The Other Side of the Island (23 page)
Read The Other Side of the Island Online
Authors: Allegra Goodman
Tags: #Nature & the Natural World, #Social Issues, #Families, #Family, #Juvenile Fiction, #Individuality, #Fantasy & Magic, #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #Family Life, #Weather, #Peer Pressure, #Islands, #General, #Domestic fiction
The rain weighed her down. Her drenched skirt slapped against her legs as she stumbled forward. The wind ripped off her sun hat, and her hair flew into her face. Trees shook above her. As she ran into the forest, branches slashed her face and body. Mud sucked her sandals. The sky was dark with the storm, and the trees made the way even darker and more difficult. She knew she shouldn’t go to the lookout; it was too exposed. The wind would sweep her up into the sky. She couldn’t go there. She was afraid Helix had tried, even though they’d agreed he would stay with Quintilian.
Her arms ached. She thought of casting off her tall bow and quiver, but she was afraid someone from school would find them. She knew she had to keep climbing as far as she could into the mountains. She was well past the Model Forest now. She stumbled between tree trunks wet and soft. Bark peeled off and stained her hands where she tried to hold on. Huge vines snaked upward into the tree branches, choking out the light. Philodendron leaves the size of open umbrellas shook water down on her. Spiky green shoots stabbed her legs. The forest thickened. She struggled against roots and branches as she pushed her way higher.
She didn’t know how long she’d been running. She didn’t know where she was, except that suddenly the ground grew steeper. The earth was red, and a path emerged between the trees, a muddy gully studded with rock but not impossible to climb. On hands and knees she clawed for a handhold here, a tree root there. Slowly, she made her way upward until—whoosh—a flood of water poured down from above. Honor tried to hold on, but the current was too strong and swept her under. The water tore her quiver from its strap and swept away her bow. Water gushed into Honor’s eyes and mouth and ears. She reached out blindly, stretching for something solid to hold, but she felt nothing. She was choking. Her clothes dragged her down.
Like all children, she’d learned to fear water, not to swim. I’m drowning, she thought. She had to pull herself up; she had to breathe. She slammed into a huge fallen tree. The current tried to suck her under, but she held on to the tree’s trailing branches. She clung to the tree and forced her head up. She was gasping for air as the water roared around her.
Honor held on, but every moment the current tried to pull her down into the tangle of branches and leaves below.
The water wasn’t cold, but she was shaking, chilled from the inside. Her hands were bloodied where she held the tree branches. She knew she had to climb out or she would lose her grip. She slid one hand along the tree trunk, just an inch, and then the other. The water pulled at her with all its might; the current tangled her skirt around her knees. Still, she worked her way along the trunk, little by little. Her hands were raw, her body numb, and when she looked up, she almost despaired at how high and steep the bank was. Tree roots hung down, but she didn’t know if they would hold her weight. She would have to thrust herself high up out of the water to grab hold of them. She was afraid to try for fear of falling, but she was also afraid to hang on where she was. She needed to catch her breath; she needed to wake from this nightmare and find herself in bed, but the water roared and pulled so hard she couldn’t rest. She closed her eyes a moment and remembered her father and mother. Then she judged the distance to the roots and lunged for them.
She fell back, flailing. Desperately she reached out with both arms and snagged the fallen tree again. Here the tree roots on the bank were not so high. She gathered all her strength and jumped like a fish from the flowing stream. She seized the roots with one hand and then the other. Gasping, shivering, she dragged herself up the muddy bank. She was soaked to the bone, her body covered with bruises, her torn clothes caked with mud. She wedged herself between the roots of a young banyan tree and tucked her knees to her chest and tried to rest.
She slept fitfully. When she did drift off, she heard strange muddled voices. She dreamed of boats seeping with cold water. The thud and plink of raindrops into pots and pans and someone shaking her. Her mother shaking her awake. “We have to go. Wake up, we have to go now. They’re coming.”
She woke up sweating. Her heart was pounding, even though she saw no one coming. She was alone, and the storm was over. All the water in the gully below had sunk away, leaving a huge mud slick behind. Honor’s white shirt and tan skirt were unrecognizable, nearly black with mud, but she had no way to clean herself. Her feet were bare. The flood had ripped away her sandals.
