Daywards

by Anthony Eaton

  Either way, she put the effort aside and turned her attention to her surroundings.

  While the area around the walls was clear, the same was not true of the centre of the shaft. There, a large pile of crushed and shattered debris blocked her view. It was impossible to discern any specific details of the wreckage, but it looked as though several enormous metal cylinders had been dropped on top of one another, plummeting from high above her head.

  Slowly she worked her way around, moving to her left, away from the ladder and carefully inspecting the wall, until she entered the deep shadow on the far side, the debris pile now squarely between her and the porthole.

  There, Dara waited for her eyes to adapt, and as they did so an outline appeared on the wall. She blinked several times, fully expecting the apparition to vanish, but instead it remained in place, more obvious with each passing moment.

  In front of her a rectangular thread of light marked the place where, clearly, a doorway still stood fast against the toxic world outside – the final sentinel guarding the dead tower from the dangers beyond those thick, plascrete walls.

  Dara stepped towards the rectangle, expecting it to turn out to be a trick of the light, or her mind deceiving her into hopeful fantasy. But when she extended a single finger towards the glimmering vertical line it didn’t vanish. Instead, her fingertip glowed slightly. Pressing her face hard against the smooth plascrete, she fancied she could feel a hair-width of fresh, cool air on her cheek. It was impossible, of course, but with the discovery of the door came an almost overwhelming flood of hope.

  As the initial euphoria of her discovery wore off, Dara began a systematic investigation of the seam, starting at floor level and probing with her fingers, hoping to find some tiny crack or button or anything suggesting a weakness in the doorway that might be exploited.

  But it soon became clear that no amount of probing or levering was going to force this door aside. Dara turned her attention to the surrounding wall, and almost immediately her hands ran across a flat, smooth panel, similar to the one that gave those with wristbands access to the Eye. Useless.

  On the other side of the door, though, she found another panel hidden deep in the shadow. This one had a hinged cover which had, at some point in the past, been bashed open to reveal a deep cavity in the plascrete wall behind.

  And in this cavity was a handle.

  The moment her fingers closed around the cold metal grip, Dara knew she’d stumbled across her last hope. With trembling hands, she took hold of the handle. Then, her breath tight in her chest, she gave it a sharp turn to the right.

  And it moved!

  Not very much, just a scant couple of centimetres, but unlike the door on the balcony which had been exposed for years to the sun and wind and merciless pounding of the elements, this ancient mechanism, sheltered and protected in the dim depths of the domestem, had survived the decline of the skycity relatively intact.

  Dara, fuelled now by a rush of hope and adrenaline, began cranking the handle around furiously.

  At first it seemed as if nothing was happening, but then the hairline glimmer widened into a solid column of light. Her dark-adapted eyes were instantly aware of the change, and the whistle of air sliding through the gap was audible.

  It was slow going. Fifteen or twenty full revolutions of the handle opened the door only a couple of centimetres and Dara soon felt a sheen of sweat on her forehead. She persisted, though, and before long a bright column spilled in across the floor, illuminating the debris pile in the centre of the shaft to reveal twisted panels of steel, tangles of cabling and then, to her horror, a skull, which leered at her efforts through empty eye sockets. The light made the bone glow iridescent against the darkness and it took a force of will for Dara to tear her eyes from the grim spectacle and turn her attention back to working the crank handle.

  And then, finally, the door was open enough for her to slip through and so, shielding her eyes against the glare of full daylight, Dara squeezed outside and breathed in deeply, relishing the taste of the dry, dusty air.

  ‘There, Jaran, you stupid shi!’

  She stumbled away from the domestem into the shade of the nearest building. The sun was overhead, suggesting that it was still relatively early. She felt as though she’d been in the darkness for hours and hours, and had expected to emerge into the twilight of approaching night. But, here in the canyons of the ruined skycity, the sunlight beamed down and she turned her face to it, savouring the burning heat on her cheeks and nose, the cold and tension running out of her like water.

