Daywards (16 page)

‘As soon as the outer door opens, they'll know. Alarms will go off everywhere. But I've disabled the drones for at least the next halfhour, and it's early afternoon outside so you've got a couple of hours before anyone else can come out after you.'

‘Why are you helping me?'

The pale man smiled. ‘My daughter would have been about your age now, if she was still alive. I would want her treated this way.'

He didn't give Dara a chance to respond, but slammed his fist against a button on the wall and quickly whipped his arm and head back out into the corridor, only just getting them clear before the doorway hissed shut between them.

‘Good luck,' he whispered as the door hid him from view.

There was a loud pop and a surge of pressure in her ears, and then, to her amazement, the other wall of the room slid aside and warm, natural sunlight streamed in to the small chamber.

The ground was about two metres below the edge of the door and Dara steeled herself for the leap. Somewhere behind she was dimly aware that a siren had begun emitting a low, regular ‘whoop'. She needed to get out now, before someone thought to lock the door again.

‘Thank you!' she yelled back at the sealed hatchway behind her and then jumped. Her left ankle twisted slightly as she landed, but not too badly.

As she'd suspected, Raj had led her into one of the large buildings and she emerged disoriented, lost in a maze of silvery walkways and thick cables. Then she spotted a corner of the Eye, and beyond it a glimpse of forest.

Alarms were going off everywhere, inside and outside. From the nearest walkway, she heard loud shouts and running footsteps. Then, above her head, the doorway through which she'd escaped slammed shut with a vicious finality. That prompted her into action and she started running, carefully avoiding the myriad cables that littered the ground between the buildings, weaving her way as fast as she dared towards the green haven of the forest.

To her amazement, she reached the forest edge without interference, and once she was standing safely in the shade of the first large trees she looked back. On top of one of the large structures a hatchway swung open and a figure in a silver suit and helmet began to emerge, but it got only halfway out before suddenly throwing its suited arms over its head and sliding back inside again.

In daylight, the Nightpeople's camp looked less frightening. The domes were dirty and worn and the silvery walkways had been visibly patched in a number of places. Even the permanent buildings had a tired and faded look about them. Their black surfaces, which last night had seemed to shine under the hard light of the powerlamps, were worn and pitted.

After a glance at the top of the Eye, to reassure herself that the spherical drones weren't, as Raj had suggested, coming after her, Dara allowed herself a grim smile and then, with a determined look on her face, she turned and vanished into the patchwork shadows of the afternoon forest.

By the time the sun was finally below the treetops and the whole forest sinking into golden twilight, Dara was well clear of the Eye and, she hoped, the Nightpeople. Her stomach rumbled, but she didn't dare stop and find food. At her side, her small bundle of tech, which she'd retrieved before plunging into the forest, swung against her hip and she thought briefly about the sachets of prosup she'd flushed down the creek. Da Janil always had a thing about waste. He wouldn't let anything be discarded, even broken-down tech. He used to lecture the littlies about it all the time. Now she understood why.

For most of the afternoon she'd plunged nightwards, below the sheltering foliage while following the line of the escarpment, all the while keeping a close eye on the descending sun, as it arced inexorably towards the horizon. Raj had told her she had at least ‘a couple of hours' before anybody could follow her, but then what? She was also constantly listening behind, always half-expecting the resonating buzz of a drone to come floating through the trees.

Luck seemed to be on her side, and as the hours passed without any sign of pursuit she allowed herself to relax, to let the swing of her footsteps fall into their more natural rhythm, and to draw some energy up from the warm forest floor beneath her bare feet.

Despite her hunger, she felt okay. Strong, even. At least the Nightpeople had given her the chance to rest up. She'd walk all night, if necessary, though she'd prefer not to. She had a destination in mind. Somewhere up ahead, half a day's walk from the Eye, she knew of a large fissure in the escarpment, a deep scar clefting into the dark granite cliff face. She'd noticed it several times when swimming at the waterhole and had always thought it looked particularly climbable. If she could find it in the dark, she'd have a way to descend to the coastal forest in relative safety. And once down there, on familiar ground, there was no way Drake or Blin would ever find her, even with all their tech.

As twilight started to fade from the sky, Dara stopped and reached, relishing the familiar tug as the earthwarmth helped her flow out into the wider awareness of the Earthmother. Back at the Eye, the now-familiar coldness of the Nightpeople's camp was unchanged. Down in the clan caves a similar sensation prevailed, although here and there isolated sparks flared occasionally, like a distant campfire seen from a long way off, flickering between trees. There were also moving patches of nothing, of the same cold emptiness as the buildings, which she presumed to be individual Nightpeople moving around.

