(eng) Patrick Ness by More Than This

Author:More Than This [This, More Than]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

He heads toward the train tracks on a path that’s become familiar. The moon is bright enough that he doesn’t need to turn on the torch. It’s completely quiet as he goes. No crickets. No owls. Still no wind, despite the earlier rain.

He keeps alert as he walks, ready to run at any movement, but he makes it to the passage between the blocks of flats without incident. He reaches the train station and treads quietly through it past the train, wondering all the while if boars are nocturnal. He hops lightly down onto the tracks and looks in the direction of the prison.

The tracks are strangely empty. There are tall weeds here and there, but it’s mostly just gravel and strangled-looking grass that barely reaches his ankles. He can still see the rails shining in the moonlight for much of their distance south. Maybe years of pesticides to keep them clear were hard to fight.

On the right, there’s a brick walkway, possibly for train repair crews, that still seems in pretty good shape. Seth makes his way over to it and heads out of the station building. To his left, over the low fences, he can see some of the burnt neighborhood. It’s too dark to make out any details, just shadows on the landscape that could be tombstones. He sees no signs of movement, just empty desolation, with the silhouette of Masons Hill on the horizon.

He knows from memory that this track goes all the way to the ocean, though they’d only gone a couple times, and frankly, it was about as appealing as the seashore in Halfmarket. All rocks and cliffs and outlandishly cold water. But before the train would reach there, he remembers, as it pulled out of the station heading seaward, it would start its journey by passing great rows of fences and walls, chain link and brick, cornered by towers poking out of the surrounding trees. An architecture designed to hide itself within its own folds: the prison.

In the moonlight, he can already see one of the towers through the treetops in the distance. It’s probably not even a ten-minute walk from here, when it should be, he feels, something that took hours.

Ten minutes seems way too easy.

And not nearly enough time to work himself up to it.

He keeps heading down the brick walkway, gripping the torch like his own version of the Driver’s baton. He checks back to make sure a boar isn’t after him, and he sees the bridge over the tracks, on top of which he caught his first glimpse of the burnt-out neighborhood, and from where Tomasz saw him for the first time, too.

He wonders if they were worried when they found out someone else was here. Frightened, even. For him. Of him. And what had they thought when they found him showering? In an intimate way. He feels himself blush, though Regine had seemed as embarrassed as he was and Tomasz took it in the same enthusiastic stride as he did everything else.

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