by Andy Graham
It was a carbunculus demonstration of the permafrost of political hypocrisy, the smell of which fermented and made his conscience boil. For every one stumbling step forwards, society staggered back two. Not as many starved or froze as before, medical advances were leaping ahead, but literacy and numeracy levels were plummeting.
“It was about priorities,” Bethina Laudanum had once said. “Would you rather have bread or books?”
Finally, though, hope was breaking through. Prothero had managed to push through some basic workers’ rights. He’d hammered out the outline of a free rudimentary health care system for the Gates and a mobile version for the Free Towns. He’d even got the bodyball ban lifted. These were all battles well won, but the blazing trail of reform he’d dreamed of had been buried in the realities of the politics of appeasement over progress. Why was it always the haves that decided what the have-nots could have?
The president had agreed to his latest demands but, again, he’d come up against a predictable stumbling block. Patient explaining hadn’t worked, neither had shouting. The VP’s sheer obstinacy had tempted Prothero to slap him. He’d walked away before doing or saying anything he would have regretted. He had made a promise to keep a secret a long time ago and would do so. You also said you’d stay away from the elecqueduct, he reminded himself. The structure reminded him of Rick Franklin and that led to memories of his daughter, Rose. She had grown up to be quite a handful after her father’s disappearance. Prothero’s grin faded. One moment of unrequited madness on his part had led to thirty years of a bittersweet mess and more arguments than he could count. He patted the concrete pillars farewell and continued his nocturnal rounds. It would be a shame if the government actually did pull down the elequeduct, but maybe it was for the best. In the meantime, it still had one more role to play in his fight for Ailan’s people.
Prothero walked the streets, handing out what food he could, until he reached the river. Star-flies battered themselves against the glass bulbs of the street lamps. At the end of a private road, four gleaming columns thrust up to the moons. The building beneath those old chimneys was bathed in soft swathes of uplighting. Unlike the rest of the city, these lights were never turned off. Alternating sections of most of the capital were illuminated or plunged into darkness as the power-saving rotations cycled through the night. The brownouts were just short enough to keep food cold and flats warm, but long enough that you could never forget power was scarce.
Energy was a currency more valuable than money; you couldn’t burn the swipe cards nor use them to stop food spoiling. Fuel was the way forwards. That was kept Prothero coming back to the elecqueduct, for the potential it had held. Fuel was the bargaining chip which would get him what he needed. What the world needed. He may not be able to save the coal mines, but he could save the miners. His waiting game of compromises and reluctant obsequiousness would play out the way he wanted. And it would start just as he’d planned back during the Window Riots, during sweaty nights in the cramped single bed he had shared.
30
The Angel Nation
Ray left the last of the tribes folk talking around the embers. Aalok had already turned in and Nascimento had helped Orr back to the hut they were sharing. The adrenaline of the win that had carried Orr through the day had long since worn off.
Maybe it was the Greenfield story, but the Angel City reminded Ray of his village of Tear more now than when the squad had first arrived. The noises from the woods, the night sky, the crunch of frosty grass under his feet, they were things he didn’t realise he missed until he was experiencing them.
Above him, the constellations watched, the Jester most prominent amongst them. Ray’s mother had taught him to navigate by the stars. It had annoyed the teacher from the Access School no end that Ray had known more than she did. Ray had learnt that the painful way. His mother had found the yellowing bruise a few weeks later.
Ray had few early memories of his mother. The Greenfield story was one, Rose making and occasionally carrying out threats that would have made Orr blush was another. It was fortunate the next time the school had come to town the teacher hadn’t been with them. He never found out why; maybe because of the teacher’s straying hands, maybe for straying off the tightly prescribed topics.
A twig snapped. His hand went to his empty belt. He was unarmed. The noise materialised into a black-clad figure, cropped short hair over bright blue eyes.
“This way,” said Brooke. She led him along the quiet tracks of the village. They walked past the hut Ray was sharing with James, past the information now whizzing across the dot-matrix notice board, and past the clunking, sloshing filtration tank. She kept going until they reached the tunnel they had escorted Orr through that morning.
“Game?” she asked, without turning round.
“Always. What are the rules?”
“You’ll pick them up.” She ducked into the blackness.
The large stone clearing beyond funnelled up to the stars. Crooked silhouettes of trees clinging to the cliffs cast strange moon shadows on the ground. The dark entrances, which he’d learnt led to the cave farms, dotted the walls. Shadows within shadows. The rumble of the waterfall splashing into the pool accompanied the scratching of crickets in the grass. The two legionnaires made their way to the dust around the Dawn Rock.
Shutting her eyes, Brooke took a step forwards onto the bare earth. She stood motionless for several seconds before crossing to the rock and laying her hands on it. “Not long ago, I would’ve been punished for this,” she said. “A turn in the spits for kids, or a round on the rock for those deemed old enough.”
Ray joined her and ran his hand over the stone. He snapped it back, a bead of blood on the tip of his finger. “This is where you tell me the rock knows I’m not one of you, right?” he said, sucking his finger.
She laughed softly. “It’s only a cut, Ray. But yes, you’re right.”
