The Girl and the Stars

The answer emanated from all directions but something turned her around to face the three dark windows. “I never told you my name.”

I watched you with your friends.

“Where are you?”

In the void. Which is another way of saying that I don’t know. A sigh. This is why I wanted to talk to you where we were.

“I don’t understand. Why don’t you just come out?” Something about the darkness scared Yaz. The way it drew her eyes and made her forget about time. It shared a lot with the stars, which often seemed to be holes into a world of light. The windows seemed to be holes into a darkness that existed outside the world. “Are you trapped?”

The sigh came again and Yaz could picture the dark youth standing in grass, bathed in sunshine, a crooked smile on his lips.

I fell too, Yaz. A long time ago. I became lost beneath the city and it hardly knew I was here. I fell into the void. I think it was the city’s heart when the Missing were here. Now . . . it’s something different. I can make worlds in here. But I can’t leave. Sometimes . . . sometimes I think that I’m not really alive anymore, that I haven’t been alive since I fell, that I’m just a memory of me. A memory the city keeps.

Yaz stepped slowly toward the lowest window and crouched before it. The dark seemed like the surface of a pool. How deep it might be and what might reach out of it to seize her she couldn’t say. Gathering her courage she set her hands to the sill and leaned in toward the blackness. It had a song to it, like the stars in the ice and the script on the walls. A slower song, wordless and discordant. A song full of sorrow and loss. “What do you do in there, Erris?”

At first I did everything. I watched stars being born. I watched them die. I walked the world, but it was always an empty one. I saw the ice come . . . These days I sleep mainly. Just like the city does. I sleep and wait for something to happen. For there to be an end.

“Then I came,” Yaz whispered.

Then you came. And the city woke me up. I think it wanted me to speak to you. I don’t think it knows how anymore. Maybe it never did. Perhaps that’s why it kept me . . . or remembered me. To speak with you.

“What does it want you to say?”

Ah, well, there my theory breaks down. The city doesn’t speak to me so I don’t know for sure. I can sense its moods though and it’s still angry about the last time.

“The last time?” Yaz turned from the unnerving darkness.

Another, like you. Another quantal came and defied the wards. He didn’t get far before he was driven off, script-burned. Not nearly as far as you, but he found core-stones that earlier scavengers had missed. Whole ones, not fragments. And he used them to build entities slaved to him and not to the city.

“Entities?”

The constructs. The things that stalk and trap your people.

“The hunters?” Yaz glanced around as if one of the monstrosities might be concealed among all the broken parts crowding the chamber. The idea that they had been constructed by a man rather than by the Missing amazed and horrified her. Who would do it, and why? And what did script-burned mean? The only person she’d ever seen with burns was the regulator himself. “When did this happen?”

Recently. Very recently. Let me check . . . oh.

“What?”

Two hundred and seven years ago. I hadn’t meant to sleep for that long.

“Two hundred years ago? And the city is still angry?”

Yes. With you.

“With me? But that was before I was born! Years before.”

I’m sorry about that. Erris did sound sorry. But the city . . . well, it’s not rational. Not in the way we are anyway. It’s damaged, confused, angry.

“You sound like the city is a person.” He sounded as if he cared for it too.

She is. A broken person. Older than she was ever meant to be. He paused. I think she loves me in her way. We’ve been together a long time. So many of the other cities have gone dark and they can’t talk to each other anymore.

“The cities talked to each other?” Yaz clamped her jaw, aware she was just questioning everything he said.

Once they did. Something haunts the ways now. A bad thing. Another pause. Anyway, she couldn’t stop you coming in so instead . . .

“Instead what?”

She doesn’t mean to let you leave.

15

   I NEED TO get out!” Yaz spun around, too fast to see if there were any exits, then turned again, this time slowly enough to see that there were none. Or if there were any that they must be hidden behind all the artefacts. Remembering her fall she looked up, expecting to see some kind of shaft above, but found only a ceiling of plain stone. “Where’s the door?”

There’s no door.

“Where did I fall through?”

Things work differently in the deep city, Yaz. Some of the Missing liked to live simply—they had houses, places to walk, doors . . . Some even rejected all the wonders of their technology and lived on the ice far to the north, much as your people do now. But they didn’t hunt because they needed to. They didn’t need food and shelter like we do. Like you do anyway. They only used doors because it reminded them of who they once were. The Missing didn’t walk away from Abeth, they didn’t set sail into the heavens. They left in a different kind of way—

“I need an exit, Erris, not a history lesson.”

To leave this room you would have to walk through the wall. Without the city helping you.

Yaz moved to the wall beside the windows, one of the few places she could reach it. She ran her hands against the stone. “There’s a hidden door?”

No.

“But you said . . .” Yaz tried to remember what Erris had said. “Oh . . .”

She began to consider the . . . things . . . littering the room, moving slowly from one to another. The Broken would consider it a treasure, a great weight of metal to be melted down and given to the priests of the Black Rock in return for the necessities of life. Fish, salt, hides. It seemed a poor trade knowing how the clans prized even the smallest iron tool, but when you’re in a miles-deep hole perhaps any trade is a good one.

“What is all this stuff? How did it get here?”

I brought it here. Saved it from the scavengers. Most of it is broken, but there are useful parts . . .

“But you said you’re stuck in there.” Yaz looked at the windows.

I have my ways.

“What’s this?” Yaz pulled aside some dusty boards made of nothing she recognised to reveal a black cube, its sides maybe eighteen inches. As she looked at it the black surfaces turned to white and then to a vibrant green.