Brink (The Ruin Saga Book 2) (19 page)

Robert swallowed, his cheeks flushing. She was right; he had been treating her like she was one of the princesses from a storybook—like she was weak. And he knew better than that. In his haste, he hadn’t been paying attention, and he had forgotten what had attracted him to her in the first place. Beneath her prim librarian’s exterior slumbered a mighty she-wolf. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I am.”

She didn’t move for a while.

“You’re sure something’s missing?”

“I’m positive.”

He watched for a flicker upon her face, but none showed. “I believe you.”

She looked up at him. “You should never have doubted me.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

They stood still for a few moments, then she was in motion again. “It’s just odds and ends, nothing specific. But I’m certain of it. There are things missing.”

“What did they take?”

“A little of everything. And they have good taste, whoever they are.” Her nose bristled with irritation. “Books, mostly. First editions, priceless articles. Some of my favourites. Irreplaceable. Besides that, some of the smaller canvases, some old film reels.”

“No electronics?”

“I don’t think so.”

He paced up and down the hall a little. “You’re
sure
? Absolutely sure?”

She shot him another look, and he held up his hands. “Fine.” He looked down along the path they had just taken, and farther along to the very end of the catacombs, hundreds of yards ahead. “It’s just hard to see how they got in through a sealed blast door. You and Alexander have the only keys, and I didn’t see any disturbance in the dust outside. There’s only one entrance?”

“I can’t say for sure. Alexander started storing things here before I was old enough to read. But they were making vaults like this since the End. They got pretty good at it. I can vouch for him.”

“But we still can’t be sure. We know they’ve been sneaking into the city for a long time, using the sewers. All they’d need is a thin wall to tunnel through, and they’d be in.”

She finished up in the hall and returned to his side. “More of the same,” she said. “Either there were over a dozen of them, or they’ve made more than one trip in here.”

They returned to the surface slowly, and Robert kept his guard up the whole way. The fact that they weren’t safe, even so close to home, inside their own perimeter, couldn’t have been fresher in his mind.

“I don’t understand it. They’ve been destroying everything they come into contact with. Burning it all up. Why would they steal those … relics? They’re farmers, they shunned what came Before.”

Robert sighed. It was yet another mystery to add to the plethora of shadows already surrounding them. “I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose there’s more to them than we thought.”

They arrived home past noon the following day. They had driven their mounts hard, too hard, and now ambled forth in a weakened shuffle. James recognised Lucian’s shock of shoulder-length hair in profile even from half a mile away. He was standing at the fence post surrounding their farmland.

Crops were still a rare sight, outside of isolated oases such as Cornwall. Most of the country’s arable land had become a hopeless chaos of wild plants and weeds; without tending hands and pesticides, the mollycoddled grains and other crop-yielding species whose genes had been touched by man’s hand over the millennia had been pushed out.

Most had become hunter-gatherers when the canned food had grown sparser, living on hunted game, tubers, and wild berries. In the North, a small-scale extinction was already underway for the survivors of the End. They had sensed the cities’ supply of preserved goods coming to depletion, but had seemed unable to muster the will to do anything about it. Now they were fading, leaving empty lean-to settlements and near-feudal villages blowing in the wind; yet more decaying ruins, beside those of the Old World.

But here, mile after mile of ploughed fields greeted the eye. All lovingly brought forth by their own hands, James’s chief among them. When he had been a boy, he had tended but one lonely field of corn. Back then, only he and Alexander had truly believed in it, in beginning anew and seizing control of their fate.

Now, they had surplus every harvest, they formed the nexus of a growing network of trade routes, and they had dozens of pilgrims under their employ; those who had travelled from across the country to meet Alex and his ilk, seduced by his speeches, his wares of already-forgotten Old World knowledge and relics, and the grandness of the mission to save humanity.

Lucian held up a hand, and Alex raised his in reply. There had been reason enough to greet them, but it was obvious there was no emergency, and so James and Alexander climbed down from their exhausted mounts and walked the rest of the way.

A little while later, a small, scrawny figure joined Lucian’s: little Norman Creek, who played with a toy airplane, passing it through the air in great sweeping arcs. They passed through the gateway in the fence and headed towards the stone courtyard at the end of the dirt lane. Lucian and the boy fell into step with them and they walked in companionable silence for a time.

Whenever they ventured out, there was never any promise of return. To be safe behind their own borders again never failed to bring about a reflective lull.

Families out in the fields waved, thigh deep in blossoming rapeseed, and it was all James could do to keep from puffing his chest. They had sowed the land well.

The cooing became audible soon after.

From all around them came the chorus of the wood pigeons:
Hoo-hoo-who. Hoo-hoo-who
.

There had been a time when James had kept a single, small coop with no more than a dozen birds. And until his education in Alex’s classes had started in earnest, they had made good pets.

And he had discovered something very strange. The books described wood pigeons as having remarkable navigational abilities, allowing them to find their homes from impossible distances—even from completely alien territory. This second sight was thanks to tiny shards of magnetised material in their brains aligning with the Earth’s magnetic field.

But after a while experimenting, James had come to a bizarre and disturbing conclusion when his birds always ended up clustered not around the coop, but around him, wherever it was that he happened to be. Sometimes, he would release them a hundred miles from home, then travel on with Alex to visit a wild clan to discuss joining the alliance.

And instead of gathering around the stone courtyard, the birds would appear in the sky over his head. They always found him. Nobody else, it seemed, shared this bizarre attraction. Even pigeons he hadn’t raised, wild birds, seemed to share a certain fascination with him.

So far as he could tell from any book that he could find, there was no explanation.

