At every high point, Tom searches the land. His gaze is keen and at the same time forlorn. Sylene watches him as he looks for the spiked van. She does too, but not really. She can’t let them find it; she must do everything she can to stop that from coming to pass. Tom not finding Bea, she has realized, is how she’ll find her son.
For days the rains fall. They run through them and shelter beneath the trees until her skin is a puckered, floating layer. She’s never known anything like it. Her limbs hurt from shaking and her fingers become blunt with cold. They find a cottage in a wood at the foot of a gully that glints dully in the rain. The door is off its hinges but the windows are still intact.
“Shall we see if the rain gets lighter?” Tom asks, his teeth chattering as the icy water flows down his chin. “We’re no use to Bea dead.”
She nods, of course she does; she has no intention of letting them find the girl and every delay will help. And she’s freezing; her nod is just a slightly deeper dip in the constant juddering of her drenched and shaking head. She has never been this cold in her life and it scares her. Inside, she is indescribably terrified. So they approach the derelict place and force the rusty door open. Stale air eases out. Aside from a slow-creeping leak of mold, the hall is undisturbed. The staircase and the rooms upstairs are the same. It’s like people were here and they only just left, or they are hiding around a corner in the soupy, unmoving air.
In the kitchen the surfaces are clean, hardly even dusty. It looks like a museum piece. A plastic-wrapped casserole by the oven has mushroomed up with mold. Only one more room to check, and Sylene is aware of the smell as she jerks the door. What had once been a dining room has been ransacked: the furniture is upended, photoscreens on their sides. Old-style LCD pictures and wallpaper have been ripped to shreds and fur lies scattered everywhere. There has been a fight here between animals. The glass garden door is pivoted open and the carpet and walls are drenched and stained. On the table and on two of the chairs are the faintest remains of people: an imprint of their arms on the tabletop and of what had happened to their bodies on the floor. A crisp layer of dark blood coats the lacquer, tongue-laps smeared across it. And two knives, stuck to the surface of the wood. She finds a blood-flecked letter, taped closed, and gives it to Tom.
Darling Paul and Jenny,
If you make it back, come join us. We’re happy, but we miss you. Cut deep.
We love you,
Mum and Dad
They rearrange the room as best they can, heave the garden door closed and barricade it with the table. Then they find tins in the kitchen and eat from them raw. Limbs aching and eyelids heavy as the sky gets dark outside, they climb the stairs and into the freezing bed. It is damp and moldy. Rain hammers against the windows. After a while, Sylene sits.
“I’ll watch first,” she says, touching his arm. “I’ll watch you, Tom; you sleep.”
“Fine,” Tom says. “As you like.”
She used to joke with her husband that their son Darian was their mistake. But then so was their firstborn, Gabe. Because who would bring children into their world? All the advice was against it, as was common sense. So what counteracted rationality? Animal instinct? Hope? Their boys were the youngest people in the Scraper, probably in all the Areas around. They had grown up angry as a result; they were too young to have known anything else, any other way of life. Never setting foot outside in their lives, they were hell-bent on fixing what had happened and on doing more besides, she began to realize as she overheard them talk. They never said the word revenge but it was always there.
She watched them train. Thousands of them had signed up when the operation was conceived, and there were thousands more in reserve. That was in their Scraper alone. That it was patently a suicide mission spoke chapters, she thought; she could only imagine how their hatred sounded when it was discussed openly behind closed doors. It was their fuel, their drive: you hurt us and so now we will hurt you. We hate you. And for good reason too. She was deeply proud of them. They had undertaken a terrifying ordeal. But she was absolutely scared of them as well. Their zeal. She didn’t understand it; their language didn’t sit right in her brain. She no longer recognized her world.
