The Cradle of All Worlds

OUTSET SQUARE

Bluehaven’s a hole. A crumbling mess of ramshackle houses and dead-end alleyways sandwiched together all the way around the rocky shore of the island. Wooden beams support bulging walls and sagging eaves. Potholes mar the narrow streets. The quakes have taken their toll. I doubt there’s a single surface in town without a crack in it – one of the main reasons the townsfolk make me feel as welcome as a fart in a bathtub on the rare occasions I step outside. So even though the sun’s shining, even though it’s hot as hell and I haven’t breathed fresh air in three days, I pull the hood of my cloak forward the moment I set off down the street. I can’t take any chances. Gotta keep my head down, walk fast, look out for the usual suspects.

Old Mrs Jones, who wails whenever she sees me pass by. Mr Annan, who shutters every window and sobs in the dark. The old woman in red, Winifred goddamn Robin, who stalks me from the shadows nearly every time, walking when I walk, stopping when I stop, vanishing the few times I’ve doubled back to tell her off. Creepy, sure, but I’m used to it. All of it. Kids usually run the other way when they see me, like I’m carrying an infectious disease. Doors are slammed shut, locks click. Old folks whisper prayers.

This morning, though, it’s a ghost town. There’s no one in sight.

‘Oi, wait up!’ Violet darts round the corner behind me in her little red boots, beaming like a thousand suns. ‘Before you start, I didn’t blow anything up. I just set fire to the trash.’ She falls into step beside me. ‘Something inside the bin exploded, but that isn’t my fault.’

‘You do realise you could’ve just called your mum upstairs or something, right?’

Violet scrunches up her nose. ‘Where’s the fun in that? Besides, I can’t help you if I’m stuck at home, can I?’ She claps her hands. ‘So, what’s the plan?’

‘I’m heading to White Rock. You’re going home.’

‘Uh-uh. If you’re caught breaking curfew, you’ll be locked in the basement for a month. Or worse. They could banish you. Stab you. Oh! Oh! They could stab you and then banish you!’

‘Wow. Try not to sound too upset about it, Violet.’

‘Obviously, I don’t want any of that to happen. But let’s face it, you’re stuck in the basement with John every day, which means I’m your only friend; you’re not allowed to go to school, which means you’re not the smartest kid around; and now you’re going for a walk on a day when people literally gather round to burn effigies of you in Outset Square.’

The fact that kids on Bluehaven know effigy-burning is a thing can’t be normal, can it? This place, I swear. ‘You’re saying I need all the help I can get?’

‘I’m saying you need me.’

‘Fine,’ I sigh. ‘You can walk with me to the edge of the cove, but then you have to go. The message said “come alone”. If we spook Atlas, this could all be for nothing. And if anything happens before then, you run home. Don’t stop. Don’t look back. Deal?’

It doesn’t seem to bother her, but Violet gets teased enough for living under the same roof as me. I don’t even want to think about what would happen if people found out we’re friends.

‘Deal,’ she says.

I hang back at the corner of Sunview and Main. Violet ducks ahead to make sure the coast is clear. She tries to whistle but hasn’t quite got the knack of it yet, so she coughs and clears her throat till I get the point and join her. A bunch of kids have just walked by. A woman’s sweeping her stoop a few doors down. I sneak across the road, stealthy as a goddamn bandit, and lead Violet into an alleyway quick smart.

Bluehaven’s like a giant maze, but I know every street, every shortcut. Sure, I only step outside to run the occasional errand for the Hollows nowadays – collecting wood, buying rice – but I used to sneak out all the time, mostly at night. I’d wander the streets by moonlight, raiding the neighbour’s bins for any clothes or knick-knacks they might’ve thrown away, maybe even a midnight snack for me and Dad. Sometimes I’d head on up and raid the mango and coconut groves and bring back a feast. Didn’t take long till I’d walked every path a thousand times.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ Violet says now. She dives and rolls under a window to make sure nobody sees her. A pointless move, seeing as the window’s boarded up, but at least she’s enjoying herself. ‘If this really is an ambush –’ she leaps up, dusts herself off – ‘I reckon you should just go with it. Have fun. Be the baddie. Run around and scream and tell ’em if they don’t give you a crate of flint you’ll sink the whole island or something.’

