by Jay Aspen
‘They got all your chestnut trees as well?’ It wasn’t her own loss, but Jac felt the common bond the outlanders shared, that deep connection with the land. Outrage for a whole swathe of life-force and precious food-supply destroyed and poisoned.
Hennek seemed to have found a way of coming to terms with the devastation. ‘They got everything except a small stand of trees on the other side of the hill. But, being realistic, it’s why we all keep a rotation of insurance saplings. There’s always someone going to need a replanting.’
‘Same in our catchment as well.’
Maybe when I’m as old as he is, I’ll be able to be philosophical about it...
Fin looked around. ‘Where’s Brennan?’
Hennek looked sad and a little ashamed. ‘He said he’d take on the debt. Didn’t think Sasha or I would survive three years of six/twelve. He’s indentured to a food-packing factory in the central agri-zone.’
‘How bad are conditions?’
‘Insolvency hostel. Twenty to a room according to his last message.’
‘How’s he coping?’
‘I worried about him at first. He seemed so depressed. Now he says he’s met a nice girl and if they both survive the sentence he’ll bring her here and raise a family.’ Hennek held out a rather scratched handset. ‘I know I should delete it but when it’s your only reminder of your only son, it’s hard to let go. They’re sharing a smuggled-in unregistered between five, so he can’t contact us very often.’
He flipped his handset link to the wall screen and replayed a video message from a pale young man in grey coveralls with a heavy black performance monitor clamped to his wrist. Brennan must have found a blind spot in the surveillance from the rows of overhead cameras scanning the long grey food-packing shed.
Bel watched in silence, transfixed by the images. Jac sensed something in her past connecting painfully with debt-slavery. She drew the others’ attention away to give Bel some space.
‘No wonder people go under the wire rather than face three years in a place like that.’
Fin tried to offer reassurance. ‘Brennan will make it I’m sure, but most people aren’t as strong as he is. You say more people are coming north?’
Hennek nodded. ‘Double the number from last year. Thirty a month. With five other places they could use instead of us. They don’t have your skill at absconding with a staz jeep though.’ His eyebrows registered another amused twitch. Fin gave him her best superior smile.
‘Hennek, I do believe you’re envious of our unusual acquisition. Anywhere further on we can get another fill-up?’
‘No. Too far north for registered holdings and the unregistered ones deliberately make their access roads difficult––and unfriendly. This recharge should get you to the jetstream barrier though. You’ll have to cross the barrier on foot anyway with all the roads cut by freeze-thaw.’
Jac felt the now-familiar pangs of anxiety as another unknown presented itself. ‘Hennek, what do I need to know about the barrier? My grandfather mentioned it but it seemed so far north I never took much interest.’
Hennek scrolled the wall screen archives to a video map showing the waves of the barrier marked as a series of blue and white broken lines curving across the north of the country. ‘The high winds of the jetstream used to form a tight band around the polar region separating cold Arctic air from warmer southern air. When the ice caps started melting the jetstream destabilized and developed deep polar vortex waves that kept one country in freezing polar air while places further round the same latitude were in a band of torrential rain. And further round still, it would be really warm.’ He keyed the animation as he spoke.
‘Even at the start of the chaos it was beginning to shift, but of course no one took much notice at the time. It would get stuck for a whole season so you never knew if winter would be frozen solid, constant flooding, or warm and sticky.’
Jac frowned. ‘It doesn’t do that now. What happened?’
Hennek waited for the animation to complete. ‘That’s where it is now. After a few years when the disrupted air masses made the arctic start warming rapidly, the jetstream finally got permanently stuck in one place and at least now it’s fairly predictable. The waves of it start a few hours from here. It’s a sudden change, with everything to the north frozen in winter.’
Fin said, ‘I don’t think the pack ice will have melted yet so travel shouldn’t be too difficult. Once the ice breaks up the fjords are impassable for a few weeks until there’s enough open water to travel by boat. If you can find one. Not many islanders––settled refugees––have boats. Safer to walk across the ice once it forms.’
