Siberia

by Ann Halam

  He stooped. Before I knew what to expect he had picked me up in his arms. “Let’s get her back to the cruiser, before she tries any more tricks.”

  Yagin and his men had used a lot of fuel chasing Toesy, and two of the sleds were burdened with extra weight. We moved slowly; in close formation. I think Yagin’s men were afraid of meeting more “man-eating muties.” It was after dark when we reached the place where they’d left their snow cruiser: at a fuel dump on the big road that I’d seen from the ridge. It was the road I’d been heading for, Wilderness Supply Road 808; I had misjudged the distance, or else the maps were wrong. The fuel for official vehicles was kept in a block-house, heavily guarded behind tall fences. Next door to it was a long gray shed, with a salt-gritted parking lot. The snow cruiser was there, alongside several battered, gaudily painted trucks that were not official transport. The young officers took down the tailgate, rode the sleds into the back, and locked it again. I stood shivering, cold and stiff after the long ride, looking at the lying claim on the side, Fitness Police: Protecting Your Fragile Environment.

  They’d had a long search: for Yagin after he’d gone off looking for me on his own; and then for me, through the forest. Yagin decided they should get something to eat and drink in the shed, which was a restaurant, before they set off again.

  “What about the girl?” asked one of his men. “We take her in with us?”

  “No,” said Yagin. He pointed at the other trucks. “Can’t you see this is bandit territory? I don’t want her making contact with the riffraff inside.”

  The officer who’d spoken looked sorry for me, but he nodded. The three younger men were very respectful of Yagin. Yagin roughly “helped” me up into the cab, and into the drivers’ sleeping compartment. His men were standing watching. “You stay here,” said Yagin loudly. It was the first time he’d spoken to me since we left Toesy burning in the snow. Then he leaned close and muttered, “We had an accident in the blizzard, so there’s a badly cracked window. But I can’t help that!”

  I wouldn’t look at him. He pulled the metal shutter across, and locked me in.

  The sleeping compartment was like a cupboard-bed with a very low ceiling, and small thick windows on either side. There was a spiderweb crack in one of them, and the frame around it was bent out of shape. I could see the flares of the parking lot, and white blurred heaps of ruined buildings: the fuel dump was in the middle of an abandoned town. I took off my knapsack and hugged it on my knees. I was glad Yagin was alive. The thought of having murdered someone had been giving me the horrors.

  Why hadn’t he taken the knapsack from me?

  He needed me as well as the kits because the Lindquists were “imprinted.” But if he wanted to be sure I wouldn’t try to escape, all he had to do was keep hold of the knapsack. Maybe he didn’t want the junior officers to know what it contained. Or maybe he really was playing a double game. I rolled over and traced the outline of the spiderweb, feeling the sharp edges. I thought about the way Yagin had talked in the cabin, and the very different way he talked in front of his men. What if he’d killed my Toesy to protect the secret of the Lindquists? What if he had left me in here to give me a chance to escape . . . ? But I had nothing except my knapsack. If I got out of this locked box, either Yagin would find me again at once, or I’d be dead before morning.

  Mama always used to say: Guards aren’t needed in the wilderness. Yagin didn’t need to guard me. He didn’t care if I “escaped” again and again. He had me on a string. He knew where I was going, he could always track me down. The cold and the emptiness controlled me, but Yagin frightened me. The mysterious way he behaved, the way he looked at me, the way he talked.

  I lay down, still hugging the knapsack. The mattress felt incredibly soft. I thought of the kits. Toesy had died unharvested, but the Artiodactyla Lindquist was still safe. They were all still safe. . . . But they were prisoners, like me. Wild animals, turned into powder and locked up in little tubes. I tried to picture them, one by one. Artiodactyla, big and strong; Nosey the bug-eater; Ears, the beautiful snow prince; Toothy with all her children; my darling fierce little Nivvy. And the last Lindquist, Chiroptera, a little furry animal with wings. I wish I had wings now, I thought.

