Dara stood up and took a few hesitant steps towards this last source of light, but almost as soon as she was on her feet a wave of dizziness and exhaustion swept over her and she plonked heavily to the ground, raising a small cloud of dust in the process, which made her sneeze several times.
The noise woke Jaran and he sat up slowly, grimacing, then stretched and yawned before speaking.
‘We fall asleep?’
Dara nodded, as Jaran took in the cluttered and dusty room.
‘Not much to look at here, is there?’
‘What did you expect?’
‘Dunno. Not this. Something a bit more … grand, I guess.’
Dara gestured towards the fallen metal stairs.
‘I think this must be a lower level. That used to be the way up over there, but the stairs have fallen in.’
Jaran nodded in agreement, then hauled himself to his feet. ‘Let’s have a look.’
He offered a hand and Dara accepted it. This time there was no dizziness and they carefully climbed over the piles of rusted equipment until they stood in the narrow column of light. Above, a doorway framed a distant glimpse of indigo sky, somewhere far beyond.
‘Must be late afternoon,’ Jaran said. ‘I guess we’re spending the night up here, after all.’
Dara suppressed a shiver. She looked up through the doorway again, but Jaran was already hunting around in the wreckage strewn nearby.
‘Let’s find something to help us get up there.’
They considered and dismissed several options until finally Dara called out, ‘Here!’
She’d found an old equipment rack, its contents long gone and now lying half-buried under a small pile of debris.
‘It should be tall enough if we can get it out.’
They busied themselves uncovering the rack, and then hauling it – a slow and painful process, resulting in several bloody knuckles and a couple of bruised shins – until they could prop it upright below the hatchway, leaning it against the rusted riser struts of the old staircase for support.
‘You reckon it’s stable?’ Dara asked.
‘I reckon it’s as good as we’re gonna get,’specially if we want to climb up there before the light gives out.’
She considered their makeshift ladder a moment longer. ‘I’ll go first.’
She moved towards the shelves, but Jaran stopped her.
‘Nah, let me. I’m heavier. If it’ll take my weight, then we know it’ll definitely take yours. And then I can help you from above.’
It made sense, so Dara stepped aside and took one end of the shelves, steadying them while her brother started to make his way upwards.
‘After this, let’s not do any more climbing today,’ he suggested.
He climbed carefully, testing each shelf with part of his weight before committing to it. Dara noted each foot and handhold. Although it was only a small climb, it took Jaran three or four minutes until he was standing upright on the top shelf. Above his head, the bottom jamb of the upper door was only just out of arm’s reach.
‘Here goes.’
He leapt for the doorway, hooked his hands over it and then, desperately kicking his legs in the air to try and maintain his upwards momentum, he scissored his waist above the level of the door and scrambled into the dome beyond. A moment later, his head appeared, framed in the opening.
‘You ready?’
‘Yeah.’
Dara didn’t climb nearly as carefully as her brother, preferring instead to clamber to the top as quickly as she could, before her nerve and her energy left her. When she stood upright on the top shelf, the entire structure wobbled slightly and she waved her arms to maintain her balance.
‘Ready?’ Jaran asked from above.
‘Yep. On three. One … two …’
Dara leapt for her brother’s outstretched hand, a shiver of adrenaline tingling in her toes and fingers as her feet left the shelf. Jaran’s grip closed around her wrist and she felt herself hauled upwards until she managed to snag her free hand over the bottom of the doorway. Then the two of them struggled awkwardly to pull her though.
‘Good jump!’ Grinning, Jaran climbed to his feet and then held out a hand. Without hesitation, she took it and he helped her upright. They took a few steps away from the door, then stopped and looked around them.
Jaran shook his head in amazement. ‘Unbelievable.’
The doorway opened out of a building onto the edge of some kind of enormous, central common – a clear space in the middle of the dome, probably a couple of hundred metres wide. It made the meeting cave back home seem tiny by comparison.
The common was bordered on each side by four giant buildings, each the height of the escarpment or possibly even higher.
The inward-facing walls of these structures were punctuated with hundreds of windows; empty eyes staring over the deserted common. Only a few still had their glass intact. Most simply yawned hollow, and through these the wind whistled and moaned, lending the entire interior of the dome a disconcertingly haunted atmosphere. The ‘ground’ was littered with glass and clearcrete.
But, crowning all this, and dwarfing even those enormous internal buildings, was what was left of the dome. High above the towers it arched, the sky beyond it blurred and distant. One entire side, perhaps a third of the dome’s clearcrete, had shattered and formed a rough maw of jagged edges, running down from the apex to disappear behind the nearest tower block. The rest, though, was intact, and Dara found it easy to picture the inside of the dome as it must have once appeared to those who’d lived there.
‘We’ll have to watch where we step,’ Jaran observed, and Dara dropped her eyes from that dizzying roof, noting the carpet of shattered glass and clearcrete that covered the floor.
‘What’ll we do?’
‘This way.’
