1st 5 Pages May Workshop- Johnson

Name: Mary Johnson 

Genre: Middle Grade (dark fantasy) 

Title: The Forest of Beating Hearts 

CHAPTER ONE 

Snow swirls through beams of golden moonlight. The market square is deserted, silent and asleep like the rest of Iore City. Even the clock tower is draped in a blanket of shadow and frost. Every now and then something screams from beyond the Wall, but nobody is around to listen. The people of Iore are unconscious in their beds and the city dreams with them.  

Except for me and Dana, of course.  

Dana stands underneath a gas lamp, arms wrapped around her shoulders. She reaches a gloved hand towards the light. “I swear,” she says, “it ain’t never been this cold before. My fingers are icicles.”  

I grab the tattered edges of her cloak and pull her away. “Stick to the shadows, remember? Do you want to be seen?” 

It seems a silly thing to ask. If not for the snowfall, Iore City could be frozen in time. No windows glow with candlelight. No chimneys exhale smoke. If I didn’t know that guards prowl the streets, I would believe we were the only people in the world. But we’re not. And since nobody is supposed to be awake after dark, we can’t get caught.  

Dana pouts. Blonde hair sticks out at funny angles underneath her hood. She cut it with a paring blade yesterday after it got too tangled, but she’s no hairdresser. Most of it barely brushes her chin, though a few wild strands hang to her shoulders.  

“You’re staring at my hair again,” she says. “Cripes, Nairi, tell the truth already. Is it bad or not?”  

“I told you a million times,” I say. “You look smashing.” 

Dana laughs. “Liar.”  

I shush her but I have to stifle a giggle too. Honestly, it’s a wonder we haven’t been caught already. If Papa was here, he’d keep things good and serious. Now it’s down to me. Dana is my best friend, but she’s a bad influence when it comes to acting sensible.  

“Let’s go,” I say. We slink around the edge of the market square, past the closed-up haberdasher’s and sweet shops. Across the square sits the Crystal Pavilion, with its spires stretching upwards to pierce the sky and stain-glass windows casting rainbow shadows on the paths below. All the other buildings in Iore are made of filigreed black stone. It makes the glass walls of the Crystal Pavilion seem even stranger in comparison.  

Dana is focussed on the shopfronts. “We could steal some warmer clothes,” she says. “Nobody’d know. Some jackets, new scarves . . .”  

I tug her onwards. “No,” I say reluctantly. “We’re not that kind of thief.”  

She groans but follows me. As we leave the marketplace behind, the city seems to shrink around us. Cobbled streets become narrower and rooftops zip together overhead, blocking out the moonlight. I swear the streets switch places. No matter how hard I try to memorize their routes, they seem to change every night. Sometimes, it feels like the city is swallowing us, and I have to fight the urge to run back across the Wall and into the forest we call home. Being eaten is kind of a fear of mine.  

“Here?” I ask. The house I’ve picked is perfectly ordinary, three stories tall and carved with stone flowers. A window on the top floor is open, drapes fluttering.   

“Suits me.”  

I nudge open the front door and cringe when the hinges squeak. No lock, as usual. Dana shuts it behind me. The house is swathed in darkness, and I trip over a bit of bunched-up carpet as I head towards the staircase. Most houses have staircases in the middle of their main rooms, so it isn’t hard to find, though I wish we could have candles. The light would probably get us caught, but it’d stop me from stubbing my toes all the time.  

I try the first door I see upstairs. It’s a bedroom. No wallpaper, just more black stone for walls and ceilings. I shiver and my breath puffs into a cloud. It might be even colder here than outside. Dana opens a chest of drawers and pulls out a hand-mirror. 

“Dany,” I say. “C’mon. I told you, no messing with people’s stuff.” 

“You’re no fun,” she says, but she puts the mirror back.  

I grit my teeth. It’s not my fault Papa isn’t here and I have to pretend to be the adult. But we are thirteen now, almost grown-ups ourselves. Now is not the time for playing around. Sleeping Iorans never wake up, no matter how loud we are, but I don’t want to make the guards angrier than we have to.  

Sure enough, the boy in the bed doesn’t even twitch as we search his room. I wish I could sleep so soundly. But then, the people of Iore City aren’t human. Papa called them automatons, but that isn’t quite right either. On the outside they look just like us, fleshy and soft with hair that frizzes in the rain. The only thing giving them away is a keyhole the size of a penny in the centre of their chests—on the inside, they’re like wind-up toys. Without their keys, their insides stop working and they shut down.

Imagine the damage if someone decided to steal them. 

“Found it,” Dana says. She swipes a silver key from his bedside table. “They ain’t even trying to hide ‘em.”  

“Because they’re stupid,” I say. I’ve never been inside Iore during the daytime so I don’t know for sure. But we have been stealing keys for almost two months now and they’ve never tried locking their doors or hiding their keys. In fact, I’ve never come across a door that actually has a lock or a shutter that has a bolt. They have guards, but they’ve only managed to catch us once, back when we weren’t so careful. And even then, escape was easy.  

See, the forest where we live is pretty dangerous. When Papa, Dana, and I stumbled across Iore City, we thought we might finally be able to live in proper houses and have proper lives. But the Iorans don’t want us here. We are from the forest beyond the Wall. We aren’t Ioran. So to them, we are monsters.  

Our plan is simple. Steal the keys. Stop their hearts. And we won’t give any of them back until the Iorans promise to let us stay. It doesn’t matter if they like us or not—it’s a million times safer within the Wall than beyond it.  

Dana ties the key to a ribbon around her waist. Then we hop out of the window and climb down to the street.  

“Onward?” Dana grins crookedly.  

“Onward,” I agree.  

We run across the cobbles, not bothering about which way. The more random we are, the harder it will be for guards to catch us. Papa always said there’s nothing more dangerous than being predictable. We climb up drainpipes, duck under arches, hurry past statues of angels and gryphons and hooded figures, collecting keys whenever we feel like it. Although we see no guards, I keep checking over my shoulder. I get the feeling the city itself is watching us.