The Eye of the North

by Sinead O'Hart

  “I’ve said too much,” muttered Igimaq, his eyes huge. “Look—just forget it. Forget it, right? I’ll ask Qila again to let you settle for the night here, and we’ll think about it in the morning. Okay?”

  “But—”

  “No buts! That’s it, young lady. Once we’ve all had a rest, this whole thing will seem clearer.”

  Without meeting her eyes again, Igimaq swung himself out of his chair and hurried after Qila, leaving Emmeline alone with her racing mind.

  “Vos papiers, s’il vous plaît.” Sasha smiled and reached over for the bundle of documents sitting on her dashboard. She handed them to the bored-looking border guard without a second glance, like they were nothing more than a stack of newspaper clippings. He grunted and began to examine them while Sasha fought the urge to drum her fingernails on the steering wheel.

  “Your business in the republic?” the guard barked. Sasha smiled again, but his glower remained. Losing your touch, she thought.

  “Pickup from the rue du Luxembourg, some sort of art consignment,” she said. The guard huffed, flicking his eyes back to her documents.

  “Passengers?”

  “Non. Just what you see.” The guard raised his eyebrow and looked at her, and Sasha tried not to shiver.

  “Registration of the vehicle?”

  “A-B-sept-quatre-huit-A-N,” she rattled off, casually glancing at a sudden movement in her rearview mirror. Faster than she had time to process, she saw men running, waving one another on. Distant yelling reached her ears. One of the figures was carrying something that made Sasha’s brain ignite—a gun. Realization sliced through her as she lifted her gaze to peer at the barrier before her. Fool! You should’ve known this was a setup! Everything looks wrong. Even this guy’s uniform is shoddy!

  She turned back to the guard. His eyes were fixed on her bodice, where her white silk flower was just barely peeking out beneath her open overcoat. He met her eyes and bared his teeth, his face twisting into a sneer.

  “Assistance!” he yelled. “Allez!” He jumped up on her front tire and leaned in through the window in order to grab her keys—but Sasha was too fast. She started the engine and gunned it, flinging the fake border guard off as the lorry started moving. It roared as she headed straight for a gate, which wasn’t open, praying she’d pick up enough speed to crash through. I can make it, she told herself. I can make it! A few hundred yards ahead someone stepped into her path, his gun raised to his shoulder. She ducked and pushed even harder on the accelerator, hearing a smash as his bullet pierced her windshield. Who are these guys? Whoever they were, they’d been strong enough to overpower the real border guards—and almost bring her mission to a halt before it had even properly begun. As she neared the gate, she realized there wouldn’t be time to stop to release Thing from the secret hiding place or to look at her map—she’d have to hope she could find Monsieur Pichon’s place from memory.

  Another bullet hit her windshield, and the engine roared as it leaped forward, faster and faster and faster. Then, with a clattering, hissing bang, the lorry crashed through the metal gate. Sasha’s head smacked into the ceiling of her cab as she bumped over the border and away, speeding as fast as she could through the streets of the republic, hoping that Thing would be all right for a while longer.

  Far behind her she heard the sirens of her pursuers, and she gritted her teeth as she pressed the pedal to the floor.

  Igimaq and Qila’s muttered conversation from the kitchen was almost enough to send Emmeline to sleep. She’d been moved into the living room again as they discussed what to do with her, and she’d made the mistake of curling up in one of the soft chairs. Her head settled against a cushion, and she sighed as she gazed out the window. The sky was strangely light still, even though Emmeline knew that it was late, and to stave off the longing to close her eyes and drift away, she began to think about what to do next. If her parents truly were in the ice, then staying in this small, warm room would get her nowhere. The ice wasn’t going to come to her, so she had to go to it, and she didn’t want to sit about and wait for Igimaq to decide her fate—or, worse, her parents’. She didn’t know much about the village council, either, besides how badly she wanted to avoid it. She imagined there’d be lots of discussion and worried mutterings and people sympathetically patting her on the head, which would accomplish nothing besides delaying her further.

