Daywards

by Anthony Eaton

  The sheer destructive power of the fall was obvious. Much of the skyline consisted of walls of plascrete, many the size of the escarpment, which lay at crazy angles to the ground, bisecting the landscape around them with hard, unnaturally straight shadows. Everywhere the ground was strewn with lumps of shattered plascrete and clearcrete, some just the size of a fist or groundnut, others several times Dara’s height.

  ‘Keep your eyes on the ground, now,’ Jaran said at one point. ‘Watch your feet. The further we get into the city, the more sharp edges we’ll have to watch out for, okay? Some of these shards are sharp enough to slice straight through your shoes, and probably your toes, too.’

  The next time they stopped, Jaran was peering intently at the plotter, oblivious to everything else.

  ‘We’ve got a way to go, so stick close and no talking. I need to concentrate. If we get turned around, or off the track …’

  He trailed off, not needing to complete the sentence. From the hills, the city had seemed to have some shape to it, but now each pile of rubble looked identical to every other, and Dara could imagine how easy it would be to become disorientated. The thought sent a shudder right through her.

  ‘This way.’ Jaran pointed, and together they made their way north across the plaza, towards a pile crowned by the gleaming remains of a broken skydome. The gently curved, transparent arcs of clearcrete caught the morning sun and threw sparks across Dara’s vision if she stared at them for too long. It looked as though somebody had cracked an enormous, impossibly clear egg onto the top of the pile.

  Several times the plotter beeped insistently and they had to backtrack slightly or ignore it while they found a way around some obstacle or other. The morning grew hotter. Down in the deep valleys of the city, surrounded by the hard, reflective plascrete, not even the faintest hint of a breeze managed to penetrate, and before long they were both wiping stinging beads of sweat from their eyes.

  Even more unnerving, perhaps, was the silence.

  Until now, Dara thought she knew what silence was – a hot dusty afternoon in the coastal forest, or the depths of a still night during the dry – but even in those instances, there was always some sort of sound; some insect chirping away even though everyone and everything else was asleep. Or some errant waft of air would stir the canopy just enough to send a quiet whisper shivering through the evening. And in the cave at night, there was always someone snoring, or moving, or breaking wind. Never, until now, had she been somewhere in which noise was so completely, so absolutely, absent. The silence was so profound that Dara fancied she could almost hear her own thoughts. It wasn’t, she decided, a good idea to concentrate too hard on it.

  ‘You doing okay?’ Jaran spoke quietly, but his voice seemed unnaturally loud.

  ‘Yeah. A bit spooked.’

  ‘I know. It’s … it’s not like I’d expected.’

  ‘Me either.’

  In her imagination, the city had always been somehow more … intact. More like the living, vibrant, sparkling world she’d occasionally overheard some of the uncles and aunties reminiscing about. Even the stories of the fall, and of the salvages, hadn’t prepared her for the deadness of this ruined landscape.

  ‘Here.’ Jaran passed her some water. ‘Have a drink.’

  The heat had managed to penetrate the insulated sides of the flask, and the water was tepid, but the wetness refreshed her, and when she’d finished drinking Dara handed it back with a grateful smile.

  Then they were walking again, onwards until they reached the foothills of an enormous rubble pile they’d been walking towards for almost an hour. Now it towered above them, rising from the hard ground in a tangled, jumbled heap. Tentatively, Dara put out a hand and rested it against a large, flat slab of plascrete. Despite the fierce sun, the plascrete was icy to the touch. Against the hot, living flesh of her hand, it felt as cold as the water in the rockpool back home, but without any of the living vitality of water. At the moment of contact a deep, primal shiver trembled the length of Dara’s spine and she withdrew quickly, repulsed.

  The movement, slight though it was, unbalanced the slab and it rocked forward, then slipped and crashed to the ground at her feet, bringing with it a small avalanche of similar-sized pieces from further up the slope. The noise reverberated across the empty plaza.

