Without her knife, she couldn’t prep her catch there, and so she had to lug it all the way back, intact and heavy.
Jaran had a cookfire blazing and he threw her his knife. An hour later, the two of them were licking their fingers clean, their appetites thoroughly satisfied by the roast meat. When he’d finished picking the last skerricks off the bones, Jaran lay back on the ground in the shade and laced his hands behind his head, sighing contentedly.
‘Time for a sleep, I reckon.’
A moment later Jaran’s breathing deepened, and when Dara checked he was fast asleep.
She tried to sleep too, but found it difficult. Around them, the forest itself seemed to be dozing in the early afternoon, silent apart from the occasional click and rustle of insects in the undergrowth.
It was hot, too, far hotter than Dara was used to. Back home at the escarpment, there was almost always a breeze blowing up from the saltwater to the south, keeping the air cool and moist. Here on the plain, the air hung still and dusty between the trees, baked by the sun reflecting off the stone of the nearby hills.
Eventually, Dara rose and wandered between the trees for a bit, making a couple of attempts to reach again, but without really trying and with no success.
When she returned to their campsite, Jaran was still fast asleep. He hadn’t so much as rolled over. His pack lay where he’d left it on the ground beside the fire. Dara carried it across to the far side of the clearing, so as not to disturb him. Then, crouching on the bare earth, she pulled the top open and peered inside.
For the most part, there was nothing of any great interest. Packet after packet of prosup, each wrapped in silvery foil. She placed these off to one side, along with the wire cooking device. There were a couple of light thermal blankets and the firekit, which she’d seen but not had a chance to play with. Experimentally, she flicked the red switch a couple of times, watching the tiny blue flame leap between the contacts.
To her disappointment, the plotter was nowhere to be seen. He must still have it tucked away in his pocket. That was a pity. She’d hoped to have a fiddle with it, just because Uncle Xani had forbidden it.
In the very bottom of the pack was a small, tightly wrapped bundle. Carefully, she lifted it out and placed it on the ground. Then, after a quick glance at her brother to reassure herself that he was still sleeping, she unwrapped the cloth.
Inside was a dull metal band – the same as the one Uncle Xani had used to gain access to the Eye. Dara picked it up. It was much lighter than she’d expected, slightly warm to the touch and too narrow to fit over a man’s hand. She turned it over a couple of times, surprised to find no visible join or seam by which the halves of the band might be opened wider.
Her hand was small enough that she was able to slip it on to her wrist. Even so, it was a tight fit. Without being able to open it up, she couldn’t imagine any way of fitting it over the hand of someone larger than herself. The warm metal tingled slightly against her skin, and she stood up and crossed to where a wide beam of sunlight fell between the branches. There, she held it up, catching the sun.
The moment it was exposed to direct sunlight the band emitted an urgent, clamorous ringing and sent a sharp bolt of electricity up the length of her arm. Dara jumped, and cried out.
‘What are you doing?’ Woken by the commotion, Jaran leapt to his feet and immediately spotted the wristband. ‘Give me that!’
He seized Dara’s arm and pulled the metal band over her hand, grazing a patch of skin off her wrist in the process. After re-wrapping the band in the cloth and returning it to the bottom of his pack, he turned to Dara, his eyes blazing.
‘What in the sky were you doing digging around in my pack?’
Dara glared back. ‘You tell me what you’re doing with Da Janil’s wristband, first.’
‘It’s none of your business,’ Jaran retorted.
‘It is, too.’
‘You stupid girl! You know you might have destroyed it, holding it in direct sunlight like that?’
Dara somehow doubted that. The band seemed to be able to look after itself and she suspected that it would take a lot more than a bit of sunlight to damage that sort of tech.
Brother and sister stood eyeing each other defiantly. Then Jaran retrieved his pack, shoving the contents back inside carelessly before turning to face Dara again.
‘From now on, you don’t come anywhere near this, understand?’
