Borderlands

by Skye Melki-Wegner

  Radnor waves his hand. ‘I just have to . . . iron out the details.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a “no”, shall I?’

  ‘Come on,’ I say, before they can start arguing. ‘We can’t just stand here on the shore – people will get suspicious. Let’s have a look around.’

  Behind the ridged shoreline, the camp is low. Even lower, perhaps, than the water of the lake. If not for the ridge, these soldiers’ knees might be taking a permanent bath.

  We settle back into single file. A moment later we’re trekking through the camp site, ducking between tents and trying to look confident. But after forests and mountains, wastelands and borderlands, the cacophony here is overwhelming.

  There must be hundreds of soldiers. They move between tents, they squat around camp fires. They drink, they laugh, they shout. I haven’t heard this many voices in weeks. There are so many accents, so many faces. We pass a spindly girl, a squat boy with a ponytail, and an older sergeant with wrinkled brown skin. A pasty girl with a golden earring, and a dark young man with attractively rumpled hair. This army is not just conscripted from isolated northern cities like Rourton, but from every corner of King Morrigan’s empire. So many faces, so far from home. My body seems to have forgotten how to move in a crowd; I’m acting like a calf at the meat market. Every shout and smashing glass makes me twitch.

  Calm down, Danika, I tell myself. Don’t let them see you’re jumpy.

  It’s one thing to tell yourself to be brave, but it’s another to make your body listen. Radnor looks just as twitchy as I am, although in his case I suspect it’s more fury than fear. His lips pull back in a constant snarl, as though the very existence of this army is a grievous insult.

  Teddy looks calm – the calmest of our group, in fact. His face is bright, and he smiles the eager smile of a new recruit. But he carries his hands by his side, and a faint tremble betrays how he’s really feeling. Back in Rourton, people said Teddy Nort could charm the purses out of richies’ pockets. I guess this is his chance to put those acting skills to the test.

  The twins walk with spines like planks, their eyes darting back and forth as though the entire army might rise up and shoot us at a moment’s notice. The frightening thing, of course, is that it might well happen. If anyone’s recently come from a major city, one with wanted posters plastered on the walls . . .

  No, it won’t happen. I can’t let it happen. No one would think to connect the dots – not with us here, in these uniforms. We’re not wanted fugitives. We’re just another crew of harmless newbies, marching up to register our names. Clearly not a danger to anyone. No one should pay us any attention . . .

  ‘Hey!’

  I flinch. A skinny young man runs towards us, waving an arm. ‘Hey, are you newbies?’ His olive skin and accent remind me of traders from the south-west.

  ‘Sure,’ Teddy says. He steps in front of us and extends a hand to shake. An easy smile spreads across his face. ‘I’m Thompson, and these are my friends from Castenith.’

  The young man shakes his hand. ‘Great. We need all the help we can get around here. I can take you to the Registry, if you want?’

  I exchange a glance with Teddy, who doesn’t let his smile slip. ‘We’re right, thanks,’ he says. ‘There was a bit of a queue up there before, so we thought we’d take a look around to kill some time.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ says the soldier. ‘You shouldn’t really be wandering around without registering, so –’

  ‘The guard up at the tent told us we could,’ Teddy says, without missing a beat. ‘My uncle’s a big man in the army, you know: made lots of friends back in the northern command.’

  ‘Oh,’ the soldier says. He looks a little uncertain, but rallies himself. ‘Well, I guess the Registry queues’ve been long for the last few days. If they told you it was all right . . .’

  ‘Absolutely.’ Teddy extends his smile. I privately think he looks a little deranged at this point, but the soldier seems to buy it.

  ‘Guess that’s all settled, then,’ he says. ‘I’m Private Mitcham, by the way. My squad’s resting over by that fire there, so I’d better get back –’

  ‘Can we join you?’ Teddy says.

  Private Mitcham looks a little taken aback. ‘I don’t know if –’

  ‘It’s really good to meet you, Private,’ Teddy presses. ‘I’ll be sure to tell my uncle about the brave young soldiers I’ve been stationed with.’

  Private Mitcham swallows, and the lump in his throat practically somersaults. ‘Well, I guess you could have one drink with us. My squad prides itself on making newbies feel welcome.’

