Borderlands

by Skye Melki-Wegner

  I offer Clementine a quiet nod, trying to show my respect, but she’s still looking intently at her sister. Maisy fiddles with her fingernails, all shy and awkward, like she can’t figure out whether she’s grateful or sorry for having spoken up.

  ‘I don’t regret it either,’ I say, when the silence has stretched a little too long. ‘We’re almost there, aren’t we? I mean – we’re almost at the Valley. This is what scruffers dream about, the stories they tell, the songs they sing to their children . . .’

  ‘Very off-tune, in my grandpa’s case,’ Teddy adds. ‘One time, our neighbours came knocking on the door because they thought we were strangling their cat.’

  The tension breaks. I can’t hold back a snort, and even Maisy giggles.

  ‘And nah, I don’t regret leaving Rourton,’ Teddy adds. ‘If I hadn’t nicked off before the coppers nabbed me, I reckon my head would be decorating the town square. On a spike.’ He grins, clearly trying to lighten the tone. ‘And hey – it’d be a shame to rob the world of my most impressive feature.’

  Clementine raises an eyebrow. ‘Meaning . . .?’

  Teddy looks down suggestively, then wiggles his hands at her with a laugh. ‘These things, of course. Best damned pickpocketing hands in Taladia.’

  Clementine rolls her eyes, but I can tell that she’s hiding a smile. ‘If you have such wondrous hands, Nort, you can use them to get this dusting done.’

  And so the hours pass, and we keep on cleaning. I haven’t done this much scrubbing since I worked at the Alehouse. At least here I only have to deal with dust – not spilled beer and drunkards’ vomit. Besides, it’s not like we have anything better to do.

  Well, apart from fretting. Fretting and planning. Now that we’re free of the other smugglers, we have a chance to really toss around ideas for our next step. Teddy favours a sneaky approach – tiptoeing into the army camp in the dead of night, and maybe blasting a hole in the catacombs.

  ‘Oh,’ he adds, ‘and nicking a few of those army uniforms, while we’re at it. Those bronze buttons have got to be worth a few coins.’

  ‘So long as we find Lukas,’ I say, ‘go ahead and steal as many buttons as you like.’

  Then Clementine starts up a new conversation – about avoiding the army camp entirely and sneaking into the Valley – and Teddy launches into a spiel about making balaclavas from tree bark.

  In the afternoon, we hit a real reason to fret.

  It’s Teddy who spots it first. He’s on the back deck, emptying his dustpan over the rail. He calls us with an anxious twinge in his voice. ‘Hey, guys? You’d better see this.’

  We tramp through the cabin’s back door. Teddy points back down the river. As soon as I see it, my throat tightens. Another boat rides upon the water, and it’s gaining on us fast. Sunlight gleams off its rails and it takes a moment for my eyes to adjust – but then I recognise it.

  It’s the Forgotten.

  ‘Silver!’ I call. ‘You’ve got to come and see –’

  ‘Can’t leave the wheel right now,’ she says, from inside the cabin. ‘This is a tricky stretch.’

  ‘Trust me, it’s about to get trickier.’

  Silver curses, then pokes her head out to see what we’re ogling. She rattles off a string of furious swearwords, which I’m fairly sure she learned as a smuggler rather than as the king’s employee.

  ‘Maybe Quirin wants to help,’ I say feebly.

  Silver darts back to the wheel, but I hear her snort through the cabin doorway. ‘Oh yes, I’m sure. He’s chasing us down from the goodness of his heart.’

  ‘But how could he know?’ Clementine says. ‘You knocked us out, for heaven’s sake! How could he guess it was a ruse?’

  ‘Because, my friends, he’s a professional liar,’ Silver says. ‘He’s spent his whole life making deals, breaking deals, doublecrossing and backstabbing. He probably knew right from the start.’

  ‘But he let us get away –’

  ‘No,’ Silver says. ‘He let me confirm my guilt. Now he’s seen you free and out on the railing, he’s got all the proof he needs that I’ve betrayed him.’

  The boat shoots forward with a new burst of speed. The jolt sends me stumbling, but I catch myself on the cabin wall. I guess Silver’s cranking up the alchemy juice. This is serious. We’re going to run for it.

