They left the guesthouse by the fire escape, the next morning. Delphine was waiting for them at the bottom with the truck. There was no one else around.
Jonah didn’t say a word to Delphine. He rode in the back with the others, this time. He felt better after a night’s rest, though also a little guilty. He knew it was irrational, but he felt he had let everyone down. He had let his dad down.
He asked Axel where they were going. ‘I told you last night,’ said Axel. ‘Delphine has laid on a plane for us.’
‘We’re still going to Moscow?’ said Jonah. ‘I thought...’
‘We aren’t the only Guardians looking for the Four Corners,’ said Sam. ‘There are other agents out there.’
‘And, when they find them—’ said Axel.
‘If they find them,’ Sam corrected him.
‘It’ll happen one day,’ said Bradbury. ‘When it does,
we must be ready. We’ll need the Chang Bridge.’ Delphine’s driving was as aggressive as ever, and Jonah had to wedge himself behind the wheel arch to keep from being thrown about. He was glad when the truck came to a halt and, a moment later, the back doors were wrenched open.
‘We’re here!’ announced Delphine.
Jonah could still hear engines. He stepped out of the truck onto an asphalt surface, and his jaw dropped open in astonishment.
He had never seen so many aeroplanes in his life. They were huddled around him, eight or nine of them. Delphine had driven right into their midst.
One of the planes was suckling at a fuel truck. The unfamiliar stink of gasoline fumes burnt Jonah’s throat. Another plane was being guided out of a hangar by a man in green coveralls holding a pair of paddles. There were several other people running about, shouting to each other in French. One of them, a man who looked too young to have a moustache, came up to Delphine and discreetly swiped his meta-card in Delphine’s hand- held. The machine dinged, the transaction complete, and only then did he acknowledge her four companions with a curt nod and lead them towards the parked aircrafts.
By the time Jonah realised Delphine wasn’t coming with them, they had left her behind. He saw her getting back into her truck. He wasn’t sorry.
He found it hard to imagine a GuerreVert supporter owning an aircraft at all. He was only a little surprised, then, to be taken past the gleaming white and silver jets, to a corner in which stood a beaten-up old turbo-prop. It was bulky and inelegant next to the gleaming jets, with its chipped red, white and blue paint.
‘Hiram!’ shouted the moustached youth. ‘Ils sont ici!’ 
The pilot leapt out of the cockpit to greet them. He was about fifty, grey-haired, with healthy bronze skin. He wore an open-necked shirt and shorts.
‘Howdy folks,’ said the pilot in an American drawl, ‘and welcome aboard the Fourth of July. The name’s Hiram. I hear you’re Moscow-bound.’
Jonah placed a hand on the fuselage of the plane. A stream of memories flooded into his brain, memories that weren’t his own. He saw himself at the controls of a hundred planes like this one, performing all manner of aerobatic manoeuvres.
The images threatened to overwhelm him, and he quickly snatched his hand away and shook his head to clear it.
Jonah had never flown in a real plane before.
It wasn’t like flying in the Metasphere. It didn’t feel
like the airship had, either.
His stomach sank into his shoes as the plane left
the ground. Once it was in the air, its small size made it easy prey to air turbulence. It was buffeted by every crosswind and bumped by every air pocket until Jonah feared he might be sick.
It didn’t help that there were only four seats in the cockpit. He had ended up wedged between the back two, between Sam and Bradbury.
‘I’ve filed a flight plan to Tunisia,’ Hiram yelled over the screaming engines. ‘So we’ll be heading due south more or less, but changing course once we’re safely out over the Med. Should keep those Millennial snoopers off our backs!’
Sam kept looking at Jonah, concerned. He returned her glances, forcing himself to smile, pretending there was nothing wrong with him. He feared he wasn’t fooling her.
Just when he thought he could take no more, however, Jonah felt a great calmness rising from somewhere within him. His father’s memories. Dad had loved this. Jonah closed his eyes and dreamed – or was it remembered – a thousand other flights like this one, a thousand open skies. It was an amazing sensation and this time he tried to hold on to it. The harder he tried, however, the faster it slipped away.
‘Earth to Jonah!’ joked Sam. ‘Where were you?’ ‘Nowhere,’ muttered Jonah, ‘and everywhere.’ Bradbury was slumped in a meta-trance beside him.
It was good to know that even an old wreck like this one had a satellite uplink. The cockpit was too noisy for Axel and Hiram to hear much, so Jonah had another chance to speak to Sam privately.
‘So,’ he said, ‘this device, this Chang Bridge – what is it?’
