Rising columns of air, and layers. Loads of layers. You think the wind is all blowing in one direction but when you get up high, there are layers of it, some going this way, some going that way. Highways in the sky. Cold and clean.

If I looked down again, there’d be fields and houses and rivers and cities. But that would be completely brutally bloodcurdling at this height. Not seeing was dreamy. Comfy. The sky felt like the sea and I was learning how to feel the currents. They were like waves. I hit warm pockets every now and then, and cold patches that swirled over my face like evaporated ice.

Couldn’t look down. Had to. Couldn’t.

I did it. And there was Whizzy below me, stretched out so thin she was a pale beam, white with a gloss of gold, like a ray of sunshine a mile long.

Like a totally excellent flat escalator.

Sam once told me about the spookfish, which can see up and down at the same time. If that’s a fact (and it is), then what might Whizzy be able to do with air currents? The thundercloud was long gone now, so it couldn’t be the force from that … Was she doing what I’d once thought Mr Clemm’s contraptions did – suction in front then spewing out behind? Had she made the air thick enough to ride? Whatever. She was doing it. Holding me up on a carpet of air.

42

Rising

We climbed higher and things got rocky. Rough. A huge surge happened, like Whizzy was riding a wave, and my stomach fell into my bottom and lurched there, quivering. Wind flattened my lips and stung my eyes. At the other side, a wall of sparkling diamonds rose in front of us and all of my guts flipped over and over as we dived down, much too fast.

We skidded into the diamonds and I worked it out – they were just reflections of the sun shimmering in a cloud. We climbed again, even higher. Too high for me. Everything was going blurry and I felt floppy and weak. And now we were inside the cloud and I couldn’t see much any more. Just flickering lights. That was all the sight I had left, but the sound of rushing air tore at my ears, and my face was drenched, and the rest of me was freezing. The air seemed too thin to breathe. My brain wouldn’t think properly – I knew I needed more oxygen than I was getting, but at the same time, I felt too dreamy to care. It wasn’t scary. Then it was. Then it wasn’t.

There was time to think one thought about those rivers in the sky—

And then the lights went out.

Lily was sitting at the side of my bed. My own bed. I’m at home. Still don’t know how. I reached out for her.