unable to keep the pride from my voice. ‘This practice was his own choice, these drawings came from his own imagination.’
‘In which case,’ said my mother, ‘it is all the more dangerous.’
‘It cannot be allowed to continue,’ echoed Caige. ‘The project must be abandoned.’
I drew myself up.
‘Yes,’ sneered Caige, taking pleasure from my reaction. ‘Abandoned. The human child’s drawings are shocking enough…’ Shocking. That was the word he used. I felt light in the head, as if the air had grown thin around me, ‘…but the fact that he has corrupted ertlings with this behaviour…’ corrupted, he said, as I lost myself in your drawing again, suppressing a smile at the looks you had placed upon the faces of the figures in the forest—you with a lopsided grin and Jorne with his scraggy beard obscuring an o-shaped mouth, ‘…is nothing short of treachery. Our ertlings…’ our ertlings ‘…will one day transcend like the rest of us, and if they bring these deformities with them then our entire collective species will be sullied.’
Treachery, deformities, sullied. What words.
My mother stepped in.
‘Now then, Caige, there is no need for hysterics. We merely need to impress upon—’
Williome suddenly stamped his foot and broke in with a piercing bawl.
‘It must be stopped. For the sake of our children, it must be stopped.’
For even a third-generation erta to interrupt a member of the high council would be viewed as gravely disrespectful. For a fourth-generation to do so was tantamount to treason, and to do so using the word children as a device to press the point was nothing short of insane.
And yet, my mother made no reply.
I studied them all, standing there with their furrowed brows and folded palms fretting over what was to be done about this. And I wondered, for the first time, what exactly was wrong with them. Why could they not see what I saw? And what was it, exactly, that I saw, other than a badly drawn balloon and my sad face drawn upon old paper?
Imperfection, I realised. Rendered perfectly.
I felt the same as when I had stepped from my balloon, or when I had run with my face turned to the sky, or touched Jorne’s arm. It was the feeling of moving across a boundary.
Jump.
‘Why?’ My voice sounded shrill. ‘Why must it be stopped? This is an experiment, and an important one, you said so yourself, Mother. So this project, this life, Reed…’
I hesitated.
Jump.
‘My son.’ Another gaping silence threatened swallow us. ‘He is the means by which this decision is to be reached. To abandon it now based upon suppositions of treachery, corruption, deformities… I mean, really. We are the Erta. We mend broken planets.’ I held up your drawings. ‘Do you honestly expect us to wither before a few scribbles?’
I regretted having to use that word. They were not scribbles, they were beautiful things. More beautiful than the sky, the sea, the earth, and all the life that raged across it.
Caige’s face prickled with rage. Finally he shook off his lover’s hand and strode towards me.
‘That thing,’ he said, bearing down upon me—‘that creature you call your “son”, that abomination, should never have been called into existence in the first place. If I could I would, I would…’
Within the space of 0.43 seconds, my mother shot Caige a look, his eyes widened as if he had stumbled upon a steep drop, and finally he shut his mouth, breathing furiously through his sizeable nose.
I stared up at him, doing my best to ignore the stench of boiled vegetables.
‘What, Caige?’ I said. ‘What would you do?’
He said nothing. With one last shuddering, cabbage-fumed exhalation he turned and left, with Williome hurrying behind.
Once the great door had slammed I caught my breath and turned back to your drawings. They were damp with the sweat from my palms.
‘Is this what the council has become, Mother?’ I said, hands shaking as I leafed through them. Skies, forests, seas, birds, creatures, suns, houses, each one as wonderful as the last, and my face in every one. ‘Angry parents weeping over drawings? Making threats?’
‘Nobody is threatening anybody. All we want is what is best for our species.’
‘I am sure of it, Mother, but I am beginning to suspect that what is best for our species was never good for Reed’s.’
Her expression soured.
‘If the council heard you questioning them like this, they would not tolerate it, do you understand? There would be consequences.’
‘What consequences? What consequences exist for the crime of asking questions? What will happen to