Astra (29 page)

‘If I told you, you’d know the secret.’

In the end, just to stop Lil being so lofty and annoying, Astra said she wanted to see the secret place and promised not to tell anyone, anywhere, for the rest of her life, anything about it. Probably Lil was making things up and the place was nowhere special, so the promise wasn’t a big deal.

‘You’ll never regret it! Come on, let’s go.’ Lil started brightly down the rock steps to the Fountain, immediately making Astra anxious: they weren’t supposed to visit Birth House on their own. But halfway down Lil veered off the steps and picked a path north through the trees, a mix of pine and stringybark, with the occasional black cypress and cedar grove, which helped their orienteering. It was the ideal territory for playing Silent Tracker. Lil was already barefoot so Astra took off her sandals too and they proceeded stealthily, Lil in the lead because she knew the way, until Astra got tired of being docked points for every crackle and crunch and suggested they play Ambush instead. Noise didn’t matter as much as speed in this game, so she put her sandals back on and they joined forces to swoop down slopes and capture dozens of Non-Landers. When they were bored with that, they just walked, following a shallow gorge that ran like a rip through the forest, talking about the ridiculousness of clothes, the potential self-defence uses of Owleon shit, Hokma’s snoring patterns and the possible reasons why she kept her
IMBOD medal in her toolbox on the verandah, in a tray with screws and nails, instead of hanging on the wall in Wise House. Lil said it was because she was planning to melt down the medal one day, and just hadn’t got round to it yet, but Astra said no, that was a stupid answer: Hokma had told her she’d put it there to remind herself that the point of fighting was to build a better world. Then they had to concentrate on the terrain for a while, negotiating a tricky slope. At the bottom Lil checked her bearings and took Astra through a paperbark glade.

‘Is this the secret?’ Astra whispered.

‘Huh?’ Lil was marching ahead. ‘No.’

But it was. Paperbark groves were rare, hidden places the Pioneers had planted far from paths so that people could worship Gaia alone in them. Astra could see why. Sunlight sashayed through the leaves and the white peeling trunks were so smooth and delicate she wanted to stop and rub her cheek against each one.

But she had to keep up with Lil. ‘We learned the Code for paperbarks at school this week,’ she said. ‘The original edition wouldn’t grow well in a dry forest, but the Pioneers especially wanted to have them in Is-Land so they were the first trees to be Gaianised.’

Lil yawned. ‘My dad said school was for mules.’

‘Mules?’ Astra had studied them in Code class: if you cross-Coded species, you risked creating a genetic dead end. But she didn’t see the connection with school.

‘Yeah. He said you go in as prancing foals and you come out half-donkey, with your Gaia Power sterilised.’

That was
ridiculous
. ‘We learn tons about Gaia Power at school,’ Astra informed Lil. ‘In
fact
, we’re taking Gaia-play lessons right now.’

Lil picked up a stick and flung it between the trees. ‘My dad said Gaia play is easy. All mammals do it. We don’t need lessons. We just have to remember that we’re worshipping Gaia first and each other second. He said it’s easy to get confused about that.’

Astra hesitated. Before the lessons she had thought Gaia play would be easy too. But if she told Lil how complicated it was to synchronise peaking, and how you had to do special exercises to prepare for it, Lil would just laugh at her. Lil would scoff even harder if Astra said that there were Gaia-play rules to obey. She’d demand examples, and Astra wouldn’t be able to provide any. Mr Ripenson was going to explain the rules next time, in the Woodland Siesta lesson. Then she would be able to correct
Lil. Right now, she started humming, ‘Gaia, Gaia, My Garden is Your Shrine’. Lil joined in, and soon, singing the hymn at the tops of their voices, they left the paperbark glade. Then they let the last note trail away and walked quietly until they reached a grove of cedars.

‘Shh,’ Lil ordered.

They were in the middle of the forest and there was no one around for miles. The cedars were impressive, maybe even ancient, but there was a whole slope of them on the other side of Or, and tons around Cedaria. And, most importantly, she hadn’t been making a sound. Astra felt irritated, until suddenly it struck her why Lil was being so mysterious. ‘Are there
animals
?’ she asked, awestruck. Was this a place with
otters
?

But Lil had plunged left, nimbly zigzagging down a gentle incline through the dark towering trees. She stopped behind a large boulder and let Astra catch up.

