Heart of Danger (21 page)

Before I could stop myself, I asked, ‘You’ll be back in time to say goodbye?’

He turned to face me. ‘Yes. I’ll be there.’

In a couple of seconds he was gone.

I went back into the house, as unsettled as ever. Mother was in the kitchen. She took one look at me and came to hold my shoulders. ‘You can’t get it out of your mind, can you?’

I shook my head. ‘It’s wrong – marrying Nash. It just feels so wrong.’

She pulled me in close for a moment. ‘Sometimes we forget that you’re still very young, my daughter. I think being away for this year will be good for you. Especially being away from Nash. You won’t have to wonder about how to behave around him. You’ll be going from one new experience to the next. There won’t be time to brood.’

I breathed in deeply. ‘Yes. You’re right. Thanks, Mother.’

She kissed my forehead and let me go. ‘Zanin and I discussed it last night. We decided it would be best for Nash to get his own place away from us before you come home again. We don’t want you pressured into anything.’

My voice choked. ‘I’m going to miss you so much.’

She busied herself at the sink. I wanted to tell her I’d be careful, that I wouldn’t take risks, that I knew how much she feared for my safety, but we would both end up in tears if we spoke of it. Leave-taking was harder than I’d imagined it would be and I was dreading saying goodbye to everyone when we boarded the train.

In the end, it wasn’t so bad – thanks to Nash. He arrived with a bunch of bright balloons floating and bobbing over his head.

Hera was entranced, especially when he let her choose one for herself.

‘Yellow,’ she said. ‘I want a yellow balloon.’

He gave one to each of my family and Ginevra’s family, and to Thomas and Gilda. Then he said, ‘Now for the travellers.’ I waited, tensed for a joke about mine being a gift for his future wife, but there was nothing other than the purple balloon. He was keeping his feelings to himself, holding himself at a distance.

Fine. Be like that.

He had instructions for Oban, Ginevra and me. ‘Hang the balloons out the windows and let them go once the train is clear of the station. We’ll do the same with ours.’

‘I bet Hera won’t,’ I muttered.

He laughed. ‘I won’t take you up on that.’

For a moment we slipped back into the old, easy way of being together, but then it was time to board the train.

I was leaving my family for a year, a whole entire year. I pulled the window open and leaned out, my balloon tugging at its string.

‘Goodbye!’

The train began to move, our three balloons bounced in a frenetic dance, and as the train cleared the station we released them.

When we could no longer see our families, or any of the balloons, we sat down and looked at each other.

‘We’re off! Adventure, here we come,’ Oban shouted.

I felt as if I could hardly breathe for excitement. I’d be with my stratum soon. We’d all be together again. Friends, adventure, new places to see and new people to meet – this was everything I’d yearned for when I lived on Taris.

I settled into my seat, letting the nagging worry about marrying Nash fade to nothing as we journeyed south. Much could happen in a year. The prospect of change, of movement and of exploration was exhilarating. Taris was truly in the past, its secrets exposed and put to rest. This was my world now.

If you want to find out what happens to Juno next, got to
www.randomhouse.co.nz/heartofdanger
and click on the ‘something extra’ link to read ‘Nash’s Story’.

Enjoyed
Heart of Danger
? Read how the story began in Chapter One, Book One of the Juno trilogy:
Juno of Taris

 

01

ANOTHER BRIGHT IDEA

O
n Taris, we shave our heads.

No. That’s wrong. On Taris, we have our heads shaved for us.

It’s to remind us who we are. It’s to keep us all the same. It’s to take away the need to spend time on our appearance, so that we can concentrate on our survival. So they say. But when I ask how growing our hair would endanger our survival, people turn away from me. It’s called withdrawing.

So here we are, all five hundred of us, our heads shaved bald every week by a gentle old man called Nixie. We wear tunics of unbleached linen and we concentrate on our task of keeping our island home functioning.

To be fair, we need to work hard at surviving. Taris is the brainchild of a desperate twenty-first century world. Somebody had a bright idea: take an island in the world’s wildest, coldest ocean, sling an artificial dome around it, give it its own balmy climate, plant it with tropical plants, stock its sea with fish, and dump a few fowl, goats and rabbits on it. Add a bunch of carefully chosen people.

I am one of the descendants of those first carefully chosen people. Well, kind of. But more of that as I tell my story, and the best place to start is a school day when I was eleven years old. I was supposed to be doing maths, but my mind skittered off in another direction – to Outside. Why was I the only one who wanted to know what it was like now? Was it worse or better? I was sure things must have changed one way or the other over two hundred years; but I had learned not to speak of it.

Justa, our teacher, tapped my computer screen. ‘Concentrate please, Juno.’ She frowned at the pictograph I’d typed without thinking:
Outside
. ‘It’s a waste of energy thinking about Outside.’

She spoke gently, but Silvern sniggered and muttered, ‘Jump out the landing dock, why don’t you?’

Justa touched her shoulder. ‘When you are perfect, Silvern, you may laugh at other’s mistakes, but not until that day.’

I didn’t bother to send Silvern a look of triumph. I frowned at my computer and tried to attend to its voice yammering in my earphones and demanding answers. I keyed in a few pictographs and hoped Justa would think I was working. But my mind had seized on Silvern’s words – I couldn’t climb the mountain to the landing dock, and there would be nothing to see through the mist when I got there. But she’d planted in my head the idea of escape, of doing something different, of going somewhere I’d never gone before, and that was a nearly impossible thing to do on our small island.

I could swim out to the walls of our island. The thought of it made me shiver with excitement.

The recreation hour was the only time I’d be able to do it. If I hurried home from school and didn’t linger over lunch, I would have almost two hours before I had to be back to help with the manual chores we all did in the afternoons.

