THE SKY WARDEN & THE SUN

CHAPTER 1: "Between Sky and Stone"

They were being hunted.

At first, Sal wasn't certain. When he and Shilly fled Fundelry ahead of the storm Lodo had summoned, he thought they might outrun pursuit. They drove furiously, pushing the buggy and themselves as hard as he could across the rolling, flooded dunes, heading not north but east, in the least obvious direction, avoiding roads and all signs of life until dawn lightened the sky ahead of them. Crudely covered beneath one of the waterproofed tarpaulins in the buggy's trunk, nestled between the banks of a narrow, stony-bedded creek, Sal and Shilly, with the machine that was their greatest hope of obtaining freedom, waited out the day in a state of feverish dread. Half-expecting capture at any moment, they slept only fitfully throughout the morning. Silent in the shade, exhausted and grieving, neither dared to voice the fears that stirred in them.

And as the sun rode higher in the sky, burning the storm away, Sal found reason to be afraid.

From a day's drive to the west, the Syndic's mental eye swept over them, far-seeing and eager to find him. He closed his mind tight and concentrated on the exercises Lodo had given him, picturing himself like a slippery ball-bearing the Syndic's fingers could not grasp. And slip they did. Clumsy in their eagerness, they went reaching away past the two fugitives, heading north-east.

The last time Sal had seen the Syndic, his paternal great-aunt, she had been sprawled at the base of a dune, knocked flat by a raw outpouring of the Change that had come from somewhere within him when she had tried to take him captive. He had wondered then if she was dead, but Nu Zanshin of Farrow clearly didn't give up easily, or quickly. They might have evaded her this time, but he would have to be careful, or their freedom would be short-lived.

Upon nightfall, they followed the creek inland as far as they could go. The buggy was familiar with rugged terrain, but Sal didn't want to risk a broken axle on the jagged rocks and crumbling banks. He was unused to driving and figured that slow progress was better than none at all. Taking that into account, and the need to avoid human contact wherever possible, he didn't let himself hope to travel more than a hundred kilometres in each of those first two days -- but that would be far enough, he hoped. The buggy had enough fuel to last almost a week yet, at that rate of travel, and the more ground he could put between them and Fundelry when the time came to rejoin humanity, the better. Exactly where they were heading in the long-run wasn't important, at that moment.

They hit relatively open country shortly after midnight, under cold skies with stars glinting like hail waiting to fall. Sal focussed his attention on the buggy and the controls he had watched his father use so many times before. He tried not to think about his father's death or the revelation that had preceded it: that the man he thought of as his father might not be so, that everything he had believed to be true in his life might actually be a lie. Instead he concentrated on the roughness of the ground ahead, glowing faintly in the light from the shuttered headlamps, on the gears, and on the whine of the motor. He felt the mental wheels of the mental exercise Lodo had called the Cellaton Mandala turning behind the effort of driving, and kept faith that it would deflect any further attempts to find him by the Syndic. He ignored the rumble in his stomach telling him that they hadn't eaten the previous day -- not since the Alders' Feast in Fundelry, the night before last, when his father had still been alive and it seemed there might still be a chance that Lodo could save them from the Sky Wardens.

Driving gave him an excuse for not talking, although the truth was that he couldn't find the words to express what he wanted to say. He wanted to say to Shilly that he was sorry, but that it wasn't his fault. He wanted to say: You don't have to come with me; this isn't your problem; you can leave whenever you want. But he was afraid of what he would do if she did leave. He didn't want to be alone. And he didn't know how to say that, either. So he said nothing. And because he was silent, he didn't notice that Shilly was silent too, or that her silence was empty and inward-looking, unlike his.

They drove all the second day, then slept that night in a Ruin he knew of, near an abandoned town called Cleve's Well. There they were safe from the Syndic, since the signature of his mind would disappear in the ancient place's unique aura. But the high level of background potential had an effect on them, beyond that. He dreamed that night that he was being followed, among other things, and woke to find Shilly crying silently in her sleep.

The next morning, after a breakfast consisting solely of the seeds and gum of a shrub Sal recognised, he tried to talk to her.

