‘Careful, sport,’ I said to Edward. ‘Watch yourself up here.’ Just like Pops had said to me a hundred times—a thousand.
If you didn’t know what was in the bell tower, right now you’d probably be thinking something like, Oh, how nice of that nerdy dad to keep his daughters so safe on that beautiful island at the end of the world! How smart to find it, so far away from everything rotting and tortured and dark. And, hoo boy, I feel as if it’s my duty to point out that it’s not as simple as it seems, but is anything?
What you should actually be asking as you read my very neat, small, tidy writing (which, can I say, is not easy to execute when you’re left-handed) is some kind of version of this: what did their dad do that was so bad that he had to drag his charming pair of daughters to camp out like fugitives at the ends of the earth?
And, well, I guess it was sort of bad, though he was actually trying to do something boomingly, globally, totally GOOD, at least to start with. But things don’t always turn out how you want them to—ask most people here, I bet, not that I’ve seen any since I arrived.
So—it came out later—my dad wasn’t studying axolotls at all. He was the guy who figured out how to put free wi-fi in the takeaway coffee cups that nobody was using anymore on account of the role of disposable packaging in environmental carnage and also because they didn’t want everyone else to think they were arseholes. By then the shame factor around single-use objects was high. This was around the time that the phone companies got everyone hooked on looking at the internet on their mobiles approximately a zillion times per day as if they seriously couldn’t help themselves, and then jacked the prices right up so that—no jokes—people started getting bills that meant they had to sell their houses and move into the weird white tent cities that sprang up around the edges of the actual cities like inside-out bread crusts. You probably remember what went down then—all the kinds of things that happen when people feel desperate and hard done by. Black markets, hostages, dodgy deals, you know how it goes. For about a year, the world was data-starved and mean with it. People were on fire with jealousy, which was fitting, given that huge stripes of the planet were on fire too.
So when Pops figured out how to pick up internet via the little fibres in cardboard, and people, with some light googling, could tap into the networks that were still around (government ones, mostly, and rich people’s), boy, was he a hero for three hot seconds. He was on about twenty-four thousand podcasts and even a TV talk show. Once Winter and I found a clip but we couldn’t watch past the theme music because it was the one with the host who makes everyone dance along to the opening credits. We shrieked and slammed the laptop shut. Let’s just say Pops might have been one smart dude, but he did not have an innate sense of rhythm.
With so many users back online, Big Tech made waterfalls of money again, and they loved Pops’s socks right off. They offered him a high-powered job on a top-secret project that was called—I kid you not—Operation Freedom. They wanted him to figure out if the internet could travel through sound waves in water so that it could be literally everywhere twenty-four seven. Turns out it can, even through puddles and taps, and because water is most places, that meant, with the help of some wires and magnets, free internet access for most everybody, coffee cups or not. Except, I guess, for desert nomads, but are they really busting to do internet banking?
You can see how it’s not a completely stupid idea and would have made things more democratic and egalitarian and all that rumble, and because Pops is an A-plus genius, he got it done. We were four when Operation Freedom launched. If you look hard enough, there’s a photo of Winter high up on our father’s shoulders on the day they metaphorically flicked that switch. He’s shaking hands with a guy in a baseball cap—you know the guy I mean. Winter isn’t looking at him, that guy, which is kind of funny, given that he was so famous. Her hands are buried deep in Pops’s curls, her head tilted back, eyes closed to the sun and smiling. But perhaps Pops knew what was coming, because his eyes are scrunched with worry behind the dark frames of his glasses and if you look really carefully, his left hand is gripping Winter’s tiny thigh so hard that it looks like he’s sinking his fingers into pizza dough.
Winter
‘Why would he come here?’ asked Edward as we lifted the pilot out of the carcase of the plane.
His face dripped from every hole. His chest pooled blood until it didn’t. Summer dropped his feet. She went to throw up. Pete circled. His eyes rolled. He barked till his voice was a scrape. When Summer dragged him away, he nipped the webbing of her fingers. But she didn’t let go.
That pilot wasn’t much older than us. Next to Edward, he seemed small.
‘Do you think he was lost?’ Edward asked.
‘No,’ I said firmly. Because he wasn’t. There was every reason for him to come.
Edward buried the corpse so I didn’t have to watch. I didn’t tell him that we had done it before.
Summer
After a couple of years, Pops quit that job at Operation Freedom, though the guy with the baseball cap begged him to stay. Pops told us it was time to return to his true love: herpetology, which is the study of amphibians, and includes, more specifically, neotenic salamanders. He told us it’s what he’d dreamed about his whole childhood, the big weirdo, out walking on the moor, where he grew up, and that all the tech stuff had just been a diversion on the way to him finding his bliss. We never thought to question that story, though I guess we were only six.
This was about the time when Winter and I started to travel with Pops round the world, but not to the south of France or the Italian lakes or Whistler or the Amazon or any of those usual holiday destinations. I’m talking some weird places, like Guatemala and Burkina Faso and Myanmar and French Guiana and Sierra Leone, and if you have to look a couple of those up, don’t feel bad, I did too. It’s pretty sad to think of that year we spent on the banks of sludgy brown rivers and slim, hungry creeks, peering over the edge and looking our hardest for Mexican walking fish, which is why we thought we were there—to help Pops make breakthroughs in the fascinating world of axolotls. Sometimes I worried that Winter would strain something in her big doe eyes, she searched so hard with everything in her.
The joke was on us, in the end, because it turns out there are no axolotls in the Nile or the Ganges, just a lot of funeral pyres, which are basically dead people bobbing around like floating candles in the bath.
Then we moved to Tokyo, where the only salamanders are in tanks, and we hardly saw Pops at all. He spent most of his time in his lab, ‘writing up his findings’, apart from a few random trips that he dragged us on. We never left the hotels, where he met people in dark corners of lobbies while we mostly hung out at the pool. We assumed they were other amphibian experts, but of course they weren’t. Some were from Big Tech and some were from the Resistance, and to cut a long story short (which is, quite frankly, difficult for me), it all grew into something bigger and Pops was right at the centre, like the faux-yolk in a Cadbury Crème Egg, which wasn’t a good place for him to be, already half mad with regrets.
That’s how we ended up flying here, Pops at the controls of a seaplane that he seemed to be driving straight into Our Mountain, and truly? In that moment, as the rockface rushed towards us, after everything that had happened, I didn’t even blame him. I just reached for Winter’s hand and closed my eyes as she whispered to herself beside me, and waited for the brutal, life-ending slam that never came.