by Rob Boffard
“Pretty good idea,” I say, getting down to his level, stretching out. In the flickering light, the wound looks even more jagged and raw. “Just bring me something I can use. Tweezers, or pliers. A knife’ll probably be fine.”
“You don’t understand,” he says, his voice shaking. “Even if we get them out, I don’t got the medicine to stop the cut going bad.”
“You must have something,” I say. I can feel my nails digging into my palm.
He shrugs, helplessly. “Had. It’s all gone. Tripped and fell a few months ago when I was checking traps. Got a massive gash all the way up my arm.” He points to his bicep. “Used the last of it on that. Even then, I don’t know if it woulda been enough to handle what you’ve got.”
I run through the options in my head. I could clean the cut, get the slivers of metal out, but I only have to miss one for sepsis to set in. I could burn it–pour lamp oil in the cut and set it on fire–but even the thought of that makes me want to throw up. Besides, I don’t even know if that would work. It might just be inviting further infection.
“Wait a second,” Harlan says. He jumps up, surprisingly spry. “This is perfect.”
I stare up at him, not entirely sure I heard him right. “I’m going to die of infection, and that’s perfect?”
“No no no,” he says, waving his hands. “It’s just… listen, I think I know where we can get the stuff you need.”
“OK,” I say slowly, feeling a tiny spark of hope flare up in my chest.
“We go to Whitehorse,” he says.
It’s a name he’s mentioned before. “What’s Whitehorse?”
“Town about twenty-five miles south from here, give or take. Except… shit, I don’t know, Eric was already making noises about heading for Calgary, so there’s no guarantee they’d even—”
“But they’ll have supplies? If they’re still there?”
“If they’re still there, yeah. Only…” He stops, a strange expression of longing settling on his face. In the lantern light it makes him look a hundred years old. More.
“Only… what?” I say.
“You gotta do something for me,” he says. “If they’re still down there, you gotta tell ’em I helped you. You gotta tell ’em I looked after you, all right? Made sure you were OK.”
It’s such a strange request that at first I don’t know how to respond. “Why?” I say, after a moment.
His expression hardens. “Does it even matter? Just do that for me. I get you down the valley, you tell Eric that I did good. That’s the deal.”
He’s going to trick you, says the voice at the back of my mind. He can’t just want something that small. He wants something else. Something he isn’t telling you about.
I’m about to listen to the voice, but then I remember something Carver told me. It happened right after we escaped from the Earthers, back on the station. He told me that I had to let other people help me–that I couldn’t do everything on my own.
I could try get to Whitehorse myself, but it’s all too easy to imagine getting lost out there. If that happens, I won’t survive. Whatever Harlan’s doing, whatever weird game he’s playing, I have to go along with it. It’s the only shot I have.
“All right,” I say. “Sure. I’ll tell them.”
He smiles, showing yellowed teeth. He digs in his pack again, tossing me another stick of dried meat. “Eat up, and get some sleep,” he says. “We got a long way to go tomorrow.”
25
Anna
Anna has to knock several times before Achala Kumar opens the door.
She’s wearing a blue sweater with a black shawl wrapped around her shoulders. The skin on her face is puffy, her eyes bloodshot. She frowns when she sees Anna. “You’re Frank’s daughter.”
Anna nods. “Can I come in?”
Achala considers for a moment, then shrugs, holding the door open for her.
The Kumars have taken over a hab on Level 2. It’s even smaller than Doctor Arroway’s, and even more spartan. Cold, too–as Anna walks in, she can just see her breath curling in the air before her.
Ravi Kumar is on the small single cot, his back up against the wall. A thin blanket covers the lower half of his body. There’s a depression where his left leg should be, and Anna finds it hard to look away. Right then, it strikes her just how much his son looks like him.
Ravi smiles at her, but she can see the puzzlement in his eyes.
Achala closes the door behind her. “I’m sorry I can’t offer you anything to drink,” she says. “About earlier: I shouldn’t be arguing with your father. It’s not his fault.”
