by Meg McKinlay
“It wasn’t your fault,” Jena said. “Papa, he …”
She stopped, because something had changed in Papa Dietz’s face. He was staring at Lia.
“Shorehaven,” she was saying, in response to a question from the crowd. “And there’s White Bay on the other side. That’s where I thought Jena was from, but …” Her lips curved in that curious crooked smile. “Does this place really not have a name, then?”
Jena felt something inside her shift, a current stirring. Was it Papa’s face or Lia’s smile? Or was it simply that a crack had opened in her mind, letting her slip inside it?
Everything has a name. A village. A girl. A six-moon baby hovering on the edge of life. A strong name, sealing you into stone. A light-as-air name, opening into sky.
Seren.
Lia.
Not a birthday but a “found outside the mountain” day.
Jena blinked heavily, letting her eyes stay closed a beat longer than they needed. In her arms, Ailin was quiet and still as if she too were holding her breath, waiting.
The crowd between them was a tunnel again, the past and present collapsed in a single, perfect moment.
Do not fall, but if you must …
“Jena?” Kari’s arm was around her.
Do not fall.
“It’s all right. I’m okay. It’s just …” In the pale light, she locked her eyes on Lia’s, forcing into her voice a steadiness she could not imagine ever feeling again. “I think you’re my sister.”
TWENTY-NINE
“It’s perfect.” Jena pressed her shoulder against Lia’s. It was so strange, but so right too – standing here in the dappled shade flanked by sisters.
“Thank you.” Thom was on his knees in the damp grass by Min’s grave. Lia’s bluestone nestled in a hollow alongside the water stone their mama had laid.
Lia had told them what happened, and though it hurt to hear it again, it was good to know. To make what sense of it there was to be made. There were tears in Thom’s eyes but the ghost of a smile on his lips. He seemed, if not happy exactly, then satisfied. Content.
He didn’t blame Lia, he said. She could not have known.
Still, Lia was stricken with guilt. The gift of the bluestone did nothing to ease it, but it was something. And what stone could be more fitting for Min?
“I’m so sorry,” Lia said again. “I wish I could have met her.”
“She would have liked you.” Thom rose and they stood together, looking down upon the grave.
Thank you.
Jena did not speak the words but let them remain a whisper in her mind. And this, she knew, was gratitude – not something that rolled easily off the tongue, but something wrenched from deep within.
In a curious way, it was Min who had saved Jena and Lia. When the Mothers offered Thom’s brothers extra mica for sealing the Pass, they could scarcely refuse. But it was Thom who had insisted on placing the last stones at the very top, and in doing so had left a space – not so much that it would draw the eye from the ground but large enough all the same.
It wasn’t that he thought Jena was alive, he said. It was simply that he could not forget that moment when the earth had closed over Min. He didn’t want to feel that again, couldn’t bear to be part of it.
Jena sighed and looked out across the clearing. On the far side, a knot of villagers had gathered alongside the Mothers. Luka was on his knees in their midst, smoothing a last clod of earth over the freshly turned ground.
Berta had lingered two days after the fire, but in the end her burns were too severe. The Mothers said she had lacked the strength to heal but Jena knew it was more than that. There was a brokenness to her. Jena had seen it when she stood by her bedside. How small she had seemed, swamped by a pile of heavy blankets, as though she were receding into herself.
Berta had not asked for forgiveness, said she knew she could not expect it. Her sunken eyes pleaded silently with Jena; she wished only for her to understand. That they had meant no harm, that their thoughts had been only for the line, for the survival of the village.
It was what the Mothers had countered when Jena told the villagers about the ripening, about the notes in the ledgers and the rubus.
We did not know. We could never have imagined.
Now, watching Luka kneeling in the dirt beside Berta’s grave, it struck Jena that those were two utterly different things.
“Are you all right?” Kari put a hand on Jena’s shoulder.
“I’m fine.” Jena reached up and locked her fingers briefly with Kari’s. Then she let go and began to walk across the clearing. When she was a few steps from him, Luka turned, seeming to sense her approach. He pressed a lingering hand against the earth, then rose to his feet. “Are you ready?”