‘Why would I want a crate of flint?’

‘Why wouldn’t you?’

A busy intersection. A right onto Kepos Road. No choice but to blend in for a bit, go with the flow. Hide in plain sight and hope the passing townsfolk don’t clock us. I pull my hood down even lower. Focus on my feet, let Violet lead the way. Keep expecting a hand to grab me and spin me around, the crowd to turn on me as one.

Violet stops. I bump into her back and someone bumps into mine. I brace myself, get ready to run, but the guy actually says, ‘Excuse me,’ and keeps on walking. I almost laugh.

If only he knew.

‘What’s going on?’ I whisper.

‘Two carts up ahead,’ Violet whispers back. ‘They’re stuck. Blocking the road. Idiots. We could try ducking under them, but –’

‘No,’ I say. ‘Come on. It’s risky, but we’re gonna have to cut across Outset.’

We duck into a side alley and start jogging. I can feel the seconds slipping away from us. We sidestep bins, jump over potholes, duck under a clothesline and scramble over a stack of crates and barrels, the hum and buzz of Outset Square growing louder all the while.

I check my pocket. The mysterious photo’s still there, safe and sound. I hold it tight, fighting the urge to run back to the basement and make sure Dad’s okay. Sometimes I swear there’s an invisible thread connecting us that spools out, stretches, then tugs at my heart and guts whenever I stray too far. Whenever I’m gone too long.

It’s pulling stronger than ever today.

Violet catches the look on my face. She knows it all too well.

‘He’ll be fine, Jane,’ she says, huffing and puffing beside me. ‘I mean, he’s much safer than you’re about to be. But don’t you worry, the square’ll be packed. Everyone’ll be way too busy setting up for the festival to notice anything. You’ll see.’

And she’s right. Outset Square is heaving. Everybody’s busy building stalls and stages. Trundling carts of fruit and roasted spits of suckling pig. Hanging flags from the lampposts. Unfurling long banners between the columns of the surrounding buildings. The Dawes Memorial School. The Museum of Otherworldly Antiquities. The grand Town Hall. The flags and banners are white, symbols of peace and slates-wiped-clean. The Manor Lament marks the anniversary of the Night of All Catastrophes. It’s the one day of the year the townsfolk come together to celebrate and remember the adventures of old. To praise their gods – Po, Aris and Nabu-kai – otherwise known as the three Makers. To chant, pray, feast, dance and – yep – burn effigies of me and Dad. There they are right now. Towering wicker things on wheels.

Maybe the festival started out as a sombre affair, but it’s more like a party nowadays. And I’m most definitely not on the guest list. I really, really shouldn’t be here.

‘I love festival time,’ Violet groans as a wheelbarrow full of fireworks rolls by.

‘Calm down, little pyro.’ I drag her into the crowd. ‘I like the idea of these losers running from something other than me, but do you really want a repeat of last year?’

‘Hey, if they didn’t want kids around the Dragon Wheels they should’ve put up a sign or something. And I only let off half of them.’

‘They were still in storage. I could hear the explosion from the basement.’

Violet sighs. ‘Yeah, you should’ve seen it.’ Then she goes all puppy-eyed on me. ‘I wish you’d come tonight, Jane. You’ve never been once. Why don’t you just give it a go?’

‘Do I really need to answer that?’

‘We could dress you up. Like a tree or something. Get a few sticks, some leaves –’

‘I’m not coming to the festival, Violet. Ever. Now can you drop it?’

‘Fine. I’m dropping it. It’s dropped. Do you reckon it’ll happen this year though?’

‘Do I think you’ll blow something up? Probably.’

‘No, stupid. The thing everyone’s thinking. Do you reckon it’ll finally wake up?’

