Stamping Butterflies

CHAPTER 52 Northern Mountains, CTzu 53/Year 20 [The Future]

Many things had changed next morning. The wind, which usually swung Tris and Luca's sleeping bag through the patterns inherent in the bag using only one retaining rope but containing two people, both fastened by tethers of their own... This wind was gone.

Better still, the heavy cloud that had clung like guilt to the lip of the cliff was also gone and had taken the snowfall with it. Clean skies spread above Tris and hawks ran thermals in the clear air below.

It was said that in the old stories skies had been blue rather than pale silver. This idea was odd enough to have caught Tris's imagination as a child. And she'd spent much of one week trying to come up with reasons why. In the end she'd given up, not because she couldn't find reasons but because she had better things to do.

Like find her way from one level to another.

And now Tris could see from where she hung on the cliff right to the valley floor, and it was very long way. So far indeed that Tris wasn't sure if what she saw below her was a village, a town or the Forbidden City itself. All she could see was a square smudge of green.

"What do you reckon?"

A faint echo was her only answer.

That was the other change and Tris wasn't too sure how she felt about this one. In fact, if she hadn't been so annoyed with Luca she'd probably be crying again. But there was a limit to how much and how often one person could cry and Tris felt she was beyond it.

All the same...

She woke cold but not frozen and found herself curled up like a child in the bottom of their makeshift sleeping bag. Curled up and alone. Waking slowly through the dreams of a man who stared out over a huge expanse of beaten metal below the blue of a childish sky.

Still tired and unquestionably cross, Tris had kicked out one leg, claiming stiffness in her knees but really hoping to hit Luca. Instead of the Baron her bare foot caught the edge of the sleeping bag and she felt it then, the change. A part of her wanted to describe it as a wrongness, but Tris wasn't sure this was the right word.

Luca was missing.

Struggling to her knees inside the bag, Tris reached out and made sure of what she already knew. Luca had gone and she was alone. More than this, he'd left his knife, the marble, his satchel, what remained of the food and their two unused climbing spikes.

Tris stopped, took a slow look around her and did what she did best.

Reconstructed events from the facts stacking up inside her mind. It wasn't intelligence that let her do this, though Tris sometimes told herself that it was. And even Doc Joyce seemed to buy into the idea of her intelligence. At least he pretended he did.

No, it was coldness. This stacking up of facts, sifting of ideas and synthesis of both into a conclusion was about protection and distance. About protecting herself from the world outside her and keeping her distance from those not drawn like moths to the same cold flame.

"I've been tried," said a voice in her head. "I'm not interested in overturning the conviction."

Tris blinked.

The man beside the huge expanse of water was standing up, waiting calmly as other men moved towards him, shackling his hands behind his back while a woman looked on.

"I'll call Gene," said the woman. "See what he says."

Tris looked from the rope that held the sleeping bag secure to the overhang, then looked at the tether still knotted around her thighs, the one which ran from between her legs, under her padded jacket and up to a steel spike in the rock-face. And finally she looked at the rope she'd been avoiding.

It was cut very cleanly, probably by the bare blade now resting in the bottom of the sleeping bag. And there was something else: the bag remained sealed along the side Luca had chosen. Which meant... Tris tried to clarify in her head exactly what this meant and rather began to wish she hadn't.

Cold and alone, Luca had unzipped the molecules along his edge of the sleeping bag, climbed out to hang in space and then leant across to seal the bag again before cutting himself free and falling to his death.

He'd sealed the bag to keep Tris safe, to prevent her absent-mindedly kicking the knife or spikes out of the bag or rolling out herself into the night wind to panic as she twisted on her short length of tether.

Tris could think of half a dozen practical, utterly prosaic reasons why Luca might have done what he did. But she couldn't think of the reason, not the one that really made sense.

"Shit," she said to herself. It was hard to remain furious with someone who'd sacrificed himself to let you live.

"If that's what he did," said the voice in her head.

"What else?"

"Despair."

"At what?" The girl's voice was contemptuous.

"The sheer scale of that descent."

Tris shook her head, even as she picked up his satchel and put it over her shoulder. The knife went through her belt, its cold edge rather too close to Tris's hips for her liking. And then she clambered out of the sleeping bag, yanked down her trousers and pissed into the cold air.

"It's time to start," said the voice.

"Yes," Tris said. "I've already worked that out." She took a final look at the silver haze above her where other worlds formed their fractured shell around the distant sun.

She would have to leave the sleeping bag where it was, because only Luca knew how to turn it from cloak into a bivouac or bag and back again and it was much too cumbersome to carry.

"Move," Tris said.

"Yeah," she said. "I know."

"Well, do it."

Tris was talking to herself again.