Chapter Eleven

  The Diarist of Floor Three

  Ariea awoke on the ground, dust on her tongue. She spat and coughed in the shadow of soldiers stood over her. They guided her to her feet, gently. She looked at them, surprised, as they handed her a set of trousers, a shirt, and boots. Another soldier waited at the entrance to the pen with parcels of food.

  She turned to Eli who was slouched in the corner, already dressed, pale as milk but for heavy black rings round her eyes. The girl shrugged.

  Ariea said nothing as she was led to a tent to change, and the guard on-call told Ariea her clothes would be washed and pressed. She wondered if she were walking through a dream. The occupiers gazed at her, transfixed.

  It gave her status, Ariea thought, that she was born and raised on Earth. These others were colonisers and carried with them the weights and guilts of their ancestors. Their homes were seized. Their bodies and cultures were tainted goods.

  Lazily, Ariea then slipped into her new clothes, and stared at her face in a mirror suspended above her. Her freckled cheeks strained. Her brow creased and her dried hair was darkening with the seasons.

  She didn’t recognise that person.

  For a moment, she watched as a vision of Agloff drifted in behind her, and reached his arms over her, gorilla-like and swayed her body side-to-side. Ariea then held two fingers to the glass, whispered, ‘Miss you. Please don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. But that’s a stretch,’ she added with a weak smile. ‘I’m safe.’

  There was a shout from outside and Ariea silently obeyed, trudging into the sunlight in her new clothes. The boots were an improvement, she had to admit. At the end of the rows of crates and pens spilling over the fields, a truck was humming on a beaten path.

  The other prisoners were huddled onto benches on the back of it, all staring at their shoes.

  ‘You alright?’ Ariea said, nudging Eli by the shoulder as she sat.

  ‘Marvellous. Haven’t thrown up since you saw me, so that’s something.’

  ‘I wouldn’t talk about that so loud.’

  Eli looked down at her gut. ‘They’re gonna know sooner or later. Where do you think they’re taking us? Back?’

  ‘I can’t imagine they would be this nice to us if it was something good. I’ll look out for you,’ she added, stooping her head to look at Eli.

  ‘I appreciate the sentiment.’ She raised her chin, half-smiled. ‘You’re already better than my ex ever was.’

  Then, the truck shuddered into life and the bounces and undulations of the road rippled through Ariea’s body as the truck rolled onwards. But for brief stretches of broken tarmac, the way was bumpy and sickening, in the full blast of the sun. More trucks followed them in a large convoy, carrying equipment and personnel.

  By the sun, Ariea knew they were heading west. Soon, the air started to choke them in dust, while the shadows thinned into endless plains of rock and gravel. Even so, the ride was better than walking, and Ariea had walked these lands twice before, with Agloff, Merry, Oxford, Memphis and Lady. She recognised them well.

  ‘Four klicks east, Ma’am!’ yelled a soldier from the front of the truck. The cabin had its roof stripped back and their voices carried in the wind.

  There was a low thrum and a spotter drone glided over them, before rushing to altitude. The passengers watched it, mesmerised, while Ariea listened into the cabin.

  ‘There’s a settlement about halfway. Abandoned by the looks of it.’

  ‘What do we know about it?’

  ‘Not much. Subterranean. Sonar shows tunnels going down about a mile underground, some reach out quite far towards the crater, plumbing mostly. Drones found sediment in the base of the crater, so the area was likely flooded at some point. Locals must have pumped the land for water.’

  ‘We’ve dated the soil?’

  ‘Overnight. The evidence lines up with mission intelligence. Impact was about eight to nine-hundred years ago.’

  ‘We’ll stop off at this settlement. We can use their pipeline as a starting point before we start excavating. Would be useful to appraise the site in case there’s any usable intelligence there. Do we know how old it is?’

  ‘Can’t say until we’re inside it, Ma’am.’

  ‘Reasonable enough. You recommend we send a squad in to check it out?’