I look around at the crowd. Between the trundling, building, sweeping and cleaning, everyone keeps glancing up the Sacred Stairs on the far side of the square. Straight as a tack and crumbling at the edges, the colossal staircase stretches all the way up the steep hill in the centre of the island, raised above the terraced farms by a series of towering arches. Up, up, up they climb, scaling the rugged, rocky slope of the hilltop – a dizzying height now, almost as steep as a ladder – until they’re devoured by an enormous stone door. The gateway to Bluehaven’s great lamented treasure.

The Manor.

With its towering columns and crummy stonework, the Manor looks more like an ancient ruin than anything. A gigantic gargoyle crowning the island, born of the cliffs themselves, as old as the sea and sky. Crumbling statues flank its windowless walls. Dying vines creep up its sides. For thousands of years, the people of Bluehaven worshipped it, praised it, journeyed through it to the Otherworlds, but it has stood like this – dormant, lifeless, closed to all – for well over a decade now. Fourteen years, to be precise.

Ever since me and Dad came to town.

They say there was a storm. They say Dad fell through the gateway and collapsed at the top of the Stairs. A man without a past. Without a name. John Doe, they called him. John Doe and his baby, Jane. Apparently, I was bundled up in his arms, crying.

They say the first quake struck at once.

‘Jane? Oi.’ Violet tugs at my cloak. ‘I said, do you reckon it’ll wake up?’

‘Don’t know, don’t care.’

‘All right, all right. Stroppy pants. I don’t reckon it was your fault, by the way.’

‘I know.’

‘I mean, you caused the Night of All Catastrophes?’ Violet hocks a golly and shines a cobblestone between her feet, a refined skill I taught her last year. ‘You’re afraid of the dark, you slobber in your sleep, and you can’t even swim, let alone curse an entire island. And yeah, your eyes are kinda creepy, but you’re not an aboma– I mean, abomo–’

‘Abomination.’

‘Yeah, that. Point is, nobody knows where you and John came from. Or what really happened inside the Manor that night. Miss Bolin reckons you cursed your home-world. Ruined everything. She told the whole class yesterday that John must’ve been trying to dump you in a different world, coz he was so ashamed and all, so you cursed him, too, like some sort of evil baby mastermind, and that’s why he’s sick.’ She shakes her head. ‘Rubbish.’

‘It’s actually a pretty popular theory, but still. Thanks for the vote of confidence.’

Violet squints up at the Manor. ‘At least you can say you’ve been inside it. You’re pretty lucky, if you think about it.’

‘You there! Hey! ’

Damn it. Old Barnaby Twigg just spotted me through the crowd.

‘Alaaaarm! Devil in our midst! Be gone, despoiler!’

‘Get down.’ I pull Violet behind a crate of bananas.

Barnaby’s obsession with the Manor is on a whole other level. Determined to witness the re-awakening first-hand, the pot-bellied maniac sleeps, eats, sometimes even bathes beside the well in the centre of the square, just so he can be first up the Stairs every morning and the last at night. He’s dressed in his best safari suit today. Thankfully, everyone’s so used to his rambling that they completely ignore him.

‘Leave now or I’ll destroy you,’ he bellows, clambering atop the well, ‘just like the demon soldiers of Yan! Killed ’em all, I did. With a slice, boom, cha, huzzah! True story.’

‘Yep,’ I mutter. ‘I’m the luckiest girl around.’

Violet grabs my arm. ‘Jane,’ she whispers, and points at a pocket-watch dangling from the hand of a stranger nearby. I lean in, can only just tell the time from here. My gut twists.

It’s already a minute past ten.

‘Uh-oh . . .’

We leave Barnaby to his theatrics and scoot back into the crowd, heading for the road that leads down to White Rock Cove. Violet tries to convince me to let her come.

‘No way,’ I say. ‘Skirt round and wait for me on the western side of the cove. If I’m not there in, I dunno, fifteen minutes, head home, check on Dad for me, and sit tight. Don’t come looking for me. Got it?’

‘But I can just hang back and –’

‘No time to argue, Violet. You go. I’ll be fine.’

‘Okay,’ she says, ‘okay, okay, okay.’ She’s pacing on the spot like she needs to pee, but fixing me with a Super Serious Stare. ‘Good luck, Jane. I’ll see you on the other side.’

And she dashes off into the crowd.

