back and felt his ribs shuddering like buried wings. She had almost forgotten the Megalith. Now she saw it a few feet away, watching them with glass-bead eyes, set close together at the top of its snout. Its body sprawled behind it, spilling in lumpy folds onto the cloud plain. The body of a slug, the size of an elephant, with a colourless mole face – the Megalith should have been absurd but something in its gaze made Lucy feel she was in the presence of some ancient, endlessly patient creature.
    â€˜Lucy?’ Daniel caught her elbow. His breath was still coming in jagged gasps. ‘Could it carry us to Earth?’ They both looked at the Megalith. In thesame instant, it stretched out a long white tongue and licked its snout.
    â€˜I am hungry,’ it said. ‘Will your friends be long?’ Its voice was reedy, piped down its snout, and oddly precise. Following its gaze, Lucy saw a white speck swooping from Altovia. Soon she could make out two figures: Wist and Jovius, standing with their coats stretched out behind them. They were riding a carpet like the ones she had seen in the Citadel. Wist was steering with tiny movements, tilting his hands this way and that.
    The thought of Earth had filled Lucy with longing. Images gathered in her mind: waking late on Sunday, walking in the green-shadowed pine forest. They were memories she could hardly have described to anyone – out of focus somehow, as though she was remembering hundreds of days at the same time.
    They stood watching Wist and Jovius drift down towards them. ‘So they escaped the Varactor,’ said Daniel. The bitterness in his voice startled Lucy. She looked at him, a pale, wind-bitten figure. On Earth, she would have dismissed him as a privileged little mess-up, yet now, when she looked at him, her breathing settled and things took solid shape again. She shook her head, confused, and looked back up at Wist and Jovius just as Wist bent one knee and slidthe carpet through a half-circle. It skidded to a stop a little way above the cloud plain. Jovius bounded towards Lucy and Daniel and clapped their backs with his soft hands.
    â€˜All safe!’ he cried.
    Daniel shrugged him off. Jovius blinked up at him with the same smile fixed, uneasily now, on his face. Stretching up on his toes, he gazed around him at the empty cloud plain. Lucy thought of her father, standing in the kitchen, staring at familiar things – the toaster and kettle, their beaten-up chopping board – with exactly that vacant expression, and something twisted in her chest. She felt sad suddenly, and impatient. Jovius annoyed her, running after everyone like a poodle; and Wist annoyed her – the way he stood rolling up the carpet now without even a greeting.
    The carpet compressed as he rolled it, shrinking to the size of a fold-up umbrella. He put it into his pocket. At last, he looked up.
    â€˜There is a matter of Comclo,’ said the