Hennek scrolled to a detailed diagram of the barrier waves. ‘Be careful crossing the pass. The barrier also developed vertical waves that create sudden gusts of intense winds, especially over the hills.’
Fin shrugged. ‘At least it deters the military from sending planes or drones anywhere near it. Knocks them out of the sky.’ She checked the time. ‘Jac, if you’ve had enough to eat, you can come with me for a few minutes.’
Jac made no protest as she stood up to leave but her disappointment must have showed on her face. Hennek followed her to the door and pushed a hastily-constructed leaf wrap of spiced meat and fried potatoes into her hand with a conspiratorial grin.
‘Fin’s a brilliant teacher but she can be a bit autocratic.’
‘So it’s not just me that’s noticed then? Thanks for the second helping, anyhow.’
‘Make sure you’ve finished it by the time you get where you’re going.’ Hennek closed the door behind her as she stepped outside. Fin called back without turning round.
‘You’ll be sorry you ate that before we’re done.’
Jac suddenly remembered the waves of nausea washing through her in the snake venom exercise and hastily stuffed the offending wrap into her pocket, trying not to imagine what state it would be in by the time she got round to actually eating it.
Fin paused to scoop several handfuls of soil from the barren ground into a plastic bag and set off uphill again.
Jac followed, aligning her focus with her mentor’s searching as she had before but this time there was no clear image, only a tangled mass of white filaments that seemed to fill the space around her. They were thin and sickly at first, growing denser and stronger as she and Fin walked further through the bare trees.
23
Jac watched as Fin stopped in a wide flat clearing and knelt on the bare ground, her hands pressed to the earth. Not knowing what else to do, she followed suit.
‘Fin, am I allowed to actually know what we’re doing?’
‘Looking for mycorrhiza. I need to find a spot with less defoliant residue so there are still enough healthy living strands to work on. This is good. If we clear this area first, it’s big enough that Hennek’s replanting next week should see them through at least till winter.’ Fin stood up, holding out the bag of collected soil.
Jac scrambled to her feet again. ‘Okay, I’ve heard of mycoremediation. We tried it when our neighbours got poison-sprayed a couple of years ago, next valley to our farm. It does help but it takes months to really get things back healthy again. How am I supposed to do it in ten minutes while the jeep fills?’
‘Absorb the poison through your palms and then neutralize it. You know how to do it now. Then you connect with fungus filaments in the soil and strengthen the catalyst you find there.’ Fin emptied half the bag’s contents into Jac’s cupped hands, taking the rest herself. ‘That’s why I took this from nearer the house where it got the heaviest dose.’
Jac prepared to go into lieth-focus, then looked at the yellowish, poison-laced soil in her hands and hesitated. The smell and feel of it was all wrong somehow.
‘Is this going to hurt?’
‘Probably.’
Deciding it might be better to just go for it rather than think about it too much, Jac squeezed the damp soil to increase contact with her palms and focused on the sour, acrid flow of defol
iant molecules leaching into her skin. It wasn’t as painful as the snake venom but there was something rank and unnatural about it. Nausea filled her whole body as if even her limbs were trying to reject the stuff. She wanted desperately to pull away but somehow Fin’s dominating presence prevented her.
To her surprise the transmutation came suddenly, as if the memory of the process was already habit at a molecular level, even with the difference in the chemistry she was taking in. She sensed an echoing frisson of surprise from Fin, alerting her to follow her mentor’s lead and throw away the soil in her hands.
Fin caught her arm as the movement threw her off balance, helping her kneel on the ground again without falling, issuing instructions as she did so.
‘Now connect with the mycorrhiza in the soil and strengthen the catalyst they already have.’
