He tosses her a chunk. Again, trying not to feel too daft, she gingerly cleans her hands. The ice wants to stick to her hands.
‘Okay.’ Lobbing the melting chunk back outside, Callum glances at his watch. ‘Shall we go?’ Slapping his knees, he pushes to his feet. ‘Whether or not it really is half nine, it’s light enough to walk. Wherever it is that we’re—agh-ah!’
He flinches. From the pocket of his jeans, a duck is quacking. Kira’s face grows wide as he pulls it out to breathe. ‘It works?’ Last night, both phones had been dead, more dead than their sad little breakfasts. ‘Who is it?’
Callum blinks his bewilderment. ‘Lena, I think.’ He scratches his head. ‘You know. Don’t-go-into-Whiteland Lena. You’ll-die-if-you-do Lena. But look.’
Screen first, he holds out the phone. On it is an image of two small children, suntanned and eating chips. It’s a standard holiday photo.
Kira frowns. ‘There’s no way to answer it.’
‘Precisely.’ The quacking continues, looped and abrasive. Callum taps the full-screen photo.
It dies.
The silence is as suddenly abrasive as the noise. ‘We’re probably supposed to take something from that.’ Kira clambers from the bed. The feeling of being followed is back. It may not relate to Lena, but they can’t know either way. ‘You were right.’ She drags her fingers through her knotted hair. Her long-abused scalp complains. ‘We should leave. Whatever that meant, it can’t be good.’
She straightens the bed, grabs the cloth, and gathers her things from the rug. ‘Come on.’ She motions for Callum to move. He looks about three light years behind her. ‘You said it yourself. Let’s go.’
Distinctly lacking direction is heinous. The woodchip path was going somewhere, but wandering, for thirty minutes, sixty, more, feels like going nowhere at all. Last night’s second port of call didn’t happen. It’s as if discussing what they’re going to do will make it ever more evident that they really, really don’t know, and so they just…don’t. They walk. She, at least, shies from that conversation, even though she identified the need. They just walk. They wander. They’re lost.
The same looming trees, the same empty snow. The same heavy, impenetrable silence. Even in daylight, the nothing is unnerving, and any conversation peters out.
Thoughts. Fears. Doubts. Where are they going, what are they doing, why did she think they’d succeed? All and sundry nips at her mind, from Romy to exams to her mother to her bonsai, alone on her windowsill. The unfinished watercolour festering on the floor. From his silence, she’d guess Callum feels the same.
Callum. Scotland. The holiday to Edinburgh back when she was ten. They tramped up Holyrood Hill in the rain while she and Romy sang like alley cats. Why are we walking? Why-y are we wa-a-lking? The year after that, they went to Whitby, to a warm, converted barn. It always smelled like fresh bread, and no one could figure out why.
In an instant, Kira sweeps back there. It was October and spooky, with witchy tales and bakery goodies and fairly unsuitable films. Her family. Her family, who have disappeared. It hurts in a sudden, tight balloon, filling up her chest. What happens if she can’t find them?
Stop. Thinking like that doesn’t help. It hinders. Holidays. Go back to holidays.
Cornwall. The year after Whitby, they went to Cornwall and gorged on huge beef pasties.
Pasties. Food. That’s better. Right now, she’d die for a curry. She’d die for a lot of things, actually: clean underwear, toothpaste, a phone that works, water that isn’t snow squished into their bottles and rubbed between their hands. Isn’t snow meant to dehydrate you? One time, Peter got heat exhaustion, and no one at the hotel spoke—
WAKE UP.
The shriek slaps Kira back to herself. It cuts her cheek with ice as it slices her mind, keening past her and away. She stops, blinking. What—
She hears the wind before the words. The shriek rushes back through the trees. A white-hot wire piercing her brain, frost on the opposite cheek.
WAKE UP.
Kira spins on her heels. ‘I’m awake!’ she cries. Her mind is a muddle, a fog, a dream. ‘Can’t you see that? I’m awake!’
There’s no one there. Kira judders, double takes. The last of the dream-fog clears. She let her guard down. They didn’t keep talking. Whiteland plucked her like a harp, pulling out memories, tangling her into a ball of wool.
Whisking Callum away.
He’s gone. Kira’s stomach bottoms out. While she got tangled, Callum disappeared.
‘Callum?’ she cries. Forcing herself to go slowly, she turns. Trees, snow, pine needles. No sound but her boots. She can’t smell him anymore, his lingering cologne, washing powder different to hers. She hadn’t realised it was there until it wasn’t. ‘Callum!’
