Between Sea and Sky

by Nicola Penfold

  But Bedrock Terrace stands steady. It’s at the end of the vast space taken up with Edible Uplands, before the land becomes a desolate nothing. Just the pylons stretching out into the distance, taking electricity inland from the solar fields.

  I expected some gated, stilted building for the District Controller’s house. Gilded, like the butterfly cocoons.

  It’s almost the opposite. It’s like the past. The world Mum would talk about occasionally. The world that got flooded and starved.

  There’s an old yellow door, the paint cracked and peeling. I bang on it again and again, but no one comes, and the house starts to seem empty and left behind.

  I’m about to give up when a man appears on the other side of the door – his face against the pane of glass, staring at me, appalled.

  “What are you doing here?” he spurts out, as the door opens.

  My hands automatically go to my hair, to pull it over my face, but it’s still gathered back with Clover’s hair tie. “I need your help,” I say. “I’m from the oyster farm, out in the bay.”

  The man continues to stare, and I think he’s not understanding me. I worry my words aren’t sounding properly. That my voice can’t be heard on land. I open my mouth to try again.

  “Pearl! I know who you are,” the man says.

  I gulp, unsure if this is a good sign or not. “We’re in trouble,” I start, but then I pause, unsure how to carry on, and what’s most important anyway. Sora, on the prison ship, for stealing pollinators she doesn’t even know exist. Nat, alone on our sea farm after a storm. Dad in hospital, and Clover making her own way in to see him. How could I make her do that journey on her own?

  “Are you Ezra Heart?” I ask, because he could actually be anyone. He looks like he’s only just woken up, and his eyes are red and his cheeks saggy.

  The man nods. “One of my officers was here yesterday with some nonsense about stolen pollinators on your farm. I sent them away.”

  “A peacekeeper came,” I say sharply. “They’ve taken Sora to the ship.”

  Ezra tenses and looks at me anew. He holds out his hands. “Sora, on the ship? A peacekeeper? I told my officer to ignore it. That it was nonsense!”

  Anger dislodges inside me and rises up to the surface. Ezra didn’t even bother investigating and yet one of his zealots got a peacekeeper to come anyway. The rules and procedures here are out of control.

  “There are pollinators then?” Ezra says astonished. “Out there on your farm?”

  “Yes,” I say bitterly. “And they’re not stolen. They’re butterflies.”

  “Butterflies? Where on earth did you get them from?” he asks, like he can’t believe we’re having this conversation.

  I shut my eyes. Just for a couple of seconds. To think it all through and put my words in order so no one gets in any more trouble.

  Ezra dashes forward and I open my eyes in alarm.

  “I thought you were going to faint,” he says, his breath fast and shallow.

  “No,” I say abruptly. “I was thinking.” I step back because he’s too close, and his eyes are too intense.

  They’ll never have seen anything like you, Clover said.

  And that day on the flats when she told me she wanted to go to school. I’m not a sea girl, she said, like that was the biggest insult there was. Is that what Ezra is seeing now? Do I stink of fish and saltwater?

  Halfway girls, Mum called us, but that was just a story. A homespun fairy tale to keep us happy. I haven’t set foot on solid land for five years and I’ve forgotten how to walk in shoes.

  “You don’t know who I am, do you?” Ezra says sadly.

  “Of course I do,” I say sharply. “You’re the District Controller. That’s why I came to you. This was done in your name. Sora’s on the prison ship!”

  He shakes his head slowly. “That’s not what I meant. Your mum, Vita…” He sighs sadly. “Vita,” he says again, like the name hurts him.

  I glower at him for saying Mum’s name in this place. Vita. It means life, but Mum died years ago. The land killed her.

  “Vita,” he says again, more urgently now. “She was my sister.”

  “Sister?” I repeat uncertainly, my mind catapulting on, unable to make sense of what he’s saying. “Sister.” The word spins round my head. “She couldn’t have been.”

  “Sister,” he repeats. “You and Clover. You’re my nieces.”