Jac clawed her fingers into the crumbling soil, sensing the connection when her hands met the white tangle of mycorrhizal strands. This time her body-awareness recognized the catalyst they contained, similar to her own but subtly different. She closed her eyes and tried to relax enough to let her own antidote spread outward. It was difficult at first but once the movement started she found her awareness flowing into the millions of tiny white filaments running through the earth.
This was a forest voice she’d not heard before and it fascinated her, endless branches dividing out and then reconnecting, joining every tree root to every other... and soon there would be trillions more roots as green plants started to grow again and the white filaments multiplied.
There was so much knowledge here, so much awareness of the whole forest network. Jac’s inquisitive mind flowed into it, longing to follow every strand until she had absorbed every drop of understanding...
It took her a few moments to notice that Fin was gripping her arms, pulling her hands out of the soil, wrenching her awareness from dark tunnels under the tree roots, already deep into the next forested valley. She became aware that she felt dizzy and weak and hadn’t even heard Fin’s warnings.
‘Jac! Enough! Don’t try too much too soon.’
Jac reluctantly allowed herself to be drawn back from that alluring darkness, alive with new knowledge and the promise of more to come. As she returned to base awareness she suddenly felt exhausted, stretching out on her back on the naked earth, fighting down the waves of nausea. She stared at the sky beyond the bare branches above.
‘That’s it?’ She was glad Hennek’s food-wrap was still in her pocket and not her stomach.
Fin was watching her anxiously. ‘Thought I’d lost you for a moment there. Yes. That’s it. The mycorrhizal strands form a continuous underground web so the new information will spread fast.’
‘Yes, I know.’ Jac spoke dreamily, not quite fully back in the present or on the surface. ‘I was in there. It went on forever and it knew everything.’
‘We’ll follow that insight next time, when you’ve had a chance to recover and the ground isn’t poisoned.’ Fin reached out a hand and pulled Jac to her feet, slipping an arm round her back to support her as they walked back down the hill. Jac’s mind was racing, thinking back to the toxic, sanitizer-blighted land near her home.
‘If only I’d known about that before! We could have fixed so much of it... Why didn’t my grandfather tell me about it? He must have known.’
Fin spoke slowly, as if she was still working out the answer to that one. ‘I only know four people who can do it and it usually needs all of us together to make that kind of instant transformation. Bel is just starting to learn but she’s in no shape for additional nightmares right now after what happened with Greg.’ Fin stopped for a moment, letting Jac lean against a tree and catch her breath. ‘Do you understand what I’m telling you?’
‘Get ready for more nightmares?’
‘Apart from that. It means you’ve only just learned this and you already have the power of three adepts. Your grandfather’s training must have been very intensive after you went to live with him?’
‘I suppose, yes... for me it was just part of being a little kid living out in the wilds. We used to wander through the forest for hours collecting plants and then we’d sit together in the sun, drawing pictures of them and making up all kinds of kid-stories about the elves we imagined as the life-force of the plant. How they lived, what they did, what their powers were. And gradually the forest grew into colour and detail for me, alive with meaning and relationships... I loved every minute of it.’ Jac smiled at the memory of home and found it had wiped away the nausea.
When Fin spoke again she sounded pensive. ‘Children are so open to these communication channels––until they have it trained out of them to make them compliant components of the workforce. Imagine if all children could have an education like yours? Think of what we could achieve with a synthesis of nano-tech added to the awareness-skills of indigenous shamans?’
Jac didn’t reply but her hand went instinctively to the scar on her scalp where Fin had taken out her neural implant. The thing had helped her initially, inducing heightened awareness of the subtle signals in the forest––but Fin had been right about it eventually holding her back. Her truthseer insights had become far more vivid since she’d been free of it.
They walked to the farmhouse in silence. Back in the kitchen Fin was her usual understated self once more as she stood at the sink washing the last of the contaminated soil off her hands.
‘Hennek, I think you could replant the south clearing next week, then work your way outwards from there.’
