Siberia

by Ann Halam

  I filled my stove with fuel, lit it, and heated a can of stew. Nivvy wouldn’t touch it, so I ate it all myself, and lay down wrapped in my quilt. Never do that again! Never let the fire inside burn low! Your brain will stop working, you’ll do something stupid, you’ll die, and it will all have been for nothing. . . . It was a long time since I’d taken any of my clothes off, they were stuck to me with grease and dirt. Somewhere under this filth is Sloe, still dressed in the pretty clothes Little Father gave her.

  I must sleep.

  When I woke, the sky outside my tent was brilliant blue, and the sun felt warm. Nivvy wasn’t with me. There was no sign of land, anywhere. I was alone in the white emptiness, and it was as magical as I had ever dreamed. . . . Only where was I? When I checked the mileage on the sled, it seemed to say I had covered forty miles. Nearly two-thirds! But the fuel gauge said I was soon going to be walking. I took out the nutshell and ate a can of cold stew, talking to the kits and reading the notes I’d made about the route. Nivvy must have gone looking for something to eat. I wished I’d thought of bringing along some frozen rats. Could I cut a hole in the ice and catch a fish? But the thought of a hole in the ice made the fear rise up. I must remember the fear was just under the surface, and do nothing to wake it. I must keep telling myself that this strait was narrow, and that people like me crossed it all the time.

  Another twenty miles, except it wasn’t quite that simple. There were currents where the sea rarely froze past the brash, the broken soup stage; and other places where the ice was liable to crunch up into ridges, sastrugi, like a nest of vipers, and I would break my legs trying to get through.

  “Nivvy!”

  I shaded my eyes. I couldn’t see him, but the ice was deceptive. It had lumps and blue towers, that you thought were the size of a fist, then you’d realize they were tall as houses. He could be close by, and out of sight. . . . I looked all around again, and saw a black dot, coming out of the south. The fear washed over me, and vanished as if it had never been. I had no time to be afraid now. I stuffed everything really precious inside my clothes, slung the knapsack on my back, stripped out the bivvy tent, and stowed everything in about two minutes flat. I shouted again for Nivvy, but for once in his life he didn’t come to me. . . . Go, then, I thought. Stay away, don’t come near. And if you see me taken, live whatever life you can. I tied the wooden sled behind the motor sled, jumped on board, and turned the key, and immediately felt hopeful again, because I was moving.

  When I looked back, grim reality returned. The devil was gaining on me fast. I couldn’t win this race. He knew how to use a motor sled and I didn’t. He could fly. If I hit rough ice I would have to slow right down or—

  I was flying again.

  I lay on my side, my head spinning. I had smashed into a huge lump of ice, I couldn’t work out how I hadn’t seen that coming. The sled lay in a crumpled heap, my gear was scattered. I heard the whine of the other engine, suddenly cut off. I heard, with my ear to the ice, the crunch of his boots, and I saw the rifle within reach of my hand. I rolled over, grabbed it, and struggled to my knees.

  “Don’t come any closer!”

  Yagin was not close at all, he was about twenty meters away. He put his hands in the air. “Sloe! You haven’t enough fuel!”

  “I can walk.”

  “I have fuel here. I brought it for you.”

  I kept the rifle trained on him while he stooped, reached into his sled, and brought out a can. He walked toward me, steadily, holding it up. He was hypnotizing me. . . . Then I realized he was wading. He was crossing a wide river of brash, that I had crossed without knowing it. My hands started to shake.

  “You’re on their side. You want to destroy the Lindquists.”

  “I’m trying to save them. . . . Sloe, listen to me. I’m a Fitness Officer, but I’ve been working for another cause all along. I had myself put in charge of the hunt for you so nobody else would get the job. I could have handed you over time and again. I’ve had you in my hands and helped you to escape.”

  “Yes, and I know why. The other cause you serve is Yagin. You sold me to the Mafia. I saw you with them, on the heath, taking their money.”

  “They aren’t the Mafia,” said Yagin. “They are just powerful businessmen. I convinced them I had to gain your trust or you would destroy the kits. I had it all figured out: how I could do my deal, and still get you safe to your mother. I told them it was better to let you run, with me using my powers as a police officer to stay close, until you were on the last lap. I was going to take you across the ice. That tent you’re using, and the supplies, I brought them here, for us.”