He told her the story of his parents: how his mother, Seirian Mierlo, had married an ambitious older man named Highson Sparre in order to increase the prestige of her family. Lodo, who had explained this to Sal, had known little more about the history of her family, beyond the fact that they had emigrated from the Interior to the Strand in order to escape a family scandal -- but that was enough to place the rest in context. Sal's mother had fallen in love with her husband's journeyman, Dafis Hrvati, and neither her divorce nor their union had been condoned by any of the families involved. Another scandal would ruin the Mierlos forever.

So the lovers had run away together, into the borderlands. Fugitives they had remained for a year, until the Sky Wardens, led by Highson and his aunt, Nu Zanshin, who had not yet become Syndic but would before long, located Seirian by virtue of her use of the Change. They spirited her back to the Haunted City, whereupon they had learned of the existence of Sal, her son. Why he made so much difference, Sal didn't know, but it seemed to. For some reason the Sky Wardens were more interested in him than either of his parents.

They recommenced their search immediately, but Sal had disappeared, along with his father. The two of them had remained hidden ever since, protected by the father's denial of everything he had ever know in the past: music, the Change, and his lover. His priority was to protect Sal, as his mother would surely have wanted. In the end, only Sal's growing potential at the Change -- and his father's attempt to hide it by seeking help from Lodo, a renegade Stone Mage -- had given them away. It was then that they had learned, from the Alcaide himself, of Sal's mother's death: she had wasted away when attempts to find Sal and his father had failed; despairing of ever seeing them again, she had died of a broken heart.

Shilly listened patiently -- or seemed to, anyway -- as he spoke. Everything after his arrival in Fundelry she knew, since she had been involved in it. Although she, like Sal's father, had no natural talent, Lodo had been her teacher too, and his instruction had enabled her to use another's talent for her own will. In many respects, her understanding of the Change was much deeper than Sal's, who had, until barely two weeks earlier, had never suspected his potential. When the Sky Wardens had come to take him away so they could train him, Shilly had been swept up in the storm and carried away with it.

He didn't need to tell her about that, just as he didn't want to tell her what to think or to feel, since he himself was still trying to work that out. He just wanted her to know the full story.

If she understood it, or him, any better when he had finished, however, she gave no sign. She sat silently beside him in the buggy, as dark-skinned as he was fair, her sun-bleached hair straying across her face -- revealing nothing, betraying not the slightest hint of what she was feeling behind the mask. Eventually she said:

"Skender Van Haasteren."

"Lodo's old teacher? What -- "

"That's where I want to go." She turned to look at him. Her face was expressionless, but her eyes were brimming over. "You can drop me off on the way to visit your family. I know that's where you want to go. You don't have to come with me all the way."

Sal opened his mouth, then closed it. He hadn't decided where he wanted to go, for all that Shilly obviously thought he had. After a lifetime of following his father around, he wasn't used to making decisions at all, and at that moment all he wanted to do was get away from the Syndic and her Sky Warden bloodhounds. Finding his mother's family, the Mierlos, was an option he had considered: he had no-one else to run to, after all. But all he knew was that they had been expelled from the Strand following his parents' elopement; their present location could be anywhere.

Still ... the obvious place to look for them was at Mount Birrinah, where they had originated. And Lodo's old teacher came from the Desert Port region; the old man had told him that much. Both places lay in the Interior.

Sal didn't know exactly where either might be. Maybe, he thought, that wasn't important. For the moment, his destination and Shilly's could lie in the same direction, if he so chose.

"North it is, then," he said.

"North," she echoed, her eyes returning to the horizon ahead.

And only then did he realise that she had never been more than a few hundred metres away from the sea, not once in her entire life. When he thought of the distance they had to travel and the land they had to cover on the way, even he quailed inside. He had been to the Divide several times but never beyond it, and that had only been with his father, whose absence ached inside his chest like a hole. Sal wasn't sure he had it in him to go so far, alone.

But there was only one way to start; he knew that much. He turned the steering wheel to point the buggy inland, and he drove.

