“I have missed you so much,” I tell her.
I have, I have, I have.
“But I’m going.”
Chapter 25
The Chill
And so I go. I leave the village—my village. My everything.
Milpy doesn’t like this, not one bit. Nor do I.
What I used to know is that there is nothing in this world that can hurt us. I knew there was no such thing as all the things people and horses used to be scared about.
Now I know some of those things exist.
One of them is right behind me.
We are not speaking. What is there to say?
He is shivering, shaking almost uncontrollably. The heat in the house was cranked up for him, but you’d think he’d be okay with his layers, even on this snowy night.
Finally, I can stand it no more.
“Here,” I tell him, pulling off my riding cape, a huge waterproof tent of a thing. “Put this on.”
“What about you?”
What about me? I’ve got my coat on underneath. I’ve got layers underneath that, but I’m facing the wind, and the wind is immediately poking its chilly fingers wherever it can. I’d rather deal with its ice than deal with—
“Just put it on, would you? And don’t flap it around. Milpy doesn’t like it.”
Mason puts the cape on and scoots forward and wraps the cape around himself and me.
I feel myself tense, but it is very sensible. There is room for two. And if it were Plat—I wish or, in this situation, ANYONE else from the village, anyone else in the world—I wouldn’t hesitate. And almost as soon as I think that, I do not hesitate. I button the cape up. I shove my hands through the armholes and gather up the reins.
His body is so cold inside this cape it feels like the wind is now at my back.
When Milpy stumbles, his arms grab around me. Through layers, I feel the grip of fingers, icier than the wind clutching, and I shudder.
“Sorry,” he mumbles, withdrawing his hands.
“This is like in olden times,” he says after a while. “You know, when there was knights and stuff, saving chicks.”
I shift and turn my head to look at him. I mean, really, in what world…
“’Cept the horses was smaller then, I reckon,” he says.
“She’s a Shire horse,” I tell him.
“Hobbit thing?!” he says.
“No, I mean she’s meant to be big. It’s her breed.”
“That so?”
“Yup.”
“You know about Hobbits and stuff, then?” he says after another long pause.
“Yeah, I…can’t remember it that well, but everyone reads those kinds of books at some point, don’t they?”
“Not me. K-Beta Unit Father used to shove on story discs when he was supposed to be doing whatever FUs are supposed to do. Y’know: fitness talks, lectures about antisocial behavior. He was all right in some ways. Sometimes.”
“Z-Beta. That’s what you said. You’re from Z-Beta Unit.”
“That was way down the line. I’m talking about K-Beta. I was…seven? Think I must have been. Started off in A-Beta. New unit every year.”
I can’t help myself. I calculate immediately. “That’d put you in G at seven,” I say out loud.
“Not if you’re bad. If you’re bad, you skip units. You sink so fast it’s like there’s rocks tied to you. I saw that on a game. Had a choice to shoot a man or just tie him up, weigh him down, and then shove him into the river. So you think, save a bullet, tie him, shove his pockets full of rocks, and push, ’cept you do that and you can’t be sure, can you? You can’t be sure what’s gonna happen. If you ain’t tied him up tight enough or stuffed enough rocks into his pockets, any man’d find a way to get loose and rise again.”
I hear the sound of skull on rock. In a flash of lightning, the sight of a flood of hot blood on cold, wet rock. I shut my eyes, squeeze them tight, to shut it out, as though shutting my eyes can make it not so.
“Maybe this is me rising,” he says. “Or maybe I’m just sinking farther. It’s kind of hard to tell. I am just glad you ain’t got tangled in this too, River. Any more than you are, I mean. It’s good that you’re cutting yourself free.”
Cutting myself free? That he sees it like that shocks and annoys me, but what is even more disturbing is my feeling of knowing with absolute certainty: I am never going to be free of this.
Chapter 26
British Rail
“That’s where we’re going?” Mason asks, looking over my shoulder at the flood of lights on snow.
You can smell the smoke of the station guard’s fire even from up here. We have stopped—that is to say, Milpy has stopped—at the top of the steep, twisting path that leads down to the station. A shortcut down from the road. A path I have decided we need to take. Time is not on our side.
“Yes.”
“There wimmin there?”
“Yes.” (Who else would there be?) “Come on,” I tell him, unbuttoning the riding cape. “We need to get down.”
As the cape falls away from me, it releases a fug of human and horse sweat so warm a little cloud of vapor puffs into the chill of the night—a night that’s starry now: clouds gone, moon blasting, snow crisping with frost. I jump down…and he hesitates.
“Come on,” I tell him.
“I can’t.”
“It’s easy! Just swing your leg around and slide down.”
“No. I mean…I can’t. I don’t want to go down there.”
I look at his face in the moonlight. What I see on it is fear.
“You can and you will,” I tell him. I’m telling it to myself really; I do know that. And I think, perhaps, he might almost know that too.
He shifts his leg around, manages to hang there for a moment, as I’ve seen the littlest of the littler ones do, climbing, when they are convinced the drop below them might require a parachute when really they are inches from the ground. He is inches from the ground. I tug the cape, and he falls, knees buckling, into the snow.
