Recursion (28 page)

They entered a patch of older woodland. The trees here were not planted in such good order. Oaks and sycamores fought for space, while tangles of glossy rhododendrons had infiltrated the forest clearings where trees had fallen. The land began to slope downward; they could peer out through the trees to see a valley cutting through the land before them.

“Let’s stop for a moment,” Eva called. She halted and began to pull off her anorak. Alison and Nicolas did the same.

“It’s too hot now that the sun is up,” she explained. “I’m thirsty, too. How much water do we have left?”

Nicolas was carrying the group’s entire supply in a couple of two-liter milk containers tucked into his shoulder bag. He unzipped it and checked.

“Just over a bottle’s worth. We weren’t expecting to be wandering around here in the woods for so long, were we? I thought there was nowhere in the country that was more than five minutes from a burger restaurant.”

He gazed at Eva, silently pleading with her to help. Eva felt as if she should say something. Katie wouldn’t, Nicolas wouldn’t be listened to. It was down to her.

“Alison?” she said.

“What?” Alison stood with hands on hips, gazing out over the valley.

Eva tied the anorak around her waist.

“This walking is exhausting. I know we need to evade the Watcher, but it will do us no good if we die of thirst in this forest.”

“Yes?” said Alison.

Eva sighed. Alison wasn’t being very helpful.

She pressed on. “Well, we’re spending a lot of time walking across very rough terrain. It’s exhausting. I think we should think a little bit less about randomness, and a little more about putting some distance between us and the Center. We must be barely two kilometers from the place as the crow flies.”

Alison reached up and brushed some hair from her face. “So what are you suggesting?” she asked. Eva noted that she did not sound entirely unhappy at this suggestion; Alison must be hating this as much as the rest of them. Eva took a step closer to her.

“Look. We’ve come to the valley now. Why don’t we toss the coin to decide which way to go? Cross it, go back, or head up or down the valley itself? Once we’ve made that decision, we choose the best possible path. We don’t change direction until another path suggests itself.”

Alison sighed. “It’s cutting down options.”

“I know. But we’re exhausted. A good leader knows when to cut her losses and change the plan.”

“I’m not the leader,” insisted Alison, but she smiled a little as she said it.

The coin sent them scrambling down to the floor of the valley. The going was easier than it had been, but still not without difficulties. They slid down earth slopes, clutching at branches to slow themselves, or stumbled down the hill at a half run from trunk to trunk, grabbing at them to stop themselves plunging down too fast. At one point Katie stumbled and slid about thirty meters on her side before finally coming to a halt. Alison screamed; Nicolas and Eva watched how pale her face got. When they came to Katie, she was clutching her arm and crying. There was blood on the tattered arm of her anorak and they now realized why she had not taken it off in the warmth of the morning. Her arm had been more badly injured than they had thought when she had tripped on the broken branch earlier.

“We’ve got to get that seen to,” Nicolas said grimly.

“I’ll be okay,” Katie whimpered.

“If you’re sure.” Alison gazed down the slope. “Not much further.”

“She’s not okay,” Nicolas said.

“I’ll be fine.”

“Look,” Eva said, pointing upward, forestalling another argument.

Three airplanes flew overhead, their white contrails forming a triangle high above.

“They’re too high to see us,” Alison said dismissively. She began to scramble downward again.

“We wouldn’t see them if they were stealth planes,” Nicolas said. He looked at Katie. “Do you want a hand?”

“I’ll be okay,” she said, and moved slowly down the hill again.

They scrambled further down. Just as they were nearing the bottom, they came up against a wall of rhododendrons. Tangled brown branches and glossy green leaves choked the bottom of the valley, completely blocking their path.

“We’re trapped,” Nicolas said flatly. “There’s no way through that.”

Katie gazed at the tangled mass of vegetation in silence. Her eyes were filling with tears.

“We’ll never get back up that hill,” Eva whispered.

Alison turned to face them, her face resolute.

“We’ll carry on downwards,” she said. “There’s bound to be a way through.”

They trudged disconsolately downward, feeling thoroughly miserable. The sun had risen high enough to shine in their faces, making them hot and bad-tempered. Tree roots lay hidden beneath the brown debris of the forest floor, tripping them or sending them slipping toward the crowded green bushes below. On the far side of the valley the old pylons they had seen earlier marched downward, too. Eva looked at the cables that looped down and up, down and up as they were passed from arm to arm.

“There’s no end to this,” Nicolas muttered angrily.

Just when they thought the rhododendrons would never end, a path revealed itself.

They stood gasping beside the sudden gap in the glossy green barrier, sweat dripping from their faces and trickling down their backs. Walking along the steep slope was extremely tiring; their water was almost finished.

Nicolas shook his head in resignation. “It’s found us, hasn’t it? It knows where we are.”

“We don’t know that for certain,” Alison said stubbornly.

The path was formed by a tall ash tree that had fallen, giving them a walkway over the tangled bushes it had crushed. Katie and Eva glanced at each other, and Katie shook her head almost imperceptibly.

Alison picked her way forward through the cage of broken branches and kicked the trunk.

“It looks natural enough to me. The roots could have been washed away by all the rain we’ve been having lately. Trees fall over all the time.”

“Does it make any difference?” Nicolas asked. “Whether it was an accident or arranged by the Watcher, we have to go that way. What other choice do we have?”

He pushed past Alison and climbed up over the trunk.

The path led them down to a yellow stone road running along the valley floor. Eva slithered to the ground to find Alison and Nicolas already deep in argument.

“It’s been cut. You can see it’s been cut! And recently!” Nicolas shouted.

There was no denying it. The severed base of the tree shone white and smelled of sap. Piles of clean white sawdust lay in the brown mud around the stump.