#

And they drove: out of the sand-dunes and into firmer country, with round, weathered hills the colour of dirt. They stuck to dry riverbeds and isolated road fragments as often as they could; maps in the buggy's tool box gave them a rough idea where to head, although many of the landmarks had changed over the years, and they were heading through places Sal had not visited before. They travelled under the cover of night if people were near, but the daylight was better for navigation. With the sun burning down on them out of a sky now utterly free of clouds, they took great care to maintain shade, unfurling the buggy's tarpaulin as a roof that flapped noisily as they drove. But still they burned. Even Shilly's dark skin was tender for the first few days, and peeled after a week.

They passed numerous signs of ancient and recent life, among them spindly metal towers many metres high that had rusted and slumped when their bases could no longer support their weight. A craterous mine ate into a hillside like a terrible, wasting disease, grey around the edges and half-filled with black water. By its edge rested an enormous crane, gutted for its parts but still glittering with the Change. Crumbling cemeteries made poignant companions to equally derelict buildings, some little more than chimneys and hearths standing alone in fields untouched for decades. Some of these structures were welcome shelter from the heat: hollow, gap-toothed silos reverberated with the buggy's engine when they arrived, and hummed with the wind when all was still again. Shilly lay awake in the silos, listening to the hum and feeling as though she was privy to one side of a conversation between gods, so slow and ponderous that she couldn't decipher individual words.

But it was the landscape that unsettled her the most. It smelled different, and it looked different. She was used to gently rolling sand dunes and the occasional cliff-face: a world defined by its relationship with the sea. Here the world extended in all directions, and it was alien in ways that weren't immediately obvious. The ground, for a start, grew redder the further north they travelled. The trees became taller but were less bushy. Once they came across a forest of slender trees that had all been burned in recent times, leaving them utterly black, but their leaves still grew green. Like the trees, the distant hills were larger but had fewer angles; they were like the rolling shoulders and hips of reclining giants, their eyes closed just over the horizon. Everything around her was worn, and dusty, and hot -- and seemed, for the most part, since they were avoiding the main roads, utterly empty.

Yet close up there was detail aplenty. Three-cornered jacks waited for her if she was careless enough to wander off in bare feet. Insects jumped around them in great hordes -- tiny flying ones that stung and heavy hoppers that could hurt from momentum alone. Fat black flies dangled in the air as though on the end of invisible strings, and many-legged creatures left furrowed tracks in the dirt. Birds with wings like outstretched hands drifted in updrafts, trying to find insects and small animals. Shilly hadn't seen any of the latter yet, although she suspected she'd heard parts of it rustling at night.

By Ottewill Peak, Stonehouse and the Devil's Brook they went, across fields once sown but now fallow and stony, or infested with weeds that flowered a brilliant purple. She had never heard of the places before but was prepared to accept what the map said, in the absence of another opinion. Sal let her handle the navigation while he was driving, and that gave them something to talk about, when they had to. The rest of the time she forced herself not to fight the buggy as it bounced across the new, hard world she had been propelled into, even when it felt like her muscles had been pounded to jelly, and her bones were on the verge of shattering.

"This is called the yukuri vine," said Sal during one of their rest stops. A headache painted spots behind her eyelids He had spotted the plant growing among some rocks not far from their camp, and collected a number of small, greenish fruit from it. He opened one up and removed some of the pulp within. "Close your eyes."

She did so warily, and let him rub the moist flesh across her eyelids and forehead. It felt cool against her skin, although it had a bitter smell, and his touch was soft.

"This'll make you feel better."

It did. Within a few minutes, her headache had ebbed to the point where it only nagged, rather than dominated. She didn't move, let the seat take her weight while Sal clattered about with their stuff, unfurling the sleeping bag they shared if it was cold at night and preparing the tarp to cover the buggy. She should be helping him, she knew, but she had no energy; she seemed to weigh as much as one of the giants whose backs they traversed every day. Tears pricked at her closed eyes: she was a dead weight, and he never complained.

