Chapter Seventeen

The Beginning of the End of the Road

‘He’s not happy, you know,’ Merry said as she ushered Ariea into the loading bay of the warehouse they had made their lodgings.

‘I don’t really care what Oxford thinks to be honest,’ she replied. ‘You and Memphis, you—?’

Merry waved her away. ‘Oh, we’re on your side. That poor girl.’

‘Sounds there’s a lot of that going around. All those kids.’

‘I can’t believe it though- Winter. They’re still out there.’

Ariea shrugged. ‘I’m just glad it seems like they’ve given up on…’ She gestured through to the shuttered bay adjacent where Agloff was probably sleeping. Merry nodded and led Ariea onto the warehouse floor.

Oxford Blue stood haggard, with his back to her, his thinning arms clasped by his knuckles. The low light from the window cast a long shadow to where Ariea stood. Memphis and Lady watched, perched from a container across the floor.

Ariea had no care for what Oxford would say: She was reckless and threatened their safety; Tails was an agent of Winter. Or some such other.

Ariea stared at her toes as Oxford prowled. Her features stonewalled. She imagined a ghostly look in her eyes, where Oxford’s words might pass right through her.

‘I said two hours!’ he whispered, waited, but Ariea brought no rebuttal. ‘Well?’ She could sense his disgust; the flare of his nostrils, the pointed shrug of his shoulders.

‘You know the routine,’ he continued. ‘You get what you need. You come back. You don’t sightsee. You don’t get distracted. We unpack, we rest, we pack up, we move… Until we are sure they’re not coming for us. Don’t you get it?’

To every utterance, Ariea planned her rebuke but what was the point. He was the one that didn’t get it. ‘Sorry,’ she feigned.

‘Sorry? Sorry does nothing for the rest of us! You were stupid staying out that long! What if someone saw you? What if there’s Winter still here? We do the minimum, and no more.’

Ariea looked up. Oxford’s face was feral, his hair overgrown in his long coat that he was slowly shrinking into. ‘We’re not your soldiers,’ she said. ‘You don’t get to take it out on us.’ Her quiet voice scattered on the rush of cold air blowing in from the outside.

‘How dare—’ Oxford’s mouth opened for another scolding but was interrupted by the trudge of lazy footsteps. Ariea turned. Agloff was watching on from the doorway, arm enslinged.

‘Tell Oxford why, Ariea,’ Merry encouraged.

Ariea shrugged and moved stiffly to sit on a container, resting her joints against the cold. She tugged off her gloves and pointed at a chair for Oxford to relent. He obeyed, and Ariea obliged.

She recanted every word Tails has said; the lengths her and Heads had gone to elude Winter, the legends surrounding Eron and the Underground, Agloff and Jask, Winter and the Departed; a Colony that had mythologised itself in the ruins of its ancestors, sleepwalking in search of its saviour. Oxford sat through it all, his features pensive. Every time Ariea paused he combed his fingers through his matted mane as if it helped him to think.

‘It was stupid to get that close to her,’ Oxford said finally. ‘Girl had goddamn fever.’

‘Hey!’ Agloff stepped forwards. ‘Cut her slack. She got more out the girl that any of us would have done or have found out. She did good.’ He passed a look to Ariea. She nodded in appreciation, though she sensed her gratitude was misplaced. Agloff had heard Tails’ tales, of the sickly boy at Eden under Jask’s watch. His dream still burned, maybe brighter than it had in the Underground.

Ariea tugged on the cuff of her sleeve. The flesh was unbroken and youthful. ‘See, not infected. It’s only infectious close to death. I’m curious, not dumb.’

‘Where I’m from there isn’t much of a difference,’ said Oxford. ‘She could have worked for Winter.’

Ariea rolled her eyes. ‘Where you’re from, you just follow orders. Sounds pretty dumb.’

Oxford stood. ‘You have no idea, do you? What I went through.’

‘You disrespected her; she spent her last hours with me. And your reply is, “what if she’s a spy”. You think we’re too dumb to make our own minds up about shit.’

‘I never said—’ Oxford stooped his neck. ‘It’s hard for me, right. I have a very organised way I do things, and now I’m just making everything up as I go, and, hard as it might be to believe, I am looking out for you. Yeah, I’m a dictator sometimes—’

‘Or just a dick,’ said Memphis.

‘Do I get no sympathy?’

‘You’ve got all our sympathy,’ Merry said. ‘But considering each of us has gone through the same and we’re managing not to make each other miserable.’

‘So, this is my thanks for getting you all out alive?’

‘Your thanks was us not having this conversation three weeks ago, when you threatened to leave Agloff in the Underground.’ Ariea said coolly.

Oxford raised his hands. ‘So, what d’you want us to do?’