  “No. We can’t be,” I stammer, stepping back further. This is the man who outlaws sisters. And brothers too. Nat’s friend’s little brother was sent away inland. Barnaby. He was just a baby. “We can’t be…” I say. “No one is allowed.”

  Ezra shakes his head sadly. “No. We were a secret too. Vita was raised by a neighbour, by our mum’s best friend. No one could ever know what she was to us. We had to limit the time we all spent together as children, so no one got suspicious. Vita never even seemed to mind that I was the one that got to live with our parents. She was so generous. Good.” He has tears in his eyes. “I lost her too, Pearl.”

  “No!” I cry, turning away from the sourness of his breath. My legs are buckling under me and I feel exposed without the ring of shells round my neck. I look for the sea, to get strength from it, but it’s obscured behind the grey buildings of the Uplands.

  “You don’t believe me?” Ezra says, impatiently now.

  “We can’t be related to you!” I cry.

  “Why not?”

  “Because you live here. And we live out there,” I fling at him. Dad, Clover and I, we’re sea people. We don’t belong anywhere but on that oyster farm, and scavenging out on the flats where no one goes, digging up treasure from long ago.

  Ezra looks wounded and nods his head slowly. “So Atticus never told you?” he says.

  “Dad knew?” I ask.

  Ezra nods.

  “I don’t believe it,” I stammer. “I don’t believe any of it.”

  “I’ll prove it,” Ezra says intently. “Come in.”

  “No!” I gasp. Here on the doorstep I’m still in sight of the sea. Here I can run if I need to. I could take off the shoes and run, like we do on the flats.

  “Wait, then,” Ezra says reluctantly. He pauses. “You will wait, won’t you? You promise?”

  “I’ll wait,” I say.

  He brings out a photo in a frame. Two children playing on the shoreline. Clover and me.

  “How did you get a picture of us?” I snatch it from him.

  “Look closer,” he says.

  I glance at him strangely, and then back to the picture, drawn in by it. Two children, one blonde, one dark. The sea defences high behind them, without all the lichen and cracks they have now.

  I look back at Ezra before me – how his dark eyebrows are furrowed and underneath them he’s staring at me with green eyes. Sea-green. Witch-green.

  The picture’s not of Clover and me at all. It’s Ezra. And Mum.

  “People thought we were best friends,” he says. “But we were more than that. I miss her too, Pearl.”

  I touch Mum’s face in the photo.

  “I know it’s not what you wanted,” Ezra continues painfully. “I know what your dad thinks about me. All the bad things he’s told you.”

  “He says the Uplands killed her,” I say bluntly. “He blames you.”

  Ezra winces and gestures towards his growing empire. “We worked on it together. It was so difficult to get new materials. It was Vita’s brainwave to use the old cooling tower and grow vertically… Maybe something dangerous in there did get into her system. We’ll never know. But I do know that people would still be hungry round here if it wasn’t for your mum, Pearl.”

  “Why didn’t you ever come to see us?” I ask.

  Ezra scratches his head, his face screwed up with sadness. “It was too raw in the beginning. For your dad. For me too. I thought you were all better off without me. But lately it all just seems so absurd, that you’re both so close, and so far away… I’ve been sending letters.”

>   “Dad never opened them,” I say. “Not one of them.” I hadn’t opened them either. I put them straight in the storm trunk, along with all the other things we don’t look at any more. Like father, like daughter. “Is this why you think you can take our oyster farm?” I say. “Because Mum was your sister?”

  “No,” Ezra says angrily. “I don’t want control of your blasted oyster farm. We should be working together. We should be on the same side. And I wanted you, Pearl! You and Clover. You’re the reason I sent Sora. I needed a way back to you both.”

  “But we’re impossible!” I cry. “Illegal! The peacekeeper you sent saw us.”

  “I didn’t send them. I never would,” he says, angry. “Central might think they own the pollinators, but they don’t own you. They can’t take you two.”

  “They took Barnaby,” I say.

  “They did,” Ezra says sadly. “I tried to save him but—”

  “And they’ve taken Sora to the ship,” I cut in.

