The Power of the Wildening, page 14
Alongside them came a tortoise, a giant, clumsy tortoise, its shell sparkling with light as it stomped casually along the shoreline. Then crabs, skunks, knock-jawed prippets. Dev glanced up, into the trees, to the brightly glowing sloths, jibbermonkeys and large whistlebaboons. And the birds, the bright, glowing birds, singing their hearts out from the very highest branches.
He looked around all the glowing flember animals they had summoned, and he gripped his chest, only now realizing he’d been holding his breath. ‘Well then.’ He grinned. ‘Looks like we have ourselves an army.’
A curious, annoying little beep broke through the beauty of it all. A small robot, not unlike one of those half-buried by the temple, bumped against Dev’s boot. At first he was tempted to ignore it, until a large metal stinger curled round from its backside, and tried to jab him in the leg.
‘EUGH!’ Dev shrieked, instinctively kicking the robot away.
‘There’s MORE!’ Santoro warned, drawing his sword. Sure enough, the hedgerows before them started to rustle, and a ragtag crew of small robots sped out from beneath. These, Dev assumed, were Iola’s discarded prototypes, the ones scattered around the temple, temporarily revived by the Flember Stream and now scooting, skidding, spinning and rolling towards the flember animals.
‘Absolutely NOT!’ Bagby yelled, clocking the nearest robot with the fat end of his hitting stick. He smiled a breathless smile, then swung back for the next.
‘We’re the children of the Wildening!’ Pena declared, drawing her bow, stretching back an arrow, and sending it fizzing between the trees. It impaled another robot into the ground, exploding it in a plume of pink smoke. ‘And we’ll defend its flember till the end!’
As Dev watched the broken robots racing towards them he noticed something curious. Their flember wasn’t blue like the flember spilling across the Deadlands. It was red. These robots were being controlled. Instructed. They were being sent to steal more flember.
Just like … the Skraw!
‘It’s here,’ he gasped, just as an incessant, garbled music pounded up into the skies, and the terrifying, furious shape of the Skraw burst out from between the trees. Its body awash with red flember. Its limbs stumbling, and scrambling, as the dishevelled beast raced across the grass towards them.
‘Mine! Honk!’ Boja growled, emerging between the trees at the shoreline. Although he was weak, the lines of poison still reaching across his chest, thanks to Dev’s attempts to rewire him the music couldn’t affect his flember any more.
Boja looked furious.
Determined.
He punched out his flember gauntlets, itching for one last fight with the Skraw.
Only for Dev to step in his way.
‘Let us try,’ he said, closing his eyes, and holding out his flemberthyst. Bagby did the same, and Pena, and Pockle too, all of them focusing their crystals towards the Skraw. All of them believing in the power of their own flember.
‘Now,’ Dev muttered, as the Skraw’s pounding grew louder in his ears. ‘Now now now NOW!’
Suddenly a dazzling light spun out from all four flemberthyst crystals. A light so bright Dev could barely look at it. And yet there, just for a split second, he was sure he could see someone standing before them. Someone made of pure light. Of pure flember. Someone who smiled back at them all with one of her wrinkly smiles.
‘Elder Nakobe!’ Dev gasped.
And then she was gone, lost in a blast of white light that tore through the Skraw in an instant. Its body was shredded, its metal bones scattered, its leaf-covered cloak ripped into dust. Each and every smaller robot shattered along with it. By the time the light had dimmed, and Dev could blink his eyes back open, all that was left was the Skraw’s smoking, burnt skull, rolling across the grass.
Dev looked at Pena, Bagby, Pockle and Santoro, none of them quite able to explain what they had just seen.
A terrible howling pulled their attention back. Senba’s huge, roaring head rose up from behind the trees, dragging the crumbling temple along behind it. Robotic arms pounded the ground. Tendrils swam out from behind, jabbing into the earth, draining everything of its flember, sucking it all up to illuminate every crack and crevice across Senba’s body.
Santoro’s armour blazed bright as he pointed his sword out in front of him. Sweat trickled down his cheeks. ‘I really wish you’d let me teach you how to fight,’ he said, standing protectively in front of his brother.