He stared at her, shocked. ‘Replant? But there’s only two of you––’
Fin shrugged and to Jac’s great embarrassment, nodded towards her. Hennek enveloped Jac in an emotional hug, tears pouring down his lined face, and then gave Fin the same treatment before she could escape.
Sasha appeared in the doorway, breathless. ‘I saw them coming over the hill!’
She scurried to the table, hastily removing evidence of several people eating in their kitchen. Fin extricated herself from Hennek’s grip as the others grabbed their gear and ran outside.
Hennek followed them out and unplugged the extension cable. ‘Use the shortcut on the dirt track. Don’t go back the way you came. I’ll go and wipe your tyre marks.’
He ran to his own jeep and thrust it into action, slewing it round on the soft mud and pushing it hard up the track towards the road. Dirt and dead leaves spewed out behind as the tyres chewed up the surface, erasing marks of the stolen jeep.
Bel drove north on mud and brambles for several minutes, then pulled onto the remains of a narrow road. ‘Fin, do you know where we are?’
‘Turn right and keep going straight.’
Another storm was moving in from the west and the sky darkened. Bel slowed suddenly, pointing to lights ahead. ‘They must have split up and covered all the roads in the area. We’re trapped.’
Fin checked the surviving side mirror. ‘In which case they’ll be behind us as well, so no point going back. At least if they’ve split up there shouldn’t be more than ten of them. Keep an eye out for a good place to stop.’
‘Here?’ Bel swung the jeep over to the side and put one of the front wheels into the remains of the ditch with the body of the vehicle sideways across the road.
Fin got out and looked at the result. ‘Good. Looks like an accident rather than a deliberate roadblock. And we’re back under broadleaf. Plenty of undergrowth, good cover.’
They ran for cover under the dripping trees. Jac looked back in time to see the security transporter squeal to a halt and just avoid a crash. Smith and nine armed guards got out and surrounded the stranded vehicle. When they found it empty they followed the trail of broken undergrowth into the forest.
Fin signalled them to get out of sight. Kit stood behind a broad tree trunk, painfully trying to work out how to draw a bow in spite of his broken ribs.
Fin took it from him. ‘Kit! Be realistic. All you’re likely to achieve is putting a rib through a lung. Or worse.’ She sh
ared his arrows between herself and Bel, then pushed Jac in front of him as the first bullets whined past. ‘Now young lady, I understand you’ve learned something about how to protect your patient, so you’d better get on with it.’
Jac felt the usual clutch of alarm at the thought of a fight. ‘Fin, I’m used to hunting rabbits, but people... it feels different––’
‘Dope your arrows. Then you won’t need a lethal hit. Takes a minute or two to knock them out so bear in mind they might just kill you both while you’re hanging around counting seconds.’ Fin didn’t wait for an answer before signalling Bel to mirror her on the right, then moved out left to circle the advancing enforcers, dodging and weaving between the wet trees like a shadow.
Jac made an effort to control her breathing. It was the first time she’d tried to use the instructions Razz had given her in a real situation. It felt very different from training sessions in the underground station.
Focus on Kit’s need for medic attention.
More shots snicked through the wet leaves. She released her doped arrow, pinning Smith’s hand to a tree as he raised it to signal his men to spread out.
‘Well done. That caused a bit of confusion.’ Kit was standing motionless behind her and she could sense him trying to reassure and calm her. She loosed another arrow and the lead gunman fell with it through his leg.
That was sheer luck. You know you’re aiming not to kill.
The guard was on the ground but still firing at them while the drug seemed to take an age to kick in. There were two more behind him, still moving forward. Jac’s next shot missed altogether and the line of guns was approaching too fast for her to stop them.
Through the confusion of noise and bullets and panic she was aware of Kit drawing his knife and moving from behind her. Then it was a blur of rain and movement as he appeared next to one of the enforcers and they were both struggling on the ground. Kit’s blade flashed once in the rain-soaked shadows and the heaving body went limp on the wet grass.