‘It’s a back-up device,’ said Sam, ‘but a very special back-up device: the first with enough memory to back up the whole of the virtual world.’
‘A copy of the Metasphere?’ Jonah was awestruck by the sheer magnitude of the possibility, but didn’t understand why the Guardians would want it. ‘But why? What good would that do?’
‘Don’t you see? If we can take a back-up of the Metasphere, we can build new server farms to power it, out of Granger’s reach.’
‘You’re planning to build your own Four Corners!’ Jonah realised.
‘Not just four. Millions.’
‘Then, who...who’d be in charge of them?’
‘No one would,’ said Sam. ‘That’s the whole point,
Jonah. No one would know – no one person should ever know. If the Metasphere were powered by millions of servers, distributed all around the world, then no one person could ever control it.’
‘So, the Metasphere would be...’
‘As it should be. Free!’ Sam declared. ‘Democratic. Owned by the users, not the governments, and certainly not the Millennials. The only way anyone could tamper with its source code would be with everyone’s agreement.’
Jonah nodded, thoughtfully. ‘You need to act fast, then, before Mr Granger has the same idea and gets his own back-up device.’
‘It could happen one day,’ Sam agreed, ‘although hopefully we’ve some time yet. As far as the Guardians know, Mr Chang is the only one with the technology to—’
‘Mr Chang?’ echoed Jonah. ‘You mean the Mr Chang?’
‘Of course. Who else did you think?’
‘I suppose I should have realised, when you mentioned the Chang Bridge.’
‘Mr Chang is Matthew Granger’s fiercest rival,’ said Sam. ‘He’s always said it was wrong that Granger had a monopoly on meta-life. Are you so surprised he should support the Guardians’ cause?’
‘No, I guess not,’ said Jonah. ‘I go... I used to go to one of his schools.’
‘A Chang Academy?’ Sam actually sounded impressed. ‘Another place I can never go back to,’ Jonah sighed. ‘You don’t know. Maybe, one day, when this is all
over...’
‘Maybe,’ said Jonah. ‘It’s all just memories now,
though, isn’t it?’
Memories... He had had an idea.
He wasn’t able to conjure up his father’s memories
consciously, but what about subconsciously? It had happened before, in Dover, and when he had talked to Axel. And on the Island of the Uploaded. Each time, Jonah realised, when he had encountered something that his dad would have found familiar, he tapped into his father’s memories.
‘Do you mind if I log on?’ he asked Sam.
Sam shrugged. ‘Be careful in there,’ she said. ‘Don’t get scanned. And definitely don’t talk to any blackbirds.’
Jonah took an adaptor pack from a pouch in Sam’s seat, reached for the wire that was coiled up beneath it. ‘There’s someone I have to see,’ he explained.
He was ready for the water, this time.
Jonah swooped low over the sea, landing gracefully
on the shore of the Island of the Uploaded. He furled his dragon’s wings behind him, and looked for his grandmother.
He couldn’t see her, at first.
Normally, this wouldn’t have worried him. Nan did wander inland sometimes, though never for long and she always returned to this spot. Jonah couldn’t help but notice, however – as if for the first time – how crowded this stretch of beach was.
Most of the avatars around him were Uploaded themselves, of course, but others were visitors like him – and what, thought Jonah, if some of them were Millennial spies on the lookout for a red dragon? He checked behind him for his exit halo. This time, he wouldn’t make the mistake of straying too far from it – and he certainly wouldn’t reveal his Real World Location to anyone.
He felt relieved when he heard his grandmother’s chuckle.
‘It’s good to see you, Jason,’ said Nan as she drew Jonah into the embrace of her dry elephant’s trunk. ‘You hardly ever seem to visit any more.’
They lay in the shade of a palm tree, and talked.
Nan’s memory seemed stuck in her younger days today. She reminisced about old school friends, and the sweet boy from Manchester she had known before she had met Jonah’s grandfather. ‘Of course, back then,’ said Nan, ‘we could only see each other on flat computer screens, through these gadgets we called webcams.’
Any other time, Jonah would have been happy to listen to her stories of the past; today, he had more important things on his mind.
‘What was my school like, Mum?’ he asked. He didn’t like pretending to be his father, not with her, but it was the simplest way.
Nan looked at Jonah, confused, as if trying to remember who he was. Then her eyes cleared and she said, ‘I know you aren’t happy there, Jason. I wish we could afford to have you tutored online, but...’
‘I know.’ Jonah smiled. ‘I was always the restless one. I hated sitting in dark, stuffy classrooms, looking out at the sky and longing to be up there, free.’
