Voices in Stone - Emily Diamand Page 0,71

Isis.

“But there’s charges set!” cried Merlin. “Didn’t you notice all the yellow wires?”

They both looked at him blankly.

“The mounds you ran through like crazy people? It’s where they’ve drilled down and dropped in the explosives – I’ve been watching them do it these last couple of weeks. They’re sealed and ready; all the wires are in place, set for detonation. Anytime now someone’s going to press a button and all this rock around you…” He mimed an explosion with his hands. “Boom!” He looked frightened and sweaty.

Jagged lines of purple and blue pulsed through the rocks, answering Merlin’s fear. In Isis’s mind, they sounded like a loud and frightened wail.

Gray was glancing about frantically, his hands up. “It’s going to be okay, I promise.”

“Oh man,” said Merlin, and he slide-slipped his way down the rubble slope, landing easily on his long legs and jogging over to them. “Look, I get it that you care, and I’m glad you feel the energy. But it ain’t worth dying for!” He waved his hands. “It’s gonna go off like bombs in here!”

“We’re not like you!” Gray snapped. “We won’t just stand by and watch!”

Merlin frowned, like Gray was being stupid, childish.

“You don’t know!” shouted Gray. “It’s not ley lines or energy, it’s an alien! Its ship crashed here thousands of years ago – actually it is the ship – but that’s why people see stuff and feel things around here. That’s what they’re mining, and they’ll kill him, because he can’t get away in time. So you see, we’ve got to stop them!”

Merlin pulled his dreadlocks back from his face with both hands. “What?”

“We can’t just leave her to die,” cried Isis. “She’s all alone.” A pale yellow began to dominate the colours moving in patterns over the quarry. Isis wanted Cally suddenly, and her dad, wherever he was. She desperately needed them to swoop down here and save her, somehow…

“She’s only a baby…” Isis said, realising those weren’t her thoughts, but the alien’s. “She’s waiting for her parents—” She halted, unsure if she was understanding it right. The word ‘budded’ sprung into her mind, instead of ‘born’, and she had a sense of many parents or maybe none at all. However the alien had emerged, by its own lifespan it was only an infant. “She’s waiting for her… family to come back,” she said.

Merlin stood still, holding his hair. Then he nodded. “Makes sense.”

He let his dreadlocks fall again.

“You… believe us?” asked Isis, astonished. She hadn’t expected him to, even as she’d explained.

Merlin shrugged. “I’ve heard a lot of theories about this place, but I never choose one as being the truth. Some people say there’s an ancient goddess in the woods, or it’s the earth’s Energy… others say aliens. All I know is there’s something in this valley, because I’ve felt it.”

Isis watched the rainbow colours dancing through the stones. “She’s all around us here.”

“But they’ve cut him open,” said Gray. “We’re standing in a wound!”

Merlin’s expression was full of pity. He folded his lanky body and knelt, putting his hands flat on the ground.

“You know me, don’t you?” he said quietly, talking to the rock beneath his fingers. “I’ve been here in your valley, walking with you every day.” He shook his head. “I wish I could help you, and I know you’re scared and this blast is gonna hurt you bad, but…” He glanced up at Isis and Gray, “If they stay, they’ll die when it happens. Is that what you want?”

A shimmer in Isis’s eyes, as if the world blinked. And then…

“They’ve gone!” gasped Gray, spinning around, staring wildly. “All the mes – they’ve all gone!”

The world had lost its colour, it was back to being grey rocks and dust. Isis’s mind felt empty where it had been full. The alien under them, all around them, had disappeared.

“Where are they?” cried Gray. He turned on Merlin. “What have you done?”

“She wants us to leave,” said Isis quietly. “She wants to save us.”

An alien whose skeleton was made of rare and precious metals. A vast creature born in the belly of some distant planet, that had swum or tumbled or flown across space, only to become trapped here like a fledgling bird caught in a net. Lost and frightened, reaching out to the tiny pinpricks crawling on her surface, whose lives must have seemed to pass in an instant, while her own stretched far into the future. This enormous creature was showing its kindness, and giving them permission to