by Angel Wedge
Here, outside the lowest level of the largest staff quarters, a sign decorated the cliff face. Between windows at the top and this balcony below, it would have been easy for the building’s staff to clean the sign if they had wanted to do so. Man-high chrome letters spelled out “Lucretia Falls”, but the letters had tarnished and picked up a layer of moss and dust that probably obscured them from anyone looking from further away. Lucy had rigged up a swing to sit on, a piece of broken guard rail and couple of dried out creepers hanging from the bottom of the sign’s ‘c’ and ‘e’. Once upon a time, if someone had tried that the staff would have taken it away. Once upon a time, they would have come out to polish the sign and replace any of the LED strips that had deteriorated in the storm.
Now it seemed like nobody wanted to remember the name of their home. She’d never heard of Lucretia Falls until she first climbed up here, though once she went looking she’d found the name mentioned on a few official documents. It was a name purely associated with taxes, or conscription, or whatever else it was the government men wanted when they came here. So many groups of suited or uniformed men who all claimed that this place was a part of their country. In their normal lives, the people who lived here just called this place the facility, or the compound. When Lucy had first found the sign, she thought she’d discovered some big secret, something that had been lost. She’d been so excited, but Father had cried again. The name ‘Lucretia’ was one more thing she couldn’t say in front of him.
“Come inside, Lucy!” Nurse Chǎ called, her head sticking out of a window higher up the cliff, “You mustn’t be out there now!” Lucy was pleased to hear the nurse address her correctly now, a fairly recent change. The sign over her bed when she was younger had simply said “Lucretia”, and the number 17. There weren’t that many of them sharing a dormitory; there were six beds in each room, and most of them were empty. Now that she had a room of her own, she wanted a name of her own. The sign on her door was just the same, “Lucretia / 17”. But that name upset Father just as much as seeing it somewhere else, and she could never understand why. She’d asked to be called Lucy instead, but Nurse Chǎ still called her Lucretia sometimes when she forgot.
“But why?” she called back, struggling to enunciate the vowels clearly so that the nurse could understand her. Nurse Chǎ spoke a Chinese dialect, a mixture of Mandarin and whatever was the local variant in the town she’d grown up in, and the meaning of a word was mostly conveyed by both the tone and length of the vowel sounds. It was a tough language to master, but Lucy knew that Mā Chǎ would understand her, even if others might need a little more effort.
“Never you mind,” Mā called, switching languages effortlessly. She was a smart woman, and had learned more in her lifetime than most people would think possible. She was always pushing her young charge to learn more, and Lucy later wondered if it was the woman’s love of teaching that had made her choose to be a nurse rather than pursuing an academic career. She loved Lucy as much as if she was her own child, that was clear in both her tone and her actions. Lucy didn’t have a mother of her own, and nobody ever talked about why, but she’d taken to calling the nurse who had raised her Mā after hearing the word in a video.
“Please child,” Mā Chǎ continued, “Please, just come inside. We can work on your tapestry, yes? You are my Xiǎomāo, you are smart but you are young still, and you are not ready for this zàng bēi.”
Lucy quirked her head to one side, but that was a word she hadn’t come across before. As she leapt from her swing onto the railing, she saw people on the road down below. The bright-coloured asphalt was supposed to be symbolic of something, once upon a time. Even though nobody used the lower entrance except the muscular tribesmen, who always travelled on foot and shunned the hard surface, the plants of the jungle had cracked the surface and grown over it until the brilliant colour was all but invisible. Lucy watched them more for the novelty value than anything else; six tall men carrying something between them, something unexpectedly heavy from the slow way they moved. It took her a few minutes to realise why the box looked so familiar, until an image from the encyclopædia jumped out of her memory. Coffin, her subconscious mind made the connection, Strange, I’d thought it would be larger than that.
She took a few steps along the railing, towards the left end of the balcony. The window that Chǎ was waving from was up above, and hard to reach from here, but her quarters spanned two levels with a longer stairway between them. Someone had said it was because it was cheaper to build into the caves left by the small underground streams from before the great waterfall had formed, rather than drilling deeper into the rock. The window of the lower level was the height of a tall man away from the end of the balcony, farther than Lucy could reach even at full stretch, as well as nearly a whole level lower down. She didn’t care about the distance though, going back into the stairwell would mean passing through 3 computer controlled doors. She always found those slow and annoying, especially as the doctors didn’t like her being so far away from her designated room.
Lucy leapt from the end of the balcony without a second thought, kicked off against one of the few trees that had been allowed to retain their full size inside the compound, and landed right at the window. Some builder or architect had decided to put bars across the lower part of every window in case some day a child was in a position to fall out, and she found that the top bar made a perfect perch to land on. Nurse Chǎ had already backed away from the window, hurrying down to meet Lucy in the kitchen rather than watch her acrobatics. Lucy didn’t know why the woman was so afraid to watch; to her a leap like this was as natural as climbing on top of the refrigerator to look for lost keys, but she understood that most of the adults didn’t see the world in the same way she did.
