Coldbrook(18)
The grass was damp and cool, the fresh air a gentle caress across his sweat-soaked clothing. Above Vic a thousand stars speckled the sky, all of them ancient history. To the east a smudge of light smeared the summits of the mountains as dawn began to break. The compound was quiet, motionless. He quickly flicked off his head torch, cursing his clumsiness, and ran crouching to the corner of a low supply building.
Does anyone up here even know what’s happening? he wondered. The only reason that they would not know was if Jonah was too busy to have informed them. Or if he was . . .
For a second Vic thought again of calling Jonah. But not yet. He wasn’t away yet. When he reached home and saw Lucy and Olivia, then he would allow himself that call.
Right now he had to run.
9
As Holly fled into the breach she thought of the man who had come through, and wondered whether he had been like her when he’d stepped past the threshold. She could see through – the dark valley, shadows of plants and boulders across the hillside, the red sky brightening as the sun slowly rose – but that didn’t mean it was as close as it seemed. Distance and direction were concepts that lost meaning in the science of the breach. It’s exactly where we are and a trillion light years away, Jonah had whispered once as they’d sat drinking and musing upon their efforts. Maybe now, she would be walking for ever.
And then she felt the breach’s clasp.
Holly would have gasped, had she still been breathing. Her legs moved and her arms swung by her sides, but it felt like the processes of her body were frozen in the moment. Her skin chilled, as if it had been exposed to an open freezer. Thoughts jumped and scattered, formed and shattered: perhaps this was how everyone felt at the moment of death.
A slew of random memories erupted all at once, each of them richer in tone and sense than memory should normally allow. Holly at four years old, making mud pies in the back garden with her brother Angus, parents looking on with indulgent smiles, the wet soil warm between her fingers, the smell of dirt. The time in school when she had told her friends that she was seeing Ashley, the boy who’d been the object of her desires for months; their jealousy, and her certainty that the relationship would be short and precious. Her drunken eighteenth birthday when her mother had cleaned up her vomit and gently chided her, then sat on her bed and reminisced about her own youth for an hour while Holly sobbed herself to sleep, the acid smell, of puke tingeing the air. A long afternoon in college when the sun shone and she was filled with an unaccountable sense of joy; the death of her mother, withered and faded yet still smiling; one mealtime at Coldbrook when Vic had smiled at her and she’d truly noticed him for the first time, burning her finger with the coffee she’d spilled.
And many more memories came and went, each of them so intense that she relived them all again, crying and laughing, smelling and tasting, sighing with pleasure and cringing in pain. Then the brief yet endless moment of pause passed and she ran on, swinging her arms through air that felt heavy with potential. She experienced a momentary tug as the world she was leaving urged her back, and then the sensation suddenly shifted and she was drawn forward. She was aware of every movement of her body, every muscle stretching and contracting, and the first touch of somewhere else brought the smell of spicy heather and the taste of cool fresh air.
What was that? she thought, the scientist in her trying to make sense of what had just happened to her, and why. But Holly ran on. It was a few seconds before she realised that tall wet grass was whipping at her trouser legs, and that her boots were impacting on soft ground, not the uncertain hardness of the breach. She skidded to a halt, and when she blinked she saw red. She gasped in fear and fell onto her back, kicking out at anyone or anything that might have followed her through. But she was alone. Melinda’s bloodied face was not staring at her, and the guard’s ravenous jaws were no longer gaping at the thought of rending her flesh.
Tears burned in her eyes but she wiped them away. She was shaking. Holding up her hand, she saw that it was jittering uncontrollably, and she clamped her mouth shut to stop her teeth from chattering. I’m through, she thought, and what had happened so recently in Control began to retreat into the realms of memory. Holly welcomed the dimming of the terror.
Perhaps the dawning sense of wonder was drowning it out.
She closed her eyes and stood still, holding her breath, hearing her heart thudding and blood pulsing. I’m elsewhere, she thought, and she breathed out and inhaled again, slowly. Definitely heather, wet and somehow spiced, and below that she could smell damp soil and something like old chocolate. She held out her hands and felt a brief misty rain cooling her skin. She stuck out her tongue and tasted moisture on the air, frowning as the tang of something unknown played across her taste buds. She didn’t like it, but perhaps only because it was a mystery.
Silence hung around her.
And then she opened her eyes and gazed upon this distant Earth. She saw trees and grasses and plants and hillsides, and a stream running through the small valley, and a sky smeared with the gorgeous colours of an extravagant dawn. The alienness was staggering.
Holly looked for anything she might recognise – Coldbrook’s structure, its surface buildings, or the Appalachian mountain landscape that surrounded it. Even if she saw something familiar and identical to how it appeared on her Earth, counterpart theory suggested that it could only be regarded as similar, a separate form of the same object. But what she saw was unfamiliar, and though she could not pin down why, it seemed wild.