  ‘Quirin’s got a bigger boat,’ Teddy mutters. ‘The Forgotten must be loads faster than this thing.’

  When I stumble back into the cabin, Silver is clutching the wheel with white knuckles.

  ‘Do you really think we can outrun him?’ I say.

  She takes a moment to respond. ‘We can try.’

  After three more vials of alchemy juice and a puff of golden smoke we’re practically flying along the river. This boat doesn’t cut through the water so much as skim across like a low-flying bird. But even if our progress looks graceful, it doesn’t feel it. Silver twists us between rocks, around bends, into narrower and narrower stretches of river. I feel every bump, every jolt, every whoosh of sudden movement. The Firebird lurches left and I stumble, collapsing into the nearest wall. Another wrench, and I’m tripping over my own legs in the other direction.

  Silver takes a sharp breath. ‘Quirin might be faster on open water,’ she says, ‘but when it comes to turns, I’d judge we’re the ones with the advantage.’

  I position myself near the back window to keep an eye on the Forgotten’s progress. I want to believe that it’s falling behind, that Silver’s tricks have paid off. But every time I look, my gut clenches. The larger boat still churns behind us, closer and closer. Sun glints from its body like the barrel of a gun.

  ‘Are we losing them?’ Silver demands.

  ‘No,’ I say, hating the word. ‘No, they’re getting closer.’

  The old woman rummages through her alchemy chest, and selects another vial. ‘We’ll have to –’

  The boat’s metal frame emits a terrible noise, so sharp and twisted that it sounds almost like a human scream. There’s a sickening crunch. And that’s when the Firebird begins to crumple around us.

  I stumble into Clementine, who falls with a shriek against the wall. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘We’re in range of Quirin’s proclivity,’ Maisy says, looking horrified. ‘His power is Metal, remember? And this boat’s made out of –’

  The Firebird shrieks and suddenly the cabin roof is falling. It crashes down around us; sheets of metal crumple like they’re made of tissue. I grab Clementine and drag her aside, just as a chunk of collapsing roof skewers the floor where we had just been standing.

  ‘Outside!’

  We don’t need telling twice. I grab the supply pack with my magnets, but there’s no time to save anything else. A moment later we’re out on deck, the remains of the cabin crashing down behind us. Silver is the last to flee – I think she lingered inside for one last yank of the wheel – and she stumbles out through a cloud of metal groans and dust.

  ‘So much for cleaning,’ Teddy says, coughing.

  We stagger away from the dust and press our bodies against the rail. The Forgotten is even closer now: barely thirty metres away. Quirin stands upon the deck, hands upheld as though to pray to the sun. But this is no prayer. He claps his hands together, squeezing tendrils of power in towards each other, and the boat beneath us starts to collapse.

  I hear screaming, but I don’t know if it’s Teddy or the twins or Silver. Perhaps it’s me, and I don’t even know my throat is making the sound. All I know is that the floor beneath me is smashing. The guardrails twist like rabid snakes. And the boat begins to scrunch upon itself, a scrap of paper in Quirin’s hands . . .

  I glance at my crewmates. Their faces are pale and strained, coated in dust. A cut dribbles blood down Teddy’s forehead, and Silver looks ready to pass out. Blood stains her clothes and I realise she’s injured, but there
’s nothing for it.

  We jump.

  The water hits hard. I feel like I’m in the Nightsong’s bunkroom again, and all the world is swallowing me. But this time it’s not dark, and I’m not trapped. The river around me runs clear with daylight. I kick to the surface and gasp down a breath.

  ‘This way!’

  I follow the voice blindly. A moment later we drag ourselves onto shore: five bedraggled bodies stumbling through undergrowth and trees.

  We’re at the bottom of a ditch when Silver collapses. It’s like someone has cut her strings; she’s a broken puppet tumbling down into the leaves.

  ‘Silver, what’s –?’

  Then I see the blood. A shard of metal protrudes from her stomach, as deadly as a spray of bullets. She coughs, fighting for breath, and more blood dribbles from her lips onto her cheeks.

  ‘We’ve got to run!’ Clementine says. ‘Leave her – she can’t keep up.’

