LONG DARK DUSK
J.P. Smythe is an award-winning author. The Australia Trilogy is his first series for Young Adult readers. He lives in London, where he teaches Creative Writing.
ALSO BY J.P. SMYTHE
NO HARM CAN COME TO A GOOD MAN
THE MACHINE
THE TESTIMONY
THE ANOMALY SERIES
THE ECHO
THE EXPLORER
THE AUSTRALIA TRILOGY
WAY DOWN DARK
LONG DARK DUSK
New York • London
© 2016 by J.P. Smythe
Jacket photo (lake) (c) Chris Niemann/shutterstock
First published in the United States by Quercus in 2017
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Smythe, J. P. (James P.), 1980– author.
Title: Long dark dusk / J.P. Smythe.
Description: First edition. | New York : Quercus, 2017. | Series: The Australia trilogy ; book 2 | Summary: When the violent intersteller transport ship Australia crashes back to Earth, seventeen-year-old Chan finds herself living in poverty on a planet she has never known but always dreamed of, and as she tries to muster the will to survive, Chan learns that Mae, the little girl she once rescued on Australia, could be alive.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016037522 (print) | LCCN 2017002335 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681442037 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781681442020 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681442013 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681442006 (library ebook)
Subjects: | CYAC: Science fiction. | Survival—Fiction. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Science Fiction. | JUVENILE FICTION / Social Issues / Values & Virtues. | GSAFD: Science fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.S6572 Lo 2017 (print) | LCC PZ7.1.S6572 (ebook)| DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016037522
Distributed in the United States and Canada by
Hachette Book Group
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New York, NY 10104
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
www.quercus.com
It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility:
They must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.
—Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Part One Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Part Two Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Part Three Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Guide
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
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PART
ONE
ONE
She says that her name is Alala but I’m not sure if I believe her. She says that it has a meaning, that in the language her ancestors spoke it would carry some weight, but she doesn’t know what it is now. Nobody remembers. It’s a word that has been lost from a language that went under the sea. She wears a wrap around her head that comes down to cover the bottom half of her face, a scarf of swirled patterns trimmed with fur, a kind of golden color that looks like dirt or vomit when you’re up close but you know it’s worth something from the way she handles it. Along the edge of the scarf, silvery tufts and tassels hang down over her neck. You can’t tell how old she is. She tries to hide that from everybody.
Alala buys what I steal; that’s our arrangement. That’s the joy of her, what makes her so different from everybody else. She’ll take anything if she trusts you—doesn’t matter what it is. She’ll give absolutely anything a price. It’s always a struggle to see her, because there are lines—others with stuff to trade or junkies who want whatever she sells that they need. Or her own people—she calls them her fingers, fingers in pies, she says, then twitches her fingers while she says it, even the stump of the half-missing one.
I hold today’s merchandise out for her to examine. It’s a knife of sorts: a filthy black blade threaded with red knots like veins. Not blood or gemstones or anything like that, but glowing metallic, running with electrics. When I picked it up, it sparked me so violently that I almost passed out. It’s serious technology, probably from somebody working on the Wall. It’s protected, which means it’s got to be worth something. I pass it to her, blade first.
“Don’t touch the handle,” I say.
“Little girl. Give me credit. You think I was born yesterday?” She doesn’t know much about me. Just my name, where I live, where I came from, and what I’m after. That’s it. Some people here give her sob stories when they try to sell to her. They tell her about who they used to be, or what they’ve lost, or who they’ve lost. I keep all of that to myself. I’m a criminal, escaped and running. Nothing too personal.
“Will they be coming back for this?” she asks. “They know where you are.”
“They won’t be coming.”
“But you did steal it?”
“In a way,” I say.
She nods. She understands. Technically it was stolen. I found it next to the unconscious body of a mugger who had been chasing me. Finders keepers. He chased me nearly the length of the slums, persistent as nearly anybody I’ve known. Whatever he wanted, I wasn’t going to give it to him. Climbed as well, which is rare. Usually they’re addicts, and usually addicts don’t have the strength to climb. I led him through the trickiest route I could find and still he kept it up. He only gave up when he had to, when I jumped a gap I knew he would never make. He fell, and I backtracked slowly, down to his body. He dropped the knife, even; like he wanted me to take it.