  She glanced toward the kitchen door. All was clear. Now or never.

  Quickly and quietly she slid out of the chair and slipped into her warm outdoor gear, pulling on the boots and mittens that Igimaq had promised and that had been laid out by the fire for her. She picked up the snowshoes and stuck them under her arm, hoping she could work out how to put them on without too much trouble.

  She tiptoed across the floor, checked her pockets one more time for her rope, her spoon, and her fishing line (discovering as she did so a small packet of food, which she wrapped her fingers around gratefully), and was gone through the front door like a gust of wind.

  Emmeline’s face tingled as the cold touched it. Wrapped up tight in her stolen coat, borrowed boots, and loaned mittens, she kept putting one foot in front of the other. The straps of her snowshoes were too loose, but she did the best she could with them and tried to force herself to believe she was making good progress. The truth was, she had no idea where she was going. She’d long ago left Igimaq’s tiny village behind, and now she was creeping around a rocky shoreline, the sea gushing and hissing to her left. Low on the horizon a pale sun burned, and there was enough light to see for hundreds of yards in every direction. The ground was barren. All that met Emmeline’s gaze was a landscape so vast, and so flat, and so unknown, that it made her bones rattle.

  Walk with a cocky step and your head held high, she told herself, Thing’s jaunty voice playing in her mind, and you can do anything.

  “Right,” she muttered, swallowing hard.

  As she walked, she dredged her memory again, and the book her father used to like to read to her floated to the surface. She could hardly believe she’d forgotten it, as reading with her father hadn’t exactly been a regular occurrence, but then the cover burst clearly into her mind and the old fear she’d had of it washed over her. She shuddered as it filled her head—a drawing of a giant mammoth, its tusks huge and yellowed and its eyes red with rage, set above the words Legendary Exploits! in a garish font. It had been a collection of stories, each one gorier than the next, and she remembered her father’s voice as he read, dark and booming at the gruesome bits and spookily whispery for the rest. She’d never let him know how much it had scared her. One story had definitely been about the Kraken, she felt surer with every moment, and she struggled to recall it in detail. As her mind orbited around thoughts of terrifying beasts that couldn’t be killed, like a small moon around a planet, she began to wish she hadn’t been such a scaredy-cat.

  But they were just stories—weren’t they? She wrapped her mittened hands around her coil of rope and her coil of fishing line. Or were Mum and Dad trying to tell me…trying to show me something…But her thoughts halted there, as if they had nowhere else to go.

  Every step she took felt like she was walking farther and farther down into a dark tunnel with no light at the other end, but Emmeline’s feet didn’t slow.

  In the belly of the lorry, Thing knew something was very wrong. He felt like he was inside a soccer ball during a very violent game, and there wasn’t an inch of him that hadn’t been battered or bruised by the journey so far. He could hear Sasha’s muffled voice shouting something he couldn’t make out, but her fear was plain.

  I have to get out of here. He felt the whoop beginning to tie his chest in knots, but he forced himself to breathe slowly as he looked around, searching for the catch keeping the compartment closed. There was barely enough light to see, and so he used his fingers instead, running them around the inside of the box until he found it.

  Crack-ping! The sound, sudden and far too close for comfort, made Thing want t
o fold himself up to the size of a postage stamp. His heart roared inside his chest.

  “Come on, you great banana,” he whispered, working at the catch, his hands shaking. Distantly he heard springs squeaking and brakes squealing and the deep growl of an engine under pressure, and he braced himself as the lorry’s movement bashed him off the inside of the box again. He dug his nails in under the loosening catch and hauled for all he was worth.

  Slowly but surely it started to give.

