Astra (27 page)

Okay, so Lil could forage and cook like a Boundary constable. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t a Non-Lander. Infiltrators must obviously study survivalist lore before they crossed into Is-Land, and of course enemy prisoners knew it was essential to gain people’s trust. At some point, though, the girl would slip up. That night, from Hokma’s loft, Astra watched Lil in bed. Lil was lying on her back, staring at the ceiling. Her lips were moving as though she was silently reciting to herself. Then she turned off the nightlight, rolled onto her side away from Astra and curled up like a small brown fox in its den.

‘That wild dinner was good last night,’ Hokma said over breakfast. ‘Maybe this morning you two should go and see what else you can find in the woods. I expect Lil knows some good places.’

Astra darted a glance at Lil. The girl had drunk her glass of oatmilk greedily and now a pale wet moustache glistened against her upper lip. She licked it away with a swipe of her pink tongue.

‘Okay,’ she said, flicking a glance back at Astra.

Astra finished chewing her toast. A walk in the woods would be a chance to resume interrogation without interruption from Hokma. ‘Okay,’ she echoed.

They left by the front gate and scrambled down the steep path to the crossroads. Lil turned right, heading towards the brook, and Astra followed.

Presently, she touched Lil’s elbow. ‘There’s an almond tree over there.’

‘The nuts won’t be ready yet,’ Lil scoffed.

Everyone
knew that. ‘I’m just
saying
, that’s all.’

But Lil was walking faster now so Astra had to jog to keep up. Together they breasted the brook and strode gleaming into the pine glade, Lil again moving ahead of her. When she reached the tree they’d both climbed so long ago, she stopped and waited for Astra to catch up.

‘That was me who chased you up there,’ Astra said.

Lil looked at her sideways. ‘No. That was
me
who chased you away.’

They both at the same time stooped and scrabbled for pine cones to throw at each other. Next they were running and dodging and screaming until Lil was twisting in the air and laughing like a hyena, and when Astra at last hit her, she rolled around pretending to play dead with her tongue sticking out and her eyes crossed, and Astra couldn’t help it, she was laughing hysterically too.

‘You hit me in the
bum
,’ Lil shrieked. ‘I died a
bum-death
!’

‘Your face looked so
funny
,’ Astra gasped between giggles.

And suddenly Astra was having the best day she’d ever had with another person.

Lil took her on a long walk, further up the brook than she’d ever been, and on the way she started to talk: about the way trees talked to each other with their roots, and if they didn’t like another tree, they ganged up and strangled it below the soil. About fire ants, whose jaws, when they ate their prey, made the fastest movement in the whole of Gaia’s realm. And about – she lowered her voice –
duck vaginas
. Did Astra know that male ducks were nearly all rapists, so the females had a maze of false canals in their Gaia gardens to catch unwanted sperm before it could fertilise their eggs? Astra didn’t know that – she had only a dim idea of what a ‘rapist’ was – but she pretended that she’d studied duck anatomy in school. In return, she told Lil about the male green spoon worm, which lived his entire life as a parasite inside the female’s ovary, spewing sperm onto her eggs twenty-four hours a day until he died.

‘Really?’ Lil sounded almost impressed.

‘Yeah.’ Astra snickered. ‘Peat, he’s my Shelter brother, says there’s a Code clinic in Vanapur that everyone calls the Green Spoon Room. It turned out they took masses of sperm from just one donor and now there’s about a hundred kids in the bioregion who aren’t allowed to Gaia-play or cross-Code with each other. The clinic got in big trouble and the director lost her job.’

Lil brushed her hand through a patch of dead nettles. ‘So is that where you were Coded?’

‘Nah.’ Astra hesitated. ‘I was a bonded baby.’

‘Me too,’ Lil said. ‘My dad said I was Coded on the night of a thousand fireflies.’