  ‘Deputy Li suggested otherwise. We use the local assets to canvas the place, in event of squatters and the like. Any skirmishes are easier to brush off then. Our hands stay clean, proverbially.’

  ‘Understood.’

  Ariea understood the fragments of their conversation. They were headed for the Underground, Colony Two’s greatest subterranean settlement, where she and Agloff had been a prisoner of Norman Fall, where its heroes had fallen to Winter. Now, it was less than a hollow memory, and one Ariea had hoped to leave here.

  She never imagined she would have to go back. Excavation, they said, of the crater. Ariea knew as well as the Confederacy did what caused it: Erobo. They were here for Erobo.

  This was their starting point; the impact eight hundred years ago when he first arrived. This was a dangerous moment. Ariea had to pretend she had never seen this place, to Eli, to the Confederacy, and to herself.

  She slid back in her seat, turned this information through her mind for the last kilometre, until the convoy ground itself to a halt in a plume of dust. When it cleared, Ariea could see the innocuous outhouse that guarded the Underground from the rest of the universe.

  A door jutted up beside it, discarded and half-buried in dust from where Oxford Blue had torn it from its hinges. The memory played through her mind in unsettling colour.

  Ariea hated this place. Anywhere but here.

  Never had she felt so alone, so suffocated as she did in that maze of tunnels. All of her fears were ghosts in this place.

  ‘Step down,’ the soldier in the cabin ordered them.

  Silently, the prisoners obeyed, organising themselves into a line. Next to them, a second truck of soldiers was being drilled to erect a row of tents and unpack equipment.

  They were shepherded toward the outhouse and watched by half a dozen soldiers. One squinted up at the arch of Cerberus across the sky.

  ‘It’s always watching you,’ a scrawny, elderly prisoner said to the soldier. ‘Does it make you uncomfortable, son? Your ancestors left this place a prison.’

  When the soldier didn’t reply, the old man chuckled hoarsely. ‘Cerberus is an old friend.’ He leaned closer, whispered. ‘But it’s your guilty conscience. We could have been up there, in the stars too. S’only ancient luck you’re the one standing that side with the gun. We had stories about you.’

  ‘You… You did?’

  The old man laughed a second time. ‘We imagined you gods, boy. And how disappointing reality was in comparison,’ he said.

  The other prisoners kept their heads bowed but the soldier seemed too unsure of himself to retaliate. He stepped back to his colleagues.

  A moment later, the woman from the truck cabin that had driven them here approached and gestured that her prisoners, eleven of them, Ariea counted, be strung into a line.

  ‘My name is Lieutenant Ullwick. The Confederacy of Colonies extends its… salutations, and its gratitude. We are deeply honoured to know you, to be amongst the first humans to return to Earth. You have our undying respect. Do not be alarmed, you’re not to be hurt or mistreated. This is not a permanent arrangement. We’re asking your help only. If anyone would like to leave, you are free to go.’ She gestured the rocky flats and shimmering heat haze on the horizon.

  That was a false economy, thought Ariea, to offer that choice after the journey there, as the sun beat down the backs of their necks. Predictably, no one moved, but Ariea could see the thought tempt them all the same. If it weren’t for Eli, Ariea knows she would have backed herself to make that journey, from here to Eden. She was young and fit and savvy.

  But the timing wasn’t right, not yet. The moment for that would come.

  Content no one was leaving, Ullwick continued. ‘Our objective is to excavate the crater two kilometres west of here.’

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  ‘Why?’ called the old man.

  ‘That’s immaterial. There’s a settlement underground on this site. We want to establish the extent to which the crater and this settlement may be connected. We would be thankful for your assistance as our teams begin excavation of the crater.’

  She paused a long time, waiting for one of them to leave. But none did. They all saw the impossibility of their situations. Obedience was the safest option.

  ‘We’ll be fed? Watered?’ the old man growled.

  Ullwick smiled. ‘Of course.’

