Daywards (10 page)

Nothing came, though. Only the hollow echo of the wind.

Jaran let out a low whistle. ‘It must go all the way down.' Involuntarily, Dara took a step backwards. The thought of falling into that long, black shaft wasn't a comfortable one.

‘What next?' she asked, and her brother looked around before pointing at the tower block opposite.

‘Let's check over there.'

They picked a careful path between the rubble. Dara was shivering slightly, but didn't know whether it was from the cold or the atmosphere. It was strange to think that hundreds, or possibly thousands, of people had once lived in here, had had their homes and families and lives enclosed beneath that massive clearcrete bubble, in much the same way that she and Jaran had theirs within the caves of the escarpment.

The building they were headed to seemed as deserted and empty as the other three. It was built onto the western wall of the dome with its back to the sunset and cast a long shadow across the common towards them. As they stepped into it, a thought occurred to Dara.

‘Do you think there'll be people in there?'

Jaran snorted, misunderstanding her. ‘People? Look at this place, Dara. There's nobody alive within kilometres of this place.'

‘I don't mean alive. Do you think there'll be … bodies?'

That thought made Jaran pause, and the mirth vanished from his expression.

‘Dunno. I doubt it, though. I imagine anybody left up here at the end would have taken their chances on the ladder. That's probably why the hatchway was left open – nobody inside to close it again.'

She still harboured doubts, but the answer seemed logical and more pleasant than the alternative, so Dara continued up the low steps with Jaran and entered the building through the remains of the front doors.

Beyond, they discovered a large lobby, littered with debris and rubbish, most of it unidentifiable. At some point a barricade had been thrown up to block access to the building's main passageway; a wall of broken and rotting furniture and twisted metal had been piled almost all the way to the ceiling, except in a couple of places where it had been torn aside.

The walls and roof and much of the barricade were scorched black.

‘What happened here, do you think?' Jaran asked her, and Dara suppressed another shiver, trying not to imagine the circumstances that might have driven the residents of the building to resort to piling their belongings up in such a clearly desperate attempt at defence.

‘Dunno.'

‘I'm going to have a closer look. You want to come?'

‘No.' Dara shook her head emphatically. ‘I'll wait outside.'

‘Okay. I won't be long.'

Her brother made his way across to the nearest opening in the barricade and Dara crept back out and sat on the building's steps.

The silence was broken only by the mournful wind, and thoughts of ghosts and spirits pressed at the periphery of Dara's imagination, so that she had to crush them down ruthlessly. It was everything she could manage just to stay calm.

Outside, the sky was now crimson, but the sunset was almost completely hidden by the bulk of the tower behind her. Only a slice of iridescent sky, glimpsed through the circle of dome directly overhead, was visible, and Dara shuddered at the thought of spending an entire life shut away from something as simple, as fundamental, as the sunset.

The wind gusted and somewhere a piece of wreckage began crashing repetitively against something else, the noise echoing. The first time it happened, Dara leapt to her feet, her heart racing. After a minute or two, though, the wind, and the noise, subsided.

‘Don't be a stupid shi!' she told herself. Clearly there was nobody and nothing up here that could hurt her. The main danger was from the state of the dome itself, rather than from anything living or dead.

Even so, when the ringing of Jaran's hurried footsteps floated from the gloomy foyer behind, she rose quickly, trembling like a hopper poised to take flight.

‘Let's go.' Her brother hurried past her without a backward glance. His face was ashen.

‘What's wrong?' she asked.

Without breaking stride, he shook his head. ‘Nothing. Let's just get out of here.'

Dara had never seen Jaran so spooked.

‘And go where? Jaran, stop!'

But her brother was already well out into the common, putting as much distance as possible between himself and the building from which he'd just emerged. Dara hurried after him.

‘Jaran, wait!' Her voice echoed back at her from a thousand hard surfaces and was whipped away by the moaning wind. ‘Jaran!'

Her brother didn't stop until he was well past the low building in the centre. When she finally caught up with him, she was amazed to find him trembling, his eyes wild.

‘What happened?' she asked, but he just shook his head.

‘You don't want to know, Dara.'

She reached out and placed a hand on his arm. His skin was cold and clammy and prickled with gooseflesh.

