The Deep (2 page)

“Why did people want to live so high up?” I
ask softly.

“To save space,” Tony replies. “The land used
to be overcrowded. But now, all the big cities lie in ruin.
Everything was bombed. And the smaller towns and villages succumbed
to diseases. All the places that used to be densely populated are
uncultivable. Poisoned with radiation.”

“Then how did your ancestors manage to
rebuild Bodmin?” Walt asks.

“The old Bodmin is gone.” Tony fixes his gaze
on the coast. “Our forefathers built a new city on Bodmin Moor. The
moors were barely inhabited before, so the enemy didn’t strike
there. The soil is hardly contaminated.”

A few days ago, he told us that there are two
large cities in this region – Bodmin in Cornwall, and Dartmoor in
Devon. The people in Devon created their capital city by rebuilding
an old prison and adding more dwellings to it. Now, Dartmoor is a
region with ten thousand inhabitants – an unbelievably high number
for a village girl like me. Walt had to explain to me what a prison
is. His people have a number of holding cells in Hope Harbor, which
they use to lock up people who’ve done something wrong. The more
serious the offense, the longer they get locked away. We don’t have
anything like that. If the adults of Newexter can’t abide by the
community rules, they get expelled. This has hardly ever happened.
Everyone on our side of the Wall knows that a life alone, without
friends or partner, isn’t really a life at all.

When Captain Tom finally brings the
Explorer
safely into Penzance Harbor, everyone is standing
on deck. We’re quiet – only the captain calls out his orders to the
deckhands. For the first time in a long while, a ship is docking at
the quay of this shattered town. Seagulls screech as they tear
through the blue, empty sky.

“What’s going to happen next?” Walt inquires.
He turns toward his father, who’s standing there a bit helplessly.
William keeps his eyes fixed on the gangplank that is being
extended to the docks – a bridge to a new world we don’t know.

“I have no idea,” he replies.

“You might want to visit the graveyard where
your ancestors were buried,” Tony gently suggests.

“Yes.” William nods. “I think I might.”

Slowly, the ship’s passengers pour onto the
quayside, looking around awkwardly and curiously at the same time.
Tony leads the way to a large, gray building a little ways away
from the docks.

“This is the port building where Henry and I
found the radio emitting the distress call,” he tells us, raising
his voice as much as he can so the people in the back of the group
can hear him too. “This is also where we found the ship’s manifest
with all the names of the children who boarded the
Annabelle
.”

We shuffle into the building. Inside, the air
is warm and stale. The summer sun pours through the glazed windows.
They look like the windows in Hope Harbor – we only had glass in
the windows of the manor, and nowhere else. Tucked away in the
corner is a sort of desk with buttons and sliders. It reminds me of
the device Tony used to play us the message. That must be the
radio, then.

“Is that thing still working?” I ask
Tony.

He shakes his head. “Henry disconnected most
of the solar panels hooked up to that VHF radio and mounted them on
an old bus, so we could drive back to Bodmin once we got back to
Penzance. He used the lightweight panels to power up the engine of
the old boat we used to sail to Tresco.”

“Ah.” I have
no
idea what he just
said.

In the meantime, Walt has walked over to a
table full of old books. His hands caress the covers reverently.
“Leia,” he calls out to me. “Come and have a look. Here’s the diary
that belonged to Luke’s dad.”

I still have to get used to the fact that
Luke’s father is not Dark Father – he was a nice, normal guy,
trying to save his son by broadcasting one final message. A few
days ago, I read through the list of names in the ship’s manifest
together with Walt, and that’s how we found out that the boy who
once wrote our Book was called Lucas Walker. Maybe that’s why he
felt inspired to take on the name of his hero, Luke Skywalker, when
he started a new life.

When I open the diary and stare at the last
page, I can’t help but shed a few tears. The words muddle together
and swim away. If only Lucas had known how much his father loved
him. If only
we
had known. I have to bring this book and
show it to the people in Newexter so they can see with their own
eyes that parents are not unreliable – that Luke should never have
turned his back on his father.

“Can I keep this?” I ask Tony hesitantly.

“Of course,” he says. “That diary should be
your new Book.”