Dev held his flemberthyst out, flanked by Bagby, Pena, Pockle and Boja with his glowing fists. They in turn were flanked by a dazzling array of flember creatures. A cacophony of stamping hooves. Brays. Snorts. Growls and hollers.
A crackle of flember riding across them all.
‘I think we know how to fight,’ Dev replied, with a glint in his eye.
38
The Last Stand
Dev stepped on to a patch of soft, freshly grown grass, his flemberthyst clutched tightly in his hand. He looked down at the slew of broken robot parts by his feet. Then he lifted his head up towards the huge, hissing, creaking creature looming over them all.
‘SENBA!’ he shouted up. ‘You can’t do this! You can’t just TAKE flember!’
He gulped nervously. Sure, he had … borrowed a bit of flember himself, back in Eden, to bring Boja to life, but he’d spent all his time since trying to make things right.
‘Trust me,’ Dev sighed. ‘It never ends well.’
Senba let out a distorted roar, sending panicked birds flapping out from the trees. Then it started moving again. Its arms hissed, and heaved, clawing its huge temple body forwards as it steamrollered a path towards the shore, stopping only a hundred metres short, before slumping back into the ground with an almighty THUDDDDD!
Plumes of dust spewed out around Dev, sending him tumbling backwards. ‘Iola should never have done this!’ he cried, as Santoro helped him back on to his feet. ‘She should never have let you feel what it was to be alive, and then left you all alone. I’m sorry, Senba! That wasn’t fair.’
Tendrils lashed out from the temple, puncturing the ground around Dev’s boots, and pulling more flember from beneath it. ‘S-S-SENBA NEEDS FLEMBER!’ Senba gasped, as its face flushed with blue lights.
‘That’s not how it works!’ Santoro shouted, raising his sword above his head and bringing it sharply through one of the tendrils. Bright, glowing flember spilled and bubbled out. Senba gave a bone-shuddering shriek, as if Santoro had mortally wounded it, then swung a huge arm out towards him. It caught him off guard, clanged hard against his sword, and sent him spinning into one of the trees.
‘NEED … FLEMBER!’ Senba roared.
‘Being alive isn’t just about flember!’ Dev shouted, as more tendrils spun out from around the temple. ‘It’s about who you are, how you act, how you treat others. It’s about how you live the life you have!’ More tendrils swung out. Dev ducked as one whizzed past his helmet, before wrapping itself around a tree and wre-e-e-enching it out from the ground.
‘FLEMBER IS LIFE!’ Senba bellowed, grabbing more trees and throwing them as high as it could, as if it were having a tantrum. ‘FLEMBER IS EVERYTHING!’
Dev fell to his knees as huge, thick tree trunks smashed down on either side of him. He clenched his eyes shut. Tried to ignore the splinters flying around him, the mud splattering against his cheeks. Tried to focus on one thing only.
The bright, glowing flemberthyst in his hands.
‘FLEMBER IS A GIFT!’ he yelled over the noise. ‘WE’RE LUCKY TO HAVE ANY!’
‘A GIFT,’ Senba repeated. ‘A GIFT. A GIFT. A GI-I-I-I-I …’
Suddenly, all the noises stopped.
The last tree crashed to the ground.
Dev didn’t dare open his eyes, but eventually he had to, only to see Senba was now completely still.
Its tendrils hung in mid-air. Its neck stretched out as its six eyes blinked at the glowing flemberthyst in Dev’s hands. Just then, the grey clouds above started to break apart. Streams of sunlight shone down upon Senba’s face. It tilted its head upwards. Basked in the warmth. Then it looked back down at Dev. At Boja. At Santoro, wobbling back on to his feet, at Bagby, Pena and Pockle. At all the fantastical, glowing creatures lining the shore. They stood like a display of life itself. Humans, next to robot bears, next to all manner of summoned flember animals.
All of them standing in front of one huge, smiling Gollup.
‘I have never …’ Senba started. Its mouth kept moving, but the words broke apart. ‘I … n-n-never … felt th-h-h-he sun. Senba … has not … s-s-s-seen life … like this.’
