Night Witches (2 page)

I
stare at him as if he’s the only thing that exists in the world. Light snow falls, hair strands drift across my face, but nothing distracts, not even the fast, shallow beat of my heart.

I notice every detail about him, even the flecks of ice on his scarf where his breath has frozen. He’s tall but not towering. His white camouflage jacket and trousers are uncreased and clean, as if ready for inspection. The slick polish of his boots is frosted over – the boot straps fused solid with ice. Is he real? Real enough to touch?

I remember to breathe.

He blinks, showing lids that are inked with black eye designs, so that even when closed he seems to be watching us.

Zoya gasps. ‘He’s a Scrutiner!’

Eyes in the Dark
, we call them. Aura’s eyes – trained to make sure that everything in Rodina Nation is normal and nice.

His voice is cold. ‘Haze? I told you to stay in the camp. It’s not safe to come back here now the wolves know your scent.’

I shake my head. ‘Sorry, I don’t know any Haze. It’s not me.’

Recognition fades from his eyes. ‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’

‘We’re normal,’ Zoya answers quickly. ‘Just Air Cadets on a training flight. I’m Zoya Mentira, this is my cousin Pip . . . Rain Aranoza. We were attacked. We can’t connect.’

‘We crashed,’ I add pointlessly.

The boy’s eyes flick through the trees to debris at the lakeside. His fingers tighten on the gun. I think, please god, don’t let him shoot us, except what’s the point of asking god for anything? God doesn’t exist any more, except for the twisted cranks of the Crux nation, pressing up against our borders, just waiting to try and convert us. God isn’t normal. Everybody knows that.

The boy’s lips move. Is he about to speak? Too late. I get the strangest sensation, as if time has stopped. No – more like time is stretching. The air pauses. I could dance between the pieces of falling snow as they glisten, poised, in the stillness. Only my heartbeat stays the same. Something cuts between the trees. Parts a snowflake. Melts it.

A bullet.

I see it clearly before I hear the sound of gunshot. It spins in a graceful trajectory, with near-invisible grooves from a gun barrel. Against all laws of science it slows. I step out of its path. I breathe in, breathe out. The bullet moves on. I watch it pass and time speeds up, super-fast, it seems. Normal fast.
Crack!
The bullet smacks into a tree trunk just behind me. Wood splinters. A cloud of spores billows from the bark. More bullets follow, real time now, puffing up the snow when they hit the ground then making Zoya scream as they tear through her skin.

The boy dives towards us. To kill us with his bare hands? No – to push us to the ground.

‘Crux creepers!’ he shouts.

‘What are creepers?’ I yell out, my voice muffled by a mouthful of snow.

I don’t know why I’m surprised at how cold the snow is when my face ploughs into it. Creepers sound bad – are they snipers? Sent to kill us, or just shooting for the fun of it? I ask Aura on the keypad. Aura doesn’t answer.

‘Traptions!’ the boy shouts next. ‘Dodge side to side and run!’

Traptions?

They must be the clumsy, clanking machines I hear, tearing down trees, their engines blowing out billows of black fug. Already I retch at the stench as the tracks trample towards us. The nozzle of a long gun gouges through a tree trunk. It’s nothing like the sleek sweep of Rodina’s war machines that we see in People’s Army parades around Sea-Ways City. This gun looks lo-tech but lethal. The ground quakes.

The boy flips on his front in the snow, shooting creepers. Me, I’m dragging Zoya away, shouting, ‘Get up get up get up and move!’

‘I’m hit! I can’t run – my leg!’

‘I’ll carry you!’

‘Pip, no!’

She’s weeping with pain as I try and hoist her over my shoulder. My boots sink in the snow and blood drops red on the white. Yash! Those Crux monsters really have hit her.

The clamour of a traption closing in is excruciating. Any moment now it’ll burst upon us.

‘P-put me down!’ Zoya’s juddering with each step I take. ‘You can’t do this.’

‘I can!’

‘What’s happening? Is it an earthquake?’

‘Traption,’ I gasp.

‘W-what? W-why?’

All I can think is, which way now? I remember back to Pedla Rue’s ramblings –
Three rules to stay safe in the forest
 . . . What was the third? I know it! The Third Rule:
Don’t step off the path
.

What path?

There is no path, just deranged twists of silver-white trees in every direction.

The traption fires a shell from that grey gun nozzle. Splinters of wood spray the air and birds caw in outrage. A second shell spews out. More trees explode. Bark and snow scatter. This is nothing like the war games we play at home on stream-screens. This is loud, confusing and can kill us!

I shudder. Duck. Stumble. Run a few steps, bent double under Zoya’s weight, but the shell blast shoves us over. Zoya slides from my back and falls, pulling me with her. My bare skin touches the ground. For a second I have the sensation of looking right down into the frozen earth, deep into the planet, seeing ancient tree roots tangling round ancient rock, feeling the force at the heart of the forest, all shrunk and old and dying . . .