  He bit on his thinned lips. His brow furrowed. ‘What d’you need from all of us?’ He put an arm around the prisoner next to him, a lanky man with a face like a horse.

  ‘Just to scope out the settlement, Mr…?’

  ‘Groughson. Hern Groughson. Just to scope it out? That’s all?’

  ‘That’s all, Mr Groughson.’ Ullwick beckoned a gaggle of her khaki-clad troopers to drop off rucksacks of equipment at the prisoners’ feet. ‘Everything you’ll need is there.’

  ‘Weapons?’ the old man said.

  ‘You can enter the settlement through the outhouse. You see anything you suspect is of use, strip it, bring it back, we’ll evaluate it. Proceed in pairs, cover as much ground as you can. We’ll provide you with radios for emergency use.’ She divided them up where they stood. Ariea was with Eli.

  So long as they brought something half-useful back, that would be fine, Ariea thought. Or at least something primitive natives could mistake for thinking was useful more like.

  Each pair scooped a rucksack and trudged single file into the Underground, torches at the ready. They punched into a plume of darkness and the air was chilled. Ariea waited for the other pairs to move on before she followed. She could feel her mind suffocating, her chest raised.

  ‘Scared of the dark?’ said Eli.

  ‘Something like that.’

  They passed down the lines and checkpoints where families were segregated, the cages that held those delivered to Winter by Fall’s regime, now long deserted. The way ahead was lit only by the guiding light of their torches. Mostly it was well-preserved, shielded from the elements. Occasional rooms and doorways had collapsed on themselves, rows of pipes were burst. Ariea felt the concrete ground dampen from where the land outside seeped in.

  They stopped where the passage bloomed into a large hall. Ariea couldn’t see how far back it reached, but the layout was vaguely familiar. She angled her torch at a row of crates, four stories high. Families had lived in those.

  ‘Don’t think anyone’s lived here for a while,’ said Eli.

  ‘I’m getting that impression.’

  ‘Must have been damn fine looking when there was.’

  ‘I can’t imagine,’ Ariea lied. ‘And she said it goes down a mile, heard her talking.’

  Eli rolled her neck back and stared up at the ceiling, watching motes of dust twinkle in the beam of her torch. ‘Woah. And probably hundreds of years old too. It lends perspective, I guess.’ She cupped her other hand over her gut and Ariea saw her smile at it.

  ‘Do you think you’re ready, for the baby I mean?’

  ‘My momma said you never are ready, so no. She will be though. For the world. She’ll be stupid and smart and funny and wonderful and perfect’ Eli looked down again. ‘I have this… instinct it will be a girl. You don’t think they’d take her off me, do you?’

  Ariea chuckled. ‘I wouldn’t let them.’

  Eli held her torch to Ariea and her gaze studied her. ‘I believe that. She barely exists and she’s already my lil’ hero. Keeps me straight.’ Then Eli swiped a hand at her eye. Ariea saw them glaze and glint in the torchlight. ‘It only feels half-real. How the fuck do you have a kid and look after it, every day? Forever? I don’t want that responsibility.’

  Ariea laughed and led Eli on deeper into the chamber, vaguely leading them towards one of the Underground’s mazy staircases. ‘I don’t even know how to choose what I’m eating from one day to the next.’

  They descended onto the next landing, which was identical to the first. The crates were in their places, rows of pews divided the mess hall from the rest of the plaza, and the air was heavy on their lungs.

  There was one distinction, however.

  ‘Shit,’ whispered Eli.

  At the heart of the plaza, the ground had given way to the next floor in a hole ten metres wide. Vines and moss grew around the fringes of the hole, creeping over the plaza like a slow infection. Ariea shone her torch over it. She could spy the plaza of Floor 3 below.

  Fixtures and fastenings were buried in the rubble.

  ‘We should get down there.’

