Budding Star (11 page)

From time to time I heard a wolf give that lonely full-throated howl. Like, “YAROO!” At times it seemed worryingly close. Other times it sounded echoey and far away.

The sun was low on the horizon when we both skidded to a halt. We stared down at the fresh paw prints in the dust.

Reuben shook his head. “That wolf is following us!”

Everyone was following us, if you asked me. Lost souls, wolves. There was probably an entire army of ninja assassins trailing us through the undergrowth at this moment.

“I thought you said wolves were harmless.”

Reuben pulled a face. “In Limbo, who knows? We should probably camp here. It’ll be freezing, because there’s absolutely no shelter, but if anything IS trying to creep up on us, we’d see it for miles.”

Reuben was thinking like a ninja too, I noticed impressed.

We lit a fire, in case the lone wolf turned out to be an advance scout for a huge, ravening pack. Then we wrapped ourselves in our cloaks and watched the sunset. Level Two sunsets are totally fabulous. When nightfall finally came the darkness had a faint red glow.

My stomach gave a long low rumble.

“Hungry?” asked Reuben.

“I’d even eat trail mix,” I said gloomily.

I unrolled the map to check on Tsubomi’s position.

The butterfly had vanished.

“That’s impossible!” said Reuben in dismay. “I looked ten minutes ago and she was right here!”

“Are you looking for me?” A ninja girl stepped out from the shadows. She wore a shabby cloak over her baggy fighting clothes, and there was a stringed instrument slung over her shoulder. Like me and Reubs, Tsubomi’s soul had put on a Limbo disguise, but I recognised her instantly.

“We found you!” I gasped.

“Excuse me!” she said, laughing. “It was actually
me
who found
you
!”

Tsubomi sounded just like she did in the Agency documentary. Cool, sassy, yet oddly grown-up. “I’ve been hoping we’d hook up eventually. I wanted to thank you for taking out that Dark lord!” She flashed us a mischievous grin.

“You
knew
about that?” Reuben looked amazed.

Tsubomi seemed surprised. “Of course! You both did a brilliant job!”

“Only because you left that note,” I said modestly. “It was really a team effort.”

Tsubomi shuddered. “Can you imagine anything so gross! Actually giving someone your heart in a locket!”

“If you think about it, it was a HUGE compliment!” I told her quickly. “The Dark lord must have liked you a lot. He was literally putting his life in your hands.”

Stop babbling, babe, I told myself. It was partly stage fright at finding myself chatting to a teenage pop star. But mostly it was because I’d always imagined that this would be the easy part of our mission, and I’d just realised that having finally found our human, we didn’t have a
clue
what to do next!

“Well,” I said brightly. “I guess we should get you back to your—”

But I couldn’t finish my sentence. I had a chilling flash of that dying girl wired up to those machines and, I’m sorry, I just could NOT bring myself to say the word, “body”.

“- back home,” I finished huskily. “We’ll get you back home, in a trice. You probably won’t even know you’ve been away.”

Tsubomi laughed. “That would be lovely - if I had a home to go back to! Sadly I don’t. For now this world is my home, and I have a really difficult task to carry out.”

Jessica had told us that lost souls often have the strangest delusions about why they’re in Limbo.

“Gosh! What kind of task?” I asked, to humour her. “Like a quest you mean?”

“Maybe I’ll tell you tomorrow,” she said evasively. “Is it OK if I stay with you guys till morning?”

“We’d like that, wouldn’t we Mel?” Reuben suddenly looked hopeful. “Any chance I can have a strum on that - is it a lute?”

“It’s called a koto,” I corrected.

Tsubomi laughed. “Actually a koto would be way too big and bulky to carry around. You call this a ‘biwa’. Reuben’s right, it’s a sort of lute. Play it by all means.” She added carelessly, “I don’t even know why I’m lugging it around. It’s not like I’m a musician or anything.”

“So you don’t play yourself?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Everyone plays a bit, don’t they?”

“Not really,” I began.

Reuben gave me a look, and, remembering the sacred rules of soul-retrieval: we wait, we watch, we keep our gobs shut, I hastily shut mine.

Be patient, I told myself. Maybe that miracle will happen like Jessica said, and Tsubomi will remember who she is.