  Emmeline rested long enough to eat the tiny packet of food. There was nothing to drink, but a small metal cup had been included with the food. After a few seconds’ puzzling she realized all she had to do was dip this into some of the clear, cold meltwater all around her whenever she got thirsty. When she finished eating, she wrapped up the greased paper and placed it in her pocket beside the rest of her treasures, and she slid her small cup into the other pocket, glad to have something so useful so close to hand.

  She’d only barely started to walk again when the sky above her head exploded with light and color, spreading in arcs from horizon to horizon. Her mouth fell open as she stood, transfixed, staring up at the dancing lights, her ears filling with a whispering, whishing buzz, like static electricity.

  “What are they?” she breathed, feeling her entire body trembling. She wasn’t talking about the lights in the sky, for Emmeline, of course, had read enough to understand that these were none other than the famed aurora borealis (she even knew the scientific reasons behind the phenomenon, not that she would have been able to remember them right at that moment). It was something else—something even more stupendous than the aurora itself—that had caught her eye.

  They looked like creatures—massive creatures—in the sky. Bigger than bears stretched up to stand on their back legs, and taller than the tallest man. They were silhouetted against the northern lights, riding on them as Igimaq’s tiny boat had ridden over the sea. As Emmeline watched, the creatures seemed to slide effortlessly over the lights, holding on to them like they were solid, sliding down them like they were made of some inexplicable fabric.

  “It’s impossible,” Emmeline breathed, but her eyes refused to stop seeing it, so she kept looking. One of the creatures clung to a fold of the aurora as a chimpanzee would cling to a tree branch. It lifted one arm and pointed across the frozen landscape, right into the heart of the empty country. As it did this, it appeared to say something to the others. Its voice, which Emmeline now realized was the source of the low, bone-fizzing buzz that she’d heard a few moments before, made her already cold blood even colder, no matter that she couldn’t understand the words.

  Then the lights started to move again, but this time it was different. It looked as if something were dragging them down out of the sky, like a giant hand had grabbed hold of them and started pulling. With plaintive noises the creatures lifted their heads to the sky, and one by one they released their grip on the aurora and tumbled down, landing heavily on the ice. As soon as the last of them had fallen, the lights flickered and began to stretch out, finally vanishing into a glowing maelstrom that swirled slowly in the far distance.

  Emmeline looked back at the creatures. They had gathered a few hundred yards from where she lay, and she immediately began to plan the best way to get across the bare, rocky ground without them seeing her.

  For whatever they were doing, and wherever they were going, Emmeline wanted in.

  Thing burst open the compartment in a flurry of kicks. He hauled himself out of the hole, pausing only to drag Emmeline’s satchel through after him, then found his seat again. Sasha’s eyes were wide, flipping between the road ahead and her mirrors, but she managed to throw him a quick nod. Her knuckles were white on the steering wheel.

  “You all right?” she called.

  “Keep drivin’!” he shouted. “Don’ worry about me.” She just nodded again and went back to focusing on the road as Thing slipped the strap of Emmeline’s satchel around his neck without a word.

  “So,” he said, glancing around at the bullet holes in the glass and noticing a large, official-looking vehicle speeding along behind them—its flashing lights in the mirror were unmistakable. “Did I miss anythin’ interestin’?”

  Sasha growled and put her foot down.

  Emmeline ran as hard as she could. She kept catching her feet in gullies and crevices that were invisible until she was on top of them, and with every stumbling step the snow was deepening. The creatures were still too far away for her to make sense of their size and shape, but they looked a lot like the letter X, she thought: with no torso to speak of, their massively long and flexible arms and legs seemed to just meet in the middle. They were covered with long fur, and on the widest feet and hands she’d ever seen, they loped across the treacherous ground so quickly and smoothly that Emmeline knew she’d never keep up.