Ariea felt the room’s gaze tightened around her. ‘Right now, we’re blind. We have no idea where we are, or where we’re going. If we don’t plan, eventually we’re gonna trip up; be at the wrong place at the wrong time. We do what Tails did, till we’re out of Winter’s reach.’ The room stayed silent for a time, and Ariea wondered if she might have said something mad.

Oxford’s eyes then narrowed. ‘Agloff’s still not right. We’re just gonna… wander round, and you’d expect that to get him better? Further we go, the deeper we’re going into Winter. If they still care about him, they’ll have a picture somewhere. They’ll know what Agloff looks like.’

‘So, we never stay anywhere long enough for people to notice,’ Memphis interjected. ‘The Underground wasn’t guarded when we left. Who’s to say we didn’t escape years ago, live our lives, and die.’

‘You’re being very quiet.’ Oxford turned to Agloff.

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‘I agree with everything they’re saying,’ Agloff said. ‘So long as I don’t get left behind, I don’t mind what we do.’ Ariea detected a flicker of rage flash in Agloff’s face, only to dissipate. Oxford twitched involuntarily, but he held his calm.

‘We get maps,’ Ariea said with a finality, nodding as if to assure herself as much as the others. ‘Find out all we can, and we plan our way out this shithole.’

*

Their final days in Block Seventeen were quieter than those that had come before. The air carried a tension, a silent determination that they were about to do something. Each of them, including Agloff, made a concerted effort to pick the last of the Block clean. If there was anything left to take, they may as well take it. Food was split into rationed bags for each of them, along with a few medical supplies to share and a satchel of knives and assorted tools. Oxford went to look for horses that might have eased their way over the snowy terrain that defended Seventeen. Alas, the stables were emptied in the evacuation, and for a mile’s scout ahead, upon the hills that sloped upwards from the city walls, Oxford could spy no lurking villages or settlements where he might have bartered their scant possessions for three Arabians.

Ariea, meanwhile, had raided a stack of maps from the library two roads down the hill. Dumping them on one of the warehouse crates, she spread the furled edges of the canvases out in front of her, each in varying shades of off-white. Some were printed, others drawn out by a meticulous hand, many dating back centuries. She layered them by date, with one even predating their departure from Backwater, and charted a course through the history of Colony Two with her finger.

‘Pretty, aren’t they?’ Merry stood over her.

Ariea was distracted. She flickered through the pages, to see Fort Backwater marked on the earlier sheets. It vanished from the map some five hundred years ago. She drew her finger across its absence. And her mind fell back to a more idyllic time. Meandering patrols along the plantations with her dad and Agloff, and dodging through the uneven streets with Kally, Maegen and Penelley on their daily escape from the Factory.

‘I’m okay,’ Ariea said, pre-empting whatever it was Merry was thinking.

‘It’d be fine if you weren’t,’ she said with her placid smile. ‘We all lost a lot. You know if it weren’t okay, I would always listen. Or we could go on walks, just into the wilderness a little bit.’

Ariea said nothing but she stared at Merry with a grateful grin. ‘We’re here,’ she began, pointing at a blot on the map. ‘Block Seventeen.’ She traced the tip of her finger across the map with her train of thought. They were someway east of the Underground, more easterly than Backwater even, and still on the cusp of Lake Principia. Ariea to’d and fro’d between past and present, noting the steady bulge of Winter’s borders till they consumed the bulk of the Colony: pencilled across the maps was the word “Winterland”. The only free regions were a band along Principia’s east coast. She knew those settlements: Fort Wishbone and Spear the largest, either side of a forest called “Erwood”. To the south were mainly mining settlements, on the cusp of the Scourgelands. She imagined them arid and vile. Third, much closer to Eden, but guarded by a row of mountains called the Silver Blemishes was Arwa County. It looked peaceful; the towns all had cute names, and there were lakes and rivulets, and she imagined rolling pastures of grassland and forest between them.

‘There’s a way up the coast,’ Merry said, noting the same route Ariea had seen, along Principia’s easterly shores, towards Wishbone. ‘We can go along there, stop off at one of the larger towns and then keep heading north.’ Ariea thought the same: to journey via Wishbone or Spear to circumvent Winterland all the way to Arwa County, where they had a mountain range between them and Eden.

One-by-one, the others convened around her. It was like they waited for her to declare where they were going next. She wondered how she had talked herself into usurping Oxford as their leader.

She painted them her view: from the block to Wishbone or Spear, then on to Arwa County, all the while never laying a toe in the grasses of Winterland. They sat and nodded to her explainer in a captive silence. But equally distant. As if greater thoughts were turning through the cogs of their minds.

‘I have an idea,’ Agloff said eventually, and Ariea sensed those greater thoughts were about to come to the fore.

At that, all five faces turned towards him.

‘Fort Wilder,’ he said, gulping. ‘It’s on the way north, along the coast… and it’s… where my mum was going. Marty said so.’