  Once there was a little girl called Rosita, who used to play at being the magic creatures. It was her secret, even Mama didn’t know. She liked being Chiroptera, the strangest and most unusual one. She’d hold out the skirts of her dress, and flit around the bare, drab prison hut, saying Cheeep! Cheeep! Sometimes she’d keep her eyes shut. . . . Although she could never understand how saying cheeep helped you to find your way in the dark, she kept trying.

  I sat up. I felt as if Rosita had joined me. A naughty, defiant little girl, with her own ideas about everything . . . “I am not helpless!” I whispered. “I won’t give up.”

  I measured the cracked window with my forearm. It wasn’t big, but it was big enough. Then I quickly ransacked the bed box. I found a pair of gloves, a bottle of tea, and a stale pack of sliced black bread. The mattress had a blanket and a light thermal quilt (Fitness Police slept in style). I rolled the bedding up and strapped it on the outside of my knapsack, and stuffed the other things into my pockets. The parking lot was dark and deserted. I lay back and kicked the window with my left foot, until the cracked pane fell out. No one came running to see what the noise was: I wriggled through the hole, dropped, and scooted, limping hard, to the shelter of the bunkers full of rubbish that stood against the end wall of the shack.

  It had been cold in the cruiser. It was a very cold night outdoors. I heard a rustling behind me, and peered into the shadows: surprised that even rats could be moving. Children’s faces, filthy, blue-shaded, pinched with cold, peered back at me. They’d seen me escape from the police van. They didn’t speak, and neither did I.

  Silently, they burrowed out of sight.

  I remembered what Satin had said: better to be a slave, than to be a stray child in the wilderness. That’s what will happen to me, I thought. Either Yagin will catch me again, or I will become one of the lost. I wanted my mama, more than I had ever wanted her. . . . But I wasn’t alone. Rosita was with me. “Cheeep . . .,” I whispered, and spread my arms, a little girl pretending to have wings.

  I drank half the sweet tea in the bottle, ate two slices of the black bread, and left the rest for the stray children. I watched the restaurant doors: flapping my arms and whispering “Cheeep” occasionally. Maybe I was going a little mad, but it seemed to help. Before long two people came out alone, talking and laughing. The woman had an embroidered scarf. As she fastened up her coat I glimpsed a belt decorated with gold coins, and a swinging red and yellow skirt. The man had scuffed but flashy red boots. Bandit tribesfolk, I thought. My kind of people.

  I ambled over to them, hiding the limp as best I could, and looking confident.

  (Cheeep . . . I’m a strange and unusual wild creature.)

  “Hey, you two. Can you give me a lift?”

  Disaster struck. The woman peered at me, with slanting dark eyes like Satin’s in a brown face with rosy cheeks, and I knew her. She was from the caravan. She knew me too, at once. “It’s Little Father’s snow bunting!” she exclaimed. “What’s all this? You’re the kid who escaped from the slavers’ holding pen, and then the god-awful mutie police came asking questions about you. Little Father was mad as fire!”

  “It shows how little you know about Little Father’s business,” I said. “That was the third time I’ve been sold this year. I was supposed to hide until the end of the fair, and get picked up again on the road. But those devils of mutie police picked me up, instead; for no reason. I’ve just got free of them. Where’s the rest of the caravan?”

  The man laughed. “Oh my God, a scam. Trust Little Father!”

  “You’re a bold kid,” said the woman who had recognized me. “We’re on our way to join them now. If you’re sure that’s what you want, you can come along.”

  My friends were called Yulia and Aliek. Yul
ia had stayed on at the end of the fair with her boyfriend; now Aliek was taking her back to her family. They would meet Little Father’s trucks at Rocket Town—another abandoned town, where the bandits liked to gather in the winter. Rocket Town was in completely the wrong direction for me, but I could double back: I just wanted to get away from Yagin.

  Their cab was warm, and full of color: painted panels, scarves and shawls and dangling ornaments. We caught up on the caravan gossip (and it was easy to behave confidently: I was Chiroptera: I was flying, strange and free). Soon Yulia decided she was peckish, though they’d eaten. She cooked boiled sausage, on a hot plate up on the bed shelf. We ate it with real mustard, washed down with vodka-laced fruit tea. I don’t know what was in the “meat,” but I had never tasted anything so greasy and delicious. The snow-tired truck bulldozed majestically through the little drifts, and swerved around the big ones: while the walls of grimy snow on either side of the road zoomed by, looming up in the light of our great headlamps, falling away again into darkness.

