Voices in Stone - Emily Diamand Page 0,72
leave.
Isis knelt on the ground, like Merlin had.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. Sorry for the pain to come, and their own helplessness.
Gray took it differently. “Come back,” he shouted, spinning at the blank rock faces. “Please, come back!”
But the ground was just the ground again. The colours of the alien’s thoughts had vanished.
Chapter Thirty-one
Gray
“Why can’t you get the alien back?” I shouted at Isis. I wanted to grab her and shake her!
“Because it’s not like a ghost!” she shouted back. “I don’t know how to do this – you’re supposed to be the expert on this stuff!”
We hadn’t left. Merlin was jiggling on the spot, looking anxious. “We need to get outta here.”
“But you saw the alien!” I said to Isis. “So can’t you—”
“I don’t see her,” she snapped. “It’s more like she talks in colours, or maybe that’s her thoughts? They map out where she is.”
“But me, Jayden and Gav, we were all in the quarry on the school trip. We got covered in dust, got bits of the alien in us or whatever. You weren’t even there, and you can still sense the alien, so that’s got to be your…” I waved my hands, “you know, seeing ghosts and stuff.”
“She can see ghosts?” said Merlin. “Nice one.”
But Isis shook her head. “I don’t know how to call it back.”
Merlin put his hand out, touching my arm. “Look, man, we need to leave.”
I shook his hand off. “You go! I’m not!” It was the first alien humanity had ever come in contact with; I couldn’t just let it be killed before anyone even knew.
“Look up there,” said Merlin, pointing to above where we were standing. “When the explosive charges go off, we’ll be underneath an avalanche of rocks!”
“But the protest…”
Merlin yanked his dreads up, like he wanted to pull them off. “Listen, man! There’s hundreds of police and security up there, all doing whatever they can to get the protestors rounded up and away. As soon as the protest is over it’ll be back to business. Press the button, boom go the rocks!”
“Isis?” I said.
“What can we even do?” she asked, and it sounded like she’d already decided the answer.
“Call your ghosts!”
“How would that help?”
“I don’t know, maybe one of them can speak alien? We can’t just do nothing!”
“Oh this is bad,” said Merlin, jittering. “It could go off any second. Look, I’m sorry.” And he ran off along the track, his dreads bouncing, his feet sending up puffs of dust.
“Where are you going?” Isis shouted after him, sounding really frightened. She made to follow, but I grabbed her arm.
“Please?” I asked.
“Angel won’t come,” Isis said, shaking her head. “She wouldn’t even get out of Stu’s car.” I could see that Isis wanted to run after Merlin. “I think we should get out of here. What if—”
“What if they blow the place and the alien is killed?”
A pebble fell away from the quarry face, clinking and clattering down to the ground. We both froze for a moment, but nothing happened; the world didn’t explode around us.
Isis glanced back at me, looking caught between guilt and anger. “I can’t make Angel do anything she doesn’t want to. She’s scared. I’m scared!”
“The alien just needs a bit more time!” I shouted.
“A hundred years!” Isis shouted back.
I punched at the rock face, then sat down, clutching my stinging hand. I wanted to never move again. I’d blow up with the alien, if that was my only option.
“She wants us to go,” said Isis, squatting down next to me. “So maybe she’s worked out some way to get herself safe?”
“No!” I didn’t want to look at Isis. At her fear, at the dust coating her clothes and smeared across her face. Alien dust. “We’re like the flies, moving too fast for him to catch. Except we’re flies with explosives.”
“What?”
“You can’t catch a fly because a second for you is like an hour for them. You need to think as fast as a fly to catch one.” A tear splashed on my hand, washing off a circle of dirt. “It’s like that for the alien, except we’re the ones moving too fast.”
Isis didn’t say anything for a minute, squatting there on her heels. Then she said, “Mandeville spoke through my mouth. He made my lips move for me.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“He made a woman in the theatre fall asleep so he could watch Philip Syndal’s show from inside her body. He calls it possession, but he must take control of nerves, or