A third shell fires, right where our heads would have been if we hadn’t collapsed. The traption makes my bones shake. It makes all the bones in the forest soil shake too – skeletons of wolves, birds, rablets, mice and people even, all dead-white like my face must be as I twist and look up to see grey metal looming over us and brace for the agony of being crushed.

Forget that!

I’m not ready to die.

I stagger upright.

‘Hey! Hey, you! Crux!’

The traption gun turret swivels. It’s hung with red metal bells that jangle and shake as the engine vibrates. Strung between the bells are banners of scrawl that I suppose must be prayers. We used to have prayers and things in Rodina, before Aura was introduced so science could triumph over superstition, and all Crux were kicked back behind the borders of their own nation. When I was a kid there used to be bells ringing in the old god-houses and people leaving bee-sweet cakes for the saynts.

Cakes won’t appease this machine. Inside the ugly metal carapace there are Crux soldiers loading new shells.

‘Yes – over here!’ I shout.

‘Are you mad? Are you completely
disconnected
?’ Zoya gasps.

Probably.

I yell at her to stay down, stay low, don’t move. No time for anything else. I’m already running, backwards at first, waving my arms at the traption . . . 
Look at me, look at me, follow me, fire on me, not her – me, not her . . .

‘Don’t leave me, Pip! Don’t leave me alone!’

Zoya’s screams are just one more noise in the chaos. I turn, expecting my back to be blistered with shell-fire at any moment.

The traption follows. Good. I speed up, just enough to stay ahead of those clanking, crunching tracks, but not so fast it’ll lose me. I dodge a fourth shell. Dodge trees. Dodge the snow that still trickles through the dense canopy of branches above. Fumes belch black in the white forest. The traption’s going flat out . . . flat over anything that gets in its way.
Na
– it’s fast! So I go faster. I’m surging forward, sprinting hard, legs pumping, heart racing, skin glowing, mind singing . . . 
Catch me, catch me, catch me if you can . . .

There are birds zooming alongside me, black to the last feather.

You can’t run like this in the city, in Sea-Ways. Not on the spongy-safe biofloors sprayed with caution notices and light strips to show the way. Not with people turning to look at you if you do a single thing different from anyone else. Not with Aura guiding and Scrutiners gliding by, soundlessly watching.

This is glorious! I almost love it – the speed, the danger, the . . .

. . . dare I say it?

The freedom
.

Yes! If I could I’d run right out of my skin and jump free, leaping, yelling . . .

. . . tripping . . .

. . . falling . . .

. . . going headlong over a block of stone, over the edge of a cliff. This time when I fall there’s absolutely nothing, no snow, no ground to catch me.

I
crash through a crazy criss-cross of knotted bushes. They’re thatched over nothing thicker than air. I grab what I can. Roots rip one heartbeat at a time.

The traption heaves up over the same stone block that tripped me and, for a few mind-grinding moments, hovers above me on the edge of the cliff, tracks turning, bells jingling, prayers flapping, gears grinding, engine raging . . . then it tips and falls, gun first, down into the mist of a rift. For long moments I hear nothing. Then comes a dull, whumping sound, as if the traption has been swallowed by cloud.

I hang.

A few hours ago my biggest headache was a total inability to find two clean socks that matched, or to work out which way my new blue cadet uniform fastened. Now I’m dangling in a rift filled with black-barked trees that reach down to invisible ground and up to a pale grey sky. Instead of the factory-crafted plant sculptures back home, these trees are wild and wicked-looking. They have black-sheened leaves like a million mirrored eyes spinning on stalks to look at me. Mist licks my boots, tugs on my legs, strokes my body, breathes on my hair . . .

Rain . . .

There’s a whisper. My name – touching my ears as soft as snow. A connection? No, it’s nothing like Aura. This is an old voice, creased and worn, with an edge of death.

‘Who’s there?’ I call.

Hurry, Rain
, comes the voice again.
There isn’t much time . . .

I brace my arms to try and haul myself up. Roots rip. I scream. Drop. Stop. Breathe. Close my eyes. Open them. Slowly I twist in the air. I won’t look down. I won’t see shapes or hear voices in the mist. Absolutely not. I look up instead.

Above, all wrapped in roots, are more blocks of stone, cut into straight lines and right angles. There was once a wall here. A building. Set into a stone frame is a window of cracked, coloured glass. There’s a pattern in the glass, perhaps a picture, but it’s covered in snow that’s scrunched into shapes like petals – snow flowers. From where I’m hanging, it looks like a picture of someone with sun for hair.

People must have been here once. Did they fall and die too? I don’t want to die, but I can’t hold on any longer, I just can’t! Where’s Zoya when I need her? She’s always been there for me, from my first day of being bullied at school, to this last day of my life when I got shoved out of my place in the canteen queue for breakfast.

‘Somebody –
please
– somebody help me!’