CATCH OF THE DAY

The streets of Bluehaven might be fair game for me on the odd occasion, but I’m banned from entering all public buildings. Never really cared, either. The museum? The Town Hall? Boring-with-a-capital-Ugh. But as far as school goes, curiosity got the better of me years ago. Trying to resist this colourful place where kids gathered every day to learn, read, laugh and play was like resisting the urge to pee. The longer I held it in, the more I had to go.

I used to sneak down a few days a week. I learned my times tables crouched beneath an open window. Learned the names of clouds hiding in an alleyway outside a science lab. When I was nine, I snuck into an actual classroom and spent most of the day stowed away in a cupboard. Peering at the class through a chink in the doors, I learned how their ancestors came from across the seas, having fled the Dying Lands. I learned the difference between a labyrinth and a maze. I even learned that booby traps have nothing to do with actual boobies. Unfortunately, the cupboard I’d chosen was filled with art supplies, so when the time came for the students to paint their favourite Otherworld, the teacher found me and threw me out the window. Security was tightened, the school scrubbed clean, cleansed with incense and all.

I’ve had to borrow books from Violet ever since.

So I’m no genius. Maths, science, history? Forget it. What I do have is a noggin-load of street smarts. Survival skills honed from a lifetime of living in a place I’m not wanted. I know when to run, when to hide, when to lie. I know I have to stick to the shadows whenever I step into White Rock Cove because, like Mayor Atlas, the fisherfolk got over their fear of me a long time ago. Hell, over the years I’ve been pelted with fish guts, threatened with hooks and chased with knives up the road. I’m pretty sure it’s an act. I doubt they’d do anything if they actually caught me – one guy nearly did but he backed off right away, all shifty-eyed and awkward, as if someone or something was gonna jump out from behind me and tear his head off – but I’d rather not test that particular theory.

I creep behind the lobster traps and trays of dried kelp, take in the scene. Luck’s on my side today. A new catch has just come in, fresh for the festival. The fisherfolk are busy unloading their sailboats, hauling buckets down the jetties, gutting their catches on these big stone tables, and flinging the scraps to the army of cats prowling around their ankles. The cove’s namesake sits out a ways in the water, beyond the boats, a pale rock poking from the swell. Atlas lives down the far side of the cove, but there’s so much junk scattered around the place I can pretty much crawl, dart and creep my way there, under a sheet of canvas, behind crates and piles of netting.

I’m knocking on Atlas’s front door in no time. Late, but only just.

I pull back my hood. The mayor’s residence is huge. Four storeys, arched balconies, window boxes weeping jasmine. Old Mayor Obi carked it a month or two back. Nice enough guy, I guess, in that his preferred method of dealing with me and Dad was pretending we don’t exist. Never gave us much trouble. The man’s ashes had barely cooled before a snap election was called. Atlas won in a landslide, and wasted no time moving into his new digs.

I knock again, but still, nobody answers.

‘What the hell are you doing here, Doe?’

Joy of all joys. Not Atlas, but his dropkick of a son, standing right behind me. The kid’s a few years younger than me, but already nearly as tall. A real meat-safe in the making.

‘Eric Junior,’ I say. ‘Yeah. Um. I’m just . . . here to see your dad.’

He doesn’t raise the alarm or shout for help. What he does is look me up and down, like he’s trying to work out if I’m really here and not just some horrid figment of his imagination.

‘Why would my father want to see you?’

‘Oh, you know.’ I shove my hand in my pocket, hold the photo tight. ‘Catch up on old times, play some backgammon. Discuss plans for a statue of me and Dad in Outset Square.’

Eric Junior frowns at me. I clear my throat, tell him I was joking, and miraculously I get a smile. One of those practised, winning smiles. The kind of smile that’s supposed to make me swoon and drool, quiver at the knees. And who knows? If I was into guys, maybe it would, but I don’t think I am. Into guys, I mean.

‘That’s pretty funny, Doe,’ Eric Junior says. ‘But I’m sorry, he’s not here.’ He cocks an eyebrow at me. ‘Let me just ask his mates, though. Surely someone knows where he is.’

