Between Sea and Sky

by Nicola Penfold

  We wish to get better when one of us is sick. For a winter without the sea freezing over. For the geese to come back in October.

  We wish for things we want too. A new dress for Clover. A notebook or pencil for me. Those things don’t turn up very often, but sometimes they do. Not washed up by the sea, but once in a while Dad will bring something back from a supply run.

  Pretty much all our spells and chants come from the Wicca book. The shapes too. Triangles and stars.

  Pentangles, five-pointed stars, are my favourite. Five points for spirit, water, fire, earth and air.

  Water is the sea all around us. Earth the poisoned land. Air’s the sky where the gulls fly.

  Fire is the Decline. Here it was floods and the rising storm water, but elsewhere it was fire. The world got too hot. Fire burned forests and villages, whole cities too.

  Spirit is everything that was lost. For us spirit is Mum, because she got lost too.

  Clover’s digging efforts have paid off. She lifts the doll from the mud triumphantly. “Ta-da! She’s a pretty one, isn’t she, Pearl?”

  “Yeah, she’s pretty,” I say nonchalantly.

  “You can have her.” Clover holds the doll out to me, her arm stretched tight. “Take it. She’s more your thing than mine.”

  I take the brittle figure but I don’t say anything. I run my finger over the smooth face. All the places the sea has touched. I place the doll down on the sand and start marking out a pentangle with my toes.

  Clover turns cartwheels, her shadow turning alongside her so she looks like two people. She’s coming deliberately close to my star.

  “Careful!” I say, irritated.

  “I wish something exciting would wash up,” Clover says. “Something we’ve never seen before. I’m so bored. B. O. R. E. D.”

  Clover writes the letters in the sand with her finger. One straight line of capitals. She does this a lot lately. She’ll write FED UP, or RESCUE ME! Like someone might see. Clover’s always wanted to be noticed.

  Then she flops down and lies on her back, looking up at the sky.

  “Watch your eyes,” I say automatically. In winter we worry about the wind, but in summer it’s the sun that can be the enemy. It glints off the sand particles and burns your skin. Burns your eyes too, if you aren’t careful.

  Clover sighs and turns over, so her face is flat on the sand instead. Her voice comes out muffled. “I’m going to ask Dad to send me to school in September.”

  I stare at her, open-mouthed. Clover stays still, face down, listening for my reaction. I can’t think of a single sound to make.

  “I need to learn, Pearl,” she says, still speaking into the sand. “I’ll never achieve my dreams stuck out here. You know how much I want to see other places and meet new people. I’m going to ask Dad.”

  “Clover, you can’t! You’re a secret!” I gasp.

  “One of us is,” Clover says purposely. “One of us is a secret. There’s one school place, if we ask for it.”

  “Don’t you dare!” I cry, outraged. “Look what the land did to Mum!”

  Clover’s silent for a moment, but she turns reluctantly on to her side to look at me. She spits out a mouthful of mud. “It’s just going to school, Pearl. Like every other kid in this entire bay except us.”

  “But we’re not in the bay, are we?” I exclaim. “We’re at sea. The compound school wouldn’t want a sea girl!”

  Clover sits up, her eyes lit with fury. “Don’t call me that. We’re no different from them. I’m no different.”

  “That’s not what they’ll think,” I say meanly. The first time Dad took Clover back to land, a kid called her a sea witch right to her face. She won’t let us talk about it, but she’s never forgotten. Only Clover’s not like me. The landlubber taunts don’t make her want to stay away – they just make her want to prove them wrong.

  “I deserve to go to that school. Just because you…” Clover’s voice fades out.

  A gull flies above. We watch its shadow on the sand, cutting between us.

  “Just because you never wanted to go,” Clover finishes.

  “You won’t fit in,” I say quietly.

  Clover’s voice trembles. “I’ll make myself fit in.”

  “Dad’s a better teacher than they’ve got, I bet.”

  Clover laughs bitterly, her eyes wet. “You’re joking, Pearl? Dad barely gets out of bed! When was the last time he got the books out?”

