Viridian (16 page)

‘
I'll
find her,' said Jay again. Nothing on earth was going to stop him.

‘So where's Viridian?' asked Dr Moran. ‘I've never seen him. I'd like to take a look at him.'

‘He's in here,' said Jay, steeling himself, as they entered the black, stinking room full of slimy heaps that had once been Immune Hunters. ‘Over there.' Jay pointed. He couldn't bear to look. ‘He doesn't look anything like he did before,' he added.

No one seeing Viridian now could imagine him as he'd been at the rally burning, like a fiery green comet, with such fierce and brilliant energy. On that balcony he'd
seemed indestructible. Franklin was far too small for all that power. You just knew he wouldn't stop until he ruled the planet.

Dr Moran said, ‘There's nothing here. He's gone.'

‘He can't have,' said Jay. ‘He was dead when I left him. Or nearly.'

‘Come and look.'

Reluctantly, Jay went over. Viridian's body was gone, only a sooty spoor print on the ground to show where it had been.

‘Look,' said Dr Moran, grim-faced. There were smudgy hand prints, knee prints dragging across the floor.

‘He can't be still alive,' whispered Jay. ‘I mean, he was eaten away by fungus, he was breathing out spores.'

‘In that case, he's finished,' said Dr Moran. ‘He's crawled away to die somewhere.'

‘Yeah,' agreed Jay, reassured. ‘Yeah. That's what must have happened.'

* * *

It was dawn when Toni, scanning the ground from the sky, found a suitable place to land. It was a swampy wilderness, perfect for carnivorous plants. She was exhausted and starving. A black-backed gull flew too close. It hardly had time to squawk before Toni's main wings snapped shut on it.

She drifted down to the swamp but landed clumsily: she still had a great deal to learn about flying.

Toni crouched on the boggy ground, on bright green cushions of moss. In each direction stretched fields of ghostly white pitcher plants, a metre high. Tiny sundew plants glistened in between them like rubies, with gnats struggling in their sticky tentacles.

A picture came into her mind. It was of a human boy called Jay shouting, ‘I'll come and find you!' and getting smaller and smaller as she soared away into the sky. The image disturbed her, she didn't know why. She felt a stab of intense loneliness and longing. The pain was so sharp, it made her clutch at her heart. But then it passed and she forgot it.

An hour later, Toni had finished digesting the soft tissue of the seagull. She let the bones, beak, feet and feathers fall out of her gorgeous wings and stared around, surveying her new kingdom.

THE STORY CONTINUES

Coming in October 2013

VENUS ANGEL

Read on…

Toni was in the swamplands, south of Franklin. Since she'd flown away from Jay and Dr Moran, she hadn't seen a single human. No-one, not even Verdans, came to these quaking bogs, where carnivorous plants thrived. But, to a Venus Angel, it felt like coming home.

Toni crouched among pitcher plants, rising around her, a metre high. From inside their traps, tall slender trumpets, she could hear the frantic whine of flies. They'd crawled in and couldn't climb back up the slippery walls. Now they were being digested, slowly.

All the predator plants had caught something. Tiny sundews had gnats struggling in their sticky tentacles. Venus fly traps had their leaves clamped shut, like clam shells. Inside them insects were being slowly drained of body fluids.

Toni watched them fondly, as if they were subjects in her own personal kingdom.

‘Good hunting,' she told them, smiling.

She still used English to think and talk to herself, sometimes. But her human speech was getting rusty. It belonged to that other world she'd lived in before she became a Venus Angel and had to learn a whole new set of skills to survive.

She still thought about that boy sometimes. What was his name?

‘Jay,' Toni said out loud. Her voice seemed strange, as if it belonged to someone else. She said ‘Jay,' again, to reassure herself that the sound was coming out of her own mouth.

In her mind, she suddenly saw him, far below her, heard his frantic cry: ‘I'll come and find you. I promise!'

Then a screech came from above her. Toni looked up. She forgot about Jay. A hawk came streaking in from the west. Bam! It hit a pigeon in the air above her. There was an explosion of feathers and the hawk spiralled off, the pigeon grasped in its talons. Its harsh wild cries faded into the distance.

Toni's green lips curved into a grin. She'd learned a lot from hawks.

‘You were useless at flying before,' she told herself.

But now she was getting better. Better at flying and hunting. Like the hawk, she snatched birds to eat out of the air now, sometimes squirrels from trees. Her wings snapped shut in a tenth of a second.

She opened her glossy, green wings. Bones and grey fur fell out in a neat, dry package. Her wings were blood red inside, rich with nutrients from the squirrel she'd just finished digesting. She took all her meals through her wings now. She'd stopped eating by mouth completely. It was like she'd forgotten how.

She spread her gorgeous wings wide, to soak up the sun. Her green neck twisted, like a plant stem, so her face could bask in its rays. She stayed like that, totally still, for ages, half gargoyle, half beautiful stone angel.

‘Time to fly,' Toni told herself.

First published 2012 by A & C Black,
an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square
London WC1B 3DP

This electronic edition published in October 2012

www.bloomsbury.com

Copyright © 2012 A & C Black

Text copyright © 2012 Susan Gates

The right of Susan Gates to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

eISBN 978-1-40817-627-6

A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

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