Tabitha
Page 48
Tabitha watched cracked ice sprawling for miles, like one vast broken window floating on the black ocean. She dozed a while longer, trying to take her mind off her appetite. When she blinked her eyes back open at the cockpit around her, she sat up suddenly and took control. The hologram globe showed that she was coming right up to the North Pole. She wanted to get out and see it.
The ship lowered her down on its wing, and Tabitha stepped off onto crunching snow. Looking down, her black feet were a stark contrast. She didn’t feel the snow between her toes. Tabitha zipped up her coat against the biting cold, and left a trail of footprints from where the ship rested. It was such a lonely place; a flat white infinity. The wind rushed past her ears in a fresh stinging chill, despite her parka hood pulled down over her face. There wasn’t a marker pole around here anywhere; she must have been slightly off dead-centre. But the North Pole was the North Pole, after all. She was near enough to say she’d been here, if there was anyone left to tell. Tabitha turned stiffly in the cold, paranoid that the ship was going to leave her here. Or remember its hostility at some point and reach over and eat her when she wasn’t looking. But it just sat there like a grey statue of a dragon, white eyes staring. Tabitha eyed it cautiously, a slave to her paranoid thoughts, and turned her back on it again. The wind whipped. Tabitha blinked against a sudden flurry of powdery snow, blowing up off the alien landscape in a fine glittering dust. The sunlight caught the snow at her feet, and made it shine like white grains of sand. It was so silent here, like another world almost. Part of her couldn’t really believe she was here, freezing her arse off at the North Pole. Another part of her couldn’t get past the fact that she was just freezing her arse off. Tucking her hood tighter around her face, Tabitha strode back stiffly through the crunching snow to the ship.
‘Er… wing. Please,’ she said awkwardly. The ship turned its head to glance down at her, disinterested, and lowered a wing to raise her up.
‘…Thanks,’ she muttered to it, climbing back onto the saddle and sinking down into the hatch. She still felt weird about interacting with it; on edge. Like trying to work around an ex once they’d both cleared the air and knew where they stood. After all, the thing had been trying to kill her. She should have fought it to the death on principle, or at least escaped from it. But now she knew that the monster wasn’t a monster at all, but a ship, things were different. And the thought of flying off anywhere in the world was just too exciting for her to pass up.
Tabitha set off and watched the vast white world rolling away beneath her from the cockpit. She kind of wished she’d brought a book. She felt terrible for the thought, but the appeal of the Arctic had only lasted so long. She pulled her hood down close, tucked her hands into her armpits, and settled down for a nap. It was always a good time for a bit more sleep.
When she woke up, Tabitha studied the hologram globe for a little while. The sphere glowed a gentle electric blue, and the white guide line still traced a path over the top of the world right down into the Pacific. At the moment they were over Alaska, moving slow on the map. Tabitha knew they were flying as fast as a jet in reality; but their crawling pace on the hologram globe seemed to tell a different story.
‘That’s Russia,’ she mumbled, plucking the globe off the console and turning it gentle and weightless in her hands. Funny, she’d never really thought of Russia and Alaska being quite so close to each other on the world map. She’d always assumed there was some vast stretch of ocean between them, but in reality they were practically touching. How did she not know that, seriously? The revelation shattered her faith in her own geography skills. Tabitha studied the globe and zoomed in on the white line that traced her progress into Alaska. She watched it closely; there was no change in it. Normally the white dot that showed their position would be crawling onwards, snail-slow. Watching it now though, it looked like they weren’t moving at all. Come to think of it, it didn’t feel like they were moving either. Usually the ship would tilt a little against the wind now and then; that hadn’t happened for a while. Tabitha pushed the white button on her seat and rose up through the hatch, and looked around at pitch-black night all around her. The freezing wind cut right through her coat, making her shiver. They were perched on a mountain.