She was. There was nothing here for her now. And she had no wish to stay and hear the Mothers repeat what they had said so often in the days following the fire: that even if there was an outside, that did not change the fact of Rockfall. The anger of the mountain, the salvation of the Seven. It was unnatural to carve a path through the stone. It was an abomination for a man to be inside the mountain. Judgement would surely come.
They had salvaged what little remained of the mica, repacking it into bags and taking up the ledgers anew. For those who remained faithful, there might yet be an allocation.
Jena scanned the faces of the villagers clustered about the Mothers; worry and fear were etched deep upon them. Though no one could argue with the fact of Lia, for some, the convictions of a lifetime were not so easily shed. Despite everything, this was something Jena understood.
But as the Mothers began to speak, Jena turned her back, letting their soothing tones fall away behind her. Luka drew alongside and they walked back to where the others waited.
As if in unspoken agreement, they looked up towards the mountain. You could not see the Pass from here but they all knew what lay beyond the trees.
“All right,” Jena said. “Let’s go.”
THIRTY
There was so much light.
Up ahead, Lia’s dark silhouette was framed against sky.
An arm’s-length, perhaps two, and Jena might reach out and touch it.
And that smell, so thick now. It seemed to saturate the air, every breath drawing it deeper inside her.
When they had first smelled it, Jena thought it was gas. She dropped the tow rope on the trolley of rocks she and Lia were hauling, and called to the others to clear the area. Papa Dietz and the other men let their pickaxes and shovels clatter to the ground and began to run back down the tunnel towards the distant light of the valley.
But Lia did not run. She stood perfectly still, a slow smile growing on her face. And when Jena shook her arm, urging her away, she said, “That’s not gas. It’s the ocean.”
The others were still inside. The tunnel was not yet through but they had opened this crevice. A crevice through which the smell of the ocean wafted. A crevice that was wide enough for a girl or two.
Lia edged across the opening, making room.
Jena hesitated. This moment of finding the light, leaving the mountain. When she would close her eyes, pull herself clear.
This moment she had lived so many times before, and yet none.
Eyes open this time. Let this new light come as it comes.
It came – bright, warm, enfolding.
“See?” There was pride in Lia’s voice, as if she had made the world, as if she were a mama showing off a new daughter.
There was a blast of colour. A green so vivid it made Jena blink. A burnished brown that seemed to ripple and sway. A thousand slender stalks ordered one way and then the other by the breeze.
Crops, at this time of year? Jena crawled to the lip of the opening, then set her back against the stone, her knees hugged close against her chest. Around them, patches of snow had settled here and there on the craggy rock face but there was none on the ground below.
Had she ever felt sun like this? She was drenched in it. She leane
d out a little, peeling herself from the mountain.
As her eyes adjusted to the light, another colour resolved itself. Between the browns and greens were seams of blue. Outcrops of stone dotted the narrow strip of land below them, like fat knuckles that had punched up from underground, shot through with mica. With bluestone. As if the earth had turned itself inside out and said, Here, take it.
And beyond it was another blue, this one deeper, and not static but moving – rippling and curling as it flowed in to the edge of the land and then back again.
“Shorehaven is around there. You can’t see it from here, but …” Lia indicated a long spur of rock that jutted out nearby and ran almost to the water.
The slope around them was overgrown, carpeted with vines and moss and small, scrubby bushes. They were still in the Pass, but it was clear that no rocks had fallen here for generations. No grief-crazed hands, scrabbling at stones, had made things tumble down anew. Anyone coming to it now would think it just another rugged crag on the stony face.
The crevice they had followed had angled steadily upwards but had not strayed much to the left or right; they were somewhere above the line of the tunnel, Jena thought. It would emerge, when it did, almost directly below where they now sat.
“Should we go?” Lia motioned towards the ground.
The climb would be easy enough. Although they were high, the slope descended gradually, spilling out onto the plain in measured stages. Beneath them, the rocks of the Pass led away and down. If you looked at them a certain way, they were almost like steps.
Lia had begun to move forwards when Jena put a hand on her shoulder. “Wait.”
