Daywards Read online

  Dara nodded.

  ‘And no reaching, either.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Ma glanced nervously upwards, tracking the trail up the hill briefly.

  ‘There’s no way to know what that New London mob might have left waiting for us up there. I can’t feel a thing, which isn’t a good sign. It’s dead land up there now, just like the Eye and the skycity. And where there’s been that sort of skyfire, it’s never a good idea to reach too hard, in my experience. So you two just keep to yourselves and leave any reaching to me, understand?’

  ‘Yes, Ma.’ Ma Saria didn’t often talk in commands, but when she did it was impossible to argue.

  ‘Good then.’ Ma took a few steps up along the trail before stopping again and looking back over her shoulder. ‘And if something happens to me up there, the two of you don’t hang around, okay? No trying to save me or find me or any of that shi. Something happens, both of you get back down here quick smart and take off nightwards.’

  Then she set off uphill, maintaining a startling pace for someone her age. Dara quickly felt her breath begin to tighten in her chest. Briefly, she considered reaching, just a little bit, and pulling up enough earthwarmth to loosen her still-aching muscles, but Ma’s warning was too absolute for her to risk it. Instead, she steeled herself against the pain, and plodded onwards and upwards.

  At least the rain was stopping. That was one small mercy. As they’d made their way along in the shadow of the escarpment the soaking downpour had slowly given way to a kind of drifting drizzle, which settled, rather than pounded, down on them. They marched upwards into this, the thickening fog of the cloud layer enfolding them until they stepped onto the broad, flat ledge outside the clan cave.

  Through the swirling night, Dara caught a glimpse of the dark opening of the cavemouth, just a few metres away, and something caught in her throat.

  It was all so familiar. The sweep in the arc of the rock arch, the pitted stone platform littered here and there with bits of rockfall from the cliffs above, the shapes and sights all utterly known to her. This was home, the world she’d belonged to for as long as she could remember, and she knew by heart every tiny fissure and lump.

  But at the same time it wasn’t home. Not any longer.

  No voices echoed from inside, no laughing children and adults, no singing, no bickering. The outside firepit was a wet, circular smudge on the grey rock, and the cavemouth was dark. In her experience there had always been fire in the communal firepit inside, casting red and yellow shadows on the roof and walls and throwing a welcoming pool of light out onto the stone ledge where they now stood.

  Now, though, there was only darkness, silence and the all-pervading damp hanging suspended in the air.

  Even the wind had gone, leaving only a restless, chilly shifting of air which set her bones aching.

  Home had gone, Dara realised in one terrible second of revelation. Home had gone and everything and everyone she knew had just … vanished.

  And in that moment she understood the terrible emptiness that had overcome Ma Saria back at the cave. She understood that yawning, inexorable feeling that had almost swamped even tough old Ma.

  The cloud swirled across the ledge, cloaking the cave entrance once more.

  ‘Come on, girls, let’s have a look, eh?’

  They stopped inside the threshold. It was nice to be out of the weather, even if just for a couple of minutes. But the pleasure was short-lived.

  With no fire smouldering in the firepit it was almost completely black inside the cave. Dara knew the space well enough that she could have walked around it with her eyes closed, but now she was unwilling to step any further into the darkness. Beside her, she felt Eyna shift a step or two closer, until she was near enough to take Dara’s hand in her own.

  ‘Hello?’ Ma Saria’s call echoed back at them.

  ‘It’s empty.’ Dara tried to keep the disappointment from her voice.

  Leaving the two girls, Ma Saria walked further in, her pale form looking like a night-spirit as she crouched beside the firepit and shoved a hand into the grey ash and coals. ‘Cold. Nobody’s been down here for days,’ she announced.

  She moved towards the back of the cavern, where the clan’s food and wood and water would normally have been stored. The darkness swallowed her, and only the sound of her footfalls on the sand-covered stone gave any indication of her position.

  Then she grunted softly, ‘Come and have a look at this.’

  Reluctantly, still holding hands, Dara and Eyna made their way forward. There was just enough glow coming in from the cavemouth behind them to let them keep their bearings, but not enough to actually see anything.