“I need his imprint. Otherwise . . .”
She reaches down to the pockets that she’s sewn into her clothes. She’s got lots, most of them secret, so that she can turn any of the obvious ones out—show you how poor she is without giving away what’s in the others. She’s got tricks, and they’re obvious to anybody who’s lived where I have, haggling with the salesmen as I did. Not what I’m after. “I only have a cheap card, ten units. If I have an imprint, it is maybe worth more, but . . .” She shrugs this exaggerated gesture where she puts her hands up in front of her, empty apart from the cheap money card. “Take it, go on. You rob me.” She covers her face with her empty hand, makes out that she’s not looking at me.
I take out the other package from my pack: the guard’s thumb, wrapped in a scarf that looks not unlike the one she’s wearing around her neck. She smiles through her fake blindness, pulls a card from her sash, and hands it over, snatching up the thumb so fast, pocketing it even faster. She’s got her imprint now.
“Don’t be spending this all at once,” she says, handing over the cash.
I walk toward my home—it is home, even if it feels transitory—past the junkies, past the families huddled around homemade water distillers and trashcan fires, through the rows and rows of shanty houses with their makeshift walls and corrugated metal roofs. On the ground, outlines of yellow lines still exist, faded nearly to nothing. In some places, you can see insignias printed onto walls: a printed shape of a bird here, a flag there. I go past the warehouses and the sheds, their walls opened up, their inside
s gutted, replaced with a maze of tents and makeshift shelters. I keep going toward the Wall, as far as you can get before the shanties drop away almost completely and there’s just a few of us, propped up against the back wall of the last warehouse. This is where I like to live. Nobody asks you anything and everybody keeps to themselves. There’s a peace and quiet like I’ve never known before.
I’m nearly to my own home when I hear the sound of a baby crying. That’s the worst sort of alarm. It could be a visitor, but who would bring a baby here? Everybody hunkers down when they hear it because no good can come of this. This means police and Services both, flooding in here like they own the place. Only a matter of time.
I watch the people here pull shut whatever they have that passes for a door, yanking across plates of sheet metal if they have them, cardboard if they don’t. Fires are extinguished because they’ll only draw attention. You want the darkness. If you’re in the dark and quiet, chances are the police won’t bother to check you out.
I miss the warmth I used to take for granted, but I’ve adjusted. I didn’t know how warm it actually was on Australia until I got here. Now I only know months of prickled skin on my arms. Months of it.
The crying’s coming from inside one of the warehouses. It won’t stay there—you’re trapped inside those things, nowhere to run if you’re cornered. I climb up onto the top of the closest building, one that’s burned out and slightly more fragile than some of the others. Still, it takes my weight. I look over to see if I can spy them, spot any movement. The baby’s mother—seems like it’s never the father trying to hide them—will either find somewhere to hide or she’ll be immediately on the move. Either way, this isn’t going to end well. I don’t know why she didn’t have the baby muted—that’s the easiest way of keeping them quiet, as cruel a thing as it is to do. Now, instead, the baby will be taken, pried from her hands, because babies here are always taken away from the people that live here. The Services swoop in, take them somewhere they’ll be better cared for. That’s what happens every time. It’s what’ll happen now.
Unless.
I stay on the rooftops and listen. She’s moving. The sound stops echoing; it’s no longer coming from the warehouse. Now she’s winding her way through the shanty village. I hear them shouting at her to move on. They won’t help her if she needs it.
So I run with her. Maybe I can help her. Could be that we take her somewhere to get the operation done. I know that Alala’s done some, so her, maybe; though she probably won’t touch one that’s this hot. I can’t hear any car sirens yet, so she’s still got a few minutes. She could still hide, maybe set the baby unconscious just for the time being, hide it somewhere. But that’s risky. I’ve seen it where the baby wakes at the worst possible moment, hidden in some compartment in the ground or something; they open their eyes and don’t have a clue where they are, then just start screaming again. They don’t even know what happened. Babies always seem to cry when they wake up. When do we learn that it’s safer to be awake?
I get from the warehouses to the shanties and I don’t stop. Uneven roofs make it hard to sprint, but at least they’re stable enough to take my weight.