I would take the path that circles the mountain. Leave it at the highest point. Find a way through the rocks and scrubby bushes to the very end of the promontory because that was the closest point of land to the walls of the dome that protected us from the ravages of the outside world.

It would be a dangerous climb down the cliff but it would be necessary. If I swam from the end of the promontory it would be half as far as if I swam from the beach. Even so, it would be an exhausting swim. But if I was to touch the walls of our world, it was the only way I could do it.

Justa tapped my screen again. ‘You should have finished this by now, Juno.’

I smiled, apologised and managed to do two calculations while she watched me. I didn’t look at Silvern.

But I was too excited to concentrate on trig problems – I was going on an adventure. I might pick up some hint of Outside, perhaps I’d be able to feel the huge waves of the Southern Ocean crashing against our walls. Would the walls feel cold – colder than anything I’d ever experienced? I shrugged. I didn’t know – all I knew was that I desperately wanted to find out.

Justa dismissed us for the day. I shut my computer down and followed the rest of my learning stratum from the room. I thought Justa might try to speak to me. She didn’t, but I felt her eyes on me as I left, dawdling, so that the other thirteen of my classmates were ahead of me.

Would I feel so hemmed in by my life on Taris if I had a real true friend? Like Silvern and Shallym for instance, ahead of me on the path: heads together, giggling over something I definitely didn’t want to know about. Stupid girls – just because they were nearly two years older than me they thought they were queens of the island.

I wouldn’t think of them. I needed to work out how I could escape from the eyes of those who loved me.

If only I could creep out at night when there would be no one around to see me, but not even I was foolhardy enough to attempt something so risky at night. It would have to be the recreation hour.

I arrived home five minutes before my parents. ‘Hello, dear girl,’ Mother said, smiling at me. ‘You’re early.’

I shrugged. ‘I ran all the way.’

Dad grinned. ‘You must have missed a lot of news on the way, in that case.’

I shook my head. ‘I heard that Oban hopes to be chosen to be the atmospherics apprentice. I heard that Arten said his first word today.’

Mother laughed. ‘I heard that too – he said “want”! Reda and Moss are mortified.’

I smiled too, but the truth was I didn’t care. It was driving me out of my mind, the smallnesses of our world. ‘I’m going walking during the recreation hour.’

My parents said nothing for a couple of heartbeats, then Mother sighed. ‘Very well, Juno. You have our permission.’

I hugged her, and then I hugged Dad. I was fortunate that they allowed me so much freedom. Silvern’s parents would not have allowed her to walk by herself during the recreation hour. There was no reason not to do it, no law, no rule – it was just that nobody ever did. If I had wanted to go swimming in the Bay of Clowns with everyone else, it wouldn’t cause gossip. But if somebody saw me walking alone around the mountain, I’d be the subject of gossip for days. And somebody was bound to see me.

‘Thank you.’ I set out the wooden platters on the table and filled a pitcher with water. Silently, I thanked them for not asking why I wanted to do such a wayward thing as walk by myself.

We sat down to our meal – at midday it was some variation on bread rolls filled with whatever salad vegetables were available and cold fish, rabbit, goat or chicken left over from the previous evening. Today we ate rabbit, with lettuce, tomato, cucumber and avocado. There was a dressing of olive oil, lemon and crushed basil leaves. I scarcely tasted any of it.

I helped clear away, bade my parents goodbye and ran off down the path. Should I go to the Bay of Clowns instead? Perhaps I could try to swim out from there? But no, I couldn’t swim that far. Not yet. And what a scandal it would be if I had to be rescued by one of the young men, or by Harl in his fishing boat.

I climbed up to the base of the mountain and headed west along the rough path. It wasn’t used much because there were no houses along it, no gardens or orchards and only one tiny beach where the stream had cut through the cliffs. I ran, glorying in my solitude. I shouted out a nonsense song of my own making:

But I didn’t sing when I came to where the path narrowed and I had to dodge fingers of vines. The stream was below me, running dark between high rock walls. It wasn’t a place we liked to go.

I hurried on to where the path widened and sloped down to the sea. The stream here was busy and happy as if it was pleased to be out of the narrow dimness of the ravine. I splashed through it to the beach, and stopped at the edge of the sea to stare out to the walls. This was Calico Bay. I could hear swimmers on the other side of the promontory in the Bay of Clowns. Oh, no! I collapsed on the sand. How stupid of me! Those swimmers in the Bay of Clowns would see me if I tried to climb down the cliff at the end of the promontory.

The questions I would be asked resounded in my head. Why, Juno? What were you trying to do? It’s dangerous, that cliff is so steep, what madness possessed you?

And I could almost hear the gossip:
Have you heard? Juno tried to climb down the cliff at the end of the promontory. She got stuck. She fell.

I stood up. I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t subject my parents to such distress. But perhaps I could try from here to reach the skin of our world. This bay, a tiny sliver of sand where the stream had cut down through the cliffs, was closer to the walls than the Bay of Clowns was. I stripped off my tunic and waded into the water until it was deep enough for me to swim.

I kept my head down, turning it every second stroke to breathe. I swam until I was tired. Surely I must be nearly there! I trod water and looked up. I was level with the end of the promontory. The edge of our world shimmered beyond it, far away.

I hoped I’d have the strength to swim back. It’s harder to swim with disappointment weighing you down. And I was very tired. By the time my feet hit the bottom, I was shaking with weariness. I staggered from the water and flopped onto the sand.

The promontory. So close. So tantalising. So impossible.

I would have to wait until I was older and stronger, but one day, I promised myself, I would touch the skin of our world.

I rested for a few minutes then ran into the water to wash away the sand sticking to my legs and back. I’d forgotten to bring a towel.