City of Dust: Completely gripping YA dystopian fiction packed with edge of your seat suspense. Michelle Kenney

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СКАЧАТЬ topsoil crunching beneath our thin-soled shoes. We gave no thought to the noise we were making, or obvious profile we were cutting across the barren landscape. Our only thought was to reach safety as quickly as possible. I clenched my fist around Eli’s lower back. At this rate we could expect a personal welcome from Cassius himself.

      It was only when the broken silhouette of the city outskirts loomed up out of the gloom that I allowed myself to hope. The ruin seemed quiet and still, but taking no chances, we made straight towards a large concrete boulder resting in the shadows. With one final effort, we half carried, half pushed Eli on top, before scrambling up ourselves. Then it was only us and the vast oppressive night.

      ‘Eli,’ I whispered, reaching across to my brother. He was curled up, motionless, and for a second blind panic clawed up my dry throat. Was he dead?

      Then he rolled over and lifted an eyelid to consider me carefully.

      ‘First time I’ve ever considered de-friending Hottentotta tamulus.’ He winced, his breath slightly laboured.

      ‘You’re stung?’ I scolded, reaching into my rations bag for some of the medical herbs we carried on us.

      ‘Yes, I’m also winded,’ he complained. ‘My feet barely touched the ground in the last part of that run.’

      Cursing, I scrambled in my leather bag. Two hundred years of living in a jungle climate meant we’d developed some natural antibodies against snake and spider bites, much stronger anti-venoms than our ancestors used to possess. All the same, the Hottentotta tamulus was one of the most venomous scorpions around.

      I pulled out my water bottle. ‘Where?’ I demanded.

      Eli rolled up his right trouser leg, revealing a raised red welt on the front of his calf. I tipped some cool water on a small rag, pressed some fresh meadowsweet into the wet patch and then placed it over the injury. He smiled gratefully, and squeezed my hand before taking over.

      ‘It’s not stinging so much already,’ he consoled. ‘Think I may have got lucky with a small one.’

      ‘Not sure any sized scorpion sting counts as luck!’ Max retorted. ‘And if this is just a warm-up for the Dead City, we’re gonna need so much more than luck.’

      I nodded grimly. Max was right. This wasn’t a good start. Eli’s leg wasn’t life-threatening, and so long as there were no other visible signs of shock, his body was coping. But the effect on his leg would probably slow us for a day or two – time we could ill afford to lose. And then there was a prophetic feeling I couldn’t shake. If this had happened to Eli, just about the most popular human in the animal kingdom I knew, what chance did Max and I stand if there were more of them?

      ‘We move slowly and as a team,’ I said, trying to control my spiralling fear.

      I hadn’t risked the wrath of Art just to become scorpion food. My head filled with his wise face. I hadn’t even told him about the theft of the Book of Arafel. There hadn’t been time, and I doubted it would change much, although he would have been sad and angry. But mostly I hadn’t told him because it would be like shining a light on my own ineptitude. I’d already broken my promise to Grandpa by letting others understand some of the legacy of the Book. Admitting to its loss felt like exacerbating my own sense of failure. Far better I put the situation right. Or at least tried to.

      For a few minutes we remained seated in the shadows, recovering our breath while the voice of the Dead City reached through the shadows. It moaned. Not in the biblical sense, although in some ways I wouldn’t have been surprised; it was so much bigger and more oppressive now it loomed up in front of us. Instead, the eerie groan was of nature herself, creaking through the rubble alleyways and broken roofs, and whistling through every decrepit gutter. As if she was warning that nothing should ever breathe or live here again.

      Silently, we examined the leather soles of our shoes, but somehow our slim goat-hide soles had protected us.

      I threw a glance at Eli. His face was filled with the same quiet foreboding I was feeling. We all understood the dangers of the forest, and had learned how to combat the most cunning cats, ferocious boar and shrewd snakes. But a sea of scorpions was new to me. It had to be nature’s response to the arid conditions in this part of the landscape, and might explain why the Prolet insurgents had become landlocked in this crumbling shell of a city.

      Silently, we bowed our heads together, an old Arafel custom to offer thanks for the sparing of a soul. There was no going back that way – that much was certain – and I couldn’t help but feel that this was the precise moment we were leaving Arafel behind. Was it for good? I pulled my trusted catapult from my leather pouch, and fought the sudden burning behind my eyes.

      ‘You think you can walk on it?’ I asked, as much to distract myself as anything else.

      He nodded. ‘And if not, Max can give me a shoulder ride!’

      I smiled as Max grimaced.

      ‘Yeah, right after you,’ he jibed. ‘Time to go?’ he added, crooking his neck to look into the darkness, while withdrawing a short, gleaming blade from his hunting belt.

      I frowned. Like most hunters in Arafel, Max could handle a knife, bow and fishing spear with practised ease. But he was particularly gifted when it came to knives, often dispatching prey from as far as fifty metres away. His precision and brute strength also made him a formidable adversary in combat, but this was different.

      I shot out a hand to pause his course, before loading a stone in my slingshot. Swiftly, I took aim and released so the stone flew through the broken archway into the darkness beyond. The hollow echo of the stone’s tumble filled the tense air, before it came to an abrupt standstill. My skin felt like a thousand scorpions were crawling across it, in some giant arachnid march. But there was no answer – nothing but the same chilling whistle of wind through the broken streets.

      There was no more reason to hesitate.

      Supporting Eli between us, we slipped off the stone and stole forward together. And as we passed beneath the crumbling Gothic arch and into the shadowed ruin beyond, I was immediately struck by a cloud of grey oppression, despite the green moss and hardy creepers.

      The whistling moan of the wind was louder here, as though it belonged in the way life had once, whispering memories. Warning us. We stared around the ruined space in silent wonder. We’d made it; we were inside the Dead City. We were the first Outsiders from Arafel to have trodden here since the Great War, and we didn’t belong at all.

      Swallowing, I tried to get my bearings. This first building was large and rectangular, with several broken pillars splayed across the debris-strewn floor. They must have once supported a high-vaulted roof, at least twenty times the height of our treehouse.

      Briefly I wondered what purpose the space might have served, and then I spotted the parallel lines sunk into the floor a little way off. They were beyond rusted, and almost obscured by overgrowth, but I’d studied the old world enough to know I was looking at what our ancestors would have called a railway station.

      ‘Toxic boxes on wheels … They choked the earth and burned precious resources, making men fat and lazy …’

      I could hear Grandpa as though he was standing next to me, and his words seemed to resonate eerily in this overgrown crypt. The space rang with the echo of a thousand impatient footsteps that no longer bore any connection to our forest community. I felt my hands grow clammy. Our ancestors’ СКАЧАТЬ