“It’s just a tradition, Brooke, just stories. My town is full of them, but we know what they are. When I was a kid, these traditions kind of made sense. Then I went to the capital. I signed up, saw the world, helped destroy a chunk of the world that I saw, helped forcibly import more traditions from Ailan, and now I don’t know what to think.”
“And what happens when those traditions are taken away from people?” Brooke asked. “What happens when we get rid of the stories? The words that make us what we are? What is anyone then but a collection of numbers and measurements?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t got an answer to that.” He picked a chunk of rock and hurled it towards the waterfall, wincing as the muscles pulled tight around his lower back.
“I can rub that better for you, if you want?” Brooke held up hands like knives.
“Maybe later.” Part of him wanted to feel her hands wrapped round his waist; a larger part of him remembered how bruised he’d felt the last time she had tried to help.
“Some of my people are digging in their heels,” she said, kicking dust up as they made their way to the fruit trees. “The more your government pushes, the more they push back, unearthing older, harsher traditions to replace the ones you destroy.”
“Lukaz and the Hoyden?”
She nodded. “I was Hoyden, too. It could’ve been me fighting Orr if I’d been allowed to stay.”
“I think I prefer you without the scars. Listen, whatever you were born, you’re one of us.”
An owl hooted. The leaves rustled above them. Brooke threw a stone in the branches and an indignant squawk echoed round them. “Thank you. I think. I wear your uniform, speak your language and know your customs, so I guess that does make me one of you. I even know which ex-pro bodyball player has the same number of championship trophies as post-doctoral qualifications. Can you believe that was on the pub quiz masquerading as my citizenship test?”
“No. Who? James Lind?”
“The very same. Not that hard to work out, but I’m not sure how knowing that makes me part of your nation.” She unzipped h
er top and pulled her belt out of her trousers in a whipping movement. “Shall we?”
“I don’t want to hurt you.” Ray said, eyeing the rock.
She laughed and slipped off her shoes. “You think you’re the first man I’ve had on the rock?” She dropped into an old pugilist’s pose, elbows down, vertical fists. “Where do you think I learnt to fight, Corporal? The tame self-defence classes we got in the legions?” She gestured for him to follow her, talking over her shoulder as she went. “We’re lucky Orr fought rather than anyone else; otherwise we’d be going back home empty-handed.”
“Not sure our government would agree with you about that last bit.” He pulled his top off.
“Follow me, if you don’t know what you’re looking for, you’ll never find the path.”
With just their underclothes to protect them, Ray and Brooke edged their way along the slippery ledge behind the crashing blue curtain. The icy water bit at them as they went. The mountains were more air than stone. ‘Nurtured by the skies,’ Kaleyne had said of the mountains earlier, ‘fleeing what lies beneath them.’
By the time they exited the tunnel, his bare feet were numb. They stood in a large cave, illuminated by an odd blue-green light floating up from the pool that filled the chamber. “The closest translation I have for what we call ourselves is the Angel Nation,” Brooke said. “It’s not quite right but it’ll do. My people believe every living thing has an angel standing watch over it. There is an angel for every blade of grass, pebble, mountain, sea and animal, both small and large, and all the people that ever lived, too. That means there has to be a devil there to keep the balance. We took the name Angel Nation to give the mountain the balance it needed.”
“You’re saying you think there’s a devil under the mountain?” He laughed. It rang harsh and loud in the small space. “Even if that was possible, mountains aren’t alive, Brooke.”
“No, I guess not.”
Brooke’s voice echoed around the rocks. She scooped some of the water over her arms and legs, pointed to the far wall and dived into the pool, leaving barely a ripple as she disappeared. Ray followed, the shock of the cold water driving the wind out of him. Brooke’s feet vanished through a hole in the wall. He kicked after her. Ray emerged, spluttering and shivering, to see Brooke standing stock still. Wet singlet and trunks clung to her body, to the arcing lines, the lean angles, the sweep of her hips.
“I’ve broken so many traditions in my time, I guess this one shouldn’t matter,” she said.
Standing in front of her were rows and rows of statues, each slightly larger than a normal person. Men and women, most with their eyes closed, stretched back until the red light from seams in the walls no longer touched them. Some held rocks in their hands. Some were covered in patterns of scars. Others wore mismatching armour. A few were holding rifles, from flintlocks and something similar to a rusty weapon Ray’d once found in his grandad’s loft, to the rifles he’d learnt on as a fresh-faced rook.
“They say they take it in turns. Some watch while the rest sleep.” She ran her hands over the face of the statue closest to her, stroking the thick beard that blended in with his mane of hair. She smiled and wiped her eyes. “Every time I used to come here, he was always sleeping.”
“It’s Kames, the brother executed by the legionnaires, isn’t it?”
She nodded. “He was asleep when I came here the night we arrived, too.”
A tension in Ray’s body he hadn’t known was there dissipated. He placed his hand on her wet shoulder. She turned to him and he lifted her chin with a finger. Her eyes gleamed black in the odd underground light.
He wasn’t sure who lunged for who first, who grabbed the other and pulled them close, nor whose head cracked back against the wall. They pressed up against the cold, hard rock. One sweaty body merged into another, oblivious to everything, even the watching statues behind them.
