Alison reached up and brushed some hair from her face. “So what are you suggesting?” she asked. Eva noted that she did not sound entirely unhappy at this suggestion; Alison must be hating this as much as the rest of them. Eva took a step closer to her.
“Look. We’ve come to the valley now. Why don’t we toss the coin to decide which way to go? Cross it, go back, or head up or down the valley itself? Once we’ve made that decision, we choose the best possible path. We don’t change direction until another path suggests itself.”
Alison sighed. “It’s cutting down options.”
“I know. But we’re exhausted. A good leader knows when to cut her losses and change the plan.”
“I’m not the leader,” insisted Alison, but she smiled a little as she said it.
The coin sent them scrambling down to the floor of the valley. The going was easier than it had been, but still not without difficulties. They slid down earth slopes, clutching at branches to slow themselves, or stumbled down the hill at a half run from trunk to trunk, grabbing at them to stop themselves plunging down too fast. At one point Katie stumbled and slid about thirty meters on her side before finally coming to a halt. Alison screamed; Nicolas and Eva watched how pale her face got. When they came to Katie, she was clutching her arm and crying. There was blood on the tattered arm of her anorak and they now realized why she had not taken it off in the warmth of the morning. Her arm had been more badly injured than they had thought when she had tripped on the broken branch earlier.
“We’ve got to get that seen to,” Nicolas said grimly.
“I’ll be okay,” Katie whimpered.
“If you’re sure.” Alison gazed down the slope. “Not much further.”
“She’s not okay,” Nicolas said.
“I’ll be fine.”
“Look,” Eva said, pointing upward, forestalling another argument.
Three airplanes flew overhead, their white contrails forming a triangle high above.
“They’re too high to see us,” Alison said dismissively. She began to scramble downward again.
“We wouldn’t see them if they were stealth planes,” Nicolas said. He looked at Katie. “Do you want a hand?”
“I’ll be okay,” she said, and moved slowly down the hill again.
They scrambled further down. Just as they were nearing the bottom, they came up against a wall of rhododendrons. Tangled brown branches and glossy green leaves choked the bottom of the valley, completely blocking their path.
“We’re trapped,” Nicolas said flatly. “There’s no way through that.”
Katie gazed at the tangled mass of vegetation in silence. Her eyes were filling with tears.
“We’ll never get back up that hill,” Eva whispered.
Alison turned to face them, her face resolute.
“We’ll carry on downwards,” she said. “There’s bound to be a way through.”
They trudged disconsolately downward, feeling thoroughly miserable. The sun had risen high enough to shine in their faces, making them hot and bad-tempered. Tree roots lay hidden beneath the brown debris of the forest floor, tripping them or sending them slipping toward the crowded green bushes below. On the far side of the valley the old pylons they had seen earlier marched downward, too. Eva looked at the cables that looped down and up, down and up as they were passed from arm to arm.
“There’s no end to this,” Nicolas muttered angrily.
Just when they thought the rhododendrons would never end, a path revealed itself.
They stood gasping beside the sudden gap in the glossy green barrier, sweat dripping from their faces and trickling down their backs. Walking along the steep slope was extremely tiring; their water was almost finished.
Nicolas shook his head in resignation. “It’s found us, hasn’t it? It knows where we are.”
“We don’t know that for certain,” Alison said stubbornly.
The path was formed by a tall ash tree that had fallen, giving them a walkway over the tangled bushes it had crushed. Katie and Eva glanced at each other, and Katie shook her head almost imperceptibly.
Alison picked her way forward through the cage of broken branches and kicked the trunk.
“It looks natural enough to me. The roots could have been washed away by all the rain we’ve been having lately. Trees fall over all the time.”
“Does it make any difference?” Nicolas asked. “Whether it was an accident or arranged by the Watcher, we have to go that way. What other choice do we have?”
He pushed past Alison and climbed up over the trunk.
The path led them down to a yellow stone road running along the valley floor. Eva slithered to the ground to find Alison and Nicolas already deep in argument.
“It’s been cut. You can see it’s been cut! And recently!” Nicolas shouted.
There was no denying it. The severed base of the tree shone white and smelled of sap. Piles of clean white sawdust lay in the brown mud around the stump.
“So what?” said Alison. “We’re in a forest. They cut down trees all the time.”
“Not individually! And they don’t just leave them to rot. It’s the Watcher. It’s reeling us in.”
He was blushing red with heat and anger, sweat dripping down from his curly red hair, mud cracked and dried on his jeans. He was a mess.
“Fine,” Alison said coldly. “All the more reason to toss the coin. Heads we go up, tails we go down.”
“Why? There’s nothing up there in the hills. We should head down and try and get to civilization. The Watcher already knows where we are.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” Katie interjected quietly. She blushed and looked down.
“She’s right,” said Alison. “We can’t give up now. Maybe the Watcher has covered all the bases. There must be a finite number of paths leading away from the Center. Maybe he’s laid signs on all of them, just to dishearten us.”
“No! This is too much. Alison, think! What were you in for? Not being able to face up to the real world. Don’t you see: that’s what you’re doing now. It’s beaten us. Why don’t you admit it?”
