Arcene: The Island (13 page)

Her personal accommodation was just off from the center of the closeted interior, almost three-quarters of the way down. The edges of her home, and the lowest quarters, furthest away from those that had to sleep beneath an open sky, were for the older, more powerful Elders that ruled under the careful, cold watch of Vorce, absolute ruler for her entire life and for many years before she was even born.

He had the most honored of quarters in prime position, a vast series of cavernous rooms and small antechambers right in the bowels of The Island, smack bang in the center and taking up almost the entire level, the rest of the rooms occupied by a few aides and his extended family, as was his right.

Talia knew that a time would come when she too would live in that secretive world, for Vorce had clearly had an eye on her for many years now, biding his time until he felt her suitably mature in years. Talia appeared to be twenty-three, as was the custom: the moment you Awoke you learned how to control your aging, and exactly one year after your rebirth you were expected to be proficient enough to never age another day.

Those who failed to do this, well, they were seen as beneath even the merely Whole, unworthy of the gift bestowed on them, and if not shunned, then regarded as a disappointment, the shame so severe many took the final plunge into the blue because they could not live up to the task of controlling the gift so graciously given.

Talia had no problem with her own Awoken Day ritual, in fact, she knew she could have done it much sooner. But it meant she was one of the youngest looking Awoken, actually the youngest alive, even though she was over a century old, and because of this she knew she would become wife to Vorce at some point. It wasn't negotiable, nobody questioned the ways of The Island.

The Laws were as solid as their isolated home, and Vorce's will was as unforgiving as the sea that marooned them for eternity in their safe-haven, away from the terrors of the land. Although, Talia and almost every other person had never set foot on truly solid ground, and for the younger ones it was nothing more than a ridiculous fairytale, as believable as the Old Man of the sea, probably less so.

She had seen it though, many times, and part of her wanted to sail away and witness it with her own eyes, not those of a bird she now and then inhabited and soared on the thermals toward the land, marveling at the green grass and the ancient broken structures that humanity had once called home. Always from a distance though, her proficiency in The Noise not strong enough to give her the range she desired.

"No time for such idle thoughts now, I have work to do. Last tour of duty, make it your best, Talia. Let no one say you give anything but your all, and don't be anything but the greatest leader of a group of Inspectors ever." Talia padded across the cold concrete into the small bathroom. She would make The Island's shell spotless, so damn clean it would shine like the winter sun, and inspect every little piece of it, direct repairs, scrape barnacles, remove all the bird poop — keeping the precious waste-product as it was so valuable for their crops — and ensure it stood for a thousand years.

The final tour. She couldn't wait for it to be over. What would she be doing a year from now? Maybe something exciting? She hoped so. She'd had about enough of ropes and the terror of falling into the blue to last her a lifetime.

Talia splashed water on her face, scowled at the toilet seat as it wobbled like it always did, the brittle plastic now yellow with age. She knew that soon she would have to give it up to be melted and put to a different use — as with most things on The Island, nothing lasted forever but everything was re-purposed, nothing wasted. Finite resources meant everything was valuable.

Sometimes things floated past, caught in the strange currents that sealed them off, miracles of days gone by. Items that may have bobbed about for hundreds of years, and it was always with wonder that the fishermen would spread out their hauls and crowds would gather to marvel over this and that, the scraps of cultures long dead that allowed them to thrive, even have the most prized luxury of all now and then: fire.

When wood was found it was treated with the reverence it deserved: dried thoroughly, then burned. Fish and birds, or the rodents that were the mainstay of their diet, roasted on the flames.

Hot food, crispy and delicious. A rare treat the entire community looked forward to, salivating as eager hands put the incredible cooked flesh into their mouths after months, sometimes years of raw fish or mouse, maybe slightly warmed by the sun if they fancied the chewy, dried squid. That, and the seaweed. Always the seaweed.

Talia never even noticed the salt, she knew no different. Neither did anyone else.