Dev slowly got to his feet. He raised his flemberthyst up as it sparkled in the sunlight. ‘Flember brought us all here.’ He smiled kindly at Iola Gray’s creation. ‘That’s why we fight so hard to protect it.’
Senba’s glowing eyes flickered down towards Dev.
They seemed to be glistening.
‘I’m … s-s-sorry,’ it croaked.
Then, all of a sudden, all the flember drained from Senba’s face. From its neck, its metal limbs, from the stone temple itself. Down it flushed, back down into the ground, and as it did, the Wildening around it flourished. Grass grew, shrubs bustled, bushes sprang even bushier than before.
‘It’s giving it back,’ Dev gasped, as Senba’s tendrils dropped from the air. ‘Whatever powered Senba’s heart, it’s giving it all back to the Flember Stream!’
Senba’s eyes closed shut.
Its mouth dropped open.
And suddenly, Senba was no longer alive.
Instead, it had become like a statue.
39
Heart Surgery
‘You … did it!’ Santoro dropped his sword and wrapped his arms around his brother. ‘Dev, you stopped Senba in its tracks!’
Bagby, Pena and Pockle all started hopping excitedly on the spot. ‘We all did it!’ Bagby cheered. ‘We kicked that robot temple butt. And we did it by mastering’ – he swirled his hands around, as if trying to look mystical – ‘flember!’
But Dev couldn’t feel quite so excited. ‘Senba wanted to know what it meant to be alive,’ he sighed, staring up at its lifeless expression. ‘It had a right to know. It just … went about it the wrong way.’
He slipped his hand inside Boja’s big red paw.
‘If only it had been given the same chances we gave Boja,’ he said.
‘Bohhhhh …’ Boja started, only for his voice to trail off. Suddenly the huge bear toppled backwards, his arms limp, his eyes spinning, his whole body thumping hard into the ground like a barrel of flapple apples.
His bright, sparkling flember started to flicker.
‘Boja!’ Dev yelled, straining to pull Boja’s huge eyelids open. ‘Boja, wake up!’
‘Bluh-b-buhb-bluhb,’ Boja replied, his tongue hanging from his mouth. Dev could see the black threads of poison running through it. He could see the same threads across Boja’s fur, from his heart all across his chest, then lacing across one of his arms.
It had clearly spread even further since their run towards the temple.
And now it was taking him over.
‘What do we do?’ Pena whimpered.
‘Flemberthysts!’ Dev called, gesturing for each of them to pull out their crystals. ‘Hold them over Boja, like this. Summon his flember around his body. This is what the doctors did back in Pajoba, with their totems. This is how they saved him before! Quickly! Santoro, even you!’
‘I don’t know how …’ Santoro said, pulling an arm guard from his glowing armour and holding it over Boja as if it might help. But it didn’t. Nor did Bagby, Pena and Pockle’s summoning skills. Nor Dev desperately begging Boja to open his eyes again. Not even the tender, cautious nudging of the flember animals gathered around them. For whatever flember still remained inside Boja, his body was struggling. His breathing became slower and heavier.
As the poison reached even further through his body.
‘There must be something,’ Dev muttered frantically under his breath. ‘There must be something we can do!’
‘We have all the flember we could need around us,’ Santoro said. ‘And it’s still not enough!’
Dev leapt to his feet.
‘Of course it’s not,’ he gasped, clonking his fist against his helmet. ‘We’re doing it all wrong!’
Without another word, he raced away from the shore, away from Boja and the confused calls of his brother. He ran as fast as he could towards Senba, the fallen temple, and hauled himself up inside its dusty remains. The floor sloped sharply downwards, folded into row upon row of rumpled stone slabs, but still he could carefully slide his way down. He skidded along on the rubble. Clambered over huge metallic arms. Tendrils. Robotic parts wrenched out from the temple walls. Then finally his feet found more solid ground and he stopped, to catch his breath.
The flemberthysts that had once hung from the ceiling now lay smashed on the ground, crumpling the cages underneath. The various machines and control panels had been scattered across the chamber. Huge twisted lengths of cable hung between the walls. They fizzed. And they popped. Sparks showered down across the crumpled floor.
‘Perfect.’ Dev grinned.