  I could never have pulled the trigger, even if I’d known how to use a rifle.

  “If you hadn’t run away from the cabin, that’s the way it would have been. But you ran, and my trusting young men found me, and that made things more difficult.”

  He walked up and took the rifle from me, and tossed the weapon into that river of mashed ice, where it sank out of sight. I had longed to trust him. . . .

  “Now give me the knapsack, and let me explain—”

  “No!”

  I fought him, but it was useless. He peeled the knapsack off my back.

  “You traitor! You traitor!”

  “You have to die, that’s the only thing that works. They know something about the imprinting. They want you, as part of the package, and I’m not going to let that happen. So you die, trying to escape. I save the goods, and that’s the end of the hunt. Don’t you see, Sloe? I tell them I saw you drown.”

  He had pulled out the nail box. He had the lab case in his hands. He ripped it open, and stared at me.

  “Where are they?”

  I shook my head, backing away from him. I could hear thunder, I thought it was the sound of my world falling apart. But there was something else, a message, a thin, fine, secret singing that seemed meant for me alone. . . . Yagin, his fist full of doll’s house glassware, turned to look behind him, and cursed.

  My mind wasn’t putting things together. I saw the snow cruiser, and only dimly realized that the thunder in my head was the rumble of its tracks. But the other vehicle, the big black shiny one, was speeding up, getting closer. . . .

  Yagin dropped everything, and started to run, waving his arms.

  “Stupid boys! Damned fools! Stop! You can’t! The ice won’t—”

  The cruiser stopped, by Yagin’s sled. The young officers got down. They started running, saw the brash, and then one of them yelled, and pointed.

  Nivvy had come back.

  He was a four-legged beast, but taller than a man. He came galloping out from behind a blue tower, moving with such power and beauty I could only stare, seeing the Nivvy I loved still there, in that fearsome majesty. He reared up, I saw the appalling gape of his fanged jaws. I saw the Fitness Police rifles leveled. They screamed at each other in terror. “Run!” I wailed. “Nivvy! Run! Get away!”

  But the bond we had wasn’t like that. I couldn’t tell the Lindquists what to do, any more than you can tell the cells of your own body not to save your life if they can. Nivvy, king of the snows indeed, charged at Yagin. Red fire spat across the ice. . . . But my message was coming clearer now. I felt it through my body, an invisible zigzag lightning, as the fault line spread, the flaw opened. A monstrously huge, jagged table of ice reared up, and flopped down again with a cracking, rending groan. The whole frozen sea seemed to shift, and shrug, making a chasm in which the cruiser and the Mafia-type vehicle were both engulfed. It took the policemen down with it. The shock wave reached Yagin, he fell backward into the open lane of night-blue, killing cold. I saw him rise up. I saw him swim, arm over arm, to the place where the cruiser had disappeared. He called his men’s names, then he vanished. I thought he had gone. But he appeared again, sounding up right beside me. He rose almost to his waist, groping in the front of his tunic with a gray-white hand. On my knees, I reached out to him.

  “Take my hand!”

  His eyes held mine
. He pushed something into my palm: cold, smooth slivers of ice. “Pinnipeds,” he said. “Cetacea.”

  The gulf swallowed him.

  I was holding two fragile glass tubes, with color-coded caps. I stowed them inside my clothes. Everything else: the knapsack, the lab case, the stored remains of Nosey and Toothy, had vanished. I limped over to Nivvy and knelt beside him, and stroked his wicked, wedge-shaped head, his bloodied fur. He was bleeding, but I didn’t try to find the wounds: there was nothing I could do. I just stayed there, while his body shuddered through change after change. When he was small again I picked him up. He was still alive, but limp as a rag. He made his little chirring noise in protest: but I wasn’t going to leave him behind. There was too much I’d had to leave behind. I packed what I could salvage onto the wooden sled, and we walked on, under the low arc of the winter sun, that was still shining, bright in a cloudless sky.