  She turns away from me to look out to land and I follow her gaze, to the upright cylinder of the crop farm and the stilted compound where the workers live. That’s where the school is that Clover’s become so obsessed with.

  Clover’s right. Our schoolbooks were put away in a trunk before a storm months ago and none of us have bothered to get them out. We’ve dropped any pretence of schooling. But how can Clover want to go to land? To give up our freedoms and obey all the rules the compounders have to live by?

  Rations.

  Curfew.

  Shifts.

  “I want to make friends, Pearl,” Clover says, quieter now.

  “You’ve got Grey, and the others,” I retort. And you’ve got me, I want to say. Only I don’t, because I know she’ll throw it back at me. Clover can be as cruel as the sea in a storm sometimes.

  “People, not porpoises,” Clover says, enunciating each word deliberately. “I want proper friends.”

  “Olive would like you. You should come to the ship, for the deliveries,” I grasp.

  Clover rolls her eyes. “I’m not making friends with prisoners, Pearl. Old cronies.”

  I let out a sharp breath of air. “Olive’s not an old crony. Don’t say that!”

  “She’s ancient, Pearl. You can’t deny it.”

  “She’s no crony.”

  “Yeah, well,” Clover says stubbornly. “You don’t know what she even did. She must be there for a reason!”

  “Olive wouldn’t have done anything bad,” I say fiercely.

  When the seas rose, the authorities said land was too precious for anyone who didn’t deserve it. All kinds of people were put on that ship. Hungry, desperate people. When I try and talk to Olive about it, she goes blank. I don’t think she even remembers.

  Clover shrugs. “I’m going to go to school, Pearl. You can’t stop me. I want it more than anything in the world.”

  There are five computers in the compound library. You’re meant to book ahead to get time on one, but they’re not popular enough for that. They’re slow and break halfway through doing anything. All you really need to do to get one is smile nicely at Mr Rose, the librarian.

  The machines are in a narrow space running along the back of the compound. Tally says Mr Rose put them here to keep them hidden. Out of sight, out of mind. There’s mostly just old games on the computers, but there’s an old encyclopedia too. Random facts about life before the Decline that maybe Central wouldn’t want us knowing.

  The encyclopedia’s why we’re here now. Tally insisted we research the creatures I found.

  “It’s loading,” Lucas says.

  “Sounds like we’re breaking it!” I say, as the machine cranks through its old memory.

  “It better not break,” Tally says from the window.

  I go and stand next to her. You don’t get this view from anywhere else in the compound. The compound was built to face inland, out of respect to everyone that died in the floods, but the low, wide windows of the computer corridor look out to sea.

  You can see the lines of razor wire, then miles of mud and sea with only the weird oyster farm breaking the grey, and the prison ship after that.

  “Look at her,” Tally says. “The sea witch is out.”

  I strain my eyes. Sometimes it’s hard to tell where the mud stops and the water begins; it blurs into one and plays tricks with your eyes.

  But there is a smudge in all the grey. A tiny, moving vertical.

  “She’s got her ghost with her,” Tally says.

  I laugh. “Don’t let L
ucas hear you say that.”

  I can feel Lucas rolling his eyes behind us and I wait for his voice to pipe up about reflections and shadows. He hates the ghost stories. He says they offend his scientific brain.

  “You shouldn’t call her a witch,” is what he actually says.

  Tally doesn’t even blink. “It’s not an insult, is it? I’d swap places with her in a heartbeat. I’d be a witch if it meant I could live out there. Or a ghost. I’d haunt the peacekeepers. I’d haunt all of them.”

  “Tal!” Lucas warns.

  “What? You’re not going to tell on me, are you?” she teases.

  I laugh. Tally’s hatred for the peacekeepers is well known. When she was eight her parents had an illegal second child. They knew from the beginning the baby would be taken, and Tally’s mum cried her way through the pregnancy. She died soon after the baby was born from some freak infection. Our District Controller, Ezra Heart, said that as Tally and her dad had lost her mum, they might be able to keep the baby. He said it was worth a try. A test case, he said. He appealed to Central for them – for leniency.

