She got through straight away. No ads, no hold music, just a recorded human voice. We are experiencing unusually high demand for this feature. Due to the number of clients currently in the queue, we do not recommend holding at this time. Did you know you can access all your records —
When she hung up, her jaw was clamped so tight it hurt.
Rich said, Try again later, yeah?
It started to rain again and kept raining. They didn’t pass another vehicle or see any sign of life. No birds, nothing. But from behind New Flinders’ wall they heard the faint rise and fall of sirens. Sounds of emergency, as if the howler had wreaked havoc inside as well. It was a deeply strange idea. The wall Li carried in her head could repel anything; the real XB hadn’t even withstood its first howler. Nerredin had survived two of them. But then, Frank always said the XB hadn’t been built to keep Weather out. It was built to keep unwanted people out of places the builders couldn’t even imagine Weather reaching.
New Fingers, she said, remembering.
What’s that?
That’s what Matti called it. What she thought it was called.
It struck her that right now, while things were chaotic and scrambled, might be the best chance they’d ever have to slip through the gaps. She looked at Rich, his hands easy on the wheel. Are you trying to get inside? Is that where we’re going?
Rich looked back at her like he hadn’t seen the question coming. What would I wanna be locked up in there for?
She remembered Chris asking her what she thought it was like inside. So where do you want to go?
He rolled his shoulders, cracked his neck. I met this woman in a roadhouse a couple of years back. Two years? She was with a mob that moved around, worked all over. He slowed to navigate a tree that had been ripped up, roots and all, from somewhere south and dumped here on the road. She said they were looking for a medic, so I hung onto her number. I was heading to meet up with them when I got pulled into Transit. Reckon I might see if they’re still out there.
Li said, Why didn’t you go with them two years ago?
Two years ago I had other stuff to do. How about you? Where are you gunna start?
She looked out through the rain on the windscreen that made the scoured plain around them seem dim and far away. I don’t know. If she’s alive, she could be anywhere.
That’s a lot of places.
Li said, What the girl was talking about on the video, where those kids were trying to get to, the best place? That’s what Matti called the Deep Islands. It’s where she thought she’d be safe. Where we’d wait for her, if. She waited for the searing in her throat to pass.
You’re heading across the range, then?
She nodded, slowly.
He considered it. There’s Permacamp on the other side, massive sprawling thing. It’s an Agency camp, they keep records. Be the first place I’d look.
She was careful with her thoughts, still, but not the way she had been before. She didn’t believe Matti was alive, not really, but she had been alive long enough to drag a bunch of other kids into the Best Place game. Maybe she was still alive when Li went into Transit. She didn’t turn away from the pain of that, she’d done enough turning away. The range in the cold season was nature’s XB. Heavy rain, flashfloods, slips, probably snow. That’s what Matti would have faced if she’d got that far. But trucks still crossed through the cold season and one of them had stopped for Lavinia. The chance was small but it was real.
They followed the curve of the wall until they were travelling due east. She’d never been this close to an XB. It looked like people had said, except for the chunks taken out of the top here and there, like missing teeth. A long way ahead the range was in view, blue-smudged and tipped with white. She’d seen it sketched on the far eastern edge of her map but with no sense of its scale. All the walls did was keep people out. The range split the continent. She looked at it and her whole body trembled. Had Matti had seen it? Had she walked towards the mountains and imagined the other side?
Looking away, she caught something in the wing mirror. Something bony and hollow, one side blotched darker than the other and pulled tight. It was her face. Stubble on her head, grey-streaked, her eyebrows ragged and half-grown. The eyes were difficult to look at. She felt a stab of grief at what was gone and what was left but she made herself look until she recognised this face.
At first the radio was mostly static but then she found a station that was covering the howler. There were unconfirmed reports of damage inside New Flinders, casualties. She sifted through the frequencies, hungry for these calm voices presenting their arguable facts, after two and a half months without news. The official Source station was reporting that the howler had come up off the Southern Ocean. High category. A state of emergency in South-West. Contact with Valiant had been patchy since it hit. She wondered if Teresa and
