‘She’s not going to come through.’
For a moment all he could acknowledge was the sky, the wide sky.
‘Switch off your gun, Branner.’
‘It’s okay. I’ve said it now.’
‘Switch your gun off, John.’
‘No, sir. I’m good. I just needed to say it. There was a falcon on the roof, sir.’
‘Branner.’
‘I’m fine, sir.’
A flock of pigeons bloomed into the space above the building, the falcon toying lazily amongst them. Twisting and tilting. As if called by Branner.
‘I’m fine, now, sir. I’ve said it.’
One of the pigeons seemed to glint with a copper sheen as the flock disappeared.
Branner went for the scope. Like he could miniaturise himself and climb within it, out of view.
A cool air. Wind sharpening.
The metal smell of his rifle.
He saw the man on the waste ground lift himself and lean back, hold something to the light. Saw it was not a weapon beside the man but a rod of some type. Some scientific thing.
It will be legit, Branner thought. Some survey. Something to do with the Dock.
There was a hiatus. Branner stayed in the scope, watched the man unpack vials, tubes. Reach for the strange rod.
Thought of the calm procedural tone the doctor used this morning, to break the news. His wife would die.
He saw then the younger boy, down on the empty riverbed. Throwing stones at the Overland as it passed above him. The scruffy thick-set mongrel dizzy round the boy’s feet.
Focus, John.
The hospital behind him.
The scene below an object now. A coin through a jeweller’s loupe.
Watch the bridge, he coached himself. Focus on the bridge.
The protest now was filtering. The crowd seeming to pour.
Something microscopic in the fact the smallest tap could send a hundred-and-seventy-grain bullet three-quarters of a mile.
Move your finger just a millimetre and you could end a life; but you cannot save one. Her. Not with the strength of your whole body.
Branner felt himself sliding again, away from the wider world. Into the big hole in his ground, the time ahead without her.
The pull of the chasm.
You need to focus now.
She is fading, you can feel it.
And there is nothing you can do.
Come on, he thought, come on. Happen, something, so I do not have to think of her.
LAKE
After the deafening noise and the cool dark of the pumphouse it took Cora a moment to adjust to the relative quiet and the bright sun.
It seemed impossible that the noise of the gravity loaders deep in the rock could barely be heard from outside. But they gave now only a low thrum.
Cora blinked in the light. Butterflies batted their wings as they sunned themselves on the wall of the pumphouse entrance.
There was the self-contained hum of the hoses as the train took on water.
Above the pumphouse, on the slope of the mountain, the gorse was egg-yolk thick. Pale sheep stood out against the grass.
Beyond the scrub and the scattered rock, the wall of the dam looked medieval. Geometric. Impassive.
It looked somehow far older than the mountain.
On the brow of the slope, like shepherds, were the wolf-grey figures of two guards.
The cloth tacked slightly to the ice as Cora adjusted her grip on the block she had brought from the pumphouse cavern.
They had collected the ice from the reservoir in January, those that were here over Christmas, stood to their waists in frozen shore water, pickaxing away.
They stacked the ice in a fissure in the cavern, on a metal grid so its meltwater could drain. As best they could, diverted the stillicide that slid down the face of the rock.
Now, in late summer, they still had ice.
Remembering was odd in this heat. That January day the first time she noticed Leo properly.
The languid way he wielded the pick. A sort of liquidity to it.
She did not think she was a body person. But. His had surprised her.
All the science here. All the tech. The astonishing engineering of burrowing through ancient rock to connect pipes to the floor of a full reservoir. And to keep their beers cool, it came down to a pickaxe. Not that, in that freezing January, any of them could imagine it would ever be warm again.
The sun though, now, was fierce. The only evidence of last night’s rain a grateful lushness in the leaves.
It was the first night Cora had spent alone for some time and she lay awake listening to it drum on the eco-foil walls of the pod.
The rain had been brief and heavy.
They needed it. The reservoir was low.
Now, the late-morning heat shimmered off the body of the train.
Cora understood the differentials. The load temperatures inside the vacuum wagon; how condensation formed immediately as the tanks filled; how the friction of the travelling train affected its surface temperature.
She felt she knew the train in some ways, as if it was a living thing.
She could not get used to the guns, though. They were as foreign and recent as the guards.
Cora thought of the cold water deep in the reservoir, loosing into the gravity feeders. Saw it, in her mind, as a liquid dark and slumbering, suddenly energised and burst into a white tumbling rush. Something passive and silent abruptly breaching with unbridled noise.
That was her thing. Latent capacities. The potential of a material to change the form of its energy.
Hence this block of ice. Hence this afternoon’s project. Leo did not believe it could be done.
It made more sense to collect the flowers first, but Cora knew that once the train was loaded, the mechs would be in the pumphouse, and she wasn’t in the mood for Ryan. Ryan would know Leo was away.
She could do without whatever mean little thing he’d do if they met. Whatever sharp little reminder.
He’d got worse since she and Leo had given up trying to pretend things were just casual, and Leo’d moved in with her.
She was still partly surprised. A year ago, she wanted more than anything to transfer to the Ice Dock project. Perhaps, she wondered now, to get away from Ryan. And then this thing with Leo happened. Quite by surprise. And. The idea of playing with icebergs melted away. She was happy.
She left the block of ice in the cloth on the kitchenette table and put on a summer dress.
Then she put on her walking boots.
She felt like her six-year-old self, going outside in the sun in wellies.
As she stepped out, the air suddenly seemed emptied. The sharp calls of the songbirds quiet. Moments later, the sheep began to wheel on the hill. Moan.
A bumblebee circled with an incongruous drone.
Then the faintest sing came to the wire stays of the accommopods, and the valley filled with the sound of the train starting up.
By the time Cora reached the foot of the hill, the sound was no more than a lessening hush, fading towards the city, hundreds of miles away.