City of the Falling Sky (17 page)

We were all in shock when we received your
email last night. I’m not sure if you realise this, but you have
the only remaining ‘true edition’ of Looking for Tomorrow. We’ve
actually been searching for it for years but were never able to
trace the purchase.

Just after the release of Looking for
Tomorrow, we were arrested by the Skyfall Patrol and told that A
Time for Change was an unacceptable track and that it had to be
removed from the album immediately. Of course, it was our first
album, we were unknowns, so we didn’t make many sales initially,
but nevertheless we were forced to have all buyers return the album
and we had to issue them new, amended ones. I doubt they even had
time to listen to it, which means that you and your friend may be
the only ones to have ever heard it. To this day, the Patrol think
we had every copy returned to us.

I don’t know what would happen if you were
caught with the true edition, but I’d keep it well out of sight if
I were you.

At the time of writing A Time for Change, we
were still in university, and E.J. was studying microbiology. He
was interested in the work they were doing at Endrin and he started
doing a bit of research into the company. What he found was a
gigantic web of greed and corruption that all seemed to stem from
the appointment of Kan Darklight as CEO.

E.J. asked around a bit and found out that
Darklight had studied at the same university and had been sighted
having heated discussions with the late Professor Holdenbubble
about a mythological element named helitonium. Darklight seemed to
be convinced it could be extracted from something called an innoya,
which we believe to be some kind of root or plant.

He was also inseparable from his best friends
Ropart Sanfarrow and Kevan Kayne, who both later went on to work
alongside Darklight as researchers at Endrin.

When we wrote the track, we believed
Sanfarrow and Kayne to be allies of Darklight’s. But it seems that
Sanfarrow and Kayne were both expelled from Endrin at some point,
and no one has seen them since. Maybe they weren’t as close as we
thought.

Anyway, it’s no surprise that we were
arrested over the release of the song – Darklight has the Skyfall
City government in the palm of his hand. He’s the wealthiest man in
the city. If he doesn’t like something, he gets rid of it. He
obviously wasn’t impressed by our track. Gedin knows how he heard
about it.

I hope this has enlightened you a little bit,
Seckry. We’re very interested in what Endrin are up to and
Darklight is a dangerous man. If you’re planning on doing your own
bit of research, we have something that you might find useful. It’s
a letter from Ropart Sanfarrow to Kevan Kayne that E.J. found in
one of the dorms. A very strange letter. When you’re at our show in
three weeks time we’d like to give this to you. Just tell security
your name and they’ll let you backstage after the gig.

We look forward to seeing you.

Tobi,

The Broken Motion

“
Eiya!” Seckry called
excitedly. “Eiya, come and read this!”

Eiya, who had been engrossed in a book in the
living area, rushed into the bedroom.

Seckry reread the email with her.

“
Can you believe it?” Seckry
said. “Darklight had them arrested for releasing a song that
mentioned him.”

“
Extractable from an innoya
. . .” Eiya read aloud. “What could it be?”

“
Some kind of root or
plant,” Seckry pondered. “That’s the first thing we can look into.
And if these two guys, Sanfarrow and Kayne, are still living in the
city, I bet they’d be able to tell us what the Divinita Project is.
If they were expelled from Endrin they won’t have any ties to the
company. If anything, they’ll be bitter about it and want to dish
the dirt.”

“
It looks like we might be
on our way to finding out who I really am,” Eiya said, and Seckry
saw both anticipation and fear in her watery eyes. “And Seckry . .
. we’re going backstage with The Broken Motion!”

It was only when Eiya said it that it
actually sunk in. Seckry let out an excited laugh and stamped his
feet rapidly on the floor.

During a particularly wet lunchtime the
following week, Seckry was able to catch Mr Vance on his own and
tell him all about the email.

“
The innoya . . . it doesn’t
ring a bell,” Vance said thoughtfully. “And Darklight believed
helitonium to be extractable from it?” He shook his head in
disbelief.

Vance pulled out a heap of books from his
shelves and started flicking through them until he said, “Aha!
Potkins’ Concise Encyclopaedia of Vegetation. Bound to be listed in
here.”