She was thirsty and her stomach hurt. When she stood, she felt sick with hunger. She needed to find food, but she was afraid she wasn’t far enough from school. She could not hear the weather bulletins from the City, but she had no precise way to measure how far she’d come from the Model Forest. If she were anywhere near, then orderlies and search dogs would find her. She needed to climb farther, but there was no path in the wild rain forest, and she could scarcely find an opening.
Slowly, Honor moved upward from foothold to foothold, picking her way around sharp rocks, trying to avoid the hissing scorpions and the slimy lizards hidden under every leaf. She had been too tired before to fear the wild animals that lived in the mountains, but now she remembered everything she had learned in school, and she shuddered to think of the wild boars that might be hiding in the trees, just waiting to charge her and eat her. There were no snakes on the island, not a single one, but there were poisonous toads, and there were biting spiders. She knew the forest was a treacherous place.
Berries hung from vines, but she didn’t know if they were safe to eat. She picked guavas hungrily, but they were green and made her feel sicker than before.
Some of the philodendron leaves had filled with fresh rainwater. With two hands, Honor tipped the leaves like great bowls. And so she made her way slowly up the mountain, sipping from one leaf and then another.
Night fell, and the dim forest grew dark. Mosquitoes clouded the air. Small animals scurried on the forest floor, rats or mongooses or something else. Moths the size of birds flew through the trees. False eyes glowed on their wings so that enemies couldn’t tell whether they were coming or going. One moth flew at Honor and struck her arm. She cried out in fright because the moth was so big and heavy, more animal than insect. Bats hung in the trees, folding their brown leathern wings to feast on fruit. In the distance Honor could hear strange echoing sounds. “Oh-oh, oh-oh.” And another sound like a question. “Twilleep? Ttttwilleep?” She had not heard birdcalls since she’d come to the island. In the City and at the shore there were no birds. Rats had destroyed all the nests long ago. The City was quiet. She had never thought about the silence before, but now she realized that without birdsong, the City streets were cold and dead.
She could not see the birds, but she felt that they could see her. What other animals were watching? If she still had her bow and arrows, she might have shot a charging boar, but she had no weapon to protect herself.
She looked uncertainly at trees crawling with ants and choked with creeping vines. Should she try to climb one?
It was then that she saw a white patch on a low tree branch. She thought at first the white was a cluster of toadstools, the kind so common in that damp place, but the bulge began to move, and she saw it was not toadstools or lichen, but the soft body of a creature—an octopus. As she drew closer, close enough to touch the animal, it opened its bulbous eye and looked at her.
“Octavio!” She recognized the animal immediately, or thought she did. Miss Blessing had said Octavio was a tree octopus, and this creature looked exactly like him. “They didn’t get you,” she whispered. “They didn’t kill you.” She touched Octavio’s rubbery body, and he wrapped one tentacle delicately around her wrist.
Then Octavio drew back his tentacle and began to move. He sidled through vines and trees, and Honor followed him as best she could. She was slow, but she kept her eyes on Octavio’s ghostly body, and she never lost sight of him. He was showing her an easier path, picking his way around the forest’s thickest growth. When she stumbled or hesitated, he always waited for her.
She was so light-headed she might have been dreaming, but dreaming or not dreaming didn’t seem so important anymore. She wasn’t frightened, because she wasn’t alone. Octavio was guiding her.
He took her to a stand of trees hung with passion fruit vines. The fruit was ripe and Honor ate greedily. Her tongue curled because it was so tart, but she gobbled up the juicy golden flesh, swallowing black seeds. Only when she stopped to pick more passion fruit did she realize that Octavio was gone. She looked for him, but he had slipped away.
She found a hidden place between the close-growing trees. It wasn’t big enough to stretch out, but she could curl up safely, barricaded there by the young tree trunks, and sleep.