‘It’s on the other side,’ she whispered, her cheek pressed to the lichen-speckled rock. ‘Don’t be scared. They can’t hurt you.’

‘Who can’t—?’

Lil put her finger to her lips, then turned and tiptoed around the rock. Astra followed. Lil stopped and pointed at a long, creeper-covered hump between a stand of oaks. For a moment Astra didn’t understand. Oaks: yes they were ancient, but hardly a big secret. Then she saw.

* * *

It wasn’t a rock or a fallen tree trunk. It was a dirt-stained, corroded metal hull, a bit like a bus, except no bus could possibly have driven here. It wasn’t shaped like a bus either. It was tubular and half-torn, with a crumpled snout buried in a tangle of bushes and, at the other end, sloping down from a jagged rip in the roof, what looked like a twisted fishtail digging into the earth. Near the nose, a flat protrusion jutted out from the hull, ending abruptly in a ragged stump. Above it was a door with a shattered window, the pane too high to see through.

She knew this shape. She had seen pictures of it from the oil junkie era. ‘It’s an
arrowpain
,’ she breathed.

‘
Shhh
.’ Lil frowned. She moved forward again, picking her way through thigh-high undergrowth. Astra hung back, then reluctantly followed in her wake, her sandals crunching through the gritty litter of metal and glass desecrating the forest floor. Arrowpains, Klor had once said, were more lethal than the sharpest arrow: they were like a non-stop hail of bullets shooting Gaia in the lungs. This one had tried to stab Her in the
heart as well. Even though obviously long disabled, it still exuded menace. The gaping holes caused by its corrosion were impenetrable to vision, puncturing the once-white metal hull with the threat of its black interior.

When they reached the base of the broken wing, Lil stopped. The arrowpain, Astra could see, had crashed on some rocks between the trees; that was why it was torn open and lifted above the ground. Though the protruding section was level with their heads it would be hard to scramble onto it without getting cut. Lil gripped the wing’s short, smooth edge and hung off it for a moment. Astra stepped back nervously: what if the arrowpain rolled over and trapped them? But the wing held Lil’s weight. She dropped back down, wiped her hands on her flanks and turned to face Astra.

‘My dad used to lift me,’ she whispered, beckoning Astra closer. ‘Give me a leg-up.’

Astra looked up at the door. There was a pinching feeling in her stomach. ‘That’s where the driver sat,’ she objected.

‘You mean the pilot,’ Lil corrected.

‘
Okay
, the pilot. He might be in there still. With other people.’

‘They aren’t
people
,’ Lil hissed. ‘They’re
ancestors
.’

The forest seemed to loom closer, blotting out whatever faint hints of sunshine the cedars were permitting through their branches. Ancestors belonged in Birth House, not in the forgotten wreckage of an oil monster – an
arrowpain
, one of Gaia’s
worst enemies
. The ancestors wouldn’t like it in there. They would be angry at being trapped all these years in a thing that should be dismantled and recycled, not left to poison the earth with its toxic paints and leaking engine. The Or-adults should be told the arrowpain was here. They would come and take it away and do a healing ceremony and return the ancestors to Gaia in Birth House. Until then, Astra didn’t want to go poking about in their decrepit, disrespectful tomb.

‘You’re not supposed to look at ancestors,’ she said hotly, instantly hating herself for sounding like Yoki, reinforcing Nimma’s petty limits on how many peaches one was allowed to pick from the greenhouse corridor before dinner.

‘You can if they’re relics,’ Lil rejoined, still in a low tone. ‘My dad said you’re supposed to look at relics. But only once a year.’

Astra didn’t know what a relic was and she didn’t want to let Lil know that she didn’t. She hesitated.

‘You don’t have to look if you’re scared,’ Lil whispered dismissively. ‘But I have to make sure they’re still here. Me and my dad come every summer.’

‘I’m not scared,’ Astra retorted, even though the pit of her stomach was throbbing and she suddenly desperately needed a wee.

‘Then help me. We have to make sure they’re okay, and give them a ceremony. That’s what me and my dad always did.’

Clenching her bladder, Astra regarded Lil suspiciously. ‘What kind of a ceremony?’

‘The window’s broken at the top. We give them a feather each.’

‘We don’t have any feathers.’

‘Yes we do. I brought one from Silver and one from Helium.’

‘You took a feather from Silver?’ Astra was outraged.

‘Don’t panic. He’s moulting. I got it from the floor of his cage.’

