But when I started scratching this thick red ink down onto this rough and leathery paper, I vowed that I’d stick to what happened, not what I might have wanted to happen. Setting down these letters and words is hard enough as it is, the way my fingers work, and I don’t want to waste my time by putting out anything but the solid truth of it, as I see it. It can’t be The True and Accurate Testimony of Arafura Ness unless I give it to you straight, so that’s what I’ve got to do.
So I suppose I’d best stick with the facts.
The fact that there were bodies wasn’t the main shock of it. I’d been expecting as much. I couldn’t see Bosa killing people and then going to the bother of disposing their corpses, like she was tidying up after herself.
I was also expecting – hoping, I suppose – not to find Adrana or Garval among the bodies. That wasn’t me being selfish in not wanting to see them dead, or not liking the idea of my sister taking her own life in desperation, just that them not being here meant there was a good chance they’d been taken, and if that was the case then it meant – for the time being, at least – Bosa had swallowed Garval’s lie.
No, the bad part was what she’d done to these people.
Cazaray, Mattice, Trysil and Hirtshal had died outside the ship, before Bosa ever set foot on it. I won’t say they were the lucky ones – what happened to Trysil and Hirtshal was nothing you’d wish on someone – but at least they weren’t face to face with Bosa when she killed them. Jusquerel and Triglav hadn’t been so fortunate, though. They’d got crossbow bolts for their trouble; Jusquerel above the sternum, through a soft part of her suit, and Triglav through the throat. There was blood all over the walls, spattered in little stars and craters, and there was more blood just floating around, in gluey red clots. If the blood wasn’t enough of a clue, I didn’t need much more to tell me that they were dead. Their bodies had stiffened up and their eyes were fixed open but not really looking at anything. It was cold in the ship and for once I wasn’t sorry, because the cold had kept them from decomposing too quickly.
Prozor was next. She’d been bludgeoned. Bosa had smashed her across the side of the skull with something blunt and heavy, like the stock of a crossbow. The wound was a knot of blood and hair, and as I touched it I felt a yielding, like wallpaper giving way over a patch of rotten wall.
Prozor and I hadn’t exactly been close. But I touched another hand to her, willing her some peace, and turned to Rackamore.
He was the worst.
The bolt was about twice as long as an index finger. It had gone in through his open mouth, aimed at an angle that took it through the roof of the mouth, into the brain cavity. It must have been going at quite a clip as half the length of the bolt had come out the back of his head before stopping in place. His eyes were still open, and it was like they were stuck rolling back into his sockets, as if he was trying to see the damage done by the bolt for himself.
I told myself that a shot like that, cutting through the precious structures of the brain – the delicate architecture of the temporal lobe, the hippocampus – couldn’t be anything but instantaneously fatal, slamming consciousness shut like a door after an angry visitor. There wasn’t any chance that he’d felt pain, was there?
But I couldn’t be sure.
The worst of it was the way Bosa had left the crossbow with him, like she didn’t even care to take the weapon with her. It was resting across Rackamore’s chest, his own fingers half-clutching at it. I imagined him fighting to keep the end of the weapon from being jammed into his mouth, but finally unable to resist.
‘You did what you could,’ I whispered, as if there were a chance of disturbing any of them.
I’d handled it well until then. I’d braced myself for the bodies, seen what she’d done to them, and studied it all with a sort of detachment, like they weren’t really there, or I was seeing them all behind glass, like wax dummies in a museum. Trying to persuade myself that they weren’t really bodies at all, or at least not the bodies of the same people I’d been talking to and laughing with not long ago.
But I couldn’t keep it up. It hit me in a wave, and I suppose all I’d ever been doing was putting off that moment. These bodies were the flesh and bones and meat of people who’d been speaking and breathing and moving around the last time I saw them, and they were people with names, and pasts; people I knew too much about; people who’d been kind and firm to me at times but mainly fair, and I knew I’d been halfway down the road to calling most of them friends, and the fact that they’d become these ruined, sightless things was too much.
I spewed my guts. I painted the walls with it, adding my vomit to the blood spatters that were already there. And the more I spewed, the more it wanted to come out of me, over and over, until all I could do was make dry heaving noises, like some braying animal. And then I curled myself up into a ball in the corner of the room and closed my eyes and thought about how I’d survived and they hadn’t, and the guilt of simply not being dead pushed down on me like an iron shroud. And with the guilt came a half measure of pity because while I was breathing, and the rest of them either dead or taken, that didn’t exactly mean I was home and dry.
I was the only living being on a damaged ship, surrounded by the blood- and vomit-spattered corpses of what had once been its crew, and what I knew about the operation of sunjammers you could scratch on the tip of one finger with a fat rusty nail and still have room to spare.
In other words, I’d got myself into quite a predicament.
As I scribble these scarlet words down – waiting for the ink to dry before I scuff it like a bloodstain – it occurs to me that there’s a version of Fura Ness that just gave up and died on the Monetta. She curled up and gave up – on surviving; on Adrana and Garval; on the hope for justice and vengeance; on the hard burden of carrying the memory of her crew; and on making good the powerful wrong that was done to them.
