Doctor Who_ Beyond the Sun - Matthew Jones [29]
The night had cooled the sun-baked ground. He massaged the soft dry sand between his toes. It hadn’t looked like a ship travelling through the air – it was more like something falling out of the sky.
He heard voices talking and giggling somewhere behind him. Ben and Felice emerged out of the trees behind the dorm. Scott frowned. For some reason, he was annoyed by their arrival, as if they were interrupting something private, something meant just for him. He considered keeping quiet about what he had witnessed and then changed his mind. That would be childish and stupid.
Their faces were flushed and their eyes glistened. Ben’s feathers were all ruffled and Felice’s long golden hair was full of tiny twigs and bits of leaf. They looked embarrassed to have been caught outside after curfew. Felice said they’d been walking through the woods and fallen asleep, which was such an obvious lie that Scott had a sudden urge to slap her. Felice actually apologized to him, as if Scott’s approval might matter.
‘Your choice,’ he told her. They were both a little younger than he was, only a few years out of childhood. And it was the young who had been most affected by the arrival of the Sunless.
He asked them if they’d heard anything but they said they hadn’t. When he told them that he’d seen something fall out of the sky, they looked concerned. The Sunless didn’t usually travel far from the cities, but there were always stories.
‘It didn’t look like one of their ships, unless it was one crashing.’
‘I wish,’ Felice said with feeling.
‘I think it hit the reservoir. It sounded like it struck water.’ When he told them that he was going to look for the ship, neither of them showed any interest in accompanying him. Scott understood. Sneaking out to the trees behind the dorm was one thing: taking a trip to the reservoir after curfew was quite another.
As they were making their way inside, Ben turned, grinning, and said, ‘Oh, dragon boy, if you’re thinking of going chasing after the Sunless, I’d put some clothes on if I were you.’
And then they were gone, giggling as they disappeared inside the shadowed doorway of the dorm. Scott looked down at his near nakedness and gave a rueful grin. There was a pile of uniforms in an untidy heap by the door. He tugged the greasy canvas overall on over his brightly coloured shorts. He smelt the stale odour of many people’s bodies. The uniforms were rarely washed
– it was one of many small rituals of resistance against the Sunless.
The uniform felt stiff and clammy. It bore three wide yellow stripes across the chest: the number of stripes denoted the wearer’s place in the new hierarchy; the colour identified the wearer with a region. Yellow for the outlying villages in the three valleys, blue for the two smaller cities and as far as the mountains, and red for the city of Anarray and the coast. People kept in their place by nothing more than numbers and the colours on a randomly divided map. An absurd arbitrary decision which no one would have even remembered if it hadn’t been enforced with the threat of being beaten or killed.
It took almost an hour to walk out to the reservoir. Scott moved quietly across the dusty forest floor. He knew he was unlikely to come face to face with the Sunless, but if he met a patrol of collaborators they would almost certainly report him.
The surface of the lake was almost still, disturbed only by tiny ripples that made no noise as they rushed to greet him in the darkness. Scott walked out to its edge from under the canopy of the forest. A long concrete bank sloped down gently to the water. He used to swim here with his brothers, Michael and Leon, on the really hot days a few summers ago, splashing in the water before soaking up the sun on the slope. It seemed like a long time ago now, although it had been only two or three years. He looked up and caught sight of the thick overhanging branch of an ancient tree which they used to swing from and tumble into the water. Michael had once fallen and crushed his knee on the steep bank. Scott and Leon