  ‘Shi, Dara!’ Jaran’s curse echoed back from a thousand hard surfaces as he spun around and realised what had happened. ‘Be careful, will you? If one of these piles comes down …’

  ‘Sorry.’

  He sighed, and the flush of anger passed almost as fast as it had arrived.

  ‘No, I’m sorry. Here, come and sit.’

  They crossed to a small patch of shade below a couple of large plascrete slabs that looked relatively stable and sat down.

  ‘I should have explained to you everything Uncle Xani told me about the city,’ Jaran said. ‘I guess I was too preoccupied with this …’ He waved the plotter.

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘No, it’s important. If something happens to one of us, the other needs to know how to get out again. The first and most important thing Xani drilled into me about salvaging was not to touch anything, unless you absolutely know what it is, what it’s for, and if it’s safe to even go near. We have to stick to the plotted routes and not go off exploring, keep noise to a minimum …’

  ‘Why?’

  Jaran hesitated briefly before answering.

  ‘Two reasons. First, the obvious one: it’s all pretty unstable. The big piles, which might look like they’re solid, can come down at the slightest disturbance. Even loud noise can set off a fall. Xani told me he once saw an entire dome come down because of a thunderclap.’

  ‘And the other reason?’

  ‘Because …’ He seemed to be weighing up how much to tell her. ‘Even though we’re pretty certain the city’s completely dead now, nobody knows for sure. There could still be … things … living here. It wouldn’t be a good idea to attract their attention.’

  ‘What sort of things? Animals?’

  ‘Nah. Animals generally avoid the place, I’m told.’

  ‘People, then?’

  ‘Yeah. But not the sort you’d want to meet. Especially not on your own.’

  ‘Ferals?’

  ‘Worse.’ He sighed. ‘Think about it, Dara. Anybody who’s managed to survive this long in the middle of all this …’

  He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to.

  They sat for a few minutes more, then Jaran hauled himself back to his feet.

  ‘Let’s move on, eh?’

  Dara fell back into step behind him, and they continued deeper in towards the heart of the city. Around them the piles of rubble grew higher and they had to spend more time diverting their path around various obstacles. Here and there they passed vaguely intact buildings – square shells of concrete, much lower than even the rubble of the skydomes.

  ‘They must be the old city,’ she told Jaran at one point.

  ‘Yeah.’

  Eventually, they arrived at a long, straight and comparatively rubble-free avenue running between a series of intact buildings so high they cast the ground below into deep shadow. Stepping into the gloomy twilight in the middle of the day felt odd, and for the first time since they’d entered the city they encountered a breeze – a listless funnelling of air between the hollow building-husks, which did nothing to cool Dara and, if anything, increased the tension in her gut.

  After perhaps half an hour, the alleyway abruptly opened out into a wide, paved area. In the centre of this, an intact domestem rose from the ground, reaching into the sky. At its top perched one of the last remaining intact domes in the city. Jaran and Dara craned their necks back.

  ‘Wow!’

  There was a definite majesty about the dome, even in death.

  ‘Can you believe people built that?’ Jaran asked, his voice little more than a whisper.

  Dara shook her head. ‘It must have been so amazing to live al
l the way up there.’

  Somewhere not too far away, a loud creaking sound broke the silence, and both of them tensed, half-expecting the dome to choose that very moment to topple and crush them. Nothing happened though, and after a moment they breathed out in relief.

  ‘Let’s have a closer look.’ Without waiting for an answer, Jaran set off across the open area towards the domestem.

  ‘Jaran …’ Dara started to object, but stopped herself. She didn’t want to get any closer to the old dome than they already were, but to tell Jaran that would only invite ridicule.

  ‘Come on, sis.’ Jaran looked back at her. ‘We’ll be quick. I just want to see what it looks like from right underneath.’

  ‘You were the one who was so keen on keeping to the path. Everything’s potentially dangerous down here, remember?’

  Jaran shrugged. ‘Perhaps in the closed-in alleys and near the rubble piles, but this area looks fairly stable to me. And there’s nothing in the plaza to worry about.’ He glanced back at the dome overhead. ‘I’m going to take a look. You can stay here if you want.’