It was happening already. Just talking about his father, hearing about his life, was stirring up the memories buried in Jonah’s brain, bringing them to the surface.
He urged Nan to say more. He prompted her with little details about Dad that he remembered from his own childhood, and with some he was ‘remembering’ now for the first time. They talked about the RAF, Jonah’s mum and the gift shop.
Then he tried to remember the locations of the Four Corners.
He couldn’t do it.
‘There’s something wrong, isn’t there?’ said Nan. ‘I could always tell with you.’
‘I think I need... The memories, they’re too old. I need to talk about what happened next, after we bought the gift shop. After Jonah was born.’
‘How is little Jonah? I miss him so much. Is he walking yet? They change so fast at that age. I was always amazed at how fast you changed, Jason.’
‘Please try to remember. I know you...I know you weren’t around then, but Dad used to... I mean, I came here every week to visit you. I must have told you things, about my life. Did I mention a man named Granger? Matthew Granger? I must have talked about him. Do you remember what I said about him?’
Nan chuckled. ‘Oh, my dear, you know what it’s like when you reach my age. The memory plays tricks on you. Why, I can hardly—’
‘Please. It’s important. I need you to remember!’
‘Really?’ Nan looked at Jonah. It was the same look she had given him the last time he had come here. The one that made him feel like she knew a lot more than she should. ‘Because it seems to me, my dear, you are the one who has forgotten.’
‘I...I suppose you’re right,’ said Jonah.
‘Then let’s see what we can do about that together, shall we? There’s a little trick I use, when I really, really must remember something I have forgotten. Close your eyes, dear. Close your eyes and take slow, deep breaths and listen to my voice...’
Jonah followed his grandmother’s directions.
He sat on the beach with his chin slumped on his dragon’s chest, the warm sun on his scales, and he let her quiet, soothing tones wash over him until he was no longer listening to her words but swimming through
a sea of dreams.
There were faces, places, sweeping by in a blur. He
resisted the urge to try to focus on any one of them, because he knew that if he did they would slip out of his grasp. Jonah waited patiently, until the barrage of images slowed down of their own accord and he could begin to make some sense of them all.
Then Nan as a young woman, walking Jason to school along a busy road filled with cars and buses. An image of his mother, also younger than he had seen her before: she was holding her round belly proudly. Then, a baby. Jonah caught his breath as he realised that he was looking down at himself, as a newborn.
In the hospital waiting room, a man offered him a cigar. It was Axel, before the grey hair and the beard. The sight of him opened up a door to another flood of memories: Flight School, training exercises with the RAF, the Icarus. Images of airports and runways came next. Jonah’s first instinct was to try to go back, to see more of his family, but he made himself resist it. He followed the set of memories related to flying, or perhaps more accurately let himself be carried in their tide.
Sitting in the cockpit of a private plane, with Matthew Granger alongside him. Jonah felt a rush of anger at the sight of his cherubic face, and almost lost the memory because of it. Granger was saying something to him, however. He was giving him directions. Four sets of directions.
A white wasteland. A red desert. An island of skyscrapers. A tropical city.
He snapped out of his trance, sitting bolt upright, gasping for air. ‘It...it worked, Nan,’ he cried. ‘It really worked. We did it!’
Jonah struggled to focus his real-world eyes.
He saw three blurry white faces hovering over him.
‘Is something wrong?’ he asked.
‘Not any more.’ Sam’s voice. ‘You were gone for hours.
We were worried... Jonah, we’re here. In Moscow. We’re coming in to land.’
‘Already?’ Jonah sat up, confused. ‘I thought... It only seemed like a few minutes to me. But listen, Sam, everyone. I did it! We did it, I mean. Nan and me.’
‘Did what?’ asked Bradbury, impatiently.
‘I remembered,’ said Jonah. ‘I accessed my dad’s memories.’
Axel craned around from his seat up front. ‘You mean...?’
Jonah was still sifting through the images from his meditation. He recognised the red desert, parched and dry, from his father’s memories. The Southern Corner. The one server farm that stored the Uploaded. Home to his Nan.
Jonah nodded. ‘I’ve found...’ He caught himself. It was something about the way Bradbury was frowning at him, something that made him cautious. What do I really know about these people? he asked himself. Can I really trust them?
‘I’ve found...one of the Four Corners,’ he said, at that moment deciding to keep the full truth back from the eager Guardians. ‘I saw it from the air, as Dad would have remembered seeing it. A giant red rock with nothing around it. In Australia.’