The Crossing of Ingo (22 page)

“It had started before, as soon as we headed north. I don’t know if you noticed?”

I think back. Yes, it’s true. Elvira seemed more – more
real,
somehow. Not calm and perfect and a little bit passive. Her eyes sparkled and she was full of energy and she didn’t seem afraid of the dangers. But what was wrong with that? “I thought she seemed … Well, better, really. More alive.”

“More alive!”
said Conor in a harsh whisper. “You should have heard her. She was
obsessed.
It was as if she wasn’t Elvira any more. All she cares about is the North and how amazing it is. She loves it here, Saph. She says she belongs here. She kept on
saying, “I’ve come home, Conor, at long last I’m home where I belong.”

“Weird.”

“She even
looked
different. You know how gentle Elvira is. That’s what she’s like, isn’t it?”

“You mean all calm and beautiful?” I ask tentatively.

“Yes! I mean, Elvira’s really brave and strong but she’s not pushy. At least, I always thought she wasn’t. But, Saph, suddenly she was like a different person. Even her eyes were glittering in a sort of – well, a sort of way that you’d think was crazy if you didn’t know Elvira. We were lost in the middle of nowhere and she didn’t seem bothered at all. I wanted to talk about you and Faro, and Elvira kept going on about ice mountains and the Northern Lights and eternal winter and eternal summer. It was like she’d been hypnotised. She wouldn’t let me rest for a second. She kept pulling my arm and making us keep going north. And she’s strong, Saph, she’s really strong.”

Conor sounds outraged. The idea of sweet, beautiful, bewitching Elvira ruthlessly dragging my brother along in her wake nearly makes me laugh, but I suppress it. The great undersea romance of the century certainly seems to have hit a rock. “That doesn’t sound too good,” I say in as neutral a voice as I can manage.

“The worst thing was that she didn’t seem to mind that we’d lost you. Not
really
mind. She just kept saying that the North would look after you and we’d all be reunited
when it was the right time.
It was creepy, Saph. It was as if she’d been taken over.”

“I expect she’ll change back again,” I say, hiding my anger at the idea of Elvira being so calm and philosophical while Faro and I were desperately searching for her and Conor. I also have to suppress a desire to punch the water and yell,
“Yess! Hallelujah! Conor has seen the light!”

“Maybe she will,” says Conor gloomily.

“So who talked to Nanuq – you or Elvira?”

“I did.”

“Weren’t you afraid?”

“No. You could tell straightaway Nanuq wasn’t going to harm us,” says Conor confidently.

“I wasn’t quite so sure when I met her,” I murmur.

“Apparently I have a personal spirit guarding me, that’s what Elvira says. It’s a northern thing.”

“You mean – do you mean your Atka?” I ask cautiously.

“How do you know?”

“I had a sort of dream. And Nanuq said something like that to me too. You can’t die until your Atka stops protecting you.”

“Don’t you start, Saph,” Conor groans, then for several minutes he is completely still and silent.

“What is it, Conor?”

“Nothing.” After another long pause he says quietly, “Sorry, Saph, I was just remembering something.”

“What?”

“You know how Granny Carne got us to press our thumbs together?”

I haven’t thought of that since we came to Ingo, but I
remember instantly.
Think of what’s strongest for you here on Earth. Let it come to you. Don’t force your thoughts.
I wonder again what it was that Conor chose to remember, but it’s not the kind of thing you can ask.

“Oh well,” says Conor, sounding a lot happier, “At least we’re together again. If we find that current Faro was talking about, we’ll be back on our way. I hate all this getting lost and not going anywhere. It’s like one of those dreams where you run and run and you’re exhausted but you’ve hardly moved at all.”

“Yes, but …” I grope for the right words. “… but maybe all the getting lost and meeting strange creatures is all part of the Crossing – just as much part of it as when we’re actually moving, I mean.”

“God, Saph, I felt so sorry for Nanuq. Swimming on and on like that and finding nothing. She can’t keep swimming for ever.”

“She might be dead by now,” I say, and in my mind I see Nanuq swimming a last few weak, jerky, desperate strokes before her sodden fur begins to drag her down. Her muzzle vanishes, and then her eyes. Polar bears can swim a long way, but they can drown too. The icy waters close over Nanuq and she sinks like a shadow into the depths of Ingo.

I
t’s the middle of the brief Arctic day when we first see the current. I knew that Faro was looking for a powerful current, but when I see it I am stunned. It is awesome. There is not much light. Ingo glimmers with the faintest of blues, as if it were dawn. We can’t be near the North Pole yet, because it will be dark all day long there at this time of year. Maybe that’s where this current will take us – to the top of the world, under the polar ice cap.

The current cuts sharply through the blue of the water. It shines jade green, the colour of a glacier in the highest Alps. But this is water, not ice, and it’s going so fast that anything caught in it would vanish out of sight in half a second. The current stretches wider than the widest motorway I’ve ever seen. Just to look at it makes me feel dizzy. I don’t see how we can survive inside that force. Even Faro looks shocked, but he quickly recovers himself.

“Greater than the Great Current, and we shall ride it!” he announces triumphantly, as if the current ought to feel honoured. But the current just keeps rushing past, terrifyingly sleek and strong.

“How are we even going to get into it, Faro?” I ask him.

“We’ll have to find the right angle of entry,” says Conor in the judicious voice he uses when he’s talking about a problem in maths.

“We certainly will,” I say with feeling. “How fast do you think it’s going?”

Conor assesses the speed of the current. “We’d have to throw something into it and measure how quickly it travelled between fixed points to be sure.” He smiles. “But since that’s impossible, I’d say it was travelling at over two hundred miles an hour. Maybe more. Just look at it.”

