Daywards (8 page)

Dara, with a satisfied expression on her face, followed him into the lengthening shadows of the forest.

Jaran hadn't said a word to her in three days. Three long days of slogging through the monotonous, dusty coastal forest in his footsteps. Ever since the incident with the band, he'd used his longer legs to maximum advantage, so that Dara had to grit her teeth and scurry just to keep up. On more than one occasion he'd gotten so far ahead as to disappear, completely hidden from view, and three times she'd come close to turning around and letting him go on without her. But each time she found herself standing alone in the shade by the side of the trail and thinking about returning home, she reminded herself that this was exactly what her brother was probably hoping for, and this helped her dig deeper into her energy reserves.

Her determination came at a cost. It had been a week now since she'd followed Jaran out of the cave – a week of constant marching, of bland prosup meals, of starting out in the early mornings and walking well into the night – and now her feet throbbed and her legs ached.

It wouldn't have been so bad if she'd been able to reach more effectively – to call some earthwarmth and let it ease the tension in her calves, perhaps allow herself to slip out into the land for a while and escape her aching body. But even this wasn't an option. Another of the side effects of exhaustion, she suspected, was that she could barely reach; every time she tried, the most she could do was generate a faint, distant tingle, which was never enough to carry her fully out of herself, and which did little or nothing to relieve the relentless pain.

And Jaran hadn't seemed to care in the slightest. On the couple of occasions she'd complained that he was walking too hard, he'd simply grunted and continued to ignore her. The fourth day hadn't been any different from the previous three. Jaran set a cracking pace right from the outset, and Dara had quickly fallen behind, trudging along lost in the misery of her aching legs. When, in the middle of the afternoon, she rounded a bend and saw him stopped up ahead, it had come as a complete surprise. As she drew nearer, he pointed out, daywards.

‘Look.'

They'd arrived at a lookout of sorts, a wide clearing perched on top of a low range of hills which ran north and south, parallel to the coastline, and perched above a wide band of flat land that extended nightwards perhaps thirty or forty kilometres, all the way to the saltwater. Arriving in the clearing – which showed signs of having been a campsite in the past, complete with firepit and a couple of rough wood and stone shelters – Dara's first impulse was to sink to the ground and rest, but when she saw what was ahead, all the discomfort of her body was forgotten.

The plain was an enormous grey tangle.

‘This is it,' Jaran said, handing her a water flask which Dara accepted gratefully.

‘It's …' She attempted to find words, but they eluded her. The city was mammoth, on a scale she'd never have thought possible. It filled the horizon, shattered and fallen piles of plascrete and clearcrete – a desolate wasteland of tangled grey.

Once, when she'd been out on an extended hunting trip with her father, they'd come across an area through which a bushfire had recently swept. An entire tract of the coastal forest had been scrubbed of its undergrowth, the canopy incinerated and the land laid bare to the open sun. The soil and few remaining trees had been blackened and shattered, and the air was still thick with the pungent, lingering smell of smoke. At the time, Dara thought she would never see such destruction again, but that had been nothing compared with the monstrous holocaust that scarred the land ahead.

Here and there amid the wreckage, the remains of skydomes still stood, towering impossibly above the surrounding ruins and throwing long, late-afternoon shadows daywards towards the hills. There was no life in them, though; even at a distance the cracked and broken clearcrete domes that crowned the stems were clearly visible.

Dara's head reeled.

‘You all right?' He hadn't spoken to her for three days, but there was concern in Jaran's voice.

‘It's so big.'

‘Yeah. Xani warned me that seeing the city can make you feel … small. I should have told you. Sorry.'

‘It doesn't matter.'

They fell into silence again, both trying to come to terms with the awful scale of the sight before them.

‘How many people lived there?' Dara finally asked.

‘Don't know. Millions, easily.'