Their training reverberated through the metal halls, the low-level light in the corridors creating a world of shadowed struts and grilles. Metal, metal everywhere. The atmosphere control had been unpowered for years. They were forced to deeper levels to avoid the building heat. So they planned their reckless escape. All odds were against it and she was powerless to protect her children from the world or from themselves, yet she was utterly desperate to try; it ripped her apart at the seams. They trained. Their time was running out. The heat was rising. Their father had died already. There was no more energy, no more fuel. This was it, where it had been going all along: the burning, futile end of things. Tens of thousands of them had gone. In other Areas, many more. She had to be strong as first Gabe, then Darian, had left, sacrificing themselves for the cause. She had watched her sons die for it; she had held their hands as their bodies died, clutched them as she clung on to the hope, the unproven chance, that their minds had somehow survived.
The rains still pour the following day. Wet trees cover the cottage. The sky is crowded with clouds. The roof drips. In the garden, two tanks have water swelling their brims.
“Would you like a bath?” Tom asks, turning back from the view.
“Sure,” she says, still in bed. “Yes please.”
She watches through the window as Tom builds a fire in the garage, smoke rolling along the ceiling and out the open door. They heat saucepans of water and run with them across the wet grass and upstairs, filling the bath until it’s deep and warm. Steam condenses on the mirror, revealing like invisible ink ancient hand-sweeps across the glass.
“In you go,” Tom says, and goes to close the door, but she doesn’t let him. He wavers.
“Would you like to get in too?”
“You enjoy it.”
She stands in the bathroom until her limbs begin to tremble with the cold. Just with the cold? Tom is behaving differently. Her survival is tenuous at best: an elastic energy, the surface tension of water, at any moment ready to snap. She undresses and wipes the condensation from the windowpane. Rubs her neck with her freezing palms. Presses her cold fingers to her forehead and then her stomach. She probes her stomach until, shaking too much, she slips into the water.
By the time she comes downstairs, trailing her fingers along the dusty wallpaper in the stairwell, there is a rich and heady smell rising to greet her.
“What’s this?” she asks quietly from the kitchen door.
“What’s this?” Tom remarks. “What’s that?”
Sylene fingers the edge of a white cotton bathrobe, the trim with stripes of pink. “Do you think she’d mind?”
Tom smiles faintly and then turns away to finish laying cutlery and plates on the table. He places a platter in its center before pulling back a chair for her to sit.
“Dinner,” he announces. “At lunchtime.”
As she eases past him into the chair, he moves only slightly away. His voice is incredibly quiet. “Kate. Kate. Look,” he says, “I’m sorry. I’ve been in an awful mood.”
“Tom . . .”
“No, I . . . I didn’t like being there. I felt so powerless. I don’t blame you—but—and he was . . .” He kneels, and they observe each other as his words fall apart. “I didn’t help you,” he utters in the end. “I didn’t save you. You did it all.”
Sylene puts her fingers through his hair as he bows his head to her chest. She doesn’t know what to say. They stay like that until Tom, quietly sniffing back his tears, fetches a tin of anemic vegetables and puts them on the table. Then he goes on his knees again, takes her head at the back of the neck, and kisses her. His grip is strong. She refuses to respond but she doesn’t pull away. He lays his hand on her thigh, where the robe has fallen open, until, finally, she turns and nods at the food. “This looks amazing,�
� she whispers. “Thank you.”
“I love you, Kate.”
“I know.” Sylene picks up her cutlery.
Clearly smarting, clearly choking something back, Tom lifts the platter to reveal a colorful block of metal, its label scuffed and torn. “It’s tin-baked salted beef à la firewood.” And suddenly he’s crying. “Kate, I’m so sorry—”
“You don’t need to apologize!”
“But I don’t know how to find her. How long can we hope? I’m so tired! How can we find her, Kate?”
The food steams as the rain pours down the windowpanes, its shadows running like graying floes on the floral-patterned tiles. She puts her arms on his shoulders and sighs. Carefully, now. “Maybe we’ve lost her, Tom. Maybe we won’t find her by wandering. Can you think of another way that we can work out where she’s been?”
“I’m not like Mark,” he says, something hardening in his voice, and he pulls away suddenly, some strength flaring up beneath his tears.
“Mark?”
