IT HAS BEGUN

The third major rewrite of Weathermen is underway. I’m aiming to have this one done before the end of the year so I can start shipping letters off to agents. I’m sure there will be further drafts and revisions, but this one is going to be the last major change of scene and characters.

The first and most important goal for me has been to punch up the intro, which was vague and languid in draft #2. So, here’s what I have to far. If you read this and feel like you want to read more, then please leave a note. It means I’ve succeeded. If you can see any way for me to punch it up even more, then do tell!

If you’ve never read any of Weathermen before, here’s all you need to know: A Weathertower, a 4km high self-contained superstructure built to manipulate the weather, has collapsed. There are very few survivors, and they have never been outside the Tower walls.

That’s just about all you need to know.

Weathermen 3rd Draft

-1-

He woke to the smell of ash.

Twice Pal struggled to open his eyes, but exhaustion made everything heavy, and he drifted back into a half-sleep where concrete walls blew apart like confetti. The third time he breathed in grit, and he jerked and coughed until his eyes watered. Then he lay there, eyes squeezed shut, and waited for the nightmare to pass.

The world was wrong.

The echoes of the walls were missing, replaced by a distant howl that could have been a klaxon alarm but could just as easily be people shrieking. A popping, sharp and high, like how he imagined gunfire. The ground felt weird. Soft and springy. Grass tickled the bare skin of his forearms, which was impossible. There was no grass outside the Atrium levels. Worst of all, something was tugging at his shirt, his hair, the hem of his pants. Ghosts running their cold hands along his body.

He remembered.

In the moment before the world exploded, Pal had been down on the fifth floor, shifting from foot to foot as he waited for the Girls Under-18 Threeball squad to finish and head for the showers. He slouched against the outer wall of the Tower, hands in his pockets, trying to look casual and collected as opposed to fifteen and fat. The plan was to latch on to the stragglers. Start a conversation. Try a few opening lines his sister had recommended. There was always a chance.

Laughter and the hustle of bare feet came from behind the door, and Pal backed himself up against the windows so he’d have nowhere to run. Rain rang heavy on the glass. His watch read one pm but outside it was dark as midnight. Clouds bubbled and flowed like ink, blotting out the sky. Thunder drum-rolled at regulation intervals, sometimes so loud the floor hummed. It was going to be a top class storm.

The doors bumped open. The first of the girls stepped out, hair done up in a bun, shirt-collar dark with sweat. Pal froze. He opened his mouth and all that came out was a squeak: “He-Hello…”

Then thunder sounded so close the walls trembled, and beneath his feet was the grind of continents. His teeth clicked together and his shirt billowed out around him. The girl was screaming. He looked down. The floor was splitting in half as easily as paper torn down the middle.

He fell, all sound vanishing, what remained of level five shooting upwards into the sky. He had time to see the great stone wall of the Tower ripping in two, a crack already as wide as a house growing wider until all the guts of the Tower were sucked out. He saw stone and steel. He saw people turning end over end, so far above that they were tiny spindles of limbs. The Girls Under-18 Threeball team tumbled through empty air.

For the first time in his life, Pal felt the rain on his face.

Then the ground came up. He didn’t feel the impact. His eyes were closed. The ground shuddered as the Tower came down around him. Darkness.

He remembered it all.

“No, no, no,” he whispered, and clenched his fists against his chest. Not ghosts, he thought. Wind. Except that was impossible. There was no wind in the Tower because the walls were stone and nothing had breached them since before his grandfather’s grandfather. There was only one world; it existed inside the walls, and everything Outside was just decoration. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be.

In his mind he saw the girl with the blonde hair, her mouth an O of terror as the explosion whipped her off her feet and tossed her into the sky. That was real, even if he didn’t want it to be.

Slowly, very slowly, he stood and opened his eyes, and stared at pockmarked plains that he had only ever seen before from above the clouds.

What had once been flat texture kilometres below now rolled and flared. Falling slabs of stone had clawed muddy trenches through the landscape and turned it into an ocean of girders and glass and spot fires. They were burned down to coals, and the sun was hidden behind smoke-stained clouds. When he inhaled he tasted copper. Particles of dust crackled on the back of his tongue. Trees erupted from the earth at lunatic angles, their shadows long fingers probing the debris.

Beyond all of this was the horizon, and that was worst of all.

“Outside,” he said. The word made him gag. He spun, and there was the base of Tower Two, his Tower, his home. It had been four kilometres tall, more than five hundred floors packed full with Weatherworkers and engineers and fathers and atrium-planters and Threeball players. Now it was shattered. The ring-wall still stood a hundred metres high and over a kilometre wide, stretching so far out that the curve was invisible, but everything that had once lived and grown inside was crushed or scattered across the Outside.

