The Color of Darkness (17 page)

“We've got to get back to Danny!” Barshin loped easily beside her, bouncing smoothly over the wasteland. “We've got to save Tom's sand. You've seen for yourself now—Sammael's
evil
!”

Cath slowed as they reached the next fence and gave Barshin a shrewd look. “Ain't I done enough? I gave Danny your message, didn't I?”

She crouched, lifted the wire mesh fence, and put her head down to scramble underneath it. It was an easy enough slither, although all the rain-damped dust had turned into a layer of fine sticky mud that smeared itself over her face, sweater, and jeans. She wiped some of it off her cheeks and stood up, watching Barshin wriggle elegantly through the gap she'd made.

Barshin shook mud off his hind legs and gazed up at her.

“Come on, teach me how you call Zadoc,” Cath said. “You said you would. I've gotta know how to get to that house.”

Barshin sat back on his haunches. “I will,” he said. “But only once I'm sure that Tom's sand is safe. And as for Zadoc dying—when he does, there will be another guardian to replace him, eventually. You will get to your house in another few years or so. I'll come back and find you when I've seen to my duty. Good-bye.”

He turned away and hopped along the fence line in the direction of the estate.

Cath watched him for a frozen second. Another few
years
? When the Sawtry buildings came into her field of vision, she almost threw up at the sudden cold in her stomach, as though someone had filled her full of old rice pudding and then punched her.

“Barshin!” She choked on the name and had to dig her fingernails into her palms to stop the ice spreading through her veins.

The hare stopped, his back to her.

“Teach me now!” she yelled. “You have to! You know I can't go back home!”

The hare hopped on, farther and farther away.

“Stop!”

The farther he went, the smaller he became, shrinking against the dark outline of the buildings. If he went into the complex, she'd have to go there and find him, and she'd never get into the Sawtry without being seen …

“Stop!” Cath tried again, but she knew it was no use. Barshin had got his message to Danny; now he didn't need her anymore. She was the one who had nowhere else to go.

This time she didn't bother to shout. She thought Barshin might hear her anyway, somehow.

“Okay, I'll do it. You win.”

The hare turned and came bounding solemnly back. He settled close to her feet and looked up at her, putting his head back and laying his long ears down his neck.

“This is it, okay?” Cath said. “I'll try and help him once more and then that's it. I like Chromos. This ain't my war.”

“Maybe not,” said Barshin. “But perhaps it is your battle, whether you want to fight it or not. Come, we will ask the hares that live on the edge of town if they know where Danny might be.”

He's not right, thought Cath savagely as she followed him in the opposite direction. It's
not
my battle. There's only one battle for me—how can I make sure that one day soon I'll wake up and know I never have to see the Sawtry again?

And she felt the buildings behind her, bunched and ready to pounce, like a wolf watching a straying lamb.

*   *   *

It didn't take too long to get up to the nature reserve, although Cath had never been that far out of town. Getting out of town seemed such a huge thing when you were in it; even getting off the Sawtry seemed impossible sometimes. But it turned out all you had to do was start walking and keep walking.

The woodland was strangely tame, in a way that the railway cutting in the park wasn't. The trees were tall and glossy, the forest floor covered in clumps of small shrubs around clearer patches of earth. Not many brambles, the only plant Cath knew by name. There were even signs up with maps and pictures of flowers and animals you might see there. Cath ignored them. Time enough to learn the names of things when she was living in her new house.

She stamped after Barshin and heard a great, sudden rustling, followed by the thudding of hooves. Nothing like Zadoc's hooves, though. Not even enough to make a single hope leap in her heart. These hooves were small and they raced away before she had time to see what they belonged to.

Danny was leaning back against a tree. He looked up sharply at Cath's arrival, and then swiftly at Barshin.

“You got away, then?” said Cath.

Danny nodded his head. “Your dad chased me for a bit. I lost him.”

He seemed to be thinking very hard about something, turning it over in his brain. Cath wasn't going to ask what.

“I saw Sammael,” she said.

