A budding writer with a bunch of ingenious rebels risk their lives to try and overthrow an oppressive government to earn back their liberty of expression. They need to unify and put aside their differences, interests and pasts, and race against time...
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AILEANA
It took her a long time to convince the people that spiking Alizeh's drink was just for fun. Honestly, she had never meant to use the twisted way but she had felt Alizeh lying time and again. She had thought they were planning some surprises and stuff and it'd be just fun to get Alizeh drunk to make her say the truth. How wrong was she? She didn't blame Alizeh though. Her reaction was genuine. How long had they known each other? A week and a half. And already she was trying to put stuff in Alizeh's drink.
What kind of a friend was she? The more she thought, the less Aileana liked what she had done. She didn't bother hailing a cab as she trudged home dejectedly. She knew Alizeh needed time. She hoped against hope that Alizeh would have cooled off a bit in the one hour she was away.
The night was still as death. A very few CloudCab crept the streets slowly. The air was rippling with the light from the crescent moon that hung overhead. The night felt clean and fresh and Aileana so longed for the light breeze to blow off all traces of her wrongdoings from her.
She didn't realise she was standing in front of their building until the key in her purse hooted in recognition. A pretty little invention, but so useful.
The house was dark as the night. She tiptoed in and threw on the lights, hoping to find Alizeh asleep. The emptiness knocked the air out of her lungs. Alizeh wasn't there, nor was any of her stuff. When she had gone to work on Cloud Two, she had just taken her trolley, but now, she had wiped the place clean of everything. Slowly Aileana moved towards her bed, hoping to find something — anything to hold onto the hope that Alizeh could come back. The bedcover was a knotted mess and her pillow lay on top of it, slightly wet from what Aileana presumed, were tears. Nina's things were untouched, so maybe she had no idea of all this yet. But Alizeh had left, left because of Aileana .
Aileana sank to the floor, her tears coming in breathless heaves. Her shoulders shook with the strain of the day's events. She had damaged their friendship beyond recovery.
And just then the power cut happened. The lights went off with a pop and darkness plunged on her like a vicious predator. Aileana knew she couldn't stay for the night in the dark. The ghosts of the past were hovering along the edges of her broken mind once again.
On shaking knees Aileana stood up, making her way to the door, in the dark. Moonlight flooded the steps in its milky white essence as she descended onto the Cloudway. Without caring for a direction, she started walking along the ghostly path, which lit up in fluorescent grey before her eyes.
The humidity of the air had increased and the heat felt suffocating. The tightness of her dress didn't help either. Her tired feet shuffled on nonetheless. The buildings looked like mobsters in the alley, towering over her in columns of black. The sky was starless and the darkness shimmered around her but she focused her attention on her feet. Trying to keep herself on her feet was a distraction enough as given a choice, she'd have collapsed in the middle of the street and never gotten up again.
But she kept on walking. Time ticked by in unknown hours. She wondered if she could fall off the cloud because unlike the earth, the cloud was flat.
She came to a standstill, rubbing her eyes in surprise. In front of her was a wall. It wasn't solid but made of a mesh of fibres like the net of a football goalpost. The fibres glowed white in the darkness. The wall wasn't anything she had seen earlier and surprisingly her road ended there.
She looked sideways and in the mellow light that the weird wall created, she could see parallel roads ending there on both sides. A foolhardy idea came to her. Very cautiously she reached out and touched the wall, preparing herself to get fried to crisp. But the fence wasn't electrified. The material felt cool on her fingers and it wasn't any metal she had seen previously.
She set one foot at a square and holding the mesh with her hands, she put the other foot on another square. It held steady. She loved climbing nets as a child. A wild thrill of adrenaline rushed through her as she climbed higher and higher, using the spaces as rungs. In a few minutes, her hands touched the top of the wall and she hauled herself up, almost tumbling over in her excitement.
She had reached the end of the cloud. The endless ocean stretched around her like a pool of dark sapphire. The moonlight glinted on the mini ripples that the currents created on the almost still sea. She had never seen the oceans so calm. The inky black night sky had melted into the sea at the horizon and a beautiful iridescent hue was lighting up the edges. She suspected it was a pre-dawn view and the sun was just waiting to peek up from her watery bed.
The air seemed to clear a bit and she saw the stars, a handful of those scintillating beauties were scattered over the dark palette of the sky. And the Milky Way stretched out like a whiff of silver glitters thrown on the canvas and smudged into swirling colours in all shades of virgin white.
She took in a deep breath. The air was salty with the taste of the ocean. It felt like heaven. It felt like bliss and the end of all her problems. For a brief second, she considered throwing her legs on the other side and just dropping off into the void.
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A/N How do you like the new cover? All thanks to Cil sereneur ❤️❤️❤️
