by Davina Bell
With so many users back online, Big Tech made waterfalls of money again, and they loved Pops’s socks right off. They offered him a high-powered job on a top-secret project that was called—I kid you not—Operation Freedom. They wanted him to figure out if the internet could travel through sound waves in water so that it could be literally everywhere twenty-four seven. Turns out it can, even through puddles and taps, and because water is most places, that meant, with the help of some wires and magnets, free internet access for most everybody, coffee cups or not. Except, I guess, for desert nomads, but are they really busting to do internet banking?
You can see how it’s not a completely stupid idea and would have made things more democratic and egalitarian and all that rumble, and because Pops is an A-plus genius, he got it done. We were four when Operation Freedom launched. If you look hard enough, there’s a photo of Winter high up on our father’s shoulders on the day they metaphorically flicked that switch. He’s shaking hands with a guy in a baseball cap—you know the guy I mean. Winter isn’t looking at him, that guy, which is kind of funny, given that he was so famous. Her hands are buried deep in Pops’s curls, her head tilted back, eyes closed to the sun and smiling. But perhaps Pops knew what was coming, because his eyes are scrunched with worry behind the dark frames of his glasses and if you look really carefully, his left hand is gripping Winter’s tiny thigh so hard that it looks like he’s sinking his fingers into pizza dough.
Winter
‘Why would he come here?’ asked Edward as we lifted the pilot out of the carcase of the plane.
His face dripped from every hole. His chest pooled blood until it didn’t. Summer dropped his feet. She went to throw up. Pete circled. His eyes rolled. He barked till his voice was a scrape. When Summer dragged him away, he nipped the webbing of her fingers. But she didn’t let go.
That pilot wasn’t much older than us. Next to Edward, he seemed small.
‘Do you think he was lost?’ Edward asked.
‘No,’ I said firmly. Because he wasn’t. There was every reason for him to come.
Edward buried the corpse so I didn’t have to watch. I didn’t tell him that we had done it before.
Summer
After a couple of years, Pops quit that job at Operation Freedom, though the guy with the baseball cap begged him to stay. Pops told us it was time to return to his true love: herpetology, which is the study of amphibians, and includes, more specifically, neotenic salamanders. He told us it’s what he’d dreamed about his whole childhood, the big weirdo, out walking on the moor, where he grew up, and that all the tech stuff had just been a diversion on the way to him finding his bliss. We never thought to question that story, though I guess we were only six.
This was about the time when Winter and I started to travel with Pops round the world, but not to the south of France or the Italian lakes or Whistler or the Amazon or any of those usual holiday destinations. I’m talking some weird places, like Guatemala and Burkina Faso and Myanmar and French Guiana and Sierra Leone, and if you have to look a couple of those up, don’t feel bad, I did too. It’s pretty sad to think of that year we spent on the banks of sludgy brown rivers and slim, hungry creeks, peering over the edge and looking our hardest for Mexican walking fish, which is why we thought we were there—to help Pops make breakthroughs in the fascinating world of axolotls. Sometimes I worried that Winter would strain something in her big doe eyes, she searched so hard with everything in her.
The joke was on us, in the end, because it turns out there are no axolotls in the Nile or the Ganges, just a lot of funeral pyres, which are basically dead people bobbing around like floating candles in the bath.
Then we moved to Tokyo, where the only salamanders are in tanks, and we hardly saw Pops at all. He spent most of his time in his lab, ‘writing up his findings’, apart from a few random trips that he dragged us on. We never left the hotels, where he met people in dark corners of lobbies while we mostly hung out at the pool. We assumed they were other amphibian experts, but of course they weren’t. Some were from Big Tech and some were from the Resistance, and to cut a long story short (which is, quite frankly, difficult for me), it all grew into something bigger and Pops was right at the centre, like the faux-yolk in a Cadbury Crème Egg, which wasn’t a good place for him to be, already half mad with regrets.