She dreamed of gold, an avalanche of gold leaves falling at her feet. She dreamed of Northern forests, massive beech trees and slender white birches, towering pines and oaks and scarlet maples. She dreamed she was with her mother picking blackberries. Their arms and hands were scratched by brambles, but the wild berries were so sweet, warmed by the unfiltered sun. She dreamed of ice. “Look, Honor.” Her father showed her a cave jeweled with icicles. She dreamed of snow falling and falling from the white sky, no sun, no moon, no stars, only the snow falling, muffling every sound, softening every step, outlining every branch of every tree. “Will you remember the snow?” Honor’s father asked her. “You won’t forget?”
“No, I—”
She woke with a start. She was alone again. The trees were green around her, but she could still feel snow on her eyelashes and cheeks and hands. She felt faint. She realized her memory was playing tricks on her because she had no proper food to eat. If she closed her eyes even for a moment, the dream-snow returned to her: the whiteness and the crunch under her feet, drifts soft to the touch, melting at her fingertips like clouds.
She was near the crest of the mountain now, close to the clouds. The forest was just as thick, but the air was misty, and the sloping rock faces trickled with water, a hundred tiny waterfalls. She shook herself and rubbed the dreams from her eyes. Bending down, she drank and washed her face in the clear running water. Sometimes she couldn’t tell which way a little waterfall was flowing, whether it was coming down from the mist or whether it was evaporating upward into the mysterious air. She imagined that no one from school could track her now. No straight-moving orderlies could follow her erratic trail.
She was alone, but she was fiercely glad. She had left everyone else behind. She had not been caught; she had not drowned. She did not worry anymore. Climbing up was so difficult it took all her strength, and she was glad. Climbing, she could scarcely think about anything else.
All that day she kept moving upward until, at last, the trees thinned and rock jutted from the mountainside. Then she wanted to creep out of the shadowy forest to look around her, but she waited. For all she knew, there was a watchtower on the mountain. Watchers might catch sight of her through their special viewfinders or even hear her somehow, creeping along the mountaintop. She had been taught in school that the Watchers who watch over us have every tool. Every tool for every rule went the saying of Earth Mother.
So she crouched down and rested. She had no sense of time, because she was too far away from the City’s projection booth to count on sky color. How strange it was to lie and wait for pale orange hour six and then pink hour seven. Orange, pink, lavender, purple, indigo. She waited, but the familiar colors never came.
When the sun was weakening, she crept out onto the rock face. She kept her head down and crawled on her hands and knees. The wind was fierce, and she panicked for a moment, thinking that the storm wasn’t really over and that the wind would blow her away. But the wind was nothing more than a passing breeze. She glanced up and winced. The sky stung, unfiltered blue, too clear, too bright. She shaded her eyes and looked down.
How strange the other side of the island was. The green slopes of the volcano were unscarred by roads or houses. Trees and other plants covered the mountains all the way down to vast valleys nestled between ridges, and those valleys were brimming with sunflowers, thousands and millions of them, a sea of gold faces upturned in the breeze. Honor had not expected this. She had seen no fields of gold on Helix’s map. She sat back on her heels. She had known sunflowers were fuel, and she had diagrammed the parts of a sunflower in school, but she had never imagined they were so beautiful.
She saw the shadow before she heard the voice or saw the man. Dark shade fell across the rock. Rough arms seized her from behind, and a familiar voice said, “Well, well, look who we have here.”
FOUR
HONOR TRIED TO FREE HERSELF, BUT SHE COULD NOT. THE
man pinned her arms back and tied them with rope. She turned her head, and when she saw her captor, she sobbed with despair. It was Mr. Pratt, the Neighborhood Watch from her old house.
man pinned her arms back and tied them with rope. She turned her head, and when she saw her captor, she sobbed with despair. It was Mr. Pratt, the Neighborhood Watch from her old house.
“I see you remember me,” said Mr. Pratt. Then he said quietly, “Don’t fight or try to run away. You’ll just get hurt.”
He slipped a blindfold over her eyes and tied it tight. Then he took Honor’s arm and led her back into the forest.
“Please,” begged Honor, “let me see. I won’t run away.”
“Can’t let you see,” said Mr. Pratt.
“Please tell me where we’re going.”
“Can’t do that either,” said Mr. Pratt. She was frightened by his calm, cheerful voice, as if tracking runaways was as easy as taking trash to the recycling plant.
“Are we going back to school?” Honor’s voice trembled.
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