  The dome was, once again, a dark speck against the sky, impossibly distant and removed from the solid, reassuring bulk of the earth beneath her feet.

  At the base of the dome a slight movement caught her attention and Dara dropped her eyes just in time to see the doorway grind slowly closed again, some ancient, protective clockwork mechanism still fulfilling its futile task. As she watched the plascrete panel slip back into place, Dara knew that nobody would ever use it again. She’d been the last.

  Offering up a silent thanks to whoever had thought it necessary to include such an escape route from the skydome in the first place, Dara turned her back on the plaza and set out along the deserted valleys of the ancient city, turning her steps towards home, and Jaran.

  In a cool clearing beside a creek hidden in deep bush, a day’s walk from the escarpment, Dara threw away her last two sachets of prosup, pouring the contents into the fast-flowing water with relish and watching the beige clumps float downstream – food for some unsuspecting hardback or fish, she thought, grinning.

  A couple of metres away, roasting on the coals of a small campfire, the smell of a recently speared rockhopper set her saliva flowing in anticipation. Looking at it, and at the small bag of tech she’d carried with her, Dara grinned. Jaran would be furious when he found out, though probably not so much as Xani.

  Her feet throbbed and she dipped them into the creek, relishing the sensation of the icy water around her ankles. For seven days now she’d been hiking fast, flowing through the days and most of the nights in her hunter’s walk, the kilometres passing below her feet almost unnoticed as she fuelled herself with a combination of earthwarmth and prosup, determined to catch Jaran if possible, or, if not, to reach the escarpment soon after him and stop whatever scheme Uncle Xani had cooked up in her absence.

  At the campsite outside the city she had discovered the stash of tech her brother had left there for the next time someone came past. Clearly he’d used at least some of the time she was trapped in the dome to go salvaging, and there’d been too much for him to carry all the way home on his own. She’d helped herself to a firekit and some water flasks and enough food to save her from hunting during the walk.

  The rest of it – mostly bits and pieces of tech she didn’t recognise – she’d taken great pleasure in pounding with a rock until they were nothing more than a collection of shattered plastic and wire.

  Her escape had left her exhausted, and her ability to reach suffered accordingly. But, as the days passed and she moved further from the city, down the coastal plain and then up into the higher country and the deep bush, Dara felt the pulse of the Earthmother more and more insistently beneath her. This morning, when she’d woken, refreshed despite having slept only a couple of hours, she reached as though it was the most natural thing in the world.

  And there he was, just a scant couple of hours ahead: her brother’s familiar spark, camped near the cliffs below the saddleback pass where she’d first caught up with him so many days ago.

  For the remainder of the day, Dara had trailed Jaran easily, slipping up and over the saddleback just an hour or so after him and then maintaining an easy gap between them through the afternoon, reaching just often enough to keep in touch with his presence, but never so frequently as to exhaust herself. She’d learnt that lesson.

  She’d expected her brother to maintain a fast pace back to Uncle Xani, but to her surprise he meandered along, strolling throu
gh the afternoon and stopping so frequently that on a couple of occasions she nearly caught up to him and only blind luck saved her from doing so.

  And then, in the late afternoon with home only a few hours walk away, he’d stopped and set up camp for the night. Dara took the opportunity to hunt for some proper food. Tomorrow, at least she’d be able to confront Jaran and Uncle Xani on a full stomach.

  So now, lying stretched out on the creekbank, Dara imagined her brother just a couple of kilometres down the trail, probably crouched over his backpack sucking down yet another meal of prosup, and she grinned widely. She had no idea why he was taking so much time to return, but it hadn’t done her any harm at all.

  Overhead, the night was deepening, the first stars twinkling into life. Dara crossed to the fire, retrieved her dinner and wolfed it down eagerly. Every mouthful sent a burst of succulent juice trickling down the back of her throat and she savoured the final couple of mouthfuls for as long as she could, glorying in the deep, smoky flavour. Then, after a long drink from the creek, she lay down beside the fire and watched the sky once more, idly waiting for sleep to overtake her.

