Ice Flight: Flux & Flight, #2

By Andi C. Buchanan

The mountain sanatorium on the edge of a glacier is a world away from the noise and hustle of Liquid City. For Rosalie, it offers a chance of health, and for Abra, Adèle's daughter and a future art student, a thrilling taste of freedom.

Things are rarely as peaceful as they seem. As Rosalie tries to piece together the past, a metal bird offers the first clue there is someone hiding in the mountains. Abra teams up with the doctor's son Jem, to follow the mystery through the snow.

As secrets come to light, and new are connections are made, their lives will take new trajectories and none of them will remain unchanged.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robot Dinosaur Press
• Release date: Jun 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223570738

Book preview

Chapter 1

As the day draws close to night, a single motor car makes its way through the mountain range that borders the southern edge of the planet’s only continent. Abra, just turned sixteen, sitting up front with the driver, is calculating speed and distance travelled, charting them in a cloth-bound notebook, projecting arrival times, looking up anxiously. It will be too dangerous to drive once night falls, and though she would happily camp out here, cocooned in blankets, her spare clothes folded into a pillow, for Rosalie it would be intolerable.

The driver, a stout man in his fifties, looks at her with a mixture of bemusement and frustration.

I’ve driven this road a hundred times or more. I said I’d get you there and I meant it. You’re too young to spend all your time worrying like this.

Abra shrugs and looks outside the window. The hot dust of Liquid City is far away and everything is cold and still. She’s seen snow on school skiing trips, and once when she accompanied her mother on a field trip, but this is different and she can’t help but feel that this is the beginning of an adventure. Six whole weeks away, and not as a child or a charge but a companion, a friend, almost an adult.

She sees the snow differently this time, anyway; now she’s started taking painting seriously she can see the hints of cobalt in the white, the shadows of the rocks below where the covering of snow is thin. She thinks about mixing colours, how she can best render the translucency to canvas. She’s watched the day’s drive unfold as if in a series of scenes, landscapes unfolding ahead of her as if pages turned in a book, a new one found around each corner of their winding journey and still she silently gasps at each new sight.

She turns, briefly, to look at Rosalie, lying across the back seat. Her face is illuminated by the light reflecting on the snow, and though her eyes are closed Abra does not think she is asleep. This journey, even if it fulfils all their hopes, will be tough on Rosalie, and so Abra and does not bother her.

Keep looking up ahead, slightly to your left, and you’ll see the glacier. We’re almost there now.

Thanks, Abra says. Her words are sounding flat now and she’s worried she’s disappointed him by not showing more enthusiasm, but if she got out her notepad and he tried to read it he could crash the car and…

The glacier catches her eye as they turn, and it’s glimmering orange in the sunset as if the whole mountain was alight. She presses her face against the cold glass edged with ice crystals and watches the colours sear across her field of vision. She mixes oil paints in her head and wonders how six weeks could ever be long enough to capture these new surroundings.

As they get closer, Abra can make out the sanatorium, one large wooden building and a cluster of chalets on the stony ground below them, like beach huts beside an icy river. It’s dark enough to see there are lights in some of the windows and Abra breathes an audible sigh of relief.

See, told you I’d get you there, the driver says with a smile.

Abra forces out the word sorry. Her mother’s always telling her she should trust people more, but she finds it hard when so many people say things they don’t mean, and it’s so hard to tell which people are which.

The driver chuckles. That’s alright. Quite the little worrier you are.

The car suddenly feels stuffy, as if the confinement of the day has suddenly caught up with her. She wants to fling open the door and run, run over the snow in the dusk, and be alone in this high mountain world. But she’s sixteen and has her mother’s trust so she clutches her knees and bears it, watching the buildings grow ahead of her, telling herself it’s not long now.

Rosalie stirs on the back seat and Abra looks back in concern, wishing she could speak more easily. There’s obvious pain on the older woman’s face; her mouth contorts for a few seconds before she – carefully, and with obvious difficulty – pulls herself into a seated position, breathing heavily as she does so. She looks out of the window. Abra points at the buildings and passes back a lozenge, stretching so Rosalie won’t have to move too much. She writes on a blank page of her notebook, in large letters so Rosalie can read them in the dying light: ALMOST THERE.

The car tires crunch on gravel as they pull up to the large building at the front. A woman with a ponytail, in trousers and a green fleece tunic, walks up to meet them, talks to the driver briefly, and then walks behind them past the row of chalets.

You’re in the end one, the driver says. Be quieter there. I stay in the chalets if there’s room, before I drive back the next day. They’re cosy but nice inside, much better than the main block with all the people coughing or whatever.

When the car stops, Abra leaps out. She stands and inhales the cold air, biting at her even as she’s wrapped in her duffel coat with thick wool stockings under her pinafore and boots. It’s dark now, the glacier invisible, but she knows it’s there, ready for painting, ready for exploring.

The woman approaches, her footsteps light but audible in the silence, a Selnon lamp in her hand. Abra assists Rosalie in making her way out of the car.

Miss Rosalie Ingrid? Hello. She holds out her hand, her introduction clearly practised but no less genuine for it. Welcome to Bluoln Peaks Sanatorium. My name is Raina. I’m a nurse and you should let me know if you need anything during your stay.

Pleased to meet you, Rosalie says, and means it.

And I you. It’s late so I’ll heat some water and bring you food and then let you sleep. The doctor will visit in the morning to assess you and begin the treatment plan. The fire has been burning so you should be quite warm – I’ll show you inside now, you don’t want to be out too long. And, she says, turning to Abra, you’ll be Miss Abra Crisita?

Abra nods, beginning to write in response. Raina frowns. The girl’s a mute?

No, no, Rosalie replies hastily, wincing at the word. She just struggles a little with talking when she’s tired. Come the morning you won’t be able to shut her up.

Well… well I hope so. We’re only set up for one invalid in these rooms.

Abra swings her folded easel under one arm and grasps the box of paints. She stumbles a little as she makes it up the icy path and through the door. Warmth hits her. In the room off to the left, Raina is helping Rosalie. The open door to the right reveals a slim bedroom with a cast iron bed on one side. Despite the size, the made bed, white curtains and wooden walls give it a welcoming appearance.

The driver arrives a few steps behind her, carrying her trunk.

In here? he asks, and Abra nods. She leaves Rosalie with the nurse, knowing she’ll want to sleep soon, and instead unpacks quietly. There’s a dressing table on which she arranges her paints and brushes and a small wooden wardrobe where she can hang her clothes. Raina brings in bread and tomato soup and places them beside the paints. Abra eats it hungrily. When she has mopped up the last of the soup, she peeks out through the curtains, but can see only her own reflection looking back at her, wide-eyed, slightly amused. She unplaits her pigtails at the window, then closes the curtains on the frozen outside world, and she sleeps.

#

When she dreams, even from worlds away, Rosalie is always in the city, and the city is as liquid as its name. It flows with her and through her, and she’s carried by the flow and the canals and the burst of Selnon gas through its tunnels. Rosalie, who was once a tunneller and then (after some time as a bookkeeper,