But still she said nothing. Every time she opened her mouth to speak, she was afraid of what might come out. She didn't want to blame him for the mess they were in for, although he was as tangled in the centre of it as a bug in a spider's web, he had as little control over it as she did. If she was caught with him, that was just bad luck; it could have happened to anyone. And wishing that she had never met him was like wishing the sun wouldn't rise in the east. She couldn't change anything about it; she could only float with the current and see where it took her.

Floating: that was what she was doing. For the first time in her life, she had to turn control of her immediate fate over to someone else, and it didn't come easily. She knew Sal would rather she talked to him about it, but she wasn't ready for that, and didn't know when she would be. Besides, although she admired Sal for the way he kept them moving, not letting them rest too long in any one spot, she knew that, for him, running was as much a form of avoidance as her silence. When he stopped, she would talk. That was the deal she made with herself.

The habit of silence was hard to break. Even when, the next day, they dared human contact to buy fuel for the buggy, she only went through the motions while Sal stayed out of sight in the buggy. She was a spirit moving through the world: if she didn't try to touch it, she wouldn't be touched in return. If the landowners she spoke to noticed anything different about her, or had been told to keep an eye out for anyone on the run from the Sky Wardens, they made no sign. They accepted the fake name she offered, took her money, filled the buggy's tanks with alcohol, and let them go.

"We can't afford to relax yet," Sal said that night, as they took shelter in yet another dry creek-bottom. So close to a major town, they didn't draw attention to themselves by travelling at night. "I can still feel her looking."

She nodded, having nothing to add. He was right: they couldn't relax yet. They had a long way to go before their journey was even half-way over.

#

North-west of Kittle they found one end of an old railway line that wound through the hills ahead. The terrain was mountainous without being alpine, and it was rugged. Although long-since stripped of its valuable tracks, Sal hoped that the Old Line, as the ancient railway was called, might still be passable. His father had talked of it once, as they had wound their way along the usual route between the Broken Lands and the more gentle plains of the Strand. That route, the Yelverton Track, was relatively wide and safe, but well-travelled because of it, and an obvious place for the Sky Wardens to lie in wait for them.

"We have three choices," he told Shilly at the base of the Old Line. "We take the Old Line and hope for the best, or we leave the buggy behind and make our way on foot. Or we can leave the buggy behind. What do you think?"

She seemed to consider the options, but didn't offer an opinion.

"If we walk, it'll take longer. That's assuming we can find a path, or can make our own. It's tough in there and I can't guarantee anything. Going around will take longer, too, although there is a road. There's chance it might be watched. I don't think we should take any chances like that."

He didn't bother to explain why they needed to head in that direction in the first place. There were only two safe places to cross the Divide; that was clear from the map. The one they were heading for was the least travelled.

"I think we should take the Old Line," he concluded, although the fact that he had brought them there made it obvious what he thought.

She nodded and adjusted her hat so the shadow covered her eyes. He waited a moment to give her a chance to say something, but that was clearly all he was going to get: a nod was enough for now, barely.

The Old Line consisted of a rutted, gravely surface that had been eroded by rain and wind into an irregularly flat surface. Some stretches were perfectly passable, but others were dangerous to an extreme. He drove slowly and carefully, even along the straight portions, where the missing railway had once sloped upward, into the hills. It snaked around slabs of rock larger than houses and through earth that had been laid down millions of years before. The scenery, when he had time to look at it, was magnificent.

Nightfall -- their seventh since leaving Fundelry -- brought an end to sight-seeing and to the first leg of their journey. The way was treacherous enough by daylight, when the frequent cracks and rockfalls could be clearly seen and negotiated. During the dark it would be suicide. They camped in the lee of an overhanging cliff as gaping as a whale's mouth but the red of old blood, under which the Old Line passed. In its shadows Sal noted an effect his father had once spoken of, but which he had never before felt: in the mouth of stone, the background potential faded to zero and he lost all sense of the world around him. It was as though the Change had been sucked out of him and drawn into the ground.

Figuring that he would be as safe in such a shadow as in a Ruin, he didn't mind the delay for nightfall. They even risked a fire, boiled a measure of their precious water and enjoyed their first cooked meal for a week. Sal had been collecting fruit and leaves everywhere they stopped; he added these to a number of small grubs he had found while digging the buggy out of a sandy patch that morning and created what his father had called a desert stew. Shilly's skin went a shade lighter when she saw him put in the grubs, but she ate her half without complaint. She couldn't complain if she wouldn't talk.