‘Jaran, tell me.'

‘No. I don't want to talk about it. I don't even want to think about it.'

There seemed little point in pushing further. Dara knew that if Jaran was determined not to talk then nothing she said or did would change his mind. Instead she changed the subject.

‘It's going to be dark soon. We should find somewhere to camp.'

Jaran nodded, grateful for the distraction, and some of the fear left his eyes.

‘Not the tower blocks, though. We should stay out of them.'

Dara left the obvious question unasked and made a show of looking carefully around, considering the interior of the dome. ‘Where then?'

‘Back underneath. Near the hatchway. We'll start down first thing in the morning.'

Dara didn't think that trying to make the jump on to the shelves in the dark was the best idea, but whatever Jaran had found in that tower block, it was obvious he needed to get as far away from it as possible.

‘All right, let's go.'

This time it was Dara who led the way, choosing a circuitous route that avoided the worst of the rubble and glass. It took them several minutes to climb down into the underfloor room, the shelves teetering precariously as Dara and Jaran carefully lowered themselves into the darkness.

Vague shadows of fallen equipment loomed out at them in the dull twilight. Immediately Dara decided that there was no way she was going to start groping around in the darkness, trying to find the exit hatch.

‘Let's just stay here below the door tonight. We'll find the hatch in the morning.'

Jaran agreed readily. After an unappetising meal of prosup, they made themselves as comfortable as they could on the hard plascrete floor. Beside her, Dara heard her brother's breathing gradually deepen as he succumbed to sleep, despite the discomfort and the cold and the constant howl of wind through the trapdoor. His slumbering bulk warmed her, reassuring, until eventually she succumbed also.

And when she woke several hours later, Jaran was gone.

‘Jaran!' Dara's eyes snapped open sometime during the small hours of the morning, instantly aware that something was wrong.

‘Jaran!' Her voice, at first a whisper, took on a new urgency as she hissed loudly, desperately, ‘Where are you?'

From the unseen edges of the room, her own voice floated back at her, and the horrible realisation set in.

He wasn't there.

She was alone in the dark, thousands of metres in the air.

‘Jaran!'

Dara shouted her brother's name with all the volume she could muster. Only the wind moaning around the dark room answered.

Her first instinct was to panic. Her breath tightened in her chest as the relentless press of fear clutched at her. Around her, she could feel the ghosts of the past – the ghosts of this insane womb into which she and Jaran had climbed – hovering about her, hungry, waiting.

‘Jaran!'

Somewhere at the very edge of her hearing, a long, soft creak echoed, the sound groaning off the circular walls with no direction or distance. Dara whirled around desperately, trying with no success to place the location of the noise.

‘Jaran?'

Then … silence.

The wind dropped; the constant, breathy moan faded to a hollow whisper and then to nothing. It was one of those strange lulls, when everything goes still and the universe seems to pause. Inside the dark room, Dara stood trembling and alert, the pulse of her heartbeat thundering in her ears.

And with the noise of the wind gone, the pressure of panic faded too. Dara breathed in several times, sucking the metallic air deep inside herself and feeling its icy touch ease a little of the tension from her chest and shoulders.

Jaran was gone. She was certain he wasn't down here in the lower room with her. That left two options: he'd either tried to make the descent on his own, without her, or he'd gone back up the equipment rack, through the doorway above and into the dome again.

They'd had their arguments in the past, but Dara was certain he wouldn't have just left her here. He had no reason.

Instinctively, without thinking, Dara closed her eyes and tried to pull up earthwarmth, to reach and locate her brother.

But this high in the sky, cocooned in the cold plascrete of a dead skydome, there was nothing there. Only a frighteningly empty coldness in which was contained all the distance and insubstantial emptiness of the sky below her and a deadening, complete absence of life.

Shivering, her mind assaulted by the sheer passivity of the skydome, Dara retreated back into herself and looked around, wondering what she should do.

If Jaran had indeed gone back up into the dome, he must have had a good reason. But she'd seen how spooked he'd been by whatever he'd found behind that barricade, and Dara couldn't imagine anything that might provoke her brother into leaving her alone while he returned up there on his own.

The only alternative, though – that he'd gone back down to the ground through the floor hatch – seemed equally, if not more, unlikely.