  I suspect Private Mitcham’s barely squirmed his way out of ‘newbie’ status himself. He can’t be more than eighteen – nineteen at the absolute most. But he’s keen to make an impression, and he stiffens into a formal march as he leads us to his squad’s camp fire.

  ‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’ I whisper.

  ‘Nope,’ Teddy says. ‘But if we’re gonna get ­information about this place, I reckon camp fire chat’s a decent way to go looking for it.’

  Private Mitcham introduces us to the rest of his squad: a gang of similarly young and gawky soldiers. They sit around their camp fire with bottles in their hands, sipping beer and toasting chunks of bread over the flames.

  I relax a little when I realise most of them are drunk; more beer spills into the fire than bread, and the alcohol causes little explosions of flame to spurt up into the night. Whenever this happens, the soldiers roar with laughter and lean back to avoid the blast. One young woman is missing her eyebrows – perhaps the victim of an earlier beer blast.

  ‘Newbies!’ she cries, and throws up her arms in welcome. ‘Taladia be . . . be praised. We nee . . . need more workers on this . . .’ She waves a hand, searching for the right word. ‘On this dig. Thing.’

  We take our seats around the edge of the fire. I find myself squished between Clementine and a boy with a metre-long rifle strapped across his back. He leans forward in a drunken haze, and the rifle’s barrel almost whacks me across the back of the head. I hope like hell that the thing’s not loaded.

  ‘That bad, huh?’ Teddy says. ‘The digging, I mean.’

  The girl nods fervently. ‘Oh yes, terrible. Just . . . just terri . . . terrible.’ She raises a finger and points vaguely into the darkness. ‘All these tunnels, all full of . . . all full of dark.’

  ‘Private Riley, get a grip on yourself,’ says Private Mitcham, embarrassed. ‘Thompson here’s got an uncle in the military command.’

  Riley’s eyes widen. ‘Ooooh. Am I s’posed . . . supposed to be impressed? Well, guess what, mister?’ Her bottle of beer slips from her fingers and smashes. ‘I’m not. I’m sick of mil . . . milly . . . military command. I’m sick of the dark, and the tunnels, and the . . . the sound. All the time, the sound, the sound . . .’

  A few other soldiers nod. The boy beside me leans back again, shifting the angle of his rifle. I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding.

  ‘Riley’s got a point,’ the boy says to Private Mitcham. ‘That sound . . . it ain’t right, Mitch, and no mistake. It messes with your head when you’re down there all day.’

  Private Riley spills forward, reaching out her arms as though to hug him. ‘That’s right!’ she squeals. ‘The sound, the sound, always the sound . . .’

  One of her friends grabs her before she can trip into the camp fire. There’s a bit of shoulder-patting and murmuring ‘there there’ as they pull her back into her seat, and her head lolls onto a comrade’s shoulder.

  ‘This sound, then,’ Teddy says slowly, turning back to Mitcham. ‘What’s she talking about?’

  Private Mitcham’s face is a little red. ‘It’s nothing. I mean, it’s annoying and that, but we’re coping with it. Those of us what don’t drink all our beer rations in one night, anyhow,’ he adds, with a pointed
glance at Riley.

  ‘It’s a sound in the catacombs?’ I say. ‘Down in the dark?’

  Mitcham nods. ‘It’s the old machinery, is all. There’s a cavern of old clockwork for controlling the water flow and that. The engine room, our sergeant calls it. Hundreds of years old. Captain says it uses heat from the earth to keep the alchemy going. All the way back from when they drained the Valley.

  ‘But it makes these awful clanking noises, you see. Echoes up through all the tunnels. There’s been rumours that it’s the sound of ghosts. Evil spirits, monsters in the dark . . . the soul of the prisoner in the Pit, even. Some people fancy he’s still down there, haunting the catacombs.’

  Mitcham pauses to take a swig of beer. The fire crackles. In the silence, I suddenly remember Quirin singing the third verse to the smugglers’ song: ‘From the prisoner’s pit to the sky . . .’

  Mitcham shakes his head. ‘Hope your uncle don’t mind me saying so, Thompson, but the sooner we get this job done the better.’

