When she got to the end, when the diary just stops, Winter wept, like I knew she would: deep throbbing sobs that shook her shoulders and also my core. ‘Here,’ I said, handing her a jar of hazelnut praline and a spoon. ‘It’s not so sad to end up a sunbeam in a zillion people’s hearts. Anne would have liked that, I’ll bet. And for real, I bet her spirit really dug floating out of the Secret Annexe after being cooped up there so long. I bet it went and got hot chips on the way to heaven.’
But that just made Winter cry harder, and scrunch her face into her knees, and nothing I said made any difference and I felt like I was throwing flour into the wind until Edward nosed his way into Winter’s lap and started licking the tears right off her cheeks, and I could say that maybe he was just salt-deficient and acting on animal instincts to seek out sodium, but I don’t think so, because by the time her face was wet with bear slobber, Winter had stopped her weeping. She scooped up that bear—at least, she tried to, but that was the second I realised the bear had Grown, and instead he tipped Winter backwards onto the floor, his paws on her shoulders, like those gold pins you stick in paper dolls to make their arms move, and he held her there, kissing her eyelids with love. And though she laughed and laughed, I didn’t laugh, because I could see from the outside that Winter couldn’t have pushed him away even if she’d wanted to. I thought about the scratch on my cheek that still hadn’t healed. He wasn’t a cub. Perhaps he never had been. He was almost a man of a bear now, and while I’d been busy worrying about old Anne Frank, Edward had got too strong.
Winter
‘Do you remember…’ I began as we kept jogging. ‘Do you remember when the internet came back, through the water, and they started to use it for terrorism?’
‘Those beheadings?’ said Edward. ‘The live hangings, and the stonings—all that?’
I nodded. It had started as a trickle. Prisoners decapitated on video. A beloved world leader lynched, his limbs torn off by two tanks rolling in opposite directions.
At the beginning, each piece of footage only lasted a few hours online before it got taken down.
But then there were more and more until every day a new one arrived. As soon as they were removed, someone else would repost them.
Soon they popped up in emails from banks and airlines. When people switched on their computers, they played automatically, until everyone was too afraid to shut down.
The images were embedded in games that taught children to read, flicking on screen when they reached the next level. A new war that was everywhere. Or a reminder that war had always been everywhere, but half the world had been ignoring it.
‘Are you saying that your dad was one of those guys?’
‘No! I mean, yes, but not how you’re thinking. My father—he was a scientist. An inventor too. A zoologist mostly.’
‘That’s why he got taken away? For being some kind of renegade zookeeper? That’s why they risked sending that pilot here?’
‘A zoologist. He specialised in amphibians, and then saltwater reptiles. And from there, he sort of…got involved in things at the bottom of the ocean.’
‘He was a scuba diver?’
I shook my head. ‘Think about what else is under the sea.’
‘Sand…crabs…shipwrecks…gold. He was a pirate! Hey, we’re back at the start. Looks like I’m reading tonight after all.’
We slowed to a walk and found a tree stump to stretch on. Edward was serious about stretching.
‘A lost city—whatcha call it, Atlantis? He found Atlantis?’
‘Think about what we were just talking about,’ I said. Hamstrings. Quads.
His expression changed. ‘Oh. The internet. The thing with the cables. That wasn’t…Was that him?’
I had said too much. Summer would know it. She would see—could see all of it. How these days my heart was tennis-ball bright.
‘I need to go and cut fruit with Summer,’ I said as I shook out my legs, one then the other. ‘For the jam.’
Edward looked up to the sky and smiled. ‘You girls. Such closed books, for all of that reading. Go on, then, to your big peach emergency. Leave me here hanging with good old Pete. I’ll make up my own version of how that story ends. Might read it to you some day.’
Before everything, when Summer and I still went to school, most people thought the internet was beamed by satellites. But it was really a web of thick cables dug into the seabeds. The Earth was wrapped in it, like a net. If an anchor ripped a cable out or a shark bit it, the system was set up to use another cable, another pathway.
‘That’s just the way it evolved,’ our father told us once when we were playing under his desk. ‘Impossible to destroy, unless millions of people around the world simultaneously take to it with axes, and even then parts of it would survive. So how else to shut it down? That’s the trillion-dollar question. That’s a whole life’s work.’
‘What’s that got to do with axolotls?’ I asked him.
‘Everything,’ he said. ‘Everything.’
Summer
I woke up and they were gone, and I know I was sleepy—that I’d stayed up too late reading the sexy bits from Forever—but I wasn’t so out of it that I could have missed a giant bear at the breakfast table, which is where he should have been, sitting there all politely while Winter made porridge on the fire pit, just like every other day. I went and did a lap of the moat, because sometimes Edward liked to float on his back there if the night had been hot. I checked the meadow, and even went up Our Mountain a little so I could see over the long, yellowing grass in case they were snuggled low in the flowers with their noses touching, or sitting on the rocks at the river bend. I even checked the Emporium, grabbed a jar of eggplant kasundi on the way through, and poked my head into all the weird priesty rooms out the back where Pops had stashed stuff, like bows and arrows. But there was nothing, nothing, nothing.
I started running, then—down to the sea, which was all cornflowers that morning, along the beach in one direction so fast I thought I was going to barf, and walked back heaving. But even though my legs were literally shaking, I started sprinting up the steps to the bell tower, all 362 of them, because I got it in my head they were there—that Winter had broken her promise and was showing Edward everything, and I didn’t care that he was a bear—he was poking around places that he shouldn’t. With every step I climbed, I got madder at him for taking Winter away to enjoy for himself. I got madder at Winter for betraying our little family. I got madder at myself for letting it happen, right under my gosh-darn nose. I tried to ask myself, I promise I did: are you sure you’re not just jealous, Summer? Are you just making a big deal out of nothing because you feel like a third wheel on a bicycle built for two?
And, sure, maybe there was a bit of that, but there was something else about that bear—something that gave me feelings like the heavy air before a storm. So when I reached the top of the bell tower, I threw the door open so loudly it split when it hit the wall and bounced back against me, and my shin was bleeding and I was hopping and the worst part was that it was all for nothing, all 362 steps, because they weren’t there. It was the same as it had been the day Pops got taken away and Winter and I had vowed to protect his secrets with our lives, and wrapped our pinkie fingers together and each kissed them after we’d said it, though in hindsight Lord knows what the kissing was supposed to achieve.