The Hush by Skye Melki-Wegner Page A

‘This ain’t gonna be the smoothest ride.’
    The echoboat jolted and Chester slipped. He grabbed the wall with his good arm to steady himself. The vessel vibrated, shaking with magic and Music. The echoboat heaved itself up slowly, like an old man rising from hisrocking chair. It groaned and grunted up into the air, until it hovered about a yard above the railway track.
    â€˜Yes,’ Sam hissed, cranking another lever. ‘That’s my girl!’
    The echoboat lingered for a moment, motionless, then shot forwards with a whoosh. Sam grabbed the steering wheel and wrenched it sideways. The machinery groaned but the boat twisted around and jerked to the side. And suddenly they were flying, out into the dark expanse of rain-streaked fields.
    â€˜Just like I told you,’ Sam said.
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜Too dangerous to run around the Hush on foot. But when you got transport waiting …’ Sam twisted the wheel again and the echoboat turned a sharper left. ‘Well, you’ll see why this place is such a secret.’
    Sam waved a hand at the window, towards the swirling black ahead.
    â€˜Welcome,’ he said, ‘to the Hush.’

CHAPTER NINE
    Inside the echoboat, all was still.
    The initial roar and rumble had died away, replaced by a serene kind of hum. Chester couldn’t decide whether the sound was an engine or the barest hint of Music in the machinery. He squeezed his eyes shut but couldn’t pick out a melody.
    â€˜Why don’t you take a look in the back?’ Sam suggested. ‘I gotta focus on steering.’
    Chester’s mouth felt dry as corn meal. He wanted to ask a thousand questions, but he saw the look in Sam’s eyes now: the focus, the pressure. The older boy’s gaze fixed squarely on an illuminated map as he wrapped his hands around the steering wheel. His knuckles were white.
    Chester forced himself to be silent.
    In the back room, a chain of sorcery lamps hung from the ceiling, casting a shimmer of pale orange light through the air. Wooden cupboards filled the corners, a hammock slouched from one side of the room to another, stacks of books posed like makeshift furniture behind the doorand a dog-eared sofa hogged an entire wall. The air smelt faintly of honey and ashes.
    Chester looked down at his hands. He was vaguely surprised to see that they were shaking, so jittery that they felt disconnected from the rest of him. Shock , he thought.
    As he stumbled forwards, a lamp glinted in the corner of his eye. Chester had a sudden flash of the axe crashing down. His entire body jerked, a marionette yanked sideways by the memory.
    With a ragged breath, Chester reached up to touch the lamp, hoping that its tune might calm him. The glass was hot beneath his fingertips. Its Music rolled down his fingers like sweat: the tinkle of piano keys.
    Oddly, the tune was unfamiliar. The Songshaper who had enchanted this lamp hadn’t played the usual nursery rhymes that formed the magic of most ordinary lamps. They had created their own song, playing a little of their own Music into the glass. The tune was warm and sweet and unsettling all at once.
    Chester sank onto the sofa, fighting to calm the choke of emotions in his chest.
    All right, so what did he actually know?
    There was another version of the world, called the Hush. It looked like the real world. It had the same buildings, the same fields, the same railway lines. But it was dark, filled with fog and rain. Unnatural rain. Rain that fell in swirls and sheaves, yet left those it touched as dry as bone …
    And not everything that existed in the real world existed here. The train, for instance. It had existed in thereal world, but not in the Hush. Here, its only remnant was its Music, the sorcery that powered it. Nothing else had leaked through.
    He also knew that there were dangers in the Hush that he hadn’t seen yet, dangers that frightened even gruff, burly Sam. And strange magic existed