  Shamefully, part of me agrees. This old woman clubbed me over the head. She worked for King Morrigan. She invented the bombs that killed my family. She’s a smuggler. A liar. A traitor.

  But she also risked everything to help us. To help save Lukas. And as she lies here, lungs heaving and lips spitting blood, the thought of leaving her to die is sickening. I reach for her necklace and rifle through its charms, searching for the tiny silver bone.

  ‘Go,’ Silver whispers. ‘Run. Save my . . . save him . . .’

  I ignore her. I pick out the bone charm and press it against her wound. I’ve bonded with an alchemy charm before, but not this one – will it work the same? Is it more complicated?

  I close my eyes. I press my fingers against the bone, and I think of healing. It’s a bit like casting an illusion, really, to bond with an alchemy charm. I conjure an image of skin that melts back together, of veins that re-stitch, of flesh that weaves its broken cells back into the whole . . .

  The air twangs. The charm flashes hot in my hand. ‘All right,’ I whisper. ‘All right, I think I’ve got it.’

  Teddy pulls the shard from Silver’s stomach. It makes a horrible sucking sound and Silver moans in pain. I press my fingers into the mess – ignoring the squelch of wet flesh beneath my fingertips – and focus on the charm. Inch by torturous inch, the wound begins to heal.

  ‘It’s too late,’ Maisy whispers, staring at all the blood. ‘Danika, it’s too late.’

  ‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘No, look, she’s healing.’

  But deep down, I know Maisy’s right. This charm might knit Silver’s flesh back together, but too much damage has already been done. Silver’s body is old. Her internal organs are crushed, broken. Her heartbeat is faltering. Blood continues to gurgle from her lips, like regurgitated food from a mother bird. It pours across her belly and pools with sodden fabric at her sides.

  Silver struggles to raise a hand, and grabs my shirt. I gasp as she draws me towards her. ‘Look.’ Her breath is barely a rattle. ‘Look up.’

  I wrench my head up to follow her gaze. Above us, the canopy dances in the breeze. I don’t know what she expects me to see, though – there’s just a thicket of leaves and branches, lit occasionally by a tiny chink of sunlight.

  ‘Stars,’ Silver whispers.

  I look back up at the light spots. I suppose they do look a bit like stars, winking down between patches of dark. ‘Yes,’ I say, mouth dry. ‘Yes, I see them.’

  Silver’s grip tightens on my shirt. Her fingernails dig into my skin, then wriggle around to the back of my shoulders, where my proclivity tattoo sits like ink upon my upper spine. She lets out a gasp. Blood stains her teeth, and her throat makes a terrible rattle.

  ‘Without the night,’ she chokes. ‘You can’t . . . can’t have stars . . . without the night.’

  I freeze. Those are Lukas’s words. Those are the words told to him by his grandmother, when she gave him the silver star charm. And for the first time, I realise the meaning of Silver’s bright green eyes. Morrigan green. Just like Lukas.

  ‘You’re her.’ The words feel like paper on my tongue. I wet my lips. ‘You’re his grandmother.’

  Silver’s lips twist into a bloody smile. ‘He takes after me, you know. Family scandal . . . when I left. My son . . . my son declared I was . . . dead.’

  She pants a little, then grabs for my wrist. She presses her fingers against the silver star – the charm that doesn’t yet contain any alchemy. The charm that can only be enchanted with a dying soul’s proclivity.

  ‘Without the night . . .’ she manages, and closes her eyes. I feel something strange against my wrist – something warm and cold and hot, all at once, and the charm falls back against my skin.

  Silver gives a little gurgle. Her hands fall slack.

  And with a twitch, her breathing ends.

  After that, I lose track of myself for a while. It’s like I’m operating automatically – a boat steered by an invisible captain. My body runs, dashes, ploughs through trees and leaves and darkness. Over roots, under branches, around trunks . . .

  Forest air fills my throat, rich with the scent of damp mulch. I stumble a few times when my ankles snag, before I tear them free and stagger onwards. I’m only vaguely aware of my crewmates: shadows, gasps, flailing limbs. Sometimes we speed up, sometimes we slow. We splash along a river for a while to hide our footprints, then emerge back onto the same bank we left behind. We clamber across boulders and lurch through undergrowth.