He gets up, dusting frost-powdery snow from his legs, shivering. Shaking.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” I tell him. That’s what I say with my heart full of fear. “We’re going to be fine.”
I look down at the station. It looks warm and welcoming—like home.
I think about going home.
“You sure I look okay?” he’s saying.
I look at him. He hands me the riding cape.
It’s hard for me to say; he is so transformed. Under a garish, woolly hat, his shaved face looks thin and frightened—on top of a body that is bulky with layers. At Mason’s own insistence, the layers include a dress of Kate’s and breasts made of socks, which are visible beneath the shapeless, baggy sweater that was added on top, because the coat Kate also donated will not close up over the bulk. His sock-breasts have become dislodged. They look wrong. Wonky is normal, everyone’s breasts are wonky, but one has migrated to shoulder height and both have become strangely lumpy. I lay my hands on his chest, and I wiggle and squish those socks into a decent shape and configuration.
Milpy stamps. What is going on here? she demands to know.
“There,” I tell him.
“I look normal?”
Now really isn’t the time to try to explain to him that people come in all shapes and sizes, dress in all kinds of ways. That’s true for the village, and that’s even more the case in Birmingham, from what I can remember. It’s got to be five years since our last school trip, but I still recall being amazed at how many different kinds of people there were. However, he is also wearing socks over his rubber-hooved feet in snow. We didn’t have any kind of footwear large enough, no boots that would fit him.
“Do I, River? You gotta tell me, because I got freakin’ fear of them she-wolv
es.”
And then there’s his voice. That it’s deep isn’t a problem—plenty of people have deep voices. It’s what that voice says that’s NOT NORMAL.
His appearance is the least of our problems.
“Yes! But…look, you need to keep quiet, okay? Let me do all the talking.”
“We gonna have to talk?! To she-wolves?!”
“I’ll do the talking.”
“Okay, River, okay,” he says, shaking with cold…and fear?
“You put this on,” I tell him, handing him back the riding cape. “We need to walk the rest of the way.”
“Then you take it.”
I’d love to. Any more of this chat and I’ll die of cold (and nerves?) right here. “You put it on. I’ve got my coat.”
He hesitates.
“Put it on!” I call over my shoulder as I grab up Milpy’s reins and lead her on and down.
The moonlight is so bright, but this path, deep in snow, is treacherous—bad enough for humans, for Milpy, it’s an outrage. I sense it’s going to take a whole ha-ha-harvest’s worth of carrots to make up for this.
“I’m sorry you ever even found me,” he says. “I’m sorry about it all, River.”
Yes, so am I, I’m thinking. But what has been found cannot be un-found. What has been done…cannot be undone.
I wish, with all my heart, that these things weren’t so. But they are.
“Hush,” I tell him.
I stop just before we reach the station. I choose a level patch on the snowy path where there’s a collapsed and rotted once-was bench, a brass plaque (IN MEMORY OF EDWARD) hanging on by a single nail. I stop and I watch. An angry horse and a shaking boy wait with me. I’ve got no way of telling what the time is, and I do not want to miss the train. All I can do is watch as more and more cars and motorbikes and horses and vans and lorries and carts arrive.
Milpy, furious, is stamping her feet; Mason is stamping too—the cold must be eating into him from the feet up.
“Okay, let’s go,” I tell them as soon as the flow of arrivals slows. The train must be coming very soon.
The angry horse? She’s eager to continue. The boy? He just comes trudging after us.
When we reach the station, I drape Milpy’s reins loosely around the fence, so she’ll think she’s tied but won’t hurt herself if she has a random panic, which is what Mason is having.
“I ain’t never been on a train,” he mutters, teeth chattering.
I’ve made him stand in his rubber hooves in the snow. Scared? Yes, he probably is. Freezing from the feet up? Definitely.
“Shh!” I tell him, heading for the waiting room. I stamp the snow off my feet before we go in, and Mason does the same, and I wish he hadn’t because the socks he’s wearing have frayed on the rocky path and his hooves are showing. I’m tempted to leave him outside, and I almost do. The waiting room is deliciously warm, so I go to shut the door behind me quick as I can, only to realize that my cape-and-hoof companion has failed to follow me, so I grab his hand and pull him in before anyone can complain about the heat from the blazing wood burner escaping.
The hard metal seats that used to be in the waiting room are dumped outside, rusting, and the room is filled with armchairs and sofas, on which people—mainly granmummas and littler ones—lounge, sipping tea or snoozing and now stirring at the blast of cold. The only positive thing to be said is that the room is dark apart from the glow of the fire and the notebook and lamp on the station manager’s desk…but not dark enough: “Big sister! Where are your boots?!” a littler one pipes up as the room looks at us with weary half interest.
“She lost them,” I tell the littler one as I smile and whisper good morning at the waiting passengers. I’m so glad it’s so early—at any other time, courtesy would mean I’d need to formally introduce us; right now, everyone is too sleepy to care.
“Who are you?” the station manager asks—almost rudely. The train must be about to come in because she’s tapping away on her notebook like mad, hurrying us on, glancing at a railway control console I don’t understand on which lights are blinking. “Need names,” she says. “And reason for journey.”