“Achala, what did you say to Frank now?” Ravi Kumar says, his voice weary.
“Don’t you start with me,” Achala spits back. “Our boy is alive, and I’m not going to sit here while—”
“I need to ask you something,” Anna says, speaking over both of them. She sits down on the edge of the bed, telling herself to stop looking at the space below Ravi Kumar’s left knee.
She doesn’t quite manage it. Ravi reaches over, taps the blanket. “Loader claw closed over it,” he says. “Crushed the shin. I was lucky it didn’t puncture my suit.” His eyes bore into hers. “But you didn’t come here to talk about old injuries.”
Anna takes a deep breath, irritated with herself. This shouldn’t have been difficult. “They keep space suits in the escape pods, right?”
“Space suits?” says Achala.
Ravi nods slowly, his eyes narrowed.
“OK,” Anna says. “But do they keep them anywhere else in the sector? Extra suits, or something?”
“No,” Ravi says. “There’s no point–there are only a few places you can do an EVA from, and there’s nothing like that in Apex.” He sees Anna’s confusion. “EVA–Extra-Vehicular Activity. Spacewalks.”
“And you were in the construction corps, right?” Anna says, more to herself than to him. “So you’d know.”
“Of course,” Ravi says, even more puzzled. He glances up at his wife. “Unless Achala knows something I don’t.”
Achala thinks hard, shakes her head. “No. There’s a workshop in Tzevya where they did suit repairs, but nothing here.”
She looks at Anna in horror. “But you can’t be thinking of going outside?”
Anna thinks back to the nightmare: drifting, weightless, in a black void. She shivers, without meaning to. “Nothing like that.”
“Then why the interest in space suits?” Ravi Kumar pulls himself off the bed, hands fumbling along the wall for the cane propped against it. “What’s going on?”
Anna is about to tell them, then stops. She has to be sure. She has to be absolutely positive about this before she tells a soul.
“I’ll tell you afterwards,” she says. She sees Achala about to speak, and ploughs on. “I’m not going outside, and I’m not doing anything bad. Promise.”
She smiles, turns to go.
“Anna,” Achala Kumar says, and when Anna turns back she sees that Achala is crying. Her hands are knotted at her waist, fingers clenched tight. Ravi looks down, embarrassed.
“You have to help us,” Achala whispers.
Anna doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t know how to tell the Kumars that she has even less pull than they do. More importantly, she can’t tell them that she agrees with her father–that the lottery is the only way. The Kumars aren’t the only people with missing sons, daughters, husbands, wives.
“I’ll try,” she says. It’s not a lie, not exactly, but she feels uneasy as she says it. What she has isn’t even a theory. It’s a hunch, a feeling, based on a collection of things that might not even be remotely related. But what if she’s right? What if this all means something? What will it mean for the Kumars?
She walks out of the hab, closing the door behind her. Then she takes off down the corridor, heading for the escape pods.
26
Riley
It’s mid-morning before we reach the tree line.
We see it from far
up the mountain, stretching into the distance, but it’s only when we’re close that I get a good look at the trees. They’re nothing like the ones in Outer Earth’s Air Lab. Those were enormous, with canopies that blocked out the light from the ceiling lamps. But these trees are no more than twenty feet high, and they’re stunted, with stubby branches and wind-bent trunks.
Even so, I make myself stop for a moment, taking it in. These trees weren’t supposed to exist. They were supposed to be gone. And yet here they are, fighting to survive, pushing back against the cold.
Harlan doesn’t notice I’ve stopped until he’s a few feet into the trees. He looks over his shoulder, nodding at me to follow. He’s wearing a tattered canvas pack, his rifle strapped to the side. There are no bullets in the gun–Harlan says he ran out months ago–but it’s reassuring to see it there anyway.
The ground is a mess of frost and brown leaves. It’s eerily silent, and it takes me a moment to work out why that bothers me. On Outer Earth, whenever we were shown videos of forests, they were always noisy–bird calls, insects, wind. Here, the only sounds are our footsteps and the laboured sound of our breathing.