Ariea heard her eyes roll. ‘Agloff!’ she groaned. She paced menacingly where they stood. ‘It’s gone on enough. It was eight hundred years ago. What makes you think there’s anything there to find? What makes you think Wilder is still even there?’

Agloff poked a finger at a tiny dot on the map. The ink dubbed it “Fort Wilder”. Ariea hastened to flicker through the sheets and noted the speck of Wilder disappeared from the maps some three hundred years ago. At once, her breathing calmed.

It didn’t exist anymore, she told herself. It was gone. So, there was no harm in going, right? She could indulge him this time. This last time.

‘I need to know!’ Agloff pleaded. ‘You don’t know what that’s like. Never knowing why they went. If there’s nothing there… then, it’s the end of the road. Wilder was the one lead I had from Marty. That and three names: Malvo Jask, Abbadiah Thawn and Tomas Wise. If Jask’s still alive, if he still gives a damn about me, then there’s still something to know.’

‘I can’t…’ Ariea breathed. Agloff was so deep in this hole he was blind to all else. It consumed him. His injury made it worse somehow.

‘If I find something, I might find Eron. He’s still alive. I’ll go to Eden. I’ll kill Jask.’

Ariea scoffed, turning her back. ‘Like that is not a thought that has gone through everyone-who-hated-Winter-ever’s head. It’s naïve. And you’re just going to walk up to Eden by yourself with no clue what it’s like, how? Bloody hell! This! This is why I was angry. Right here. Has it not occurred to you how we might feel about this grand plan of yours?’

‘It’s not like they’re gonna kill me. He wants me for something.’

‘Ever thought that might be worse than dying?’

‘Just Fort Wilder,’ Agloff begged. ‘Give me that.’

There was heavy silence. Everyone waited for someone else to say something.

‘Okay,’ Ariea said at last, utterly defeated. ‘Okay.’ What would he find there anyway?

Was he crazy, Ariea thought? Or was she being cruel to think he was? A silence hung around them, the six of them spread into a circle.

Oxford stood. ‘I wanna go to Eden. Winter took everything I had.’ He looked at Agloff. Ariea was unsure if it was an admission of wrongdoing. ‘What do I have to gain in going from town to town, just wandering about. It’s no life. I’m a misery to everyone. And I mean that sincerely. This is the closest thing to closure. I- I need catharsis. I need them to suffer. To hurt.’

‘I’d be lying if I said the idea wasn’t… appealing, to a part of me,’ Memphis added. ‘They took our home. Twice. They butchered the Underground.’ Lady quietly nodded beside him. ‘With Agloff, we could have a chance to fight for more than just ourselves. It’s about the whole Colony. I look at Lady and I think of those kids they steal. They need us.’

Ariea dropped to her knees. ‘If this was doable, would it not have been done already! Why is being alive not good enough?’ She thought of Tails, and the story of her sister who became infatuated with cutting Winter down, piece-by-piece. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

She was swimming upstream. Maybe it was better to let the current take her. Maybe it was their purpose. Why had Wilson chosen this moment for their survival? Like Tails, Ariea didn’t believe in God, but perhaps their lives were bound in more than circumstance, and this current was inevitable. She thought deeply. Perhaps the six of them were bound to Eden, as surely as they were bound to each other.

‘Difference between us and other people,’ Oxford said then, ‘is we have something they want.’ He turned to Agloff.

Ariea laughed a long and hollow laugh. ‘So, to be clear, before you wanted to leave him in the Underground, now you wanna use him to get to where, may I point out, they would shoot the five of us instantly, and take him. This idea has more holes than a sponge, or- or are you all not seeing what I’m seeing?’

Still, she fought that current. It pulled her, dragged her in twirling vortices of purpose. She breathed. It threatened to take her, like she might surrender all agency, overcome by some great and terrible purpose that was yet to reveal itself.

‘We would need a plan,’ she said. ‘We would need maps of Eden, information. We’d need to scope Eden out. For weeks, months. Maybe just to find a way in! We’d need people who actually understand Winter.’

‘There’ll be others,’ Oxford said vaguely. ‘Defectors. Winter won’t stand unchallenged. We just have to find them.’ He tilted his head, like a child in for a scolding from a parent. ‘I… I would- wouldn’t suggest it if Agloff didn’t want to go himself. And if I didn’t think there was a chance. I’ve hurt you all, I know that. I’ve been selfish. And how many people are under Winter’s thumb right now.’ He pointed past them, East, to Eden. ‘That there, dead or alive, that’s the cure. And not just for me.’

Ariea looked from Oxford, to Agloff, to Merry, to Memphis. Her will relented, defeated, and she let that current take her at last, on into some twisted future.

‘Bloody hell. Every one of you is mad.’