Hunting For The Sun

CHAPTER FORTY SIX

It seemed like the weather was trying to remake itself after my distaste for its antics the day before. The sun was blisteringly hot and the crystal clear sky set the grass and trees aglow on either side of the dusty road. I squinted into the sunlight, listening to Neit telling Adam her life-story. I could see this being a very, very long journey. Even up until the point where the roads were in use and we could hitchhike or something. There had been no sign of human habitation for - what? - five hours. I sighed, watching my feet steadily overtake each other on the stony, unkempt road surface.

'Rae?'

I looked up; Raven was walking beside me.

'Hey,' I said, smiling slightly then looking back down at my feet.

'You did a great job on them back there. Very powerful. I should think that the other half'll come around soon enough.'

I nodded, swallowing through my dry throat.

'How far d'you reckon we have to go until we get to London?' I asked. 'Tomorrow?'

Raven laughed. 'What are you, insane? We've only gone about twenty miles so far. There's another eighty to go.'

Eighty miles. That's... twenty hours more walking. I almost crumpled at the thought. A whole twenty-four hours of stumping along dusty roads in this heat. My displeasure must have shown in my face, because Raven laughed.

'There's a railway up ahead. The station here isn't used, but we can break in and send false signals to get the train to slow down so that we can jump on and hitch a ride. It's an industrial one, crates and the like. Shouldn't take us too long to find one.'

'How far ahead?' I asked, my spirits lifting.

'Five miles or so.'

'Where does it go to?' I was smiling with relief now.

'Right to the heart of London. It's the Ministry's supply train. They don't let anyone except the train drivers and spies in or out of London anymore. The trains are searched and scanned, so we're going to have to get off before then, even though it's a priceless opportunity. The train will go through the wastelands, so we can hop off there and visit papa.'

I grinned. This was too good to be true. But then again, I thought, it had all been laid out for us to do this for ten years. Bitterly, I thought that it would be more helpful if the Ministry hadn't put those sensors up all over the country. I looked across the meadow at the nearest tall, ugly pylon with its purple light flashing away, tasting the air for magic. The moment any was cast, they'd know. We couldn't risk that. As Raven put it, the Ministry's power crawled slowly northwards, ripping up everything in its path. I mean, fair enough: I had been against the Ministry's destruction of non-magic people, but that never meant I was against magic. It's so useful and they stopped everyone because of that bloody war.

Soon I could see an unnatural cleft in the land indicating the railway line. The thundering of engines echoed up through my feet and we began to run alongside the track. The grey grass sloped sparsely down to the weed-punctuated gravel between the old sleepers. Little flakes of pebbles scattered across the shining metal of the rails began to skitter. Raven swore, scrambling to the top of the small ridge and sprinting along it to the graffiti-plastered station with its tumbledown asbestos roof, hurling herself against the shattered screen door and bursting into the engineering room. I shrugged to Neit and the excited-looking Adam, chasing after her.

The skittering grew louder and more pronounced as a column of slipstream lifted several birds into the air. I took a flying leap from the ridgeline across the pathway and onto the station roof, dropping with a clang onto the bridge over the track. My knees jarred and I leaned on the rail to support myself, catching my breath. Raven burst out of the room beneath as the grime-smeared signal lights flickered into action. She jumped up, grabbing the bottom rail of the simple, plain, iron bridge and pulling herself through the bars.

'When - it - gets - here,' she gasped, clutching her chest, 'we jump.'

I swallowed, glancing down at the pebbles and hearing some kind of bell go off in the bowels of the station. It sounded ominously like the bell at the start of a boxing match. I felt the shaking through the pillars of the bridge and stepped up onto the handrail, holding my arms out to steady myself.

A vast reluctance filled me, and I couldn't imagine wanting to go to London at all. Some kind of sick little voice murmured that I damn well had a right to sit down for ten minutes, but I couldn't understand why I thought it to be a sick voice at all. After consideration, I decided that it was instinct telling me that I shouldn't listen, and squinted into the hazy distance of early spring.

As the engine hurtled toward us and we were all lined up on the rails I judged the distance calmly, my academic section ignoring the thundering of my physical heart. It was a short train: no more than four carriages behind the engine with a tarpaulin-covered flatbed at the very end. Bunching up my muscles and crouching to prepare, I forced my mind into blankness and opened my mouth, taking in a huge sooty breath and bellowing, 'JUMP!' as the engine roared beneath us.

My legs, muscles like a coiled spring, straightened and threw me horizontally off the bridge, spread-eagled to hit the train roof like a spider or similar. The air pressure against my body curved me around as though I were hugging a dome and the rippling of my fur collar distracted me to the point that I very nearly broke every bone in my body as I hit the train like a falling pancake. Instinct told me to roll sideways, but I didn't dare, knowing that the others would land soon, that there was only so much space on the roof at all, and that I was highly likely to roll right off the edge.