  “We should be in Rocket Town by tomorrow noon,” said Aliek. “We’ll take you right to Little Father, I know where he camps.”

  “Oh, there’s no need,” I said casually. “Drop me anywhere, I’ll find him.”

  Aliek, who was driving, glanced at Yulia with a crooked smile.

  “Little snow bunting,” said Yulia, kindly, “we don’t blame you for trying it on but you’re a runaway slave. Are you sure you want to be taken to Rocket Town?”

  Every hand will be against me, I thought. I am finished.

  I forgot about being Chiroptera.

  “No,” I said, coming down to earth hard. “I don’t.”

  I was sitting between them, I couldn’t reach either of the doors, and anyway Aliek drove fast, even over ice in the dark. They looked at each other over my head.

  “So, where do you really want to go?” asked Aliek, calmly.

  “I want to go north, to the frozen sea. I . . . I was trying to get there, when I got collected by Little Father. My mother had escaped from a prison Settlement, and crossed the sea. I was trying to join her.”

  The road plunged just then, as if straight into the center of the earth. We went down into darkness. Aliek hit some smooth ice and rode into a magnificent skid.

  “Drive into it! Drive into it!” shouted Yulia. “Don’t brake! Change gear!”

  The big truck buried its armored muzzle in a wall of rock-hard drift. Aliek laughed, put it into reverse, and it did the same wild gyration backward: except now we were missing one bank of headlights.

  “Backseat driver,” he shouted. “Get into the backseat, or drive yourself!”

  “You know my night vision is no good!”

  Then Aliek stopped the engine, and the silence of the cold, cold night out there gathered around us. “We’ll catch hell if Little Father finds out,” he remarked, after some moments’ thought. “But we could take her to the Depot. It isn’t so far.”

  “Why should he find out?” said Yulia. “I’m not going to tell him.”

  I fell asleep. Yulia woke me up, and coaxed me onto the bed shelf. I lay curled up with my back to the cab, and dreamed of flying. In the gray dawn Aliek shook me awake, and put a mug of very hot, bittersweet dark liquid into my hands. Yulia was driving.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s called coffee. It’s very good, and rare as hens. It will wake you up.”

  I got into the front seat again. There was no sign of the forest, no high walls of frozen snow, only a flat, wind-scoured heathland in every direction. We drove for another hour, until we reached a wide pan of concrete, swept bare by the wind. There was a row of sheds. Around them, piled up anyhow, partly buried in snow, partly stripped naked, there were heaps and heaps and heaps of different-sized boxes.

  “Where are we?”

  “This is the Depot,” said Yulia. “The Commission Supply trucks come here. Folks say it used to be an airstrip, but there are no planes anymore. There’ve been no planes for years and years. No fuel they can use, or no parts, or something. Now the trucks just unload for no reason. Caravans come here, to see if there’s anything useful.”

  She pointed, over the ramparts of boxes.

  “The narrow sea is that way. Not far, about a mile, I think.”

  “You go to the Observatory,” said Aliek. “That’s where people meet, who are going to cross. Don’t try it on your own! It’s very dangerous.”

  “Are there guards?”

  Aliek shrugged. “No need. Who cares if you cross, it’s still the Wilderness on the other side, unless you have city papers.”

  “There used to be guards in the Observatory,” said Yulia.

  “But not anymore.” She gave me a hug, and tucked a greasy paper parcel into my pocket. “Good luck, little snow bunting. Enjoy your freedom.”

  Aliek opened the cab door and let me down; and tossed my jacket after me. “Don’t cross alone! Wait for other people, they’ll turn up. People like you!”

  I stood looking up at their smiling, weather-worn, carefree faces.

  “Come with me. I . . . I have something like city papers. I can get you in. You can be free too, and live in comfort, and not be outlaws.”

  Yulia laughed. “We are free already.”

