by Paul McAuley
The girl gave a little scream. I crushed the accelerator, wrenched the yoke to and fro. No good. The ute was tilted nose down, the nearside front wheel jammed fast.
‘I thought you knew what you were doing,’ the girl said, which didn’t help any.
‘I can fix this.’
‘If you’d let this thing drive itself, like you’re supposed to, you wouldn’t have got us stuck.’
‘Shut up and let me think.’
It was getting hard to control my temper. I used to talk back, my Mama would swat me. But if I swatted the girl I’d probably break something.
‘Well we can’t stay here,’ she said. ‘And I’m not going to walk all the way to wherever.’
I switched on the headlights. They made two tunnels of light through the falling snow. One just above the surface of the running water, one a little higher. Dim shapes crowded the far bank. Trees.
‘You won’t have to walk,’ I told the girl. ‘See, this thing has a winch.’
I shucked my boots and stripped to my underwear, a struggle in the cramped space, knotted my shock stick in one sock and the pistol in the other and tied the socks together and hung them around my neck. I was still wearing my stupid cap. I took it off after I opened the door of the ute, spun it away into the night, and stepped out into the current. It washed around my waist, muscular, cold as ice. I told the girl to stay exactly where she was and sloshed around to the front of the ute, bare feet gripping slimy stones under the water. Switched the winch to free spool and pulled out the cable, hauling it behind me as I waded to the bank. I looped it around the biggest tree I could find, pulling it tight and clipping it with the hitch hook. Then waded back in, swung inside the ute, all wet and steaming beside the shivering girl, and engaged the winch motor.
‘Now you’ll see how it’s done,’ I told her.
A spray of droplets leaped from the cable when it spanged taut, shining like diamonds in the glare of the headlights. I cranked the motor in short pulls, rocking the ute to and fro until at last it jerked free and the winch was reeling it in, pulling it at a slant against the strong river current. I saw a shelf of rock looming out of the dark and yanked the yoke hard over, trying and failing to steer out of trouble. The girl gave a little scream, the ute banged into the rock and scraped past, and I switched off the damn winch motor and took control, driving the ute through the shallows, bumping up onto the riverbank.
I mopped myself dry as best I could with my jacket, pulled on my clothes and boots, and climbed out of the ute and uncoupled the cable from the tree. When I came back, squinting in the dazzle of the headlights, the girl was gone.
After the first little kick of panic a cool calm rolled over me. I grabbed the flashlight I’d stuffed into the kitbag, circled around the ute and found prints in the snow leading away downstream, caught up with her in less than two minutes. She was walking steadily through the falling snow, hunched inside her little jacket, her fur hat tamped low over her eyes. When I laid a hand on her shoulder she stopped and stood there, shivering, refusing to look at me.
‘You’re going in the wrong direction,’ I said.
‘No I’m not,’ she said, trying for defiance but sounding close to tears. ‘If I follow the river it will take me back to the work camp.’
‘You’ll probably break a leg, stumbling around in the dark on your own. If the cold doesn’t get you first. Or wolves.’
‘There aren’t any wolves. You just made that up.’
‘There are wolves and things worse than wolves out here. Bad people. Crazy people.’
‘As bad as you?’
‘I’m the kind of bad person you want on your side. I saved you from the bravos who tried to snatch you, didn’t I?’
The girl stared off into the darkness, as if taking one more look at the path she wanted to take.
‘Let’s get back to the ute,’ I said. ‘I know a place where we can rest up. We’ll be there before you know it.’
7
The ute’s steering was cocked to the right and a couple of its body panels were crumpled and gouged, but otherwise it appeared to have survived the river crossing relatively unscathed. We headed west, slanting towards the Albone Valley, climbing a long slope out of the forest. Trees thinning to scattered clumps, snow falling thickly now, visibility down to a few metres. I was driving at walking pace, more or less feeling my way along, when the night-vision display cut out and a ribbon of alarm icons began to stream across the canopy. A bare moment later all four wheels lost power and poisonous white smoke began to snake into the interior.