He ran to it, sucking unfiltered air between his teeth, climbing over and through the labyrinth of rubble. Glass and jagged stone cut long slits through the skin of his palms. He didn’t feel the pain. When he hit the wall of the Tower he tried to climb, but it was perfectly vertical. Moss tore free under his fingers and he tumbled, and the breath was smashed from his lungs.

Pal lay on his back, fingers curled into claws. Everything ached, from his toes up into his brain. The clouds overhead seemed so much sharper without a window dimming his view. Even with the sky hidden behind smoke and ash, the world was painfully bright.

“It’s not fair,” he whispered, and realised he was crying. Two clear trails cut through the dust coating his face, leading down his cheeks to his chin. “Not… fair.” He chanced another look around at the ruins, the flames, the forest and the horizon.

Oh, how they rolled.

He started to throw up.

- – - – -

He cowered in the shadow of the Tower for a long time, knees hugged to his chest. There weren’t any tears left in him. The wind kicked up and blew dust into his eyes, and he pulled his shirt up over his head and shook silently until it stopped.

The screams were fading. At first they’d been deafening, hundreds of voices all crying for help, but they’d dropped away one by one until he felt he could pull his fingers from his ears. There were still distant whimpers. Sometimes he heard a single shout, hoarse and filled with anger, but it too was growing quiet. Soon there would be nothing.

Help them, he thought, you have to help them, but when he tried to stand his legs protested and gave out. Then, for the first time since waking, the face of his sister Maia popped into his mind. He saw her with her tongue sticking out the side of her mouth as she worked on a tough sum, and how she twisted pencils into her hair when she got bored. Sitting on the edge of his bed, homework in her lap, asking for him to help even though they both knew she was ten times better in school than he ever could be. Any one of the voices could be hers.

He forced himself up. The ground was all strange divots and inclines, and it was hard to keep his feet from shooting out from beneath him. He kept his gaze on the grass just ahead. One step at a time.
The Tower had fallen hard. The debris was piled so high in places that when he squinted it looked like distant mountains on the horizon. Some slabs were fifty meters tall and bristling with structural steel, leaning against each other to make yawning corridors. They led straight into canyons, deep and groaning, funnelling down and down before finally bending back towards the light. The thought of walking through those pits made his guts clench.

But what if Maia is down there?

He didn’t have an answer.

It was coming on evening. Through gaps in the tumble of concrete he saw the clouds on the horizon flaming from within. The walls around him were growing higher the further he pushed into the maze, so he began to climb, crawling on all fours up the side of a slab until he was above everything. He perched, the wind snatching at his hair, and looked around for the first time.

To his right was what remained of Tower Two. Even from his vantage point the wall was too huge to take in. It stretched out in all directions and soared so high that looking at its peak gave him a churning sense of vertigo. The edge was jagged with snarls of stone. Pal had seen pictures of bear-traps, many years before, and now the Tower was a bear-trap a kilometre and a half wide, set to catch a giant.
It was impossible to believe that lightning had done this. A million tonnes of concrete brought down by a storm? But the proof was there. He was standing on it. “Someone will come,” he whispered, and then again, louder, as if it would make it true. “Someone will come help.”

To his left was the base of the hill, and beyond that, the forest. It had only existed as a vague concept before, a discolouration kilometres below that would get greener when it rained and brown when it didn’t. The idea of trees growing without hydroponics and constant care was bewildering. Now he could make out the individual peaks, and the way they swayed with the wind. It was dizzying.

The closest edge of the forest had been torn apart by debris, tossed and spun until there was nothing left but mud and woodchip. There were other things there too, half-buried. He tried not to look at those. But beyond the no-man’s-land was a clearing, and in the furthest corner of the clearing was the shimmer of sun on water.

His throat ground like sandpaper when he swallowed. That was where he had to go.

So he descended from the peak and kept his head down and advanced into the forest, every step jolting pain up the base of his spine, and the wind blew cold through the wreckage of Tower Two. He walked until the sun was gone and the trees closed over above him, and all he could smell was damp earth. The sounds were becoming louder again. Like the hunting howls of midnight creatures.

He walked past bodies with his eyes closed and pretended they weren’t there. It was easier to do in the forest than up at the Tower. There it had still been bright. He’d seen bare feet peeking out from beneath a slab, little pink toes covered in a fine dust. An arm torn free at the shoulder, curled up, snakelike. Here there were shadows, and they hid the things he didn’t want to see. They were just debris, so long as he didn’t look at their faces.

He hoped Maia wasn’t one of them.