  It didn’t, though. Perhaps because she was so close to home, or perhaps because her belly was full for the first time in a week, Dara felt energised and so, as the last of the twilight faded from the western sky and the night foragers began to rustle and chirp in the undergrowth, she rose, gathered her equipment and extinguished her campfire, a new scheme forming in her mind.

  She’d beat him back.

  The thought of Jaran’s face when he returned home to find her waiting for him was enticing and so, grinning, Dara set off into the night.

  The evening shadows grew deeper, and by the time she approached her brother’s camp it was full night – but not full darkness. After her night spent in the crypt-black domestem, Dara doubted she’d ever find anything truly dark again. A three-quarter moon was rising above the northern horizon and the forest was dappled into a million silver shades. Gumleaves trembled in the monochrome light, scenting the air with their oil.

  The faint flicker of flames between the tree trunks gave away Jaran’s location before she reached him. He hadn’t even left the trail, but had simply settled below an old tree immediately beside the path, not bothering to conceal either himself or his campfire.

  Carefully now, Dara crept towards him. Even though his behaviour appeared from a distance to be strangely nonchalant, Jaran was still a formidable hunter and she knew that even the slightest footstep out of place – a faint, foreign rustle, or a snapping twig – would wake him instantly.

  Except that he wasn’t asleep.

  Skirting carefully through the scrub, Dara stopped and crouched in the shadows, startled to discover her brother not slumbering but sitting upright, staring into his small fire and poking at the embers with a long twig.

  Dara froze.

  She hadn’t known what to expect when she next laid eyes on her brother. She’d kept her attitude towards him fuelled with a mix of cold anger and grim determination, but now, seeing him, Dara felt her rage waver slightly.

  She’d imagined that he’d look smug, or triumphant, or at the very least happy with himself, but there was nothing of that evident in the listless droop of his shoulders or the miserable expression etched into his face. In fact, his whole posture seemed so defeated that, for a brief, insane moment, Dara had to fight the urge to go over and reassure him.

  Only for a moment, though. Then she recalled the sickening lurch in her stomach when she’d first realised that he’d sealed her up inside the skydome, and her resolution returned with a vengeance. Tearing her gaze from Jaran, she concentrated instead on slipping quietly around the next patch of scrub and rejoining the trail again, several hundred metres down from his campsite.

  Then she set off again and the dull glimmer of Jaran’s campfire was quickly masked by the thick forest.

  She allowed herself to relax and fall back into her easy, loping walk. There was always something ethereal about being in the forest at night: the way the bark on the tree trunks captured the silvery moonlight, illuminated on one side and cast into deep, featureless shadow on the other; a world of ancients, standing guard over the passing ages with impossible patience.

  Occasionally, the gentle night breeze would stiffen into a gust of wind, surging through the canopy and setting the leaves whipping overhead with a dislocated roar of air, before settling once again into the restive stir of regular night.

  And in the midst of this, always somewhere nearby, there was life.

  Even without reaching, Dara was aware of the constant chatter of the night forest: the murmur of insects hidden under the leaf litter, the scurrying scuffle of some creature or other foraging through the cool gloom, the almost silent whisper of a nightbird whipping between the trees with uncanny precision. All these combined with a million and one other tiny sounds to form a lullaby that settled Dara’s nerves and allowed her to walk through the evening divorced from her concerns about what sort of welcome might be waiting for her.

  So when, during the small hours of the morning, the song fell silent, she took it as a warning.

  It didn’t happen instantaneously. Initially it was just a subtle fading – fewer insects, a longer gap between scuffles, or greater urgency in the sound of the nocturnal animals of the forest hurrying away. Finally, when the song had completely given way to unnatural, profound silence, Dara stopped and cocked her head, listening.

  As best she could tell, she was very close to home now. The Eye should be only another couple of kilometres down the trail. She strained, looking for the dull orange glow of the solar lamps between the trees, but saw only the usual pools and hollows of shadow that made up the night forest.