The night was cold. Shilly slept under the tarp while he sat up to watch the stars. Humming an old tune to himself, enjoying the moment of relative privacy, he went through the contents of his pack by feel until he found his way to the clasp wrapped in soft leather near the bottom; once it had belonged to his mother, and had, Lodo said, symbolised the Earth. But that wasn't what he was looking for. Deeper still lay the heavy, grey globe that the old man had given him on his last night in Fundelry. It was like one of the powerful globes Lodo had used to store light during the day then illuminate Fundelry at night, but smaller and denser, more mysterious still. Lodo had said on giving it to him, I think you will need a little light in the future, wherever you go, and had bade him to keep it secret from Shilly. Sal had done so, although his conscience nagged at him.

He drew it out into the starlight, and cradled it in his lap. It was as heavy as he remembered, and cool to the touch. No light reflected off it. He pressed his palms against its smooth surface and enclosed it in his fingers. Shutting his eyes, he sought any sign of recognition within it, the slightest hint that it knew what it was for and how he could use it.

But there was nothing. His thoughts vanished into the globe like rain down a well. Part of him thought that that might be a result of the Change-deadening place they occupied, but a greater part suspected otherwise. He would have to learn to reveal the globe's secrets, just as he had had to learn to use other Change-endowed artifacts. The Change wasn't something he could use intuitively, no matter how much innate talent he had. It was a skill to acquire through hours of practice. And it was a responsibility, Shilly had said.

With that thought in his head, he put the globe back into his pack, rested his head against the wheel of the buggy and slept.

He dreamed that globe was burning brightly, just as it had in his dream shortly after leaving Fundelry. Again he saw the bully, Kemp, in the golden tower, the ghostly city buried in sand, a tunnel mouth guarded by two swinging corpses, an old woman who looked something like him, and a talking statue. Lodo was in the dream, too, and so was Tait, a journeyman like his father had once been. Tait was leading a Sky Warden in blue robes across a desert.

The first time he had had the dream, the identity of this man had eluded him. Now it came to him: it was Shom Behenna, the new Selector of the Fundelry region. Much more powerful than his predecessor, Amele Centofanti, he had taken over her position when she had failed to detect Sal. What the man was doing in Sal's dreams, he couldn't guess.

It wasn't until after they had woken the next morning and inched their way from beneath the shadow of the rock that he guessed.

As soon as they left the Change-numbing bubble of safety and entered the background potential again, the Syndic's eye was upon again -- scouring the Strand for any sign of him.

He evaded her with greater ease than before. Her mind was distant, diffused across the very large space she had to search. But beneath her grasping lay that of another mind, one more subtle than hers, and nearer. He felt it as a gentle tap-tap against his defenses rather than a full-scale assault. Just as an ant might find access where a human hand might not, this mind sought to insinuate itself into his without him noticing. It prodded at him for a while, then went away; then it returned later on, as though to check that he was still there. Sal went cold at the feel of it. He knew it was Shom Behenna as surely as he knew that a tumble off the Old Line and down the hillside would kill him.

Had Behenna found him? Did he know where Sal and Shilly were, and where they were headed? Sal fervently hoped not. He was uncertain just how much information could be conveyed by that gentle tap-tap, and was afraid to risk a probe in return, if such a thing was possible. Perhaps Behenna could tell nothing more than that Sal was still alive, and maybe roughly where he was. The latter didn't please him; he had, after all, hoped to slip out of the Strand completely unnoticed. But if Behenna did know, where were the gulls, descending out of the sky to confirm their location? Where were the Sky Wardens to drag them back to the Haunted City?

He put the fears out of his mind and didn't tell Shilly. They had enough to worry about, with the Old Line to negotiate and the Broken Lands ahead. The time was coming, all too soon, when they would have to rejoin humanity, and that would be far more dangerous than any feeble nudging.