Slowly, carefully, he led them out towards the centre of the common, where a low circular structure, similar in some ways to the Eye, crouched above the point at which the main domestem met the base of the dome. Neither spoke, both concentrating on avoiding the minefield of razor-sharp glass. Dara usually hated wearing moccasins, and rarely did so back at the escarpment, preferring like most of the clan children to wander the forest barefoot, but she was glad of them now. Even though many of the shards would have sliced easily through the soft leather and deep into the flesh, the footwear provided some degree of protection.
Reaching the round building, they discovered a number of closed double doors set into the curved walls. They worked their way around, trying to lever each door in turn, but with no success. On the far side, though, they came across one that had been jammed half-open. A blast of cold air rushed through the opening with a dull whistle. Jaran stuck his head in through the gap.
‘Careful!’ Dara warned, but her brother waved the caution aside. ‘What can you see?’
‘Nothing. It’s pitch black in there.’ He pulled his head out again and searched the ground around them, looking for something. A fist-sized chunk of rubble caught his eye and he hefted it a couple of times, thoughtfully. ‘Come here.’
Dara joined him beside the opening. She could taste the air rushing out from the gap, an oily, metallic flavour. Jaran dropped the rubble through the opening and they strained their ears, listening for the thump of it striking the bottom.
Nothing came, though. Only the hollow echo of the wind.
Jaran let out a low whistle. ‘It must go all the way down.’ Involuntarily, Dara took a step backwards. The thought of falling into that long, black shaft wasn’t a comfortable one.
‘What next?’ she asked, and her brother looked around before pointing at the tower block opposite.
‘Let’s check over there.’
They picked a careful path between the rubble. Dara was shivering slightly, but didn’t know whether it was from the cold or the atmosphere. It was strange to think that hundreds, or possibly thousands, of people had once lived in here, had had their homes and families and lives enclosed beneath t
hat massive clearcrete bubble, in much the same way that she and Jaran had theirs within the caves of the escarpment.
The building they were headed to seemed as deserted and empty as the other three. It was built onto the western wall of the dome with its back to the sunset and cast a long shadow across the common towards them. As they stepped into it, a thought occurred to Dara.
‘Do you think there’ll be people in there?’
Jaran snorted, misunderstanding her. ‘People? Look at this place, Dara. There’s nobody alive within kilometres of this place.’
‘I don’t mean alive. Do you think there’ll be … bodies?’
That thought made Jaran pause, and the mirth vanished from his expression.
‘Dunno. I doubt it, though. I imagine anybody left up here at the end would have taken their chances on the ladder. That’s probably why the hatchway was left open – nobody inside to close it again.’
She still harboured doubts, but the answer seemed logical and more pleasant than the alternative, so Dara continued up the low steps with Jaran and entered the building through the remains of the front doors.
Beyond, they discovered a large lobby, littered with debris and rubbish, most of it unidentifiable. At some point a barricade had been thrown up to block access to the building’s main passageway; a wall of broken and rotting furniture and twisted metal had been piled almost all the way to the ceiling, except in a couple of places where it had been torn aside.
The walls and roof and much of the barricade were scorched black.
‘What happened here, do you think?’ Jaran asked her, and Dara suppressed another shiver, trying not to imagine the circumstances that might have driven the residents of the building to resort to piling their belongings up in such a clearly desperate attempt at defence.
‘Dunno.’
‘I’m going to have a closer look. You want to come?’
‘No.’ Dara shook her head emphatically. ‘I’ll wait outside.’
‘Okay. I won’t be long.’
Her brother made his way across to the nearest opening in the barricade and Dara crept back out and sat on the building’s steps.
The silence was broken only by the mournful wind, and thoughts of ghosts and spirits pressed at the periphery of Dara’s imagination, so that she had to crush them down ruthlessly. It was everything she could manage just to stay calm.
Outside, the sky was now crimson, but the sunset was almost completely hidden by the bulk of the tower behind her. Only a slice of iridescent sky, glimpsed through the circle of dome directly overhead, was visible, and Dara shuddered at the thought of spending an entire life shut away from something as simple, as fundamental, as the sunset.
The wind gusted and somewhere a piece of wreckage began crashing repetitively against something else, the noise echoing. The first time it happened, Dara leapt to her feet, her heart racing. After a minute or two, though, the wind, and the noise, subsided.
‘Don’t be a stupid shi!’ she told herself. Clearly there was nobody and nothing up here that could hurt her. The main danger was from the state of the dome itself, rather than from anything living or dead.
Even so, when the ringing of Jaran’s hurried footsteps floated from the gloomy foyer behind, she rose quickly, trembling like a hopper poised to take flight.
‘Let’s go.’ Her brother hurried past her without a backward glance. His face was ashen.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.
Without breaking stride, he shook his head. ‘Nothing. Let’s just get out of here.’
Dara had never seen Jaran so spooked.
‘And go where? Jaran, stop!’
But her brother was already well out into the common, putting as much distance as possible between himself and the building from which he’d just emerged. Dara hurried after him.
‘Jaran, wait!’ Her voice echoed back at her from a thousand hard surfaces and was whipped away by the moaning wind. ‘Jaran!’
