“Fuck off,” came two words from the darkness.
So Calix ducked his head and followed Barrick, each step shifting. There was a reason they didn’t work at night; sure it was cold, but more than that, it was dangerous, with footing unsure. He heard Walker’s faint groans as he lifted himself out behind him.
In his ear, Barrick’s comm clicked, but there was only heavy breathing.
“Something, Barrick?”
“Shrinkage. Pointy nipples. Retinas freezing. You name it.”
“This is nothing,” said Walker. “Back down there, that was cold.”
“What was down there?” asked Barrick.
“Darkness, a cavernous feeling. Scaffolding descending into darkness. Sense of... strangeness. There was something like a watchtower where that dead guy was, with consoles. No chance to check everything out.”
“What happened, just before Caia knocked you out?”
“The dead guy stopped talking. He was talking about extracting the information, whatever that was. ‘I’ve lost everything,’ he said. ‘But what is my insignificant loss compared to humanity’s?’” There was silence for a few beats as Walker remembered the next event. Or caught his breath. “Then the room started to descend. Caia had set something in motion. We were going down. And then she put me out.”
“Bitch,” said Calix.
“Double-bitch,” said Barrick. “There’s a hoverbike missing.”
Flying
Dawn.
Light the quality of dull orange, a neon bulb turned to a wall that was expected to light the whole room. Instead accentuating areas of darkness.
Calix lowered his head into the wind and forged on, the gentle re-powering of the electric clouds going on to his left. The day alive again. For what it was worth.
But if felt different. With a handful of aspirin coursing through his veins, he was greeting the day with a vague sense of numbness he’d only ever felt before in moments that moonshine had tipped him over into memory-loss territory. He pulled his scarf tighter around his cheeks for the thousandth time, the touch of his glove on his cheek barely registering. Maybe cold. More likely the aspirin – the pain in his ribs was almost none-existent.
As the sand rushed past, so did his thoughts. Annora one moment: torn from him – or so it felt – flashes of her face as she saved him a piece of pie in the canteen with a smile and a wink; or crying as the chairs fell on her that time in the storage off Rec; or the times they avoided each other through the cloud of talc more recently on the crawler. A glance, just as the other looked away. So synced they’d synced their reticence.
Calix wanted to stop, shake his head, and bury it. But Annora... missing – it confused him and burned in his gut.
Can’t this go any quicker?
And the next moment: every deceitful grin that Caia had ever turned his way pulsed as his heart pumped blood through his muscles, tightening them. Every few minutes he had to consciously relax his jaw, only to tense again as his thoughts moved on. Looking, as he was sure Walker must be doing right now, for some clue of this treachery. Searching for reason. Out here, on the equalising sand, where even now after a couple hours of riding, the horizon was as flat as anyone’s prospects in this dystopia. What was there to be gained from her treachery? Who could be responsible?
The only logical sign pointed to Kirillion and whatever he was hiding. Kirillion the optimist. The philosopher. How could he talk of hope and love and the meaning of life, while throwing boys to their death?
With every passing grain he was closer to his confrontation. He could barely imagine Kirillion’s face. A field of red formed whenever he tried to conjure the words he would say when he turned up, the missing hoverbike no doubt still missing, going chest-to-chest with the white-bearded fuck. Oh he had grown up now. He’d been a wiry, and lanky, boy. Tall enough since he was sixteen to match Kirillion. But Kirillion had the weight on him, even if he had never thrown it about much. Calix would ask about the hoverbike, no longer punching above his weight. He’d ask the others about the hoverbike – they wouldn’t keep his secret. “Please be there,” he thought. He couldn’t rid the nagging feeling that they’d get to Sanctum only to find there was nothing to find. Nothing at all! That not only was Caia’s hoverbike nowhere to be seen, that Sanctum itself had dissolved like powdered sand under piss.
The hoverbike won’t be there.
Too easy.
Today was a day that had already changed everything.