The girl and I clambered out into snow blowing on a freezing wind. As I dragged the kitbag from the ute I glimpsed a flicker of flames at the buckled edge of the battery compartment – something must have been fritzed when we hit that rock. I scooped big handfuls of snow over the fire, but there were flames inside the ute now, and with a sudden thump and blast of heat the entire vehicle caught alight.
We retreated to a safe distance and watched it burn. A chalice of flames tinting the snow falling around it blood red. Stinking smoke driven this way and that by the wind.
I was having trouble sequencing what had just happened, yet it somehow seemed inevitable that I’d end up here on this bleak hillside in a snowstorm, my plans actually going up in smoke in front of my eyes.
‘Well this is great,’ the girl said. ‘What are we going to do now?’
She’d lost her hat – taken it off in the ute, forgotten to retrieve it when we’d scrambled out.
‘We’re going to walk,’ I said, because in my mind we were still travelling towards the refuge and I couldn’t think of any other way of getting there. Bringing up my fone, making a call, asking for rescue? It didn’t even cross my mind.
I shook a heap of cold weather gear from the overstuffed kitbag, sorted out a down gilet, a pair of gloves, a windproof jacket and windproof trousers. Threw them at the girl and told her to put them on.
‘My bodysuit will keep me warm,’ she said.
‘Then why are you shivering? It’s minus ten plus wind chill, and going to get colder. Put on that gear and lose your fancy shoes,’ I said, handing her the smaller pair of snow boots I’d snaffled back in the transport office.
I let her lean against me while, standing on one leg and then the other, she kicked off her silver-toed ankle grippers and stepped into the boots. I pulled windproof trousers over my uniform pants, shrugged into a windproof jacket, and wedged my feet in the other pair of snow boots and stamped around in a circle until they had adjusted to a snug fit.
The burning shell of the ute sizzled as it sank into snow melt, flames flickering, flaring in a gust of wind, dying back. I thought of the distance we had to go, thought of drones sailing high in the snowy dark, spotting the fire and swooping in to investigate.
‘We have to get going,’ I told the girl, and had to make some ugly threats to drive her forward.
The burning ute diminished to a dying star, lost in snow and darkness as we climbed the bare slope, slogging through drifts, picking our way by the small beam of my flashlight. The girl trudged in my footsteps, the hood of her bodysuit pulled over her head, the collar of the overlarge jacket turned up and buttoned tight so only her eyes showed. We must have looked as strange and desperate as a pair of explorers from olden times, got up in inadequate clothing, stumbling through a storm in unmapped and unforgiving territory.
I hoped that we were heading into the Albone Valley, hoped to find an overhang or crevice in the bluffs along its north side where we could shelter, but the girl was already flagging, dropping behind, floundering through the snow. At last we blundered into a small field of erratics, found two big boulders leaning together with a narrow space under the point where they kissed. I scraped a brittle lace of ice from the floor and built a snow wall in front, and the girl and I sat shoulder to shoulder in this modest shelter while I used the stove to brew tea from snow melt, stirring plenty of sugar into it. The girl drank quickly, gripping the cup in bot
h hands, but refused to share the biscuits and jam I found in one of the ration packs.
‘Food is fuel,’ I said. ‘You’ll need it.’
She made the smallest of shrugs inside her overlarge jacket.
‘The only way out of this is to stick with me and do exactly as I say.’
‘Look where that got us,’ she said under her breath.
I gave her a break, pretended I didn’t hear that. I’d found only one sleeping bag in the lockers of the transport office, insisted that she take it. She was too tired to argue. There wasn’t enough space for us to lie down, so she sat half-turned from me, head pillowed on a bulge of stone. I had been warm enough during the hike, but despite huddling close to the stove I could feel the cold settling into my bones. The reality of our plight was sinking in too. It was a very comprehensive disaster. I’d lost the ute, I wasn’t certain where we were, how far we had to go, how things would play out when I tried to ransom the girl.