‘Hey!’ she called to the ship’s head. Her voice echoed across a dark lonely wilderness. Silhouettes of endless pine forest sprawled out under the cold starlight. ‘Why have we stopped?’ she demanded. The ship’s head was looking up at the night sky. ‘Oh.’ Up above them, the Northern Lights shone vast like a ghost-green river. There weren’t any movies to compare with this. This was real. Or at least she thought it was real. It felt more like a dream.
‘Wow,’ she told the ship quietly, watching the shifting green rift in a reverent hypnosis. Sometimes she’d heard Jen talk vaguely about a life force in the world; something that she’d picked up from books on healing and mysticism. Tabitha had never believed in that stuff. But when she stared up in awe at the twisting eerie lights above her, the life force idea seemed pretty damn close to it. Watching the dead Nordic light painting the starry sky, Tabitha stopped thinking about the why and the how. Suddenly the science of it fell away, disregarded, leaving only silent revelation in its place.
Later Tabitha started up the ship’s jet scales with a white glow and launched into the dawn sky. She had to wonder – why had the ship stopped there on the mountain? Was it a warning that it was running low on fuel? Or did it see what she saw when it had watched the Lights? The thought occupied Tabitha’s mind as they flew on in the growing dawn, searching the cockpit console for any kind of fuel gauge. Whatever creature normally flew this thing, how was it supposed to know how much fuel the ship had left? Did it just know, with some deep mental connection? There was so much that she didn’t understand. For all her changes, Tabitha began to feel decidedly inadequate.
The ship flew on south over warmer oceans without any sign of slowing down, but still the thought of fuel nagged at Tabitha’s mind. Almost as much as her hunger, in fact. Eventually she took herself out of the ship’s vision, and looked around at the fake dawn glow of the cockpit. She had to know.
‘Are you going to have enough fuel?’ she asked the walls. She felt stupid for asking the question. It was a ship. She’d be waiting a long time for an answer. She waved her hands over the white seeds on the console. Nothing. She reached her arms out at her sides, and could just about touch the walls with her fingertips. The ceiling was just out of reach, but it felt good to stretch her arms out. She searched everywhere. There were no buttons, no dials, no screens or little glowing whatevers. Nothing to show her how the ship worked. Tabitha stretched her arms a little more, then stood up and shook her stiff legs out too, and peered around the back of the ribbed console. A gentle glow caught her eye. There was a dim white light down there, hidden away beneath twisting pipes like tree roots. She could feel the power there, tingling in her fingers, as she leaned around the console and reached closer. She stretched out her fingers, and placed them gently into the glow between the roots. Gasped. She knew that feeling. It was electricity; a colossal current hidden away beneath the floor. She had to take her hand away, the tingling pull felt so intense. And she wasn’t even touching the surface of the glowing core itself, nestled away down there in the metal roots. She put a hand on the closest root to push herself back up again, and felt the voltage there beneath the dull grey rubbery metal. She glided her rough hand over the root with a rasping sound, and followed the feel of the voltage right along the pipe until it merged into the cockpit wall. The power wasn’t coming from the glowing light behind the console; it was coming in from somewhere else on board. Tabitha pressed the white circle on her seat and rose up in the saddle onto the ship’s back. Straight away she faced a biting wind, chilling her face and rushing in her ears. She strained against her saddle harness and reached her hand down over the ship’s huge scaly side. Sure enough she felt the same electrical current coursing beneath its skin, right where the pipe would be
inside the cockpit. She slid her palm along the ship’s thick scales, following the feel of the current as far as she could reach. Until she realised that she could feel the current all over its grey skin. Then it dawned on her. The current wasn’t coming from somewhere inside the ship; it was coming into the ship from its skin. Solar power, huge and intense. Collected down there in the cockpit core, in the glowing heart of the ship. It was a flying power station; probably the key to the ship’s jet scales down its sides, and that terrifying breath that seemed equal parts fire and energy. Tabitha sat back in awe, marvelling at it. Not just the technical side of it; she could feel it. She felt the voltage running through its skin. She could feel the ship’s power inside, strange and colossal. The cold wind was unbearable out here though. She was glad to sink back down into the cockpit away from it, and slipped back into the ship’s vision to steer it. She made the ship tilt this way and that, keeping the dim white line of the compass dead ahead. She took the ship higher into the air, then corkscrewed back down towards the sea. She pulled it up at the last second, and felt a rollercoaster dip in her stomach as she climbed back into the air and levelled out. Tabitha headed high, dived straight down again, and laughed as she felt her stomach rise and fall. She couldn’t pull again up though, as hard as she tried. Suddenly they were plummeting towards the sea.
