Paradigm (9781909490406) (23 page)

‘All okay with team two?' she whispered through the communicator to Filip.

‘Yes,' he replied and then responded, ‘Everything as expected with team one?'

‘Uh-huh,' she said. ‘So far, so good. We'll have made the river in an hour.'

A
s they reached
the curve of the city, the smell of the river rose to greet them. The overwhelming stench of dead fish that had been prevalent in the bowels of the city became stronger and increasingly more disgusting. Interspersed with the trash and bones and melee of the old city, there were fragments of fish skins and skeletons like sawdust sprinkled over a carpenter's workbench. Alice avoided stepping near them, around them or alongside them. They both smelled and looked disgusting.

‘Try not to touch anything that looks like it used to be alive,' said Alice, ‘until we work out toxicity levels. Remember your training. These suits are pretty durable but…' she hesitated, ‘…a test in test conditions is no real test at all.'

I
t was early afternoon
, when the sun was bleeding past its zenith, casting a trail of silver and orange, that they came across the first of the cruisers. It was wedged cleanly between the roof of a supermarket and the city library that both stood about five storeys high on the other side of the river. In the years before, they had been used as casino ships, drifting out into the middle of the wide loop of the river further downstream, taking tourists back and forth from one side of the city to another, enabling them to do a little mid-afternoon gambling during their journey. Alice remembered that her mother had taken her on one of those boats; she'd spent the whole time alone, throwing up over the side of the cruiser, while her mother had been busy with two of the deckhands. Jonah walked down towards the very edge of the river, eyes fixed on the boat teetering above them.

As it towered across the other side of the filthy, swollen river, the bow that protruded from the edge of the buildings cast a long shadow across the pavement and out into the road. The hull was battered; chipped and peeling paint where the bottom had been scraped over the submerged rooftops of iceberg-esque buildings and a huge gaping hole in one side spewed out some precarious mechanics like nautical intestines, dripping downwards towards the water.

On one side, the clean black script that was once etched like a signature into the side of the boat was now a dull, faded series of unconnected, indistinguishable letters. They all stood there in silence, agape, looking at the giant body above them as the sun filtered rays around its edges. Alice moved closer to look at the giant hull above them.

‘Must have got wedged when the waters subsided,' said Grenfell. ‘We've seen some others like this on the screens—nothing this spectacular though.'

‘It looks like the pictures of Atlas,' said Jayden. ‘Like the whole heavens are on the shoulders of the supermarket.' Alice laughed and looked upwards at the freakish, circus scenario.

‘It's one of the things we're going to have to deal with,' she said. ‘One of the gigantic, crazy problems that we will need to find a solution for.' Grenfell nodded, his mouth still open.

A
lice thought
about the incomprehensibility of it; how five years ago, the removal of a boat from the roof of a supermarket would have been someone else's problem—anybody else's problem but hers. But now, in the bright sunlight, she felt an overwhelming responsibility to fix everything. The hawk that had followed them earlier circled in the sky above them, drifting on its wings and making the occasional call. Alice wondered what the whole sorry scene must look like from up there, in the quiet of the clouds with just the whistle of the wind and the occasional gurgle of the river.

It was because her eyes had been drawn upwards, caught by the sun and the boat and the madness, that she missed what was obviously out of place. It wasn't until she heard the splash of water that she or anyone else realised that Jonah wasn't with them any longer.

He was in the water lying face down on a splintery pallet, paddling with his hands through the murky depths. The hood of his suit was off and he was trickling water through his thin, floppy hair as he moved arm over arm towards the supermarket on the other side of the river.

‘Jonah!' screamed Alice. ‘What are you doing?' Her voice was agonised, drained against the splashing as she watched him inching further away from the shore.

‘It's Scarlett,' waved back Jonah through mouthfuls of black sludge. ‘My sister Scarlett. She's on that ship, I can see her. Look, it's the Princess Aurelia.'

Filip's voice came through on Alice's earpiece.

‘Davenport,' he said, ‘what's happening?'