‘It doesn’t matter. You can’t give Silver’s feather away. Only
I
can do that.’

‘I
know
. That’s why I brought it for you. I couldn’t tell you because it was a
secret
. I took good care of it. Look.’

Astra glowered as Lil unzipped her hydropac and took out a rolled-up red kitchen cloth. She laid it out on the ground. Inside were two feathers: one small and snow white, one long and tawny. The tips weren’t bent or separated. Astra couldn’t complain about how they’d been transported. As she was inspecting the flutings, making sure none were broken, Lil took a left-handed Owleon glove out of her pac and put it on.

‘Does Hokma know you took that?’

‘Oh, don’t be such a
mule
. She’s got about
forty
of them. And we need it. My dad always put a rabbit-skin blanket over the wing before we climbed it. You can get blood poisoning if you cut yourself on rust.’

Well, she didn’t want to do
that
. Or start trapping rabbits. Ignoring the mule remark, Astra folded her arms. ‘Did you bring two?’

‘We need a lefty and she’s only got one. We can share it.’ Lil stuck Helium’s feather behind her ear. ‘C’mon, Astra, give me a legsie. You can go after me.’

Why did Lil always treat her like a servant? Astra scowled. ‘No. You’re heavy. We can make a ladder. With logs and vines.’

‘That’d take
hours
. I’m not that heavy. I just need a booster.’

Astra glared at her but there was no point squabbling. She couldn’t let Lil use Silver’s feather in a ceremony without her. And even if they did
spend an hour building a ladder, there was no other way to look inside the arrowpain apart from taking turns.

‘All right. But I have to wee first.’ She stepped away, squatted and whizzed, and wiped herself with a leaf. Then she returned to Lil, bent and cupped her hands.

Gripping the arrowpain wing edge with her gloved hand, Lil placed the ball of her right foot in the cradle of Astra’s hands. As Astra hoisted her as high as she could, Lil jumped, nearly kicking Astra in the face as she hauled herself onto the wing by her elbows and knees. At last Lil was standing on the metal ledge, peering down at her.

‘Let me stand on your shoulder,’ she demanded.

Astra rubbed her hands against her thighs. ‘What?’

‘The gap in the window is too far over. My dad always let me stand on him. I thought I’d be tall enough now to reach now, but I’m not.’

She’d gone too far to object now. At least Lil didn’t want to stand on her head. Lil gripped the window frame with her gloved hand and Astra let her balance her right foot on her shoulder. She waited like that for what seemed an age, Lil’s anklebone grazing her ear and her grimy sole bearing down on her hydropac strap. She wanted to watch the ceremony, but when she looked up all she could see were Lil’s leg and belly pressed against the door.

At last, Lil dropped down to the ground. Her stomach was speckled with dirt and rust, but her eyes were gleaming. ‘No one has been here,’ she announced, in a tone of rich satisfaction. ‘Not since the Dark Time. No one except me and my dad and now you.’

Then Astra put Silver’s feather in her own hair and Lil gave Astra the glove and a leg-up. Astra was a bit shorter than Lil and she couldn’t get onto the wing on her first jump, but Lil hoiked her higher the second time and she made it. Lil made her take her right sandal off and she rested her bare foot on Lil’s shoulder. The window was too splintered and fogged with age to see through, but at the top right-hand corner, just as Lil had said, the pane had fallen clean away. When she’d found her balance, she steadied her left hand above the window and peered inside the arrowpain.

* * *

A thick mulch of leaves had accumulated over the front window and it took her eyes a minute to adjust. She had known she was going to see the ancestors, otherwise, even with the gradual revelation, she might have
screamed and fallen. As it was, the scream shrank to a frog-gulp in her throat, and her muscles trembled for only a moment.

There were two ancestors in the arrowpain. You couldn’t tell if they were male or female, sky-clad or clothed, because any clothes they might have been wearing had rotted away with their flesh. All that was left were their skeletons – not tall, bleached, airy skeletons like the pictures in anatomy lessons, but hunched assemblages of moss-coated bones, riven with cracks. The ancestor closest to the window was slumped forward, face smashed into the dashboard, arm bones dangling down by its feet. The other ancestor was sitting up straight, except for its skull, which was drooping over its ribcage. The seat material had rotted away too, and the ancestors were resting on rusted metal coils. There was a long, jagged hole in the floor beneath the seats, and Astra could see the roots of a tree crawling through the earth below.