‘Millions.' Even to her own ears, Dara's voice sounded flat. Having grown up surrounded by only a handful of people, every one of whom she knew inside and out, it was impossible to imagine there being that many people in the entire world, let alone all together in one place. She'd known it had happened, of course – she'd heard the old stories – but until now the stories had been just words, interesting words, words that had lived only in her imagination. Now, standing beside Jaran and looking out over the remains of the skycity, they weren't just stories any more. Now they were real. Those millions of people were no longer only in her imagination. They were buried and strewn across the shattered cityscape before her. Littlies, oldies, da's, ma's, uncles and aunties. They'd all lived, and died, right there.

‘Are we going down?'

Jaran shook his head.

‘Not today. Uncle Xani reckons the city's not a good place to be at night, and it's too late today to get anything useful accomplished. We'll stay here tonight and get moving before dawn tomorrow, so we're in the city at first light.'

‘How long will we be staying?' The thought of going on a salvage had always seemed exciting to Dara – something of an adventure. Now, having seen the awfulness of the ruins, all she wanted to do was retreat back into the bush, back to the escarpment and the safe, green, sun-dappled world of the forest.

‘Not long. We're only here for a couple of items, and Uncle Xani has plotted the most likely places to look for them. So if we're lucky we'll be on our way home again by sunset tomorrow.'

They sat on a fallen tree trunk and watched the sun slowly sink towards the nightwards horizon. As it did so, the ruins seemed to lose some – but not all – of their deadness. As the sky began to glow crimson, the light reflected off the enormous, shattered panels of clearcrete that littered the landscape, causing them to gleam and twinkle in the dying moments of the day. For a brief second, Dara could picture the city as it must have once been – a spectacular show of light and colour; thousands of glimmering domes suspended in the sky, glowing in the sunset while their residents went about their business inside.

But then the moment was gone and the ruins were just ruins again. The blasted remains of a great human folly. A mistake.

‘Hungry?' Jaran dug into his pack and pulled out the cooking equipment and two packets of prosup.

‘Not really.'

An hour earlier she'd been starving, but now her appetite was completely gone.

‘Me either.' Jaran tossed the prosup packets back into the pack. ‘Especially not for this. Shall we hunt ourselves up some real dinner?'

Tearing her gaze from the ruins, Dara turned to look at her brother. Bone-weary as she was, she suspected that hunting would serve as a good distraction from the pressing sense of melancholy which her first sight of the skycity had brought with it.

‘Yeah. Good idea.'

They set off back along the trail. As the trees closed around her again and the city was hidden from view, Dara felt a little of her uneasiness lift.

Only a little, though. Now that she'd seen it, was aware of it, she could feel the ruins parked at the edge of her consciousness.

Jaran cut a long, straight stem from the middle of a grass tree and used his knife to shape one end into a crude point. He tossed the makeshift spear to Dara. ‘You go first.'

Dara knew her brother was trying to distract her by keeping her occupied, and she was grateful for the gesture. The anger that for the previous few days had been obvious in Jaran's every movement was now nowhere to be seen, which she took to indicate that Jaran was clearly as perturbed as she was.

‘Thanks.'

Leaving the trail, they stepped into the forest proper. At this time of evening, with the daylight dying and the coolness of night pushing aside the dusty heat of the afternoon, there was game everywhere, coldbloods settling down now that the blood-warming sun had slipped from the sky and warmbloods just waking after dozy afternoons spent in shaded hollows. It should only be a matter of minutes before she located a suitable meal.

But despite her best efforts, Dara found it impossible to hunt. Each time she thought she'd detected a suitable quarry, it either heard them coming and scurried away or her throws – usually so controlled and calm – became desperate lunges, the spear spiralling awkwardly into the darkness. Only once did she try to reach, but her mind was in a whirl and the presence of the ruins was so completely overpowering that she quickly withdrew from the attempt.

Finally she handed the spear to Jaran. ‘You try.'

Under normal circumstances, such an admission of defeat would have drawn a derisory comment from her brother, but this time he simply accepted the spear and took the lead.

