Night Witches (10 page)

Z
oya stares at me. ‘Shouldn’t we wait for orders?’

I shrug. ‘No keypads in a Storm . . . we can’t connect.’

‘We could ask Furey.’

‘Night’s over. Furey won’t let us leave now.’

Her mouth drops open. ‘
Go without permission?
’

‘For Henke. For Rill. We can’t just leave them there.’

‘But . . .’

‘If no one’s told us
not
to go, it hasn’t been forbidden. You don’t have to come. Stay here with everyone else.’

Zoya scowls. ‘You’re my cousin – you’re
family
. I won’t let you go alone. My father said . . . your papi said to keep an eye on you.’

‘If we’re going, we go now . . .’ Before habits of logic, reason and normal obedience kick in.

I suppose because Storms have been buzzing around all night, no one really registers our engine noise until we’re already bumping along the runway and our wheels are off the ground. What can they do? Shout at us? Yes – violently. Shoot at us? No – thankfully.

I force the Storm up into the brightening sky and back towards Sorrowdale. It’s outrageous, I know. So is dying young, when you should be playing music, or studying for school, or hanging out with friends, or just being
alive
.

I don’t really need Zoya to navigate, not with this nagging, dragging need pulling me back to the bomb-zone, but I’m hugely relieved she’s with me, even if she blisters my ears with worries –
Have I gone completely disconnected . . . Do I realise how much trouble we’ll be in when we get back . . .

The Storm cuts through streaks of black smoke to circle the town. It looks like the Crux aren’t the only invaders – forest plants are rampant in the ruins. Sorrowdale used to be civilised. Now rambling bushes of thorn-vines curl round ugly mounds of bomb-mangled traptions, and trees send out spores with every sway of their branches. It’s oddly wonderful to see a once winter-bound forest spread out for a spring revival, even if it’s not at all normal for trees and plants to grow in towns.

I pick a field and we land with no more than the usual jolts. The early spring biofood crops have been slashed then burned by Crux soldiers. I taxi over the stubble to where new woods will shade the plane a little. The propeller blades slowly stop.

Silence. I close my eyes and smell the air – ashes, explosives, death and defeat. And something else.

Expectations.

‘There’s no one left,’ I say. No one alive, at any rate.

A breeze rustles the broken crop stalks. I’ve a crazy urge to bury my hands in the soil to feel if new life is sprouting from forest spores. When I look down at my palms I see faint red marks from where the bomb wires cut my skin to ribbons last night. The gashes are almost completely healed, despite the fact I never thought to spray medicine on them. Has Zoya noticed? She’s just looking shocked we’re even here.

Any other day, any other place, the morning light might seem cheerful. Now the sun is a great eye watching us as step by step we cross the burned field to town. Where are the foodlanders who once tended these crops? Where are the trucks that once hummed down these streets? That school there, where are the children and their screens? Who last shut that yard gate, tended that withering bioweave, played with that deflated ball?

Zoya whispers, ‘They were all evacuated, weren’t they? Our people, I mean – they did get out of town before Crux came?’

‘They all got away safely,’ I whisper back as Aura isn’t here to answer, and who knows – it might be true.

We walk on, round rubble, bomb craters and Crux corpses, one careful footstep at a time. I wish Sorrowdale didn’t have this faint feeling of
familiar
about it.

Zoya’s got her scarf pulled up over her face against the stink of death and burnings.

‘Our bombs did all this?’ she asks in a hoarse voice. ‘You couldn’t tell from up in the air. If I was a scientist I’d figure out a weapon that could just pick off the enemy all nice and neat without this . . . this mess. My father’s always saying it would be a much more logical way to win a war. It’s what all his research is about. Everybody would be so much better off, don’t you agree?’

She peers at me like a Scrutiner.

‘Sure. These corpses are disgusting.’

I suppose if I were Steen right now I’d be scanning mottled faces, looking for people I knew.