#

The last stage of the Old Line was the worst. The northern face of the range was almost sheer, as though someone had torn the range in two and they were descending the rift into the middle. The missing half was nowhere to be seen, however. Shilly wondered if it was in the Interior, on the other side of the Divide, or if it had been swallowed up by the plain like an ocean might swallow a leaky boat.

Whenever the buggy's wheels slipped beneath them, all such speculation was instantly forgotten. Sal inched the buggy forward through such areas while she walked behind, carrying their packs. That way, if the buggy did fall, they might not lose everything. Sal was ever-ready to jump free, and they could walk the rest of the way if necessary.

So she thought, anyway, until they came to the bridge.

The great cataclysm that had torn the mighty range in two had sent fingers of destruction into the midst of the hills. The ravine below them was clearly one such, for its walls were sheer and angular; the creek far below, even when full, could not have carved it. To their left and right it stretched for kilometres, a difficult climb even without the buggy. The side they occupied offered no route down to the ground; only on the far side had the ancient builders of the Line found a way to safety. There would be no point to the bridge, otherwise.

Once, she supposed, it had been a piece of engineering to be proud of. It spanned the gap in one smooth arch one hundred metres across, as slender as a single tree trunk, with no supports, and had held up a perfectly flat length of track. Where the tracks had been were now only lengths of decaying concrete and rusted metal forming a road of sorts wider than the buggy was long. Staring across it, at the gap-toothed mesh the buggy would have to traverse, with the depths of the ravine below them, Shilly had a sudden premonition that something was going to go wrong.

Sal threw a rock out onto the bridge. It clattered noisily, and the bridge didn't crumble into dust, which was only a slight relief. If it had, they would have known for certain that they should turn around and go back.

"There's a safety rail," he said, indicating the waist-high barrier one either side of the span. "That'll make it stronger."

He walked twenty paces out across the bridge and looked around. Shading his eyes, he looked along the ravine, far away and to her right. Then he pointed.

"Yor!" he shouted to her. "That's where we're headed."

She shook her head to indicate that she couldn't see it from where she was standing, on the last metre of road. He lowered his hand and gingerly picked his way back to her. His eyes, she noted, didn't look down once, and she didn't blame him for that. Where the rails had been were two long, plank-like beams just wide enough for the buggy's tyres. It was a close fit; the slightest deviation would threaten to tip the buggy to one side onto a rusty grill. The grill was supported by metal beams every metre or so. If all wheels four slipped off the planks, she didn't see how they could possibly get it back on. That was, of course, assuming that the planks could take the weight of the buggy in the first place ...

Sal sat in the driver's seat. He didn't say anything for a moment, and Shilly waited, watching him. He looked older than he had before, in Fundelry, although that could just have been the effect of the freckles congealing on his pale skin, and the dirt.

"You go first," he said. "Take the packs. Go all the way across and wait for me there."

"Don't be stupid," she said, the first real sentence she had uttered for days.

"It's not stupid. There's no need to risk both of us. If I fall, you can keep on going."

"If you fall, I'm as good as dead. I don't know anything about this place; I'll starve, or be bitten by something, or fall foul of the locals." She felt a heady resentment of her situation rising up inside her, but she fought through it, to what really bothered her. "If you fall, I don't want to stand over there and watch you die."

"I'm not going to fall," Sal began

"So I won't either. And to make sure, I'll walk ahead of you. If the bridge won't take my weight, you'll know to turn back."

For a moment he seemed about to argue, but then something like relief spread across his face, and he nodded. She turned away to get out of the buggy and put on her pack, hoping her face wasn't so naked. It felt good to have made a decision, to have contributed. Maybe the journey back to being natural with each other wouldn't take as long as she had thought it might.

Sal started the buggy's engine and inched it forward until its front wheels were a metre back from the beginning of the bridge. Shilly took a deep breath and stepped out along the plank opposite the one Sal had walked along before, since she already knew the first one was safe. Even without looking around her, she sensed the emptiness of the ravine enclose her as she put one step in front of the other, then another, then another. Like Sal, she tried not to look too far down, even though she had to, to inspect the integrity of the bridge. She just walked as carefully as she might across the beams of a rundown jetty. I will not fall, she told herself. It's only a hundred paces across.