And as it turned out, he had no more success than Dara. By the time he surrendered, hurling the spear away into the forest in frustration, it was completely dark and obvious that they weren't going to catch anything.

‘Come on, let's get back to the camp, eh?'

They plodded back to the clearing, walking silently in the faint starlight. Jaran busied himself heating up the prosup sachets he'd earlier discarded, while Dara rummaged in the undergrowth until she'd gathered enough dry wood to build a small fire. Both assiduously kept their gazes averted from the nightwards horizon.

The food tasted worse than ever, but at least it filled their bellies, and, after washing it down with long drinks of water, brother and sister lay by the fire, back to back, just as they had as children, and slept.

When Jaran shook her awake, it was still early, not even a hint of sunrise in the sky. Around them, the night-forest had subsided into restive silence.

The darkness hid the view. When Dara glanced nightwards, the landscape was still cloaked, and she found herself absurdly grateful for the fact.

Their fire had burned out while they'd slept.

‘You want me to get that going again?' she asked Jaran.

‘Nah.' He rummaged in the pack and pulled out a small sphere slightly bigger than his fist. Gripping the two halves, one in each hand, he gave them a sharp twist in opposite directions. There was a loud ‘crack' followed by a soft humming and the sphere began to glow, giving off an odd, orange light. Jaran placed it on a tree stump at the edge of the clearing. ‘There. At least we can see, now.'

In the sickly glow, he heated a couple of packets of prosup and handed one to Dara, who shook her head.

‘It's too early. I'm not hungry.'

‘Eat it anyway. We've got a long day ahead.'

When they were ready to go, Jaran looked at Dara, the orange light not quite hiding the concern in his expression.

‘You sure you're ready for this?'

Dara ignored the patronising sentiment behind his words, and instead nodded at the glowsphere.

‘What about that?'

‘We'll leave it. They only work once and it might be useful to have it here if we get back in the dark.'

‘It'll stay lit that long?'

‘So Uncle Xani says.'

At the edge of the clearing, they stared ahead into the blackness. Overhead, stars gleamed in the moonless sky, a glittering miasma above the black ruins.

‘Let's go. Watch your step.'

Despite his warning, the trail proved relatively easy, wide enough for them to walk two abreast and winding in broad sweeps down the rolling foothills until it levelled out on the plain below.

In silence they followed it nightwards towards the ruins. The forest thinned out rapidly, until, by the time the sky began to brighten, they were marching through low scrub with not a tree to be seen anywhere.

Even the scrub eventually vanished and they walked the final few kilometres across a wide belt of loose, cold, grey sand, into which their feet sank slightly and which seemed to suck the warmth down and out of Dara's body with each step.

‘You want to rest for a bit?' Jaran asked her at one point, but she shook her head and they kept walking.

The loose sand gave way to hard-packed dirt and then to wide slabs of broken and shattered concrete. Gradually, they began to pass piles of debris – small ones at first, but then larger and larger. When the sun finally rose above the hills behind them, they were already well inside the city, standing in the centre of a vast plaza. Enormous slabs of crazed concrete stretched away in every direction and the horizons were hidden behind mountainous piles of crushed rubble.

The sheer destructive power of the fall was obvious. Much of the skyline consisted of walls of plascrete, many the size of the escarpment, which lay at crazy angles to the ground, bisecting the landscape around them with hard, unnaturally straight shadows. Everywhere the ground was strewn with lumps of shattered plascrete and clearcrete, some just the size of a fist or groundnut, others several times Dara's height.

‘Keep your eyes on the ground, now,' Jaran said at one point. ‘Watch your feet. The further we get into the city, the more sharp edges we'll have to watch out for, okay? Some of these shards are sharp enough to slice straight through your shoes, and probably your toes, too.'

The next time they stopped, Jaran was peering intently at the plotter, oblivious to everything else.