  Ezra shakes his head slowly, like he’s got the entire world on his shoulders and it’s crushing him to the ground. But I don’t have any room left in me for sympathy. All I can think about is Clover.

  “I want to go to the hospital now, to see my dad,” I say. “You have to get me in.”

  I follow Olive through the windowless corridors of the ship. The walls have an unnerving sheen to them, which flickers under orange strip lighting. They’re closing in on me, and my heart thumps erratically. “Wait!!” I cry, snatching for air that’s stale and hot.

  Olive turns back, surprised.

  “We’re not going down?” I gasp. “I can’t…” If we go down, it feels like I’ll never come back up.

  “There’s a window, in the library,” Olive offers.

  I nod gratefully and force myself to scuttle after her.

  When we reach the library, I stand in the doorway, my mouth wide open, before Olive motions anxiously for me to move into the room so she can shut the door behind me. The compound library is mostly desks, and what books there are, the bound pamphlets of stories, are all different versions of the same one. Stories to make ourselves feel better about our life in the compound. That’s why Tally won’t touch them.

  These books aren’t pamphlets. They’re thick, solid, and they’re here in their hundreds, on steeped wooden shelving and piled up in towers by the door. Others are still scattered on the floor. The prison ship must have been thrown about too last night. I can feel it rocking now, and the seasickness from the first couple of days on the oyster farm comes back tenfold.

  What would Mr Rose say if he could see this place? All this knowledge kept for one man.

  “Windows,” Olive says, seeing my green face and pointing to thick panels of glass.

  I walk up the steps and stare back at the oyster farm and then the land beyond it. Seeing everything back to front, and further away, is disorientating.

  For a moment I forget what I’m even doing here, among all these books. There will be whole worlds here for me to explore… Lighthouses, forests, whales, unicorns. Manor houses with turrets. Man-made canals with narrowboats travelling to different places.

  Olive thrusts a book into my hands. It’s not thick or heavy. Pocket-sized, it says on the front. My hands tremble as I open it. It’s got all the pictures the computer’s encyclopaedia had lost, or someone had removed.

  I scan past some of the butterfly names Lucas had called out. Meadow Brown, Brimstone, Swallowtail, Gatekeeper. Until I get to the one I’m looking for.

  “Painted Ladies,” I read aloud. I recognize them immediately.

  Olive leans closer, her dark eyes glistening.

  “We grew them, on the sea farm,” I say, pointing down at the page.

  “Pearl?” she asks.

  “It was me,” I say fast, greedy, even though the butterflies are what brought Mum here.

  “Could you get my mum?” I ask Olive suddenly. “Without anyone seeing?”

  Olive shakes her head in alarm.

  “Or take me to her? Just for a moment. Just so I know she’s OK. She still won’t know what any of this is about,” I plead. “She’s innocent!”

  “No.” Olive shakes her head again and looks frightened. “Price,” she says.

  She hesitates for a moment and then goes to the bookcase nearest the door. It’s full of thick, bound volumes. She opens one to a page of ruled lines.

  Mum’s name is in the last row. Sora Okamoto of South-East District. The crime is written in black ink. Pollinator theft.

  I stare at the words in horror, and then flick back through the book desperately, at all the names over the years. I recognize some from the compound. And the meaningless crimes – food theft, disrupting social order, breaking border restrictions, endangering national security, non-compliance with compound protocol. What do those things even mean?

  Olive takes another book down from the same shelf and lets it fall open. The dates are earlier here – they go back to the start of the Hunger Years, soon after siege state laws were first brought in.

  Her fingers point to an inconspicuous row and a name leaps out at me. Olive Crier.

  “Olive Crier,” I read out heavily, aghast. “Crier? That’s you?”

  I’m back in the windmill, my finger on the carved letters. Billy’s mates. Except Olive wasn’t his mate. Olive was his sister.

  Her crime is stamped in capitals. SURPLUS CHILD. And her age is there too. Ten years old. The same age as Clover.

  Olive’s eyes, bright despite all the years she’s been here, plead with me for recognition. “Billy Crier,” I say quietly. “We tell his story, back in the compound. He was your brother?”