That’s how we ended up flying here, Pops at the controls of a seaplane that he seemed to be driving straight into Our Mountain, and truly? In that moment, as the rockface rushed towards us, after everything that had happened, I didn’t even blame him. I just reached for Winter’s hand and closed my eyes as she whispered to herself beside me, and waited for the brutal, life-ending slam that never came.
Now, looking out at Our Mountain from the bell tower, I shuddered at that memory, and I picked up the bear to squeeze it away. ‘Come on, Edward,’ I said to that imp of a cub as I gripped him tighter. ‘You’re out of bounds, and you’re never to come up here again without us. And if we’re all up here together and I’m pulling something out of the wall, well, then you know we’ve reached the moment where shit’s about to get real.’
The bear looked up at me, looked over at the wall. I squeezed him tighter. And then, I swear to you, he looked me in the eye before he reached up with his gorgeous little paw and scraped his claws down my face, so hard that it acid-burned and blood pearled up straight away, and I screamed and I dropped him.
‘Hey!’ I yelled, my hand to my cheek. ‘That’s not nice. You come back here and say sorry.’
But the bear just sniffed at the south-arch wall until I started after him, and then he ran, ran, ran, scrambling down the stairs, all 362 of them, while I burbled down after him, feeling raw and cross and mean.
Winter
I had to stop. My throat burned. My legs just wouldn’t.
Pete bounded ahead. He looked the way Summer did when she played charades—like someone doing just what they were born to do. I crouched on the forest floor.
‘No way.’ Edward laughed, doubling back. ‘That’s, like, less than a minute you lasted.’ He held out his hands.
I shook my head.
‘Sure you can,’ he said. ‘You can walk. You can breathe.’
‘Hardly.’ But I gave him my palms. His hands felt big but soft, like my father’s driving gloves. We started again.
‘The trick is to set a goal, like that giant tree up yonder, and then distract yourself till you get there.’
‘How?’ I wondered who still said ‘up yonder’. ‘I’m dying.’
‘I’ll say. Do you come this way often?’
‘No. The forest is creepy. And once…we found…a dead person…’ I puffed. ‘Why have we stopped?’
‘We reached the tree. Dead how?’
I stood with my hands on my knees. My ribs hurt with breathing. If I gasped a little, I didn’t have to answer. ‘Are we reading tonight?’ I asked when I could again. ‘We could go to that bit of the forest with the tree stumps to sit on. I could tell Summer that I’m counting tins in the Emporium. She hates it back there. And you could be fixing something.’
‘Some kind of dirty secret, am I?’ Edward was smiling so it didn’t sound mean.
‘I just…Summer doesn’t like to feel left out, that’s all. And I don’t like to make her sad.’
‘Well, if you can make it back to the start of the path without stopping, you’ve got yourself a deal. But don’t think I’ll enjoy it. ’Cept the part that means sitting down next to you.
‘Speaking of dead guys. That pilot…’ he said as we turned around. ‘What was the deal with that? You girls haven’t mentioned it since. Isn’t that kind of weird?’
‘We did,’ I panted. ‘Summer described her dream funeral, remember?’
‘Yeah, that was morbid. The girl has issues,’ said Edward. ‘Just tell me where he came from. I know that you know. I’ve got, like, intuition. Don’t laugh—for a guy I’m pretty sensitive.’
Perhaps it was because it had been so long.
Or because Summer was the one who always told our story. Perhaps I wanted his hand on my head, fingers on my sorrow. Perhaps that is why I told him so much.
Summer
By the time I got to the bottom of the bell tower, Edward was sitting at Winter’s feet where she stood dusting the altar. His back was against her shins, his chin up and his eyes closed.
‘He scratched me—on purpose!’ I told her. ‘See? We need to punish him, that little monster.’
Winter looked horrified, and I waited for her to rip a strip from her shirt to wipe the blood off my face in that gentle dab she does so well for injured things.
But she didn’t. She bent down to rub his head, that bear. ‘Don’t call him that,’ she said. ‘I’m sure he didn’t mean to. He’s just a baby. He doesn’t know any better.’
