Storm of Ash. Michelle Kenney

      Legacy or lunacy, Cassius’s ambition had never been clearer. It was all about power to redesign the natural world, and now that he had The Book of Arafel, Thomas’s secret research decoding the Voynich, it was nearly within reach.

       Arafel was nearly within reach.

      All that remained was the keyword to operate the cipher and, if he was looking to replicate Hominum chimera perfectly, a certain annotated, aged diagram. It was the same fragile page I’d rolled up and inserted into a certain treehouse dart tube for safekeeping, the last present Max made for me. To get it Cassius would have to slit the feral throat around which it was hung.

      I lifted my hand to the precious tiny dart tube. Thomas’s clue had been there the whole time, a simple faint abbreviation on the same page as Thomas’s Hominum chimera sketch.

       REQ.

      It wasn’t until August mentioned its appearance in the tomb frescos beneath the ancient Colosseum that I guessed at its true significance. REQ was an abbreviation for Requiem, or Mass for the Dead, and a warning, through the sands of time, from the original medieval scribe of the Voynich Manuscript.

      Five hundred years later and against all the odds, Thomas had worked out it was also the only keyword to operate the Voynich cipher, the same cipher he drew out on the floor of the first treehouse in Arafel. Our treehouse. I thought of my mother’s living area, of the old reed mat that had always covered what we believed to be our ancestor’s first crude map of Arafel. Little had we known we’d been walking over the only existing key to the world’s most dangerous genetic heirloom.

      Now it was a knowledge that burned, in the same way my blood burned every time I imagined Lake’s heavy double-lidded eyes peering out of the crevices and caves of the North Mountain landscape we scoured. Ancient, powerful eyes that watched us track and hunt, from the icy dawn until the fireflies danced.

      Biding time.

       Chapter 1

      Arafel

      Raven was the first to spot us.

      I watched her slight figure straighten in shock, as I fell into a stumbling run towards the afternoon shift working among the corn. Twice my exhausted feet slipped on the mountainous shale, making me skid and graze my blistered skin, but nothing could slow me. We’d been walking for longer than I could remember, and our conversation had long since worn as thin and broken as our soles. But in the past few minutes, Arafel had finally reached through the mountain mist like a ray of dawn after a nightmare, and Raven’s expression was everything I needed to pull me over the last stretch.

      She lifted her hand, and a sharp piercing whistle filled the air. It was the village alert, the same one we’d all learned as part of our shift training, more usually associated with flagging wild animals among the crops than alerting the village to intruders. But not today.

      A dozen more figures straightened throughout the large cornfield, and I could read their incredulity even at a distance.

      ‘Mum?’ I tried to force the word out between my blistered lips, but there was no sound but the rustling of the breeze through the corn.

      I was spent. My body knew it, I knew it, even the ground beneath my exhausted feet knew it. Just a few more steps. The whisper echoed around my head as the field group convened and stood together to await us. And I understood their hesitation. I knew what a sight we had to present: the disloyal, rebellious girl with two strangers – a gladiator and a Cyclops – for company. But still they waited. And although Mum wasn’t among them, dry sobs reached up my throat, racking my body with convulsive pain as I opened the field gate and stumbled in among Arafel’s irrigated crops.

      ‘Talia?’

      Raven’s voice was as sweet as the first rain, and as I barrelled into her open arms I was overcome by her homely scent of apples and cinnamon, warming me a thousand times faster than any knitted blanket.

      ‘Hush, Talia, you’re in Arafel now … you’re home,’ she soothed, her voice distant and strained as my knees buckled.

      My vision shrank, but I was just conscious of Bereg’s thunderous face as he strode past to confront August and Unus, flanked by three machete-wielding hunters.

      I wanted to protest, but there was nothing left – just a few hoarse words that spilled over my cracked lips as the fields receded in a blur.

      ‘Don’t hurt them … they’re friends.’

      ***

      The days that followed were a haze of delirium. I was racked with pain one moment and incoherent with fever the next, but as the world slowly returned, I became aware of two stone-cold facts:

      I’d made it home; Max and Eli hadn’t.

      And each time I remembered, it was as though I was teetering at the edge of a North Mountain abyss all over again.

      August and Unus made swifter progress and became frequent visitors. And if the villagers were wary of my new Insider companions, they guessed my survival was at least due to them in part, and afforded them a cautious respect.

      ‘They want to know if you’re feeling well enough for the Ring meeting?’ August murmured a few mornings after our return. ‘I could handle it myself but your leader, Art, he’s quite insistent you’re there … needs to hear it from you … it’s understandable.’

      He was trying to act normal, to be his old confident self but his iris-blues betrayed him in a way they never had before. His pain was visible. There were glimpses that spoke louder than the iron will forcing his Roman lips upwards, or his tone to be even. It was a vulnerability no amount of Pantheonite training or armour could hide, and then there was our own stalemate, frozen in place by the icy North Mountain winds.

      I turned to gaze out of the window. It was the end of winter, so the rains were still heavy and frequent, but there was a hint of the new honeysuckle that grew all around the old wooden frame in spring. A ghost of its scent.

      ‘Tal?’ August laid his hand gently over mine.

      I drew my hand away distractedly, focusing on the forest, willing spring to come and chase away the winter that had settled in my bones.

      Because I couldn’t pretend. Not to August.

      And the furrow between his eyes told me he knew. He could sense I was watching the world as though I’d never really emerged from the glass river at all. I could see and hear it all in sonorous detail, I just couldn’t touch it. I was isolated – from everyone. And while he did his best to deflect the darting glances and barely contained curiosity, I knew he felt it too. Every second of every day, we were slipping a little further away from each other, and we were both utterly powerless to stop it.

      Again and again my dreams took me back to the North Mountains, to the unique magic we’d created in a remote cave, and to what almost happened there. The edges of my thoughts darkened with guilt, the same guilt that forced me into consciousness each time. Because of my best friend Max, because of my twin Eli, because of August’s sister Aelia, and because of Lake and her guardian, Pan. And finally because the spell binding us in the harsh solitude of the North Mountains had been broken. We could no longer pretend we were at the end of the world, that no one else existed, or that we were the only ones hurt by Isca Pantheon. And while our connection had saved us while we were isolated, it did nothing but scorch in Arafel, where ghosts darkened every corner.

      ‘I’ll tell him you need more time,’ he breathed.

      I stared out at the white oak branches shadowing my window, willing the impossible every time it rustled.

      ‘No.’

      I turned back to face him. My head was still hazy with weakness and denial, but in the last few hours one thought had materialized clearly: so long as Max was missing, there was