  I exchange a glance with my friends. ‘If this machinery’s so noisy, can’t they just turn it off?’

  ‘Nah. It’s still working, you see – still keeps pumping so the water doesn’t flow back down into the tunnels. Whoever set it up, they knew what they was doing.’ He pauses, struck by a sudden thought. ‘Didn’t you see none of them outlets on your way here?’

  ‘Outlets?’

  ‘Outlets for the pumping system. It pumps back up into the borderlands, you see, to keep the tunnels dry.’

  As he speaks, I’m struck by a memory. A torrent spewing up from the earth, spilling its guts into a nearby river. A roar, an eruption, a rush of wild water. At the time, Radnor dismissed it as a quirk of the borderlands – but now, I realise, it was more than just alchemical pollution.

  ‘So if the engine room stopped working,’ I say slowly, ‘you’d have big problems.’

  Private Mitcham nods. ‘Whole tunnel system might flood, for all we know. No one knows what all them little levers are for.’ He shrugs. ‘Anyway, that’s why we’re stuck with the sound. And that’s why I say there’s no point moping about it.’ He throws a glare at Sergeant Riley. ‘And we should just get the job done quick.’

  I look across at Teddy, who returns my gaze. This is it. This is our chance to destroy the tunnels. If we can somehow reach this engine room . . .

  ‘Well,’ Teddy says, ‘it was nice to meet you, Private Mitcham. I’ll be sure to tell my uncle what a right kind chap you were, showing us the ropes.’

  ‘You’re leaving?’

  ‘Gonna check on the Registry queue,’ Teddy says. ‘No, no – don’t get up. We can find our own way, I reckon. You’ve already been generous enough.’

  It takes another minute to convince Mitcham that we don’t need an escort to the Registry, but eventually we’re threading our way back into the throng. The recruits’ camp fire disappears behind us: just another speck of flame among a hundred more the same. We weave between soldiers, stroll around tents and keep up our facade of confidence.

  Finally, I spot a hiding place – a cluster of abandoned tents, dark and alone. I’m guessing their inhabitants are away on a night shift; this part of the camp is silent, as though an entire platoon has left for work. Even the camp fires are out. The only lights are external lanterns: one adorns the front of each tent, marking their location in the dark.

  Cautiously, I peer into the closest tent. ‘In here.’

  The tent itself is plain: sleeping sacks, a cheap candle, a couple of knick-knacks from home. We don’t dare light the candle, but at least the external lamp provides a smidge of watery light. I sit on the floor beside a ragged old teddy bear, and give its head a surreptitious stroke.

  ‘Right,’ Radnor says. ‘We’ve got two options. One: we destroy the dam to flood the whole Valley. Or two: we shut down the engine room to just flood the tunnels.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘but the dam’s protected by those kindred runes, so that leaves –’

  ‘The engine room.’ Radnor nods. ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But they’ll just restart the machinery, won’t they?’ Maisy says. ‘They’ll send down someone with a Water proclivity to start up the machines and drain the tunnels again.’

  ‘At least it’d be a setback,’ Teddy says. ‘Better than nothing, I reckon.’

  ‘It will be more than a setback,’ Radnor says. ‘We’re not just going to switch off the machinery. We’re going to destroy it.’

  I stare at him. ‘How?’

  ‘Fire,’ Radnor says. ‘The machines are based on alchemy, right? Even if it’s running in a loop, there has to be something there to start it – a source of the original magic.’

  ‘Alchemy juice,’ I say, nodding.

  ‘Could be anything,’ Teddy says. ‘Acids, gun­powder, chemicals . . . If we set that on fire, I reckon the whole contraption’ll go kaboom.’

  We all sink into silence. It’s not hard to imagine it. A cavern of dark, clanking machinery. A scream of sound through the tunnels. Then fire, and a roar, and the water rushing through . . .

  ‘What about the workers?’ I say suddenly. ‘We can’t do this while there are people in there – they’ll drown!’

  ‘So what?’ Radnor says. ‘They’re working for the king. They deserve it.’

  I whip my head around. ‘Just because you had a chance to run away before you turned eighteen, Radnor, doesn’t mean everybody did. You think Mitcham deserves to die? Or Riley? Or all the other people who are stuck down there in the dark?’