I don’t blame that version of Fura. I don’t judge her or think ill of her. In some ways I think she was probably a better, nicer version than the cove setting down these words. Being dead, she didn’t have to face some of the things I’ve seen, or hold some of the knowledge stinking up my skull. And if she had handwriting – which would be a tricky proposition, being dead – you can bet your last quoin it wouldn’t be as scrawly as mine.
But I’m not her.
I can’t tell you what snapped in me, only that something did. It was like that last sob you give when you know you’re done crying and it’s time to dry your eyes and face the world. Maybe it was because I kept seeing Garval’s face, before she slid the panel into place and offered herself up to Bosa. Maybe it was Adrana, on the other side of the glass, pressing her hand against it like she needed that last touch with her living kin. Or maybe it was just some stubborn survival instinct, one that told me I’d done enough heaving and bawling and feeling sorry for myself, and now was the time to act.
So I did.
I cleaned myself up as best I could, then cleaned up what I could of the blood and the puke in the galley. I left the bodies where they were for now, then went to the control room. The first thing I paid heed to was the ship’s clock, which told me I’d been in Garval’s hideaway for a day and a half – about half what it felt like. The second thing I noticed was the sickly pulsing glow of the sweeper. The instrument was still running on some minimal power. Captain Jastrabarsk’s ship was still showing up at maximum range, but unless I was reading the sweeper wrong, there was no one close to us.
Except there wasn’t any ‘us’ now.
Just me.
I went to the squawk console. Its dials and readouts were still aglow, but faintly. I’d watched Rackamore and the others when they used it, and although there were aspects I hadn’t got straight in my head, the basics weren’t too knotty. There were switches to receive and to talk, and various channel and power selectors. The console was still set as it had been in when Bosa Sennen ma
de her demands to board.
I snapped the switches, worked the selector toggles, watched as the dials flickered almost to darkness before regaining their glow. My hand trembled on the ‘talk’ switch. I had seen Rackamore use it so many times, and the urge to scream for help was almost more than I could bear.
Almost.
I moved my hand from the switch, then found the main control that put the console to sleep. It snapped with a hard, definite clunk. The dials and readouts faded to darkness. I hoped they’d come back on again when next I tried.
I went to the sweeper and was about to do the same thing when a cold dread passed through me. I’d almost given myself away to Bosa. If the sweeper was active now, she would be aware of it – and she would know if someone was around to switch it off suddenly.
So I let the sweeper remain.
The cold was beginning to get to me, so I worked back through the ship to find some extra clothes, blanking the corpses in the galley as I passed through. The ship was cooler than it had been before the attack, her metal surfaces turning icy under my fingertips. My breath was showing up in the lungstuff.
The cold wasn’t the worst of it, though. I was thirsty. Hungry, too, but it was the thirst that was making itself felt the loudest. So I went to one of the water spigots and pressed my lips around the nozzle. Water had come out when I needed to clean up the galley, but now it wasn’t more than a dribble. Then the spigot dried up completely, and when I went to try the others it was the same. Never mind, I told myself, thinking of the bottled reserves.
But when I opened the store room, I saw Bosa had beaten me to it.
It wasn’t theft so much as spite. Things had been taken, I was sure – ordinary rations, alcohol, treats, luxury foodstuffs reserved for special occasions. But much else had been destroyed purely for the sake of it. Bottles had been smashed. Their weightless contents glooped around like they were playing at being deep-sea animals. I tried to catch and swallow what I could, but that was a harder trick than it appeared.
Bosa had also taken whole crates of our fruit, vegetables and meat, presumably because such supplies would always be useful on a ship that was obliged to keep away from the Congregation’s civilised trading centres. What remained had been pulped into a splintered mass, smeared around the walls, embedded with shards of wood and glass.
Bosa might not have counted on someone being left alive on the Monetta, but she’d still considered the possibility. For a couple of stupid instants I wondered why she hadn’t simply blown all our lungstuff out of the locks.
But that would have been too quick. Too clean and too easy.
Not Bosa’s way.
I kept a close watch on the sweeper. Between one hour and the next there wasn’t any sign that the distant blob had moved. But if I marked its position with one of Rackamore’s pens, then went away and came back a watch or two later, I could just about convince myself that it had sneaked a little nearer. After a day, there wasn’t any doubt. Jastrabarsk was closing in on us, presumably meaning to pick over our bones and see what was left in the bauble. But I measured the distance that the blob had moved in twenty-four hours and then worked out how many of those intervals it would take to reach me, and what I came up with was another five days.
I wasn’t going to make it – not with the cold leeching the energy out of me, and no water or rations.
Not unless I did something drastic.
I’d be lying if I said it never crossed my mind to cook and eat the bodies. At least, it crossed my mind that I’d be halfway to madness if I ever got to the point where that was something I’d seriously consider. Maybe I’d get there. But between now and then, there was something else I could try.
I could eat the lightvine.