As he ran his finger down the index page, he
read, “Ingleberry, Inifern, Inkenspot, Inlandarrow . . .
Innsbarrow.”

“
No innoya,” Seckry
said.

“
No innoya,” Vance
confirmed. “Strange. You can usually trust Potkins.”

Vance flicked through a few more of the
books, but found nothing of use in any of them.

“
I know a man who may be
able to help us. Professor Thaumatop. He’s head of plant biology at
the university. As soon as I manage to get in touch with him,
Seckry, I’ll let you know.”

Over the following two weeks the weather took
a turn for the worse and there was torrential rain in Skyfall,
soaking everything in the city. Seckry and Eiya visited the library
and the university in an attempt to find out a bit more about
Ropart Sanfarrow and Kevan Kayne, but there were no records of
them. It was as though they had never existed.

Eventually they came to the conclusion that
the only thing they could do was wait until the concert, where
they’d be able to speak to The Broken Motion and get this
mysterious letter from them. In the meantime, Seckry began to spend
a lot of time playing Friction with his new avatar, Anikam, who
felt a lot more comfortable than the wooden training dummy. He
found that, as Anikam, he could actually beat Tenk nine times out
of ten in combative matches by simply firing arrows at him from
rooftops before jumping down and swiping whatever items were there
to be found. Tenk seemed to be in complete awe of Seckry’s Friction
skills, but Seckry had been playing hand held computer games all
his life, and he had picked up a few tricks along the way.

“
Seck,” Tenk said the
following Monday morning, “you ready to meet the Eastern
Eidolons?”

Seckry had been looking forward to this day
for a while. After school he was going to be joining the school’s
official Friction team to discuss the possibility of him training
with them.

“
Do you think they’d really
consider training me up to actually join the team?” he asked. “I’ve
only played a few games.”

“
Of course, man,” Tenk said
confidently. “I’ve never seen anyone pick up Friction as quick as
you. It’s like you were born to play it. I’ve told the guys about
you and they can’t wait to get you involved. We’ve been waiting for
a good player like you to come along all summer. Good riddance to
Rungle. That guy always held us back.”

Seckry spent most of the day daydreaming
about competing in the annual Friction event, the Friction Mega
Meltdown, with his new team, and during a practical biochemistry
lesson he accidentally spilled a test tube of liquid nitrogen and
froze the base of his tie, whilst imagining himself bowing to a
cheering audience.

When the bell rang, Seckry followed Tenk to
the third floor and into the Friction training room.

It was an unused classroom that had been
fitted with six Friction pods. The walls were strewn with posters
of avatars, levels, event flyers and other stuff, and there were
tack boards full of photos from Meltdown games of the players in
their pods and holding trophies.

A short girl with rosy cheeks and a big,
white, fluffy hat on her head thrust her hand out to him.

“
Loca Thumbsuckle,” she said
brightly, and shook his hand.

There were two, long, fabric ears hanging
from either side of the hat, two little black eyes pinned to its
front, and a set of sharp teeth around its base. It looked like the
girl was being chewed on by some cute animal turned bad.

“
And this is Kimmy,” Loca
said. A slender, tanned boy sitting in one of the chairs smiled and
said, “Hi.”

“
Am I invisible?” said the
only other person in the room that Seckry didn’t recognise, a
large, stocky girl with fiery red hair and a scowl on her
face.

Loca gave Seckry a look that indicated
disgust and said, “That’s Lessana.”

“
They’re all a year older
than us,” Tenk informed him.

“
Nice to meet you all,”
Seckry said politely.

Before they got settled, Seckry had time to
have a better look at some of the photos on the walls. The largest
of them all was an enormous framed photo of a man holding a golden
cup with the Friction logo on it.

“
That’s Kolda Kod,”
explained Tenk. “Best Friction player there ever was. The guy took
on the Northern Nightmare team single-handedly back when he was in
Estergate, and when he moved into the over eighteens division he
won the cup for the east seven years in a row.”

“
Tenk tells me you’re pretty
good,” said Loca, interrupting. “Heard you’re better than
Tenk.”

