Michelle Kenney - City of Dust - Completely gripping YA dystopian fiction packed with edge of your seat suspense

We flew like birds, running through trees as though we were animals that had always belonged there. Occasionally I caught the flash of a green tunic or brown hand, dirtied with dust to make it less visible, but no greetings were exchanged. Tree trials were sacrosanct, and no serious hunter would compromise their time with mischief or chat.

At first I hung back for Eli, hoping he might still run with me, but when I finally caught sight of him, he’d paired with Fynn. I swallowed my disappointment and flew on, Grandpa’s advice lulling me into a swift rhythm:

‘Remember what Thomas taught us. An Arafel hunter believes in natural order, respect for his place in the forest, and takes only what he needs to survive.’

His words were as good as imprinted in my mind, and it was several minutes later when I finally dropped to the floor to pause beside a drinking hole. This part of Arafel’s forest was lush and dark, and the water came from a deep underground spring, which made it reliably fresh and cool to drink.

I leaned over the water, and watched two hazel eyes gaze back from an earth-stained face. I stared back, trying to read them before I bent to drink. August had always seemed to find it so easy, but right now they seemed as closed and secretive as the dark pond water in which they danced.

I glanced over my shoulder. All was still. Max and Rief had run into a nest of fire ants, which had left me out in front. Fire ant nests were more usually found at the base of trees, but this particular nest had somehow managed to find a home in the centre of one of the well-used tree forks. I frowned. Art’s Council were clearly upping the stakes, and I had a suspicion it wasn’t just to keep things interesting. Art was nervous, and he had every reason to be.

We’d all but razed Pantheon to the ground, and then taken off. August had been left in charge, but who knew how that had gone down in the twisted, archaic world of Isca Pantheon. And now our existence wasn’t a secret. Cassius might be dead, but the Insiders couldn’t deny our existence any longer. I thought about the message I’d left: the photograph of Cassius striding through the forest, smiling and helmet-free. It was a message about betrayal on a momentous scale.

I stared back into my own jaded eyes. Our idyllic forest life looked cocooned and protected, but in truth it all balanced on the edge of a harvest scythe. Its continuity depended on political stability inside the domes, and that was so dangerous to assume.

The faint crackle of weighted branches filled the air, and I didn’t need a second warning. Rising swiftly, I darted up the nearby kapok tree.

A good hunter never gave up her lead, not for all the apricots in Arafel.

It was falling fast now. I shimmied down a fallen trunk and leapt up into a thick willow, keeping my eyes trained on the sky above the trees. Max followed agilely, sensing my need for urgency, and only paused when I reached the swaying branches near the top. I held up a hand, knowing the thinner, reedy branches wouldn’t support his weight. And it only took one of us to look past Arafel’s silvery waterfall into the canopied clearing beyond.

It had been two days since the hunter tree trials, and we were on the outer perimeter of Arafel’s forest, the last thicket before the gently sloping pastures we’d cultivated for our rotational crop supplies.

I scanned the busy fields swiftly. I could just spy Kela, today’s shift leader, checking the green shoots of the second barley crop, which once only grew in the old-world Middle East. It was another newcomer since the change in climate, and we were grateful for the flour that provided our village with barley bread throughout the volatile monsoon months.

Beyond the long pastures were the gentle, arid slopes that signalled the start of the mountainous terrain. They were used mainly for grazing the village goats, and the occasional wild caribou kill. The slopes were also where Eli had found Jas, our snow leopard watch-cat, when we were just children. As far as I was aware, she was still the only living creature I knew to have wound a precipitous route from the North Mountains’ snowy peaks into our hidden paradise.

Today though, Jas’s Herculean feat was not foremost in my mind.

I’d followed the tiny falling speck from the roof of our treehouse, feeling suspiciously like I’d fallen into one of my nightmares. Yet this speck was real, I was sure of that. It was also big with a predatory shape, like one of the birds of prey circling way up in the mountains. And its direct, urgent flight marked it out from the rest.

I craned my neck, trying to peer through the dense foliage into a clearing a few tree jumps away. The bird had merged with the trees here several minutes ago.

‘What was it?’ Max’s whisper was barely discernible above the rustle of the willow. ‘Boar?’ he added hopefully.

I shook my head, drawing mixed comfort from the warmth of his breath against my calf. The fallout was forgotten. I never could stay mad with him anyway, he was simply too Max. And he never suffocated me with words; everything that needed to be said was conveyed with a look or a touch. Apart from that one night, when he’d rolled onto his side to look at me. Really look at me. And I’d never felt more naked. The moon painted his Outsider skin in runes when he whispered the three words that terrified me most. And it was the best and worst moment of my life.

My own words had dried at the back of my throat, and it was part of the reason we hadn’t stopped. Because I couldn’t wrap words around my own feelings. They wouldn’t fit no matter how much I tried to force them. And now the nights were so much harder. The question was always there, hanging between us in the darkness. I really tried to bury my memories, to leave it all behind like we had that night, but the same confusion that stopped my words, stopped everything else. His frustration was tangible. And I could only hope that it overshadowed my guilt, which gnawed like a hunger at the pit of my stomach.

The sun glinted through the trees the way it always did, but today felt different somehow. I lifted my head and sniffed. It was too early for the rains, but the breeze was sharper.

I craned again, and then I glimpsed it, several trees away. The tip of an outstretched wing, a burnished gold-edged wing, and then something else that made my fingers clench the willow until the whites of my knuckles gleamed.

I shinnied back down the branch to face Max.

‘Hey, what’s up?’ he asked, weaving his fingers into mine. ‘You look like you spied a strix!’

‘Golden plumage,’ I whispered, loosening my hand before leaping again into a strong maple, and scurrying down into its thickened fork.

‘Griffin?’

Max was right behind me in a heartbeat.

He meant Friskers of course, our much-loved village pet griffin, who now roamed the outside forest. Although the outside forest inhabitants had been disgruntled, I’d no choice but to leave Octavia’s engineered beast there when I made it back from Pantheon. I knew it stood the best chance of survival among the wilder animals and vegetation, rather than within our farming community. But instead of embracing its new-found freedom, it had taken to waiting patiently in the outside forest for Arafel hunters to appear, when it would appear like an over-enthusiastic dog, its pink tongue lolling over its carnivorous beak. Even genetically modified mythical beasts had the potential for domestication, it seemed.

One of the village children had since named it after its unique mix of bushy feathers and whiskers, and somehow the name had stuck.

I shook my head.

‘Two heads,’ I mouthed, watching the teasing light fade from his eyes.