As it was, I stretched my stiffened arms out to hook my fingers under the roof-plate and dug my knees and toes as hard down as I could. The extended seconds quaked with the thumps of Raven, Neit and Adam landing further up the carriage.

It was only when my badly oiled mind scraped enough strawberry jam -- or maybe blueberry - together to count to three that I decided that the others were here and I could afford to move. I peeled my cheek away from the metal to squint across at the others. The instant I lifted my head, the slipstream hurled all the loose strands of my hair it could possibly find into my eyes. I was too scared to scrape them out of the way with a hand, so I settled for flicking my head until as many of them were gone as possible. I crawled forwards slowly, feeling for handholds to stop myself from slithering down off the roof.

'Raven?' I called hoarsely; my throat was still full of dust. 'Is everyone okay?'

'I think so,' I heard her call back. 'We need to find a way in. Do you want to go down to the last carriage and crowbar the end door?'

'There's a flatbed at the end that we can sit on for a while out of the wind,' I suggested. 'We can catch our breath a bit and break down the end door.'

Raven's head bobbed slightly and I kneeled, raising myself into a crouch and running along the roof, my stiff legs wobbling precariously. At the dreaded end of the carriage I sped up, throwing myself over the gap and dropping to my knees quietly. I was reminded of those boring Westerns my father used to watch on Sunday afternoons as I gathered courage, standing almost upright to sprint along the carriages and leap between them. I pricked my ears up, hearing the footfalls of the others and feeling the metal vibrate beneath me. I smiled. London had trains; trains were fun.

I was immensely shocked to find that I was running along the last carriage, and it took all I had to gather myself to roll safely when my feet were already pedalling thin air. I tucked my head in, holding my breath, as the bump of bone between the tops of my shoulder blades hit the wood six feet below the roof. Straightening out various cricks, I sat on a crate to wait for the others and catch my breath.

For some reason, a curiously romantic vision filled my head: I was sitting on a chaise-longue type thing flicking through a magazine in a beautiful room. French windows opened onto a balcony overlooking fields and woods while white muslin curtains billowed in a breeze. I turned to look at him, sitting in an armchair with a heavy book, its spine resting on his knee as he lounged indolently, accustomed to the grandeur. I wanted to marvel, to look closely at him in this setting, but the vision flickered and I was sitting on a packing crate on the back of a train hurtling towards a war-torn city.

'Rae?' Neit said, prodding me in the arm. 'C'mon. We need to get into the carriage for the journey.'

I nodded, but I wanted to stay out here really. The sun was out and it looked to be nice for the rest of the trip. I stood up.

'Adam's got to be the strongest,' I said, looking him up and down.

He flushed and shrugged. It occurred to me that he had hardly spoken since he joined us. I grinned.

'If you aren't sure, I'll give you an arm-wrestle,' I suggested.

He flushed again.

'Or a thumb war if you don't feel up to a big fight,' I grinned. He actually smiled back and I was immensely pleased with myself.

'If I can't do it, you try,' he said quietly, flicking up the tarpaulin to start looking for a suitable tool. I nodded, although I had been joking. I'm a weakling. It annoyed me when people took me seriously like that, but strangely I didn't mind this time. I shot the lock off a crate and began to raid the contents.

Adam selected a length of lead piping, which I felt it highly likely I would be unable to lift. He hefted it a few times and took an iron mallet to the end, flattening it against a block of steel. I watched with fascination, never having found metalwork at all interesting. I found myself imagining his tanned, muscular arms shiny with sweat and his tousled fringe sticking to his forehead as he did some manly hitting of innocent strips of metal in a forge. He seemed to sense my eyes on him and turned slightly to look at me. Although his gaze itself passed over me without interest, he smiled with his eyes. I felt a fluttering in my stomach.

I watched his shoulders bunch under his T-shirt as he put the end of the crowbar inside the gap and prepared to pull on it. I drew a pistol and waved it for him to move aside. He turned his face away and moved his hands right to the end of the lever as I shot the padlock off in a shower of sparks. With a manly grunt, he bent one elbow up and slammed his body-weight into the end of the crowbar. With a crunch the bolts on the inside came free from their fixings and the door swung wide. Adam stepped back for us to go in, sticking the crowbar through his belt. The other two went in and he waited silently for me, but I shook my head.

'I like fresh air,' I told him. 'There isn't enough of it these days.'

He nodded and looked as though he would go in, but he turned and walked over to me, sitting down beside me.

'Unless you want to be alone,' he added in his quiet voice.

I had, but I reflexively reconsidered, looking into his mahogany eyes.

'No, that's fine,' I said, sitting back and linking my hands behind my head.

