She crouched and steadied herself, fingertips to the ground. ‘That’s why he can’t get out – the door’s covered up again.’ She was on the edge of the slope now, still on grass, but working her way around the bowl to the top of the area where the land had given way. ‘What else could it be? The little boy must have got inside, and now he can’t get out.’ And for all that he was frightened, for all that he wanted to be anywhere but here, there was something amazing about finding this thing, vomited up by the earth. ‘It’s a tank,’ he said, suddenly remembering the word. And the tracks that the wheels fitted into, with their hinged metal plates, one after the other like the segments of a worm. He recognised it by its many small wheels, too many of them along the visible side for this to be a car or truck. He had seen something like this in one of his books. ‘What is it?’ he asked, although he had a dreadful sense that he already knew. Something poked through the tawny ground. An arc of the bowl’s interior had collapsed away, leaving a steep rain- washed slope. They’d emerged at the edge of a bowl-shaped depression in the ground, hemmed in by dense stands of mixed trees. He stared in jaded wonderment as the two edges of torn fabric sutured themselves back together. Thickening undergrowth clawed at his trousers, inflicting a rip. Something slithered away under dry leaves a metre or two to his left. Trees fretted the sky with languidly moving branches, chips of kingfisher blue spangling through the gaps. Geoffrey steeled himself and soldiered on. ‘It’s some kind of machine,’ she shouted back. ‘The rain’s washed this whole slope away, like an avalanche! There’s some- thing sticking out!’ ‘Something’s happened here!’ Sunday called, just out of sight. They had been here before, many times, but that didn’t mean they knew every bush, every rise and hollow of the landscape. He didn’t know what was on the other side of the trees. ‘The Mechanism will be keeping an eye on us.’ ‘We’ll be safe, whatever happens,’ he said, as much to convince himself as anything else. Geoffrey reached up to jam his own tighter, crunching it down on tight curls. The hat bounced jauntily against her back, secured by a drawstring around her neck. ‘It’s not far now,’ Sunday called back, looking over her shoulder. They passed the rusted white stump of an old windmill. Sunday pushed confidently forward into the acacia trees, Geoffrey struggling to keep up. Remembering a time when Memphis had praised him for not crying after tripping on the household’s hard marble floor, he had made a point of not telling his cuff to make the pain go away. More than could be said for Geoffrey’s mud-blotched arms, now crosshatched with fine, painful cuts from sharp-thorned bushes. Despite the mud they’d splashed around in, and the undergrowth they’d struggled through, their clothes remained as bright and colourful as when they’d put them on back at the household. They wore snake-proof boots and long snake-proof trousers, short- sleeved shirts and wide-brimmed hats. Watchful for hazards, they crossed drying ground and boggy marsh- land. ‘You don’t have to come, if you’re scared.’ ‘I think it’s coming from this way.’ She started walking, then turned back to Geoffrey. ‘I’m used to them now.’ Sunday hopped off the stone and pointed to the trees. ‘Could it be the things in your head ?’ Geoffrey asked. And if by some chance Maasai were nearby, one of their boys would have known better than to get into difficulty. The trails they followed were trampled by elephants rather than people. There were no homes here, no villages or towns. Bilious clouds patrolled the horizon, thunder sometimes bellowed across the plains, but the sky was clear.īesides, they had been this way many times. The waters had gone down com- pared to a week ago and the rains were petering out. ‘Maybe we should tell Memphis first, then look for him.’ ‘He’s in trouble,’ Sunday said determinedly. He heard the river, the sighing of leaves in acacia trees, drowsy with the endless oven-like heat. Geoffrey kept a firm grip on the wooden aeroplane he was carrying. They stood on a rectangular rock, paces from the river that still ran fast and muddy. She was two years older than Geoffrey, and tall for her age. Sunday sighed and placed a hand on her brother’s shoulder. ‘I still can’t hear anyone,’ Geoffrey said. It was there that they came upon the death machine. After weeks of bored confinement they were at last allowed to wander from the household, beyond the gardens and the outer walls, into the wild. The ground had borrowed moisture from the clouds now the sky claimed its debt in endless hot, dry days.
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