  I stopped often, to check my compass, and Nivvy was always still alive: but no more than that. We camped when the sun went down, and got up and did the same again the next day. The day after that, we reached the place the diary book called Rescue Island, and I was saved.

  Rescue Island wasn’t natural. It was a big block of concrete, floating in the ice and anchored to the seabed. It had been an oil rig when people still got oil from under the sea, instead of growing it. It had been converted into a place where the people of the city I was heading for dealt with fugitives from across the ice. Being an asylum seeker isn’t a lot of fun. I was asked a lot of questions, and not everybody was sympathetic when I refused to answer some of them. Not everyone understood how shaken up I was. I stank pretty badly, and I wouldn’t let them undress me: I suppose that didn’t help either. But they didn’t take Nivvy away, and they didn’t search me. They just put me in the secure hospital, with a bathroom I could use; and gave me some clean clothes.

  One day a woman came to my room. She was middle-aged, thin, and stern. She wore a white coat with the Chervil Ring embossed on the buttons, and she’d brought a tray of shiny instruments.

  “Sloe, will you let me examine, er, Nivvy?”

  “Are you going to kill him?”

  “No.”

  She laid out her instruments, and I let her take Nivvy from me, though he protested. She looked him over, and measured him: checked his teeth, and shone a kind of ray-thing through him so she could see his insides. Finally she took a scraping from his mouth, and looked at it through her microscope. The room got very still.

  At last she raised her head and stared at me, with shining eyes. “This is incredible. And you are? Tell me your name again?”

  So I told her my true name, the name I had never told to anyone since I was four years old, and hardly knew it was mine. She went away, and came back with a phone. I spoke to my mama, for the first time in nearly four years. I heard her voice and I said, “Mama, I’m on Rescue Island, does that mean I’m safe? Is it safe?” She told me afterward that I wouldn’t say anything more, I just kept asking that question. But she knew it was me. She knew it was me. . . . When Mama had told me it was safe, I took out the nutshell, and the seed tubes I’d hidden inside my clothes, when I saw Yagin coming on the ice.

  Insectivora, Lagomorpha, Rodentia, Artiodactyla, Chiroptera, and the two new ones, Pinnipedia and Cetacea. And of course Carnivora, whose living type-form was sitting up on my shoulder now, fascinated by these strange events.

  The kits were dead, they had come to the natural end of their miniature lives, in the first days I’d spent on Rescue Island. But nothing was lost, because the seeds were safe. I had brought them through.

  They call it the city where the sun always shines because of the solar panels, which collect sunlight so efficiently that the city doesn’t need any other power source, winter or summer. Inside, it was just like any other city, only rather small. You could walk across it: and people usually did walk, everywhere. My mother’s house was in a square with a beautiful garden in the middle: and every house had its own garden in front of it too. Walking up to her front door was like walking into a specially flowery grove in a green and blossoming wood. There were roses and violets and snowdrops all in bloom at once: and every rosebush had flowers of ten or fifteen different colors. Birds sang, and there was a little stream, singing back at them.

  Mama hadn’t been able to come to Rescue Island. Things were really changing, but some important people in our country still regarded Mama as a dangerous rebel, and she must not leave the city of refuge. She was standing at the door. My beautiful mama was just the same as I remembered her. I had been a child when we parted. Now I was taller than my mama, I would soon be fourteen, and I had done so many bad things. . . . I looked at her, she looked at me: we didn’t speak. Then she hugged me, and I hugged her back. Nivvy, who had to be carried in a little case around the city, started to chirr indignantly: so I got him out, and gave him to Mama. He went berserk with joy, rippling all over her, sniffing her and licking her, holding her face with his paws. Mama began to laugh, and cry, at the same time; and so did I.

  We went indoors, to a pretty room with rugs, and pictures, and a wide window looking out on the garden. We sat on Mama’s sofa, holding each other’s hands.