Danny flinched, but he didn't set his face into that expression of not wanting to know that he'd worn yesterday outside school.

“You saw him?” he said. “Where is he?”

“Chromos. I dunno where, though—we were going too fast. He don't like you, does he?”

Danny leaned his head back against the rough bark of the tree, his short brown hair messy with wind and bits of leaf. Underneath his flushed cheeks, his face was gray with tiredness.

“What did he say, then?”

“He told me about Chromos—how he uses it to put ideas in the world. He wants to keep doing it, so that the world gets to be more and more like Chromos and nothing is impossible. Imagine it…”

Danny shook his head and shuddered. “That would be terrible,” he said. “Imagine if all the worst things that could happen came true.”

“But it might be the best things,” said Cath. “Chromos is a weird place, yeah. But kind of great.”

“So Sammael's going to do something really great for us, is he?” said Danny. “Right. Don't be an idiot. He's going to open up Chromos so it covers the world, and it's going to be chaos. Horrible chaos. We've got to stop him.”

“Chicken,” said Cath. “You haven't even seen it. You couldn't even go there 'cause you were too scared of it.”

“No,” said Danny. “I couldn't go there because I'm normal. And you're a freak.”

Cath shoved him hard, and he fell over, sitting down heavily on the exposed tree roots. She turned and walked away. If she left him behind, sitting in the woods alone, then Sammael would do what he'd promised and Cath would be able to live in a world full of color and strange life, and she'd find that house between the mountains and the sea, and stay there, and not have to live and die on the dead, gray estate.

“Why are you leaving him?” said Barshin, hopping after her, and for the first time since she'd been a tiny kid, Cath felt a scalding heat run up her nose into her eyes until something threatened to dampen the corners of them.

“He's a loser,” she said. “He's a goody-goody, snotty-brained, pathetic little loser. I ain't doing nothing with him no more. You showed me Chromos, didn't you? What did you do that for?”

“To help you escape,” said Barshin.

“Yeah. And so now it turns out that it was great, the best place I've ever seen, and he wants to screw it all up just 'cause he doesn't like it, and I'll still be down here running away from my blimmin' dad until I'm old and dead.”

“He doesn't want to ruin Chromos,” said Barshin. “He just wants to make sure it stays where it is, that's all.”

“Yeah, whatever,” said Cath, shrugging. She blinked once and saw, straight ahead, a bank of clouds swallowing the trees, freezing the forest in a sucking mist. And then she blinked again and it was gone, the world normal again, white and green and brown, a few fragments of blue breaking up the sky overhead.

If only she could keep going, leave them both far behind. But there was the question: where would she go?

She looked down at her feet and turned, and kept turning until she was facing Danny O'Neill again. Then she walked back to him.

*   *   *

Danny told her what the stag had said, about the story of Phaeton and Sammael's boots. Cath listened in silence, picking at threads on her frayed cuff.

“So what are you going to do?” she asked, wiping away more dirt from her face with the sleeve of her sweater.

“I have to make sure Tom's safe first,” Danny said. “You're right—I should try and make a bargain for his sand. So I have to get Kalia. But apparently I can't get into Chromos because I'm too scared.”

“You reckon?” said Cath.

“I don't care.” Danny shrugged. “It's normal. That's what being brave is, isn't it? Feeling scared and doing things anyway.”

“Except getting into Chromos,” Cath pointed out.

Danny looked at her, frowning as though he couldn't quite work out how all the bits of her face fitted together. “Are you really not scared to go in there? Not at all?”

“No,” said Cath. “Why would I be?”

“Oh, I dunno. Because you've no idea what's in there, or what it might do to you? Something like that?”

Cath shook her head. “It's fine. I know it is. It feels …
brilliant
. Like I can do anything. Like the whole world is
mine
.”

Danny's fists clenched against his legs, and for a second his face was still and sharp. “Let's try again,” he said. “Tell me about it as we're going in. Maybe if I listen to you, I'll feel the same. I
need
to get there. That must count for something.”