  With that, he headed off towards the base of the dome, perhaps three or four hundred metres away. Sighing, Dara followed. They stopped at the point where the domestem, wider and more perfectly round than even the largest tree, rose from the pavement.

  From their vantage point the sun was blocked by the disc of the dome, casting the plaza into a kind of artificial eclipse and rendering the dome itself as a black, formless circle against the shimmering blue, a hole in the sky through which one might pass into who knew where.

  Dara stopped a couple of metres from that alien, curved wall, but her brother walked right up and placed the palm of his hand flat against it.

  ‘It’s cold,’ he told her, sounding surprised.

  Jaran worked his way around the diameter, trailing his fingers across the smooth surface while Dara followed a few steps behind. On the far side they stopped.

  ‘Look at this!’ Jaran couldn’t conceal the excitement in his voice.

  Before them, set into the domestem, a set of rungs extended upwards, rising in a perfectly straight line directly into that distant, black disc. Dara followed them until her eyes began to water at the effort.

  ‘What do you think, sis?’

  It took her several moments to decipher his meaning.

  ‘Are you mad? No way!’

  ‘Come on.’ Jaran grabbed the first rung and tested his weight on it several times, with increasing vigour. ‘It’s solid.’

  ‘It’s hundreds of years old. And sky knows what’s at the top!’

  ‘Only one way to find out.’

  Dara studied her brother. His eyes were bright, excited.

  ‘Jaran, we don’t have time. It’d take ages to climb all the way up there, and you said yourself that we have to get out of the city before …’

  ‘It shouldn’t take too long,’ he interrupted. ‘We’re both good climbers, and if we have to spend a night up there …’ He shrugged. ‘We’ll cope. It’d be worth it.’

  ‘Unless the whole thing falls down with us on it. Or one of the rungs comes away when we’re halfway to the top, or we get up there and find a locked door.’

  To Dara’s amazement, Jaran grinned at her. ‘It’ll be an adventure.’

  It’ll be an adventure. Her brother’s words and the familiarity of his grin took her briefly back to another time and place and for a moment she wavered, before pulling herself back into the present. ‘You’re crazy.’ She shook her head. ‘Now come on, let’s go.’ She started back towards the avenue but after a few steps realised Jaran wasn’t following. She wasn’t at all surprised to find him already fifteen rungs up in the air, watching her.

  ‘See, it’s fine. They’re as solid as the escarpment.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Dara replied. ‘I’m not going up there.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’ Jaran continued climbing. ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be. Just wait here until I get back …’

  Dara watched him climb steadily and evenly, one hand in front of the other. By the time he was twenty metres up, with the stem ahead of him still impossibly tall and the dome at the top impossibly distant, he already seemed tiny: an ant working its way up the face of an enormous tree trunk. When she lowered her eyes again, the shadowy desolation of the city pressed in around her and the air shifted restlessly across the bare skin of her arms.

  Sighing, she reached for the first rung.

  Dara climbed. Her arms ached – every tiny ligament in her shoulders and elbows seemed on fire. Hooking one arm through the next rung, she stopped and tried to get her breathing under control. Further up the ladder, Jaran stopped and looked back.

  ‘How you doing, sis?’ He was desperately trying to hide the fact, but it was obvious he was in as much pain as her. Beads of sweat ran down his face, leaving him bathed in a heavy sheen despite the cold wind that howled around them, snatching at their clothing and sucking the heat from their bodies. And, unlike Dara, Jaran was also burdened with his pack, adding further weight to his load. ‘Not much further.’

  Dara didn’t waste precious breath replying.

  She’d lost any sense of how much time had passed since they started. It felt like they’d been ascending for hours. The higher they climbed, the more the domestem, which at ground level had seemed so massive, became little more than a fragile thread against the endless blue. To Dara, it felt as though the entire structure might give way beneath them at any second – it was a miracle it had survived this long. Despite her brother’s reassurances that it was ‘just like climbing the scarp back home’, the domestem had none of the reassuring bulk of the rock cliff, and none of the Earthmother in it, either. The higher they progressed, the more acutely Dara became aware of a yawning emptiness, an absence, inside her.