There was more than enough of it snaking through the Monetta, certainly more than I’d ever be able to stuff into my gob in five days. And I knew it wasn’t poisonous. I’d picked that up from somewhere, some half-remembered tale of how you could eat the stuff without too much in the way of repercussions. That the clever coves of some earlier Occupation who’d engineered lightvine – and that was what it was, some cooked-up organism, tweaked from parts of other plants and animals – had made sure it wasn’t poisonous. It couldn’t be, the way people would be brushing past it, touching it, as they made their way through a ship. No, lightvine was supposed to be helpful, not hurtful. It gave off light, breathed in bad gases and gave out the ones we needed in our lungs.
And you could nosh on the stuff.
That was some third factor they’d built into it, like a final insurance clause. If your ship was in trouble, and provided you left enough lightvine to keep the lungstuff getting too groggy, you could scoff the rest and not die from it.
No one promised it was tasty, though.
I found a knife and hacked away a finger-sized length of it. It cut easily, and gave off some juices that I licked from my fingers. It was sweet but otherwise flavourless, like sugary water. It kept on glowing, too, even though it wasn’t connected to the rest of the organism. In my palm it was soft and cool.
I pushed the lightvine into my mouth, and bit into it.
The softness gave way to a harder, chewier core. It wasn’t quite tasteless. Peppery, to start with, then a sour afternote. I couldn’t say it was delicious, but it wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever tasted and if you smothered butter on it you could probably charge coves for the pleasure of eating it. I kept on chewing. The pulpy core was hard work, but gradually I got the whole mass down to something I could swallow. It was going to take more than that to stop me feeling hungry. But the juices in the lightvine had taken the sting out of my thirst, and that was something.
I reckoned I could put up with it.
With me being the bookworm I am, it might seem queer that I didn’t go to the library sooner than I did. But books were a nice thing in my life, a luxury and a reminder of better times, and I didn’t want to start letting nice things back into my world until I thought there was at least a chance of making it through the next couple of days. The lightvine took the edge off my fears, though, just a bit, and maybe it was the act of feeding myself or some chemical in the lightvine itself, but all that really mattered to me was that I started thinking of ways to fill the hours, and my grey working the way it does, what jumped to mind first of all were books.
So I went to Rackamore’s library . . . and that was when I saw what she’d done to it.
I knew that books were valuable to some coves, and boring to others, but I’d never ventured beyond that thought to the idea that books might be something to be hated or destroyed. Books were like lungstuff, I’d liked to think. There were bottles of lungstuff kept for safekeeping all over a ship. There to use when you needed them, but that didn’t mean you burned them up just because you had enough to breathe somewhere else. But I suppose that was how an educated girl from Mazarile saw such things, and it didn’t mean that everyone else was obliged to have the same view.
Bosa had destroyed Rack’s library. It wasn’t an accident, or a side-effect of close action. This had been systematic, and it must have taken two or three of them to get the job done. They’d gone in with sharp tools – maybe the long-bladed yardknives that coves like Hirtshal used to cut rigging – and they’d hacked and hacked, gashing books apart at their spines, so that the pages had come out and gone fluttering all around the room, like a snowstorm with palm-sized flakes. But a yardknife will cut anything, even a page floating in the breeze, so they must have kept on hacking, slicing and dicing those pages until it would have taken a hundred years to stitch them back together. They’d used fire, too, so that for every white fragment there was a black or brown one, and there was still ash hovering around when I gulped a breath of it down my gullet. I was inhaling his library, or a bit of it, and somewhere in that choking taste was enough history to cram a thousand lifetimes. I coughed out some of it, but not the whole of it.
r /> I found the covers of some of the books. With their pages stripped out, they were like the wings of dark, leathery birds that had been ripped whole off their carcasses. There was that 1384 edition of the Book of Worlds, not the earliest one Rack had shown me, but still strange and old and valuable. I thought of how proud he’d been, and how rarely he must have been able to show off that collection to someone who really appreciated it, and I realised he’d seen something in me that meant he trusted me with the knowledge of his library, and it was that thought beyond any other that turned my grief even sharper than it had been before.
There were probably books that hadn’t been badly damaged, or that could have been put back together without too much trouble. But going back into that library was more than I had the strength for. You might think it cold of me, but the damage that was done to those books turned my stomach more than all the wounding and murder done to the crew. It wasn’t that I didn’t think highly of people. But there are always more people, and I’d have bet quoins that some of those books were truly unique, not another of their kind anywhere under the Old Sun’s light.
Still, I steeled myself to take one memory of the library. Of all the books that had belonged to Rack, I took that one black cover from the 1384 edition. As I closed my hand around it I remembered him blowing dust off it, brushing his fingers against it so lovingly, and I hoped he wouldn’t have objected to me taking it as my own.
I’d been out of my hiding place for two days when I decided to chance using the squawk.
I worked the switches and toggles. I brought my mouth close to the speaking grill and when I made to shape a sound, what came out of me was so raw as to be almost unrecognisable.
‘Captain Jastrabarsk. This is . . .’