Astra stepped around the nettles. This conversation was going in a bad direction. She didn’t want to talk about her Birth-Code parents. A year or so ago, when she’d first started having bad fights with Nimma, she’d begun to daydream that Eya would come and find her soon and take her to live in Atourne, where they’d search for her Code father together. But when she’d broached the subject with Hokma one day while they were gardening, her Shelter mother had put aside her spade and said Astra shouldn’t count on that. Eya probably wouldn’t ever come and find her, Hokma had said. She undoubtedly had more children now, with her husband, and she wouldn’t want him to know that she had lied to him about her past. ‘You’re stuck with us, kid,’ Hokma had said, tousling Astra’s hair. Later, Peat had told her that Shelter parents had more legal rights than Birth-Code parents, so even if Eya did show up, she wouldn’t be able to rescue Astra anyway.

‘Did your dad really go into communities and steal things?’ she asked, and when Lil said, ‘All the time,’ she pelted her with questions about living in the woods: What was the longest her dad was away for? How far up the mountains did they go? Did they ever see reintroduced bears or wolves? How did Lil brush her teeth?

Some questions Lil answered; some she ignored. At last they reached a place where the brook rushed over a low craggy outcrop of rock. A host of watercress was blossoming in the water and on the banks, the bushy dark green leaves scattered with clusters of small white flowers. Lil sat down on a large flat stone, picked a stem of cress and ate it. Astra did the same. The leaf was peppery and invigorating, the stem fresh and crunchy. They could pick bushels and make soup later.

‘There are otters a couple of hours from here,’ Lil pointed upstream. ‘We made friends with one once. It used to come and eat fish with us.’

Astra ignored the fish bait; Lil wasn’t going to upset her again. ‘Otters are extinct in Is-Land,’ she contradicted. ‘They all died when the water dried up. And they haven’t been reintroduced yet because of politics.’

Lil twirled another stem of cress between her thumb and forefinger. ‘He must have been hiding. Him and his family. Once we saw him holding hands with another otter, and in the night they screamed like ghosts.’

‘Holding hands?’ Lil had made that up for sure.

‘Yes, it was so cute. While they were swimming. Like this—’ Lil lay down on her back, clasped her hands together at her chest and pulled a nibbly, rodent-like face. Then she craned her neck and ate the stem of cress. Despite herself, Astra giggled.

But this was all wrong. She shouldn’t be having fun with Lil, and definitely not secretly envying her. She should be testing her, trying to catch her out. She dangled her feet over the edge of the rock, cooling her toes in the fast-flowing water. ‘Did you ever see the Boundary?’ she asked, as casually as possible.

Lil was leaning back on her elbows now. ‘There’s too many constables at the Boundary. Same as the off-limits woodlands. We would have been caught for sure.’

‘They might have thought you were Non-Landers,’ Astra ventured, cautiously. ‘That you came through the tunnels.’

‘Nah.’ Lil examined a scratch on her elbow. ‘Non-Landers are fighters. They have guns and suicide bombs, and they wear clothes until they get to the roads. Anyway, the tunnels are all blocked up now.’

‘Did you ever see one?’ Astra pressed.

‘A tunnel?’

‘No, a Non-Lander. But yeah, a tunnel too.’

Lil shook her head. ‘There aren’t any Non-Landers in the forest any more. Only otters.’ She paused. ‘We saw a cave once with boulders stacked up over the entrance. It didn’t look like a rockfall. My dad said that was probably a tunnel. We got out of there quick, in case there were constables patrolling.’

Practically everyone thought there weren’t any Non-Landers left in the forest. It was so frustrating. ‘There are urban infiltrators though,’ Astra declared. ‘There was a mass arrest last year, in Sippur. They caught a whole cell, six Non-Landers using Gaian ID papers. One of them was even pretending to be an IMBOD officer. And they were going to go to the forest. On the news it said their plan was to dig a new tunnel out of the off-limits woodland. I think they had accomplices outside the Boundary and they were going to meet in the middle. So the constables might have thought you were in disguise as Is-Landers. Maybe they’d think you had
nanogrenades
in your pacs.’

Lil sat up straight and lifted her arms in the air. ‘My dad said if I ever saw a constable, I was to raise my arms and chant “O IMBOD Shield”. Or sing “Gaia We Love You”. ’

Astra eyed her warily. ‘That’s my favourite hymn,’ she said.

‘
O Gaia You are beautiful
…’ Lil crooned.