  ‘I’m not bloody jumping,’ yelped Eli. ‘What are they even expecting us to bring back?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe they just want to break us in. Keep us busy so we don’t run off.’

  ‘Well we can’t go down the stairs.’ Eli gestured back the way they had come where the path downwards was barricaded by rubble. Ariea knew there were other stairways but thought better than to say as much.

  ‘Let’s see what they gave us then.’ Ariea slackened her bag straps and dug into the toys the Cons had given them. She chucked a pocket knife at Eli. ‘How trusting of them.’ Then pulled out an orb of some sort, clicked a button on the side. At once, it burst alight, brighter than any light Ariea had seen. She set it rolling down the plaza and the entire floor was caught in a silvery glow. Next, she dug out a small tablet, with a lens on one side. ‘Cameras?’

  ‘The high and mighty Departed,’ laughed Eli. ‘Heard they had the power of gods, and they give us a light bulb and a camera.’

  ‘Ah-hah!’

  ‘Oh?’

  Ariea pulled a towing winch from the bag. There was a harness at one end and a power back attached to the cable at the other.

  ‘That seems far too convenient,’ mused Eli.

  Ariea scoffed. ‘If they were planning to go spelunking in a crater, it’s not that surprising they brought it.’

  ‘You won’t have me on the end of that thing.’

  ‘Good job then,’ said Ariea with a smirk, ‘I wasn’t offering.’ She leapt from her haunches by the hole and stapled the winch to the ground adjacent, pegging it in place with a chunk of rubble, and strapped the harness over her shoulders.

  ‘You are enjoying this far too much.’

  Ariea ignored her, digging into the bag, and pulled out a pair of headsets and passed one to Eli. ‘Keep me company,’ she said.

  Eli laughed loudly. Her voice bounded across the hall. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  Ariea took two gulps of stale air, and set herself against the side of the hole, dragging on the cable as she did so. With a click of a button on her chest, the cable unwound, and she began to sink.

  ‘Check the winch is firm,’ she called back to Eli.

  ‘It’s good,’ came back a crackle. ‘You like this, don’t you?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘All of it, the thrill, the danger. You get off on it. You’re way too comfortable.’

  ‘Not really,’ Ariea said defensively. ‘I don’t sleep well anymore. I haven’t since Jask died. I’m tired. I want things to be normal.’

  Eli hummed in crackly tones. ‘Hmm, but maybe that’s the problem. You don’t sleep because this is your normal now. Whatever the fuck this is. Nothing wrong with that, just an observation.’

  How could Eli be right? All Ariea wanted for months was to sit and read and eat and sleep and love and be loved and exist in mundanity. She never wanted to go back to Eden for Poll’s little summons. And yet, Eli was right. She was at ease. She hated this place. but in some twisted sense, she was happy?

  Comfortable.

  As she descended in the gloom of the glow-globe, she remembered that feeling when she killed Jask. It felt good in a sick kind of way, like Eden had broken something inside her. Something she couldn’t place. She wanted to be the people’s saviour.

  Saviour, not Slayer, she thought.

  ‘The way you were talking to those soldiers last night…’ Eli continued. ‘You enjoy it. I could never.’

  Ariea couldn’t think of a reply.

  ‘You are a maniac, and I mean that in the best way. You don’t realise you inspired a lot of people. You’re the Ariea Finland.’

  Ariea felt the buzz of adrenaline wash over her body. She wasn’t scared. This world didn’t understand her. Only Agloff did.

  ‘Ariea?’ said Eli. ‘You okay? I didn’t mean to—’

  ‘Yeah, good. I’m about ten metres from the bottom.’

  ‘You don’t wish you were like me,’ continued Eli. ‘I am normal. I wouldn’t start a fight with a bumblebee. Whereas you’d jab it with a pointy stick and tell it to fuck off. I like that.’

  Ariea laughed. ‘After Eden, things I enjoyed would just make me feel guilty.’