Ten minutes later, he was running back out of the temple, his arms laden with a towering stack of parts. He’d salvaged what he could, what he’d need, a buffet of robotics and mechanics left behind by Iola’s half-realized plans. He dumped it all on the sunlit grass, just beside Boja.
Poor, exhausted, rambling Boja.
‘Chicken feet,’ Boja mumbled. ‘Fish bums. Honk honk b-b-blopholes.’
‘His flember’s fading,’ Santoro said, stroking the bear’s head with an unusual tenderness. ‘And all the flember he was carrying for the Eden tree, too. Dev, whatever your plan is, you need to do it fast.’
But Dev had already started. He plugged a few of the loose wires up Boja’s nostrils, connecting them to stoppers he then wedged into the bear’s ears. Optylopops, fisplestaws, burnt-out fexagons, all connected between half a chunk of engine. ‘It’s something Elder Nakobe said,’ Dev muttered, pounding the engine with the ball of his fist until it PUTT-PUTT-PUTT-ed noisily into action. ‘Where there is no light, darkness grows. That’s what’s happening here. The poison’s taking over, instead of the light.’
‘But … but we tried that!’ Bagby insisted. ‘We can’t get Boja’s flember to fight back.’
‘Boja’s a machine,’ Dev said. ‘Like Iola made Senba, I made Boja, and I did it the same way – using mechanical parts and a golden heart. But Boja’s heart is bigger, more intricately designed. It’s more complicated …’ He pressed the sputtering engine hard against Boja’s chest. ‘It just needs a bit of a … KICKSTART!’
‘HOOOOO!’ Boja suddenly gasped, his eyes bulging open.
‘I’ve plugged directly into his circuitry!’ Dev shouted above the engine noise. ‘If we can’t move his flember around with flemberthysts, then maybe some good old-fashioned MECHANICS will do it!’ He pressed the engine harder against Boja’s chest. The PUTT-PUTT-PUTT soon became drowned out by another noise, an even louder noise.
The DOOMPF-DOOMPF-DOOMPF of Boja’s heart.
‘THAT’S IT!’ Dev roared, watching in delight as Boja’s flember started to blaze around him. ‘Get your heart pumping faster, harder, send all your own flember rushing round your body so fast the poison has nowhere it can hide!’
He looked down at Boja’s prickling fur. It was working. The dark black lines were retreating, fading back into the bear’s synthetic flesh as they withered against the light. Brighter, he shone. Brighter. And brighter. As his heart pumped faster. And faster. And faster!
DOOMPF!
DOOMPF!
DOOMPF DOOMPF DOOMPF DOOMPF!
Dev pulled the engine away. The attachment of cables snapped out from Boja’s nose and his ears, whipping across the grass. A crisp, electrifying crackle rode upon the air.
Then an eerie silence fell.
Everyone stared at Boja, at his fizzing, glistening body. His glow started to settle. His heart started to calm.
As his wide eyes stared out to sea.
And a smile stretched across his mouth.
‘Breakfast,’ he whispered excitedly.
Dev turned around to see a line of rafts bobbing along the water. At their head rode Pibbles. His raft was heavily laden with what he clearly considered essentials – a huge pile of food, and a towering stack of tables and chairs upon which to serve it all. Behind him, a raft stacked with drums, furiously pounded by a gaggle of drummers. Behind them, a rather frantic looking Elder Pinobei and Elder Knuttle. And behind them, a horizon almost filled with flember soldiers.
‘You look like you’ve been busy!’ Pibbles exclaimed, staring at the shore in absolute amazement. ‘You all must be HUNGRY!’
40
Second Breakfast
Pibbles’ raft bumped and bomped alongside Gollup, who GOLLUPed cheerfully. Pibbles marvelled at the remarkable glowing creature, but Pinobei and Knuttle weren’t hanging around. They had already spotted Pockle on the shore.
‘POCKLE!’ they cried, leaping from their rafts and wading frantically through the water. Upon reaching Pockle they squeezed her so tightly it looked like they might never let her go again. Tears streamed down the elders’ faces, while Pockle squirmed and giggled between them. Then Bagby and Pena both splashed through the water, piling into the hug.