Brooke shuddered as she picked up her clammy singlet. “I really am going to hell now.”
“We both will if Nascimento and Orr find out what just happened,” Ray replied as he examined the front row of statues. “What is this place?”
“Most of our people choose to be cremated when they die. Some choose to come here and wait. We call it the Resting Room.”
“For what?”
Brooke started to untangle her top. “Every culture has a flood myth.”
“Myth? Our planet was almost destroyed by the Great Flood.”
“And we could have used that moment to rebuild a world that was a home for all, and look what we ended up with.”
“Who’s naive now, Brooke?”
She grinned at him, seemed to think better of it and made to punch him instead. Ray took a step back, hands raised in mock fear.
“Our flood myth is a little different,” she said. “We’re waiting for our Great Flood. We call it the Rise of the Seven Suns. Other people call it the Last Battle, Time’s End, the Final Coming, the Twilight, the Escha-something-or-other. Our people believe it’s a time when the land will burn and the world will spurt forth the bile and vengeance trapped under the mountains. Whether the flood is of fire or water, I’m not sure. But the legends say the devils will come with it. One devil for every angel.” She gestured to the statues. “That’s why we bury our dead with their eyes open. That’s what these people are waiting for.”
“I thought the statues were just modelled on people?”
“They’re modelled on the people inside them.” She laughed at his shocked expression. “Don’t worry, they were dead.”
Ray relaxed.
“Unlike the statues outside the palisade.”
“What?”
“Our captives weren’t always so lucky. That’s why those statues had to be so big.”
Brooke snapped the moisture off her top. The crack echoed down the cavern. She cocked her head to one side and stared at the point in the darkness.
“Did you hear that?”
“What?”
“That’ll be a no, then.”
“Maybe someone you thought was dead has woken up in one of these statues.”
“Don’t make jokes like that, not here.” Her voice was muffled by the cloth as she pulled her head through. “There are stories of people settling scores by drugging their enemies so they’d be buried alive.”
“Do your legends explain the Hoyden, too?”
“It depends on the interpretation. Our old language was phonetic. Some scholars debate the translation of ‘suns’. They say it should be ‘sons’. It led to some unpleasant traditions in the past. Mothers who had seven boys were exiled, their youngest disappearing. It’s better now but the attitude lingers like rancid grease. Lukaz, for example, he’s a seventh son of a seventh son. The tribes have been wary of him since he was a baby, but he sees what he’s doing with the Hoyden as his destiny.”
The singlet had rolled up into a wet twist around her shoulders. “Help me with this, will you? It’s stuck.”
He grabbed the bottom edges of her top and pulled it over her head, dropping it at their feet. “Yes, ma’am.”
31
An Ambulance
(Scream Fields)
Possibilities tossed and turned in Stella’s head as she did the same under the tangle of her bed sheets. It wasn’t thoughts of Ray keeping her awake, though she was still baffled by Dr Neufeld’s bizarre diagnosis, it was Lenka. What did the old woman know about twins and the Light Net? The latter was illegal, the government considered it seditious and treasonous, a place for hackers, low life and the Resistance. So for Lenka to speak of it so casually? She was hiding something. Of that, Stella was certain. Sleep only arrived once she had decided to go back to Tear to find out what.
Stella slept, dreamt of monsters with numbers and letters stitched into their foreheads, woke, got the kids ready for school and stumbled into another argument with her husband. Dan had found the route to Lenka’s settlement programmed in their car. Stella didn’t lie to him as to why she was going. She
just left out some of the information. Dan deserved better than that and she hated herself for it. She left him to deal with the children, all the time fighting the feeling she was behaving like a ‘pig’s arse’, and gunned the car away from the city as fast as she dared. The sensation of guilt only stopped when she pulled up at Lenka’s place.
There was no answer to her ringing, not even barking. She knocked and called but got no reply. To her surprise, the smaller door within Lenka’s gates opened first time.
Inside, everything was exactly as Stella expected, even down to clothes on the line swaying in the breeze. Wandering further into the smallholding, she became aware of the emptiness above her, scurrying noises, creaks and groans from the buildings that were louder than before. There was too much space here. Too many places for people to hide.
A sudden barking. Her head snapped round. Wilby ran out of the open gate to the orchard. His unkempt coat was covered in mud. The dog growled, ears flat. Slowly, Stella put her bag down. “Good dog. Sit dog. Stop dog.” She couldn’t outrace Wilby, and the ladder that had been by the woodshed where she stood was gone. “Stay there. Please.”
The snarling animal got closer, baring dirty yellow teeth. Something flew out of the barn and bounced on the ground next to it. Wilby turned in a flurry of matted white fur and bounded after the ball. Ben got there seconds later, wrestling with the animal, unfazed by the teeth.
“Ben,” she called once his misplaced throw had sent the ball down the outside-cellar steps. “Where’s Lenka?” She was breathing more easily now. Wilby wouldn’t have done anything, would he?
“Drak’s gone.” He hop-skipped over to her. “The horses have runned away too.”