One time, Alex had said that he had seen strange things happen to pigeons just after the End, when James had been but a baby. He had loved birds even then, he was told.

It seemed they shared a bond that no Old World science could explain.

“Yet another mystery to add to the growing mountain range,” Lincoln often said.

Once James had opened his mind to all the secrets hidden in the millions of books scattered in the rubble, he had learned about the Great War long ago where pigeons had been used to send messages to millions of soldiers stationed in muddy trenches.

The idea had stuck fast in his mind. Imagine bringing word to and from the few others who still lived out there in the vastness of the world, conversing without the danger and rigour of travelling across the great hostile stretches between them, linking up the ragged clans out there in the wilderness in the same vein of the old ways of the written letter, or the fantastical magic that had been the telegram, the text message, and email.

And so he set about turning their kinship to his advantage, training them to disperse far and wide, covering all the land. Like telephone boxes.

Young Melissa Tarbuck had been right: wherever he went, people already knew him as the Pigeon Keeper.

“You got our message?” Lucian said finally as Chuck alighted upon James’s shoulder.

“We left as soon as we could,” Alex said. His voice was tight. “Whatever’s going on, it was important enough to bring us back from Cornwall.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes,” Lucian said.

“If we lose their cooperation, we could be set back years.”

Lucian scowled. “I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t thought I had to.”

Alex was quiet for a moment, then nodded. “Show me.”

Norman watched them all warily, still playing with his model airplane. He followed in their wake, not really paying them any mind, just wanting to be a part of it like always. He was a strange kid, caught between the two schools of thought that had divided James and Lucian; he neither eschewed the Old World’s bounty, nor did he grasp any sense of wonder or destiny. He was indifferent to it all, just a kid who liked his toys and reading.

Alex had little time for him. He had little potential, a poor asset for the mission.

But James accepted him for what he was: a good boy who adored his parents and might be made into a passable carrier of their torch, if he were but given the time of day and a little encouragement. He reached down to Norman now and ruffled his hair.

Then he turned to Lucian, and the two of them clasped arms as Alex hurried on ahead.

“What took you?” Lucian muttered.

“Later,” James said. “Now, tell me what’s going on?”

The courtyard was usually empty in the afternoon. Only during the Sunday communal meal were tables brought for everyone to eat together. Besides that, it was an occasional haunt for those looking to catch up, or rope an extra hand into field work for the day.

Today, the stone circle—around which their tiny oasis of thatched cottages stood, built with their own hands—was obstructed by a large wooden cart. Tied to it were a few oxen, mighty beasts with impressive flanks of solid muscle. Bulging sacks were piled high upon the back of the cart, covered over with torn blue tarpaulin.

Nobody manned the foreign behemoth. It sat unattended and alien in the centre of their homestead.

“What is this?” Alex said.

“He rode up yesterday morning,” Lucian said, leading them away towards the stables. They rounded a corner and came into sight of a small gathering in the shade of the stable door’s awning, the remainder of those James would have called his family: Agatha, more matriarchal than even the Early Years as she entered her sixties, even if she had begun to forget things; Hector and Helen Creek, Norman’s parents, hanging back a little, their faces etched with worry; and grizzled old Lincoln, who had in the Old World been a naval engineer, and gone by the name Sir Oliver Farringdon.

Between their feet lay sprawled an odd creature, a shrunken man wrapped in an enormous mass of coats and underthings, all of them far too large for his lanky frame. His eyes bulged from their sockets, bug-like, giving his face an expression of permanent surprise. The remains of more food than a man could eat in a week were strewn around him. Even now he was still eating, chomping on fresh bread in great mouthfuls, not bothering to even tear it from the loaf.

“Who is he?” Alex said.

Lucian bowed his head slightly to keep them out of earshot. “At first I thought he was hysterical. We almost had him packed up and set to turn around before he gave us something to listen to. Said if we turned him away we’d all end up in the ground.”

“He threatened you?”

“Thought so. Almost had his skin for it. But no … He meant all of us. As in, everyone.” They turned a corner and Lucian lowered his voice. “I was sure he was just some nut, dumber than a bag of blind mice, then he spat something out that made us start listening. But you’ll want to hear it from him.”

James scowled, thinking of Beth. She could be in Malverston’s clutches by now. Her, or her sister, or mother. He had managed to keep his focus until now—but if they had been called back on account of some wandering crazed hobo … “How could you do this?” he hissed. “Did the sun soften your head? Our work in Newquay’s Moon is important. We were so close, Lucian, so close! And now—you’ve pulled us away to listen to some wandering madman!”

Lucian glanced between him and Alex, and his lips grew tight. “You’ll want to hear him. I’m certain of it.”

“How do you know?”

“Because, he came from Radden.” A moment’s silence stole between them all, and James and Alex shared a look. Lucian finished: “He said someone’s calling you home.”

Radden.

James shivered as an icy chill swept across his body, tautening the hair upon his crown and drawing his balls close to his body. He hadn’t heard that word for a long time, not since he was a boy.

Radden County was in the far North, slicked along the length of the Lake District, where James and Alex had been born and lived before the End. To his knowledge, they were the only two from the entire region to have survived—two, from a population of over a hundred thousand.

By their reckoning, over ninety-nine per cent of the world’s population had vanished, leaving an even spread of random survivors across the Earth’s surface. That put an average of one human being per eight square miles the world over. In all of the British Isles, there couldn’t have been more than five to ten thousand survivors. But even this paltry smattering paled in comparison to what had happened in Radden. It had been wiped clean. Since then, it had remained abandoned, unplundered, avoided as fervently as death itself.