Voices in Stone - Emily Diamand Page 0,70
for purchase, dust coating her hair and face, and entering her open mouth as she screamed. Isis was falling properly now, then… “Ow!”
A shuddering slam smacked through her body as her feet hit the bottom. She fell forwards, landing hard on her knees and palms.
“You all right?” Gray asked, coming over.
“Ow… I think so.” She stood up, her legs and hands stinging with pain. She glanced down at her uniform, now streaked with pale clay and mud. Gray’s was just as bad, his back smeared almost white, his hair looking as if it had been dipped in flour.
Looking around, Isis could see there was no one else here. The diggers and trucks had been driven away, leaving only their criss-crossing tyre marks on the wide track that led out of the quarry. The Portacabin offices and car park were hidden behind the high mounds of earth and rubble. No one could see them here.
In the distance, Isis could hear chanting and whistles.
“That must be the protest going on,” said Gray. It sounded like a wild party, except the voices were angry instead of having fun. “All the workers must be guarding the gates or whatever.”
Isis looked around the stony slopes of the quarry. The dust in her eyes was making her sight teary and smeared, but at the same time it made the alien almost fully visible. Flickering in different colours, covered in something between the scales of a fish and the crystals of a snowflake. But the texture was neither of those.
“It’s like my mind tries to find what she looks like,” Isis said quietly, “but she isn’t a whale, or a spaceship, or ice, or any of those things.”
Gray’s eyes were darting around, constantly looking about them. “You know, I’m getting kind of used to this. I quite like having a crowd of myself.”
Glancing at him, Isis realised what it must’ve been like for Jess and the others. When I talk to Mandeville and the spirits, it’s just me talking to the air. No wonder they’d turned on her in Mr Gerard’s office. If she didn’t know, she’d think Gray was mad right now. And yet here they were, in the rubble and dust of a living being. She shook her head, wanting to run, to get away. This was too big, too impossible; too frightening and inexplicable…
“Escape,” she whispered, suddenly understanding the alien’s message, the one speaking into the back of her mind and giving her those feelings.
Gray was listening to his invisible crowd, reacting to things she couldn’t see or hear. “Can’t you just… fly away or whatever?” he asked the air.
The answer came in patterns, in colours slipping across the rocks. Incomprehensible, and yet Isis understood some of it.
“She was hurt when she fell,” she said.
Gray nodded. “But he’s almost healed. He can… limp?”
Isis smiled. ‘Limp’ was Gray’s word, nothing like the movements of a wounded alien.
“Even limping, you should go!” Gray said to the air.
A shift and spiral of the colours beneath Isis’s feet. Deep reds and blues, a flash of fluorescent green.
“There’s something she has to do first?” she said, not quite certain. “It takes time.”
“Calculations,” said Gray, nodding in agreement, but not at Isis. “He can’t lift off like a rocket or something; he has to work out a trajectory and his route…”
Isis shook her head. It felt more instinctive than the way Gray was describing it. Like judging how to catch a ball, or run through a narrow gap.
“She can’t react fast enough,” she said, realising. By the time the alien could work out how to leave, it would be too late.
Gray stared at nothing. “How long do you need?”
The answer took Isis a couple of seconds to disentangle – thoughts from feelings, words from sensations.
“Years?” she said. She couldn’t tell the number exactly, but she had a vision of herself as an old woman. This alien was as large as the landscape, and moved as slowly as the rocks it was part of. It struggled to grasp the speed with which humans passed through time. Gray half leaned against a pile of rubble, his body sagging. “But there’ll be nothing left of him by then,” he whispered.
A rattle and slide of pebbles came from above them. They both jumped, getting ready to run, but it wasn’t anyone from the quarry, only Merlin on the level above.
“Oh, man,” he said, panting and catching his breath. “You gotta get out of there. It isn’t safe!”
Gray shook his head.
“We can’t just leave,” said