“I won’t give up like him!” he says, searching Sylene’s eyes. Something changes there; something resolves. “We’re going north, like the Pharmacist said. We’ll get up high and look for the van. Look for the smoke of their camp. Let’s look for their fires at night. We will find her, Kate, I promise. Come on! We mustn’t give up hope!”
“I know,” she says, backtracking before the glare in his eyes. “I agree, but . . .” But she can’t tell him about SaveYou without revealing herself. Because Kate wouldn’t know. So she must help him work it out. She has to get them to the tower; she must gain access to their homeHub. “. . . but surely, Tom, think,” she pleads, and runs her fingers through his hair. Down his neck, where she rubs it at the base. She imagines the implant there, woven gracefully into his brain, into his very being. She kisses him softly and smiles. “There must be a clever way to find her.”
By the time they leave the cottage, the trees are saturated and their bark is dark. The gully looms rottenly above them, its rocks jagged to the sky. The air is ionized and the ground sodden, leaking up into their boots.
“That smell,” Sylene says. “It’s amazing.”
“It’s autumn. It’s turned. I hope they’ve harvested at home.”
They walk through the wood on mulching leaves, a wood that has stretched over fields and tracks without care. Sunlight slides through the branches, lighting up the moss. Birds skitter and stop, bowing at the moist ground, pecking for worms and grubs. They camp in the most sheltered spots they can find—in hollows and caves with fires built at their entrances to kill off the increasing cold—but still they shake through the nights. That smell she loved becomes the herald of shiver-aching joints, fingers numb with cold. They scramble up into the jagged hills and survey the land. It is tough and very steep. Rain makes the moss-covered slate slippery and sharp. Tom stops often to check that she’s all right. She nods every time. Of course she is. She’s climbed worse than this.
She remembers climbing the Scraper after Darian had died. That had been a climb. She had signed up to be in the next wave, what looked to be the final one because there was hardly anyone left. She had enough provisions for the two days she thought it would take her to reach the surface and return, scaling the hundreds and hundreds of levels of the Scraper by stairs. The tubes had been down for decades. All the screens in the emergency stairwells were blank—down for decades too. She could remember in years gone by all the beautiful vistas screened on them when energy supplies were too low to run individual Feeds anymore, the rivers and grasslands and lakes replaced now by the bland grayness of the obsolete screens. The daily domestic aspects of the Scrapers had been powered by people’s harvested footsteps as they went about their lives; but with too few now there just weren’t enough steps. Energy had become sacred. The cold-fusion generators couldn’t keep up with the demand for the long journeys back. There was no way to manufacture parts for the solar arrays above, being pummeled by the heat, and anyway it was too dangerous to go onto the surface to fix them. Rather, they had to preserve energy. The Feed was largely shut down. Entire Areas had been closed, thousands of Scrapers sealed. Their vast central plungeholes provided limited natural light, their arrays of mirrors twinkling in the void making the habitats places of diamond-flecked darkness. The energy needed for the atmosphere control had simply been too much for years, so the air was stale and the temperature out of control. The temperature. Always mounting, even though she still had four hundred levels to climb. Already the air here was baked, the handrails too hot to hold. Deep breath . . .
“There!” Tom hisses, and grabs her arm.
She sees nothing; and then movement on the road far below, twisting below the cliffs where they stand. Tom’s grip tightens.
“There,” he growls. “Do you see it?”
She isn’t prepared for this. She doesn’t expect the terrible thing that she sees. There is no denying its spiked shape. It is small with distance, but definitely round, and prickled with spines all over. This far away she can’t see what’s pulling it, but it’s moving slowly for sure. Tom’s grip is viselike. His hand trembles intensely. His face is ashen, stunned. And then he breaks out in a cheer.
They stay up high to keep the vehicle in sight. It’s Tom’s idea and it works. Sylene is impressed; she wouldn’t have thought of something so obvious, though she is disappointed, of course, that he has. If they find Bea now, she doesn’t know what she’ll do; she can’t allow it to happen. But how can she prevent it? she wonders, as they keep running along the ridge, parallel to the valley floor. Their route up high is more direct than the road’s, a curling ribbon of mossy green. They close distance that afternoon and Tom stays awake all night, watching the tiny fire in the valley. When it is extinguished, he paces around until dawn, when he wakes her and tells her they’re moving. They run, and approach, and start to descend the ridge, and she still hasn’t worked out how to thwart this. She needs Tom not to find Bea but she still needs him to trust her. So she needs to alert these people whom they track throughout the day, closing in, stalking carefully.
