‘The line should cross the coast just up from here.’ She pointed around the bay. ‘Or even here. Actually here.’
Her eyes narrowed at Crows.
The man seemed unperturbed. ‘Without the maps, without your insight, we would never have guessed.’
‘Says you.’
Dalip held out his hands for the collection of maps that Crows still held. He gave them up with only the merest hint of reluctance.
Mary watched as the boy slowly leafed through them one by one. He was looking at them with his eyes almost closed.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Just,’ he said, and then nothing more as he continued his search. He looked down at two maps already positioned, then back at the one in his hands. ‘It’s not here.’
‘What isn’t?’
‘If Crows made this one, then he made another one, from where he made landfall to the White City. But we don’t have it. Or if we do, I don’t recognise it.’
Luiza went to the trunk and seized the larger pile of discards and gave half to Elena. ‘We can check through all these, or you can tell us the truth.’
Mary clenched her jaw and felt her temper begin to rise. Visions of the Red Queen started to blot out rational thought and she had to turn away, stamping her way down to the wash of the waves. When she was ankle-deep and the biting water tugged this way and that at her, she let out a noise that started as a moan and ended up a shriek.
When she stopped, and was resting herself, leaning forward, hands on her knees, she heard someone else wade up behind her.
‘He’s never been to the White City, has he? Not even close.’ Her throat was raw, and her voice hoarse. ‘We don’t even know if it fucking exists. He could have heard someone say it, and he believed it. Or thought that we’d believe it.’
‘It could be a myth, like Shangri-La or R’Lyeh.’ Dalip had waded next to her, staring out to sea. ‘I don’t know if anything he’s ever told us can be trusted.’
‘Of course it fucking can’t. But he does tell the truth. Sometimes. Mostly. Fucking chancer.’
She kicked at the water, and found the effect unsatisfying. She wanted it to be Crows’ head. Or his balls.
‘We still have the maps.’
‘They might be lying too. We’ve no way of telling.’ She subsided. ‘Is this better than being burned to death?’
‘On balance?’ He wiped spray off his face with his lean fingers. ‘Yes.’
4
Dalip made the most of the light, going through the maps one by one, discussing them with Mama, finding it more effective to talk about the features that each showed, than to simply stare blankly at the lines and scratches and then put them to one side. The few words written on them were mostly in English, but sometimes not: the French, Italian, German or perhaps Dutch or Danish he could pronounce even if he couldn’t understand it. There were others in alphabets that weren’t Latin, and one beautiful and enigmatic sheet that was not so much drawn as painted, calligraphic characters of either Chinese or Japanese adorning the side. No Punjabi: he could be Down’s first Sikh.
Sitting there, on the beach, with pieces of paper riffling about them in the late afternoon breeze as it swept on shore, they made a small but significant discovery.
‘We’re right, aren’t we?’
Mama flexed her bare toes in the sand. ‘Well, it looks that way to me. I don’t know what it means, but let’s say we are.’
‘It might mean that we can put the maps together more easily, now we know what to look for. It might mean that it’s impossible, because none of them overlap.’
‘Whether we can do it at all depends on finding somewhere to do it.’ Mama regarded her surroundings. ‘We can’t do this here, taking everything apart and putting it back together again every day, worried about the wind and weather. Pack it away, Dalip. Pack it all away, while I go and soak my poor feet.’
She rolled upright and walked wearily down to the sea’s edge, while Dalip started to tidy the maps away, blowing them free of sand and placing them back in the trunk.
‘Done?’
Mary dropped more driftwood on the pile next to the fire.
‘Every single map shows a portal,’ said Dalip. ‘As far as we can tell, none of them show two.’
‘Is that…?’
‘Significant?’ He put the only two maps they had convincingly put together on top, then heaved the lid closed. ‘Yes. It has to be, but I don’t know how.’
‘Oh.’
‘Where’s Crows hiding?’
She turned around slowly, trying to locate him. ‘He said he’d fuck off until we decided what to do with him.’
‘He may never come back,’ said Dalip. He refixed the hasps and pushed the locking pegs into place. ‘Are you ready for that?’
‘What do you mean?’
He didn’t honestly know; his comment had just popped out. ‘You seem to like him. Despite—’
‘Everything?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fuck. I don’t know. You’d think there’d be something about safety in numbers, running with a gang, that’d mean he’d not try to shaft us at every available opportunity. He’s on his own otherwise.’ She raised her gaze to the sky. ‘Maybe we should cut him free, if that’s what suits him best.’
‘He’ll always come back for these.’ Dalip thumped the lid of the trunk. ‘If we let him.’
‘We can’t…’
‘We can’t stop him unless we either kill him or cripple him.’
‘And you’re going to do that? You?’
‘Of course not.’ Dalip twisted away. He had a knife, a kitchen knife that was his kirpan, bound to him with a strip of cloth around his waist, under his overalls. He’d probably be no match for Crows’ magic in open combat, but a stealthy first cut to the back of one of his legs would bring him down without killing him.
Of course, stabbing someone with a dirty blade was a double death sentence on Down. If infection didn’t get him, the weirdness of the landscape would.
He was too squeamish. Stanislav had been right all along.
Could he do it? He knew how to. If getting rid of Crows was the only way to protect himself and his friends, was that enough of a moral imperative for him to act pre-emptively?
‘Would you let me?’ he asked.
‘What? Crows? I… We’re just kids, Dalip. How the fuck did we end up like this?’
Dalip watched Mama standing in the sea, her trouser legs neatly turned up to her knees as the waves broke around her generous calves.
‘We ran,’ he said. ‘We did what we needed to survive. And we kept doing it. You got away from the Wolfman, we broke out of the pit, we fought Bell, we fought Stanislav. We chased Crows, we captured the maps.’
‘Do you ever wonder what happened to Grace?’
‘Maybe she escaped. Maybe she died. Whichever, we’ve seen no sign of her since, and we wouldn’t know where to start looking.’ His shoulders shifted, stretching back against his natural tendency to stoop. ‘But, yes. Every day. I try and picture how I’d be coping on my own, against all this.’
‘Down gives,’ said Mary.
‘And half the time the gifts could kill you.’
He had another thought, a terrible, world-changing thought, and the only way to see if he was right was to look.
He opened the trunk again in slow, deliberate moves, lifting the lid and lowering it on the hinge side, then lifting out each map in turn until he was sure he was right.
And when he was, he tilted his head back and yelled. ‘Crows? Crows? Get back here and tell me how you did it.’
He hadn’t gone far. Barely had the cry died away that a familiar thin black shadow crested a dune and started to lope down towards the beach.