Slowly, not wanting to exhaust herself, she started to push out further, hoping to find Eyna or Ma Saria nearby, but before she could do so, a vibrating thrum caught her attention.

Something was coming from the Eye, headed in her direction. Dara thought it must have been one of the drones, but the sound was different and built too quickly. This was a low-pitched hum, which set the air vibrating and resonated into the ground so deeply that she could feel it as much through the soles of her feet as her ears.

Straining her eyes, Dara peered back the way she'd come, frozen for a moment in fearful indecision, hoping for a glimpse of whatever bit of tech they'd sent after her. But it remained hidden by the forest and cloaked by the deepening darkness. Once she thought she caught a bright flicker, like lightning, somewhere in the sky several kilometres away, but it was gone in an instant.

She set out again, following the hunting trails of small animals and occasionally pushing her way through thickets of spiny underbrush. The night continued to hum and vibrate around her. As she grew more accustomed to the sound, Dara began to realise that there were three or four separate tones, suggesting several different sources moving independently of one another. On one occasion, Dara stopped, faced daywards, closed her eyes and turned her head left and right, as she would if trying to locate a hopper by sound alone. It did her no good. The humming filled the evening air completely, betraying little more than the fact that it was coming from somewhere daywards of her present position.

The sound scoured the evening and Dara noticed that all the usual scurryings and scuffles of the forest were absent. Even when she strained her ears and focused her hearing on the background, trying actively to ignore the humming and concentrate instead on the more natural sounds of night, she heard not the faintest insectile chirp.

Later in the evening, the weather picked up from the south, a slow, languid breeze at first, but quickly building into a solid wind that set the canopy whipping back and forth in a frenzy. Through the branches she glimpsed the sky, the moon all but hidden behind long streams of ragged cloud that fled past in a blur. Dara knew this weather pattern well. In a couple of hours she'd be caught in the middle of a gale. The southerly wind would carry cold air up from over the saltwater and bring with it freezing, torrential rain. Once established, the storm might last for days. Normally she'd have cursed to be caught out like this, but tonight the thought brought a grim smile to her face. Whatever tech the Nightpeople were using to search for her, if it flew then it wasn't going to be too useful for the next little while.

Ignoring the growing, gnawing ache in her belly, she pushed on, angling through the bush towards the edge of the cliffs so that when she did finally come across the cleft there would be no chance of missing it in the darkness.

The wind picked up again, increasing in its ferocity, and somewhere close by a large branch crashed down heavily, causing Dara to leap sideways, startled. It took several minutes to calm herself enough to continue.

The wind also swept away the sound of the search. The resonant hum now reached her ears only during small lulls in the weather. Three or four times she thought she caught quick flashes of intense light through the trees, but it was possible that it might have been nothing more than lightning.

As the first fat drops of rain splashed down around her, Dara stumbled across the edge of the scar. Quite literally. One moment she was winding through dense underbrush, a hundred metres or so inland of the cliff-edge, and then suddenly her foot slipped, the ground beneath her vanished and she found herself sliding sharply down a steep gravel slope for several metres until her momentum was checked by a low, scrubby tree.

‘Shi!' She could feel blood seeping from long grazes on her shins, which had caught a ridge of sharp rock somewhere during the fall. Her bag, with the precious firekit inside, had slipped from her grasp during the tumble, and so, grimacing in pain, she searched around until she found it several metres downhill, lying on a patch of loose scree in the valley at the bottom of the cleft. Then, she lay back and closed her eyes, allowing herself a few moments of rest.

Downhill, the ravine descended sharply, a deep ‘V'-shaped incision in the cliff face, filled with unstable piles of shifting rock and dirt, much of it held together only by a dense tangle of scrub and the occasional spindly tree that had managed to gain a tenuous toehold in the inhospitable, rocky soil. Above, the two sides of the scar were almost invisible against the black sky beyond. No longer were the clouds simply torn shreds of shadow silhouetted against a silver sky. Now dense sheets of cumulus had rolled in, blanketing the stars and swallowing all traces of moonlight. Overhead, at the edges of the cleft, the trees of the plateau forest loomed black, casting the steep slope deeper into shadow.

Heavy drops of cold rain plonked steadily from the sky, causing her clothes to hang limp and damp on her and setting her shivering, despite her recent exertions.