I pick one of the nearby leaves from a tree, rub it between my fingers. It doesn’t feel like any leaf I’ve touched in the Air Lab. It feels crinkly, desiccated, and before long it comes apart in my hand.
Harlan sees me looking. “Most of this was frozen over five years ago,” he says. “Kind of amazing how the forest just comes back, given half a chance. Topsoil’s pretty thin, but that’s changing. Twenty years, this’ll be green all the time.”
“How do you know it’ll stay this way?” I say, dipping a hand under my jacket. Harlan gave me one of his shirts to wear under it, and the material feels scratchy against my skin.
He looks helpless suddenly, as if I’ve brought up something he doesn’t want to think about it. “No way to tell. Better hope it does, though, or we’re all done.”
He strides ahead, plunging deeper into the forest, his canvas pack bouncing.
I’m trying to ignore my fatigue. My eyes are gritty with it, my muscles leaden. Harlan wouldn’t let us leave until dawn–he refused to travel in the dark, told me we needed sleep if we were going to hike down to Whitehorse. I didn’t want to push the issue, but even curled up in one of his blankets I only managed a couple of hours of sleep.
It didn’t take long for infection to start showing in my thigh. The wound felt hot, like some of the heat from Harlan’s lantern had cooked into the flesh. I couldn’t tell in the low light, but it looked a little red, too. Harlan bandaged my thigh, wrapping it in a wide strip of cloth, and sometime in the night it began to itch, sending up waves of discomfort. That would have been enough, but my mind was like an engine that wouldn’t shut off. It kept going round and round, throwing up every uncomfortable scenario it could think of. Most of them involved Carver and Prakesh.
I think about them now, as we head into the forest, replaying my thoughts without really wanting to. My relationship with Prakesh was supposed to be simple. After everything we’d been through, it should have been enough. We had our little hab in Chengshi, and we had each other. I didn’t need anything else.
But then I kissed Carver. And no matter how many times I tell myself that it was something I did in the heat of the moment, I know it isn’t true. Even then, when we were trapped on the Shinso and I told Carver I was staying with Prakesh, I thought I was making the right choice. But it hurt him, badly, and it was only later that I realised that it hurt me, too. More than I care to admit.
What does that mean?
I know when I find them, I’ll have to make that choice again. But what if the choice gets made for me? What if I get to Anchorage, somehow, and find that one is dead, and not the other? What am I going to do if they’re both dead? I know I’ll have to carry on, keep surviving, but it’s like looking up at the sky, like trying to take in something bigger than I can imagine.
I bring myself back. The wound on my thigh isn’t slowing me down–not yet, anyway–but I can’t quite hold my balance on the uneven ground, and I keep having to use the trees to steady myself. Harlan slips between them, moving with an easy grace.
It’s not long before I slip, my foot skidding on a patch of ice. I have to grab a branch to stop myself falling, the bark scraping my skin.
“Whoa,” Harlan says, turning. He skips back up the slope, and puts his hands under my arms. “There we go,” he says, pulling me upright.
“Thanks,” I say. I feel strangely embarrassed, the blood rushing to my face. I want to tell him that I’m not used to the ground, that if we were on Outer Earth, with its flat metal surfaces, I’d be the fastest person he’s ever met. No point. And I don’t want to think about Outer Earth right now.
“Is it always this cold?” I say instead, shaking my hands. My fingers are still numb at the tips.
“Cold?” Harlan says over his shoulder. “This ain’t cold. You wait until winter.”
“Does it ever get warm?” I ask.
“It’s not too bad in summer. We actually get a little green, if you can believe it. That’s hunting season, though, so it means harder work. Hey, am I getting better at the conversation thing?”
I smile. “You’re doing fine.”
“Good to know, good to know. Good, good, good.”
A few minutes later, we come across a pool of water, fed by a trickling stream running down from the mountain. I fill my water bottle, shivering as my hand touches the surface, then take a long drink.
