The Cloud Collector

Chapter 1: The boy with the jam jars

Pip had seventy-three jam jars on his windowsill, and every single one of them held a cloud.

There was a small fluffy one that looked exactly like a sleeping rabbit. There was a long thin one that looked like a piece of string someone had forgotten in the sky. There was a grey one that rumbled very quietly when you held it up to your ear, like it still remembered being a thunderstorm.

Most people in the village of Thistledown could not see the clouds in Pip’s jars. They looked inside and said, “Pip, that jar is empty.” But Pip knew better. The clouds were there. They were just very good at being see-through.

Pip’s best friend was a girl named Fen, who lived next door and had muddy boots and a gap in her front teeth and absolutely no patience for anything she could not touch with her own two hands.

“You cannot collect clouds,” Fen said one afternoon, sitting on Pip’s fence and eating an apple. “Clouds are made of water. You’d just have a wet jar.”

“These clouds,” Pip said patiently, “are made of something else entirely.”

“What?” said Fen.

Pip thought about it. “Leftover light,” he said. “And the feeling you get just before something wonderful happens.”

Fen looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked at the jars. Then she took another bite of her apple. “That,” she said, “is the silliest thing I have ever heard.”

But that night, before she went to sleep, she looked out her window at Pip’s windowsill full of glowing jars, and she thought just for a moment that she might have seen one of them move.

The trouble began the very next morning, when Pip woke up and looked out of his window and saw that the sky was completely, entirely, perfectly blank.

Not grey. Not stormy. Not even a pale, washed-out, winter kind of empty. Just gone. As if someone had taken the whole sky and folded it up and put it away somewhere, and left nothing behind but a flat white nothing from one end of the world to the other.

Pip pressed his nose to the glass. Then he ran next door in his pyjamas and knocked very loudly.

Fen opened the door, still eating toast. She looked at the sky. She looked at Pip. She looked at the sky again.

“All right,” she said. “That is not normal.”

“No,” said Pip. “And I think I know what happened.” He held up one of his jam jars the small fluffy one, the one that looked like a sleeping rabbit. Inside it, the cloud was moving faster than he had ever seen it move, bumping against the glass like it very urgently wanted to get out. “The clouds know something. We have to follow them.”

Fen looked at the jar. The cloud inside was definitely moving. She could see it. She could absolutely, completely, undeniably see it.

She put down her toast. “Fine,” she said. “But I’m bringing the apple.”