  The appeal dragged on for almost two years, which turns out is way too long to live with a little kid and not fall in love them. And not just for Tally and her dad. You don’t get many babies in the compound and we all loved Barnaby. But when the decision came back from Central, the answer was no. Tally’s family couldn’t keep a second child. The peacekeepers came to take Barnaby to the Communal Families to be raised for shift work inland.

  Losing Barnaby broke Tally and her dad’s hearts most of all, but all our hearts broke a little. And after that Ezra Heart stopped even trying to push back against Central’s demands. He must have decided it wasn’t worth it.

  That’s when Tally, Lucas and I started hanging out more in the solar fields, and here in the computer corridor, playing old games the processors can still handle, like Lemmings and Space Invaders.

  “It’s up,” Lucas says, reading from the screen theatrically. “‘Welcome to the World. All-new reference guide. Comprehensive and up to date. All your questions answered!’”

  “Budge up then,” Tally says, squeezing into the seat next to him. Her fingers flutter over the keyboard and butterflies appears in the grey search bar.

  “You really think that’s what they are?” I whisper, looking over my shoulder to check no one’s nearby. “They don’t look much like Mum’s picture.”

  We have a painting of butterflies in our kitchen, above our table but low on the wall, so you can look right into it when you eat. Bright-winged creatures flying around trees of pink blossom. It’s Mum’s prized possession. It used to belong to her grandmother. Mum brought it with her when we were posted here from inland.

  “They look just the same as the caterpillar in that book I used to read to Barn. Honestly, Nat. I swear they do.” Tally’s voice doesn’t miss a beat when she talks about her brother, but she goes slightly robotic. Like she’s removed herself a little from what she’s saying.

  “It starts with an egg,” Tally says. “There’s an egg on a leaf and it hatches into this caterpillar that doesn’t stop eating. It eats holes through all kinds of weird things. I don’t even know where the book came from, but I swear the caterpillar looked like yours. Except this one was green.”

  “Here,” Lucas says, leaning into the screen. We’re sat in a row in front of the cranky computer. “Butterflies,” he reads out. “Insects in the order ‘lepidoptera’. They undergo complete metamorphosis.”

  “Meta-what?” I ask.

  “Metamorphosis. Change,” Lucas says, continuing to read. “The egg hatches into a larva, or caterpillar, which grows bigger and sheds its skin through a series of moults, before hanging upside down and spinning itself into a chrysalis.”

  “Exactly!” Tally says triumphantly. “Like I told you. It eats and sleeps on repeat. And then it turns into a butterfly in the cocoon thing.”

  “Shush,” I say. “If they are butterflies, we’ve got to be careful. They’re on my windowsill, remember.” I can feel my heart racing. Butterflies are property of Central District. All sightings must be reported.

  Tally ignores me. She’s peering at the screen. There are labels for four separate life stages. Egg. Caterpillar. Chrysalis. Butterfly. But the pictures aren’t loading, there’s a slowly flashing icon of a grey paintbrush instead. “They stole the pictures,” Tally says angrily.

  “Why would they do that?” I say. “Pictures aren’t going to hurt anyone.”

  “They make us think about the past, though,” Lucas replies, matter-of-fact. “Stops us looking to the future.”

  “‘Be future thinking’,” I mutter, reciting one of our school values.

  “Falsifiers,” Tally declares murderously. “Do they think we can’t handle knowing what we’re missing out on?”

  “Red Admiral,” I say, reading the caption under one of the flashing paintbrushes.

  “There were lots of different types,” Lucas says, scrolling down the page. “Peacock, Common Blue, Meadow Brown, Holly Blue, Brimstone, Painted Lady, Speckled Wood, Gatekeeper, Swallowtail, Skipper.”

  I shiver at the old names. You can hear the computer winding through its memory but the paintbrush icons stay grey.

  “How can we tell anything without the pictures?” Tally sighs, frustrated. “We need an actual book. I’m going to ask Mr Rose!”

  “Tal! You can’t!” I call after her, but she’s already striding down the corridor and turning back on to the main library floor, where Mr Rose sits behind a stack of pamphlets ready for repair.

  “We’re looking for books about insects of the order lepidoptera,” Tally pronounces.