  Somewhere off to her left, a large hopper bounded off into the bush, crashing back in the direction from which she’d just come. As the sound of its passage faded, the night returned to perplexing, dead stillness.

  Dara closed her eyes and breathed in deeply a couple of times, making a conscious effort to release enough of her nervousness to allow her to reach. She could still feel the Earthmother, and the reassuring pulse calmed her enough to allow herself down into it and then out, stretching her awareness into the stillness and reading the land around her.

  There was life, plenty of it, in all directions. All the myriad sparks she’d expect to find in the forest, from tiny insects to large hoppers, were there. Everything, though, was still, frozen in place, held motionless by some fear Dara couldn’t discern.

  Carefully, she slipped deeper, pushing herself out a little past the local area, probing especially towards the Eye, or to where she thought it would be.

  It was some minutes before she found it. As usual, it was hard to locate, and she found it only when she remembered that when reaching for Nightpeople artifacts she needed to be aware not of the life flowing into the Earthmother but of its absence. She had to look for the dark, cold holes where the Earthmother was held back and where skyfire pulsed instead of earthwarmth.

  Once she remembered this, it took only seconds to find. There was the Eye, some way ahead, its cold emptiness dominating the clearing.

  But something was different, too, changed since she’d last reached into this particular land.

  Concentrating harder, Dara dropped a little further, pulled into herself as much earthwarmth as she dared, and then focused all her attention on that alien emptiness.

  It was hard to tell – absences of life were almost impossible to read with any degree of detail, but the Eye seemed to have grown, which was impossible.

  But that was how it felt. The clearing felt just as it normally did, but the coldness in it, the emptiness where the blockhouse stood, now felt larger than she remembered, as though it took up more of the clearing.

  There wasn’t a single glimmer of life there, nor for some distance around it. It was as though a dead zone had been imposed on the forest, a wide belt marked only by its silence. In there nothing moved, nothing breat
hed, nothing stirred.

  And at the centre of this, beside the Eye, where Uncle Xani should have been waiting for Jaran, there was nothing.

  Frightened now, Dara had to focus her will on staying calm enough to remain open, to keep the earthwarmth flowing into her and her awareness flowing out.

  She shifted her attention, pulling gratefully away from the emptiness of the Eye and pushing out again, seeking the escarpment and the clan caves, where at least she’d find the reassuringly familiar sparks of the people she knew and loved. Eyna and Ma Saria and all the others. Until now Dara hadn’t realised how much she’d missed them, how acutely aware she had been of their absence.

  There were the caves. It was easy to find the hollow cavities in the living earth.

  But …

  For a fraction of a moment, the reality of what she was seeing did not sink in, and then the shock caused Dara’s breath to catch in her chest and the pulsing earthwarmth vanished in an instant, hurling her back, mercifully, into the confines of her own immediate senses. One hand flew to her mouth, and Dara bit down hard on a knuckle to stop herself from screaming.

  There was nobody there.

  Nothing.

  Worse, the caves themselves felt as empty as the Eye. That same unnatural deadness, that complete absence of life, had oozed from the rockface, smothering her perception and holding the Earthmother at bay.

  Her contentedness now completely forgotten, Dara slumped to the ground, her head spinning.

  They couldn’t have gone. They wouldn’t have, surely. Ma Saria would never have allowed it, and Eyna, at the very least, would have waited. And even if the entire clan had, for some reason, packed up and moved, that didn’t explain the awful deadness that now pervaded their former campsite.

  But there was no escaping the fact that there was nothing there – at least nothing she could see through the Earthmother.

  Which left Dara with only her own eyes and ears and whatever courage she could muster.

  Leaving her small bag of supplies hidden under a patch of scrub, and deciding to eschew the relatively easy to navigate trail in favour of a slow but hidden path through the dense bush, Dara slipped into the shadows, creeping towards the place where the Eye crouched, cold and lifeless, in the night.