  ‘Over here.’

  Ma Saria emerged from the gloom, a bare shadow against the dark, beckoning them over to one side of the cave, where a featureless shape, almost as tall as she was, stood on the floor. As they made their way towards it, Dara felt a cold shiver, heavy and slow, tremble through her muscles, followed by a dull, distant buzzing.

  ‘What do you reckon that might be, eh?’

  The object was a large rectangular box. The small amount of light that came in through the cavemouth gleamed against the smooth metal sides. Slowly, they walked around it, carefully feeling their way in the dark. As far as Dara could tell, the black metal was unmarked and unadorned. The only feature on those surfaces was a tiny green light, no bigger than her smallest fingernail, which glowed in the middle of the face that looked away from the cavemouth. The light was so dull as not to cast even the slightest corona.

  Eyna made as if she was about to reach out and touch it, but Ma Saria’s hand floated out of the dark, gently restraining her.

  ‘Careful, girl. If you can’t reach it you shouldn’t touch it. Can’t you feel that thing?’

  ‘That’s what I was about to do,’ Eyna replied, confused.

  ‘Not with your hands.’

  ‘But you told us not to reach,’ Dara interrupted.

  ‘You don’t need to reach to feel the skyfire in this thing.’

  Dara stepped a little closer to the black cabinet, and the strange buzzing in the back of her head increased sharply, setting her teeth on edge.

  ‘What’s it for?’ she asked.

  ‘No idea,’ Ma Saria replied. ‘Nightpeople tech’s a mystery to me, for the most part. That thing could be sending them everythin’ we say right now, or it could be just measuring the temperature in here. Could even be somethin’ to knock us out so they can come an’ collect the three of us. Whatever it does, I don’t much want to find out.’

  Both girls were in full agreement, and so the three of them backed away to the cave entrance. Outside, the fresh air washed over them. Now that she was aware of it, the skyfire buzzing of the box still nagged at the edge of Dara’s mind, diminished a little by distance but not entirely gone.

  ‘Where next?’ Dara knew the answer before she’d even finished asking, and, sure enough, Ma nodded towards the uphill trail.

  The situation was exactly the same in the sleeping caves – nobody and nothing left there, apart from another black cabinet that emanated the same menacing buzz as the first. They continued on up the trail until the bulk of the sentinel stones emerged from the cloud ahead. Stepping between them, they stopped for a few moments to catch their breath. Below, the saltwater forest was hidden, and a few steps away the plateau forest began. Only the nearest trees were visible, and even these were wreathed in fog.

  ‘We going to the Eye?’ Eyna asked, and Ma nodded.

  ‘We gotta be certain.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then we head daywards.’

  With Dara in the lead, they stepped into the shadowy forest and onto the path to the Eye, which was now significantly wider and more travelled than it had been during Dara’s original visit here. All the low-hanging foliage had been cut right back, the ground was scored with deep track marks that had widened the trail considerably, and there were even dull-glowing solar lights mounted
on small poles every hundred metres or so. None were bright enough to cast any real illumination, but they at least showed the way, a thread of pinpricks winding through the forest. When she saw them, Ma Saria shook her head and made an odd ‘tch!’ sound with her tongue.

  ‘Bloody Nightpeople. Gotta tech up everything they touch. Even a forest.’

  They hiked up the trail with relative ease, slowing only when the familiar orange glow of the Eye appeared ahead.

  ‘Looks like they’ve taken their big lights down, at least,’ Dara remarked, absurdly grateful. She hadn’t been looking forward to the prospect of having to step out into that unforgiving whiteness again.

  At the edge of the clearing they stopped, hidden in the shadow of the trees, and Dara stared in disbelief.

  The Eye still crouched there, the blockhouse squat and square in the middle of the clearing, its single antenna stretching up into the night. Otherwise, everything was gone.

  The glowing domes, the large solid buildings, the silvered walkways, the forest of towers atop the blockhouse – all vanished, as though they’d never been there. She almost doubted her own memory, so absolute was the change.