Calmer now, Dara sat in the darkness and allowed herself to puzzle it out. Jaran's behaviour was horribly out of character, even for him. But then, he'd been acting strange ever since Da died, so who could say what was going on in his head. Either way, without any light, and without any alternatives, there was nothing Dara could do but sit and wait. There was no point trying to climb up into the dome above on her own – she needed Jaran's help for that. Similarly, the prospect of scrambling around in the pitch darkness searching for the hatch in the floor was no more alluring now than it had been when they'd first descended from the dome.

Sighing, Dara stretched out on her back, staring upwards at the narrow, dim rectangle of light that was the only indication of the doorway above and clutching her shivering arms close around herself for warmth. After some time the wind rose again, though from a new direction, and took up a banshee wail that filled the darkness and took with it any prospect of sleep.

The hours stretched by and Dara passed them in cold solitude, her ears straining for even the slightest sound, the vaguest shuffle of a footstep over that droning, constant wind.

Finally she dozed and woke to find herself curled up in a tight ball, a gloomy beam of dull iridescence floating down from above. Daylight.

Outside, morning was approaching, the sky lightening and the resulting daylight casting just enough light through the doorway above to illuminate the rectangle of floor upon which, all those hours ago, Dara had settled to sleep next to her brother.

And there was still no sign of Jaran.

Dara sat for some time basking in the little warmth that was able to penetrate as far as her island of light. Around her, the rest of the low-ceilinged room was still hidden in shadow, except for the small, square doorway over on the far wall, which was beginning to glow brightly as the sun rose above the horizon, so far below.

It took some minutes for the full meaning of that lit-up doorway to dawn upon Dara, but when it did it settled over her with a sickening horror.

If the side-door was admitting sunlight, then surely by now the floor-hatch should be doing the same. By this point, it too should be lit up by the dawn outside – throwing a bright beam up into the room and lighting the way out.

But it wasn't.

Apart from the doorway above and the one in the side, not another single chink of light revealed itself.

Which could mean only one thing: Jaran hadn't gone back up to the dome above.

He'd simply gone.

And he'd blocked the way behind him.

Dara leapt to her feet and, on legs trembling as much with anger as fear, she forced herself to look around carefully, immediately noticing that a couple of things had changed.

Firstly, the equipment rack was no longer upright below the hatchway. It had been carefully lowered onto the floor again, and then pinned there below a plascrete beam which, even at a glance, Dara knew she wouldn't have a hope of moving on her own.

Secondly, sitting atop the rack, perched deliberately so that she'd find it, was a pile of about twenty prosup sachets, and propped beside the rack were two large containers of water.

So he hadn't left her here to starve then.

‘Jaran, you
shi!'

Furious, Dara kicked out at the equipment rack, but the only effect this had was to send a sharp bolt of pain up her leg and dislodge the pile of sachets, which scattered so that Dara then had to crawl around and gather them together again.

He hadn't left her with equipment to warm the food, and the only thing less appealing than eating nothing but prosup was having to eat nothing but
cold
prosup.

‘Shi, shi, shi,
shi
!'

The cursing solved nothing but, perversely, it made her feel better.

Settling on the floor, her back against the equipment rack, Dara massaged her foot, which still throbbed, then idly tore open one of the sachets and chewed on the bland contents while she waited for the light to improve.

As far as she could tell, she didn't have many options. She could try and find another way back up to the level above, but that wouldn't do her much good. She could sit and wait either for Jaran to return or for something else – she had no idea what – to happen. Or she could find the hatchway, and get down on her own, if she could.

It was obvious that her first step was to locate the escape hatch and see what Jaran had done to seal it. While she scraped every last skerrick of prosup out of its silvery packaging – there was no point wasting it – she watched as the room around her gradually emerged from the gloom and she allowed herself to wonder, calmly now, what in the sky Jaran meant by leaving her.

It was, she had to admit, the perfect trap. She couldn't get up to the top level, and so wouldn't be able to find any escape there, if there was such a thing. Even more telling, up here she couldn't reach into the Earthmother, and so she had no idea what Jaran might be up to. She couldn't track him, or try to call Ma Saria for help.