The rain increased rapidly, the fat droplets giving way to a torrential downpour that plastered her hair flat against her back and shoulders and ran in rivulets down her face. In the cleft she was slightly protected, but only slightly. To add to her discomfort, the wind, blowing directly against the escarpment from the south, was channelled into the cleft, howling upwards between the rocky walls with an unearthly wail.

Rising slowly and painfully, Dara peered downwards, hoping to gauge whether the ravine was, in fact, navigable. It was hopeless. The way was hidden in deep shadow and behind the sheeting rain. The only alternative was to attempt to climb back up into the forest, but that would be almost as dangerous, with the added bonus of the searching Nightpeople.

So, clenching her teeth against the stinging in her legs, Dara began a slow, careful descent. On a couple of occasions she had to sit and slide over short stretches of loose pebbles, holding her breath and plunging into the dark, hoping there wasn't an abrupt dropoff hidden in the darkness ahead.

It took perhaps an hour to navigate halfway down to the forest. Then she stopped for a few minutes, clinging to the trunk of a relatively large tree and catching her breath. She was gratified to see the outline of the clifftops now well overhead. Below, the trees were still concealed in the dark and storm, but she knew she was getting closer.

She had a new problem, though. A stream, an intermittent watercourse, fuelled by the relentless rain had began to flow down the bottom of the cleft, tumbling over the loose rocks and rendering the ground underfoot, which was already treacherous, even more so. To this point she'd been climbing in the relatively safe bottom of the ‘V' formed by the meeting of the two walls. Now that path was being filled by rapidly rising water, forcing her higher up one of the steep walls, onto less stable ground.

Up here, there were fewer handholds. Most of the solid trees that had managed to take root in the cleft were concentrated in the bottom of the ‘V'. Several metres above the rushing water, where Dara now found herself, there was little in the way of scrub apart from a few shallow-rooted bushes unable to take her weight.

Slowly, spending more time sliding along on her backside than upright, Dara eased her way down. The watercourse quickly became a raging torrent, hurtling out of the darkness above and vanishing into the shadows below. Occasionally she'd catch a glimpse of solid black shapes, presumably large stones or boulders, being carried along by the furious energy of the cascade, bouncing down and crashing into the forest below.

Several times she slipped and almost fell into the water, each time saving herself only by desperate scrabbling, which removed skin from her fingertips and knuckles. By this time she was too numb and cold to even bleed much.

Finally a new sound reached her, echoing up the cleft loudly enough to carry even over the howl of the wind and the constant thunderclaps; the rumbling of a waterfall not too far below suggested that she was almost at the bottom. Carefully, she eased closer to the water, gratified to notice that outwards from her position there were now treetops. Not the scraggly specimens that she'd been using during her descent, but the familiar, well-developed coverage of a forest canopy. She reached the final step: a sheer, vertical drop perhaps five metres high from the bottom of the cleft to the forest floor. The torrent of water poured from where she stood at the bottom of the ‘V', tumbling from out of the scar into thin air then crashing onto a broad expanse of flat, rounded riverstones below. There it pooled briefly before running off in a creek that vanished into the forest.

From her position at the top of the waterfall, it was impossible to tell whether the temporary pool below was deep enough to jump into. There seemed no other way down, however, apart from waiting here until the storm finally stopped and the water dried up.

That could take days, and, already faint from hunger and exposure, Dara knew there was no way she could survive that long, not clinging to the cliff face in such a precarious position.

In the end the decision was made for her. A stone the size of her fist came flying from the darkness behind her, bouncing up out of the stream and catching her a glancing blow on the shoulder. Dara stumbled forward, realising too late that she'd passed her balance point and having only enough time to leap reflexively outwards, away from the cliff face and the pounding waterfall.

For a moment she hung suspended in mid-air, feeling curiously as though the night was flowing upwards around her, and noticing, absurdly, an odd dark shadow against the sky overhead.

She hit the freezing water with a shocking burst of pain that squeezed the breath from her lungs. She rolled, tumbling in the turbulence that boiled around her. Her eyes, ears and nose filled and she was flung, feet over head over feet along the bottom of the shallow pool, until the unmistakable bulk of an earth bank thumped solidly into the small of her back and she was able to coax her protesting muscles into crawling up on to the dark muddy ground, rolling and collapsing, utterly spent. There she lay, her feet still snatched at by the nipping current.

Overhead, the sky was hanging heavy and low, unleashing its pent-up energy onto the helpless land below. The top of the escarpment was hidden, not in the darkness but in the blanket of the cloud itself. Only the dim glow of diffused moonlight, filtered through brief gaps in the cloudbase, provided any light, apart from occasional flashes of lightning, which strobed the night into individual moments.