She rakes both hands through her hair. Her nails dig ten little grooves in her skull. How can he have gone so completely?
‘Kira?’
A Callum-shaped blur appears up ahead. It’s as if he stepped out of a tree. ‘Kira?’ he yells, but distant, muffled. Kira can almost hear someone laughing, a tickle inside her mind. They will not find each other. They will be forced apart. ‘Kira!’
The word becomes cement, setting in her joints. She can’t move. She can’t reply. His head whips round in a frenzy to find her, but all she can do is blink. A numbness seizes her thoughts. Kira? Why so frantic? She’s here.
Hello.
‘Kira!’ Callum calls, high and scratched with relief. He breaks into a jog, crossing the space between them, but all she can do is stare. Hello, hello, the voice whispers. You’re more than a child. ‘What happened?’
Grabbing her shoulders, he searches her face. Kira says nothing, does nothing, thinks nothing. Everything is slow, sluggish, slothful. Sentient to unreachable, second by dizzying second. ‘Where…’ She works her mouth. It feels as foreign as her very self. Focusing on his expectant face, she tries to think. ‘Where did you go?’
Expectation morphs into confusion. ‘What do you mean?’ He releases her. ‘Where did you go?’
Kira’s mind shuffles clear. They will not find each other. They will be forced apart. Whiteland isn’t just playing with her; it’s playing with them both.
‘Okay.’ Kira shivers, pulling up her collar. ‘So they tricked us, again. Whoever they are, they—what are you doing?’
Slowly rotating, Callum doesn’t answer. His concentration is analytic, as if every identical tree, every laden-down branch, every patch of powdered ground can help. An exasperated mother, Kira sighs. ‘Callum, this is not the time to keep quiet.’
He holds up a finger. ‘Bear with.’
Stopping his circle, he peers at the snow. A moment passes. Two. Three. Toeing the snow, Kira twists her lips. ‘Callum, the forest will get in again.’ He strides off. She throws up her hands. ‘Callum!’
‘Look.’ Crouching, he gestures to the ground. ‘Right here. Look.’
Three seconds is enough. Kira catches him up and looks away. The footprints are dizzying, heat and cold colliding like the Hadron inside her. She clenches her fists, enough to strain hot. The games are too much.
‘Kira.’ Callum comes to stand in front of her, concern trying to smooth itself certain. ‘It’s okay. At the end of the day, it’ll only make us more careful.’
Kira wraps her arms around her torso. ‘Will it?’ She bows her head. ‘We say that, but we still get caught. When you were shouting, I couldn’t move.’ She looks up at him, open, raw. ‘I couldn’t speak. I saw you and didn’t care.’
‘Kira.’ Callum lifts a hand and hesitates. ‘Okay.’ He lowers it. ‘Agh. Ah, I just…we’re okay. It had us for a minute, but we’re all right, and that’s what I want to believe.’ He scrubs a hand over his head, ferociously rubbing his face. ‘I—we’re—’ He drops his hand. ‘We’re okay. Let’s go with that. I guess we just have a lot to learn.’
Kira flashes her eyebrows. ‘Clearly.’ Uneasily, she glances back. A metre or two behind her, their footprints diverg
e. One path left, and one to the right. ‘I was so sure I was alert.’ She looks away again. ‘I wasn’t numb; I was thinking the whole time. It’s this place.’ She waves a hand. ‘It’s not stopping at switching us off. It’s thinking for us, moving for us. We split up without even realising, and I thought I heard…’
She resists looking round. Why is she such a glutton for punishment? ‘How do you walk, when you’re walking with someone, in an entirely different direction? How do you not realise, unless you’re so drunk you don’t know your own name? At no point have we considered splitting up, but we did.’ She shivers. Her body stays tensed. Muscles that shouldn’t be taut are so tight they almost cramp. ‘We really need a plan.’
‘Agreed.’ Callum retrieves the water, takes a drink, and passes it to Kira. ‘Pretend this is liquid courage.’
She does.
‘So, this plan of ours.’ Callum squats, scraping snow from the ground. ‘Beyond finding people, I have no idea.’
He squishes the snow into the bottle. Crouching, Kira gathers a handful. Glove-fluffy water. Yum.
‘For now, I think that’s all we can do.’ She squishes the snow and rubs the bottle. Fairly inefficient, but it’s all they’ve got. ‘Look for signs of life. There must be people here.’