“We don’t know that.”
Slowly, deliberately, she pulled the coin from her pocket and spun it in the air. She caught it deftly, smacked it on her wrist, and looked.
“Heads,” she called. “We go up.”
Nicolas shook his head. “No. Not this time.”
“Suit yourself,” Alison said. She turned on her heel and began to march up the loose yellow stone of the road. After watching her walk twenty meters or so, Nicolas turned to face Eva and Katie.
“What about you two?” he said. “You must see that she’s wrong.”
Katie looked down at the ground. “We don’t know that. We agreed before we set out to follow the coin.”
Nicolas stamped his foot petulantly.
“I might have known you’d follow Alison. What about you, Eva? You know I’m right.”
Nicolas was burning red with anger; his face was twitching. Eva suddenly realized that, whether he was right or wrong, she didn’t want to go off on her own with Nicolas.
She shook her head gently. “I’m sorry, Nicolas. Katie is right. We agreed to follow the coin.”
“Fine. Suit yourself.”
He turned and began to stamp down the road in the opposite direction. Katie began to trail up the hill after Alison, who was making good progress with her angry, determined stride.
Eva sighed in resignation, and as she did so an enormous weight dropped from her. A realization was slowly dawning. Here she was, trapped in a long valley, hemmed in by overgrown rhododendron bushes, too hot, thirsty and hungry and with nothing to look forward to but a hard climb up a steep stone road, but…
But she wasn’t in South Street. She wasn’t part of the endless grind of days without purpose. Her friends might be argumentative and bad-tempered, but at least she had friends and she was walking for a reason. The South Street Eva would have just taken the first opportunit
y to lie down and die. It was what that Eva had secretively worked toward for months.
But not this one.
This Eva wanted to live.
The end was drawing near.
They climbed the long road into the hills, Eva occasionally turning to check Nicolas’ progress. He remained in sight for quite some time, an obstinate figure in orange marching into and out of view between the choking rhododendrons—and then he was gone.
Their climb was a long, hard drag. Yellow stones skidded and skittered beneath their feet; they kicked them, watched them bounce over the raised edge of the road to fall into the wide ditches on either side.
“It’s a quarry road,” Katie explained.
“How do you know?” asked Eva, but there was no reply.
The hills began to play games with them. They would climb in silence, putting their all into one last effort to reach the top of an incline, expecting finally to reach the road’s summit, only to see a gentle dip and then the road resuming its ascent further on.
“Not again.”
Eva thought she heard the whisper as they reached their third virtual summit. It sounded like Alison’s voice.
The pylons to their left marched steadily closer. As they climbed higher she thought she saw a second set of pylons off to her right. They appeared to come marching out of the next valley along.
“They’re heading to the same place as we are,” she muttered to herself.
“What’s that?” asked Alison suspiciously, and Eva jumped. She hadn’t realized that Alison was walking so close. She had been watching Eva as she looked at the pylons, an odd expression on her face. It was almost as if Alison had been caught out.
Eventually they reached the real head of the valley, from which the road descended to a natural bowl among the wooded hills. Below them they could just make out a space that had been cleared.
“A quarry,” said Katie. “I knew it.” She looked at Alison, but Alison just looked away, as if embarrassed.
“It’s very big for a quarry,” Eva replied. “Look at all those buildings.”
The second set of pylons now marched clearly over a hill to their right and picked its way down a steep slope to converge with the lines of the first set. Eva looked up at the sun. It was halfway down the sky, heading toward evening. The earlier heat had vanished. Eva knew that when they stopped walking they would feel cold. Her skin already felt cool to the touch.
The stone road sliced its way through a deep cutting in the hills and they walked in the shade for a while. Looking up, Eva could see an old grey pylon perched immediately on the cutting’s edge, thick brown branches of rhododendrons wrapped around its legs and spilling out over the lip of the earth. Higher up, cables looped down from the heavy brown ceramic disks anchored to the pylon’s arms. They were humming.
“It’s live,” Eva whispered, suddenly halting. “I don’t like this, Alison. I think we should go back.”
Alison turned to her impatiently. “What? After we’ve come all this way? Don’t be silly.”
Eva looked on down the road. At the far end of the cutting, a few hundred meters ahead of them, stretched a rusty chain-link fence. The road ran through a rusty gate set in the center of the fence. The gate was propped open invitingly. Eva felt a shiver of fear. The gate looked like a trap, waiting to be sprung. Involuntarily, she took a step backward.
“I don’t like it,” she said. “It feels all wrong. We shouldn’t go in there.”
“What? Should we just turn around and go back then?” The other Alison was coming back. The nasty, bad-tempered Alison. And as she did, Katie was becoming more and more nervous and shy.
“So? Are you really saying we should go back?” Alison laughed nastily.
Eva took a deep breath and forced herself to speak calmly. “Yes. There’s obviously nothing for us here. No food or water. We can’t stay here.”