  Teddy suggests a treetop route, swinging from branch to branch. ‘Means no tracks on the ground, doesn’t it? I reckon it’s worth a shot.’

  But Maisy looks pale, still on the mend, and a wild scramble through the canopy would be too much for her. So we choose another stream, and splash among shallow rocks and river weeds.

  And through it all, I barely know what’s happening. All I can think of is Silver lying dead in that ditch. We didn’t have a chance to bury her. Lukas’s grandmother. Lukas’s grandmother, a member of the royal family, and we left her to rot.

  As I run, my charms hit the skin of my inner wrist. Every twang makes me think of Silver. And now, the little silver star . . . it’s not just a sentimental piece of jewellery any more. I felt something back there, in Silver’s dying moments. I think she distilled a little of her own proclivity into the metal.

  I know Silver’s proclivity was Night, but I have no idea what the charm will be able to do. So how am I supposed to use it? Confusion races through my head, my body races through the trees, and all I hear is the crash of footfalls and the bark of my crewmates’ breath.

  Finally, we collapse. We have run until we can’t press our bodies any more – until Maisy looks ready to have a heart attack – and then pushed on further anyway. It’s Clementine who finally stops us. She doubles over, grabbing her knees. ‘We have to . . . rest . . .’ she manages. ‘Maisy . . .’

  I nod. ‘I know.’

  There’s no sign of pursuit from the smugglers; for all I know, they’ve given up. Maybe they found Silver’s body and figured they’d dealt with the traitor. Maybe they just don’t want to leave their boat – not if there’s a risk of the catacomb restorations triggering more storms. Either way, I’m not about to complain.

  We set up camp on a sheltered hillside, where the earth curves inward on its slope down to a creek. There’s a nest of boulders about halfway down, and we wriggle inside to find a small cave. I lay out my magnetic circle and cast a quick illusion. The earth is damp and the rock is mossy, but at least we’re protected from the wind. It’s picked up quite a bit over the last hour, so it’s a relief to place a wall of stone between my face and the late-afternoon sky.

  I only rescued one supply pack, and its contents are drenched. The pack was soaked two nights ago, when the surge swamped the Nightsong, and it’s already starting to stink. We shovel a mess of gluggy porridge out, then plunge our fingers into a bag of mysterious mush that
was probably a flour cake in a prior life.

  ‘Yum,’ Teddy says.

  The porridge has a strange odour, and I sniff at it suspiciously. A moment later I discover the cause for the smell, and I almost gag. This was a batch of mushroom porridge, cooked days ago, and the muggy weather hasn’t been kind to its remains.

  ‘That’s disgusting,’ Clementine says. ‘Who mixed that in with the oats?’

  Teddy looks a little sheepish. ‘I figured it’d be good to have some precooked food – you know, since it’s not always safe to light a camp fire . . .’

  ‘Oh, come off it, Nort. Even you must have realised it would go bad.’

  ‘Yeah, but I thought mushrooms were a kind of fungus!’ Teddy says. ‘You know, like mould. You can’t get mould growing on mould, can you? It’d be like a weird incestuous fungal party.’

  I peer down at the remains of our porridge. ‘Hate to break it to you, Teddy, but it looks like your mushrooms were in a partying mood.’

  In the end, all we can salvage is a bag of soggy nuts and the apricot syrup. I dump the rest in a corner of the cave, but the stink of mushroom porridge seems to intensify with every passing moment. Soon Clementine is holding her nose and giving Teddy a pointed look. He deliberately avoids her gaze.

  I fight back a sigh. My head feels like it’s ready to explode, and the last thing I want to deal with is an argument. ‘I’ll get rid of it.’

  I scoop the glug into a porridge bag and wriggle out of the cave, trying not to inhale. Then I drag the lot down to the stream, dump it, and watch our hopes of dinner churn away.

  The light is fading to grey with the evening, but as I straighten up, something catches my eye. A shadow, a movement, a human at the edge of my vision . . .

  I whip around.

  Nothing.

  The water downstream runs clear and empty. No sign of shadows. No sign of anything, really – except for a couple of skinks on the rocks. I wonder briefly whether they’re edible, but as soon as my gaze falls upon them they flit away like tiny green arrows.