  But then she noticed the small differences. The patches of dead grass which mapped precisely the location of the various buildings and their interlinking walkways. The indentations in the earth where hummers had settled into the soft topsoil. The small pile of discarded metal and other waste, flung into the scrub at the edge of the clearing near the base of one of the solar lamps. The absence of the Nightpeople and their tech made the clearing feel almost as strange as their presence.

  ‘They’ve shot through, all right,’ Ma Saria observed.

  ‘And taken everyone else with them.’

  The old woman nodded sadly.

  Eyna walked out into the orange glare before stopping and looking around, her skin sallow in the dirty light.

  ‘It’s quiet,’ she said.

  Dara had become accustomed to the total absence of life around the Nightpeople, so she hadn’t noticed it, but, when Eyna pointed it out, she realised that the forest around them was just as still and silent as it had been when the Nightpeople were still camped there. The ‘dead zone’ was still in place, even after those who’d created it had vanished.

  ‘Don’t worry about that. Life’ll come back,’ Ma Saria told them, her voice unusually quiet. ‘Might take a while, but life likes to live, eh?’

  Slowly they made their way towards the Eye. Outwardly, nothing about the building seemed to have been altered, but as they drew closer Dara stiffened as the hard buzz of skyfire intruded once more into her awareness.

  ‘You think they left another one of those boxes in there, Ma?’ she asked.

  ‘More’n likely, I’d say. Sounds like the sort of thing they’d do.’

  The ground underfoot, which had been disturbed by various bits of equipment and by the buildings themselves, was mushy and soft and on several occasions Dara’s feet sank ankle-deep into the heavy clay, which had been churned into thick, glutenous mud. The first time it happened she shuddered, revolted by the alien absence of earthwarmth in the dead earth. It felt like sinking into plascrete.

  Halfway across the clearing, they stopped.

  ‘You think we can get inside?’ Dara asked.

  ‘I’m not sure there’s any point,’ Ma replied. ‘We’d just find a whole lot of tech we can’t use.’

  ‘There might be things we could take for the walk, though. Food or firekits or stuff.’

  To her surprise, Ma Saria laughed softly.

  ‘You don’t know how to start a fire without a firekit?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah, of course I do, but …’

  ‘And you like the taste of prosup, eh?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why worry about it? The Nightpeople’ve got nothing we need. They never did have.’

  Dara understood. In the drizzling night they stared at the angular, unnatural shape of the Eye, until finally Ma Saria turned back to the forest.

  ‘Come on, girls,’ she said, ‘I reckon it’s time for us to head daywards.’

  She set off without a backward glance and Eyna followed. Dara, however, lingered, reluctant to leave the place where her world had fallen apart without some sort of gesture. Nothing came to her, though, and with a sigh she started towards the others, who were waiting beside the treeline.

  She’d only just begun to move when the door of the Eye slid slowly open and a lone figure stepped out into the night.

  ‘Jaran!’

  Her brother retreated backwards into the brightly lit Eye.

  ‘Dara?’ Jaran’s voice, usually so confident, was so tentative that she could barely hear him over the rustle of the forest canopy around them. She took a few steps towards him before she was stopped by an increase in the buzzing intensity of the skyfire.

  ‘Hey, brother! Yeah, it’s me.’

  A wave of relief swept over her. She’d assumed he’d been found and taken with the rest, that the drones had picked him up the moment he came near to the Eye. So when his familiar silhouette appeared in the doorway, and despite everything that had happened between them, it was like having some tiny fragment of her life returned to her.

  ‘Where …’ Jaran turned his head left and right, clearly still night-blind.

  ‘Over here.’ She took another half-step towards him, but again the grinding hum of the power emanating from the building stopped her.

  ‘Can’t see you. Can’t … what?’

  ‘Jaran? Are you all right?’ She was aware that Ma Saria and Eyna had left the shelter of the forest and were now standing behind her. ‘I can’t come any further. There’s some sort of energy field which hurts.’

  ‘Shi.’ He took another step backwards into the bright light. There was something unsteady about his movements. ‘No field. Nothing here. Can’t. Nothing.’

