“Good job Violet isn’t here,” said Tommo. “The brightness would give her a migraine in a flash, and you know how ratty she gets when she’s having a headache.”
“What’s that?”
“What?”
Courtland didn’t answer and instead walked into the purple grass and picked up a human femur. It too had been stained magenta. He looked around and found another bone, this time the left half of a pelvis, and tapped them together. They made the dullish thud that fresh bones make, and not the ringing click of the long dead.
“What do you think, Court?”
“Couple of years.”
We were all looking around then, to find something that might give a clue as to who it was or where they were from, but the bones had been scattered by animals. We didn’t find the skull, but I did find a single brogue, a belt buckle and a celluloid collar. It had a postcode and a name scratched on it: Thomas Emerald. Courtland and Tommo didn’t know him.
“A lot of Rebootees were lost out here,” said Courtland. “They never stayed long enough for us to learn their names.”
“He had three spoons on him,” said Tommo, picking them out of the soil and rubbing the magenta mud off so that he could read the codes engraved on the back, “and none of them were his. Do you think the codes are registered to anyone?”
“They’d be worth a small fortune if they’ve got clear title,” said Courtland. “Let me see.”
So Tommo handed them over, and Courtland put them in his pocket and grinned avariciously at him.
“Nice one, Court,” said Tommo. “Thanks for that.”
“Why would he take spoons with him on a toshing trip?” I asked.
“Maybe he didn’t,” remarked Courtland, with a greedy gleam in his eye. “Maybe he pulled them out of the soil at High Saffron.”
We looked at one another and walked on.
We came to a river and, after wading across, walked past the five-arched bridge that had once carried the roadway, now sitting rather pointlessly over a grassy dent. The mutual anxiety we were feeling had momentarily cleared the bad air, and we walked along side by side for a while, talking nervously.
“So,” said Tommo with forced bonhomie, “what was Violet like?”
“Exactly as you might imagine.”
“Yikes.”
Courtland voiced what we were allreally thinking about. “Why didn’t we find Thomas Emerald’s skull?”
We suddenly stopped and looked nervously about, the unspoken horror of having our brains eaten by Riffraff suddenly making us more than jumpy. But no matter how hard we stared, it was simply an empty landscape with trees, wildstock and grassland. And aside from the occasional pwoing of a bouncing goat, it was quiet, too—oppressively so. We were utterly alone. At least, we hoped we were.
“Okay,” said Tommo after I had told everyone to move off, “what do we do if we see a Riffraff?” “Run,” I said. “Fight,” said Courtland.
“You fighting is good,” said Tommo. “While they’re occupied with you, Ed and I will be activating the ‘run like a lunatic’ plan.”
We passed through a grove of beech trees that had grown over the track in happy profusion, then came across some grass-covered earthworks, a few bramble-filled pits and a deep, grassy ditch that zigzagged away to the left and right of us. We paused for a moment on the edge of the open moorland and stared at the road, which carried on in a straight line until it vanished over the summit. It was the loneliest section of the route, a two-mile stretch without any sort of cover at all. I looked up at the sky to confirm that the likelihood of lightning was low, then set off at a brisk walk.
The course of the road was easily delineated by the flat profile and two low, grassyridgesabout thirtyfeet apartthat might once have been walls. The landscape up here was different, as the road had been disrupted by several large pockmarks, some of which had filled with water and might have been natural dew ponds but for their uniform roundness. Here and there we could see rusty scrap and twisted aluminum poking out of the turf like a metallic harvest that no one had troubled to remove, and the wildstock were considerably tamer. As we approached the isolated herds that drifted across the upper pastures, they parted languidly to let us through, with only the mildest sense of curiosity. It portended well, as they spook easily, and Riffraff were known to kill and eat them. I even spotted an antelope I hadn’t seen before. It was a dark reddish color with stripes down its front and back legs, the latter doubling as a convenient place to display its bar code. I jotted down as much of its Taxa as I could before it turned away.
We walked like this in silence for a good forty minutes until we encountered the first proper structure we had seen since leaving East Carmine. The flak tower stood in a commanding position at the top of an escarpment that looked down on the broad, fertile valley hiding the remains of High Saffron. Cynics that Courtland and Tommo were, I think even they were impressed, and we all stopped to soak up the view.
The Flak Tower
2.5.03.02.005: Generally speaking, if you fiddle with something, it will break. Don’t.
Although I had seen the ocean on at least three occasions, I had never witnessed a more beautiful stretch of coastline than greeted my eyes that afternoon. The land was dappled with the shadows of the clouds as they drifted lazily across the sky, the sunnier patches highlighting points of interest better than any tour guide. The town nestled comfortably on either side of a long tidal estuary that led into a bay where several abandoned ships were anchored. The biggest of these was a flat-decked vessel so large that it was now an artificial breakwater, the sloping deck white with the guano of seabirds, and the gently rusting hulk altering the dynamics of the bay so dramatically that the whole area between the ship and the shore had silted in and was now dry land.
Of the town, not much could be seen from where we stood. The remains of the bypass appeared as a circular swathe of different-colored vegetation, and a bridge across the river was still standing. The town itself was hidden within the foliage of thick woodland, from whose canopy only a few buildings protruded. The outlying commercial and residential areas could just be seen as a faint grid pattern of different trees and brush. There seemed to be a road that led out to the east and another to the north, but of the open spaces Yewberry had hoped for, I could see nothing.
“We’ve still got a good four-hour walk to go,” I said, estimating the distance. “Less if we can meet the Saffron end of the spalled Perpetulite. Five minutes’ break.”
“We’ll take ten,” said Courtland, and he and Tommo trotted off toward the tower. Scrap found on trips like this could be claimed as personal trove and was worth 50 percent of its value—not a huge sum, unless you’d brought a handy wheelbarrow, but enough for a scone or two at the Fallen Man .
I looked around to make some notes. Easy vehicular access past the looming six-story tower was blocked by a large grassy mound. To one side was a corroded bulldozer, which had sunk a foot into the earth. Behind this was a jumbled collection of boxy-looking vehicles, which were all in the middle stage of rust death and shrouded with nettles, brambles and outcrops of hawthorn and elder. The tower itself was identical to the one at East Carmine, except that it had not been stripped of its narrow bronze window frames. The tower was one of eight that I could see, ringing the town from the highest points all around and, it seemed, connected by a series of steel posts at least twenty feet high and set at fifty-foot intervals. I walked to the first of the high posts and noticed that in places it was still draped with the remains of wire, and that glass insulators similar to those on the telephone poles were bolted to the steel.