I thought of my friends, what they’d say. Lola, her opinion didn’t count, by now she must have been arrested for the same shit I’d been caught up in. Sage would probably tell me to ditch the girl, go it alone. And Paz … Paz would call me every kind of fucking fool, but she knew my family’s history and I believed that once she calmed down she’d be sympathetic, tell me that I was a husky, and huskies always finished what they started.
Weak sauce I know, but it was all I had. I couldn’t go back. Couldn’t surrender. No, I’d go on, I’d find the damn refuge and ransom the girl and in a couple of weeks I’d be in Auckland, looking across the waters of Waitematā Harbour at the carnival lights of the Wheel …
When I woke, my clothes were crackling with frost, my feet were frozen, there was a sliding queasiness in my gut, and the girl was gone. The sleeping bag crumpled beside me, the snow wall trodden down. I scrambled out into thin dawn light and a keen wind. It had stopped snowing. Thin strips of cloud layered above the distant ridge of Weasel Hill glowed pink ahead of the rising sun. I saw the girl standing in a knee-deep drift a little way below me, semaphoring with her arms. And heard a voice blowing on the wind and felt my heart catch.
I ran straight at her, knocked her into a drift and held her tight while the voice, a woman’s voice, called her name. Called Keever’s name.
Muffled against my breast, the girl said, ‘They found us.’
I told her to shut up. The voice was faint and far off, coming and going. Kamilah Toomy. Kamilah Toomy. We are here to help you. We are here to help you. Keever Bishop. Keever Bishop. Surrender the girl. Surrender the girl. Kamilah Toomy. Kamilah …
I thought of police drones floating through Star City before a raid, warning people to get off the streets and stay in their homes until further notice. Sometimes a lockdown would last for two or three days while snatch squads went from door to door, looking for gang members or political troublemakers while monotonous threats and orders broadcast by drones echoed through the canyons between the apartment blocks. But I couldn’t see anything moving in the paling sky and the voice was drifting away, fading to silence. If there had been a drone up there above us, the thing had moved on.
The girl squirmed beneath me, said she was freezing to death, couldn’t breathe, and I relented and let her sit up.
‘They’ll come back,’ she said, angrily dusting snow from her clothes. ‘They won’t stop looking until they find us. But if you let me go, I won’t tell them about you.’
‘If I let you go, you’d freeze to death in about five minutes.’
‘I’m not entirely helpless. I can light a fire, they’ll see the smoke … And when they find me, I’ll tell them I don’t know anything about you. I swear I won’t.’
‘Listen,’ I said.
‘What I am supposed to be listening for?’ the girl said after a moment.
The snowy slope dropped away to dark forest cut by the Pyke River. Above us, cliffs rooted in cones of scree curved south and west towards the Albone Valley. Everything quiet and still in cold early light, only the whisper of wind hunting among stones and boulders and the chirp of an unseen bird, now here, now there. A hopeful sound that lifted my heart.
‘Do you hear any more drones?’ I said. ‘Any helis, any search parties? No? That’s because they aren’t looking for me. They don’t know where I went, where I’m going. They don’t care. They think Keever Bishop kidnapped you. They’re looking for him. And Keever, he probably isn’t even on the peninsula any more.’
Lola must have told the state police that I’d taken the girl, but no one had seen me drive off with her. And it was no secret that I had been Keever’s baby behind the wire, the police probably thought I’d gone with him … I was suddenly brimming with stupid optimism. I had gotten away free and clear, the blizzard had blown itself out, things could only get better. The refuge was no more than a day’s walk away. We’d hole up there and I’d figure out what to do next. How to ransom the girl. How to arrange my passage off the peninsula.
The girl wanted to know who this Keever Bishop was, why the police thought he had abducted her. That was the word she used – abducted. I told her that Keever was a bad man, rich and powerful, sent down for tax evasion, more or less running the camp. Told her that he was going to be extradited to Australia, to stand trial for murder, and had worked up a plan to get out from under.
‘He organised the riot, it gave him cover while he escaped. And abducting you – sounds nicer than kidnapping, doesn’t it? Abducting you, that was part of his plan too.’
