The Golden City Read Online Free Page A

watchtower. Alice was twelve years old—a small, serious girl who had once practiced the cello and built forts in the desert with her friends. Now she was living on an isolated island with four nuns who thought they were taking care of her—not realizing that the opposite was true. When Alice was alone, she could assumeher new identity: the Warrior Princess of Skellig Columba, Guardian of the Poor Claires.
    She could smell peat smoke coming from the cooking hut and the rotting odor of the seaweed hauled up from the shore and used to fertilize the garden. The cold wind coming off the water touched the collar of her jacket and made her eyes water. Directly below her were the chapel and the four convent huts, each one resembling a stone beehive with slit windows and recessed doors. Looking out at the ocean, she could see the whitecaps on the waves and a dark line on the horizon that marked the circumference of her world.
    The Poor Claires cooked special treats for Alice, mended her torn clothes and poured pots of hot water into a galvanized washtub so that she could enjoy a once-a-week bath. Sister Maura made her read Shakespeare plays and Irish poetry, and Sister Ruth, the eldest nun, guided her through a Victorian Era textbook of Euclidian geometry. Alice slept with the nuns in the dormitory hut. There was always an oil lamp burning in the room; when Alice woke up in the middle of the night, she could see the nuns’ heads lying in the center of goose-down pillows.
    She knew that these gentle, devout women cared about her—perhaps they even loved her—but they couldn’t protect her from the dangers of the world. A few months earlier, Tabula mercenaries had landed on the island in a helicopter. While Alice and the nuns hid in a cave, the men broke down the door of the storage hut and killed Vicki Fraser. Vicki was a very kind person, and it was painful to think about her death.
    Alice believed that everything would have been different if Maya had been on the island. The Harlequin would have used her sword and knives and shotgun to destroy all the men on the helicopter. If Maya had been living at New Harmony, she would have protectedAlice’s mother and the rest of the people living there when the Tabula arrived. Alice knew that everyone at New Harmony was dead, but they were still with her. Sometimes, she was doing something completely ordinary—tying her shoes or mashing her potatoes with a fork—and then she saw her mother getting dressed or heard her friend Brian Bates playing his trumpet.
    Alice jumped off the boulder, turned away from the convent, and headed west across the rocky ground. The island was formed when two mountain peaks pushed their way out of the water, and the bluish-gray limestone was riddled with caves and sinkholes. During her months on Skellig Columba, she had stacked up columns of rocks; some were signposts for her different pathways around the island while others were false clues that might lead a careless invader off the edge of a cliff.
    Her storage spot was a badger-sized hollow hidden inside a patch of weeds. She kept a rusty butcher knife that she had found in the storage hut and a paring knife stolen from the convent kitchen wrapped in a sheet of plastic. Alice thrust the butcher knife beneath her belt, wearing it like a short sword, and strapped the paring knife to her forearm with two large rubber bands. There were no trees on the island, but she had found a walking stick down by the landing dock, and she used it as a tool to probe mysterious places. Now that she was armed, she tried to walk like a Harlequin—calm but alert, never fearful and uncertain.
    After hiking for about twenty minutes, she reached the western end of the island. The constant attack of the waves had cut away chunks of limestone. Now the cliff looked like five gray fingers reaching into the cold water. Alice walked to the largest of the fingers and stood near the edge. It was a six-foot jump over a crevasse to the