‘No, don’t –’

‘Hey, everybody,’ Eric Junior shouts. ‘Jane Doe’s looking for my father. Anyone know where he’s gone? Anyone want to help her out?’

The fisherfolk freeze. Even the cats abandon their fish heads and stare.

‘Huh, guess not,’ Eric Junior says. ‘Actually, how stupid of me. I just remembered he’s at the Town Hall, working on his speech. It’s a good ’un this year.’ The creep slaps me on the shoulder and stands aside, ready to enjoy the show. ‘Pity you’re not invited.’

A seagull squawks. A cat meows. A lonely buoy-bell clangs in the distance.

‘W-well,’ I say in the general direction of the fisherfolk, ‘I’m running late, so I’ll leave you all to –’

‘GET HER! ’

They charge. Naturally, I run for my goddamn life. Duck and dodge. Jump over a barrel, slide under one of the gutting tables, and leap to my feet again. For a second I figure I’m gonna make it, too – there’s a break in the crowd, an alleyway beyond – but then some jerk swings an anchor at me – an actual anchor – and I have to change course. I’m surrounded in no time. Everything’s a blur. Everyone’s shouting and screaming, closing in, so I head for the only clear space I can see. Before I know it, I’m running along a rickety old jetty stretching out into the sea. The fisherfolk weren’t just closing in. They were herding me.

I’m trapped. Over water. Maybe not so street smart, after all.

A cheer from the fisherfolk now. Even Eric Junior joins in, whooping and howling.

I feel sick. I can hear the water lapping far beneath my feet. See my shadow drowning between the rotting planks of wood. A few sailboats are anchored nearby, but for a girl who can’t swim they may as well be floating on the horizon. I turn around, slowly. The fisherfolk are already stalking down the jetty towards me, led by Eric Junior and a gap-toothed giant with a wooden leg. Peg, they call him. Yeah, they’re really great with nicknames round here.

‘We told you not to show yer face here again, little Doe,’ he growls.

The jetty groans under our combined weight. It sways a little.

‘We really need to get off this thing,’ I say. ‘Please, I – I’ll go home. Right now.’

‘You don’t have a home,’ Eric Junior says. ‘You’re a parasite, Doe. A leech sucking this island dry. You and your demented dad.’

I barely get the chance to think Nobody calls my dad demented, you overgrown turd before he breaks away from the others and sprints right at me. The jetty cracks and buckles.

‘Wait,’ I shout, ‘nobody move,’ but it’s too late.

The jetty lurches to one side. The fisherfolk topple like dominoes. Eric Junior slams into me and we fall and fall and hit the water hard, shoot right under. My cloak’s too heavy, dragging me down already, as if the pockets are filled with stones. I cling to Eric Junior. He kicks, thrashes, tries to break free, but I can’t let go. I plead with him, scream bubble-shaped cries for help, my lungs heaving and burning. It’s like I’m trapped in one of my nightmares.

And then he’s gone.

Eric Junior disappears and an eerie quiet settles around me. I can hear my own heart beating, every spasm in my throat, but all I can think about is Dad, lying in the basement at the mercy of the praying mantis and the weasel. Alone. Hungry. Waiting. Worrying.

The invisible thread between us tugs and wrenches.

But now there’s a different feeling. Some tentacled thing wrapping around me, squeezing, stealing me away. No, not away. Up. I’m rising, faster and faster, caught in a fishing net. I burst from the water in a flash of brilliant sunlight and glorious air fills my lungs. I’m not just breathing it, either, I’m flying through it. The net swings around, dumps me on the deck of a sailboat and I collapse in a tangled, panting mess. Even manage a smile, till I realise someone’s watching me. An old woman in a red cloak, standing by the rope pulleys.

Winifred Robin. Up close and personal. Her skin’s wrinkled and scarred. Face like a goddamn chopping board. Hands like talons. As she strides across the deck towards me she pulls a shotgun from her cloak. Clearly my situation hasn’t improved.

‘I am sorry, Jane,’ she says. ‘You are going to wake up with quite a headache.’

And she knocks me out cold with the butt of her gun.