She didn’t reply, but the tilt of her chin and the glittering anger in her eyes gave Jaran all the answer he needed.
‘I mean it, Dara. You don’t know what half this stuff is for, or how it works, and if you damage it we’ll have big problems, so you stay away. If I catch you in here again …’
‘You’ll what? Tell me off?’
‘I’ll send you back. Then and there. You can make your own way home. I should do it now.’
‘I’d like to see you make me.’
Having reached this point of impasse, Jaran took a step towards her and for a moment she thought he might have been about to grab her, but then he pulled himself back under control.
‘Just stay away from it, Dara. I won’t give you another warning.’ At that, Jaran shrugged his arms through the straps of the pack, pulled the plotter from his pocket and studied it, then marched off along the trail ahead, pausing only to kick some dirt over the remains of their cookfire.
Dara, with a satisfied expression on her face, followed him into the lengthening shadows of the forest.
Jaran hadn’t said a word to her in three days. Three long days of slogging through the monotonous, dusty coastal forest in his footsteps. Ever since the incident with the band, he’d used his longer legs to maximum advantage, so that Dara had to grit her teeth and scurry just to keep up. On more than one occasion he’d gotten so far ahead as to disappear, completely hidden from view, and three times she’d come close to turning around and letting him go on without her. But each time she found herself standing alone in the shade by the side of the trail and thinking about returning home, she reminded herself that this was exactly what her brother was probably hoping for, and this helped her dig deeper into her energy reserves.
Her determination came at a cost. It had been a week now since she’d followed Jaran out of the cave – a week of constant marching, of bland prosup meals, of starting out in the early mornings and walking well into the night – and now her feet throbbed and her legs ached.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if she’d been able to reach more effectively – to call some earthwarmth and let it ease the tension in her calves, perhaps allow herself to slip out into the land for a while and escape her aching body. But even this wasn’t an option. Another of the side effects of exhaustion, she suspected, was that she could barely reach; every time she tried, the most she could do was generate a faint, distant tingle, which was never enough to carry her fully out of herself, and which did little or nothing to relieve the relentless pain.
And Jaran hadn’t seemed to care in the slightest. On the couple of occasions she’d complained that he was walking too hard, he’d simply grunted and continued to ignore her. The fourth day hadn’t been any different from the previous three. Jaran set a cracking pace right from the outset, and Dara had quickly fallen behind, trudging along lost in the misery of her aching legs. When, in the middle of the afternoon, she rounded a bend and saw him stopped up ahead, it had come as a complete surprise. As she drew nearer, he pointed out, daywards.
‘Look.’
They’d arrived at a lookout of sorts, a wide clearing perched on top of a low range of hills which ran north and south, parallel to the coastline, and perched above a wide band of flat land that extended nightwards perhaps thirty or forty kilometres, all the way to the saltwater. Arriving in the clearing – which showed signs of having been a campsite in the past, complete with firepit and a couple of rough wood and stone shelters – Dara’s first impulse was to sink to the ground and rest, but when she saw what was ahead, all the discomfort
of her body was forgotten.
The plain was an enormous grey tangle.
‘This is it,’ Jaran said, handing her a water flask which Dara accepted gratefully.
‘It’s …’ She attempted to find words, but they eluded her. The city was mammoth, on a scale she’d never have thought possible. It filled the horizon, shattered and fallen piles of plascrete and clearcrete – a desolate wasteland of tangled grey.
Once, when she’d been out on an extended hunting trip with her father, they’d come across an area through which a bushfire had recently swept. An entire tract of the coastal forest had been scrubbed of its undergrowth, the canopy incinerated and the land laid bare to the open sun. The soil and few remaining trees had been blackened and shattered, and the air was still thick with the pungent, lingering smell of smoke. At the time, Dara thought she would never see such destruction again, but that had been nothing compared with the monstrous holocaust that scarred the land ahead.