“
Well, I wouldn’t say I’m
bett–”

“
He’s awesome, Loca,” said
Tenk. “Just wait ‘till you see this guy play.”

As they sat around and talked, Seckry
realised that the slender boy, Kimmy, wasn’t saying anything at
all. He was staring at the floor and his face was becoming more and
more upset about something as time went on.

“
So d’you reckon Seckry will
be better than all of us after a bit of training?” Lessana asked
Tenk, loudly.

“
Yeah maybe,” said
Tenk.

“
So you’d say he was a bit
of a . . . prodigy?”

“
Yeah, maybe.”

“
I think we should change
the conversation now, Lessana,” Loca interrupted. “I’m sure Seckry
is great, but he’s probably fed up of hearing about it.”

“
Yeah, I’m really not that
good,” said Seckry, feeling embarrassed and unworthy of the praise
he was getting. “I probably just got lucky against Tenk on two
occasions and I actually cheated in the training level by using
Tenk’s sheet which–”

At that moment, Kimmy muttered something
about the bathroom under his breath and hurried out of the
room.

“
Look what you’ve done now,
Lessana!” shouted Loca. “You knew exactly what you were doing,
didn’t you?”

“
Is he okay?” said Seckry,
perplexed, searching the others’ faces for answers.

“
Yeah, what’s wrong with
him?” asked Tenk, as clueless as Seckry.

Loca sighed. “Tenk, you’re so tactless. Don’t
you realise? Kimmy’s been training so hard for the last two years
to become as good as his dad, and now everyone’s going on about
Seckry being a natural. It must be like a kick in the teeth.”

“
Well it’s not Seckry’s
fault that Kimmy’s dad is who he is.”

“
Who’s Kimmy’s dad?” asked
Seckry.

“
Who’s Kimmy’s dad?”
repeated Tenk. “Who’s Kimmy Kod’s dad?” He leaned back in his chair
to give Seckry a better look at the huge framed photo of Kolda Kod
holding the Meltdown trophy.

When Kimmy returned from the bathroom, he
seemed to have composed himself, and Loca gave anyone mentioning
Seckry’s natural ability a furious glare. They played a few games
of non-combative Friction in some lands that were new to Seckry and
he was introduced to everyone’s avatar. Loca’s was a cat-like anima
named Kittya that matched her height and was equipped with a
dagger, Kimmy’s was a humanoid named Slider who looked ready to
slip out of site before using his tazer gun on the back of your
neck, and Lessana’s was a hulking ogre anima named Ogg, who was
like a female version of Tenk’s Basher. It was the first time
Seckry had been introduced to Tippian’s avatar too, since even
though he had heard a lot about Apocalyptia, he had never been in a
game with him. The thing was twice the size of everyone else and
was like a walking, mechanical giant, with a digital version of
Tippian sitting in its cockpit of a head.

Despite being overwhelmed, Seckry managed to
beat everyone’s scores on all three levels, which got everyone
murmuring excitedly, but Seckry knew it had been down to luck. He
had accidentally stumbled upon the rarest item of the Nightbloom
land (the crystal petal) when he had tripped over some tangleweed
and fell face first onto it. And in the other two lands, called
Sandstone Temple and Mystic Cavern, Seckry had been unusually lucky
in spawning extremely close to a cluster of items.

As Seckry rode home on the monorail with Tenk
that evening, he felt slightly guilty.

“
I didn’t mean to make Kimmy
feel bad,” he said.

“
Don’t worry, man,” said
Tenk, shrugging his shoulders. “It’s not your fault you’re good.
And anyway, we’re all better than Kimmy. It just sucks for him that
he’s got all that weight on his shoulders.”

“
Does Kolda Kod still play
Friction?” Seckry asked.

“
Nah. It was tragic what
happened to him. Got smashed in a car accident and they had to
amputate both his legs. Been in a wheelchair ever since. ‘Course,
you can still play Friction with no legs, there are plenty of mecha
avatars. But after being the world champ with his anima avatar,
Dagger Eyes, he just couldn’t accept it, I reckon.”