Rachel Thompson

#Excerpt from Lights Over Emerald Creek by @ShelleyDavidow AmReading #YA #SciFi

To Walk Again

The music she’d been playing became an echo of woven sound. She could no longer see her cello.

Lucy was above the hills, the sea, the melting mountains that all dissolved into watercolour; a thrilling terror suffused her as she continued upward through liquid light.

A roar like a distant rumble of thunder or the crashing of waves filled her ears. Broken shards of reality tumbled past her as she spiralled into a rapidly darkening vortex. She held her breath and closed her eyes, and thought, am I dying? Dead?

Hard drops of rain peppered her head, her face, her neck.

Only, when she reached to wipe her cheek, it wasn’t wet. Lucy opened her eyes. Light dazzled her. Blinded her. Around her, danced a billion droplets of pure light. They were electric as they touched her skin. She got up on her hands and knees.

And knees!

Her cello bow lay beneath her. She could feel something softly pressing against her knees. Her hair fell in front of her face. Slowly, carefully, she flicked it back over her shoulder, and looked up as the light stopped showering her, and slowly receded, like a sparkler dying out, until it was a blue glow high above her.

‘Holy — holy crap! What the hell?’ she whispered, not usually prone to swearing, still on her hands and knees. Then, carefully, as if in a trance, one leg at a time, she stood up. She stared at a twilight lit, pink horizon. It was misty, or rainy, but she couldn’t feel anything on her skin. Something soft squished between her toes. Sand? She looked down at her legs. They were standing. Her toes were feeling something. She held onto her legs, touched them, felt them. This could be a lucid dream, she thought.

She looked around at an unfamiliar landscape.

Or a seascape.

Or a mistscape. It was hard to tell.

The sand beneath her feet was the colour of coral. A few paces ahead, she saw a still, soft, pink ocean. Far out across the ocean, the water dissolved into sky, or cloud. When she looked behind her, two enormous blue lights glowed in the sky, and then slowly turned to purple, to magenta, to pink, and became one with the atmosphere.

Lucy stood on tiptoes. She took the bow in her right hand and placed it down at her feet. She felt very strange, as if she wasn’t quite in her body. She could feel things, but she was light, and when she took a step, it was almost as if she floated. A sudden, unexpected surge of joy rushed through her. If this was some kind of dream, she loved it. She could walk. No, she could run! If she could have this one experience, this one single moment of feeling whole, she would give everything. She ran, tripping over her own feet, towards the shore. Her toes touched ground, but barely.

LightsOverEmeraldCreek

Lucy Wright, sixteen and a paraplegic after a recent car accident that took her mother's life, lives in Queensland on a 10,000 acre farm with her father. When Lucy investigates strange lights over the creek at the bottom of the property, she discovers a mystery that links the lights to the science of cymatics and Scotland’s ancient Rosslyn Chapel.

But beyond the chapel is an even larger mystery. One that links the music the chapel contains to Norway’s mysterious Hessdalen lights, and beyond that to Saturn and to the stars. Lucy’s discoveries catapult her into a parallel universe connected to our own by means of resonance and sound, where a newly emerging world trembles on the edge of disaster. As realities divide, her mission in this new world is revealed and she finds herself part of a love story that will span the galaxy.

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Genre - Young Adult SF
Rating - PG
More details about the author
Connect with Shelley Davidow on Facebook & Twitter

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