The Fall of Koli by M. R. Carey

Author:M. R. Carey [CAREY, M. R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2021-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

38

The crow’s nest was a lot darker than I was used to seeing it. Morning still hadn’t come, and most of the sky was just a piled-up darkness with no moon or stars. Only where it met the sea a ragged line of light was starting to show.

“Lights,” Paul said.

“Override.” Lorraine rapped the word out just as the lights in the room gun to rise. They switched themselves off again of a sudden and we was throwed back into darkness. “We’ve waited three hundred and sixty-five years for this. Now the grand cycle completes itself, and we have to observe it properly.”

“You’re overly fond of metaphors, my love,” Paul said. His voice had some anger half-buried in it like it did oftentimes.

“Dawn isn’t a metaphor. Dawn is a source of metaphors. I won’t insult this dawn with lesser lights, and neither will you. Wait. Wait in silence. Find the place in your heart where Albion abides, and ready yourself. Stanley, come and stand here between us. That’s right. The rest of you can wait wherever you like. Just remember that the drones don’t need light to see you by.”

Cup grabbed my arm and pulled me close to her. After a few seconds, as my eyes got used to the dark, I seen that Ursala was there too. Cup leaned in close to me and whispered in my ear, “If we get a chance, we’re gonna run. I’ll shout free-come, and we’ll go together.”

“No, I’ll give the signal,” I said. “It won’t be a word. It’ll be when I move.”

“What do you mean? Koli, what are you going to do?”

“You’ll know when I do it.”

The light on the horizon got brighter and wider, like there was a giant up there in the sky that was taking the lid from off of a pot to see if what was inside was ready to eat or not.

The first time I ever heard that word horizon I was high off the ground, just as I was now. It was in the lookout tower at Ludden, right after I took the DreamSleeve back from Mardew. Monono had come back from the internet, and she was different. It was nearing morning, again just like now, and she said we had got to go. The light’s just under the horizon, she said, and I asked her what that was. She laughed, but it was not to make fun of me. She knowed answering that one question would be like kicking a stone on a steep hill, that would touch another stone and then another, until the whole hill’s side was rolling down. I’ll teach you. There’s so much more I can give you now. You don’t have any idea how lucky you are.

I knowed how lucky I had been to have met her and to have her by me. I knowed who had took her, and what they deserved. I knowed glass was brittle as ice on a pond, and like to break if you even looked at it too hard.

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