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Chapter 1
Chapter One: One Hundred and Six Clouds
Chalkwell sat on a white hill like a loaf of bread left too long in the sun.
Everything in it was pale. The road was pale. The rooftops were pale. The goats were pale, and so were the people, because chalk dust settled on everything that stood still for more than a minute, and quite a lot of things that didn't.
It had not rained in four years.
Tilda Somers was ten, which meant she could just remember rain, the way you remember a song you heard once at somebody else's house. She remembered a sound on the roof like hundreds of small feet. She remembered the smell that came up out of the ground afterward, dark and sweet, like the earth had been holding its breath and finally let it go.
Every evening she sat on the low wall behind her house with a stub of pencil and a notebook, and she wrote down clouds.
*Entry 104. Long, thin, grey underneath. Travelling east, quick. Hopefulness: 3 out of 10.*
*Entry 105. Fat. Very promising. Turned yellow at the edges and left. Hopefulness: 8 out of 10, which was a mistake.*
*Entry 106. Small. Round. Went north and did not come back.*
One hundred and six clouds. Not one single drop.
Inside, her mother, Martha Somers, was scraping the dirt off her boots with a stick. Martha dug wells. She had dug eleven of them in four years, and every single one had come up chalk — white, dry, crumbly chalk that squeaked between your teeth and held no more water than a biscuit tin.
"Twelve tomorrow," Martha said, to nobody. "Twelve's a lucky number."
"You said eleven was lucky," said Tilda.
"Eleven lied to me."
By the window sat Tilda's grandmother, Rosa Somers, in a chair that faced north. Rosa always faced north. She had a blanket over her knees even in the heat, and a small dented thimble on a string around her neck, and she hummed — except it wasn't really humming. It was a sound with no tune in it, the way a kettle sounds before it decides to boil.
"Gran," said Tilda, sitting on the floor beside her. "I saw a cloud today. Number one hundred and six."
Rosa's hand found Tilda's hair and stayed there.
"They say you used to sing," Tilda said. "Nobody says why you stopped."
Rosa's hand went still. The not-quite-humming stopped too, just for a moment, and in that moment Tilda felt as though she had knocked on a door and heard somebody inside decide not to answer.
Then the humming started again, and Rosa went on looking north, at the hard blue nothing where the weather was supposed to come from.