I slip the notebook into the pocket of my
pants. It’s not big – even smaller than our old Book with Luke and
Leia on the front cover – but its contents mean the world to
me.

Walt puts his arm around my shoulders and
pulls me along to go outside, leaving the stifling heat of the port
building behind. We end up in the graveyard. Many of the grave
markers here are made of wood and have a strange shape – two beams
crossing each other. No idea what it means. Our graves are always
marked with flat, square tombstones. Silently, we follow William on
his way down the path, reading the names scribbled on the markers.
Some of them sound familiar. There’s a Toja, a Walter, a Tom. But
we also encounter names I have never seen before – Tamsyn, George,
Vincent.

William comes to a stop next to a small
marker leaning against a tree. “Walt,” he whispers. “Here she is.
Mary’s mother.”

My eyes flash to the name on the tombstone
shaped like a cross. “Jenna Whitford,” I read out loud. The person
all those people in Hope Harbor were waiting for without knowing
it. Mary’s mother – the black-haired woman who transformed into a
goddess for the Hope Harborers as the years passed. We also found
Mary’s family name on the list in the manifest.

“So here she is,” Walt states, a bit sadly.
“Annabelle. Our savior.” He touches the wood of the grave marker as
if to affirm his words.

“Shall we put some flowers on her grave?” I
propose, taking his hand.

Walt looks up, a gentle smile around his
lips. “Yeah, let’s. White and yellow ones, just like we do at home.
And I want you to read a passage from the diary. Like a kind of
tribute.”

And so we spend our first hour on the Other
Side by visiting our own past.

When Tony said his friend had put the old
radio solar panels on the roof of a bus, I had no idea what he was
talking about, obviously. And now that I’ve seen Henry’s invention
in action, the enormous vehicle is still a big mystery to me. It
has wheels, just like our carriages, but it’s not cow-drawn. And
yet, it moves.

Tony has settled into the front seat of the
bus and is currently driving it around the square in front of the
port building, to prove to our people that it’s perfectly safe. To
turn the vehicle, he uses a kind of steering wheel similar to the
ship’s wheel on the
Explorer
.

“How is that possible?” I whisper in
astonishment. “How can the thing just
move
?”

“Maybe it’s powered by waves we can’t see,”
Walt philosophizes. “Tony mentioned energy from the sun, right?
Well, maybe this carriage sails on waves of light.”

“The Force,” I mumble, dumbfounded. “Light.
Like in the twins’ swords.” They may not have existed for real, but
maybe the man who created Luke and Leia’s story did use the truth
as inspiration for his heroes and their powers.

When Tony stops the bus again, he invites us
to get in. One by one, the travelers from Tresco board the strange
vehicle, looking around them awkwardly. Padma shoots me a nervous
little smile when she pushes past me, and I momentarily pump her
hand for encouragement before she sits down.

“We’re going to Dartmoor,” Tony announces. “I
think the president will be eager to meet you all. Besides, that’s
the best place to find more info about the world as it is today, as
well as how it used to be.”

“President?” William echoes. Walt, he and I
have picked seats right behind Tony. As we drive off, my stomach
lurches because of the sudden movement. We speed up quickly, and my
entire body tenses up because of it. I’ve never gone this fast.
Anxiously, I grab Walt’s arm, who doesn’t look too comfortable
himself.

“Yeah, he’s like your Eldest, or Bookkeeper,”
Tony is clarifying in the meantime. “He or she is elected by the
people. President Jacob reigns over Dartmoor and he has strong ties
with the mayor of Bodmin. He knows about Henry and me setting out
to investigate that distress signal.”

“Is it far?” Walt asks.

Tony shakes his head. “By bus, it will take
about three hours. We’ll do about fifty miles per hour once we
leave Penzance.”

Walt chuckles disbelievingly. “Yeah,
right.”

Tony cocks an amused eyebrow. “I’m not
kidding, Walt. It’s really possible. This bus has an electric
engine, which is now fully charged thanks to the sun. Henry thought
we might need a big vehicle to transport people if we found any
survivors on the island.” His eyes fill with a quiet sadness. “I
hadn’t considered the possibility that he wouldn’t be among
them.”

“Did he have family?” I inquire softly. My
insides coil even tighter because of his remark.