  Olive groans very slightly. A quiet, guttural sound from deep within her.

  “I saw your name, Olive,” I say. “It was carved in the windmill, next to Billy’s. With your friends’ names. Jones, Yusuf, Mara.”

  Light flickers in Olive’s eyes like sun on water.

  You know Crier wasn’t his real name? Tally said. She was obsessed with Billy’s story because she thought it was real. But the story was wrong. Details had been left out and forgotten. Crier was Billy’s surname, and there was someone else. A whole other person. Another half to the tragedy. Surplus child.

  Was Olive taken before or after Billy died? Did their parents have anyone left to love?

  There’s the sudden sound of footsteps outside in the corridor and Olive startles, gazing at me in terror. She pushes over a teetering pile of books and they topple down the stairs. She shoves me in the direction of the tallest shelving, just as the door opens.

  A man has come into the library. From between the shelves of books, I see Olive’s legs tremble. “What’s happened to my books?” he’s asking, his voice deep and dragging.

  Olive stays silent. I wish she’d speak up and defend herself.

  The man’s getting closer to her.

  All Olive needs to say is it was the storm, and she shouldn’t even need to say that. The governor was here too last night. How could the books possibly have stayed on the shelves?

  Benjamin Price’s voice winds on cruelly. “I give you this privilege and you don’t even keep them safe.”

  He’s right up close to her now and Olive’s shrinking back, like she’s worried he’ll strike her. I want to shut my eyes and block up my ears, or scream out loud and put a stop to it. The governor’s attention would turn off Olive pretty quickly if I did that.

  Benjamin Price laughs horribly and he plucks his right fingers into the air, as if on a whim he’s decided on a different course. “I wanted a book,” he announces. “Deserts, I think, with all this rain. Find me a book about deserts.”

  My heart pounds in my chest and my eyes dart to the titles above me. Dust-covered books on forest, grassland, wetland, tundra. I don’t know what all these things are, but the word on the next spine sucks the breath from my mouth. Desert.

  “Well,” Price is saying angrily. “Where would that be?”

  “I…
I…” Olive stammers, knowing very well where I’m hiding.

  Then there’s another clatter, bigger this time, like the rolls of thunder last night. The tallest tower of books by the doorway has toppled over, and others are coming down around it, like dominoes.

  The governor swings back towards Olive. “You did that on purpose. How dare you!”

  I don’t stick around to see what happens. It won’t do Olive any favours if I’m discovered here too. I steal behind the next set of shelves while Price is turned away from the door, and I slip out into the corridor and run.

  The hospital is smaller than I remember. A man sits in a blue uniform behind a desk. He looks at me oddly and opens his mouth to say something – to protest against my dishevelment maybe – but then he sees Ezra Heart and shuts it again.

  It’s hard not to feel like I’m eight years old again, coming to see Mum under the bright lights and behind the oxygen mask.

  After speaking with the man, Ezra beckons for me to come forward. “Atticus is on the top floor, Pearl. I’ll take you.” He sounds tentative.

  “You don’t have to,” I say, turning left for the stairs, just as I remember. “Dad won’t want…”

  But I stop talking as memories uncover themselves in front of me. Mum was on the top floor. Three floors up. There are no windows in the stairwell. I hated that feeling, that lack of sky.

  She’ll get better, Pearl. Dad said it every visit, until the last.

  Ezra follows in my wake. Despite his authoritative voice at the desk, he’s nervous.

  “Turn left here. Your dad’s at the end of the corridor,” Ezra says at the top, even though I’m already running. I feel I’m being led with a magic thread to Dad and Clover.

  “Pearl!” Dad’s sat up in bed, looking straight at the door. My dad, in hospital sheets, with tubes in his arm, but sitting up, breathing. Alive. He squeezes me tight when I go over. Tighter than he has in months. “My big one, you made it.”

  “You’re OK?” I ask, patting his arms and his face and his chest, checking he’s solid. “Your foot? Your foot’s OK?”

  The sheets move slightly as Dad wriggles his leg. “They saved it. Saved me,” he says sombrely.