Aurora by Julie Bertagna Read Free Book Online

and joined our Surge.’
    Pandora’s mind reels as she tries to take it all in. The Noos – the virtual universe of the empire – is the sizzling energy of millions of computers and human brains. As mysterious to Pandora as the inside of a sky city, the Noos is where the citizens of the empire work and play and dream. She can only try to imagine the wonders of the cities and then stunning cyber-universe from what Fox has told. The twenty-first-century cyber-Weave is hers to roam but he won’t let her near the Noos. Far too much is at stake, he insists, to risk her discovery there.
    The trusty old computer godgem of his youth still connects Fox to his beloved Noos. He slips through its wild undergrowth, teeming virtual jungles of frenetic brilliance, sneaking into renegade pockets where rebels uncover the truths he has set free in the cyber-universe; shameful truths the empire has tried to erase.
    But now she, Pandora, is one of those ugly truths.
    ‘The empire wants to experiment again.’ Fox’s voice is leaden. ‘It wants to engineer humans designed for life in the Far North, for colonizing space – humans who are better engineered for life in the sky cities too.’
    All-powerful the empire might be, but the rebels have said that its people are weakening. Lack of sunlight over generations is causing new deformities and diseases that the ingenuity of the sky scientists cannot seem to solve.
    ‘Some older citizens know what happened with the Amphibian Experiment,’ says Fox, ‘and there’s a spreading horror that it could happen again – and this time the experiment might be with their own descendants, their own flesh and blood.’
    ‘If the empire doesn’t like what the scientists make this time, they’ll kill them too?’ Pandora feels sick.
    ‘And maybe they won’t stop there,’ adds Fox. ‘Maybe they’ll get rid of the sun-sick ones. Or the old ones. Who knows? Those are the seeds of doubt I’ve sown in the Noos and there’s a – a surge of distrust,’ Fox’s troubled eyes lighten, ‘against the Guardians of the empire. I’ve never known it before. Their defences are weak and so is the trust of their people. This is our time. We have to break them, Pan.’ He glances at the city above. ‘And my father has to be broken – he’s behind so much of this.’
    Fox has tracked the activities of his estranged father through the Noos. Mungo Stone, Caledon’s son, has lost the influence he thought was his birthright now that power in the empire has swung East and to younger cities in the southern hemisphere. The City Fathers who ruled the New World under Caledon’s leadership have been replaced by a new generation of Guardians ruthless in their rivalry for power in their sky empire. An early stake in the riches of the North would rekindle Mungo’s fire in his world. My father, says Fox, is a desperate and dangerous man.
    But there are good people in the sky cities too, thinks Pandora. People who didn’t want her kind killed and who don’t want anything like that to happen again.
    Another whale-like darkness moves across the dusky netherworld and engulfs them in its shadow. Pandora shivers, reeling from all that Fox has told her, and he pulls her close.
    ‘It doesn’t change anything, Pan,’ he says, through the thunder of the airship. ‘You’re still you.’
    But everything has changed. Now Pan thinks of the boat people with a wrench inside. Is she to risk her life and fight for people who would see her as a freak to be hunted down? People who drove away her desperate parents or did nothing as they were killed?
    And now she begins to understand why she can never seem to break through Fox’s fond, brotherly affection. She used to think it was the coming war that worried him. Once their battles are all over, she thought, then she would be his true queen in a far greater realm.
    But it wasn’t the risks of war or the netherworld, she now realizes. It was her own self that repelled him and the