Dusk falls as they reach the valley floor. Tom has hurried them on and they have dropped down beside the road, ahead of where the van will come. They rest outside a thicket through which the vehicle must pass, hiding behind huge ferns whose buttery smell clogs her head. They wait until the night is pitch. No movement but the whispering wraiths of trees, the gasping hustle of the grass. And then, finally, she hears creaking. It draws effortfully up the road: the roll of rusted wheels crunching over moss and soft wood, the squeaking of the vehicle as it trundles ponderously past.
“Can you see them?” Tom whispers, and she shakes her head. It’s too dark. The vehicle is obscured by the trees. There could be many people flanking it. Or no one. And they may all have gone past or not. Sylene snaps around: maybe they’re being flanked; maybe the vehicle is a trap, a lure for them. The ferns bristle silver in the moonlight. The cliffs rise above them, their jagged edges defined by the scattering of stars. Wind. Silence.
“Okay, what do we do?”
She makes a face at Tom; she really doesn’t know. She says they should wait until dawn—it’s all she can think, to buy time—but he won’t wait any longer. The hopeful plan is formed that she will follow the van along the road while Tom runs to overtake it. They’ll follow it until it stops. She is there to watch, that’s all, to see if an opportunity arises; Tom, meanwhile, will get close, right up and inside the van if possible. If he can sneak up and steal the kids away tonight, then why wait until morning?
“Listen,” he says, and takes her hands. “If anything happens, to me or either of us, the other must save Bea. All right?” He raises his eyes and seems like a ghost in the moonlight. “I love you, Kate,” he says, and she can hear the tears in his voice. “Let’s get her back. We’ll go back to Claire’s. And we’ll never be apart again.” He kisses her and peers through the darkness. “Kate?”
She lets his hands go and takes his cheek. “I
love you too, Tom,” she tells him.
She watches him disappear between the ferns and then pushes through the trees to the road: a more open darkness, though smothered with slippery moss. Sodden branches collapse softly beneath her feet as she skids onward. The world is sketched out in gray. The trees’ branches wave above her. The silver, mossy road. Black tracks of wheels are churned up where the van passed just before. A crashed car crumpled into a tree across the undergrowth. And Tom somewhere ahead, running through the dark, risking his life for the child. She can’t let it happen; she needs him alive; she needs him desperate for his daughter.
Birds screech somewhere ahead. She wades through the deep grass off the road back to the crashed car. Its hood is burst open, its doors flung out wide. She fumbles around for a large, firm stick and then, lifting it high, smashes the rear windscreen as hard as she can. The glass fractures into cubes and scatters like a sneeze, near silent. Some birds beat into the canopy but the night is barely disturbed. “Fuck!” she spits, and her face is contorted as she raises the stick again and brings it down onto the roof. The flat thump echoes, drumming into the trees. Boom. She does it again, again, and again, smashing more glass and rattling the stick around the frames, booming the roof, sending a tumult into the night.
She finally stops, panting, and the sounds echo away.
The road is empty behind her. No one in the woods that she can see.
She climbs back up to the road and runs until she sees the van ahead. Abandoned. Alone in the moonlight, taking up half the way with its smooth-domed spiky bulk. It has stopped below a slight clearing in the trees, and as she watches, Tom sneaks from the bushes beyond. Moonlit, keeping low, he looks around quickly and runs to the vehicle. As he nears it, he slows and reaches out to touch it, and something clangs into its side. Something else does too, and Sylene sees a small rock smack into Tom’s arm before hearing a shouting cry coming from the trees. A figure runs out and shoulders Tom to the ground. They roll in the earth as Sylene runs out to help him, but Tom has already won with ease: he has his hands around the throat of a small and flailing man.
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