63 Old Friends

63 Old Friends Peanut lay on the concrete bench staring at the ceiling. She couldn't remember another time when she had felt this hopeless. Even the weeks immediately after her dad had left weren't this bad. Despite the fact that she had lived for twelve and a quarter years unaware that the yellow pencil even existed, she was now finding it hard to imagine life without it. Not least because it had always, throughout this entire adventure, been their ticket back home. Home. 80 Melody Road had been a pretty unhappy place for the past year. Dad wasn't there, Mum always seemed angry about something, and her brother didn't talk to her any more. Her

only comfort had been her drawing and painting, and now Mum was doing her best to take that away from her. Lying there, alone in a prison cell several hundred metres above the Illustrated City, she whispered, 'I need you, Dad. I need your help now more than ever. She sniffed, looked at the paint-splatter stars through the cell window, and listened to the rhythmic flutter of the leaves as the wind danced through the forest canopy. Her head was swimming. At that moment, she would have given anything for her mum to walk through the door, give her a cuddle and tell her that everything was going to be OK. Wait a second! She sat bolt upright, held her breath and listened again. 'We're ninety-nine floors up. That fluttering noise can't be leaves. No tree is that tall,' she said out loud. She scrambled to her feet, jumped on to the bench, stood on tiptoe and put her face to the small window. And what she saw made her heart leap. There, hovering on the other side of the bars of Peanut's cell window,

were three kaleidoscoppi. One had a red crest on his head, one green and one gold. Their rainbow wings, beating hard, were a multicoloured blur as the great birds hung in the air. 'It's you!' said Peanut, smiling. 'I set you free back in the North Draw!' They nodded. Then something very strange happened. The red-and- green-topped birds looked straight into Peanut's eyes and trilled several bars of a beautiful, mesmeric melody, causing a warm, tingly feeling to spread from the top of her head to the tips of her toes. In an instant, all of her feelings of despair vanished and were replaced by something new. Something she hadn't felt in a while. Hope. She couldn't explain how or why, but she felt sure that her dad was OK. Somehow, he'd managed to escape from the Spire and make his way to a safer place. If only she knew where. She smiled at the kaleidoscoppi. 'You helped him, didn't you? You helped him to escape,' she said. The birds didn't respond but their song continued to

swoop and soar. It filled Peanut's heart. Then she noticed that the gold-topped bird wasn't singing. He was holding something in his beak. Something eighteen centimetres long and bright yellow. Peanut could hardly believe her eyes. ' Little Tail!' she gasped.