Here and there amid the wreckage, the remains of skydomes still stood, towering impossibly above the surrounding ruins and throwing long, late-afternoon shadows daywards towards the hills. There was no life in them, though; even at a distance the cracked and broken clearcrete domes that crowned the stems were clearly visible.
Dara’s head reeled.
‘You all right?’ He hadn’t spoken to her for three days, but there was concern in Jaran’s voice.
‘It’s so big.’
‘Yeah. Xani warned me that seeing the city can make you feel … small. I should have told you. Sorry.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
They fell into silence again, both trying to come to terms with the awful scale of the sight before them.
‘How many people lived there?’ Dara finally asked.
‘Don’t know. Millions, easily.’
‘Millions.’ Even to her own ears, Dara’s voice sounded flat. Having grown up surrounded by only a handful of people, every one of whom she knew inside and out, it was impossible to imagine there being that many people in the entire world, let alone all together in one place. She’d known it had happened, of course – she’d heard the old stories – but until now the stories had been just words, interesting words, words that had lived only in her imagination. Now, standing beside Jaran and looking out over the remains of the skycity, they weren’t just stories any more. Now they were real. Those millions of people were no longer only in her imagination. They were buried and strewn across the shattered cityscape before her. Littlies, oldies, da’s, ma’s, uncles and aunties. They’d all lived, and died, right there.
‘Are we going down?’
Jaran shook his head.
‘Not today. Uncle Xani reckons the city’s not a good place to be at night, and it’s too late today to get anything useful accomplished. We’ll stay here tonight and get moving before dawn tomorrow, so we’re in the city at first light.’
‘How long will we be staying?’ The thought of going on a salvage had always seemed exciting to Dara – something of an adventure. Now, having seen the awfulness of the ruins, all she wanted to do was retreat back into the bush, back to the escarpment and the safe, green, sun-dappled world of the forest.
‘Not long. We’re only here for a couple of items, and Uncle Xani has plotted the most likely places to look for them. So if we’re lucky we’ll be on our way home again by sunset tomorrow.’
They sat on a fallen tree trunk and watched the sun slowly sink towards the nightwards horizon. As it did so, the ruins seemed to lose some – but not all – of their deadness. As the sky began to glow crimson, the light reflected off the enormous, shattered panels of clearcrete that littered the landscape, causing them to gleam and twinkle in the dying moments of the day. For a brief second, Dara could picture the city as it must have once been – a spectacular show of light and colour; thousands of glimmering domes suspended in the sky, glowing in the sunset while their residents went about their business inside.
But then the moment was gone and the ruins were just ruins again. The blasted remains of a great human folly. A mistake.
‘Hungry?’ Jaran dug into his pack and pulled out the cooking equipment and two packets of prosup.
‘Not really.’
An hour earlier she’d been starving, but now her appetite was completely gone.
‘Me either.’ Jaran tossed the prosup packets back into the pack. ‘Especially not for this. Shall we hunt ourselves up some real dinner?’
Tearing her gaze from the ruins, Dara turned to look at her brother. Bone-weary as she was, she suspected that hunting would serve as a good distraction from the pressing sense of melancholy which her first sight of the skycity had brought with it.
‘Yeah. Good idea.’
They set off back along the trail. As the trees closed around her again and the city was hidden from view, Dara felt a little of her uneasiness lift.
Only a little, though. Now that she’d seen it, was aware of it, she could feel the ruins parked at the edge of her consciousness.
Jaran cut a long, straight stem from the middle of a grass tree and used his knife to shape one end into a crude point. He tossed the makeshift spear to Dara. ‘You go first.’
Dara knew her brother was trying to distract her by keeping her occupied, and she was grateful for the gesture. The anger that for the previous few days had been obvious in Jaran’s every movement was now nowhere to be seen, which she took to indicate that Jaran was clearly as perturbed as she was.
‘Thanks.’
Leaving the trail, they stepped into the forest proper. At this time of evening, with the daylight dying and the coolness of night pushing aside the dusty heat of the afternoon, there was game everywhere, coldbloods settling down now that the blood-warming sun had slipped from the sky and warmbloods just waking after dozy afternoons spent in shaded hollows. It should only be a matter of minutes before she located a suitable meal.