Level Two might be a simmering dust bowl during the day, but it gets FREEZING when the sun goes down. I was really grateful for that campfire.

Tsubomi was holding out her hands to the flames. Suddenly she cleared her throat. “You’ve both been so kind and I kind of feel like I owe it to you to tell you the truth. The problem is, I’m scared it’s going to change the way you feel about me.”

I felt like
such
a pro! We’d only been with her ten minutes, yet already Tsubomi trusted us enough to spill the beans about the stresses and strains that had driven her to take her accidental overdose.

“Don’t tell us unless you really want to,” I said in my gentlest voice.

She swallowed. “It’s about the demon lord.”

My smile froze on my face. “Oh, right.”

“He told you he couldn’t bring himself to kill me. What he didn’t tell you, is that when I ate the fruit I immediately fell under an evil curse.”

“No way!” I gasped. “You poor thing! What kind of curse?”

“I’m only a girl by night,” Tsubomi said earnestly. “But when the sun rises, I have to take on the shape of a wolf.”

“You’re
kidding
!” I breathed.

She giggled. “How do you think I crept up on you earlier? Ninja skills? Yeah right! Wolves can outsmart ninjas every time!”

“But that’s so awful,” I said in horror. “How can you joke about it?”

Tsubomi shook her head. “It’s not so bad. It’s taught me a lot actually.”

She seemed surprisingly eager to talk about her wolf experiences. After several extremely detailed descriptions of fascinating smells (fascinating to a wolf that is), Reubs and I started getting restless. We tactfully tried to bring the conversation round to Tsubomi’s real life in Japan; her home, her studies, parents and friends. But we just hit this total wall.

To hear her talk, you’d have thought she’d been born inside this game. I can see why. It might be weird and scary but it was also extremely simple. Inside the game, Tsubomi didn’t have to stress about her mother, or her agent, her fans or promoters. She didn’t have to jump on and off planes, zooming from one city to another, meeting ridiculous schedules. She was as free as, well, a wolf.

Reuben was still softly tinkering with the harp. He asked Tsubomi to show him the proper way to tune it. I watched her lively laughing face as she corrected his fingering, then quickly shut my eyes to banish the chilling image of that pale, blank girl in a hospital bed.

I could literally feel the minutes ticking, ticking. For souls who’ve left their bodies for keeps, time obviously doesn’t present a problem. But each minute, each
second
, that Tsubomi Hoshi’s soul spent in Limbo made it increasingly unlikely that she’d ever be able to return to life on Earth.

Reuben seemed totally oblivious to all these concerns. He’d started playing a funky old-style Japanese version of one of his own songs. I could see that Tsubomi was having some kind of internal struggle until finally, she couldn’t resist any longer, and started to sing along. The evening turned into an impromptu jam session. Sometimes Tsubomi sang, sometimes Reuben, sometimes they sang together. Like I said, Reubs doesn’t have what you’d call a great voice, but their voices harmonised beautifully.

It’s not unusual for me to have at least two Melanies squabbling in my head at any one time, but suddenly there was an entire football team! Mel Number One was stressing about how we were going to save Tsubomi. Mel Number Two, I’m ashamed to say, was hopping with jealousy! Reuben was my friend. And Tsubomi and I had a special soul connection from who knows where. So how come I was the cosmic gooseberry here?

Mel Number Three ached with pure envy. If I could only open my mouth and hear a wonderful sound come out, instead of a tuneless squeak. Mel Number Four on the other hand…

I eventually ran out of Melanies, and fell into an uneasy doze.

I woke to the sound of Reuben stamping on the remains of our camp fire. The sun was coming up over the mountains like a huge gold beach ball. My angel buddy gave me a beaming smile. “You’re awake! Great evening wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. Great!” I agreed.

He looked worried. “Do you think I was wrong, getting her to play? I was hoping it might help her remember. But she’s got such a huge block about it. It’s like she
wants
to play, but she thinks she shouldn’t. Now I’m worried that I’ve just made her even more confused.”

“Oh, I’m sure you haven’t -” I started.

But Reuben was still fretting. “She just kept bringing everything back to her task, or quest, or whatever, like she’s some character in a fairy tale.”