“Don’t fall in, whatever you do,” Harlan says. “Water that cold, it’ll shut your body down in minutes. Then we’ll never get you to Whitehorse. The thing you did with that man’s jacket was smart, by the way.”
I blink at him, trying to follow the conversational path he’s laid down. When I do it, I realise he’s talking about how I tore Syria’s jacket into strips, used it to mark my path while I tried to find water.
“Didn’t work,” I say. “I still got lost.”
He taps his head. “Doesn’t matter. You might not know how the outside works, but you think like someone who does. The tags, getting to the water, stuffing your clothes with leaves. All smart.”
“It was cold.”
“Exactly. And out here, cold’ll kill you faster than almost anything. You gotta stay warm. Good clothing, good fire, good shelter. You remember that, and you’ll be OK. Here, let me show you something.”
Without waiting for me to answer, he strides off into the trees. He’s heading back the way we came, but before I can tell him that he’s going the wrong direction he comes out again, carrying something in his hand. It looks like a clump of hair, only it’s a pale green, with much thicker strands. When he passes it to me, the underside is slightly sticky.
“Old man’s beard, we call it,” he says, wetting his hand in the water. “And the gunk underneath it is spruce sap. Best fire starters nature has, these two, even when they’re not together. You get a spark, these’ll kindle like anything.”
“How do I start a fire?” I say, stuffing the sticky bundle of fibres into my jacket pocket.
But he’s off again, skipping across the boulders that ring the pool. “Come on,” he shouts. “Town ain’t far. I know an old forest road we can use.”
The road, when we get there, is wider than two of Outer Earth’s corridors laid side by side. The surface is overgrown, covered in a skin of wet leaves, but it’s easier going than the forest itself. The stunted trees hug the road from both sides. Here and there, some of them have fallen, their tilted trunks slick with moss. Despite their lack of a canopy, their shapes cut the sky down to a thin sliver above us, which is just as well. I still can’t look at it without getting a little nauseous.
Harlan keeps stopping to point things out, and soon my pockets are full of strange plants with even stranger names: burdock, cattail, lady fern, and a tart berry Harlan calls lowbush cranberry. It’s bright red, and so sour that I almost spit it out.
I want to tel
l Harlan to hurry–I don’t know how long I have left. But if I’m going to survive down here–if we, as in Prakesh and Carver and I, are going to survive down here–then I’ll need to know about plants like this. I can’t depend on Harlan forever.
“Who exactly are these people?” I ask. I’m still turning over our conversation of last night, when he asked me to tell the people in Whitehorse that he kept me safe. I still don’t know what that’s all about, but maybe coming at it at an angle might get me some answers.
Harlan glances at me, as if weighing up how much I need to know. Eventually, he says, “I used to be with this group. We’d try and stay one step ahead of the Nomads, but every year we lost more people to ’em. It got harder and harder to convince ourselves to keep moving.”
“Why were the Nomads chasing you?”
He shrugs. “Nomads don’t have anything against us, specifically. They just take down anybody who isn’t them, grab as much supplies as they can, and keep moving. Lot of different tribes around here, all with the same MO. And believe me, you don’t want to run into them.”
He goes silent for a minute. I’m about to prompt him, but then he says, “We found this old hospital in Whitehorse. Place had been abandoned for decades, but it had a basement you could seal off. Plenty of space, and plenty of visibility around it.”
“And if the Nomads came?”
“If the Nomads were in the area, we could hunker down, wait them out. They never found us. Not once.” He gives me a toothy grin. “We had food, we had power, we even cooked up a water—”
I’m walking with my head down, moving carefully over a boggy patch, when I nearly bump into Harlan. He’s stopped dead in the middle of the road.
“Hey—” I say, but then my voice cuts off when I see what he’s looking at.
There’s a wolf in front of us, mouth closed, eyes bright. Its fur is dark, matted with dirt and leaves, and its ears are pricked straight up, as if it’s scanning the forest around us. My eyes go wide as I realise that it’s the wolf from the night before–the first one that attacked me.