‘We've got a way to go, so stick close and no talking. I need to concentrate. If we get turned around, or off the track …'

He trailed off, not needing to complete the sentence. From the hills, the city had seemed to have some shape to it, but now each pile of rubble looked identical to every other, and Dara could imagine how easy it would be to become disorientated. The thought sent a shudder right through her.

‘This way.' Jaran pointed, and together they made their way north across the plaza, towards a pile crowned by the gleaming remains of a broken skydome. The gently curved, transparent arcs of clearcrete caught the morning sun and threw sparks across Dara's vision if she stared at them for too long. It looked as though somebody had cracked an enormous, impossibly clear egg onto the top of the pile.

Several times the plotter beeped insistently and they had to backtrack slightly or ignore it while they found a way around some obstacle or other. The morning grew hotter. Down in the deep valleys of the city, surrounded by the hard, reflective plascrete, not even the faintest hint of a breeze managed to penetrate, and before long they were both wiping stinging beads of sweat from their eyes.

Even more unnerving, perhaps, was the silence.

Until now, Dara thought she knew what silence was – a hot dusty afternoon in the coastal forest, or the depths of a still night during the dry – but even in those instances, there was always some sort of sound; some insect chirping away even though everyone and everything else was asleep. Or some errant waft of air would stir the canopy just enough to send a quiet whisper shivering through the evening. And in the cave at night, there was always someone snoring, or moving, or breaking wind. Never, until now, had she been somewhere in which noise was so completely, so absolutely,
absent.
The silence was so profound that Dara fancied she could almost hear her own thoughts. It wasn't, she decided, a good idea to concentrate too hard on it.

‘You doing okay?' Jaran spoke quietly, but his voice seemed unnaturally loud.

‘Yeah. A bit spooked.'

‘I know. It's … it's not like I'd expected.'

‘Me either.'

In her imagination, the city had always been somehow more … intact. More like the living, vibrant, sparkling world she'd occasionally overheard some of the uncles and aunties reminiscing about. Even the stories of the fall, and of the salvages, hadn't prepared her for the deadness of this ruined landscape.

‘Here.' Jaran passed her some water. ‘Have a drink.'

The heat had managed to penetrate the insulated sides of the flask, and the water was tepid, but the wetness refreshed her, and when she'd finished drinking Dara handed it back with a grateful smile.

Then they were walking again, onwards until they reached the foothills of an enormous rubble pile they'd been walking towards for almost an hour. Now it towered above them, rising from the hard ground in a tangled, jumbled heap. Tentatively, Dara put out a hand and rested it against a large, flat slab of plascrete. Despite the fierce sun, the plascrete was icy to the touch. Against the hot, living flesh of her hand, it felt as cold as the water in the rockpool back home, but without any of the living vitality of water. At the moment of contact a deep, primal shiver trembled the length of Dara's spine and she withdrew quickly, repulsed.

The movement, slight though it was, unbalanced the slab and it rocked forward, then slipped and crashed to the ground at her feet, bringing with it a small avalanche of similar-sized pieces from further up the slope. The noise reverberated across the empty plaza.

‘Shi, Dara!' Jaran's curse echoed back from a thousand hard surfaces as he spun around and realised what had happened. ‘Be careful, will you? If one of these piles comes down …'

‘Sorry.'

He sighed, and the flush of anger passed almost as fast as it had arrived.

‘No, I'm sorry. Here, come and sit.'

They crossed to a small patch of shade below a couple of large plascrete slabs that looked relatively stable and sat down.

‘I should have explained to you everything Uncle Xani told me about the city,' Jaran said. ‘I guess I was too preoccupied with this …' He waved the plotter.

‘Don't worry about it.'

‘No, it's important. If something happens to one of us, the other needs to know how to get out again. The first and most important thing Xani drilled into me about salvaging was not to touch anything, unless you absolutely know what it is, what it's for, and if it's safe to even go near. We have to stick to the plotted routes and not go off exploring, keep noise to a minimum …'

‘Why?'

Jaran hesitated briefly before answering.

