Avera Falls - Terry Wilson (the reading list book txt) 📗

In the rain, no one can see your tears. Avera Ochiru liked the rain. She would remember the happy times she had with her uncle Gibson while on her way to school. Even now, two years later, she would still look forward to spending the weekend with him.

The twelve year old red-haired girl arrives at home under her umbrella and hooded jacket, gently shivering. Her parents would do their best to warm her up, but inside she still shivered. Her red hair was prone to static, and it was a minute-by-minute effort to keep it under control. Pulling off her hood creates a spectacular, almost affro-like bloom, poor Brenda, her mother, would almost vainly comb down.

Everyone knew who her uncle Gibson was today. Even two years later, his fireball would occasionally show up on television, and her mother Brenda would cover her daughter’s eyes, not that it made any difference.

Avera retreats to her room and calls up on her computer the video file, on that big video-sharing website. His aspiration was to go into space, and finally, with his life savings, he went. Avera wanted to go with him, but it was the early days of space tourism and she simply wasn't old enough to understand the dangers, and put her name on the dotted line of the waiver at ten years old. Her parents didn't want her put at risk either.

The video file plays.

"Phoenix Two, Mojave, congratulations on a good ascent burn, we have you going over the top at one-one-four kilometres tracking slightly northwest of the aimpoint, we'd like you to set your roll angle..." Little Avera couldn't hear her uncle's voice, only those of the pilot and the mission director on the ground. The video was taken from somewhere nearby called "Edwards Air Force Base."

"Mojave, Phoenix Two, the uh- INS has stopped updating," the pilot squeaks.

Avera has no idea what this means exactly. All she knows is that the pilot got really scared at this point. Her uncle and the other passengers were just strapping back into their seats as the ship came down.

"Switching the AFCS to control surface response ... I'm getting no response from the craft's attitude visually, my eight-balls are still frozen. Uh- Mojave, I think we're in an inverted spin, can you con-<scratch>" The video shows her uncle's glowing yellow ship turn into a streak of sparks just as the last syllable is spoken by the pilot.

Her uncle Gibson, along with three other passengers, won fame as space tourism's first ever casualties, victims of a software bug in the ship's automatic flight computers.

Avera looks up at the bedroom window: Grey skies, lightning, tears of God running down the window.

Avera's little sister Nona, whose grandmother cut her straight blonde hair using the old salad-bowl formula, also tried to cheer her up in addition to their parents. Avera gradually grew distant from everyone.

To cheer up Avera, for her thirteenth birthday, they bought a light aircraft with the funds Space Tours Phoenix provided their family as compensation. Nona absolutely loved the ride, but Avera rode silently. She was also silent as she opened the door and leapt from the aircraft, falling four thousand feet into oblivion. Her ten year old sister, who always aspired to be a pilot, screams and follows her out, apparently unaware of the danger.

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Brenda wakes up. How old would Avera be today? she thinks. Sixteen ... today would be her sixteenth birthday. She wasn't expecting to see the day. Any night she would pass away from the leukemia she spent the last year battling. She squirms under the covers, opens her eyes and sees red, somehow knows that she should nod her head up and down.

It was a bizarre dream she had: She was a raven in her dream, and her older daughter was falling out of the sky in this fluffy white robe. Try as hard as she could by pulling on the hem of this robe with her talons, she could do nothing to stop her daughter's plunge. Avera thanked her for trying, and that was all she could remember.

Her nose bumps into something. Brenda keeps nodding her head up and down, bumping her nose into that something until it cracks. Then she somehow knows to turn about a little bit and keep nodding.

It didn't make any sense to her at all. Why would the hospital staff do something so silly as to put her in a-

An egg?

Suddenly she realizes that her nose is a bill, and that she is hatching. She drives away the thought and puts her mind to the primitive task. Eventually, the top of the shell gives way and she emerges, uses her arms ... sorry, wings ... to climb from the shell and drop herself onto the pebbles beside it.

She realizes that she didn't make it through that last night before Avera's would-be birthday. She died in her sleep, and now emerges into her new world, a new life.

She breathes the dry, parched air. Her eyes see nearly all around her small black head. Her egg is part of a strange little plant with roots, and veins cover the outside. It is more like a cocoon. Much like in the dream, she is a fully grown raven, and remembers everything from her previous life now, far more clearly than she did before. The sky is a deep ruddy grey, and lighting like the veins of a leaf fill the sky, but produce little sound.

The little black bird vigorously preens her wings. She must be ready for flight to find shelter from this storm. Once she is dry, she flies, finding a cut in the cliffs around the quarry she hatched into. The cut in the rock face is the safest place for now. A few big, angry drops of rain warn of shockingly enormous hail.

Brenda waits anxiously as this tremendous hail comes down around her, smashing her cocoon and several nearby plants trying to make a home out of the gravel. She mourns as one splits the trunk of a gnarled tree a few hundred metres away in soil outside the quarry. Every hailstone in this brief, but violent three minutes of precipitation weighed between thirty and fifty kilograms.

It was a hard day's work getting out of her cocoon, so she naps until the sun comes out. The sky is clearer to the west, and redder in the east, despite the sun being in the western part of the sky. Flying west, she soon comes to an enormous wall, over one hundred metres high and deep grey, very old. It seems to be made of a highly advanced form of concrete, more like it is an enormous stone, or perhaps the city and a large area around it was somehow sunk that far into the bedrock. She flies to the top of this strange wall to look over it.

As she arrives, she realizes that the sky is clear above the town this wall surrounds, clear and blue, and clean, unlike outside where she was born. She sees a gathering of robed people with wooden costume wings and masks gathered around a bunch of carts. There appears to be one with a special mask, which has a hole right in the middle of it. These don't speak, but instead use some sort of sign language.

She is attracted to a chattering group of girls gathered at the edge of what appears to be a trading square with a temporary market.. They wear more realistic wings, and glowing rings over their heads. After a minute of observation, she sees the wings flap. They are a part of their bodies, made of real flesh and grey feathers! The glowing rings are supported by nothing, but an invisible force over the heads of all of these strange beings, with the exception of one of them.

Brenda has found her daughter Avera, a strange little angel in a new and mysterious world.

Publication Date: 10-09-2009

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