  Radnor raises an eyebrow. ‘What about all the hunters in the airbase? Or the biplane pilots?’

  I open my mouth to respond, then close it.

  ‘Not so high and mighty now, are you?’ Radnor says with a sneer. ‘Don’t pretend you’re better than me, Danika Glynn. I’m not the one who leaves her friends behind to die.’

  ‘It’s not the same thing,’ Teddy says. ‘Those people in the airbase – they were hunters and pilots. They volunteered to kill innocent people.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Radnor says. ‘Well, if it helps you sleep better at night, you keep thinking that, but this is my crew and you play by my rules. And I say we’re going to –’

  ‘Your crew?’ Clementine interrupts. ‘You might’ve been our leader when we left Rourton, scruffer boy, but we’ve been through a lot since then. I don’t see what gives you the right to waltz back in and –’

  Maisy interrupts with a nervous cough. She looks pale and strained, as though frightened by the idea of butting into our argument.

  ‘Yeah, Maisy?’ Teddy says. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nobody has to die,’ she says quietly. ‘I mean . . . all these soldiers have Earth or Water proclivities. Even if the catacombs flood, can’t they can just melt into the water or the tunnel walls to escape?’

  We all stare at each other.

  Teddy gives a little laugh. ‘Well, I reckon that simplifies things.’

  In our moment of relief, no one seems keen to point out the obvious. Melting into proclivities is easiest with lifeless forces: Air and Darkness, Stone and Water. Yes, the soldiers might survive a deluge – but if we don’t escape in time, our crew will not be so lucky.

  With a power like Beast, the trick is almost impossible to master – the result of years, maybe decades, of training. In my entire life, I’ve only met one or two scruffers who could melt into the body of an animal.

  Theoretically, Night should allow me to survive – except that I can’t control it. And as for Flame . . . well, it’s simply too dangerous. If an amateur like Maisy tried it, her heart or lungs could explode into fire. She would die in a pyre of burning flesh.

  ‘Good,’ Radnor says. ‘It’s settled then. We’ll send someone to sneak down into the engine room, set fire to the place, and –’ he snaps his fingers – ‘that’s the end of the king’s invasion.’r />
  ‘It won’t be that easy,’ Clementine says, still looking miffed. ‘Surely the machinery would be guarded? I don’t see how five of us can possibly sneak down there without being spotted.’

  ‘Five of us won’t sneak down there,’ Radnor says. ‘Just one. One person will be enough to start the fire. The rest of us will create a diversion.’

  We all fall silent.

  One person, alone in the dark. One person to set fire to a vat of unknown alchemy juice. One person to somehow make it out alive . . .

  No one looks at me. But I know what they’re thinking, and the knowledge makes my stomach twist like tissue paper. In our crew, there’s only one person who can sneak past the guards. One person who can cast an illusion and make herself temporarily invisible.

  I take a deep breath. ‘I’ll do it.’

  The others start to argue, but I cut them off with a wave. ‘You know it has to be me. No one else can get past the guards.’

  They fall silent. They know it’s true. I clench my fists behind my back, and try to distract myself. I can’t let myself think about it – about what I’ve just agreed to. The fire, the water, the dark . . .

  Maisy bites her lip. ‘But one little spark won’t be enough, Danika. We’ll need a big fire, something to cause major damage. I’m the one with a Flame proclivity; I should be the one who goes.’

  Radnor points at Maisy. ‘You go with her. Danika, you can make an illusion to cover two people, right?’

  ‘What?’ Clementine says, startled. ‘No, Maisy isn’t going to –’

  ‘It has to be me, Clem,’ Maisy says. ‘No one else can –’

  ‘I’m not letting you go down there! I’ll do it, I’ll go in your place.’

  ‘No offence, richie, but you don’t even know your proclivity yet,’ Radnor says. ‘You won’t be much use.’

  ‘Well then, we’ll all go,’ Clementine says. ‘Maisy can start the fire, and I’ll help her –’

  Radnor shakes his head. ‘You’ll just be putting her in more danger. We don’t know how crowded it might be down there. It’ll be hard enough sneaking two people in, let alone five.’