Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Fiction 2020complete | Page 417

Giants, Walking
Harrow International School Hong Kong, Wong, Alyssa - 15
Xiangyi woke up to stillness. The rocky motions that came with living in a house attached halfway up a giant’s
leg were missing. Something’s wrong, she thought, before correcting herself. Nobody had blown horns to signal
danger, and she felt no sense of dread. Something’s different.
She climbed out of bed, pulling on her coat and scarf, and hurried across the small room before tossing open the
trap door on the floor. A blast of chilly winter air hit her and she quickly wrapped the scarf around her face. She
attached and unfurled the rope ladder before sliding out the door. It was a quick climb down as Sui, her giant,
was still young and her legs growing.
Just a meter off the ground, Xiangyi suddenly stopped. It wasn’t just Sui, she realised. All the giants stood still. It
was a cloudy day; the bodies of all but the youngest giants were hidden above the layers of clouds, and all
Xiangyi could see were giant legs. It was like looking at a forest of tall branchless trees, although the legs of most
giants were ten times the width of most trees. Their skin was also dark grey and wrinkly, far thicker and stronger
than bark. A passing trader had once compared it to the skin of the long extinct elephant.
Xiangyi hopped off the ladder, landing lightly on her feet. She could see other people emerging to this strange
sight, either from little houses like hers or from the numerous caravans attached to giants’ legs by thickly woven
rope. Glancing around, she spotted her older brother standing further along the highway they were travelling on,
near the edge. The highway broke off halfway, leaving just a jagged cliff and a steep drop to the ground. Once, it
had been the longest in the Greater Bay Area, but no cars roamed it now.
“Haiming!” Xiangyi burst into a sprint. “Wait!”
His look of confusion quickly turned to annoyance when he saw Xiangyi.
“Why aren’t we moving?”
Her brother frowned. “I… don’t know,” he admitted.
There were only two things the giants never did: sing, and stop walking. Nobody had heard the sound of
giantsong since Shanghai sunk into the sea and the Old World fell. As for the walking, giants were almost always
in motion. They had only been known to stop for a birth or death, be it of one of their own, or one of the
giantfolk— Xiangyi’s people. Even when they stopped to trade at one of the New Cities, the giants would walk
slowly around the city limits without pause. At night they could be seen in the distance, dark blotches moving
across the starry horizon.
Suddenly, a thought struck her. “Grandma said we were near Old Guangzhou. Do you think we found the Sky
Cities?”
The Sky Cities were the home of the giants, and the place the first giants were created with technology long lost.
Sky City was a name for any of the great metropolises of the Old World, anywhere with floating buildings and
flying cars. The purpose of the giants had originally been to consume pollutants in the smog-filled sky; that was
why their legs were so long. It was also why they had hundreds of long keratin bristles growing out the top of
their mouths in place of teeth, in order to filter out the dust. Some people said that giantsong would only be
heard again when the giants returned to the lost Sky Cities. That was the reason they never stopped walking—
because they were trying to find a way home.
Xiangyi spun around, studying the formless wall of grey cloud that lay beyond the highway. It revealed nothing.
She needed a better view. Xiangyi ran towards the nearest giant, Hua Hua, her grandmother’s. She began