‘Pull up!’ she yelled at the ship, poking the console frantically. They were still nosediving. The jets droned higher and higher as the ship fell. Panicking, Tabitha shook herself out of the ship’s vision and braced for impact. The sea loomed massive below, getting closer and closer. Tabitha covered her eyes with her hands as they hit the water. The impact moved her back a little in her seat, but it wasn’t really that much of an impact. They were still moving. There weren’t any alarms, or any water pouring in. Tabitha looked into the ship’s vision and saw the deep blue water all around her. A silvery shoal of fish glided past in the distance. Down below was the big dark deep, and they were fine. An amphibious solar-powered dragon ship, she told herself sarcastically. Of course it was. Obvious, really.
‘You could have told me,’ she said grumpily, crossing her arms and glancing around the cockpit. Her heartcore was still racing. The ship swam when she willed it forward. She could feel its wings tucked in against its body, and its feet and tail steering it this way and that. She felt the jets in its sides too, leaving a vast trail of bubbles behind them. They passed the terrified shoal of fish, scattering at the sight of the ship’s big white eyes in the water. Its huge grey shape cut through the blue, twirling and spinning playfully as it went.
‘You wanted to come down here,’ Tabitha said to the ship. ‘That’s why you wouldn’t pull up.’ Ships didn’t have wants. They were ships. She looked around at the glowing white walls; at the pilot seat and the console. At the white seed things set out in front of her, pulsing with light. ‘What the hell are you?’ she asked it. ‘Are you alive? Or a robot? What are you?’ getting no kind of response, Tabitha pulled the ship up towards the sunlight rippling bright through the surface. They burst out into the daylight and shot into the sky, leaving a showering trail of water sparkling and crashing in their wake.
The rushing sea below them grew lighter and lighter by the hour as they flew. The water rippled hypnotic in reflected sunlight, creeping slowly from dark dead blue to bright turquoise. Tabitha woke up to the sound of a gentle squelching beep in the cockpit; a round organic sound she’d never heard before. She felt weak, starving for blood. Headache, clammy skin. Sweating for a fix.
‘Are we there?’ she croaked dozily to the cockpit. The globe popped up in front of her then, and zoomed itself in on the middle of the Pacific. The white dot she’d first pressed into the globe had a ring of light pulsing from it. They’d arrived. Rushing in her excitement, Tabitha pressed her palm into the circle on her seat and rose up through the opening hatch. She felt a heavy rush of hot air above her, like she was stepping off a plane. She unclipped her harness before the seat could even morph into a saddle and looked around her, speechless. The ship had come to rest on a blinding white beach. Wispy palm trees rustled above her in a sea-salt breeze. The ocean was electric blue; impossibly turquoise in the shallows and clear as glass where it lapped and tumbled on the shore. It was the kind of place she’d only seen in movies and travel magazines. The ship raised a wing up to help her down, and Tabitha looked around at the island like she was dreaming. She shrugged off her blue-grey coat and dropped it down on the white sand, warmer than she’d ever felt in her life. She closed her eyes for a moment, just to take it all in. She could hear the clear tide rumbling and rushing on the soft sand, and the wind rattling gently through palm leaves behind her. The sight of it all gave her a fresh thrill when she opened her eyes again, squinting at the warm sunlight in an ink-blue sky. Tabitha wandered over to a palm tree and put her hand on it, struggling to believe she was really here. The trunk felt rough against her wrist; scaled and solid and fibrous. There were birds chirping in the tropical forest beyond, and a lone mountain towering over the small island. She’d never seen anywhere so beautiful. It was the kind of place she’d seen online and always assumed to be a fake image, touched up to look surreal. But here it was all around her, filling her senses. Even her red curls and the blue-grey of her parka looked more bright and vivid in the strong sun. She breathed deep, sat down in the sand for a while, and smiled. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d smiled.