We all just look. Even Elvira’s passion for the North doesn’t seem to extend to tackling this current.

“We’ll need to float parallel with it,” says Faro. “Diving wouldn’t work. The force of the water would break our necks. But if we floated at its edge, then the current would suck us in.”

“Are you sure?”

Faro shrugs. “I’ve done it with other currents when they’re too dangerous for me to dive straight in.”

But not with one like this.
The same thought occurs to all of us, but nobody speaks. Maybe we’d still be there, watching the snake-like northward rush of the current as if hypnotised …

But then a dark speck floats into the corner of my vision. I blink, but it’s still there. The others are all staring in the same direction.

There’s a dark, torpedo-shaped creature way off in the distance, growing rapidly bigger. Faro tenses. Maybe he thinks it’s
a shark. For a few seconds my stomach tightens with fear. But no, the shape is wrong for a shark. It must be a whale. I can’t hear any whale sounds, though, and as the creature comes nearer I realise that its shape is wrong for a whale too. The dorsal fin is too rigid as well as too far back on the body. The flippers look wrong too. The body glistens dully, but it doesn’t look alive. My brain refuses to make any sense of what my eyes see. Faro is quicker. His expression changes, and he clenches his fists.

“Metal,” he says in a voice of such contempt and fury that I flinch. “One of your human machines. That
thing
does not belong in Ingo.”

“It’s a submarine,” says Conor. “I recognise the outline.”

A submarine. Of course, it makes sense now. It looks like a child’s drawing of a whale, but it has its own power. Why would it be up here in the Arctic?

The submarine moves no closer. It seems to hang in the water, the way a whale does when she’s resting. It looks so alien. I glance sideways at Faro and Elvira. Their strong, smooth seal tails are the most natural things in the world to me by now. This thing of metal, engineered to slip through the water with the least possible resistance, is a complete stranger. Faro is right. It doesn’t belong in Ingo.

“It’s got to be Polaris,” says Conor.

“What’s that?”

“A nuclear submarine. I’ve seen programmes about them. They travel under the polar ice cap. It’s like a ship, Faro, only it sails underwater instead of on the surface.”

“You mean that there are humans inside that metal thing?” demands Faro.

“Yes. And enough missiles to vaporise half of Ingo,” says Conor grimly. We all stare at the submarine in silence, trying to absorb what its presence means. “It’s a thousand times more deadly than any shark, Faro,” adds Conor.

Faro’s nostrils flare with revulsion. “Only humans would bring such a creature into Ingo,” he says.

I was wrong when I thought the submarine had stopped moving. It’s coming closer. If there were windows on a submarine and the people in it could look out with binoculars, we’d be within range …

Radar.
How sensitive is the radar on a nuclear submarine? They must have all kinds of other tracking devices too. Maybe they are tracking us already. Someone might have just picked up our images on a computer screen. We’ll show up as four living, pulsing dots. Maybe their technology is so advanced that they’ll even be able to hear our heartbeats. What if they were able to pick out our arms and legs – or our tails …

Take a look. You ever seen anything like this before?

Increase the image magnification immediately. Alert the bridge.

“Conor! What if they can see us on radar, or pick up our body heat or something?”

Conor’s eyes widen. He turns quickly to Faro and Elvira. “It could be able to hear us and see us, the same way a whale can. The submarine has all kinds of equipment inside it. We’ve got to get away before it spots us.”

Faro turns aside and spits in disgust, just as he spat when he told me about Mortarow’s spear.

“Faro!” exclaims Elvira, sounding horrified, but Faro ignores her. Instead, he seizes my right hand and pulls me forward towards the current. The submarine swings slowly, probing the water. What if the people on board suspect we’re enemies?

“This time, keep close to us!” Faro shouts over his shoulder to Conor. One by one, we manoeuvre ourselves into position. We’re beside the current now. I feel the force of it tingling on my skin, although it’s not even touching me. A first faint nudge comes through the water, and then another, stronger. Suddenly I’m not afraid. My blood races, like the current. The suction seizes hold of my right hand, and I am gone.

We speed through the dark, beneath the ice. I don’t know how long we’ve been in the current. Ingo time ebbs and flows so strangely that I’ve almost given up trying to understand it. Sometimes what I’m sure is only a minute turns out to be an hour. I’m sure we’ve travelled a long way. Hundreds of miles, maybe thousands. I know that Faro is close, because I can hear his thoughts beaming out towards me.

I am here, little sister.

Sometimes I feel a wave of Faro’s exultation. He is loving this current, riding it like a surfer riding the biggest wave in the world. I know how he feels because the same exhilaration
courses through me. Behind Faro’s thoughts I can pick up the shadow of Elvira’s. She’s in touch with Conor somehow. She assures us that he’s safe.

I can’t feel any bubbles against my skin. The current seems to have crushed everything into a river of speed. It’s not jade green any more, but black, because there is no light at all. I know that we are under the ice because we glimpsed it above us, before the dark swept over us.

I keep thinking about Dad. Not Dad as he is now, but Dad as he was a few years ago when he kept getting such terrible headaches that our doctor sent him upcountry for an MRI scan on his head. Dad said when he was in the scanner it sounded like a huge hammer being hit very fast, over and over, inside his brain. The current is like that. I thought it would be a smooth rushing sound but it’s a thundering noise, as if all the atoms in the water are flying apart and then being smashed together again at high speed. I wonder where the current is taking us, and how long we’ve got to travel like this? I can’t see anything; I can’t taste or smell anything. All I know is the roar of the current, and the pulse of elation inside me.