He saw it to his left; Barrick racing along beside him, head bowed. He saw it in the gusts they left in their wake, and in the motion blur he could have previously only imagined, or seen in the films of the past, of racing cars on solid ground accelerating around corners. He felt it between his legs; a gentle thrum that vibrated through his body to his fingertips. Amazed even now how he was disconnected, for the first time in his life, from this lifeless planet. That was what was different.
Despite his worries, something else he could barely keep from his cluttered mind was the sense of freedom. The power of this movement was monumental. They were never taking it away from him. For the first time in his life he saw something other than Agri-farming or crawling in his future. He saw... nothing. And in that: freedom.
Wind, blasting past his covered ears. Annora, twisting him upside-down. Caia, turning him inside-out. Kirillion, reddening his blood. The forgivingly flat sand parting before them, cast aside as contemptuously as he’d always dreamed.
Wind. Annora. Caia. Kirillion. Sand.
Freedom.
Barrick
Barrick’s voice, even gruffer when muffled, broke the monotony of sand. “Ahead, Cal. Starting to bank.”
Calix felt the side of the hoverbike tilt on his right and the brush of sand on his boot as it ploughed into the rising dune.
“Slow down, let’s see how it handles. The last thing you want to do is fuck this thing up, Calix.”
His toes dipped into the sand again. It was like touching the dead. He slowed down; visions of overturning playing through his mind, and he almost gave the hoverbike a reassuring tap on the side, a sort of apology. Look after me and I’ll look after you, he thought. In blind haste he had forgotten how much he needed the hoverbike. “I’m slowing,” he said.
“How much power you got?”
“Fifty-eight percent. You?”
“Near enough the same. Hold up a minute.”
Calix turned his head: Barrick was slowing to a stop. “What is it?” he said, easing off. As he slowed, the hoverbike noticeably dropped until it was possible to lower his feet to the ground again. Like pushing on air.
“The sun.” Barrick was too far away to hear naturally, or be read by his expression, (what could be seen through his goggles). His voice, now the air no longer rushed, was clearer over the comm. “Before it gets too choppy, we should think about hoisting the sails.”
“Hoisting the sails?”
“An old sailing term. Spreading our wings, Calix, while we can.”
“We don’t have time for that.”
“They’re solid. We can move at the same time.”
“They’ll slow us down.”
“Better than running out of juice and having to wait for it to recharge. Think!”
“Alright,” he conceded, imagining the frustration of pitching up. Back at the crawler, the ‘wings’ had withdrawn as elegantly as they had unfolded. The four of them had stood in silence; partly in awe, partly with tiredness. They hadn’t slept. Only discussed possible options. And now that their party was splitting into two, weariness and odd depression tempered their collective anger. As the sails re-entered, as the engines were turned on, as the hoverbikes jumped two feet off the ground and Calix and Barrick swung their bodies into the seats, and despite everything that had happened, Calix could feel the excitement among them as they tried out this technology for the first time. For Calix, the excitement soon disappeared. It was a machine. It was simply a means to an end.
Back in the
present, he pressed the button that unfurled the sails. It was a means to an end all right. An end he could now define himself.
Slowly, the hoverbike transformed back into a dragonfly.
“May not be for long anyway,” said Barrick. “Breaker’s Ridge should be coming up on the left soon and that area is always inconsistent. The way the wind moves, taking the sand with it. We’ll have to be careful.”
“Is there another button to make this thing fly?”
“It’s called the throttle, Cal.”
Calix grinned. Barrick could be an ass but he was glad he was here. And he’d stopped calling him ‘kid’.
“When we start moving the wings will move up forty-five degrees, if this hologram is accurate,” said Barrick.
“You have a hologram?”
“Swipe your hand in front of the screen.”
Calix did so. A hologram of the hoverbike appeared, green and revolving, approximately four inches wide. The wings spread, each moving into a forty-five degree angle. “This just gets better and better,” he said quietly.
“You know it. I ain’t ever giving up this toy.”