‘How do you know all this?’ the girl said. ‘Wait. You were working for him, weren’t you?’
‘He found out that I was related to your father, told me to use that to make trouble at the opening ceremony. I thought it was to create a distraction, like the riot. I didn’t know he wanted to snatch you until those two bravos turned up.’
‘So you took me instead.’
‘I like to think I saved you.’
I was growing uneasy about where this conversation was heading. Exactly how I was involved with Keever, how Alberto Toomy was involved with him. Why I had gone on the run. All kinds of complications I didn’t need, and the girl didn’t need to hear about. So when she started to ask another question I gave her a hard look and held my hand up, palm out, the way I’d shut down a con who started to get mouthy.
‘You don’t have to worry about Keever Bishop,’ I said. ‘He’s long gone. It’s shaping up to be a fine day, and we have some walking to do. The sooner we get to it the better. But before we set off I think we should have some breakfast.’
The touch of nausea had vanished. I was suddenly ravenous. Back inside our little cave, I brewed tea, broke open one of the ration packs. The girl ate a handful of dried fruit and nuts, nibbled half a marraqueta spread with apricot jam. I devoured everything else. The rest of the marraqueta, chicken and rice, a lump of quinoa and avocado, a chalky leche asada.
‘It’s cold, we’ll be walking a fair way, so we need to load up with plenty of calories,’ I told the girl, but she refused to share the leche asada. Sulking again.
I packed up the stove and the sleeping bag and we set off, the girl stepping in my bootprints, careful and neat as a cat. It was slow going, slogging through fresh-fallen snow, stumbling into buried sinkholes, climbing down into ravines, climbing back out. I was constantly aware that we were exposed to any eyes hanging high in the blue blue sky, that we might even be visible to a spysat, two dots moving through a powdery white landscape, but the sun was warm on our backs, the cold air scoured my lungs, feathery wisps of snow blew from the crests of ridges, sparkling in diamond sunlight, and the whole world seemed fresh and clean. Reborn. Renewed. I remembered walking with Mama on days like this and my heart lifted on a tide of bittersweet nostalgia and for a little while everything seemed possible.
We followed the curve of the cliffs into the mouth of the Albone Valley. Tongues of rocky debris mantled with snow, remnants of landslides common in glacial valleys after the disappearance of ice that had once
buttressed the valley walls, plunged to a river snaking among scattered clumps of dwarf pines and big boulders washed down the valley by floods. On the far side, the cliffs of Wolseley Buttress stood against the sky, sheer black rock fretted with white snow. Ahead, the valley climbed towards the remnant of the glacier which had carved it. No sign of civilisation apart from an old mining road on a low embankment, the snow that covered it untracked, and a truss bridge thrown across the river.
And there, beyond the curve the mining road made before it crossed the bridge, was a smooth ribbon of snow cut into the slope above the river. The beginning of the ecopoet road, exactly where it should be.
We stopped for a brew of tea and a bite to eat on a gravelly runout blown clean of snow. A little way below, the ecopoet road bent around an elf stone, a finger of smooth black rock set in a kerb of white stones. One face carved with runes in a language made up by someone back in the twentieth century. I pretended to translate them, although I actually remembered the stone’s name from Mama’s geography lessons. The Gate of the Ghost Wolves.
I told the girl that my grandmother had once met a man who claimed to have met the man who made the elf stones. ‘He was one of the first settlers. A geologist employed by one of the mining companies. His work took him all over the peninsula. He’d find suitable stones, lever them upright, use an automatic cutter to engrave them.’
‘There’s one near the harbour in O’Higgins,’ the girl said.
‘That’s right. The First and Last. At the spring equinox people hang wreaths of kelp on it and wish for a good summer.’
‘Do you believe in them?’
‘That there are actual elves? Creatures who were living here before people came, who cause mischief if we trespass on their sacred places? They’re just stories people tell. But I like the idea that there are things we don’t know. City people think the back country is some kind of park. It really isn’t. It’s a wilderness, full of danger and mystery.’