‘He dang well does,’ I said darkly. ‘I’m putting up a gate so he can’t get back up those stairs and TBH he should go sit in the corner to think about what he’s done.’
As I stalked out the back door to find Pops’s building stuff, I heard her whisper to him, all tender. I couldn’t make out the words, but they made me want to hammer things hard.
Everything went downhill swiftly after that. And, looking back, if I’m going to blame anyone, it isn’t just Edward alone—it’s also Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, and here’s why. I’ve told you enough by now that you could probably guess how Anne’s story affected Winter. Every couple of years when she picked it off the shelf, I would groan on the inside and dredge my soul for arguments about why we should all Keep on Living in spite of all the injustice in the world. And I’d brace myself and dig out the hazelnut praline from the back of our Emporium and grab a couple of hankies we’d made from the raggedy old christening gowns we found in a chest.
Why she got it in her mind to read Anne Frank to the bear, I’ll never know, because I was usually the one who read aloud and did all the voices, and besides, even though I was faster, Winter could still read so quickly in her head that it must have felt like she was tap-dancing in quicksand to say each word individually. But when she opened it up and said to Edward, ‘This is our story,’ I felt a little panic. Because I’d never thought that we were like Anne Frank, with her coffee-puddle eyes, locked in like a caged canary at an old person’s home, death all around her and not quite knowing the point of it all but still trying to sing.
Anne was confused and Lonely (capital L) and she could have been caught any second, so no wonder she had to keep a journal and wax lyrical about all kinds of profound stuff. And, sure, we were alone, me and Winter, but we had each other and Freedom and no bickering, farting adults or sweaty adolescent boys playing with our heads like they were harp strings, and, yes, some mornings bugs flew into our tea and, truth be told, I would have liked some overhead lighting installed. But, hey, compared to what was going on out in the world, well, you’ve probably read all about that and so you’d have to agree that we had it pretty dang good. I know you’re probably wondering if we even knew what was going on out there, and I guess the answer is that we knew enough.
‘If you’re introducing him to strong female characters, wouldn’t he prefer Pippi Longstocking?’ I asked Winter. ‘There aren’t any animals in Anne Frank.’
Winter just Looked at me (capital L) and if you think she’s all windchimes and fairy floss, you’ve got her totally wrong because, believe me, Winter is boulder-stubborn. So Anne Frank it was, all day and all night.
Here’s the kicker: the bear really liked that story. Sounds ridiculous, I know, but he sat there on Winter’s lap, all innocently, and I swear that when he heard Anne’s dreams about being in love with Peter Schiff and then eye-sexing with Peter van Daan, he blushed all rosy, and if you think that’s impossible, well, you’ve never read Anne Frank to a bear—at least not all the way to the bits about the Peters.
When she got to the end, when the diary just stops, Winter wept, like I knew she would: deep throbbing sobs that shook her shoulders and also my core. ‘Here,’ I said, handing her a jar of hazelnut praline and a spoon. ‘It’s not so sad to end up a sunbeam in a zillion people’s hearts. Anne would have liked that, I’ll bet. And for real, I bet her spirit really dug floating out of the Secret Annexe after being cooped up there so long. I bet it went and got hot chips on the way to heaven.’
But that just made Winter cry harder, and scrunch her face into her knees, and nothing I said made any difference and I felt like I was throwing flour into the wind until Edward nosed his way into Winter’s lap and started licking the tears right off her cheeks, and I could say that maybe he was just salt-deficient and acting on animal instincts to seek out sodium, but I don’t think so, because by the time her face was wet with bear slobber, Winter had stopped her weeping. She scooped up that bear—at least, she tried to, but that was the second I realised the bear had Grown, and instead he tipped Winter backwards onto the floor, his paws on her shoulders, like those gold pins you stick in paper dolls to make their arms move, and he held her there, kissing her eyelids with love. And though she laughed and laughed, I didn’t laugh, because I could see from the outside that Winter couldn’t have pushed him away even if she’d wanted to. I thought about the scratch on my cheek that still hadn’t healed. He wasn’t a cub. Perhaps he never had been. He was almost a man of a bear now, and while I’d been busy worrying about old Anne Frank, Edward had got too strong.
