Free The Quality of Silence by Rosamund Lupton Page A

quite solidly formed. He’d wondered how ice could really take the weight of a truck.
    When Saaib arrived in the UK he found work in the pouring room of a glass factory. It was a huge room, Saaib said, with a totally even floor, into which was poured – carefully, by special machine – molten glass, which then solidified into a perfectly even sheet on the even floor, before being cut. But one morning something went wrong with the careful special machine and the molten glass gushed into the room, too much and too fast, and the liquid glass forced its way out of windows and doors and set light to whatever it touched. Only the level room, made of marble, could withstand the heat; outbuildings and offices were destroyed in the fire. Saaib had been badly burned. Since then glass and ice had seemed not only tough to Adeeb, but vicious, murderous even, and all the time their transparency belied their power.
    Yasmin closed her mouth against a scream so that Ruby couldn’t see her fear. They were plunging down a sheer drop into the darkness. She watched Adeeb locking the differential gearing in the rear axle, so that each wheel had all the torque it could, but it wasn’t working because they were going too fast down this precipitous slope; surely this was too fast. They got to the bottom and the momentum sped them up the opposite slope. They reached the top. She was shaking from adrenaline.
    She turned to Ruby who smiled at her, showing no sign of being afraid, as if this was an adventure. She was excited about getting to her dad and excited about the road itself, not realising how dangerous it was because how could a mother who makes you eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day and has a homework schedule stuck to the fridge do something that puts you at risk?
    ‘I‘m sorry I frightened you,’ Adeeb said to Yasmin. ‘I had to drive fast enough for us to get up this side. Too slow is as dangerous as too fast. I should have warned you; should have warned you about the whole road before we left Fairbanks . It’s just that sometimes I don’t remember how bad it is until I’m driving it again.’
    ‘I asked you to take us,’ Yasmin said.
    ‘Do you want to go back?’ he said. ‘Because I’ll take you.’
    The cab’s thermometer measured the outside temperature as minus twenty-four, already colder than Fairbanks. At Anaktue the average temperature in winter was minus thirty and could reach minus fifty, without the windchill. This road was dangerous, yes, she knew that now and wished to God that Ruby was somewhere safe, but if she left Matt there wasn’t a risk that he would be hurt but a hundred per cent, no margin of error certainty that he would die.
    ‘I want to go on’, she said.
    I keep thinking we’re going to skid and I grab hold of Mum, like you do on a roller coaster. In our headlights you can see this ginormous pipe running right next to the road. It looks like a huge black vein in a white body, and inside there’s all this slushy warm oil pumping along.
    I’m squashed up next to Mum and she’s got her arm around me and it feels really nice. Normally I don’t do this, because I need to practise for being eleven and grown up and at secondary school and everything. I wish she’d tell Mr Azizi that we want to go all the way to Deadhorse because I’m sure he’ll say yes and then she won’t look so worried. I hope that if I go to sleep when I wake up we’ll be near to Dad.
    As Adeeb navigated their truck round hairpin bends and down hills more like ski-runs than a road, Yasmin focused on the drive axles and the air-actuated clutch and how power flowed to the tyres without any differential action, giving each wheel all the torque the road permitted. She’d never enjoyed the engineering part of physics but out here, in this truck, she was glad she knew how Adeeb was keeping control because she understood why, for the moment, Ruby was safe.
    Ruby had fallen asleep, tired out from the long flight, the