Cloudland by Lisa Gorton

staring up at them. He was struggling, fighting to open his arms.
    â€˜Jovius!’ she screamed. Her cry trailed into nothing. Over the edge of the carpet, she saw a dingy cloud plain, perhaps a hundred metres down. Dark cracks marked its surface. Lucy’s mind blanked out. She felt a kind of vertigo when she tried to imagine the end of that plummeting fall.
    â€˜What happened?’ Daniel had drawn his knees to his chest. He was breathing fast through his mouth.Wist lay between them on the carpet, arms splayed. ‘In the Mist. How did we get out?’
    â€˜Remember in the tunnel, that Megalith said they went into the Mist to die? When that snake ate into my mind, I realised – they couldn’t ever die, not really, not there. The Mist wanted to keep everything just as it was, forever. So I asked the Megaliths to help us, whatever was left of them. They dug us out.’
    â€˜You can’t even see the Mist now,’ said Daniel. In the sky, wide above them, they saw only an odd twisting of light, like a bubble in old glass.
    â€˜We should wake Wist.’ When she shook his shoulder his hands clenched and opened – but he only moaned and rolled onto his stomach.
    â€˜We’re about to crash!’ cried Daniel.
    Lucy twisted to look over the edge of the carpet. When they had been high up, she had thought they were drifting, almost motionless. Now she saw how the cloud rushed to meet them.
    â€˜Jump before we hit,’ said Daniel. They stood up, half-crouching, as the carpet tipped and swayed. The wind stung Lucy’s eyes.
    â€˜Now!’ They flung themselves into empty air. After a sickening pause, they crashed onto frozen cloud. The shock sent a jolt up Lucy’s spine. Everything hurt.
    â€˜Lucy?’ Daniel prodded her ribs.
    With a moan of protest, she rolled over and sat up. ‘Alkazia,’ she breathed. All this time, she had been imagining it as a palace, ornate and magnificent, but she knew Alkazia now with absolute certainty. Brutally simple, it hulked against the sky: a tower with no windows, no doors, nothing to break its surface. Lucy’s flesh felt like glass. She couldn’t move. Her mind kept repeating:
Alkazia, Alkazia
. Its shadow stretched across the plain like a road.
    â€˜The Protector and her army,’ muttered Daniel, gazing around them at the horizon. ‘What do we do now?’
    Lucy kept seeing the Citadel, the pale crowd of Cloudians rushing towards her. ‘Wake Wist, I suppose,’ she said. ‘Find Jovius.’
    When she turned Wist over, his arm swung out. With a start, she saw that his eyes were open. He stared past her at the sky. ‘I was weak in the Mist,’ he said. ‘I thought –’ He broke off, so fierce in his humiliation Lucy felt embarrassed, and stepped back.
    â€˜Can you get up? We need to find Jovius.’
    â€˜He’s over there.’ Daniel pointed at a scrap, half-hidden behind a lumpy mound in the plain. Jovius lay spreadeagled with his coat open around him. Oneof his boots had come off. His pale hands turned up to the sky. They stood looking at him.
    â€˜My fault,’ said Wist. ‘If I hadn’t – if I’d been watching.’
    â€˜Look at these cracks.’ Daniel pressed at the cloud plain with his boot. ‘He must have hit pretty hard.’
    â€˜Don’t!’ Lucy turned away, pressing her palm against her mouth, trying to hold down the nausea rising through her body in waves. In her mind, she kept seeing Jovius spin away from them. Miserable, distracted, she didn’t notice how the air was shuddering with cold until she felt Daniel plucking at her sleeve – but when she saw his face, bone-pale, her blood stopped.
    Above them, the air was black with shadows loosed from things and clustering. Soft clots of dark, they floated on nothing; they crawled down air with hunching shrugs. Lucy was back at the beginning, in the plane, helplessly