  Their truck had looked big when it was beside me, racketing and shuddering. It looked very small before it disappeared, but I was much smaller. I was freezing, in my pretty clothes. I picked up my jacket, and put it on. It had been lying on the floor of the cab, and the folds were stiff with rime. My leg was stiff too. I didn’t have wings anymore. Chiroptera, the furry animal who flies, needs a lot of energy, and I suddenly had none. I hobbled over to the nearest boxes and sat down to rub my knee. I wondered if I could even walk as far as the sea. And what then?

  What then?

  The boxes were stamped WS, for Wilderness Settlements, with a Brigade, a Sector, and a batch number. Long before they’d been sealed with tape, but it had withered and fallen away. They looked oddly familiar. I pried open the lid of the nearest one, wondering what I would find. Maybe I should search this “Depot” for useful supplies.

  It was full of nails.

  I put my head in my hands, and cried.

  I cried for my mama, and all the years she’d been chained to that workshop bench, all those hours of useless toil under the red rat’s eye. For the magic that couldn’t really save me from loneliness or helplessness. For the countless lives wasted, so that the cities could stay warm and bright. I cried for everything hateful about my world, and everyone who had struggled and hoped and tried, and finally failed.

  Then I got up and set off, limping and very stiff in the cold morning, to see if I could find this mysterious Observatory.

  * 11 *

  Carnivora

  There was only one building. It stood on a headland, at the farthest point of a wide bay, where the white waste of the heath met the pale sky. It had a domed roof, and windows all around; the double glass crusted over with snow. It must have been a lookout, or maybe a weather station, when people still lived on this coast. In front of it a concrete path—partly blocked by drifts—cut through the low, reddish cliffs, down to the shore. I had never seen the sea before. But all I could think, as I stood there, was that the lumpy gray ice that stretched to the horizon looked like ugly walking.

  The door was on the landward side, in shelter. When I knocked the snow off it, I found it was fastened with a padlock and chain. But it was only a Settlements Commission sort of chain. I hit it with a rock until it snapped. There was a short, shadowy passageway, with old framed photographs of ships on the walls, and then the main room, about twice the size of Mama’s hut. Dim light came through the veiled windows. The dome, high overhead, was made in sections that looked as if they were supposed to move. There was a gallery, around the base of it, reached by a wrought-iron staircase. There was a stove, with a stack of wood (I was very glad to see that), and bunks around the walls, with cupboards under them. Some of t
he bunks had tattered mattresses. A child’s mitten, covered in dust, lay on the dusty floor.

  “Mama?” I whispered. I felt her presence so strongly. It was as if we had agreed to meet here: but where was she?

  I lit a fire, with one of my last precious matches: ate half the boiled sausage Yulia had given to me, and drank some of my last water. Gradually warmth crept into me, and a little courage. I began opening the cupboards. In the first one I tried, I found a cardboard box full of pots and pans. “That’s good!” I muttered, trying to be positive. The next cupboard held canned food, that looked quite fresh; a coil of rope; and a lamp that was also a stove, with a supply of little blocks of fuel. A heap of slick, folded fabric proved, when I pulled it out, to be an inflatable bivvy-tent.

  I knelt there with my mouth open, dazzled by this plunder.

  I was saved!

  I went back to the stove, took the nutshell out of my knapsack, and opened it for the first time since the morning before Toesy died. The four remaining kits were at their full size. They looked up at me, bright eyed. “Hi,” I said. “I’m sorry I haven’t been talking to you. Toesy and I ran into trouble, and Yagin caught me again. But I got away and everything’s all right now. We’re in a good place, just where we’re supposed to be, and we’ve got everything we need for the last part of the trek.”

  I looked in the other cupboards, and found a good box of matches in one of them, and a few very rusty, swollen tins in another. There were two trapdoors set in the floor. When I pulled up the larger one I saw a ladder going down into darkness. A gust of deadly cold rose up: it was a cellar, cut into the frozen earth. I decided to leave that for another time. The smaller trapdoor had only a shallow space under it, that held a dark-covered exercise book, and a pencil. I opened the book, and found dated entries, like a diary.