“Oylambwe, child,” Chǎ swatted Lucy gently about the ears as she dropped down to the kitchen floor, “You always scare me so.” There was one word there that Lucy still didn’t know. Like nearly everyone else around here, the nurse knew a few odd words of the tribal language, but she didn’t speak it well enough to teach it.
Lucy knew that she should have been back in her own room if there was some reason she was supposed to be indoors. But the doors that led there were all connected to the computer, tracking every person as they moved through the building. The computer controlled the security of the whole facility, as well as the air conditioning in rooms that had it. Lucy didn’t want to go back to her room now, because she knew that Dr Igor or one of his scientists would be ready to yell at her for going out without using the doors. Chǎ wouldn’t push that one, because she had never believed that the climate-controlled, sterile environment of the official quarters was suitable for a growing child. She much preferred to have Lucy stay with her in a well-appointed five room apartment.
Lucy liked staying here as well, and once she’d formed a bond with the nurse, nobody else was going to complain. Most of the scientists had never raised a child, and Nurse Chǎ was the only one who could get Lucy to behave. The walls here were steel grey paint, marking this area as lower priority than those where everything was painted white. The most important rooms, like the hospital, had every surface coated with sterile plastic laminate. But you couldn’t tell this was an unimportant staff room; you could barely see the walls under the vast number of pictures and hangings. In the centre of the floor was a rush mat, although if you ran your fingers over it you could tell it was a vacuum-formed extruded polypropylene imitation in order to meet the complex’s strange quarantine requirements. Everything that Lucy and her sisters came into contact with was supposed to be screened and pronounced sterile in order to avoid stressing her weak immune system. She’d been told that so many times when she was too young to know what the words meant, but she had never let it stop her exploring the whole compound.
As promised, they spent the afternoon working on a tapestry. Lucy had been learning needlework, and proved surprisingly adept at it. Right now, she was making a sampler to hang in front of the
unwelcome name plaque on the door of her room. The characters were a little uneven and wobbly, but she persevered and she knew that if she kept on trying she would get better. Mā Chǎ had got her a rainbow of bright threads for her birthday, which she’d loved all the more when she realised nobody else was going to mark the day. They’d made a cake too, against the objections of the scientists who still thought they could monitor or control the child’s diet.
Nurse Chǎ still found it hard to believe just how young Lucy was, and her birthday brought that more sharply into focus. The sampler, the cake, her skill with words – she’d never imagined that a child of that age could be so eloquent, especially when she was learning four different languages from the various people around her. Lucy was so far ahead of any other child her age; but then again, there was nobody else that she could be compared to.
Chapter 17 — On the Edge
The sound of the rainforest was overwhelming. I’d woken up to that sound every day for a couple of weeks now, both within the complex and outside under the trees, but today was different: the drip of rainwater from high above seemed like a roar, and the cracking of twigs under unseen creatures’ feet was like a storm. My head felt as if I’d been using it as a hammer, and I had more other injuries than I could count. As soon as I tried to move, I found my clothes were snagged on the rough edges of this narrow ledge of stone, which was probably the only reason I hadn’t rolled straight off the edge. Whatever crazy dream I’d been lost in, it couldn’t have lasted long or I wouldn’t still be here.
I realised as I woke properly that it wasn’t just the background noise of the jungle I could hear. It was gunfire fading into the distance, a staccato contrast to the roar of a river, deep and fast flowing, that sounded like it was only a dozen feet below me. I tried to move, but a stab of pain from my shoulder made me cry out. The stone beneath me was slick with blood. If I moved suddenly enough to pull my snagged shirt free, I might fall into the torrent below. The sound wasn’t a small stream, or a wide and sluggish river like most in this area, but a raging torrent. Years before, something had split a rocky outcropping in just the right way to guide a river down the middle, and as generations of erosion cut the channel deeper, it had gained more tributaries and evolved into a torrent of white water hidden beneath the jungle canopy. Only a chance collision with this protruding slab of rock had stopped my descent down the unexpected cliff. Now I couldn’t see any safe way back up, and I wouldn’t even think of dropping down.
‘In a crisis, don’t panic. Think about the problems you can deal with.’
It was a useful thought in my head right now, so I tried to focus on that. I might be able to postpone fretting about the insurmountable problem of my location, until I knew if I was dying. I explored with my fingers, trying to determine the extent of my injuries. My left shoulder was swollen, and the pain was a constant dull throbbing that I could just about bear until I tried to put my weight on it. I’d bruised it heavily when I struck the ground, but there was no way to tell yet if it was broken.
The blood came from other injuries, to my abdomen and hip. A little probing found that I probably hadn’t been shot; fragments of wood were embedded in my skin, and thickening blood oozed from a dozen different places. Shrapnel, from where a distance of an inch or two had put the nearest tree between me and a bullet. I didn’t need the tourniquet, which had slipped away in any case. If I’d really been hit, I would have died by now, and I knew that it was more luck than my own decisions that had let me survive so far.