The bridge creaked as the buggy moved slowly onto it . She felt the planks beneath her flex and refused to breathe any faster. She looked over her shoulder, and saw Sal, white-faced, inching the buggy along. Its weight made rusty rivets pop and ancient metal groan; every metre or so it jerked slightly as something small gave way beneath it.

Perhaps, she thought, they should have taken some of their supplies over first. Without the extra fuel and water tanks, or their packs, it would have been lighter, less of a strain; and they could have inspected the way properly first, too. But she hadn't thought to suggest that, and it was too late now.

Looking ahead was her job. Sal gave her a quick thumbs-up, and she turned her attention forward again, watching where she placed her feet and looking for any sign of instability. The ancient builders had done their job well. She never felt desperately unsafe, even at the half-way point, when the wind sung through the soles of her feet and the sense of space around her was at its peak.

She glanced in the direction Sal had indicated before, and saw on the horizon a smudge that could have been a town. Yor, she presumed, whatever that was.

The rest of the way was in shadow, but she had the measure of it now: walk forward ten paces and wait for Sal to catch up; think of how good it would feel with solid earth underfoot, but don't look down to where that same earth waited, far, far below; savour the moment of stillness as long as it lasted, and be glad that she wasn't in the buggy with Sal, who wouldn't get to rest at all until he joined her on the far side. He could afford neither to stop nor to go too quickly. The buggy seemed to crawl along in slow motion, as in a dream that would never end.

Yet her objective grew clearer with every press forward. The bridge terminated in a road no different to the one they had left, but looking like paradise the more she thought about it. Forty metres to go. Thirty. Twenty.

It happened just before the last rest stop, with only eleven metres left to go. She had barely taken her ninth step when she heard a new noise from behind her, over the burbling of the buggy's engine. She turned immediately, even though the sound hadn't been a crack. More of a groan, or a creak. She opened her mouth to shout a question at Sal, to ask if he had heard it too, when it came again, louder, and the plank beneath her twanged like a plucked string.

Sal clearly felt or heard that. His eyes grew wide and the buggy jerked forward with a snarl as instinctive panic drove the accelerator downward. It stopped after a metre or two, and for a split second Shilly thought that that was it, that the crisis was over and their slow progress would continue. But then she realised that the engine was still snarling, and its front wheels were slipping.

Something clattered far below. She didn't look; she didn't need to. If part of the bridge had fallen away and the buggy was teetering on the lip of a precipice, it would look exactly like this.

Sal glanced behind him as the buggy tipped backward slightly, then he looked firmly forward again and put his foot down.

The engine roared to no avail. Shilly ran forward, toward him, reaching.

"Give me your hand!'

"No! I can do it!"

You can't! she wanted to scream. He couldn't what she could see. Out of his line of sight, behind the front mudguards, the wheels had already lifted off the surface of the planks. He would have no traction, front or back, no matter how hard he accelerated. There was nothing he could do to arrest the buggy's slide backwards. And down.

Except ... If he wouldn't jump and there wasn't time to explain, there was only one thing she could do. She jumped into the air and brought both feet down hard on its front bumper bar. Her extra weight brought the spinning wheels into contact with the planks and the buggy lurched forward. Taken by surprise, Sal struggled with the wheel and Shilly sprawled helplessly across the bonnet. The rear wheels made contact a second later and the buggy slewed wildly across the bridge, crossing the remaining distance in a little more than a second -- but not in a straight line. First it jumped off the planks and scraped against the left safety rail with a shower of sparks. Then it fish-tailed to the right side, jumping back onto the planks then off them again. One metre from the edge the buggy impacted with the right rail hard enough to pivot it entirely around, so that when it finally came to rest, on the solid, red earth, it was facing the way it had come, toward the bridge that had so narrowly let them pass.

The engine died and everything was silent for a moment. But ringing in Shilly's ears was the crack she had heard when the buggy had struck the right rail with her still strewn across its bonnet. For a second she entertained the hope that it was the buggy that was broken, not her -- but then the pain hit, and she screamed aloud.