‘Two reasons. First, the obvious one: it's all pretty unstable. The big piles, which might look like they're solid, can come down at the slightest disturbance. Even loud noise can set off a fall. Xani told me he once saw an entire dome come down because of a thunderclap.'

‘And the other reason?'

‘Because …' He seemed to be weighing up how much to tell her. ‘Even though we're pretty certain the city's completely dead now, nobody knows for sure. There could still be … things … living here. It wouldn't be a good idea to attract their attention.'

‘What sort of things? Animals?'

‘Nah. Animals generally avoid the place, I'm told.'

‘People, then?'

‘Yeah. But not the sort you'd want to meet. Especially not on your own.'

‘Ferals?'

‘Worse.' He sighed. ‘Think about it, Dara. Anybody who's managed to survive this long in the middle of all this …'

He didn't finish. He didn't need to.

They sat for a few minutes more, then Jaran hauled himself back to his feet.

‘Let's move on, eh?'

Dara fell back into step behind him, and they continued deeper in towards the heart of the city. Around them the piles of rubble grew higher and they had to spend more time diverting their path around various obstacles. Here and there they passed vaguely intact buildings – square shells of concrete, much lower than even the rubble of the skydomes.

‘They must be the old city,' she told Jaran at one point.

‘Yeah.'

Eventually, they arrived at a long, straight and comparatively rubble-free avenue running between a series of intact buildings so high they cast the ground below into deep shadow. Stepping into the gloomy twilight in the middle of the day felt odd, and for the first time since they'd entered the city they encountered a breeze – a listless funnelling of air between the hollow building-husks, which did nothing to cool Dara and, if anything, increased the tension in her gut.

After perhaps half an hour, the alleyway abruptly opened out into a wide, paved area. In the centre of this, an intact domestem rose from the ground, reaching into the sky. At its top perched one of the last remaining intact domes in the city. Jaran and Dara craned their necks back.

‘Wow!'

There was a definite majesty about the dome, even in death.

‘Can you believe people built that?' Jaran asked, his voice little more than a whisper.

Dara shook her head. ‘It must have been so amazing to live all the way up there.'

Somewhere not too far away, a loud creaking sound broke the silence, and both of them tensed, half-expecting the dome to choose that very moment to topple and crush them. Nothing happened though, and after a moment they breathed out in relief.

‘Let's have a closer look.' Without waiting for an answer, Jaran set off across the open area towards the domestem.

‘Jaran …' Dara started to object, but stopped herself. She didn't want to get any closer to the old dome than they already were, but to tell Jaran that would only invite ridicule.

‘Come on, sis.' Jaran looked back at her. ‘We'll be quick. I just want to see what it looks like from right underneath.'

‘You were the one who was so keen on keeping to the path. Everything's potentially dangerous down here, remember?'

Jaran shrugged. ‘Perhaps in the closed-in alleys and near the rubble piles, but this area looks fairly stable to me. And there's nothing in the plaza to worry about.' He glanced back at the dome overhead. ‘I'm going to take a look. You can stay here if you want.'

With that, he headed off towards the base of the dome, perhaps three or four hundred metres away. Sighing, Dara followed. They stopped at the point where the domestem, wider and more perfectly round than even the largest tree, rose from the pavement.

From their vantage point the sun was blocked by the disc of the dome, casting the plaza into a kind of artificial eclipse and rendering the dome itself as a black, formless circle against the shimmering blue, a hole in the sky through which one might pass into who knew where.

Dara stopped a couple of metres from that alien, curved wall, but her brother walked right up and placed the palm of his hand flat against it.

‘It's cold,' he told her, sounding surprised.

Jaran worked his way around the diameter, trailing his fingers across the smooth surface while Dara followed a few steps behind. On the far side they stopped.

‘Look at this!' Jaran couldn't conceal the excitement in his voice.

Before them, set into the domestem, a set of rungs extended upwards, rising in a perfectly straight line directly into that distant, black disc. Dara followed them until her eyes began to water at the effort.