Free Dark Eden by Chris Beckett

that went all the way up to Starry Swirl, Jeffo, if it’s so cold and dark even just up above the edge of forest? Think how cold it must be right up out there among the stars.’
    He looked at me resentfully.
    ‘They had a way, didn’t they? Tommy and Angela and the Companions, they had a way. They knew stuff that we don’t know about, like metal and plastic and lecky . . .’ he stumbled on the word, ‘and lecky-tricktity. They knew how to fly and they knew how to keep warm. If we keep on building boats, we’ll find a way too.’
    So he said, but meanwhile he was angrily smearing glue onto an animal skin at the end of a log,
exactly
as he’d done with every other boat he’d ever made. He wasn’t trying anything new, and he never had done, not once in all those thirty forty boats he’d made.
    ‘How did they get your leg off?’ I asked.
    ‘Sawed it off with a blackglass knife, the bastards. Didn’t Roger tell you that? You ask a lot of questions, young man, I must say. A lot of rude questions. I don’t want to talk about it, alright? It’s not a thing I like remembering. Would you, if you were me? You get on now, John, and leave me to finish this boat off in peace.’
    Smiling a little bit to myself for my cleverness in getting away, I made my way back through Brooklyn and Spiketree and finally back to Redlantern, where the hunters and scavengers were just coming back from forest with a chewy old starbird and a couple of bags of fruit. Not enough, nothing like enough for forty-odd people. If we hadn’t still had three legs of that woollybuck left over, we’d have all been hungry that sleep.

6

Tina Spiketree

    At the end of a waking, two sleeps after he did for that leopard, me and John Redlantern walked up along Dixon Stream. We climbed the rocks beyond London and Blueside fence until Deep Pool was there below us, shining with wavyweed and water lanterns and bright beds of oysters.
    ‘It’s like there’s another forest down there, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Another little Circle Valley, with the rocks around it like Snowy Dark. Only difference is that this forest is under water.’
    It even had a narrow little waterfall at its lower end, where the water poured down on its way to Greatpool, just as all the water of Circle Valley poured out down that narrow gap at Exit Falls.
    ‘Yeah,’ said John, with a snort. ‘And if there’s ever another big rockfall over Exit Falls, whole of Circle Valley forest could end up under water too.’
    People didn’t come up to Deep Pool much and there was no one else there. We climbed down to the edge of the water, took off our waistwraps and dived in. The water was clear like air and warm warm as mother-milk. The stream that fills Deep Pool comes down icy cold straight off Dixon Snowslug over in Blue Mountains, but the tree roots and water lanterns heat it up.
    ‘So that was pretty brave of you,’ I said, when we’d come up to the surface by the water’s edge, ‘killing a leopard all by yourself.’
    We grabbed hold of warm roots and faced each other, close close, with the warm warm water up to our shoulders.
    ‘Most people tell me that,’ John said, with a little laugh, ‘but you make it sound like a question.’
    I nodded. It
was
a question. I was trying to get the measure of him. He looked nice, no doubt about it, he looked beautiful, and it was obvious obvious why he was a favourite with oldmums looking for baby juice. Plus he was quick and clever, and other kids respected him. And he was a big name in Family too now, one of the names that everyone knew. It was all good good, but I still didn’t completely get him. No one did. There was something about himself that he held back.
    ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I think sometimes people just do one brave thing, and then that’s it. Or sometimes people are brave in just one way.’
    He shrugged.
    ‘Yeah, it’s true. One brave thing doesn’t mean much. And sometimes people do brave things when they just haven’t