‘Wait,’ called Dalip, trotting up behind her, his feet sinking into the soft dry sand and causing him to have an awkward, almost stumbling gait.
‘You got something to say too?’
‘Me? No. What I know about relationships could be written on a stamp.’
She laughed despite her mood.
‘What is it, then?’
‘I wanted to,’ and he stopped, his lips twisting and no words coming out. ‘It’s complicated.’
‘Fuck, Dalip. Sometimes you need to just say it.’
‘Okay.’ He took a deep breath. ‘If it comes to it, save the maps, not us.’
‘What?’
‘At least that way, one of us might survive. If you can’t carry the box, because it’s the wrong shape and too heavy, how many maps do you think you can hold in your claws?’ He waited for an answer, but she was too stunned to say yes or no. ‘We might get five minutes from shore, when I do something stupid and turn the boat over. If those maps get wet, they’re ruined for ever. So even if it’s just an accident, and we can get right way up again, we’ve lost the point of the journey. So you have to get as many maps as possible to safety, whatever happens to us.’
‘You want me to watch you drown?’
‘No. But who are you going to save? Me? Mama? Luiza or Elena? And while you’re doing that, you’re not saving the maps.’ He looked surprised at his own words. ‘We’ve all talked about it, and we’re agreed.’
‘Without asking me.’
‘Or letting Crows know.’ He held up his hand to forestall argument. ‘We have to consider that he’ll try and take the maps, just like we have to consider storms, shipwreck and me screwing up.’
‘Okay. Okay.’ She felt even considering the matter was a defeat. They might have decided she would be the last woman standing, but she didn’t have to go along with that when the time came. She could say yes with her mouth, and no with her heart. It wasn’t like she didn’t lie every five minutes back in London. ‘I’ll try. Carrying you was hard, but at least you were the right shape. Prey-shaped. What if we ditch the box, maybe rig up some sort of sling I can grab?’
‘It’s not that we won’t try and save ourselves. None of us want to die, and who knows? Crows might do the saving for us, flip the boat back over and dump each of us on board. It still means that you have to go for the maps first, because while you have them, we’re worth saving.’
That was a good reason, and she felt happier. ‘I said okay.’ Crows wasn’t going to renege on his deal, the deal they forced out of him, with promises of destitution and mutilation being his only alternatives. Was he?
She watched Crows play in the breaking waves, threading his sinuous black-scaled body through the walls of water as they rose and rushed inland. She knew what a gold-plated bastard he was, and yet… She chewed at her lip. Sooner or later, he was going to betray them. They all knew it, even◦– especially◦– him. All the kindnesses, the advice, the food: none of that would matter. Not to him, not to her.
At that moment, there was one person she really wanted to talk to, and that was Bell.
‘I thought that conversation was going to be much more awkward,’ said Dalip, and she tuned back in. Apparently he’d been saying some other stuff, but if it had been important, she’d missed it and she wasn’t going to ask him what it had been.
‘You’re fine,’ she said absently. The wind carried the smallest grains of sand across the beach, blurring it. She felt it tug at her skirt, and wished it was pulling at her feathers. She watched Crows for a few moments more, then deliberately turned her back on him.
‘We need more firewood,’ said Dalip, ‘and we used most of the nearby stuff last night.’
‘What happens when we run out?’ she said, more thinking aloud than an actual question. ‘We’ve got nothing.’
‘It’s not that bad. We’ve got enough to be getting on with.’
‘That’s not it, though, is it? We’re living like, I don’t know, cavemen or something. No wonder everyone ends up in a castle.’
‘Those brass instruments of Bell’s mean that there’s somewhere here that makes them. It’s another reason to believe that the White City is real place. Those things have to come from somewhere.’
‘But what if they don’t? What if there are paper trees and metal bushes and cotton mines, or stuff pops up out of the ground like the castles do? What if the White City doesn’t exist and we’re all just Down’s bitches?’
‘We’ll find out soon enough,’ he said. ‘Our one advantage is you. You can fly up and search a huge area quickly.’
‘I could do that now!’
‘You’d be gone for days, and we’d be alone with Crows.’ He sighed. ‘We wouldn’t stand a chance.’
Her enthusiasm deflated like a slashed tyre.
‘Don’t think I hadn’t thought of that,’ said Dalip. ‘You’re the only thing keeping us and the maps together.’
He knew it too, then, that Crows would ultimately turn on them. And, like her, he lacked the balls to get rid of him first.
‘The boat’ll be ready to go in the morning,’ she said, for the want of anything better. ‘How far do you think those islands are? When I’m flying, they look like I’d be gone for hours.’
Dalip shielded his eyes from the sky-glare and stared at the distant smudges of land. ‘It’s impossible to say. I can’t make out any features, except there’s a mountain on one of them. Could be five miles, ten miles. Twenty miles.’
‘Further than that.’
‘It is what it is. If Down is… flatter. Bigger.’ He shook his head. ‘Every time I look up, I get a little bit more of an idea of just how vast this place is. Nowhere on Earth is this empty. Nowhere. It’s easy to forget.’
She gave him a sceptical look, and he shrugged.
‘Okay, not that easy. But it’s possible. This looks like places I know, places I’ve been to.’
‘Lucky you.’ She thought again about Greece, about the video advert she’d seen just before the fire, about the blue water and white sand and the tanned, toned girl in a bikini. Maybe one day.
‘And then, of course, a sea serpent comes into view and ruins the illusion.’ He spread his arms wide as Crows’ sleek, serpentine head emerged from the depths. ‘I’m on a beach in a different universe, I’m dressed like a Guantanamo convict and my best friend can turn into a falcon.’
‘It could be worse,’ she said.
‘It was worse.’ Then, in an effort to brighten the mood, Dalip said, ‘We still need to find more firewood, or we’ll be cold and hungry tonight.’
‘Where’s Luiza?’ She didn’t need to ask where Elena was, because either by choice or habit, they were almost always together.
‘I think they went inland.’
‘To…’
‘Look for food, I suppose.’
She glanced over to where Mama sat, next to the map box.
‘How long have they been gone?’
‘Most of the morning. I think Luiza, at least, wanted some time away from Crows.’ He turned to face the line of dunes backing the beach. ‘Do you want to check up on them without looking like you’re doing it?’
‘Better than picking up driftwood and hauling it halfway across Down.’ She was still self-conscious enough about changing in front of him to want to find somewhere private. She’d done it before, but not while he was in any state to notice that there was a moment◦– blink and he’d miss it brief◦– when what she was wearing disappeared but the physical transformation had yet to begin.
Crows always changed underwater, so she hadn’t known, and quite why she cared she couldn’t say: except that Dalip would be embarrassed, and she didn’t want that. Well, perhaps a little. But not enough to cause more problems between them.