‘It's Jonah,' she breathed heavily, ‘he's gone rogue. You need to come. Quickly.'‘I'm on my way.'

T
he water was thick
, viscous and black. It no longer looked like a river but more an oily snake slithering around the outside of the city. Alice pushed out the shell of a makeshift boat that Jayden had made from some wood.

‘Whatever you do, don't touch the water,' said Grenfell, shaking a tiny test tube with some grey-brown drops in it. ‘It's toxic; possibly hallucinogenic, with the waste that's in there. There's some evidence of some life but whatever lives in there is likely to be pretty dangerous. ‘Stay safe, Butterfly,' he added.

E
ven though the
river had probably doubled in width since the Storms, Jonah had made it almost halfway to the other side; Alice could hear him laughing and singing to himself as he splashed towards the shore. His arms were now fully out of the suit; Alice could see his shoulders above the pull and ebb of the slow, thick waves.

‘Jonah!' she screamed again. ‘Come back!' He stopped for a second and Alice thought she heard him call her name. But it wasn't her name. It started with a wailing, then a chant and eventually, it became a song. Just one word, over and over: Scarlett. Scarlett. Scarlett. Alice pulled her boat into the water.

‘How do you think those buildings look, structurally?' she said to Grenfell with urgency. He shrugged.

‘It would have been waterlogged through all five floors,' he said. ‘The joists would have been weakened, the architecture damaged—but it's holding the boat. I don't know.' Almost before he had finished speaking, Alice had gone, pushing out into the water after Jonah, striking the wooden oars hard. In the first few minutes, she gained good ground on Jonah, straining her muscles hard as she'd been taught below deck on the Ship. But as she reached the halfway mark, Jonah had climbed out the other side and he was wringing out his suit on the bank, wearing just the thin grey uniform that he'd been issued with on the Ship.

‘Wait!' cried Alice. ‘Let me come with you. I can help you.'

Jonah strained his eyes across the river at her.

‘She's here,' he called, waving and smiling, ‘waiting for me, just like she said she would be.'

A
lice turned
around and watched as the small frame of Jonah slipped inside the supermarket, stomping through crushed glass and disturbing a crowd of ravenous pigeons. They flew out of the smashed shopfront in an explosion of movement, circling over the edge of the water before heading further west towards the forests on the outskirts of where the city had used to be.

She paddled her little boat faster, the faces of Jayden and Grenfell getting smaller and paler as she got further from the shore on the east bank. With the exertion of exercise, Alice felt warm inside her suit. She longed to feel the sun on her bare arms. In her ear came Filip's voice.

‘It's the water,' he said. ‘Don't touch it, don't let it get inside your suit, and whatever you do, don't get into it. The effluent from Drakewater somehow infected it—it's dangerous. It's mood-enhancing, hallucinogenic.'

She looked back at the shore. Now there were more people, maybe ten or fifteen. Her mother was there, and Hutchinson. He had his notebook out in front of him, making plans. Charlie Davenport sat on a patch of yellow grass and barked, one side of his head bloodied and sore. But there was a noise inside her head, a buzzing, like a song that wouldn't go away.

‘Davenport, Alice, it's me, it's Filip. Keep your mind focused. You're almost at the other shore. Stay with me, you can do this. Concentrate. I need you. We all need you. I'm on my way.'

Alice squeezed her eyes tightly shut and then opened them again. This time there was just Jayden and Grenfell. She rowed faster, harder; she could feel the blisters forming on her hands as she dragged the pieces of wood through the water. Within a few minutes, she had beached on the other side and, breathless, she hauled herself and her boat onto the muddy pavement above what used to be the wharf dock that was submerged in the depths of the new Black River.

T
he inside
of the supermarket was strewn with rubbish, bones and a covering of dirty, squelching moss over which muddy footprints led to a useless, flapping fire escape door toward the back of the shop. On the spiral that wound upwards, prints dripped out the shape of Jonah's boots going upwards towards the roof, the click of her own steps unnerving in the echoes of the shadows of the stairway.

