I stared back into my own jaded eyes. Our idyllic forest life looked cocooned and protected, but in truth it all balanced on the edge of a harvest scythe. Its continuity depended on political stability inside the domes, and that was so dangerous to assume.
The faint crackle of weighted branches filled the air, and I didn’t need a second warning. Rising swiftly, I darted up the nearby kapok tree.
A good hunter never gave up her lead, not for all the apricots in Arafel.
It was falling fast now. I shimmied down a fallen trunk and leapt up into a thick willow, keeping my eyes trained on the sky above the trees. Max followed agilely, sensing my need for urgency, and only paused when I reached the swaying branches near the top. I held up a hand, knowing the thinner, reedy branches wouldn’t support his weight. And it only took one of us to look past Arafel’s silvery waterfall into the canopied clearing beyond.
It had been two days since the hunter tree trials, and we were on the outer perimeter of Arafel’s forest, the last thicket before the gently sloping pastures we’d cultivated for our rotational crop supplies.
I scanned the busy fields swiftly. I could just spy Kela, today’s shift leader, checking the green shoots of the second barley crop, which once only grew in the old-world Middle East. It was another newcomer since the change in climate, and we were grateful for the flour that provided our village with barley bread throughout the volatile monsoon months.
Beyond the long pastures were the gentle, arid slopes that signalled the start of the mountainous terrain. They were used mainly for grazing the village goats, and the occasional wild caribou kill. The slopes were also where Eli had found Jas, our snow leopard watch-cat, when we were just children. As far as I was aware, she was still the only living creature I knew to have wound a precipitous route from the North Mountains’ snowy peaks into our hidden paradise.
Today though, Jas’s Herculean feat was not foremost in my mind.
I’d followed the tiny falling speck from the roof of our treehouse, feeling suspiciously like I’d fallen into one of my nightmares. Yet this speck was real, I was sure of that. It was also big with a predatory shape, like one of the birds of prey circling way up in the mountains. And its direct, urgent flight marked it out from the rest.
I craned my neck, trying to peer through the dense foliage into a clearing a few tree jumps away. The bird had merged with the trees here several minutes ago.
‘What was it?’ Max’s whisper was barely discernible above the rustle of the willow. ‘Boar?’ he added hopefully.
I shook my head, drawing mixed comfort from the warmth of his breath against my calf. The fallout was forgotten. I never could stay mad with him anyway, he was simply too Max. And he never suffocated me with words; everything that needed to be said was conveyed with a look or a touch. Apart from that one night, when he’d rolled onto his side to look at me. Really look at me. And I’d never felt more naked. The moon painted his Outsider skin in runes when he whispered the three words that terrified me most. And it was the best and worst moment of my life.
My own words had dried at the back of my throat, and it was part of the reason we hadn’t stopped. Because I couldn’t wrap words around my own feelings. They wouldn’t fit no matter how much I tried to force them. And now the nights were so much harder. The question was always there, hanging between us in the darkness. I really tried to bury my memories, to leave it all behind like we had that night, but the same confusion that stopped my words, stopped everything else. His frustration was tangible. And I could only hope that it overshadowed my guilt, which gnawed like a hunger at the pit of my stomach.
The sun glinted through the trees the way it always did, but today felt different somehow. I lifted my head and sniffed. It was too early for the rains, but the breeze was sharper.
I craned again, and then I glimpsed it, several trees away. The tip of an outstretched wing, a burnished gold-edged wing, and then something else that made my fingers clench the willow until the whites of my knuckles gleamed.
I shinnied back down the branch to face Max.
‘Hey, what’s up?’ he asked, weaving his fingers into mine. ‘You look like you spied a strix!’
‘Golden plumage,’ I whispered, loosening my hand before leaping again into a strong maple, and scurrying down into its thickened fork.
‘Griffin?’
Max was right behind me in a heartbeat.
He meant Friskers of course, our much-loved village pet griffin, who now roamed the outside forest. Although the outside forest inhabitants had been disgruntled, I’d no choice but to leave Octavia’s engineered beast there when I made it back from Pantheon. I knew it stood the best chance of survival among the wilder animals and vegetation, rather than within our farming community. But instead of embracing its new-found freedom, it had taken to waiting patiently in the outside forest for Arafel hunters to appear, when it would appear like an over-enthusiastic dog, its pink tongue lolling over its carnivorous beak. Even genetically modified mythical beasts had the potential for domestication, it seemed.
One of the village children had since named it after its unique mix of bushy feathers and whiskers, and somehow the name had stuck.
I shook my head.
‘Two heads,’ I mouthed, watching the teasing light fade from his eyes.
This time his pace matched my own. We both understood the implication of what I’d glimpsed. And as far as we were aware, the only two-headed creatures in existence were Octavia’s genetically enhanced haga, supposedly incarcerated inside Pantheon’s Lifedomes. Not flying free over the North Mountains.
We took a wide, circuitous route around the clearing, and leapt through the trees like spider monkeys, before dropping into a grove of large banana trees. A newcomer to the western world, they grew in abundance here. Today, I was grateful for their thickened corms and blades, which obscured us from whatever was shuffling around the forest floor just ahead.
I stole forward, pausing only at a light touch on my shoulder. I shook my head abruptly before returning my gaze to my path. Max had always struggled to accept my need to look after myself, but it was one thing I couldn’t compromise on. Like those words.
The pounding in my ears steadily increased as we crept forward beneath the swollen leaves, and each careful footstep seemed to sound as loudly as a felled tree branch. But as the interwoven leaves thinned I glimpsed bright colours that made my hairs strain to attention, until finally as I pulled aside the last fronds, there was a sharp gasp. It took a couple of seconds for me to realize it was my own.
I’d seen nothing and no one from Pantheon in a year and yet, somehow, I was staring straight into the archaic eyes of one of Octavia’s flying watchdogs of the night.
A haga.
It threw back its crested heads as our eyes connected, one microsecond before it crowed its aggression to a group of red pandas above. They scattered while we stared, mesmerized by the impressive newcomer, which was as alien to its forest surroundings as ever a creature could be.
It reached head and shoulders above any man or woman in Arafel, and had a wingspan that extended beyond twice that of a natural eagle. It was also one of the creatures August had sworn to keep within the world of Pantheon, despite my protest that the natural world would survive if he threw open the doors. Its containment was one of the fundamental reasons August had stayed behind; so what, in the name of Arafel, was it doing out here?
But I had no time to think. The question was crushed by a sudden leaden weight around my shoulders, sending me careering forward into the lush green grass as a