Now I would have to think and act very carefully. This ledge was a narrow shoulder of rock, probably only two feet at its widest point. There were occasional tangles of weeds growing along the cliff in front of me, dangling roots and stems that might just have provided a handhold if I was fifty pounds lighter. I knew the plants were no use, but where they had been growing, questing taproots would have widened the slightest cracks in the rock, and decaying plant matter built a little pocket of fertile earth to feed the next generation. If I pulled hard at each tiny flower, I might be able to scrape out enough soil and living plant to provide a handhold, a fissure in the rock large enough to insert two or three fingers and take my weight. I pulled myself up to my knees, grinding my teeth as I struggled to ignore the pain from my shoulder. I grabbed a clump of foliage with my good hand and pulled. I ended up putting as much weight as I dared on the plant before it finally parted company with its rocky home. It took another ten minutes to work loose the soil and root ball, but once I did I found that I could grip on the new hole in the cliff, and maybe start to pull myself up.
I didn’t need too many of these steps; the top of this little ravine was only maybe a foot out of arm’s reach. I started on the second, and then froze. I’d been focused so much on the danger of the river that I hadn’t even thought what might be happening inches above my head. When I heard an animalistic sniffing, it startled me so much that only a frenzied grasp at one of the remaining plants saved me from the edge.
Something was up there. I could hear breathing, the crack of green stalks underfoot. I imagined I could smell the rank breath of some meat-fed beast, but the rational part of me knew that could only be in my mind. No doubt it could smell me though, whatever it was. I was caught between a rock and a hard place, up and down the slippery cliff both leading to a terrifying prospect of death. Would being smashed against the rocks be a clean death, compared to being consumed, torn by teeth and fangs?
* * *
I froze, panicked for a few moments. I wondered if I could hide, flat against the wall of my tiny canyon. If the predator could get down here, it wouldn’t make any difference. It was dark enough that I could barely see anyway. My awareness of the world right now didn’t include much visual detail. I knew enough about the river from the growling and the roaring sound, where the froth must be whipped up like a mill race just inches behind me and a dozen feet down; I could smell damp earth, rotting bark and moss; and feel the roughness of bundles of roots digging into my palms as I clung desperately on to the rocky wall. And pain, I couldn’t manage to block that out however much I wanted to. The pain was a constant reminder of how I was teetering on the edge of death, whether it was the burning, stabbing from my side, or the dull throbbing of my shoulder.
There was another growl, and a squeal. I could imagine it was some kind of leopard, a sound like the hissing of an angry cat but deepened by the larger physique of the creature. More sounds, but the expected strike didn’t come. Another animal shriek, this time I thought the creature might be in pain. What was going on up there? Was I a valuable enough morsel to provoke a fight between two apex predators? I don’t know how long I waited there, clinging on, dreading what would happen next.
I felt blood running down over my hands, and it wasn’t my own. The crevices I’d managed to wedge my fingers into started to feel slippery, but that wasn’t my biggest concern right there. The cacophony of roars and growls stopped abruptly. Then, almost inaudible against the background hum of the jungle, I heard steps. Paws cracking the grass underfoot, padding closer. Getting louder, accompanied by deep breathing just about on the edge of hearing. I panicked, I needed to get away.
I shuffled sideways along the narrow ledge, but didn’t account for the slickness of the stone with my blood on it. For a fraction of a second as the world spun I believed that this was finally the end, and somehow that didn’t scare me as much as the uncertainty of the last few hours. I flung out a hand to try and catch myself, not even knowing in the darkness if my fingers would find sharp-edged rock, or branches of jungle flora, or lethal thin air.
Or a hand. Strong fingers closed around my wrist firmly enough that nails dug hard into my skin, and my weight felt like it was going to wrench my injured arm out of its socket. I screamed first until my face slammed into the side of the little canyon that would have been my grave. I exhaled sharply and my hands opened. If I’d somehow managed to grab a root or a rock I would have died right there, but the stranger
’s hand held firm, and another reached out to grab my right hand. My unseen saviour was strong enough to haul me up the cliff edge and lay me out on the grass, though the gasp of exertion was only one step away from being a moan of pain. I couldn’t even say thankyou. I’d punished myself too hard and for too long, and my eyes wouldn’t stay open once the adrenaline rush died away.
I was delirious, half starved, and beaten way past the point where I would have expected to die. I couldn’t remain awake, but drifted in and out of consciousness. I was vaguely aware of being dragged through the jungle on some kind of makeshift stretcher, maybe just a sheet woven of the giant leaves. Even the insistent screams of my shoulder were muted as the world became a blur.
There was one moment that I remember clearly, but it could just as easily have been another dream or hallucination. Firelight, flickering on the other side of my eyelids, got my attention. We were still surrounded by the sounds of the jungle, not muted by any walls. Had Amba found me and decided to take pity on the stranger who wanted to understand? Or had Paul’s men somehow managed to track me down, showing that on some level he really did care for his little brother?
Someone was leaning over me as my eyes opened, their whole posture radiating concern. My vision was blurred and the dancing shadows didn’t add much, so I couldn’t see who it was right now. I was glad for anyone who didn’t want me dead, and I told myself that the identity of this miraculous silhouette saviour was a secondary problem. Slowly, the world cleared. I still couldn’t make out the details, but I could see the firelight glinting off pink eyes, making them seem to glow from within. Pupils like vertical slits; eyes I’d seen up close just a few days before.