“You noticed that too.” I was brushing red dust off my ninja clothes. I felt like such a child. Reuben hadn’t been trying to leave me out. He’d been doing his job. Like
you
should have been doing, Mel, I scolded myself.

“Where is she anyway?” I asked guiltily.

“Up on those rocks,” Reuben said in a low voice. “Keep your voice down, she’s quite jumpy.”

I looked around and eventually spotted a young she-wolf eying us nervously from the rocks. Tsubomi must have changed back at sunrise. I was
so
ashamed of myself. What kind of angel is jealous of the soul she came to save?

Reuben has an unnerving habit of reading my mind. “Don’t feel too sorry for her,” he said, carefully folding up his cloak. “In some weird way, I think this is actually doing Tsubomi good.”

“You think being under a curse is doing her good? Is that, like, Level Two logic!”

“Don’t twist my words, Beeby,” he said mildly. “I meant being a wolf. Running on all fours, out in the elements, sniffing all those smells. The Dark lord had a point. This has to be healthier than that mad celebrity life she had before.”

“I never thought about it like that,” I admitted.

“Jessica’s right. We’ve just got to go along with this big quest delusion, let Tsubomi run with it and see where it goes.”

I gulped. “I’ve been thinking the exact opposite.”

“I could tell,” he said gently. “But I think we should hang on in.”

“Reubs, she’s
dying
.”

“I know, but if we interfere, we’re disrespecting her, don’t you see? If we want to save her, we have to trust her, even when she’s doing something that seems crazy or dangerous.”

I was close to tears. “I know you’re right. It’s just the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

Reuben nodded. “Me too, and we should probably get going.”

I tried to grin. “Yeah, it looks like Fido’s getting restless!”

Up on the mountainside, a bored Tsubomi was chasing her tail.

She followed us all the rest of that day as we covered the remaining miles to the volcano. I say “followed”, but it was more like she roamed around us in huge circles, like a hyperactive puppy.

As we got nearer, something happened that it isn’t easy to put into words. Something started calling to us. A
force
, kind of, some ruthless attraction that wrenched at our heartstrings, pulling us closer and closer and closer…

This probably sounds v. alarming, so you’ll have to believe me when I say that it
felt
wonderful! We’d been travelling for hours, yet not only were we not tired, Reubs and I were just bubbling with high spirits; laughing, teasing each other, doing silly walks. It was like we were literally being energised by our proximity to the volcano.

“This feels like falling in love,” Reuben said, half laughing at himself.

“True love on an industrial scale!” I agreed.

It was evening by the time we reached the lower slopes.

The track snaked around a sharp bend and suddenly, high above us, was the most magical-looking palace. Its walls had been covered in millions of pieces of highly polished metal. Each one reflected the setting sun, turning the palace into one huge blazing mirror.

Then it hit me. The sun had already set. The light wasn’t a reflection, it was flooding out from
inside
. This palace must be the source of that fabulous life force that we’d felt zinging from every stone and tiny desert plant. I could actually see it, now, radiating out from the palace, like those sunrays that baby angels like to put in their paintings.

“This is the Palace of Eternal Flames. It’s even more amazing than I imagined!” Tsubomi appeared in her human form, babbling with excitement.

As angels, Reubs and I are used to high levels of cosmic energy, and even so the extraordinary volcano vibes had us buzzing. Tsubomi was as high as a kite! Gabbling on about how she knew we were really her friends, how special last night was, sharing our fire and our companionship. But to cut a long, l-o-n-g story short, Tsubomi had made a decision. “I’ve decided I can trust you and so I’m going to tell you absolutely everything,” she told us.

I was fairly sure that Jessica Lightpath would approve our decision to go along with Tsubomi’s quest fantasy, however mad. Our soul-retrieval teacher would probably tell us to follow Tsubomi’s soul into the boiling crater of the volcano if necessary. I’m not sure she’d have wanted us to commit actual
burglary
though.

My heart sank into the bottom of my ninja boots, as Tsubomi explained exactly how she’d break into the Palace of Eternal Flames and steal its owner’s most treasured possession.

“Oh, and obviously I want you both to come with me,” she bubbled. “It’s going to be a blast! Back in a sec, I’m just going to scout around and check out the positions of the guards.”

More like she’s totally hyperactive and can’t sit still, I thought gloomily.