I ask, ‘Do you reckon Steen Verdessica has any family or friends in the war?’

‘Who cares?’ replies Zoya. ‘If he does they’ll all be dead soon, or prisoners like him.’

‘I wonder if they know he’s alive?’

‘What’s it matter? He’ll be executed as soon as he’s stopped being useful for the squadron, if he even is any more. I don’t know why they let him hang around. Anyway, why are we even discussing him? Shouldn’t we be looking for something to dig with?’

That’s true. We’ve got friends of our own to seek out. First I ask, oh-so-casually, ‘So what’s that you said about my family living in Sorrowdale once?’

‘It’s true. I heard my father talking about it with some Scrutiner man who came round, a while back. It was just after the Eclipse. You were still a baby.’

‘I never knew. Where . . . where do you think we lived?’

Zoya stands on a door in the middle of a street, hands on her hips. ‘Take your pick – they’re all ruined now.’

The only sign of life is the sudden swoop of a solitary corvil. It settles on the roof of a half-ruined house at the far end of the street and begins preening.

Black feathers drift through my mind. I shake them away. They won’t be shifted.

We walk on, wafted by eddies of spring spores. Hyper-aware, I can count each one, well into the tens of thousands. Most will fall and die. Some will root and thrive; some will root and be weeded. That’s the way it goes. We survived the night; Rill and Henke didn’t. Life is life.

Rain . . .

My name comes blowing over the burned fields. I twist round, scaring a whole flock of corvils now lined up on the guttering of the end house. Who’s there? Who’s calling me? It’s an ancient voice – the tremor of an old woman.

Rain . . .

I seem to hear footsteps running along Sorrowdale’s streets. Prayers from a god-house. Mama’s voice reading the bedtime screen –
Look, Rain, look at the wicked wolves waiting in the forest . . . Always be a good girl, Rain
.

Reaching the end house I imagine Mama’s here, in the open doorway, with me wrapped tightly in her arms –
Welcome back, my baby, my precious sweeting. I promise I’ll never lose you again.
She takes me into the kitchen where I smell a fresh batch of spring cakes, hot from the oven. On the tree branches in the yard yellow paper suns are smiling and turning on their strings.

There, that’s where Papi sat, looking at me with a mixture of joy and confusion once I’d been rescued.
Rescued from what?
There, that’s where I was set once, in a beautiful bioweave cradle with a blanket that smelled of some other baby.
Who?
Over there, that’s the window where Mama watched me as I played in the yard at the back of the house . . . making sure that the forest didn’t come to steal her child again.

All illusions, of course.

There’s a shed at the end of the yard. I yank the door open and yelp as a rustle of furry rablets run for darker corners. I spot a spade – made for gardens, not graves.

‘Pip?’

I almost leap out of my skin. ‘Zoya! You nearly gave me a heart attack.’

‘You went off without me and didn’t answer when I called.’

She’s standing outside what would have been a kitchen, looking through the gap where a yard door would have been. Crux soldiers have obviously scoured the place for food or fine things. Cupboard doors swing open on to emptiness. A hateful white god-cross has been slashed on one wall, like an obscene kiss.

‘Sorry, I was . . . looking for a spade. I got one.’

Zoya scuffs her boots in the mess on the floor. ‘This place is dead. Come on. Let’s get this over and done with.’

We find the wrecked Storm soon enough. Find Henke and Rill. Find the courage to pull them from the burned wood. Zoya’s sick until she’s got nothing left to heave up.

‘Where shall we bury them?’ she hiccups.

‘The old god-house is close. There’ll be a body-field next to it.’

I know where the god-house is without even looking – how abnormal is that? I can see, without needing eyes, the street leading to the burial plot, except in my memory the body-field isn’t edged with a brittle lattice of modern bioweave. In my memory, bulky bushes of some nasty plant guard the bodies of the dead. The word
feybane
sneaks into my mind.