Her brother didn’t stop until he was well past the low building in the centre. When she finally caught up with him, she was amazed to find him trembling, his eyes wild.
‘What happened?’ she asked, but he just shook his head.
‘You don’t want to know, Dara.’
She reached out and placed a hand on his arm. His skin was cold and clammy and prickled with gooseflesh.
‘Jaran, tell me.’
‘No. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t even want to think about it.’
There seemed little point in pushing further. Dara knew that if Jaran was determined not to talk then nothing she said or did would change his mind. Instead she changed the subject.
‘It’s going to be dark soon. We should find somewhere to camp.’
Jaran nodded, grateful for the distraction, and some of the fear left his eyes.
‘Not the tower blocks, though. We should stay out of them.’
Dara left the obvious question unasked and made a show of looking carefully around, considering the interior of the dome. ‘Where then?’
‘Back underneath. Near the hatchway. We’ll start down first thing in the morning.’
Dara didn’t think that trying to make the jump on to the shelves in the dark was the best idea, but whatever Jaran had found in that tower block, it was obvious he needed to get as far away from it as possible.
‘All right, let’s go.’
This time it was Dara who led the way, choosing a circuitous route that avoided the worst of the rubble and glass. It took them several minutes to climb down into the underfloor room, the shelves teetering precariously as Dara and Jaran carefully lowered themselves into the darkness.
Vague shadows of fallen equipment loomed out at them in the dull twilight. Immediately Dara decided that there was no way she was going to start groping around in the darkness, trying to find the exit hatch.
‘Let’s just stay here below the door tonight. We’ll find the hatch in the morning.’
Jaran agreed readily. After an unappetising meal of prosup, they made themselves as comfortable as they could on the hard plascrete floor. Beside her, Dara heard her brother’s breathing gradually deepen as he succumbed to sleep, despite the discomfort and the cold and the constant howl of wind through the trapdoor. His slumbering bulk warmed her, reassuring, until eventually she succumbed also.
And when she woke several hours later, Jaran was gone.
‘Jaran!’ Dara’s eyes snapped open sometime during the small hours of the morning, instantly aware that something was wrong.
‘Jaran!’ Her voice, at first a whisper, took on a new urgency as she hissed loudly, desperately, ‘Where are you?’
From the unseen edges of the room, her own voice floated back at her, and the horrible realisation set in.
He wasn’t there.
She was alone in the dark, thousands of metres in the air.
‘Jaran!’
Dara shouted her brother’s name with all the volume she could muster. Only the wind moaning around the dark room answered.
Her first instinct was to panic. Her breath tightened in her chest as the relentless press of fear clutched at her. Around her, she could feel the ghosts of the past – the ghosts of this insane womb into which she and Jaran had climbed – hovering about her, hungry, waiting.
‘Jaran!’
Somewhere at the very edge of her hearing, a long, soft creak echoed, the sound groaning off the circular walls with no direction or distance. Dara whirled around desperately, trying with no success to place the location of the noise.
‘Jaran?’
Then … silence.
The wind dropped; the constant, breathy moan faded to a hollow whisper and then to nothing. It was one of those strange lulls, when everything goes still and the universe seems to pause. Inside the dark room, Dara stood trembling and alert, the pulse of her heartbeat thundering in her ears.
And with the noise of the wind gone, the pressure of panic faded too. Dara breathed in several times, sucking
the metallic air deep inside herself and feeling its icy touch ease a little of the tension from her chest and shoulders.
Jaran was gone. She was certain he wasn’t down here in the lower room with her. That left two options: he’d either tried to make the descent on his own, without her, or he’d gone back up the equipment rack, through the doorway above and into the dome again.
They’d had their arguments in the past, but Dara was certain he wouldn’t have just left her here. He had no reason.
Instinctively, without thinking, Dara closed her eyes and tried to pull up earthwarmth, to reach and locate her brother.
But this high in the sky, cocooned in the cold plascrete of a dead skydome, there was nothing there. Only a frighteningly empty coldness in which was contained all the distance and insubstantial emptiness of the sky below her and a deadening, complete absence of life.
Shivering, her mind assaulted by the sheer passivity of the skydome, Dara retreated back into herself and looked around, wondering what she should do.
If Jaran had indeed gone back up into the dome, he must have had a good reason. But she’d seen how spooked he’d been by whatever he’d found behind that barricade, and Dara couldn’t imagine anything that might provoke her brother into leaving her alone while he returned up there on his own.
The only alternative, though – that he’d gone back down to the ground through the floor hatch – seemed equally, if not more, unlikely.
Calmer now, Dara sat in the darkness and allowed herself to puzzle it out. Jaran’s behaviour was horribly out of character, even for him. But then, he’d been acting strange ever since Da died, so who could say what was going on in his head. Either way, without any light, and without any alternatives, there was nothing Dara could do but sit and wait. There was no point trying to climb up into the dome above on her own – she needed Jaran’s help for that. Similarly, the prospect of scrambling around in the pitch darkness searching for the hatch in the floor was no more alluring now than it had been when they’d first descended from the dome.
Daywards Page 9