“So what?” said Alison. “We’re in a forest. They cut down trees all the time.”

“Not individually! And they don’t just leave them to rot. It’s the Watcher. It’s reeling us in.”

He was blushing red with heat and anger, sweat dripping down from his curly red hair, mud cracked and dried on his jeans. He was a mess.

“Fine,” Alison said coldly. “All the more reason to toss the coin. Heads we go up, tails we go down.”

“Why? There’s nothing up there in the hills. We should head down and try and get to civilization. The Watcher already knows where we are.”

“We don’t know that for sure,” Katie interjected quietly. She blushed and looked down.

“She’s right,” said Alison. “We can’t give up now. Maybe the Watcher has covered all the bases. There must be a finite number of paths leading away from the Center. Maybe he’s laid signs on all of them, just to dishearten us.”

“No! This is too much. Alison, think! What were you in for? Not being able to face up to the real world. Don’t you see: that’s what you’re doing now. It’s beaten us. Why don’t you admit it?”

“We don’t know that.”

Slowly, deliberately, she pulled the coin from her pocket and spun it in the air. She caught it deftly, smacked it on her wrist, and looked.

“Heads,” she called. “We go up.”

Nicolas shook his head. “No. Not this time.”

“Suit yourself,” Alison said. She turned on her heel and began to march up the loose yellow stone of the road. After watching her walk twenty meters or so, Nicolas turned to face Eva and Katie.

“What about you two?” he said. “You must see that she’s wrong.”

Katie looked down at the ground. “We don’t know that. We agreed before we set out to follow the coin.”

Nicolas stamped his foot petulantly.

“I might have known you’d follow Alison. What about you, Eva? You know I’m right.”

Nicolas was burning red with anger; his face was twitching. Eva suddenly realized that, whether he was right or wrong, she didn’t want to go off on her own with Nicolas.

She shook her head gently. “I’m sorry, Nicolas. Katie is right. We agreed to follow the coin.”

“Fine. Suit yourself.”

He turned and began to stamp down the road in the opposite direction. Katie began to trail up the hill after Alison, who was making good progress with her angry, determined stride.

Eva sighed in resignation, and as she did so an enormous weight dropped from her. A realization was slowly dawning. Here she was, trapped in a long valley, hemmed in by overgrown rhododendron bushes, too hot, thirsty and hungry and with nothing to look forward to but a hard climb up a steep stone road, but…

But she wasn’t in South Street. She wasn’t part of the endless grind of days without purpose. Her friends might be argumentative and bad-tempered, but at least she had friends and she was walking for a reason. The South Street Eva would have just taken the first opportunity to lie down and die. It was what
that
Eva had secretively worked toward for months.

But not this one.

This Eva wanted to live.

The end was drawing near.

They climbed the long road into the hills, Eva occasionally turning to check Nicolas’ progress. He remained in sight for quite some time, an obstinate figure in orange marching into and out of view between the choking rhododendrons—and then he was gone.

Their climb was a long, hard drag. Yellow stones skidded and skittered beneath their feet; they kicked them, watched them bounce over the raised edge of the road to fall into the wide ditches on either side.

“It’s a quarry road,” Katie explained.

“How do you know?” asked Eva, but there was no reply.

The hills began to play games with them. They would climb in silence, putting their all into one last effort to reach the top of an incline, expecting finally to reach the road’s summit, only to see a gentle dip and then the road resuming its ascent further on.

“Not again.”

Eva thought she heard the whisper as they reached their third virtual summit. It sounded like Alison’s voice.

The pylons to their left marched steadily closer. As they climbed higher she thought she saw a second set of pylons off to her right. They appeared to come marching out of the next valley along.

“They’re heading to the same place as we are,” she muttered to herself.

“What’s that?” asked Alison suspiciously, and Eva jumped. She hadn’t realized that Alison was walking so close. She had been watching Eva as she looked at the pylons, an odd expression on her face. It was almost as if Alison had been caught out.

Eventually they reached the real head of the valley, from which the road descended to a natural bowl among the wooded hills. Below them they could just make out a space that had been cleared.

“A quarry,” said Katie. “I knew it.” She looked at Alison, but Alison just looked away, as if embarrassed.

“It’s very big for a quarry,” Eva replied. “Look at all those buildings.”

The second set of pylons now marched clearly over a hill to their right and picked its way down a steep slope to converge with the lines of the first set. Eva looked up at the sun. It was halfway down the sky, heading toward evening. The earlier heat had vanished. Eva knew that when they stopped walking they would feel cold. Her skin already felt cool to the touch.

The stone road sliced its way through a deep cutting in the hills and they walked in the shade for a while. Looking up, Eva could see an old grey pylon perched immediately on the cutting’s edge, thick brown branches of rhododendrons wrapped around its legs and spilling out over the lip of the earth. Higher up, cables looped down from the heavy brown ceramic disks anchored to the pylon’s arms. They were humming.

“It’s live,” Eva whispered, suddenly halting. “I don’t like this, Alison. I think we should go back.”

Alison turned to her impatiently. “What? After we’ve come all this way? Don’t be silly.”

Eva looked on down the road. At the far end of the cutting, a few hundred meters ahead of them, stretched a rusty chain-link fence. The road ran through a rusty gate set in the center of the fence. The gate was propped open invitingly. Eva felt a shiver of fear. The gate looked like a trap, waiting to be sprung. Involuntarily, she took a step backward.

“I don’t like it,” she said. “It feels all wrong. We shouldn’t go in there.”

“What? Should we just turn around and go back then?” The other Alison was coming back. The nasty, bad-tempered Alison. And as she did, Katie was becoming more and more nervous and shy.