Tony nods. “I have to tell his wife that he
passed away. Which is why we need to go to Dartmoor in the first
place, because that’s where she lives.”

I gulp down the lump in my throat. “That
woman must hate us. Maybe she wants us to go to prison for
murdering her husband.”

Walt puts a calming hand on my shoulder.
“Whoa, slow down. It’s not your fault, Leia. If anything, you tried
to stop it.”

As the bus gains more and more velocity and a
nagging, sickening feeling nestles itself in the pit of my stomach,
Tony shakes his head. “We don’t have any prisons,” he replies
quietly.

“At all?” William asks, sounding puzzled.

“No, we don’t.”

“So what do you do with lawbreakers?”

Tony remains silent for a moment. “There
aren’t any,” he then replies. “It never comes to that.”

I shoot Walt a sidelong glance, frowning
slightly. What on earth does Tony mean by that? I can’t imagine
that the entire Dartmoor population consists of saints and kind
souls.

Walt shrugs, taking my hand. “We’ll just have
to get there to see it,” he mumbles. “You want some water, by the
way? You look pale.”

“Yeah, the speed isn’t helping.” I smile
bleakly and gratefully accept Walt’s water flask. Slowly, I take a
few sips and lean my head against the window. Even the bus has
glazed windows. The Other Side is full of wonders I could never
have dreamed of.

As we continue our journey to Dartmoor, I’m
starting to appreciate the thick glass between me and the world
outside. The road we follow is cracked and fissured, and with each
hole we hit, the bus trembles and rattles violently. But that is
not what scares me most. It’s the blackened fields and demolished
towns and buildings along the roadside. Bodmin and Dartmoor may
have been rebuilt, but it’s clear that the world around those
places still bears the blemish of all the warfare that Tony told us
about.

“Why haven’t you repaired this road?” I ask
him curiously.

“Because we never use it,” Tony answers.
“Nobody lives in Penzance, and if we want to go to the seaside to
do some fishing, we drive from Bodmin to Newquay. There’s an
abandoned harbor there, too.”

The world is enormous, yet empty. We could
drive around here for hours without meeting a soul. I wonder what
it would be like to get off this road and hit the smaller tracks.
Would we find all houses and trails tucked away in the forest
deserted? Or is it possible that animals and people are hiding
there – other survivors who believe
they
are alone, too?

Relief washes over me when the pavement
improves and the road becomes wider. It’s obvious this part of the
route is kept in better condition. I even spot signs along the road
with names of places on them, to guide people on their way.

“Bodmin,” I whisper, when we pass a road sign
featuring the name of Tony’s town. We hit a fork in the road. Like
Tony said, we’re not going straight to Bodmin. He follows a sign
saying Liskeard and Yelverton. Outlandish, unfamiliar names that
make me painfully aware of being a total stranger here.

“Look, there’s some kind of fence,” Walt
observes once we cross a river and leave the desolate, destroyed
town of Yelverton behind. The road curves to the right and narrows
down to a small, winding trail. Walt is right – a barrier looms in
the distance, and the bus is driving toward a gate in the high
fence. Beyond the barrier, I can make out green, rolling hills and
tall boulders of jagged, gray rocks jutting out from the undulating
landscape.

I smile. No charred destruction. Finally a
piece of earth that reminds me of home.

“We’re here. This is Dartmoor County,” Tony
states. He slows down and stops right in front of the gate, next to
some kind of guardhouse. Two men emerge, and Tony opens the window
on his side to lean out and address them. It surprises me how
different his voice suddenly sounds – a bit more cautious and
timid. I don’t get why, because the two border guards don’t really
strike me as dangerous. In fact, for a pair of sentries, I think
they look strangely convivial. Saul’s hulking disciples would have
walked all over these two. I do spot weapons dangling from their
belts, though. They look similar to the weapon Luke Skywalker is
holding on the front cover of our Book.

“So they have a Wall as well,” Walt mumbles.
“People can’t walk in just like that.”

“Maybe they want to keep the people within
the enclosure safe,” William pipes up. “Tony told us the lands
surrounding these former nature reserves are poisonous, right?
Nobody wants to run the risk of getting sick again.”