After she'd finished eating, Dara decided there was enough light to take a look around. Cautiously, she began to explore, examining the room closely.

She had a rough idea where the hatchway was – it had to be close to where the domestem rose in an enormous column through the middle of the room – so she made her way over to its shadowy bulk.

Outside, the easterly wind was still howling, and it might have been her imagination but a couple of times Dara was certain she felt the entire dome sway around her. She certainly didn't imagine the loud groans and occasional gunshot creaks that boomed through the eerie, dusty darkness.

Reaching the stem, she began searching in earnest, scanning the floor intently for anything: a square, discoloured section perhaps or even a tiny chink of light.

It was difficult, though. The room was so much darker than it had been with the hatch open and it was often too difficult to see anything much at all.

Finally, though, she found it: a square hatchway of dull plascrete set flush into the floor, with a round folding handle recessed into its surface. By the time Dara discovered the hatch, she'd already crawled over it three or four times, and would probably have missed it again but for the changing position of the sun outside, which was now casting a long, angular beam through the side door, revealing the slight relief at the edges of the hatchway.

Her heart pounding, Dara pulled the round handle out of its recess and hauled on it with every bit of strength she could muster.

Nothing happened.

No matter how hard she pulled, the hatchway didn't budge. Her eyes full with tears of frustration, she slammed the handle back into its cradle.

‘Jaran, you bloody shi!'

The curse echoed around the circular room, mocking her.

In the shifting light she noticed a thin smear of liquid along the back edge of the hatchway and, dipping a finger into it, found it to be oily and slippery. Jaran had obviously lubricated the hinges with some sort of tech before closing it, which meant that this had been planned all along.

Gradually, her ragged breathing returned to normal and, for the first time since she'd come to the realisation that her brother had left her here, she asked herself the question she'd been avoiding.

Why?

What in the sky would have possessed Jaran to do it? She knew he didn't particularly like her a lot of the time, but she couldn't come up with any reason for him to leave her like this. Especially here.

The only explanation was that Uncle Xani had put him up to it. And that, in turn, meant that Ma Saria was probably in a lot more trouble than Jaran had implied.

This thought drove her back to her feet, and she grabbed the handle again, giving it one more hard pull, to absolutely no effect. It was impossible, she realised. If he'd known enough to silence the hinges, then he'd have known how to lock the hatch, too.

Which meant there was no hope. None at all.

Resisting the temptation to kick at the stubbornly sealed hatchway, Dara took stock of her situation. Jaran had left a lot of food and water. Enough for at least a week if she ate and drank at her normal rate, and even more if she …

Where had the water come from?

Jaran had been carrying his pack with him, true, but when Dara had gone through it she'd noticed only a couple of small flasks, not the large containers now resting on the ground beside the equipment rack. Clearly the water, at least, had already been cached here when they arrived. And that suggested a whole range of possibilities she didn't like to contemplate. Like this whole thing was somehow … planned.

Dara pushed that thought aside for the moment. Jaran had left her supplied enough to ensure that she stayed alive for some time – she'd easily manage a fortnight, perhaps more, if she rationed herself. This meant that he – or somebody – was probably going to return and get her. And when they did, they'd be lucky if she didn't kick them off the ladder! Either way, she should expect a long stay.

The prospect of an indeterminate number of days trapped in the freezing gloom of the dome was too awful to contemplate. Sighing, Dara clambered through the wreckage towards the opening in the side wall. If nothing else, there was enough sunlight angling in through there to warm her up a little.

The hatchway, like the one in the floor, was a perfect square. She felt the chilly breath of the easterly on her arms and suppressed a shiver. The sun threw a long, intense rectangle of light into the room, and she bathed in it, allowing the warmth to wash some of the tension from her.

The hatchway was the opening to a small, square tunnel, which ran several metres through the thick outer wall of the dome. Ducking slightly, she peered through and was surprised to see what appeared to be a small balcony. If she wanted to see the view, she would have to crawl through the tunnel and stand out on that ancient, flimsy platform.

This was not a prospect that filled her with joy. Briefly, the memory of the dome as seen from ground level ran through her mind. From down there, the dome was so high as to be a speck at the top of that impossible stem. The thought of standing exposed at the edge of such a precipice sent a cold shiver through her.