A face looks over the rift edge and I nearly drop from the shock of it.
Be careful what you wish for
 . . . A wolf is there, eyes bright, tongue out, panting. Its muzzle reaches low – to eat my hand or pull on my sleeve? Gunshot cracks the silence. The air mists with blood and the wolf slumps, completely eyes-dark dead.

‘Hey! Hello? Rain Aranoza, are you there?’

A voice I know! Like a silver net it scoops me up. There’s the dark-haired Scrutiner leaning over the edge of the rift to spy me out, sending snow specked with wolf-blood spattering down.

‘I’m here – down here!’

‘Hold tight, I’ll pull you up! Don’t let go!’

He grips my sleeve. He’s strong but still out of breath by the time I’m up out of the emptiness and sprawling on the snow at his side. Close by, the wolf corpse is slowly cooling, and beyond it are the stone blocks with the glass picture.

The boy studies me closely. That’s Scrutiner training – always watching for what’s not supposed to be there. I laugh, a little too loudly.

‘The ground disappeared.’

‘It’s the trees,’ he says without a flicker of emotion. ‘They eat it. They grow down instead of up.’

I roll on my stomach, away from the rift edge and hungry trees. The boy rolls over too and that sort of makes him closer to me. The wide world shrinks to this patch of now. Time doesn’t bother slowing. It doesn’t even exist. The snow between us seems to clump into delicate crystal flowers – tiny snow roses that grow then melt from our body heat.

I hear the boy’s heart quicken. His cheeks take on a warmer tinge. I feel like I’m in one of Pedla’s stories, all that Old Nation nonsense about gods, monsters and enchantment. I shiver at the intimacy.

‘You’re cold,’ he says abruptly. He stands and brushes snow from his uniform so it’s as smart as new again.

‘I’m fine.’ I get up too, suddenly wishing I was older, taller and dazzlingly beautiful.

Nothing story-like about his reply. He’s all common sense and science.

‘You don’t feel chilled now because you’re fired with adrenaline. Without more layers your core body temperature will drop so quickly you’ll hardly notice you’re dying. Take this thermal wrap and these gloves, they’re spare. Are you injured?’

‘I’m OK.’

‘Are you sure?’

Yes. Incredibly, against the odds, I am OK, though I feel strange, like the time Cousin Zoya said cherry brandy was completely harmless, so we sneaked some at Pedla Rue’s and it made me see shapes in my head, and Zoya sicked up her lunch all the way down the stairwell as she tried to stagger home.

My mind widens. The spell breaks. Real life rushes in.

How could I forget Zoya? You don’t ever, ever put yourself first, before others. Individuals don’t count as much as community – we learn that from the cradle.
One of Many
– that’s the motto we live and die by in Rodina. Loyalty, that’s what binds our friendships, our families, our Nation together.

This time when I run the forest flashes past – snow, bare branches, black birds – scant seconds only before I’m at the patch of ground where I left her. Is it the right place? I see a bright-red pool of blood in the snow, and bootprints all around.

Zoya’s not there.

I’m so mad at myself I could rip trees up by the roots. I shouldn’t have left her like that! Why do I always get things wrong? No wonder Papi gets that quiet,
disappointed
look whenever I speak. No wonder Mama reckons I’m not fit to be left alone ever.
Be a good girl
, she always says, even though I’ve never been anything
but
good all my life.

‘Zoya’s gone!’ I shout the moment the boy catches up with me. ‘The Crux have got her!’

He examines the bootprints and shakes his head. ‘Don’t worry, she’s safe. My men will be helping her to our camp at the edge of the forest where we have medics. We need to get there as quickly as possible too. We do not want to be in the woods when night comes. Keep close behind me. Tread where I tread. Whatever you do, don’t step off the path.’

Don’t step off the path.
Pedla Rue knew what she was talking about there. What about her First Rule?
Be very careful who you meet . . .

The boy sets off. I don’t move.

‘Sorry, but there’s no Aura and I don’t know . . . what’s your name?’

‘I’m Reef. Reef Starzak. Now let’s go. Try to keep up.’ He gives a half-smile. ‘Judging by how fast you can run, that shouldn’t be a problem.’

‘Sorry. I was worried about Zoya.’

‘You should be.’

‘Because of the Crux? What are they even doing in the forest? Why did they attack us? Why can’t we connect to Aura and find out what’s going on?’

He stops and looks back. ‘You ask a lot of questions.’

I freeze. There’s a saying in Rodina –
The weed that sprouts up gets yanked out
. The best thing I can do now is keep quiet and be good.

‘Sorry. It’s not normal here.’

Reef’s laughing at me now, I’m sure of it, behind that mask of a face. ‘You’ve noticed that?’

I notice everything. Every strand of colour in his eyes, every shade of blood under the soft skin of his lips.

A bird lands on a nearby branch. Reef grips his gun, making me think of the wolf on the rift edge, with life trickling out of bullet-holed fur.

‘I got more than I expected on this hunting trip,’ he says, staring down at me.

‘You mean, finding Crux as well as wolves?’

‘No. I came here hunting witches. Instead I found you.’