Calix twisted the handle and the hoverbike moved on, rising into the air, and once more Calix felt that rush of liberty. Of independence. The sand parted as they surged, weaving between the higher dunes, snaking in the troughs and kicking up sand. Barrick took the lead and Calix followed, trusting in his knowledge of the landmarks. Every time they passed a boulder or a hill, whenever rock poked up from the ground exposed to the wind, Calix tried to record its shape in his mind. A moment passed where he realised he had been doing it subconsciously, preparing for his time on the sands. And now he did it consciously, seeking the memorable landmarks that flew past. “Is there a trick to this?” he asked. “Memorising? It all looks the same.”
There was a muffled laugh before Barrick answered. “You could try carving your initials into the stone.”
“No-one ever heard of setting up a sign?”
“Maybe you can get around to that one day.”
“I’m going to back off some more. The cloud you’re making is getting in my face.”
“When it flattens out we can go side-by-side again.”
“You almost do look like you’re flying,” said Calix. The hoverbike was moving more slowly, but its charge was rising; it was already back up to sixty-percent. From horizon to horizon the clouds had moved from grey to yellow and somewhere up there the sun was now at full height.
***
Navigating the dunes was difficult. Try to head up a bank and the nose, as much as it wanted to rise, would instead forge onwards, cutting a tunnel through which the hoverbike could soon be buried as the sides collapsed. A number of times, Calix and Barrick had to veer off course at the base of one of these tall dunes until a way around could be found; until solid ground made a rare appearance or the dune naturally plateaued. And when it did; when the sand went flat – swept smooth by the ever-shifting convection current – there was fun to be had. Giving each other distance, with the throttle maxed until they could hear the gentle roar of the thrust behind them, they shot across the desert like twin stones across water, great explosions of dust interluding the constant wake of sand, sometimes sixty feet high.
At Stone Rose they stopped. It was an outcrop that arrowed from the sand, and depending on the sand levels it could be relatively flat, or already forty-degrees at the base. They eased the bikes up the slope and came to a rest about half-way up. They walked to the ridge at the top. You couldn’t quite see Sanctum from here, but Stone Rose was a marker that not only pointed a wanderer in the right direction, but also said they were a day away. Of course, that was on foot.
“An hour, maybe two,” said Barrick. He stared out towards the horizon, water bottle in hand, and casually stretched his spine.
Calix walked up beside him, then sat down. The painkillers had worn off and the ride had taken a gradually severe hit on his sides. To the point they now burned. He clamped his right hand to his rib with his left upper-arm, and tried not to groan too much.
“Drink up.”
Calix grunted. He lifted the goggles from his eyes, carefully, so no sand would fall in them. Immediately, sweat threatened to drip past his eyebrows. He wiped a gloved hand across his forehead and left behind a red dash to soak up the moisture.
The sun – Calix laughed – was so bright all he could do was squint and stare at Barrick’s dull excuse of a shadow.
“What’s so funny?”
“We still say the sun is bright. Or I’m blinded by the sun.”
“We still say a lot of things. You should take another aspirin.”
“Walker said not to take too many.”
“Don’t want you keeling over out there.”
Calix looked ‘out there’. Without the goggles, and at the height of day with the glow of the sun marking the clouds directly above, the sand was almost blood. “Hard to believe people travel across it on foot.”
“Well they do.”
“We’ve not seen anyone.”
“No,” Barrick took a sip. “No we haven’t.” His shadow shifted, and shrunk, as he sat down beside Calix. “We’re dying, Cal.”
“Everyone’s dying. What’s new?”
Barrick laughed. “We. Humanity. Whatever. Not long ago, we wouldn’t have been able to make this trip without bumping into five, six... ten other groups.”
“Wanderers?”
“Wanderers... that’s just a name. Used to be a way of life. Shit. This rock: this was a meeting point. You could look out there,” and he gestured with his water bottle, “and you’d see little dots spread out, going left-to-right or right-to-left, or just plain heading for Sanctum.”
“What happened?”
Barrick shrugged. “It’s a hard life. Living that way.”
“I bet.”