  Lucas groans into his hands. “If anyone finds out you took those things from the fields, Nat!”

  “They won’t find out, will they?” I snap nervously. “Unless someone tells…”

  I creep to the end of the corridor to listen. Tally’s not shut up about the caterpillars since I showed her. It’s all she’s talked about since she sailed up to my room with no apology for abandoning me halfway up a windmill with a ghost – just questions about what Uplands people wanted in the fields and then total fascination with the creatures. She calls them ours, even though I’m the one the points would go to. Or rather Mum, which makes it a hundred times worse.

  I should hurl the creatures down the rubbish chute. I might have done too, except Tally makes us go for fresh leaves every day and they’re eating and getting bigger. What kind of person would I be to throw them to their deaths now?

  Mr Rose’s eyes twinkle with amusement. “Where have you dragged that one up from? Lepidoptera? It’s a long time since I heard that word.”

  “You know what it means then?” Tally says, her eyes dark and shiny.

  “Lepidoptera. Insects with scaled wings. Butterflies and moths.” The words float out of Mr Rose’s mouth, like he’s enjoying saying them. Our parents were all kids when the Decline happened. Bees and butterflies were already gone. Mostly our parents just remember the hunger. But Mr Rose is older. I wonder if he remembers skies humming with insects?

  “Butterflies are pollinators, aren’t they?” Tally says pointedly.

  Mr Rose gazes at her, surprised.

  “They are, aren’t they?” she presses.

  Pollinators are symbols of the Recovery. It’s in the small print, in the rules plastered all over our compound. If pollinators return, it’s a sign the Recovery has begun and the siege state laws that govern every bit of our lives will finally be relaxed. That was the promise Central gave when they took control of the districts.

  “Were pollinators,” Mr Rose says sadly. “They were pollinators.”

  “I knew it!” Tally smiles back at me and puts her thumbs up. “We want to see pictures. The computer won’t show them.”

  Mr Rose shakes his head. “Images like that won’t have survived. You’re lucky you found anything. Why are you interested anyway?”

  He looks over to me curiously, sensing me
watching. I freeze.

  Tally shrugs. “There was a butterfly in Barn’s favourite book. I sent him off with it, to the Families. I wanted to see a picture of one, to remember…”

  Mr Rose’s face moulds itself into an expression of sympathy and Tally scowls. She doesn’t think Barnaby should be anyone else’s sadness but hers and her dad’s.

  “This library’s useless,” she says, and Mr Rose flinches a little.

  “Tal!” Lucas groans again beside me.

  “If you tell me what you want to know, perhaps I can help, Tallulah?” Mr Rose prods gently.

  Tally pulls a face and stomps back to us. A couple of kids nearby who’ve listened to the whole thing snigger into their hands. Tally glares at them furiously.

  Back in our corridor, she goes straight to the glass, her face pressed up against it. Tally looks out to sea way more than anyone else. She’s not scared of it, not even when the storm clouds form, like a giant hammer, and the siren’s sounding for us all to take cover in the bunker halfway up our compound – the safest place from floods and high winds.

  Tally would absolutely run away to sea, if she could. Anything to get away from the district and its rules.

  “Sorry, Tal,” I say awkwardly.

  “I swear sometimes there are two of them,” Tally murmurs.

  “Huh?” I reply, confused.

  “The sea witch and her ghost. Look,” she says.

  I follow her gaze. You can barely see the figure – a thin shape moving horizontally against the wide expanse of sand. It’ll be the girl from the oyster farm. I often see her walking out there. She’s hazy in the heat.

  “Can you see, Nat?” Tally presses. “Two of them?”

  Maybe there are two figures. They never come close enough to land to really know.

  I rub at my eyes. “How can you even see that far?”

  Tally sighs loudly. “You just got to grow those caterpillars, Nat. Let them do their metamorphosis thingy. That can be our proof that the Recovery’s started. Our district’s been kept down long enough. Even without a picture, Central can’t pretend they don’t know what a butterfly looks like, can they?”

  I shrug. “But they must know already. What they are, I mean. Or else why take them?”