Winter
‘Do you remember…’ I began as we kept jogging. ‘Do you remember when the internet came back, through the water, and they started to use it for terrorism?’
‘Those beheadings?’ said Edward. ‘The live hangings, and the stonings—all that?’
I nodded. It had started as a trickle. Prisoners decapitated on video. A beloved world leader lynched, his limbs torn off by two tanks rolling in opposite directions.
At the beginning, each piece of footage only lasted a few hours online before it got taken down.
But then there were more and more until every day a new one arrived. As soon as they were removed, someone else would repost them.
Soon they popped up in emails from banks and airlines. When people switched on their computers, they played automatically, until everyone was too afraid to shut down.
The images were embedded in games that taught children to read, flicking on screen when they reached the next level. A new war that was everywhere. Or a reminder that war had always been everywhere, but half the world had been ignoring it.
‘Are you saying that your dad was one of those guys?’
‘No! I mean, yes, but not how you’re thinking. My father—he was a scientist. An inventor too. A zoologist mostly.’
‘That’s why he got taken away? For being some kind of renegade zookeeper? That’s why they risked sending that pilot here?’
‘A zoologist. He specialised in amphibians, and then saltwater reptiles. And from there, he sort of…got involved in things at the bottom of the ocean.’
‘He was a scuba diver?’
I shook my head. ‘Think about what else is under the sea.’
‘Sand…crabs…shipwrecks…gold. He was a pirate! Hey, we’re back at the start. Looks like I’m reading tonight after all.’
We slowed to a walk and found a tree stump to stretch on. Edward was serious about stretching.
‘A lost city—whatcha call it, Atlantis? He found Atlantis?’
‘Think about what we were just talking about,’ I said. Hamstrings. Quads.
His expression changed. ‘Oh. The internet. The thing with the cables. That wasn’t…Was that him?’
I had said too much. Summer would know it. She would see—could see all of it. How these days my heart was tennis-ball bright.
‘I need to go and cut fruit with Summer,’ I said as I shook out my legs, one then the other. ‘For the jam.’
Edward looked up to the sky and smiled. ‘You girls. Such closed books, for all of that reading. Go on, then, to your big peach emergency. Leave me here hanging with good old P
ete. I’ll make up my own version of how that story ends. Might read it to you some day.’
Before everything, when Summer and I still went to school, most people thought the internet was beamed by satellites. But it was really a web of thick cables dug into the seabeds. The Earth was wrapped in it, like a net. If an anchor ripped a cable out or a shark bit it, the system was set up to use another cable, another pathway.
‘That’s just the way it evolved,’ our father told us once when we were playing under his desk. ‘Impossible to destroy, unless millions of people around the world simultaneously take to it with axes, and even then parts of it would survive. So how else to shut it down? That’s the trillion-dollar question. That’s a whole life’s work.’
‘What’s that got to do with axolotls?’ I asked him.
‘Everything,’ he said. ‘Everything.’
Summer
I woke up and they were gone, and I know I was sleepy—that I’d stayed up too late reading the sexy bits from Forever—but I wasn’t so out of it that I could have missed a giant bear at the breakfast table, which is where he should have been, sitting there all politely while Winter made porridge on the fire pit, just like every other day. I went and did a lap of the moat, because sometimes Edward liked to float on his back there if the night had been hot. I checked the meadow, and even went up Our Mountain a little so I could see over the long, yellowing grass in case they were snuggled low in the flowers with their noses touching, or sitting on the rocks at the river bend. I even checked the Emporium, grabbed a jar of eggplant kasundi on the way through, and poked my head into all the weird priesty rooms out the back where Pops had stashed stuff, like bows and arrows. But there was nothing, nothing, nothing.