“But not impossible. People would walk, sure. But in convoys. And with caravans. But not everything lasts forever. Once the caravans became unfixable, that spelled the end.”
“Caravans? Like crawlers?”
“Similar – like tanks – but a lot smaller, and slower. Each settlement back then had its own recalibration station so you could reset the internal gyros, in case it had gone awry. It’s amazing, just that one little thing meant that the settlements kept communicating, to make sure their own telemetry was spot on.”
Calix thought of Galen in the salvage yard, sitting inside the engine hood of the crawler, recalibrating their own internal gyro to Sanctum’s internal landmarks. Should that ever fail it would be pure experience and luck that would get them home. Like now. “Was that your life then? Before Sanctum?”
“No. I just... appreciate what it meant to live that life.”
Calix nodded.
Barrick removed his goggles and creased his forehead. Cracked his neck. A gust of wind blew his hair back from his hairline, revealing a scar.
Calix frowned.
“Something you want to ask?”
“No,” said Calix, shaking his head. “Just realised I don’t really know anything about you.” He considered his next comment, but figured Barrick would take it for tongue-in-cheek. “You could be another Caia for all I know.”
“Low blow, kid.”
“Joking.”
Barrick ‘hmmed’.
“Or not. You’re part of this whole conspiracy.”
“I’m just a kid from the north. I’d eat, sleep and fuck – until I got this exciting assignment. And now my fuck is gone too.” Barrick laughed. “As if you didn’t know,” he added when Calix stared at him with eyes wide.
“I... You hid it well.”
“Yeah, well. And now yours is gone too.”
He grit his teeth – why, whenever some connection is being made does Barrick have to push it? he thought. He moved his leg to stand.
“Hold it.”
“She’s not some fuck.”
“Because you haven’t even fucked her yet.” As soon as the words were
out of Barrick’s mouth, his arm was reaching out to Calix’s rising shoulder. “I’m sorry. Shit spews. You know me by now.”
Calix looked at the hand on his shoulder, and threw it off. “That shit’s gonna get you in trouble.”
“Once or twice,” smiled Barrick.
“Just when I think I can trust you.”
“Hey... Cal. I may spew shit but at least I’m honest. Look...” he pointed at Calix’s water bottle. “Have you had that aspirin yet?”
Calix reached for the bottle, popped the lid and swallowed a couple of tablets. “Thanks for the reminder.”
“Okay. Five minutes until that kicks in. In the meantime, I’ll tell you a little story.”
“Oh good, story-time,” said Calix, leaning back, feeling the grit in the ends of his gloves against his fingertips as he spread them across the rock.
“I was born in the north. It was cold, colder than this. We had water at least. Easily accessible, clean, water. In the months it wasn’t frozen over. I was one of three boys – the oldest. And I had a mother and a father. We were the lucky ones – there were so many orphans. Always, new orphans, coming in. Father used to wonder about that, all those ‘Irresponsible Deviants’. And us, not really knowing what that meant.
“Well, the merchants – gradually they stopped coming. Not all at once, of course. Just over time. Their visits became more and more infrequent. At the same time, our reliance on them grew. The whole settlement that was. The orphans had grown. People had as people do, made more people. We may have had plenty of water but we were only a small dome, and probably not the best farmers. When I was a baby, or a little older probably, the crop was just enough. But as I got older, and my brothers got older, and we kept on taking more and more people in, the crop wasn’t enough anymore. We would barter for extra food but soon that wasn’t enough either.
“People began to starve.
“I would look around me. Heck, I only needed to look as far as my own family. Sam, my youngest brother. El, my other brother. They got thinner, and thinner. There were days I thought my ribs would start poking out of my skin. Like you,” Barrick laughed. “But instead, we just felt tired. It was a weird kind of illness – everyone, everywhere, just sort of, lying there, slumped against this or that, eyes half open. Moving as little as possible to conserve what little energy we had. People would faint. Others would have seizures while everyone just watched.”
Neon Sands Trilogy Boxset: The Neon Series Season One Page 16