Daywards (27 page)

‘After this, I'll be happy never to go near the saltwater again,' Dara said, poking disconsolately at the fire. ‘Nothing good ever seems to happen here.'

Ma Saria didn't respond, and there was nobody else in a position to answer. Jaran was still unconscious, as he'd been for two days now, wrapped in a thermal blanket they'd found among his gear and lying prone on the fire-warm sand. Eyna was in her usual place, sitting statuelike several hundred metres up the beach, at the base of the dunes. She was brooding, staring out across the ever-shifting grey expanse of water.

Overhead, the afternoon was cloudy, a cast of heavy, dark cloud completely hiding the sky and throwing the world below into a shadowless greyland. The wind blowing off the water was cold and matched Dara's mood perfectly.

‘Why don't you go talk to your cousin for a while, eh?' Ma Saria suggested. ‘I'll keep an eye on him, while you two sort out your differences.'

Dara threw Ma a scornful look and didn't deign to answer. She'd made her feelings on that perfectly clear. She'd talk to Eyna again only when Jaran woke up.
If
Jaran woke up.

‘She needs all the help she can get, that one,' Ma added.

‘Not as much as Jaran does.'

‘Shi, girl. Jaran's only need is a warm place to lie and someone to keep an eye on him. That girl down there, though, she's putting herself through all sorts of pain at the moment. Pain like you'd never understand, and you should thank the sky for that.'

‘Psht!' Dara spat.

‘Believe me or don't, Dara, but I know what I'm talkin' about'. A sharp edge crept into Ma Saria's usually steady tone.

‘How? I know you, Ma Saria, and you can't expect me to believe you've ever done that to someone. So how in the sky can you know she doesn't deserve everything she's going through?'

Ma Saria didn't answer, but just stared into the flames. When she did speak, her voice was strained.

‘Two times, Dara. Two times in this long life of mine I've done exactly the same thing as your cousin. Worse, really, ‘cause on one of those occasions it wasn't even an accident. I did it deliberately, and I've hated myself for it ever since.'

Dara stared, dumbstruck, speechless.

‘So don't you dare think I don't know what that girl's going through, eh? And trust me when I tell you how lucky you are you don't have to go through it yourself.'

The driftwood fire spat blue and green sparks into the drab afternoon.

‘I'm going for a walk,' Dara said, setting off in the opposite direction to Eyna.

It made no difference. Even if she hadn't meant to, Eyna had still done it. She hadn't been able to bear the idea of Dara and Jaran sharing something she wasn't part of it. She couldn't take it, so she'd ruined it for everyone.

Ruined Jaran.

So Dara didn't care if her cousin was sorry. If she was hurting. Sky! She deserved to hurt. And if Ma Saria felt sorry for her, then that was fine for Ma Saria, but every time Dara looked at her brother's pinprick eyes, every time she tried to spoon some bushnut porridge into his senseless mouth, the only sensation that filled her was one of unquenchable rage.

Below her feet, the sand grew cold and firm and she realised that she'd strayed on to the hard sand near the water's edge. She'd avoided going too near the waves, preferring to confine her activities to the soft sand high up the beach, near their campsite.

Now, though, Dara didn't care. Ahead of her the beach was wreathed in pale spindrift, as set after set of long, dark rollers slid in from the south and pounded themselves to oblivion against the shoreline. The beach seemed to go on forever. There were no headlands, no bays, just long stretches of sand and water.

Perhaps I should just keep walking,
Dara thought.
Pull up some earthwarmth and keep going alone. Leave the rest of them back there.

The notion was uncomfortably tempting and so she pushed it aside quickly. Her thoughts returned to her brother.

‘He might pull through it,' Ma Saria had told them. ‘Sky knows for sure, but he might. It's hard to tell, but I get a bit of a sense of him, just now and then. Just a flutter, so perhaps he just needs some time to find his way back out to us.'

But there'd been more doubt than hope in her voice, and both Dara and Eyna had known it.

‘Stupid shi, all of them,' Dara muttered.

Once or twice, she glanced behind, half-expecting to find either Ma or Eyna following. When she found herself alone, she didn't know whether to be pleased or mad.

‘Doesn't matter, anyway.'

She wandered daywards, occasionally trailing her feet through the cold water as the foaming waves rushed around her ankles. For the most part, though, she stayed above the point where the waves petered out. Once or twice, when particularly big waves came crashing in to break on the sand, she had to dash sideways, scuttling up the beach to avoid being overtaken by the icy water.

Gradually, the slow ebb of the afternoon eased some of the anger from her mind, and she allowed herself to lose track of time, drifting slowly along, lost in the moment, until something on the beach ahead caught her eye. It was a large, dark shape, just above the tidal line of seaweed, which rose, round and smooth and ominous against the pale sand. In the gloomy light it threw no shadow and Dara found it difficult to judge its size. It was clearly man-made, though; nothing in the real world was that smooth or so perfectly curved.

Coming closer, it soon became obvious that it was bigger than her, about twice her height. Cautiously she approached it, sketching a wide circle around it so that she could take in the entire object.

It was metal of some sort, but impossible to tell what. The surface looked as though it had been through an intense fire; it was blackened and pitted, and in a number of places long ragged seams had torn open. The object was roughly spherical, and on one side most of the outer skin had torn away to reveal a charred and incomprehensible array of metal tubing and wiring inside. It was tech, no question about that, but nothing else about the thing looked even vaguely familar, and Jaran's words from their salvage trip came back to her: ‘Don't touch anything unless you know for certain that it's safe to do so.'

