have to go that way. What other choice do we have?”
He pushed past Alison and climbed up over the trunk.
The path led them down to a yellow stone road running along the valley floor. Eva slithered to the ground to find Alison and Nicolas already deep in argument.
“It’s been cut. You can see it’s been cut! And recently!” Nicolas shouted.
There was no denying it. The severed base of the tree shone white and smelled of sap. Piles of clean white sawdust lay in the brown mud around the stump.
“So what?” said Alison. “We’re in a forest. They cut down trees all the time.”
“Not individually! And they don’t just leave them to rot. It’s the Watcher. It’s reeling us in.”
He was blushing red with heat and anger, sweat dripping down from his curly red hair, mud cracked and dried on his jeans. He was a mess.
“Fine,” Alison said coldly. “All the more reason to toss the coin. Heads we go up, tails we go down.”
“Why? There’s nothing up there in the hills. We should head down and try and get to civilization. The Watcher already knows where we are.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” Katie interjected quietly. She blushed and looked down.
“She’s right,” said Alison. “We can’t give up now. Maybe the Watcher has covered all the bases. There must be a finite number of paths leading away from the Center. Maybe he’s laid signs on all of them, just to dishearten us.”
“No! This is too much. Alison, think! What were you in for? Not being able to face up to the real world. Don’t you see: that’s what you’re doing now. It’s beaten us. Why don’t you admit it?”
“We don’t know that.”
Slowly, deliberately, she pulled the coin from her pocket and spun it in the air. She caught it deftly, smacked it on her wrist, and looked.
“Heads,” she called. “We go up.”
Nicolas shook his head. “No. Not this time.”
“Suit yourself,” Alison said. She turned on her heel and began to march up the loose yellow stone of the road. After watching her walk twenty meters or so, Nicolas turned to face Eva and Katie.
“What about you two?” he said. “You must see that she’s wrong.”
Katie looked down at the ground. “We don’t know that. We agreed before we set out to follow the coin.”
Nicolas stamped his foot petulantly.
“I might have known you’d follow Alison. What about you, Eva? You know I’m right.”
Nicolas was burning red with anger; his face was twitching. Eva suddenly realized that, whether he was right or wrong, she didn’t want to go off on her own with Nicolas.
She shook her head gently. “I’m sorry, Nicolas. Katie is right. We agreed to follow the coin.”
“Fine. Suit yourself.”
He turned and began to stamp down the road in the opposite direction. Katie began to trail up the hill after Alison, who was making good progress with her angry, determined stride.
Eva sighed in resignation, and as she did so an enormous weight dropped from her. A realization was slowly dawning. Here she was, trapped in a long valley, hemmed in by overgrown rhododendron bushes, too hot, thirsty and hungry and with nothing to look forward to but a hard climb up a steep stone road, but…
But she wasn’t in South Street. She wasn’t part of the endless grind of days without purpose. Her friends might be argumentative and bad-tempered, but at least she had friends and she was walking for a reason. The South Street Eva would have just taken the first opportunity to lie down and die. It was what
But not this one.
This Eva wanted to live.
The end was drawing near.
They climbed the long road into the hills, Eva occasionally turning to check Nicolas’ progress. He remained in sight for quite some time, an obstinate figure in orange marching into and out of view between the choking rhododendrons-and then he was gone.
Their climb was a long, hard drag. Yellow stones skidded and skittered beneath their feet; they kicked them, watched them bounce over the raised edge of the road to fall into the wide ditches on either side.
“It’s a quarry road,” Katie explained.
“How do you know?” asked Eva, but there was no reply.
The hills began to play games with them. They would climb in silence, putting their all into one last effort to reach the top of an incline, expecting finally to reach the road’s summit, only to see a gentle dip and then the road resuming its ascent further on.
“Not again.”
Eva thought she heard the whisper as they reached their third virtual summit. It sounded like Alison’s voice.
The pylons to their left marched steadily closer. As they climbed higher she thought she saw a second set of pylons off to her right. They appeared to come marching out of the next valley along.
“They’re heading to the same place as we are,” she muttered to herself.
“What’s that?” asked Alison suspiciously, and Eva jumped. She hadn’t realized that Alison was walking so close. She had been watching Eva as she looked at the pylons, an odd expression on her face. It was almost as if Alison had been caught out.
Eventually they reached the real head of the valley, from which the road descended to a natural bowl among the wooded hills. Below them they could just make out a space that had been cleared.
“A quarry,” said Katie. “I knew it.” She looked at Alison, but Alison just looked away, as if embarrassed.
“It’s very big for a quarry,” Eva replied. “Look at all those buildings.”
The second set of pylons now marched clearly over a hill to their right and picked its way down a steep slope to converge with the lines of the first set. Eva looked up at the sun. It was halfway down the sky, heading toward evening. The earlier heat had vanished. Eva knew that when they stopped walking they would feel cold. Her skin already felt cool to the touch.
The stone road sliced its way through a deep cutting in the hills and they walked in the shade for a while. Looking up, Eva could see an old grey pylon perched immediately on the cutting’s edge, thick brown branches of rhododendrons wrapped around its legs and spilling out over the lip of the earth. Higher up, cables looped down from the heavy brown ceramic disks anchored to the pylon’s arms. They were humming.
“It’s live,” Eva whispered, suddenly halting. “I don’t like this, Alison. I think we should go back.”
Alison turned to her impatiently. “What? After we’ve come all this way? Don’t be silly.”
Eva looked on down the road. At the far end of the cutting, a few hundred meters ahead of them, stretched a rusty chain-link fence. The road ran through a rusty gate set in the center of the fence. The gate was propped open invitingly. Eva felt a shiver of fear. The gate looked like a trap, waiting to be sprung. Involuntarily, she took a step backward.
“I don’t like it,” she said. “It feels all wrong. We shouldn’t go in there.”
“What? Should we just turn around and go back then?” The other Alison was coming back. The nasty, bad- tempered Alison. And as she did, Katie was becoming more and more nervous and shy.
“So? Are you really saying we should go back?” Alison laughed nastily.
Eva took a deep breath and forced herself to speak calmly. “Yes. There’s obviously nothing for us here. No food or water. We can’t stay here.”
“Of course we can,” Alison said derisively. She shook her head and turned away, stamping down the road a little, kicking stones before her as she did so. She took a deep breath, kicked another stone so hard that it bounced from the scrubby walls of the cutting, and then suddenly turned and walked quickly back up to Eva. She wore a nasty smile.
“You haven’t figured it out, have you?”
“Figured what out?” Eva felt a shiver of fear. She could guess.