Magic Awry by Sarah Armstrong

Author:Sarah Armstrong [Sarah Armstrong]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hardie Grant Children's Publishing
Published: 2023-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

chapter 20

Maria dashes to the corner of the room and pulls at a bookshelf. It slides to one side, revealing a rough wooden door in the wall. ‘Escape tunnel,’ she says as she swings open the door, and a wave of cool, musty air hits us. ‘Let’s hope whoever told them about our hideout doesn’t know about this. Quick! I will not let them take my magic!’

Kit and I follow Maria into the low, dirt-walled tunnel.

‘I’ll stay and distract them so you can get away,’ says Carys. ‘If you see Efa, tell her I love her.’ She pushes me deeper into the tunnel. ‘Go! Run!’

We hear the bookshelf scraping back into place as we jog up the tunnel, the way ahead lit by the torch on Maria’s phone, the only sound our jagged breath.

After a minute, there’s a distant cry from the hideout. Maria turns to look back down the tunnel. In the torchlight, her face is stricken. ‘Maybe she’s hoping that they’ll take her to the Seat,’ she says. ‘So she can see Efa. Let’s keep going.’

As I hurry after her, I imagine the moment when Mum tells Dad and Kit’s mum that we are not coming home, that Kit is trapped here and that I am … Mum’s always said ‘dead’ rather than ‘passed away’; she reckons it’s more honest, that it faces facts. But now, the word makes me dizzy, and I have to concentrate hard to keep my legs moving.

I realise that I’ve taken life for granted. I’ve often felt a bit annoyed that I am so small and not as strong as Kit, but now I love everything about this body and the way it carries me through the world.

‘Where do we go, Maria?’ I ask abruptly. ‘When we die.’

She doesn’t reply for a minute. There’s just a deep-earth hush all around us and the pad of our shoes on the tunnel floor.

‘The truth is I don’t know,’ she says finally. ‘But we’re all made of energy and energy doesn’t just disappear. It changes form when we die – when anything dies – and goes into the earth and trees, the water and wind. Into the web.’ She pauses. ‘I often feel my mother. I feel the essence of her, everything that she put out into the world. All her love.’

‘I don’t want to die,’ I say. I want reassurance that everything will be okay. But I am not a little kid anymore. This is the real world, and death is part of the real world.

‘I don’t want you to die either,’ Kit says quietly.

‘No-one does,’ Maria says. ‘So we’re going to get you north and give you a chance at surviving. A slim chance – but like you said, it’s better than doing nothing.’ She’s talking to me like an equal now, not mollycoddling me, and I feel it strengthen me.

At the end of the tunnel is another solid timber door. Maria turns off her torch and we’re in pitch black. I hear Maria think, Please, please, don’t let them be waiting for us.

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