Callum packs the bottle back in his pocket. ‘That woman last night was people-y.’
She’d rather not think about that. ‘Very true.’ She pushes it firmly from her mind and locks the cabin door. ‘So, there must be people. I guess we look for footprints, fires. Remnants of camps?’ She huffs with a wry ridicule of herself, of this, of all of this. ‘I’m going for a snowy, old Wild West, in case you hadn’t guessed.’
Callum turns down the corners of his mouth. ‘Sounds right. So we cowboy along, hope to find people, and what? Explain ourselves?’
Kira turns down the corners of her mouth. ‘Sounds right.’ She meets his eyes. For a moment, it’s nice. ‘And then?’
‘Beg for food. Trade for food. Sell our souls for food.’ Callum sighs gustily. The little moment snaps. ‘Give them outside junk in return for roasted squirrel.’
Kira’s stomach squirms. ‘Lovely. Apart from that, and explaining ourselves, we should ask about that symbol. You know.’ She traces the sketchy tree in the air. ‘It may mean something, it may mean nothing, but at least asking makes us seem a little less passive.’
Callum nods. ‘Less, “Hello, strange world, we’re entitled to your help.”’
‘Or accept your hindrance.’
‘Precisely.’
‘Okay.’ Kira mirrors his gusty sigh. ‘So, we have a plan. Ish. It feels marginally less…’ A flutter of white drifts down to her glove. ‘…Oh.’
For a moment, they stare. Star-shaped, hand-sized, and gracefully intricate, the snowflake settles on the wool.
Callum tilts his head at it. ‘Do snowflakes here not melt?’
Kira smiles. It’s the antithesis of everything since the birds. The plan-ish makes things marginally better, and maybe this is hope.
Tipping her head back, she squints at the sky. A wisping mist trickles over the treetops, too thin to be masking snow. ‘Hey, Callum?’ Kira lets her eyes fall back to him. ‘Can snow come from mist, or—oh, my God.’
She stiffens. Callum wheels around. ‘What?’
A man stands a few trees ahead, still and looking their way.
Kira’s stomach drops. Her heart quails. Slipping past her ribs to hide above her hips, it rejects one beat, and skitters through another. Against the snow, the man is stark, conspicuous by his humanity. Dark, woollen clothes hang bulky from his body. A thick-stitched hat fits tight on his head. His hair is grey, his beard a bristle, tangling around his face. His gloved hands rest on two thin poles, and his feet, encased in hulking boots, are strapped to long, wooden skis.
Kira’s heart tiptoes from hiding. He doesn’t look a threat: a bag of rough-hewn hide by his side, two wooden snowshoes strapped to his back. Still, though, he watches; and still he doesn’t move.
‘Who are you?’ she calls. Her voice, at least, sounds brave. She resists the urge to slip her hand in the crook of Callum’s arm. Will the man understand? They might speak Elvish here, or Dothraki.
But the voices spoke English. The woman in the cabin did, too.
‘Doesn’t matter.’ Abruptly, the man tilts his head back. ‘We need to go.’ He jabs a pole at the sky. His voice is a grumble, verging on a growl. ‘Now. The mist is coming.’
The mist is coming. Sharply, Kira looks up. She’d seen it through the branches, but she’d thought it normal. Now it’s thicker. Now it’s crawling. Now it’s almost upon them.
‘We?’ Callum sounds like he can’t believe what he’s hearing. ‘You want us to come with you?’
Kira grabs his arm. ‘Callum,’ she hisses. The mist’s approach is clammy.
Stamping his skis, the skier turns himself around. ‘If you want to live,’ he says gruffly. ‘Good luck avoiding the mist on your own.’
Ramming his ski poles into the ground, he heaves himself away.
Cold ghosts across Kira’s cheek. Her heart crashes. She jerks her head around. Everything behind is white. Everything above is invisible. A single damp tendril creeps ahead to brush her skin, and her crashing heart becomes an orchestra, a band. The clashing of cymbals, the whine of violins. The mist is coming, and fast.
‘Let’s go.’ Kira tugs on Callum’s arm. He sticks in the ground, and she whirls around. ‘What are you doing? Let’s go!’
‘Kira.’ Glancing over his shoulder, Callum lowers his voice. ‘Wait. Just wait. We have no idea who he is. We have no idea where he’s going. He could lead us somewhere worse, somewhere with a whole lot more to worry about.’