A little later Tabitha left her ship sitting in the sunshine and wandered off down the beach for a look around. She heard a crash behind her, and turned around to see the ship lie down in the sand like a giant dog. It was basking; that was the only word for it. Looking much more animal than mechanical. It was a mystery to her.
Laika would have loved it here, Tabitha thought, as she wandered further down the beach. Her mum too, and Emma and Jen. And the Ghosts, of course. What a place she could have brought them to, if only she’d known what to do at the time. That old aching sadness started eating away at her. She couldn’t think like that though, filled up with regret. Tabitha stopped walking and squinted at the striking blue sky. At the lonely white beach around her, stark and beautiful. This was it; this was how it had all happened, and she couldn’t go back and change anything. She couldn’t bring anyone back, so what was the point in feeling guilty about it? She felt glad to be alive, even if she was the only one left. It was a cold selfish thought, but she couldn’t just pretend that self-preservation didn’t apply. Not in a world like this. It really was everyone for themselves, and she’d finally made it out of that grey hell back home. It wasn’t like she’d abandoned anyone; they were all gone. As for Chris… she was surprised how justified she felt about it. He’d already killed her once, after all. He got a quicker death than her, anyway. And he had it coming.
Tabitha walked on a little further, following the line of palms that circled the island. Sweating in the heat, she paused for a moment to watch the clear whispering tide. She sighed contentedly at the view and gave up on her walk, and lay down in the sugar-white sand. It felt hot against her legs; so hot that she scooted down the beach a bit further to stretch her legs in the lapping waves. She lay back on wet sand and put her hands behind her head, feeling the gentle tide rush against her sides. She breathed deep, and stared up at the sky. There wasn’t a single cloud up there, just endless jewel-blue. She watched an unfamiliar seabird glide overhead, sharp black and white, tilting its wings in the breeze. No thoughts, no worries for a while. No sadness. Just… whatever this was. A sunbleached reverie. By the time her thoughts came back again, Tabitha was too hot to lie around anyway. She couldn’t help but dwell on her next fix; a bloodmeal that wasn’t coming. She stood up and turned her back on the beach, and swore she could hear running water in the forest beyond the palm trees.
Tabitha wandered through the palms and into the shaded jungle beyond. She came out at a small clearing just beyond the beach, mesmerised at the sight. There ahead a cold fresh waterfall tumbled down into a rocky
pool, crowded with ferns and framed by the forest. Tabitha took a few parched sips from the pool, stripped off, and walked down the rocks into the cold water. It felt good to shiver in there, like her past was washing away. Her base-layer catsuit was draped and dripping on a boulder nearby, and looked much healthier for a wash. Tabitha slicked her wet hair back and closed her eyes, and felt the cold water goosebumping her arms. She remembered shivering in the rain, back when she’d hidden from the monster in the city of skin. A dark memory that was all too recent, and yet suddenly a lifetime away. All around her in the clear pool, the grime and brick dust of a ruined city in England drifted away in coffee-coloured clouds. Tabitha felt new. She waded over to the waterfall and edged beneath it. Gasped at the cold endless smack of the water pounding down on her back, beating the sad thoughts out of her head.
The beach felt warm and inviting when she ambled back, drained and chilly from her cold shower. Tabitha sat down in the sand in her underwear to dry off, close to the grey hill of the sleeping dragon. She couldn’t really think of it as a ship any more; not if it was curled up asleep. Tabitha shook out her wet hair and watched a crab on the shore, scurrying along where the tide broke and soaked into the sand.