Was this thing safe? She had no idea. It didn't look dangerous, that was for sure. If anything, the device – whatever it was – seemed thoroughly and completely destroyed. Something about it reminded her of Da Janil in the Eye on the night of his death, his silver daysuit still wrapped protectively around his body but nothing left of life inside it, just an old, damaged shell.

This device looked much the same. Whatever its purpose might once have been, there wasn't much chance of it ever doing anything useful again.

‘I wish Jaran was here.' He'd have known, perhaps, what the thing was.

Carefully, Dara stretched a hand towards the object, but hesitated.
Don't touch anything you can't reach,
Ma had cautioned them, that night in the cave.

Dara thought about it. She could reach, just a tiny amount, and see if she could feel anything. Even if all she found was that odd emptiness that Nightpeople and their tech usually gave off, it would at least give her a clue as to the thing's origins.

But, since reaching with Jaran on the dunes, she'd been avoiding doing it again on her own. Something inside her, some tiny voice in her head, didn't want to, just in case it wasn't the same any more. In case it didn't feel right. When they'd linked their reaching, they'd been able to feel so much – Earthmother and Skyfather together at the same time – and the thought that her own reaching might no longer satisfy her had kept her ignoring the insistent push of earthwarmth below the soles of her feet, and given her the impetus to distract herself as much as possible.

But with Jaran unconscious, there seemed little alternative.

Carefully, Dara curled her toes into the cold, damp sand and sought out the traces of deep earthwarmth that she knew would be there somewhere. It wasn't difficult. Perhaps because she'd been keeping such a tight rein on herself the tingling energy flooded into her and in seconds her fingertips and toes were abuzz with it.

A couple of deep breaths and Dara let herself go, out, down, opening her senses until she could feel herself in every grain of sand around her ankles and in the cold rush of the water over the ground beside her and in the warm heat of the rotting seaweed above the tideline.

And just as she'd feared, reaching didn't feel right, now. It felt incomplete. The sky stayed obstinately distant and detached, the same as always. A little way up the beach from where she stood, a flock of seabirds – small, silver-winged creatures that she'd watched for hours the previous afternoon as they whipped across the wave surfaces – were roosting against the cold wind. Their life sparks were obvious. They were, after all, in contact with the earth, however insubstantial and fleeting that contact might be. But as was always the case with birds, there was something missing. Some part of them that dwelled not on damp sand but in warm currents of air and the twisting of wind across a headland; that part of them remained closed to her, no matter how hard she concentrated.

There was nothing of the other night, when she'd felt as though she was reaching every bird, every bat and every flying insect within a thousand kilometres.

Sighing inwardly, Dara turned her attention to the object. It gave off the same nothing emanation that so much Nightpeople equipment seemed to convey. It was more than half-buried, the vast bulk of it extending metres down, held in the concrete embrace of the sand forever, it seemed.

There was nothing in it, though. No skyfire, no earthwarmth. Just cold emptiness, the same as everything she'd touched and felt during her time in the city.

Dara pushed the object aside from her immediate consideration and relaxed. Now that the initial disappointment had passed, she realised how much she'd missed reaching. Even if it wasn't the same connectedness that she'd felt with her brother, it was still comforting to let herself drift out into the land around her and enjoy the baking inland warmth and the cool rush of the subterranean streams and rivers and the unmoving patience of the stones and boulders.

A brief focus of her attention back up the beach showed that everything in the camp was just as she'd left it: Eyna hunkered alone up the beach, keeping vigil over the waves, Ma crouched beside the fireplace watching Jaran, and Jaran himself …

Dara hesitated. Since her brother was ‘burned', as Ma called it, she'd been too frightened to reach for him. Too scared of what she might, or might not, find inside that husk-like body. She expected him to feel something like Nightpeople tech, like this metal shell half-buried in the sand beside her. Empty.

That was how he looked, after all. Eyes like pinpricks, breathing shallow and laboured, arms and legs insensible.

But now, as she pulled all her attention back from the wider earth and focused it on her brother's body, she was startled to find something there. Not a lot, just a faint flutter of consciousness nearly lost against the background burble of life and movement on the beach. Still, there was something there which …
tasted
like Jaran.

Excited, Dara pushed herself towards it, but the moment she did so the flutter vanished.

A brief wave of panic flooded through her, and Dara cast her mind out, and felt both Ma and Eyna's sudden awareness of her in the immediate flaring of their sparks.

Dara?
Ma's enquiring thought probed towards her, but Dara ignored it, calming herself so that her sudden panic wouldn't push her back into her own mind. She wasn't ready for that, not yet.

Again, she focused all her attention on her brother's form, but this time there was nothing. No insubstantial moth-wing flutter against the edges of her awareness, no mind-wraith in her peripheral vision.

You all right, child?
There was a note of concern in Ma's thought, now, and Dara couldn't ignore it any longer.

‘Fine.'
She spoke the word aloud, even as she sent the thought back out into the Earthmother, and then returned quickly to the privacy of her own mind.

He'd been there, she was certain. It was fleeting but it was definitely him, just as Ma Saria had suggested.

It wasn't much, but Dara found herself grinning. For the first time since Eyna had pushed her mind in to Jaran's, Dara felt a spark of hope. He was still in there – or out there – somewhere.

Overhead, a pair of enormous seabirds whirled in the wind, screeching at the grey afternoon as Dara, feeling more hopeful than she had in days, set out back along the beach.

She'd walked a lot further than she'd realised. By the time the dancing glimmer of their fire appeared up ahead, the light was fading and the sky was glowing an apocalyptic crimson as the sun, still hidden below the murk of cloud, refracted its last rays for the day down through the upper atmosphere.