  I had talked to her on the phone, after that first mad time, but there was so much I hadn’t been able to say. Suddenly it all came bursting out. Every worst thing I’d done. How I’d boasted about her science teaching, and Madam Principal’s yellow cake. Rose and the thieving, Rain and how I’d let him go into the Box and die. All the bewildering things Yagin had told me . . . at New Dawn, and afterward. How I’d told Mama I understood about the Lindquists, when I didn’t, and I’d had no idea what they meant, and I’d almost lost them in a stinking fur factory. Leaving Satin and Emerald and the others with the slavers, and how Toothy became many, and how Toesy died. And Yulia and Aliek, who had helped me when they knew I was a runaway, and they’d probably got into bad trouble with a bandit boss. And the northern lights, and the silver forest, and the wild ride across the ice.

  Nivvy got bored, and went exploring.

  Mama told me parts of her story too. We sat there for I don’t know how long, repeating ourselves, interrupting each other: the lost years all unfurling, and folding around us, until we were bound together again, as if we’d never been apart.

  Mama said that after she’d been smuggled out, and reached this city, people had tried hard to get permission for me to join her. But nobody had known how bad things were at New Dawn, so they hadn’t wanted to try anything extreme like kidnapping me. They hadn’t known about the Lindquists. Mama had told no one, not a soul. She’d been betrayed once, she wasn’t going to risk it again. The kits were done for, if any word of their existence got to the wrong people. Nobody at New Dawn had told me anything, of course. Nobody had told me that my mama had escaped, or even whether she was alive or dead. Except for Yagin and his mysterious promise, about the spring being a dangerous time.

  “Mama?” I asked. “What made Yagin do what he did?”

  I knew his real name now, but he was still Yagin to me.

  She shook her head. “I suppose he wanted to survive, although he didn’t like the price he had to pay. He’d been a scientist at the Biological Institute. When the government took over the Institute and made it just a branch of the Fitness Police, he had the choice of losing everything, or going along with that. . . . He chose to become an Intelligence Officer for the Fitness Police: but he kept in touch with the other side too, although of course he wasn’t trusted. That’s how he knew I was safe. I’m sure it’s true he’d guessed I had a set of kits, and he knew they hadn’t been found. When you turned up at New Dawn, he saw his chance to get hold of a fabulous treasure. But he still wanted to save your life.”

  I nodded. I believed now that Yagin had never meant to kill me, on the ice. He had meant to rob me, to take the kits and let me go.

  “That’s what I meant,” I said. “That’s what I don’t understand. The way he felt about me, the things he di
d.” I hesitated. “For a while, I thought . . . I thought he might be my dadda. That my dadda had escaped, and you had sent him to help me, but it was a secret so he couldn’t tell me who he was.”

  “Your dadda is dead.”

  “I know,” I whispered. “They told me, at Rescue Island.”

  “Rosita . . . I mean, Sloe. I keep calling you both, which do you like?”

  “I don’t know.” But then I did. “Call me Sloe, it’s my name.”

  She touched my cheek. “All right, Sloe. It suits you, my dauntless winter flower. Listen, I will tell you a story. It’s a grown-up story, are you ready for that?”

  I nodded.

  Mama looked away from me, out into the garden. “Well, it starts more than ten years ago. There were three scientists, working together at the Biological Institute. Two of them were married to each other, and had a baby girl. A very naughty, clever little baby girl, who used to make me tear my hair out. But the three were all close friends. . . . When your dadda and I found out what the government planned to do with the wild mammal Lindquists, we decided to take action. We made two sets of the kits, then we destroyed all our work, leaving not a trace to show how it was done. That was when the marine mammal kits disappeared, and we were very afraid this must mean there was a traitor. Your dadda tried to take his kits to safety anyway. He was arrested. As you know, it’s a very serious crime to move factory animals without a license. Taking the Lindquists was much, much worse, and I knew there was hardly a hope. But I thought I knew who had betrayed us. I went to him, and he—”

  “This was Yagin.”

  “Yes . . . Maybe I should say he was married, but to someone he didn’t love. To a very highly placed official’s daughter, in fact.” Mama drew a deep breath. “That’s the way life was . . . if you wanted to get on in the world. Well, he was drunk that night. He told me he had always loved me, and he said if I would be his mistress, he would use his influence to save your dadda’s life. I laughed at him. I said I didn’t believe he’d do anything to save Pyotr, however I humiliated myself. I went away, and I never saw him again. . . . I don’t know what power he had, really. I will never know if I signed your dadda’s death warrant.’