When she reached the fourth floor, the puddles were thinner, less wet and led outwards to the roof. She heard Jonah before she saw him, singing loudly from deep within the body of the Ship.

‘Jonah,' she called, ‘where are you?' His head emerged from a hole on the second deck, followed by a shower of poker coins that landed at Alice's feet.

‘Look,' he said with a demonic laugh, his eyes wild and glazed, ‘the chips are down.' A dark rash had spread across his cheeks and his skin was starting to break out into thick, pus-filled boils. Already, his thin hair was weeping in great tears from his head. Alice stopped as he threw the last of the red-and-green plastic coins at the floor.

‘What are you doing?' she said slowly, looking at the curve of the boat between the two buildings.

‘My sister Scarlett is here,' he said cheerfully. ‘I always wanted you to meet her. I told her you were going to be my wife until you met Filip. When we got down to the river, I could hear her calling me. She told me to take my suit off so that I could hear her better. She's here, you know, in the boat.'

Alice looked past Jonah and into the broken hull of the boat through the jagged gaps gouged out by the buildings that had been underwater as it had lolled about above. It was empty and silent.

‘Why don't you come back with me?' said Alice quietly. ‘We can help you,'

‘Oh, no,' said Jonah, his tone laced with a decisive vehemence that Alice had rarely seen in the five years they had been together. ‘I won't be coming back across the river. I have to stay here with my sister in the boat. We're going to wait for the water to come back and then we're going to sail away—to the Caribbean or somewhere warm.'

‘You're not going to be able to do that, Jonah,' said Alice.

‘Yeah, and who's going to stop me?' said Jonah jumping down from the boat. He grabbed Alice by the hand and pulled her towards the edge of the supermarket roof. The soft swishing sound of her protective suit slithered through the air. Below them the river looked like a thick black ribbon, winding its way through a dirty tea towel of land, pockmarked with devastation.

‘Keep calm, Alice,' said Filip through the communicator. He sounded close, comforting even. A blood-specked trickle trailed from the corner of Jonah's left ear.

‘We could go together,' he said. ‘You and me and Scarlett. You'd love her, Alice, she's just like you. Pretty and kind and good. She's a good person, Alice. I used to be a good person too. I used to be someone else before this.' He looked out across the horizon. ‘Where am I?'

Tears welled in Alice's eyes as the city below her danced in the giddiness of height and depth and she could feel the dampness of the sweat from Jonah's body mixing with the toxic, foul-smelling water from the river. In her heart she knew it was only a matter of time.

‘It's okay, Jonah' she said, biting back the saltiness of her tears. ‘It's going to be all right. We can go now and everything will be okay.' She leaned back from the edge of the building, one white-gloved hand holding his, gently leading him back towards the fire escape.

‘Scarlett,' he said, looking at Alice, ‘are you there?'

‘Yes,' said Alice, ‘I'm here. Come on, Jonah, let's go.' They managed two steps before he suddenly let go of her hand and pushed her backwards onto the floor.

‘You're not Scarlett,' he said with a vicious snarl, ‘you're Alice, Alice full of malice, came like a slum-dog into the palace. What did you do with my sister, you evil little bitch?' The poison streamed from his mouth and landed not just in the fountains of spittle that hit her suit but in deep, sharp spikes in her heart. He looked five years old and not sixteen; gap-toothed, angry, inconsolable. The small face of the eleven-year-old underneath the table in the first year on the Ship flashed in front of her. She reached out her hand.

‘It's okay, Jonah,' she said over and over. ‘It's okay.'

‘Where's my sister?' he screamed in a torrent of questions. ‘Did you kill her like you killed everyone else in your life? Were you jealous of her? Like you were jealous of your father, taking all of your mother's attention? And Charlie Davenport too? Am I next, now that you have Filip to help you? Do you just hurt everyone who tries to help you? Now, where's my sister? What have you done to her? I want my sister.'

Alice felt her heart sinking to somewhere deep within her body, out of reach of Jonah's cold fingers of anger that clawed over her each time he spoke.