Astra couldn’t not join in. Together they sang the hymn, sending the notes soaring out into the forest:

The last long note hung in the air, vibrating like the cloud of midges that had descended over the brook. But Astra and Lil were wearing citronella oil and didn’t wave the insects away. After you had sung a Gaia hymn, you needed to stay still and listen so you could hear Her welcoming you deeper into Her open heart, Her secret truths. The brook was splashing over the rocks and sunlight was caressing the slender grey trunks of the hornbeams. Two were growing together, their branches gently intertwining. Astra noticed them and with an almost painful queasiness felt Gaia nudging her.
Be nice to Lil
.

‘I like the word “benevolence”, ’ she confided. ‘It sort of wraps you inside it. That’s what Gaia does if you respect Her.’

A caterpillar ambled by Astra’s finger, carrying a torn bite of leaf. Astra could nearly hear his little feet pittering. Lil put her finger in its path and let it crawl over her knuckle. ‘I like “magnificence”, ’ she said. ‘It makes
everything bigger when you sing it. My dad had a magnifying glass and we looked at ants with it, and made fires too. But then I dropped it and it broke.’

‘Was he mad?’

‘No.’ Lil picked up a pebble and rolled it between her palms. ‘He said you could never totally rely on technology. You always had to have a biological solution to every problem too.’

That was interesting. Most Is-Land products were biotech – elegant, exciting and innovative – but every Or-child knew that ultimately these were two different systems, that every component had to be detachable and feed back into its own recycle loop. If you lived off-off-grid, like Lil and her dad, then of course you had to depend on exclusively biological processes, but normally you didn’t learn survivalism until the first year of IMBOD Service. Lil’s dad had probably been good at that course, Astra thought.

‘Was he a Craft worker or a Code worker?’ she asked. ‘In your community, I mean.’

Lil threw the pebble into the brook. It landed with a plop, like a frog. ‘He was a Crafty worker.’

For the first time, Astra tried to imagine this man. He couldn’t be like Klor, tall and booming, or Ahn, ethereal and remote. He must be like a wild stag, bony and alert. ‘Was he thin like you?’ she asked.

Lil turned and looked her in the face. When she spoke, the whites of her eyes flashed. ‘When I placed him on his pyre, he weighed as much as an empty bees’ nest.’

Astra didn’t know what to say. But from her silence emerged an Imprint, one of the first ones she’d ever learned at school; the one she had chanted this year at Elpis’ Return Ceremony.

‘Gaia will gather your loved one in Her eternal shawl and glowing like the warm rays of Her heart, he will be around you always,’ she recited. As she did, she felt in her blood it was the right thing to say. Imprints were so reassuring.

‘I know. That’s what he said.’ Lil slipped her feet into the water. ‘He had dreads, like you.’

Astra fingered her loc. ‘Really?’

‘Yeah. But he wanted me to have hair like my Birth-Code mother’s. So he combed and brushed mine every night.’

‘Do you want a dread now? I could help you make one.’

‘Nah. I didn’t like it getting all matted when I was by myself. Yours looks good, though.’ Lil stood up and waded into the brook. ‘You have to snip the cress with your fingernails. Don’t pull it up by the roots.’

* * *

They gathered cress until they had enough for a big pot of soup, and then they returned to Wise House, singing Gaia hymns and foraging for vetch, nettles and wild asparagus until their hydropacs were full. As they walked back down the path to the crossroads, Lil, for the first time, asked Astra a question.

‘Are you going to be an Owleon Coder like Hokma when you grow up?’

Astra frowned. How did Lil know she’d been asking herself that question all the time lately? Much as she loved Silver, and all the birds, she was starting to realise she
didn’t
want to be an Owleon specialist when she grew up. That was Hokma’s Code expertise, and no one could ever be greater than Hokma in the field. Astra wanted to find her own way of being famous. The problem was, she didn’t know where her genius lay. When she was little she’d wanted to work on limb regeneration, but Klor had been right: that research had been abandoned in favour of developing more sophisticated prosthetics. Nothing else especially interested her, which was worrying, because to be a genius at anything, she had read, you had to spend ten thousand hours practising, and the longer she went without specialising, the longer it would take her to make a major breakthrough and win an IMBOD medal.