  “Oh, please,” she gasped. “Please wait!” She was sure these things, whatever they were, had to know how to find the Kraken—maybe they could even help her, if she asked them nicely. And even though part of her hated to admit it, Emmeline was desperate for a closer look simply because she’d never seen or heard of anything like them before. Imagine! she thought. Will I be the youngest person ever to discover a new species? Emmeline kept her brain warm by thinking about this as she ran. She had just decided on a name—the Widgetosaurus—when she realized that she’d started running slightly uphill.

  Her heart hammering, and her mouth and throat dry, she clambered to the top of the snowdrift. Her exposed cheeks and nose were tingling. She blinked, trying to clear her eyes.

  Before her lay some rocky, snowy ground, and beyond that something that looked like a huge black ribbon, and beyond that again a massive slab of ice stretching out in front of her like a giant’s dining table. Distantly she could see the animals tumbling across it, getting farther and farther away with every heartbeat.

  “Oh, no,” she sighed, feeling her tiredness sneak up behind her and take her by the hand.

  “Finally,” Sasha gasped. The lorry rocked from side to side as they drove, slapping Thing’s head against the window. They were headed right for something huge, stuck by itself in the middle of a field of mud. It was a tall metal tower with a large sphere perched on top like a grape on the end of a toothpick. Thick chains, attached somehow to the sphere, disappeared into the clouds overhead, which boiled and swirled in midair like they were trapped inside a glass jar. Pulses of powerful light flashed inside the clouds, and the closer they got, the more Thing could hear the rhythmic sound of metal clanking on metal. After a few seconds he worked out what it was—the chains straining to be released.

  “What is that?” he said, gawping out through the battered windshield and trying to keep his grip on the door. Sasha didn’t answer at first, her eyes glued to the rearview mirror. Thing looked too—their pursuers were closing in fast.

  “We’re not going to have time,” Sasha muttered. Her eyes were wide, sweat rolled down the side of her face, and her hair was thick and ribboned, plastered to her head. “There’s no way Monsieur Pichon can lower the ship now!”

  “The—the ship?” Thing glanced around, but all he could see was this isolated field, flat and completely empty—except, of course, for the strange contraption that led up into nothing.

  “The Cloud Catcher,” muttered Sasha, lifting one finger from the steering wheel just long enough to point toward the tower.

  “The what what?” Thing felt his mind start to get heavy and thick, like a sponge soaking up water. Sasha sucked her teeth and flicked her gaze toward the rearview mirror again. The lorry hopped and bucked over the ground. It seemed to Thing that their pursuers—or maybe it would be more accurate to call them followers, as they didn’t appear to be in any huge hurry—were catching up to them. Then, suddenly, Sasha started fumbling on the ceiling of the cab, her fingers feeling blindly for something while her eyes flicked between the ground in front of them and the mirrors all around.

  “What’re ya lookin’ for? I ca
n help!”

  “The horn!” she said. “We need to make some noise, get Monsieur Pichon out here.”

  “Right!” said Thing before realizing he had no idea what that meant. Eventually his scrambling, fumbling fingers found a cord, and because he couldn’t think of anything better to do, he pulled it.

  He almost fell back into his seat when a noise like a dying bull blared all around.

  “Brilliant!” said Sasha, a smile breaking over her face. “Do it again! Longer this time!” Thing pulled it as hard as he could, and they battled on, roaring as they went.

  A door opened near the base of the tower, and in the doorway a shape appeared. He—Thing presumed it was a he, maybe even Monsieur Pichon himself—stood in silhouette against the light of a tiny room.

  In the same second a loud crack sounded from behind them, far too close for comfort. Sasha jerked, and Thing saw her face crumple. The lorry swerved but kept moving forward.

  Thing let his fingers slip off the cord, and he flopped down into the seat beside her.

  “Y’all right?” he asked her, even though he knew she wasn’t. She couldn’t be.

  “Just peachy,” she grunted. She turned to him and tried to smile, but her eyes were clouded. She clutched the steering wheel with her left hand and grabbed herself around the middle with her right, but when she brought her hand back around again, Thing saw bright red blood on her fingers and palm.