I didn’t even know we’d have to do this, sign in for this journey. On the school trip, someone must have done that for us. The station manager has her hand hovering above the keyboard.
“So…we’re May and River.”
She types superfast into her notebook.
“Going to the National Council.”
She looks up at me. “Are you River of Zoe-River? From the tech village?”
“Yes,” I whisper.
“Your mumma’s our National Rep, isn’t she?” she whispers back.
Whispering is no good in this place. Granmummas in that waiting room nudge each other as they sip final slurps of tea, pulling on boots and coats that are warming by the fire.
I nod. “Could you please take care of the horse? I’ve got horseradish vodka,” I tell her.
The manager peers out through the window. In the darkness, Milpy is just an angry hulk of a shadow, but somehow, as though she knows we are speaking about her, she tilts her head. Moonlight glints off her eye. Yup, she is furious.
“I don’t drink,” she says.
“And honey! I’ve got honey!” And I do. Or rather, Mason does. I elbow him and he jumps to it, wrestling the backpack out from under the riding cape. He hands it to me, and I rummage and set TWO jars of honey down on the manager’s desk. The crazy seasons make hard work for the bees, so honey is still a precious, precious sweet. Two jars is A LOT.
The station manager eyes them—as other eyes in the room are doing—then gently slides them back at me. “I don’t need honey,” she says. “Just tell your mumma we need another points guard at the interchange.”
“Oh, I really can’t…” That’s what I start to say, whole roomful of people listening now. In my village, everyone knows me, knows I can’t—and won’t and wouldn’t—make any kind of special plea.
“I’ve told my 150 that Ella needs assistance,” the manager says.
“Assistance?!” a mumma in the room chips in, confirming my fear that everyone IS listening. “Her eyesight is going! She needs to stand down! She’s dangerous!”
“She’s a granmumma,” another granmumma says. “Don’t you forget that.”
“I am not forgetting that,” says the mumma. “How could you even think I would? How could any of us ever? She is still dangerous!”
“Train!” cries the granmumma, shaking the sleeping girl at her side because—THANK THE EARTH!—the train is rolling in.
“Tell your mumma,” the manager says to me, bustling out of the door. “Tell her we need assistance at the interchange.”
“I really can’t,” I say—too late. She’s gone. Everyone else is bustling out too, though I notice the looks in my direction. At least they’re not at Mason.
I leave the honey.
We follow the bustle out onto the platform. Goods are being loaded at a frantic pace: I see winter cabbages, parsnips, potatoes, other root veg, and apples, apples, apples (where we live is good for them, and you can store them until spring if you know how). I take a look back at Milpy.
“Horse is mad as hell,” says Mason.
“Thought I told you not to speak,” I whisper back, looking at Milpy. I’m glad I left that honey, because I’m fairly sure she’s not going to be a gracious guest. I grab Mason’s hand and bundle him onto the train and we find ourselves some seats. Though this train is mainly goods with only a couple of passenger cars, there is plenty of room for everyone…but everyone seems to want to sit by me.
Which means sitting near Mason.
He’s got the window seat. I’ve got the aisle…and the crowd.
So your mumma’s a Rep, is she?
National! Her mumma’s a National Rep!
Oh please, what about Cornwall?!
No fish! That’s what you do, isn’t it? It’s not even been that stormy—
We risk our lives! What would you know about the sea?!
I know when people aren’t pulling their weight!
Fish! My Crystal-Rose needs cancer meds. Will you tell your mumma that? Crystal-Rose in Taunton East.
Yes, but what about our comms?
What about comms?!
The satellite’s going to go down. Think about that!
Yes! What’s your mumma doing about comms?
What’s your mumma doing about fishing?
What’s your mumma doing about health care?
Crystal-Rose. Health care. Comms. Fish. I don’t know is all I can keep saying—because I don’t. I’m so sorry. I can’t help you. I don’t know. And all the while, Mason, next to me—he’s freaking out. I can feel the tension in his whole body and most particularly in his hand. It’s still clutching mine, and it’s covered in sweat.
“What’s the matter?” I whisper to him out of the corner of my mouth, because although no one seems remotely interested in him, my knowing he’s a him is making me so anxious. If these people saw what I can still see plain as day—IT’S A BOY!—there’d be questions so much more tricky than fishing—or even cancer.
“It’s so fast,” he whispers back, voice all shaky. He glances at me; the lights in the car are low, but his eyes glint in them like those of a small creature: bright and round and crackling with terror.
I don’t travel much, except on the motorbike or on Milpy, so I understand a tiny bit, but still! “You’ve been on a plane,” I whisper through gritted teeth. He has been on a plane, and I never have. “This is at least a thousand miles an hour slower.”
“I couldn’t see outside!”
“Then don’t look. Shut your eyes.”
“Is she travel sick?” a granmumma asks. “I’ve got ginger,” she says.
“Granmumma stash,” Crystal-Rose’s mumma mutters.
“It’s old,” says the granmumma, ignoring her and shaking out the bag, “but it’s still good.”
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