  ‘Jaran, listen to me, you gotta come with us. Me and Ma Saria and Eyna. We’re all here, but we’re not staying.’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head and almost fell over. ‘Trick. They took … everyone. Saw them. Saw them take you, too.’

  ‘I got away. And they never got Ma, or Eyna. They’re right here.’

  ‘Come on out, Jaran,’ Eyna coaxed. Her voice caused Jaran to stumble even further into the light.

  ‘Uncle Xani said … wait. Said to wait every night.’

  Dara shot a worried look at Ma. The old woman’s face gave nothing away, and when she spoke her voice was whip-sharp: ‘Come out here, boy.

  Jaran flinched slightly, as if the words had hit him physically, like a slap. But to Dara’s amazement he stepped forward and tottered unsteadily down the steps. On his arm, a wristband, just like Da Janil’s, gleamed briefly in the light.

  At the base of the stairs, he stopped until he could make out the three figures standing in the drifting fog.

  ‘Over here,’ Ma ordered, her voice still sharp and, as if he was being pulled in on a string, Jaran walked towards them in a daze, stopping only when he was a metre or so from Dara.

  ‘It’s … you!’ he exclaimed, sounding genuinely surprised.

  ‘Of course it is, you stupid shi. Who’d you expect?’

  Jaran simply shook his head, as though unable to believe either his eyes or his ears. He looked terrible. Heavy bags hung below his eyes and his skin was sallow. The moisture in the air was already clinging to him, lending him a wretched appearance. Even after their father had gotten exposed, Jaran hadn’t allowed himself to fall into such a state. Then he’d been all strength and determination.

  Now he looked as though someone, or something, had simply deflated him, sucked all the pride out and left behind a sort of Jaran-shell. A hollow echo of her brother.

  Dara glanced at Ma Saria. The old woman’s back was ramrod-straight and her eyes glittered like those of a snake as she appraised the bedraggled boy.

  ‘Where’d you come from, then?’ she asked, and silently Jaran gestured back towards the Eye.
r />   ‘Before that.’

  ‘I …’ Jaran started to speak but his legs buckled under him and he folded to the ground in a limp heap. A faint sigh escaped his lips as his eyes rolled back in his head. Then he lay in the mud with the light rain forming rivulets on his cheeks and forehead.

  Dara moved to help him, but Ma’s restraining hand clamped around her upper arm. The old woman’s hands felt like pincers, digging into her flesh.

  ‘Don’t,’ she commanded, and despite herself Dara stopped.

  ‘He needs help,’ she argued.

  ‘So did you, when he locked you up in that old city.’

  ‘Ma …’ Dara began, but the old woman wouldn’t be moved.

  ‘Just wait. I can’t feel that boy, even though he’s half buried in the mud. The Earthmother’s got no sense of him, and until I know why that is we don’t touch him.’

  Despite Ma Saria’s earlier warning, Dara looked down at her brother and tried reaching. The earth around the Eye was so dead, though, and the skyfire so strong that she wasn’t able to reach more than a tiny way into the Earthmother. Even so, she expected that Jaran, whose spark she knew as intimately as anybody’s, wouldn’t be difficult to locate, not with him right there in front of her.

  But there was nothing. Only cold, dead ground.

  ‘Jaran …’ The words escaped her in a whisper. ‘What have you done?’

  On the wet earth her brother groaned softly and returned to consciousness. He attempted to rise, but only half succeeded before collapsing again with a splatter of mud.

  ‘Dara.’ He looked up at her and his eyes, so familiar, were now different – vacant.

  Shaking off Ma’s restraining hand, Dara crouched beside her brother and reached out to touch him, resting her fingertips lightly on the skin of his forearm.

  He was cold. Not just the cold of someone lying in the rain, but a deeper, more internal cold – the same sort of lifelessness she’d felt when Raj had touched her, Dara realised.

  With sudden understanding, Dara knew what had happened to her brother.

  ‘They did it to you, didn’t they? That probe thing? They …’ She choked back the words and struggled as a mixture of hot anger and cold dread caused her to recoil involuntarily from her brother’s prone form.