Adam put his hands either side of himself on the crate and gave a heave, lifting his legs up with ease and standing in one movement, turning to look out of the back of the train, over the crates. He wore two bands, each of three different coloured metals twisted together, on his right wrist. They didn't shift or jangle as he moved, looking as though they had been made to be exactly where they were. On his other wrist was a wide band of thick, very dark brown leather, exactly the same colour as his hair. He folded his arms on the crate in front of him, resting his chin on them and looking thoughtful.

I thought that if he preferred to be silent, I wouldn't force him to talk. To be honest, it was something of a pleasant novelty not to be dragged into talking constantly. It seemed that everyone I spent my time with had something to say all the time. I would never be described as a quiet person, but I couldn't remember the last time I had just sat in a companionable silence with someone - at least while I was awake, that is.

So sitting there in the spring sunshine, I took the opportunity to check that all my kit was all right. I examined each of my boots closely: polishing the metal spur-straps, buckles and toe caps; rubbing polish from my pack into the black leather, and, engrossed in my task, picking grass, twigs and dirt out of the buckles. I spat onto a cloth and wiped the mud from my leather trousers, checking the cuffs for loose stitches. Adam still gazed into space. I could hear Raven and Neit talking in the distance as I polished my belt-buckle and took off my flying jacket to comb the fur collar lovingly with my fingers and rub the battered coat down. I left it unzipped in the heat, fingering my pendant.

But even after months of talking, that much silence got to me. I stood up and looked out across the back of the carriage with Adam. A raging urge to say 'What ya thin-kin?' almost overtook me, but I squished it by sighing. Adam barely glanced at me. Oh dear. Now I wanted to say 'Sooo...' What was my problem?

'Was there something?' he said after a while, and I blushed.

'Oh, not really,' I babbled, then I caught myself. I did have something to say. No damn reason to be embarrassed; this guy had decided to come with us and if I, as the leader, wanted to talk, he should damn well comply. 'Yes, actually. How old are you?'

'Twenty-two.'

'How did you get into the Army?'

'Signed up.'

'Oh, that's nice.' I wasn't going to get much out of this guy. 'Why do you have such big muscles?'

Oh GOD. I tried to save my crumbling ego by reassuring myself that at least I hadn't said 'nice muscles'.

His mouth twitched and his eyes were twinkling. He was laughing at me, in a very Adam way, though. A very Adam way that made my tummy flip.

'Errands.'

'For whom?' I asked, looking to my right to hide my blush.

'Satan,' he answered sincerely. 'My stepmother.'

'Demon stepmother?' I turned to look at him again.

He nodded. 'My father's dead, my mother too, so I'm stuck with her.'

'Well, not any more,' I smiled. 'What sort of errands?'

'What? Because doing the groceries isn't sparkling enough for you?' he grinned, showing even white teeth. 'Do you want me to tell you that she forced me to carry anvils around for her because she collected them as an evil, evil hobby?'

I laughed, but he seemed to have realised that he'd spoken and clenched his jaw tight, staring fixedly at the horizon. I rolled my eyes. He clearly didn't want to talk, but this time I had to fight with myself not to try to make him. My eyes settled on the side of his arm. It looked so smooth and hard that I was desperate to reach out and touch it to see. My fingers were peeling themselves away to do just that when Raven said behind me, 'We're crushingly bored, so we're going for a hundred, wanna join in?'

I turned sharply, snapping out of it.

'A hundred whats?'

'Boxes of bottles of beer on the wall,' Raven said sincerely. 'Now we're adults it takes more than one green bottle to get us going.'

I rolled my eyes. 'Are you sure no one'll hear us?'

'Not entirely, but we can pelt them with empty bottles, can't we?'

I shrugged, sitting cross-legged on the flat wood at the near end of the flatbed. Neit and Raven sat down too, then Adam joined us, leaning his back against a crate and not looking like he planned to sing along.

'A hundred boxes of bottles of beer on the wall, a hundred boxes of bottles of beeer. You take one down, pass it around, ninety-nine boxes of bottles of beer on the wall. Ninety-nine boxes of bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine boxes of bottles of beeer...'

The words rolled off my tongue without my thinking about them after a while. Adam leaned back and closed his eyes and I watched him. I couldn't take my eyes off him. Sunset streaked golden-pink swirls through the air as though someone was dangling a never-emptying bucket of paint out of a window on a train through heaven. The colours trailed down through the sky, sifted by the powder-blue clouds like coloured sand in a child's toy, dyed by the blue to crumple onto the horizon like a waterfall or to run peach-golden behind it. Long cerulean shadows pooled behind the hills and in the valleys rolling past us, as though we were a stationary boat in a slow, languid sea.

I fell asleep as the last rays of the sun kissed my face and awoke again as something else did.