By Light Alone (53 page)

Li on the roof was staring in rage, or bafflement, up at them. She had a weapon in her hand.

‘We do not go back for her,’ Issa told the driver.

‘What do you mean?’ he replied. ‘Don’t be crazy! What do you mean?’

‘She is about to fire at the flitter,’ said Issa, with total focus. ‘See?’

‘She thinks we’re abandoning her!’ said the driver, and Issa could see that her spell was broken. ‘She won’t fire if we go back down.’

The gong chimed. Or whatever it was. A proud, profound sound. A sort of deep-clipped, giant’s cough, like a vast door being slammed a long way off. ‘Look,’ said Issa, her composure returning to her. She was in charge. She had never stopped being in charge. ‘Look.’ The driver followed the line of her arm. In between the buildings, the vertical line of puffing-out dust was clearly visible in the very middle of the Hough Wall.

You might have counted off the silent seconds, had you been there. One, two, three, four, five. ‘That’s not supposed to happen yet,’ said the driver, in a low voice.

‘We can’t go
back
,’ urged Issa.

Everything depended upon this. Everything came down to convincing the driver of this one thing: persuading him not to land the flitter back on the roof, but rather to take it higher and to fly away. Issa had never met him before that day. She did not know his name.

Then the wall broke in a thin vertical line, with a thunderclap. Water came through in a great pillar that broke into two, like the pages of a white book being opened.

The flitter wobbled, and then began rising. The driver’s eyes were on the wall. In moments they were far enough above the roofs to get a good view of the splinter that had appeared from top to base in the structure, and the blank pages of Atlantic water that were waiting to be written upon.

Issa went back into the cabin. ‘Dad!’ she cried, grabbing her father’s two hands in her own. ‘Daddy, it’s me.’

He looked into her eyes. She saw what happened. She saw him understand her, not only her words but the wholeness of her. And then he pulled that understanding back into the shell of his head, as a snail withdraws itself. His eyes looked at her, but his soul did not. ‘Who are you?’

‘It’s me, Daddy!’ she said. ‘You remember!’

‘No,’ he said, not loudly, but with great force. She saw right through the moment. There was a crystallized future, right there. He was going to have to choose between the changeling daughter who had his heart, who had brought him all the happiness of recovery and renewal, and the real daughter whose loss had caused him such pain. He could not choose them both, that was clear enough. It would become clear to him too, in time. He would have to choose the one or the other. Of course, the changeling had spent years growing herself like a bush of strawberry-red roses, all softness and thorn, about his heart. And of course, the real girl had spent years growing into something perfectly alien. But as she looked at her daddy, all her anger sublimed away, she thought to herself: I do not know which he will choose.

It all trembled. Her heart was the point around which the world pivoted.

Then his eyes opened wide, and water came out of them. ‘Leah?’ he cried, unable to hold back his love for her. ‘Is it you? Is it? Is it you?’ And he came over to her, and said; ‘Oh my beautiful girl!’

Everything else fell away into the void. Nothing else mattered. She was weeping, and she called out, ‘Daddy, my daddy’ and embraced him. It was wonderful and terrible to feel his torso shudder with tears as she held him. He felt smaller, inside her hug; more frail. ‘It’s alright,’ she told him. And the
all
and the
right
were equally balanced. ‘It’s alright,’ she said.

‘My beautiful girl!’

‘It’s alright.’

At that moment the whole flitter rang like a bell: a hole popped into existence on the floor, and a bigger one clicked open in the roof. Boom, boom. The noise levels suddenly increased, and air blew through loud as a snake’s hiss. ‘Come
on
,’ yelled Issa, her face still wet, though she was no longer crying. She moved herself back over to the driver. Bundled by circumstance, and propelled only by her willpower, he zipped the craft forward. They flew in the direction of the Hough Wall. He had been told, Issa thought, that he was to fly back to the barge. Thinking quickly, she ran through possibilities. They would have to try and dissuade him of that. But that would come later. It was clear that she was in charge now, clear that her whole life had shaped her for this role. Right now, though, everybody was at a window, and looking down. The white foam was filling the bay like a latte, and as they flew over the last of the buildings they saw the advance line of the onrushing bulge break, with a great arc of lace and frill, upon the old docks of the city. The Hough Wall groaned like a living thing, and there was another gunshot crack. The pages of the book became a curved screen, and the story of turmoil and foam was visible upon it. Issa watched the mass of water fall through the air. And at the back of the flitter, Leah, her better half, her other self, her real being, her authentic copy, the
actual
her who did not (now that she came to look more closely) really look that much like her, spoke, her voice breathy and amazed and teenage in a way that Issa had long since lost the ability to parse, and which she would never recover: ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘my,’ she said, ‘
God
,’ she said.

Water was pouring over the white wall now. It sparkled in the winter sunlight as if, oh my
God
, it was full of stars.

Also by Adam Roberts from Gollancz:

Salt

Stone

On

The Snow

Polystom

Gradisil

Land of the Headless

Swiftly

Yellow Blue Tibia

New Model Army

A Gollancz eBook

Copyright © Adam Roberts 2011
All rights reserved.

The right of Adam Roberts to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London,
WC
2
H
9
EA
An Hachette UK Company

This eBook first published in 2011 by Gollancz.

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

ISBN
978 0 575 09908 1

All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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