So Barshin gave his strange growling shriek and the air began to shimmer, although it wasn't as strong as last time—closer to a harsh heat haze than a tremendous shaking of the air's very particles—and Zadoc's hooves began to appear. They had changed color, to a gluey purple, and his legs were now the browny-green of a stagnant pond. His eye was still bright with the thousand colors of Chromos and he still tossed his head, snorting. But Cath thought for a second that she caught a brief glimpse of the world through the other side of him, as if for a moment he had lost all his colors and become one with the forest.

She ran to his side.

“Come on!” she shouted to Danny. “Get on! We'll go to my house!”

“What's it like?” Danny gasped, pushing himself up off the ground and approaching Zadoc. But his face was white and he was biting his lip.

“Away from everywhere. Between the mountains and the sea…” But she stopped. She didn't want to tell Danny where it was, even if it would help her in the end. Nobody should know except her and Barshin.

It didn't matter anyway. Danny's arms were up and he was yelling something about dogs, and staggering backward, falling over a tree root, tumbling down onto his butt, kicking his legs out, fending off something she couldn't see.

She let go of Zadoc, and he vanished out of the air with a hissing snap. Barshin, who had come forward in readiness to throw himself into her arms, dashed back to the safety of a bush and crouched under its fringes, peering out at the place where Cath now stood alone.

“Stop it, idiot,” Cath said to Danny. “Everything's gone.”

Danny's arms and legs stopped waving, and he brought them down to the ground and then sat up, looking around with suspicion. Eventually, when he had seen that only Cath, the hare, and the forest remained around him, he stood and brushed off his clothes.

“I couldn't hear you,” he said. “Kalia just went for me. She hates me too.”

“Seems fair,” said Cath. “If you killed her and all.”

“I'll never get her,” said Danny. “She's the actual thing stopping me from getting into Chromos. Going in and thinking her up, giving her to Sammael—it's never going to work.”

He stood, shoulders sagging, staring at the ground. The tips of his ears had gone red; Cath couldn't see his face. She ground her teeth, wanting to kick him, then jumped as Barshin came leaping out from under the bush, scuttling to a stop at her feet.

“He's going to the farm! He's going there soon!”

“What? Who?”

“
Him.
He's going to see Tom! The hares that were watching the farm—they say he was there yesterday, and they've seen him again nearby. We have to go and stop Tom from talking to him! We
have
to go and try again! Now!”

Cath told Danny, whose shoulders sank so low that she was sure his knuckles touched the ground for a second. He looked at her, his eyes rimmed with red, although he wasn't quite crying. Yet.

“It's too late,” he said. “All of it. It's too late.”

“No it ain't!” Cath saw her house in her mind's eye, just beyond the fringes of this little woodland. It was out there, waiting for her. She knew it. All they had to do was save Tom.

“What do you care, anyway?” said Danny. “You'll be fine, whatever happens. You can just go home and wait for Sammael to rip Chromos open. You'll have a great time when everyone else has gone insane.”

“I ain't got time to wait!” Cath snapped. “I. Can't. Go. Back. Get it? I gotta get to Chromos before my dad catches up with me again. And Tom's your cousin, ain't he? You can't just hang around with a face like a bulldog's butt going on about how you can't do nothing. You've gotta do
anything
you can! Come on!”

Danny lifted his eyes and stared at her, and she saw a hardness come over his face, sweeping away the pale uncertainty. Whatever doubts he had battled with, they had been stomped on, for a while.

“Okay,” he said. “We'll do it. We
will
make him listen to us. Sammael is
not
getting my cousin. I can't let it happen. Wait here.”

He stalked off into the woods. Cath threw a piece of grass at him. The wind caught it and batted it back to her. She turned to Barshin, expecting at least a disapproving look, but the hare merely kicked a fly off his ear and waited.

After a while, there was a loud rustle from the direction Danny had gone, and the sound of light
thud
s against packed earth, and then the bushes swung themselves aside and an animal with a reddish-brown hide stepped out. It had thin legs that came delicately down to shiny hooves, deep black eyes, and a wide forehead crowned with a pair of businesslike antlers.