Shelaid her head down on the pillow and smiled. “Don't worry, I think I am ready to die.”
“No,” David said. “No, you are not.”
“There's enough of the gel to keep her together,” Kara said. She looked over at David. “But not enough for the both of you.”
“I'm all right,” David said. “I'm all right. Buchan, we need to go, and now. She's dying.”
He said, “David, I give you my word, I will get her there in time. I may have not been able to get you out of Hardacre, but I can get you out of this. I know the way to the Underground.”
And so does Watson, David thought.
Buchan said, “And it's where we are heading, as far as I know it is the only place where there might be food and supplies, and doctors. We've maps and charts, and the instruments on this ship are more than up to the task — and though the landmarks are for the most part gone, the mountains are hard to miss.”
“So is that storm,” Kara Jade said, nodding towards the dark snow-filled clouds rushing towards them. “If we stay here, we're dead. If we fly into that…”
“Optimism is a virtue in such instances, Miss Jade. I would suggest we hold to our course and think only of what lies beyond the storm.”
Part Five
The Underground
CHAPTER 54
Monteroy Bleaktongue breathed raggedly. Though his wounds were not fatal, he had been worn down by them. His bones seemed anxious to break the surface of his flesh. He'd become a creature of angles and pained breaths — a caricature of geometry. “Mr Grave, don't you see? You have failed. We have failed. Everything is undone.”
Travis the Grave shook his head; blood stained his teeth, and bubbled in time with his breaths, and he knew he had too few of those left now.
“Monteroy, you’re wrong as usual. Endings, they are just beginnings. And until the great engines of the universe run down, it will always be so. And who's to say what will happen after that greatest ending of all? No, Monteroy, there are no endings. Not even the cage of our flesh can make it so.”
THE UNDERGROUND
It had been Grappel's idea to set up the floodlights in the snow: sweating beacons aimed into the sky.
“We've no reason to hide now,” he'd said to Medicine from his cot in the infirmary. “Let those who remain find us. The more bodies we have the better.”
It was sometimes hard to believe that the world had suddenly changed so much. Here in the Underground it was still all business, all struggle, but it had been that way for years. Though the urgency was gone from it, and the fear. The Engine had turned, the worst had come, and they were still alive.
Beyond the great iron gates the old world was gone. Sometimes, in the day-to-day business of the Underground it was a struggle to remember that. Thousands upon thousands had died, but it was still all so abstract. And when Medicine tried to bring it in, frame it with faces and friendships he had had, it became too painful. David was gone, and Agatha. There’d been no word from Hardacre, so they had to assume the worse there.
Better to focus on what lay ahead, on the many tasks that had to find resolution, so that many thousands more wouldn't die as well. But sometimes he took himself out to the lights. To remember and honour what had happened. Most nights there was a crowd at the outer wall, standing, craning their heads to watch the coruscating tubes, and wait to see just what might come out of the darkness.
Because, nearly every day, since the lights had been activated, things came.
Medicine lifted his head towards the dim sputtering and the sharp fingers of light caressing the horizon. An airship. The third that day. And this ship he recognised.
“It's them,” he said. “It's the Collard Green.” And he knew that they would be on it.
The Collard Green landed, in an ice field aswarm with airships at mooring masts. Medicine did not know how long the ships could last without hangars, and there was no way that they could broaden the cavern mouth to the Underground- facilitating flight had never been part of the idea behind it. They were doing their best to construct covers, but the weather was horrible, even now, some days after the Engine's activation. Though the mooring masts were made of reinforced steel, one of the ships had already been taken away by the wind.
He knew he would have to negotiate with Drift — word had just reached them that there were survivors in that city, too — or they might as well let the ships rot. One thing he did know with absolute certainty was these airships would be the last of their generation. There simply wasn't enough cow gut to make the gold-beater's skin. There'd soon enough be pilots and airfolk with no ships to work.
Medicine thought of all that pent-up energy, all those pilots's egos. Yet another administrative nightmare to add to the menagerie.
But before then, once the worst of the storms had passed, the ships would be sent out. To Mirrlees and Hardacre to Eltham, and all the other townships, searching for survivors or at the very least, bearing witness to what had happened.
David clambered out of the airship, shivering as the cold air struck him; his face stung. Twice the wound had grown so horribly infected that Whig had had to drain the pus from it with a syringe. Kara had held his hand through that ordeal.
The flight had been awful; several times he'd thought they were going to die, despite Watson’s assurances that he could survive anything. Indeed, the look of horror on Watson's face (and echoed in Kara's) was enough to make such assurances null and void. What's more, the ship had constantly required clearing of ice, around the clock, done in shifts that even David had been unable to avoid.
And all the while he had suffered the pangs of Carnival withdrawal. The screaming aches, the nightmares, more savage and cruel than he could imagine. Once on the ropes he'd actually let go, only to be grabbed by Kara and bundled back inside.
“You're not dying on me,” she said. “No one dies on me. Not now.”
And still, when his time came around again, he staggered out and worked on the ice. The hard work ground away his thoughts. The wind cut through them all with a dreadful indifference. And Kara — finding him as some sort of project — found relief from her thoughts, too.
Margaret alone had stayed in bed. Sometimes she would speak, but no one was ever entirely sure that she was speaking to them. Once she demanded her guns, another time her mother. Kara looked after her, too. With a kindness and a sensitivity that David found surprising and utterly wonderful.
No one dies on me.
And no one had.
And now, after that, here were so many people, unfamiliar faces one and all, until he came to Medicine. David nodded towards him and tried to smile. The former leader of the Confluent party looked at him and David thought he was going to cry. There was a hesitation there, perhaps a guilt, but not fear. “You're safe,” Medicine said.
David nodded. “I'm safe.” He moved slowly, every part of his body ached, his face burned. “But Margaret…”
“Your friend?”
Two of Buchan and Whig's men were carrying Margaret out on a stretcher. Solemn and slow.
Medicine looked at the woman. “Infirmary, now,” he said, and sent a man to lead them there. David made to follow, except Aunt Veronica was hugging him, squeezing him so tight he thought he might break a rib. She stepped back and grimaced.