‘Than what?’ Kira throws out her arms. ‘The mist?’ She can hardly hear herself for the cymbals, the violins, the drums. ‘Callum, he said if we want to live—’
A shrill shriek echoes in the distance. Callum’s eyes stretch and snap to hers. ‘Okay. We need to go.’
The skier merely grunts when they catch him up. He’s skiing away as fast as he can, flying toward a rearing slope, but with the snowshoes on his back and the bag at his side, the strain on his face is plain. At a second shriek, he skids to a halt. Unbuckling his smooth-worn skis, he slings them over his shoulder and runs.
A howl rips the trees as they hit the hefty slope. Kira flings a look back: the mist is keeping pace, snaking up around their heels, and with an urgent crash of guttural fear, she pushes faster, faster. Callum on her right, the skier on her left. They run and gasp with all they have.
And still the mist creeps on.
Not again. She can think nothing else, incredulous, frantic. It came so fast, too fast for reason. It rids the air of oxygen. It freezes her skin and scrapes her throat, and as they slip on pine needles, sinking in the snow, her peripheral vision turns white. Up, up—
‘There!’ the skier barks.
At the top of the slope, there’s hope. It drops to a bowl-bottomed village, uneven openings huddled round the edges and a bonfire blazing in the centre. Kira’s mind hiccups, gallops: hope. ‘We need to get inside,’ the skier shouts. ‘Head for—’
A raucous howl drowns out the rest. The skier doesn’t hesitate, careering down the slope. With a quick glance at Callum, Kira skids after him, hurtling into a sprint. Between two caves and onto the flat, past the fire and on. The village looked small on high, but no. Workshops abandoned, lesser fires quenched. Liquid spilled, the smell of hearty cooking, animal droppings, life.
‘Inside.’ The skier herds them through two heavy curtains, chopped and reeking of the wild. Kira’s legs shake. She staggers after Callum. The curtains swing shut, catching her rear. Her legs tweak and fold. She sinks to the floor. Crumbly, earthen, the whump of Callum’s knees. Wrapped by the dark, there’s nothing.
Not nothing. A candle wicks on in a corner. A shadow beside it lifts a finger to its lips. A shape in its other hand drops to the floor, softly snuffed by the rock. B
reathing in gulps, Callum shuddering beside her, Kira grips her throbbing legs and tries to quiet her lungs.
The air inside the cave grows cold. Their curling breaths puff up in the dark. No one moves. Callum’s arm is warm against hers, the scrape of their coats too loud. Outside, the shrieks and howls give way to a thump.
Colder. Colder. Heavy footsteps cross the clearing, a deadweight body slamming into the ground. The shadow by the candle quickly blows it out.
Colder. The thump shakes the ground, entwined with coarse, scraping breaths. Kira digs her gloved fingers into her thighs. This time, they’re actually done for. The rasp is too close, a wet gurgle of breath. She can picture the spit at its lips. Monsters, and girls who go looking for them; they should have listened to Lena. The mist before was a warning. Dammit, they should have listened.
But then she’d be sat on the hotel sofa, talking to police with her limited French, trying to leave out the parts of this that make her sound insane. She’d know her family were here. She’d know she could have followed. Maybe she’s not the best of help, but at least she’s doing something.
Mum. Dad. Romy.
Thump.
Mum. Dad. Romy.
Thump.
Kira hugs her legs. The cold ground shudders. If she’d stayed out of danger, that choice would have ended up feeling just as cursed.
The thumping stops.
Kira’s mind hiccups. Oh, no. Oh, no, oh, no. The coarse breath inhales, a long, throaty rattle. They really are done for. It’s right outside. The mist will drift in, damp on her face, and the beast, whatever it is, will make them Minpins until they—
With a last, rumbling thud, a sweeping over snow, the shadow, phantom, monster thumps away.
A second. A minute. An hour. Forever. Kira doesn’t breathe until she absolutely has to. Soon, the beast’s breaths merge with the blood in her ears. Soon, as the air starts to thaw, it’s gone.
The candle fluuts alive in the corner. The skier releases a long, steady breath. ‘Parasites,’ he mutters above her, running his fingers along a ledge.
Callum offers her an unstable hand. ‘Thanks.’ Offering him a dim smile, Kira gets cautiously to her feet. In a swinging, swaddled holder, another flame flits to life, and with the taper flickering between his fingers, the skier holds it to four, five wicks until a ragged room takes shape.
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