“What is it?”
“I … I wanted to say I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For letting go of you. I was supposed to look after you. I was holding you and then …” Jena lowered her eyes. “I just let go.”
Lia was silent for a while, thoughtful. Then she spoke. “It was good that you did.”
“Good?”
“If you hadn’t, I would have been in the valley with you all this time.” Her face softened. “I mean … I would like to have had a sister. But then I’d never have lived outside. And I wouldn’t have been in the mountain that day, with my weird hair and my funny clothes, waiting to become your proof.”
Jena inhaled sharply. “But–”
“You did look after me. You looked after both of us. We just didn’t know it till now.” Lia flashed her crooked smile. “Come on.” She turned once more and began to make her way down the slope, her movements nimble and quick.
As Jena watched her go, she felt something inside her ease. An old knot – one she had not realised was there – slowly loosening.
In a minute, she would go down the mountain, to the plain, to the village, to the sea.
In two days, the point of a pickaxe would open the smallest hole.
In three, a larger one. And they would begin to come through. Her people, her world, out here.
To Shorehaven or White Bay? Or to make their own place, give it a new name?
No matter, those things. For now, she closed her eyes, breathed deep, opened them again.
That light. That slim figure, clambering easily down the slope below.
And beyond Lia, in the distance, something else was moving. Out in the blue, a bird freewheeled, buoyed from beneath by an invisible updraft – no fear in it, no haste, wings spread wide, open to the sky.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For me, a story comes from many places. This book owes a large debt to Kafka, whose leopards set the idea in motion; a smaller one to CS Lewis, whose underground world of Bism shifted my eight-year-old thinking in fundamental ways; and many more to people and stories whose traces I haven’t yet detected. I’m grateful to everyone who makes art and ideas and adds them to the well from which we all draw.
I also owe particular thanks to a few people. Firstly, to the team at Walker Books Australia and especially my editor, Sue Whiting, who has an uncanny talent for helping me make my work the best version of itself it can be.
To Amanda Betts, who just gets it, and whose combination of steady calm and wild enthusiasm helped talk me out of the mountain when it felt tempting to stay inside.
And finally, to Carl and Bailey, for impromptu brain storming sessions and assistance with character names, plot holes and roadblocks of all kinds. For their patient tolerance of my many foibles and the fact that when they hear me shout, “I wrote a sentence!” they know me well enough to call back, “You deserve a reward!”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Meg McKinlay grew up in Bendigo, Victoria, in a book-loving, TV- and car-free household. On the long and winding path to becoming a children’s writer, she has worked a variety of jobs including swim instructor, tour guide, translator and teacher. These days, she lives with her family near the ocean in Fremantle and is an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Western Australia, where she has taught Australian Literature, Japanese, and Creative Writing. Meg divides her time between teaching and writing, a balance that swings wildly between chaos and calm. She is always busy cooking up more books and you can visit her on the web at www.megmckinlay.com
Published in 2015
by Walker Books Australia Pty Ltd
Locked Bag 22, Newtown
NSW 2042 Australia
www.walkerbooks.com.au
This ebook edition published in 2015
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
Text © 2015 Meg McKinlay
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior written permission of the publisher.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
McKinlay, Meg, author.
A single stone / Meg McKinlay.
For children.
Subjects: Belief and doubt – Juvenile fiction.
Child labor – Juvenile fiction.
Mines and mineral resources – Juvenile fiction.
A823.4
ISBN: 978-1-925126-46-4 (ePub/mobi)
ISBN: 978-1-925126-47-1 (e-PDF)
Cover image (braid) © stocksy/Jelena Radosavljevic
Cover image (plaster wall texture) © Shutterstock.com/re_bekka
Cover image (portrait of woman) © stocksy/Eduard Bonnin
Cover image (rock) © Shutterstock.com/Festa
Cover image (illustration of girl) © Shutterstock.com/re_bekka
For my mother and my daughter, for all the things we share.
ALSO BY MEG MCKINLAY
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As summer heats up and the lake waters become lower and lower, a shocking truth is slowly uncovered.
And soon, both their lives will change – forever.