Now these bushes have been uprooted, but narrow wires of red metal still criss-cross the cemetery, dividing rows of grave markers.

Zoya kicks some of the metal. ‘I read about these, or Rill told me, or someone did. They’re more of that bane-metal stuff. Meant to keep witches away.’

‘No such thing . . .’

‘ . . . as witches.
I know
.’

I start digging, careful not to trip over the wires. The sun is unfairly hot for this early in spring. Heat, effort and emotion make me feel sick inside and out.

The nearby god-house casts shade, but not on us. I’m surprised it’s still standing. Most were pulled down once people learned from Aura how to think properly. They were converted into food stores or schools. Standing here now, looking at the garlands of paper prayers Crux have pasted round the door, I think I remember the day the witch-warning bells came clanging, ringing, falling down, leaving dents on the cold, stone floors. Trucks took them away because there were no such things as witches, so no need to warn against them.

Are these real memories or is it the sun? The trauma? Should I have kept the bane-metal charm Papi wanted me to have for protection? What if there really are witches? What if they’re waiting for me, just on the edge of common sense and science?

Rain . . .

Spores make me sneeze – a welcome distraction. Keep busy, that’s the best answer. Dig.

Our hearts are heavy as we hack into the wet ground to make a final resting place for Henke and Rill. I hardly knew them, apart from the last, intense days of training together. We never messaged. I never took Henke up on his offer to learn some balika tunes. Never asked Rill what sort of stuff she liked connecting to. Now he won’t play music ever again and she won’t churn out bad jokes. We may have given them the respect of a burial but it seems horrible just to leave them in the ground, alone and unknown.

‘Can’t we put something with them? Some goodbye present?’

Zoya frowns. ‘Sounds a bit Old Nation. What would Aura say?’

‘Aura doesn’t work here any more.’

I notice a tangle of thorn-vine bushes crawling up one side of the god-house. The warmth of the sun has made their buds burst open into flame-coloured flowers, and there, alone in a bed of twigs, is a speck of glossy black – a baby bird with a miniature beak and fluffy feathers sprouting. I hear a whirr of wings and the grip of talons on branches. Too late I remember what Reef said about corvils killing to protect their kin, but the birds higher up on the vines don’t attack. They’re watching me, seeing what I do next.

I pick four of the thorn-vine flowers, one for each eye socket. I can’t explain why. Then we say
goodbye-and-go-well
to the brother and sister.
Goodbye and go where?
I wonder. Steen would say something like,
The dead are gathered to the lap of the Light Bringer
. Aura would send intricate explanations of how the body is broken down through decomposition and its molecules recycled into the surrounding ecosystem.

I’m sure Henke would’ve liked music, but my voice is dry. It will not sing, despite the tune I’ve got going through my head with snatches of lyrics –

Light the white light, burn the red flame;

Blows the wild wind, snuffs all out again . . .

Who used to sing that dismal song to me?

Rain . . .

Zoya steps over the bane-metal and starts heading towards the fields. ‘We should go. The Crux could come back . . .’

I’m right behind her when down from the sky comes a flurry of feathers and claws, straight at me. I cover my face. Feather-tips brush past and there, when I look down, is the baby corvil, set at my feet. It peeps at me. I step over it. Two corvils swoop again, driving me back.

Zoya takes off her cap and starts flapping it at them. She looks so funny I can’t help laughing. The whole joke goes on until I scoop the baby bird into my cupped palms. Then the corvils fly away.

‘You’re not keeping that,’ Zoya says.

I run the tip of my forefinger over the bird’s shining head. It peeps again. ‘Life is life,’ I say.

‘Can I stroke it?’ she asks. ‘Ow! It stabbed me with its mouth!’

‘It’s called a beak, I think.’

She glares. ‘Beak, then. I’m bleeding!’

‘It’s only a little cut. It’ll be fine.’

‘Since when did you train as a medic? Right about the time you started stealing planes and kidnapping me?’