But despite her best efforts, Dara found it impossible to hunt. Each time she thought she’d detected a suitable quarry, it either heard them coming and scurried away or her throws – usually so controlled and calm – became desperate lunges, the spear spiralling awkwardly into the darkness. Only once did she try to reach, but her mind was in a whirl and the presence of the ruins was so completely overpowering that she quickly withdrew from the attempt.
Finally she handed the spear to Jaran. ‘You try.’
Under normal circumstances, such an admission of defeat would have drawn a derisory comment from her brother, but this time he simply accepted the spear and took the lead.
And as it turned out, he had no more success than Dara. By the time he surrendered, hurling the spear away into the forest in frustration, it was completely dark and obvious that they weren’t going to catch anything.
‘Come on, let’s get back to the camp, eh?’
They plodded back to the clearing, walking silently in the faint starlight. Jaran busied himself heating up the prosup sachets he’d earlier discarded, while Dara rummaged in the undergrowth until she’d gathered enough dry wood to build a small fire. Both assiduously kept their gazes averted from the nightwards horizon.
The food tasted worse than ever, but at least it filled their bellies, and, after washing it down with long drinks of water, brother and sister lay by the fire, back to back, just as they had as children, and slept.
When Jaran shook her awake, it was still early, not even a hint of sunrise in the sky. Around them, the night-forest had subsided into restive silence.
The darkness hid the view. When Dara glanced nightwards, the landscape was still cloaked, and she found herself absurdly grateful for the fact.
Their fire had burned out while they’d slept.
‘You want me to get that going again?’ she asked Jaran.
‘Nah.’ He rummaged in the pack and pulled out a small sphere slightly bigger than his fist. Gripping the two halves, one in each hand, he gave them a sharp twist in opposite directions. There was a loud ‘crack’
followed by a soft humming and the sphere began to glow, giving off an odd, orange light. Jaran placed it on a tree stump at the edge of the clearing. ‘There. At least we can see, now.’
In the sickly glow, he heated a couple of packets of prosup and handed one to Dara, who shook her head.
‘It’s too early. I’m not hungry.’
‘Eat it anyway. We’ve got a long day ahead.’
When they were ready to go, Jaran looked at Dara, the orange light not quite hiding the concern in his expression.
‘You sure you’re ready for this?’
Dara ignored the patronising sentiment behind his words, and instead nodded at the glowsphere.
‘What about that?’
‘We’ll leave it. They only work once and it might be useful to have it here if we get back in the dark.’
‘It’ll stay lit that long?’
‘So Uncle Xani says.’
At the edge of the clearing, they stared ahead into the blackness. Overhead, stars gleamed in the moonless sky, a glittering miasma above the black ruins.
‘Let’s go. Watch your step.’
Despite his warning, the trail proved relatively easy, wide enough for them to walk two abreast and winding in broad sweeps down the rolling foothills until it levelled out on the plain below.
In silence they followed it nightwards towards the ruins. The forest thinned out rapidly, until, by the time the sky began to brighten, they were marching through low scrub with not a tree to be seen anywhere.
Even the scrub eventually vanished and they walked the final few kilometres across a wide belt of loose, cold, grey sand, into which their feet sank slightly and which seemed to suck the warmth down and out of Dara’s body with each step.
‘You want to rest for a bit?’ Jaran asked her at one point, but she shook her head and they kept walking.
The loose sand gave way to hard-packed dirt and then to wide slabs of broken and shattered concrete. Gradually, they began to pass piles of debris – small ones at first, but then larger and larger. When the sun finally rose above the hills behind them, they were already well inside the city, standing in the centre of a vast plaza. Enormous slabs of crazed concrete stretched away in every direction and the horizons were hidden behind mountainous piles of crushed rubble.
Daywards Page 7