Budding Star by Annie Dalton Page A

Tsubomi!
    Jessica had mentioned the possibility of running into helpful spirits in Limbo, but I didn’t remember her mentioning anyone drawing maps.
    All my misgivings faded away. This was going to be a doddle! We’d survived Extreme Angelic Melting. We’d located exactly the right dimension by using our own natural magnetism. Now we had a helpful flashing butterfly to show us which way to go. Missions don’t get any more jammy than this, I thought happily.
    Following the path indicated on the map, we made our way out of the trees into a sparkling rain-washed world.
    Reuben was enchanted. “This is like a dream.”
    “So pure angels do dream, then?” This was something I was always meaning to ask.
    “It’s a phrase, Beeby!”
    “Sorry! I forgot you guys don’t actually need to sleep!”
    Reuben was looking down at the ground with a perplexed expression. “This should be killing our feet,” he said. “There are stones and all sorts in this mud.”
    “Maybe Limbo feet are tougher?” I suggested.
    I felt heaps tougher in general. It was getting really hot and the air was loads more humid than I’m used to, yet I was twinkling over the ground like Tinkerbell.
    In flooded fields beside the road girls were planting seedlings. Wading knee-deep in the muddy water, they sang as they worked, a truly heartrending melody. Reuben reckoned they were singing in medieval Japanese. This could be true, but I couldn’t seem to get past their strong country accents.
    “They’re asking the god of rice to come down and bless their seedlings, so they’ll get a good harvest,” he explained.
    “Think we can spare minutes to send them vibes?” I asked.
    Discreetly as possible, we beamed uplifting vibes at the waterlogged fields. I didn’t think the girls had noticed us, but as we walked away, a few waved rather wearily, and one called out what sounded like, “Hope you find her!”
    “Was there something weird about that?” asked Reuben, after we’d gone past.
    “Yeah, like, how did she know?”
    He shook his head. “Not that. Didn’t you get the feeling if you were to come by tomorrow, those girls would be doing exactly the same thing?”
    “I see what you mean,” I said slowly, “like they were just there for local colour, or whatever. Do you think they stopped singing once we were out of sight?
    “Or stopped existing ,” he suggested.
    I shivered. “That’s not funny.”
    Jessica had constantly warned us: “Limbo is a world of traps and tricks. Never trust anything or anyone.”
    “When I think about it,” I admitted, “they didn’t seem exactly real. Not real real.”
    “And the birds are wrong,” he said suddenly. “They sound right, but they fly all wrong.”
    I burst out laughing. “What’s that supposed to mean? Like, they’re going backwards!”
    “Don’t snigger, Beeby,” he said sternly. “Just look and learn.”
    Spinning me around, my buddy pointed me at a patch of sky. After a few seconds a line of wild geese, or it could have been swans, flew out of some trees and disappeared towards a line of hills, making their sad honking cry.
    I rolled my eyes. “And this is interesting because?”
    “Keep watching and you’ll find out.”
    Reuben started counting under his breath. He got as far as twenty.
    “Bingo!” he said triumphantly.
    An identical line of long-necked birds flew out of the same cluster of trees and disappeared towards the same line of hills, with the same eerie cries.
    “And they always fly right to left, never left to right,” he said.
    “They’re probably migrating,” I suggested vaguely.
    “In sevens? I don’t think so! There are always exactly seven birds. Not five or six or eight. Seven , exactly. Every time.”
    I didn’t share Reuben’s fascination with local bird behaviour, but he’s my mate, after all, so we hung around for a bit to test his theory. And actually it was quite spooky. Every twenty seconds on the dot, exactly seven birds flew out of the