“Of course we can,” Alison said derisively. She shook her head and turned away, stamping down the road a little, kicking stones before her as she did so. She took a deep breath, kicked another stone so hard that it bounced from the scrubby walls of the cutting, and then suddenly turned and walked quickly back up to Eva. She wore a nasty smile.
“You haven’t figured it out, have you?”
“Figured what out?” Eva felt a shiver of fear. She could guess.
Alison laughed.
“Katie has. She’s not stupid. Are you, Katie?”
“No,” Katie muttered.
“No. I never thought you were, either, Eva. Don’t you realize? You’ve been tricked. All that nonsense with me tossing the coin and none of you ever thinking to check which way it was really landing. I’ve been leading you here all along. The Watcher wants to meet you.”
She laughed again, and her voice echoed from the walls of the cutting, reverberating up into the sky to be lost in the late afternoon hills. Alison resumed her march back down the road toward the invitingly open gates.
After a moment’s hesitation, Katie began to follow.
After another moment, Eva did too.
There was nowhere else to go.
constantine 4: 2119
Constantine walked into the hotel lobby, the green bottle containing the message gripped tightly in his hand.
A blue-suited receptionist met him as he crossed the floor toward the elevators, a company smile on her lips.
“Your guest is waiting for you in the Uluru Bar, Mr. D’Roza.”
His guest? Constantine hid his surprise.
“Thank you,” he said.
“And would you like me to dispose of your bottle, sir?”
The receptionist took the bottle from him. Constantine watched as she carried it off and dropped it in a bin behind the reception desk.
—It’s all a simulation, remember, said White.—There is nothing back there, behind the desk. The object will have been destroyed. Its resources restored to the heap. Now that the message has left the simulation, it will have some way of getting into the outside world.
—Fascinating, said Blue sarcastically.—Now, who do you think is waiting for us in the Uluru Bar?
—I’ve no idea. Have you got any suggestions, or are you just going to be sarcastic?
—No. Sorry.
There was a dark pause.
—I don’t like this. It’s not part of the script.
They rode the external elevator to the Uluru Bar, a dark glass-and-steel corner of the hotel where it was nearly impossible to tell what was real and what was a reflection. Booths and open seating areas were formed out of cuboids arranged at random orientations to each other, making navigation of the bar difficult without a waiter. Constantine was led to a table that seemingly hovered over nothing. Only the faint reflection of its steel legs in the glass floor indicated that he was not experiencing another fault in the simulation. The woman already seated there was hidden by shadow: the bar had been designed with just such an effect in mind.
Now she leaned forward. “Hello, Constantine.”
“Hello, Marion,” he replied. “Should you be here?”
—Be very, very careful, said a voice.
It was Grey. Constantine felt a little shiver of apprehension.
—This is it.
Marion smiled worriedly. She leaned closer and the strain was evident in her face.
“Oh, Constantine, I don’t know. We’re so close to the end, and I’m so worried. Tomorrow’s meeting is the last. We have to make the decision then.”
A waiter appeared, hovering a discreet distance away.
“Scotch,” said Constantine. “An Islay malt, if you have it.”
The waiter nodded and withdrew. Constantine looked sternly at Marion.
“I know, Marion. We’re all feeling the strain.”
“No one more than us, Constantine. The pair of us have been ghosts for the past two years. Does anyone else really understand how we feel?”
A picture of Mary, her dirty green suit trailing cotton from its skirt, sprang
into Constantine’s mind. He dismissed it.
“I doubt it,” he said politely. “Look, Marion, it’s not safe for us to be seen together like this.”
Marion picked up her glass and took a sip. Constantine got the impression it wasn’t her first drink that night.
“We left in such a hurry today. So many things weren’t discussed. We’ll be going into tomorrow’s meeting with so much still unknown.”
“That can’t be helped.”
“Are you sure, Constantine? There could be an opportunity now to discuss things. Maybe tonight.” She smiled. “Who would suspect? Two people seen together earlier today, they meet in a bar later on. A woman and an…an attractive man, may I say?”
The waiter placed a cut crystal tumbler before Constantine and smoothly withdrew. The golden liquid inside seemed to light up by itself, casting a pattern of brilliant amber shards onto the table.
Constantine took a sip from the glass and bowed his head. He was stuck for words.
—Tell her you’re flattered, but that all matters must be discussed by the quorum. That was what it was set up for. Blue was shouting the words in frustration at Constantine’s hesitancy.
Constantine repeated what Blue had said.
Marion looked a little downcast. She took another sip, then reached out and touched Constantine’s sleeve.
—Are they for real? asked Red, incredulously.—They’re trying to seduce you?
“Okay,” she said. “Maybe no decisions can be made tonight. But that doesn’t stop us discussing things.”
Marion wore a blue silk evening dress. Her red hair was done up in a French plait. Constantine found her attractive on some abstract level. Whoever had set this up certainly knew how to play on his feelings…. Maybe if he hadn’t felt so distracted he would be more open to seduction. Constantine loved his wife, but it had been two years now…
Blue was shouting in frustration.—Tell her you’d love to discuss things with her. Tell her that she looks stunning in that dress, or that you like her hair, or, or that her perfume smells nice. Anything! Just change the subject.
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