A Special Day

The number stuck in her head like three pins: 111. She was never big on celebrating the anniversary of her birth, but this felt different. Special. Talia was now officially one hundred and eleven years old.

She wasn't sure of the time of her birth, but it was this day, so, as far as she was concerned, she was now forty thousand five hundred and fifteen days old, nine hundred and seventy-two thousand three hundred and sixty hours, give or take a little, or one point one one centuries old. She worked it out, spent the last few evenings trying to exercise her brain in-between getting everything organized for her group of Inspectors, a temporary caste that could be shed once you proved yourself.

There was something about the three single digits, as if it was an omen, a portent of today being a special day, somehow different. Although, truth be told, it was just another day. Another birthday that would go mostly unnoticed by all but a few friends.

Maybe Cashae and Erato would get her something nice, a piece of wood, a slice of cooked meat, dried and saved for special occasions, but she held out little hope — she was as lax in such regards as her few friends, and they weren't to blame, birthdays just weren't that big a celebration, not when they came around every year.

The proud digits stuck: 1.1.1.

The prime number. 1, the age on her first birthday. Times by a hundred and it was her first century on the planet. Now there had been one hundred and eleven of the precious years. The numbers were lined up in her mind like three daggers, each significant but multiplied by the powerful number three. Talia had never been a superstitious child, and certainly wasn't now she was an adult, but these damn numbers, they held significance, she was sure of it.

This was no normal day, too much had conspired to make it anything but. She wasn't old as such, Awoken didn't live lives like Whole did, with their measly few years, over so soon it hardly seemed worth the bother. No, she had a lengthy future ahead of her, a future that may span millennia — Awoken. As long as she wasn't unlucky enough to succumb to The Lethargy, she would carry right on living and living. Who knew when it would end? Maybe it never would, but Talia was no child any longer.

The Elders would still see her as a somewhat immature woman, but not a child, and although she felt a little silly for believing the numbers were special in some way, too much had come together on this day for her to ignore the signs.

Not only was it the first day of the Inspection, although it should be called the Cleaning as far as she was concerned, but it was also a full moon. It would be at its apex this evening. Maybe it was nothing, but it all seemed to hint at some hidden meaning, something significant. An event.

Talia didn't think herself particularly special, but with her youthful appearance, and the fact she Awoke so early, there was a secret sense of destiny she tried to hide — acting smug and self-important was not the way to get ahead in life — but she didn't see herself as unimportant either.

She was just herself, Talia. Wise enough to know that everyone believed themselves to be the center of the world, the opposite being the truth in most cases. Of course, she would never utter a word of this in the presence of the Elders, certainly not to Vorce, but as far as she was concerned everyone was just as important as the next person. Even that didn't stop her being awed by the older inhabitants, with their stories of the time before The Lethargy. And Vorce himself, well, she literally shook in his presence, and if she was very truthful then as much as she liked to kid herself everyone was equal when you got down to it, he was far from just another man on The Island.

"Come on, Talia, stop this nonsense. You have work to do, time to go topside." Talia finished her morning ablutions, stepped out of her cramped bathroom, and returned to the bedroom where she dressed for the day in one of her least prized outfits.

Clothes were a real luxury. You did what you could with what you inherited, could barter or earn, and she, just like everyone else, wouldn't dream of wearing anything she cared for if she risked ruining it while working.

In fact, she would have been happy wearing nothing at all, but that was another thing strictly forbidden — flaunting your youth in front of those less fortunate, those that Awoke much later, or the old Whole that clung to life as they withered and wrinkled, was seen as rude. She never saw it that way, but rules were there for a reason, and she would never disobey if it meant others felt inadequate or inferior.

For the children it was different. They weren't expected to wear clothes, it would be a waste and they would ruin the precious materials, but once puberty began you covered up to some degree — bare arms and legs were fine, anything else was asking for punishment, or a severe reprimand at the very least.