  After a few minutes’ rest her breathing returned to normal and her heart ceased pounding in her ears. She drew in a deep breath, steeled herself for the inevitable bolt of pain in her back and shoulders and reached upwards for the next rung.

  Jaran threw her a quick nod of reassurance, then kept on climbing himself.

  He was right about one thing though; they were getting close. They’d long ago passed the point where it would have been easier, safer and quicker to turn around and head down again, and so, left with no choice but to continue, Dara had kept her eyes locked firmly on that dark disc, relishing every tiny detail that revealed itself, as they rose higher and the sun slipped around from above to beside them.

  No longer was the underside of the dome a black hole against the sky. Now she could clearly discern the smooth grey plates of plascrete. Fifteen minutes earlier they had passed three supporting arms that branched from the domestem around them and arced gracefully outwards to the edges of the dome’s base, dividing it into even thirds.

  Best of all, at the point where their ladder met the underside of the dome, a small, black rectangle suggested an opening, and this, more than anything else, helped Dara keep pushing past the aching shoulders and putting one hand in front of the other.

  For the most part, she climbed with her eyes straight ahead, watching her hands with an odd intensity as they gripped each plascrete rung, and only occasionally glancing up to gauge their progress and check on Jaran.

  She never let her gaze drift down. The distance to the ground was so dizzying and the air between her and the hard ground below so empty, it made her head spin just to think of it.

  Instead she kept her eyes locked on the wall in front of her and climbed in a sort of daze, almost trance-like, her mind wandering to other places and times even as her body screamed for respite. Eventually, finally, they passed upwards into the shadow of the giant dome and the change in the light snapped her awareness back to the here-and-now. She was startled to discover the dome filling the entire sky. Not even a glimpse of blue showed around it. Dara struggled against a brief vertiginous sensation, as her mind desperately reminded itself that the base of the dome was in fact a hor
izontal surface they were climbing towards, rather than a vertical one towards which they were crawling.

  ‘Just a bit more, sis!’ Jaran gasped, his face set in a grimace of pain, and Dara managed a sharp nod in response.

  With complete exhaustion riding on her back, Dara was dimly aware of the ladder leading her up into a tight, dark tunnel, and then Jaran was grabbing her shoulders and hauling her bodily over the edge. A sharp corner dug at her and then the two of them were sprawled, spent, on the hard floor.

  It was several minutes before either had the breath to speak. Eventually, Jaran half-turned his head towards his sister.

  ‘Won’t be doing that again in a hurry, eh?’ He attempted a weak grin, and Dara, her stomach cramping almost as badly as her shoulders and arms, shook her head at him, too tired to even glare.

  Wind whistled upwards through the open hatchway, the breeze echoing hollowly around the dim space into which they’d emerged. The sound was an uncomfortable reminder of the enormous void now between them and the earth, and Dara rolled awkwardly a couple of times, moving further from the opening.

  The floor was freezing cold, and hard, harder even than the flat granite stones of the escarpment, if that was possible. Despite this, and herself, she dozed for a while and woke to find Jaran still sprawled on the floor near the hatchway, snoring heavily.

  Ignoring the fact that every muscle in her body protested the movement, Dara eased herself into a sitting position and took her first proper look around the inside of the dome.

  It was nothing like she’d expected. Climbing up, she’d imagined them emerging into a massive, vaulted sky-cathedral, crowned by broken clearcrete, with limitless horizons. Instead, she found herself in a dark, low-ceilinged space, cluttered with fallen machinery and equipment long gone to rust. The only light was the dull glow coming upwards through the floor hatch, a dusty, angular beam shining in through a square opening in the outer wall, and, on the far side, a dim column of light falling from the roof, illuminating the fallen remains of a rusted steel staircase, which must have once led to an upper level.