  ‘Because you know what the world’s like. I imagine being at home after that, you’d feel a lil’ pent up. I can see why you volunteered for the long patrols. Luckily, me, I ducked conscription by a week with the pregnancy. I am a barmaid, I have soft hands, not made for climbing, or shooting, or shitting in the words, whatever it is you do.’

  A smile touched Ariea’s lips. Those patrols were the highlight of her week. With Agloff or Kira, trekking over open country, always to somewhere new. She never dreaded them as she knew Agloff had. Yet she had spent six months telling herself to. Because that was how she was supposed to feel. Anything but was a sickness to be treated, a psychological error to correct.

  And here she was back in the Underground, a place she knew she hated, but content.

  Then, her feet touched ground. ‘I’m down!’ she said and clicked her harness to halt the winch. She stared from the shaft of light into the darkness of Floor 3.

  ‘Anything interesting?’

  ‘Not yet. I’ll walk around.’ Ariea clicked on her torch. ‘I’ll have a look at some of these rooms.’ She walked on, towards the crates and offices of the Underground, hoping she might stumble on something useful she could give their Confederate masters.

  She saw bloodstains, soaked into the concrete, moss spreading in tendrils through the cracks in the walls. Bullet casing scattered at her feet like stones.

  ‘Why do you think people left this place?’ whispered Eli.

  ‘There’s bullets about, I see a couple of knives, bloodstains on the walls.’

  ‘Ah. You think they did it to themselves?’

  ‘Hard to say,’ lied Ariea. ‘Wait.’ She stopped at a wall, graffitied by burn marks, like someone had taken a blowtorch to the concrete. It was Winter’s mark.

  ‘Something there?’

  ‘Someone has seared Winter’s mark on the walls.’

  ‘Makes sense, I guess. They’ve been around long enough to be responsible.’

  Ariea felt her chest tighten, almost imperceptibly. Beside the graffiti, someone had knotted Winter’s flag around an overhead pipe. This Winter were dead, she reminded herself.

  She moved on; took a left, then a right and found herself zipping up a stairway onto a balcony, running along the fronts of the crates she knew people here lived in.

  At random, she entered one, and saw a greyed vision of the family that stayed here. Two bunks were lain out on either side, one with toys, a teddy bear, stiffened in dust. Clothes were strewn between them, welded to the floor by the damp. She picked up a book from the larger bunk where she thought the parents of this family slept and flicked through it to see a hand-written scrawl. It was leatherbound and engraved with a name: Harmon.

  Thoughtlessly, Ariea turned to the last scribbled page. The handwriting started neat, then became rushed into squiggles she could not decipher.

  ‘Found a… diary, I think,’ she said to Eli.

  ‘What’s it say?’

  Ariea cleared her throat and set herself, then began to read:

  9 September. I write to you in haste this evening. It is a little after 10 at night. My friend Merl rushed to our door. He was worked a wedding this evening on One. He said he saw a shooting star ride the sky in fire through the screens. It landed but a klick or two away. It shook the Earth, by Cerberus we all felt it. Had no idea what it was. Now he says the land is smoking.

  He left the ceremony in a panic, as did all the guests, he said. There’s chatter and rumour outside. He says Winter are at the gates, that they are coming. Why today, is all I can ask myself. I think the shooting star is a warning to us all. I panic for my children, my girls. Even now, their steps come closer. I write quickly. Save the Underground! Serve the Underground! Let this not be our last day. Winter are the enemy of all.

  I leave my diary here, in the good faith that I will write again, when we are home again. They are telling us to leave. I don’t know for how long.

  ‘There’s a couple more lines, but I can’t read the writing,’ said Ariea. ‘That’s the last entry.’

  ‘Fuck. Well, we got mention of the crater at least. We know this place was nothing to do with it, not deliberately anyway.’

  Ariea stared at the room for a while. She let his words rest in their memory. ‘Yeah,’ she said eventually. ‘Alright, check the winch is still steady. I’m coming back up.’