So Talia dressed reluctantly in a pair of shorts, put her boots on, fastened the two buttons she stitched onto the rather coarse shirt she'd made years ago from a piece of cloth she swapped with Cashae for a whole small fire's worth of kindling, and moved from her bedroom — comprising a bed made of gull feathers sewn tight into seal skin, and a plastic crate where she kept the few precious and private items she liked to look at and touch now and then — and stepped out into her main living space.

Although it was an honor to have accommodation so deep in The Island, she preferred the open air to being down in the gloom where the floor was bare concrete, always cold and unwelcoming, and her living space was as minimal as her bedroom. But, to be fair, she had been given one of the better main living spaces, which meant she was slowly moving up the complex hierarchy of The Island.

She had one of the original rooms, just as it was when Vorce and the Elders came to The Island all those years ago. It was complete with a series of metal lockers along one wall, a simple galley kitchen fixed securely to the concrete walls, with a counter top Talia cleaned meticulously each and every day, polishing until it gleamed, the steel shining even in the poor, but nonetheless precious light.

There were a few cupboards containing little but precious crockery, again a part of the original fittings. As with all other accommodation, such things were to remain when, or if, you moved to better living quarters. There were metal knives and forks, plates and bowls, even three glasses she hated to use as she'd never hear the end of it if she smashed one.

She had a small table and two chairs, metal, of course, and she even had a seating area, comprised of cushions she had made herself over the years, and a few inherited from her mother after her untimely demise. There was a blanket too, which her mother had made as and when she got scraps of material, all sewn together to make a patchwork blanket that was extremely ugly yet beautiful too — she often sat and hugged it, crying even after all these years without her mother.

There were no pictures, she had never managed to get one, nothing much in the way of ornamentation apart from a few bits and pieces. None of it held sentimental value, just splashes of color, plastic bottles and three large, shiny and mysterious seeds the fishermen found and she'd bartered for without having to give too much away.

She liked it like that: simple, quiet. It allowed her to lose herself doing what she loved best in the whole world: reading.

Talia loved to read more than anything else. She would give the clothes off her back and every possession she owned if it meant more books.

Ever since a child, she had fallen in love with the written word. Not just the skill of reading, which she grasped easily, but the flow of the letters, the miracle of how they were put together in endless combinations to form new and exciting worlds that captivated her as her imagination soared.

Talia loved the different fonts, the upper and lowercase, vowels and consonants and the way you could read a series of words and feel like a different person. It altered your emotions, your very being.

Reading was different to speaking. There was something magical about seeing words written on paper, and that was without the sheer joy of holding a book in her hands, breathing in that ancient, musty smell, delicately turning a precious page, her heart leaping into her mouth, sweat beading on her brow if she heard that most dreaded of sounds: paper tearing.

She'd done it as a small girl, torn a page as she clumsily turned it, keen to continue the adventure. She was inconsolable for days, thinking she would be punished terribly for such a crime, until she realized that it wouldn't be the tearing that would get her into trouble, it would be if she got paper wet, ruined it so it couldn't be burned if it was no longer part of a book.

Yes, books were precious, one of the most precious commodities and the most expensive, but fire was more important.

So Talia kept her most prized possessions in a cupboard under the counter, safe and secure. She liked nothing better than curling up on the cushions, wrapped in her mother's blanket, ugly as it was, and reading until she fell asleep.

What she wouldn't give to stay in her room today, just read, let the digits flash in her mind like three candles flickering in the breeze, but she had work to do.

Speaking of candles... Talia cupped a hand around the fat stick positioned at the intersection between living room and bedroom to maximize light while wasting as little as possible — although she always let it burn through the night as she was still useless with her flint and the horrid, dry seaweed they used for tinder and she always burnt her fingers — and as the room plunged into a darkness so complete she often wondered if this was what it was like at the bottom of the sea, she made her way with confidence to the door leading to the corridor. She'd done it so often, and there was nothing in her way, so she didn't need the light, but she liked it for company and needed it for reading.