Between Sea and Sky Read online

  For Mum, Dad and Emma

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Reviews

  Chapter One: Nat

  Chapter Two: Nat

  Chapter Three: Pearl

  Chapter Four: Pearl

  Chapter Five: Nat

  Chapter Six: Pearl

  Chapter Seven: Pearl

  Chapter Eight: Nat

  Chapter Nine: Pearl

  Chapter Ten: Nat

  Chapter Eleven: Pearl

  Chapter Twelve: Nat

  Chapter Thirteen: Pearl

  Chapter Fourteen: Pearl

  Chapter Fifteen: Pearl

  Chapter Sixteen: Nat

  Chapter Seventeen: Pearl

  Chapter Eighteen: Nat

  Chapter Nineteen: Pearl

  Chapter Twenty: Nat

  Chapter Twenty-One: Pearl

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Nat

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Pearl

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Nat

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Pearl

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Nat

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Nat

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Nat

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Pearl

  Chapter Thirty: Nat

  Chapter Thirty-One: Nat

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Pearl

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Pearl

  Chapter Thirty-Four: Nat

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Pearl

  Chapter Thirty-Six: Nat

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: Pearl

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: Nat

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: Pearl

  Chapter Forty: Nat

  Chapter Forty-One: Pearl

  Chapter Forty-Two: Nat

  Chapter Forty-Three: Pearl

  Chapter Forty-Four: Pearl

  Chapter Forty-Five: Nat

  Chapter Forty-Six: Nat

  Chapter Forty-Seven: Pearl

  Thanks

  Extract

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Praise for Between Sea and Sky

  “A message to us all in the most powerful, evocative and hopeful story spinning.”

  Hilary McKay, author of The Skylarks’ War

  “A beautifully told adventure that will have readers, like its protagonists, diving deep to discover the fragility of our eco-system and emerging emboldened to protect its delicate balance.”

  Sita Brahmachari, author of Where the River Runs Gold

  “Breathtaking, transporting and captivating. I was absolutely hooked.”

  Polly Ho-Yen, author of Boy in the Tower

  “BOSS level MG dystopia, so vivid!”

  Louie Stowell, author of The Dragon in the Library

  “A shimmering testament to the restorative power of nature and the limitless wonder unearthed by childhood curiosity.”

  Piers Torday, author of The Last Wild

  “Nicola Penfold makes me want to love our planet harder, hold it closer.”

  Rashmi Sirdeshpande, author of How to Change the World

  “I loved Penfold’s debut … and this confirms her as a rising star of children’s fiction, mixing a thrilling evocative adventure with pertinent themes of the environment and recovery.”

  Fiona Noble, The Bookseller

  “This is compelling, high-stakes storytelling… This will be a favourite that I will return to over and over again.”

  Nizrana Farook, author of The Girl Who Stole an Elephant

  “A powerful call to protect the world we’ve got.”

  Sinéad O’Hart, author of The Eye of the North

  “A post-apocalyptic love song to the tenacity of nature, this is a story of the inbetween places, of change, loss and hope.”

  Lindsay Galvin, author of The Secret Deep

  “An original and wonderful story of wild children and a world in trouble … so perfectly written that reading it is living it. And living it is an adventure.”

  Rachel Delahaye, author of Mort the Meek

  “A compelling story with a richly imagined world woven with wonderful characters.”

  Lou Abercrombie, author of Fig Swims the World

  “I loved Between Sea and Sky. I was totally immersed… I could almost smell the sea and feel salt in my hair. Powerful storytelling and a thought-provoking tale.”

  Gill Lewis, author of Sky Hawk

  “An ecological adventure that’s though-provoking, poignant and an utterly immersive experience… Absolutely brilliant.”

  Juliette Forrest, author of Twister

  “My book of the year. I adored Between Sea and Sky… This is a book that will leave a lasting impression.’

  Marie Basting, author of Princess BMX

  The dares have started early this year. Normally we wait till summer, but there are still two weeks of school to go and coloured flags are already appearing around the bay. Like everyone got bored at the same time.

  It’s a trail. You put the flag someplace you shouldn’t go. The marshes or shoreline, or ground still saturated with poisons from way back. Mostly it’s the solar fields. The fields of silicon panels that have been our playground since we were five, even though they’re strictly no access.

  The flags are calling cards. Proof you’ve been where you say you’ve been. Then you dare someone else to go and get them.

  I call on Lucas at 8 a.m. sharp. He’s in the apartment next to me and Mum, on the top floor. The most stairs, Tally says when we leave her behind on the first floor. The best view, we retort. Yeah, of the solar fields, she’ll fling back at us.

  “Flag day! Flag day!” I chant through Lucas’s letter box. The door swings open into my face.

  “Watch it!” he says, stepping out in front of me. “You want my parents to hear?”

  “You’re joking, aren’t you?” I say. “No grown-ups would be awake this time on a Sunday! Mum says her eyes need to be shut for twelve hours straight after a week in the growing tower!”

  Lucas smiles good-naturedly. The growing tower is the heart of Edible Uplands, the crop-growing complex where most of the adults in the compound work their shifts. Vegetable and salad plants stacked up in rows in a pink incubating light. Mum says it’s like looking into a permanent sunset, especially since Central District upped their quotas again. Sometimes I wonder if they need the extra food at all. Maybe it’s stacked in warehouses somewhere, rotting, and all they really want is to show their power over us.

  Lucas and I spring down the concrete stairwell. We always take it three steps at a time.

  “Tally?” Lucas asks at the first floor.

  “She’ll be at the bike sheds already,” I say, swinging past him and leaping down to the ground floor.

  Tally whistles when she sees me. “Nat! Mate! You’ve not chickened out then?”

  I shake my head, fast. Tally, Lucas and I have flagged together since nursery and today it’s my turn to place the flag. A red one. Everyone uses red for their hardest dares. It’s meant to be someplace dangerous, that’s the point, but we’ve always left Billy Crier’s windmill alone.

  “We need to up the stakes. You said it,” I say.

  “We’ve only got two years left, but we’re still playing baby games,” Tally had said at lunch yesterday. I’d known straight away where I’d have to go.

  At some point kids stop with the daring. They get pulled into work at Edible Uplands or the desalination plant. Or inland – some assignment will come up at the polytunnels or one of the factories. We’ve got to make the most of our time together.

  “Least there’s no wind,” Lucas says. I take a gulp of air. It’s hot, with the lingering taste of salt. It hasn’t rained in weeks.

  Tally leads the way out of the compound. We live in four floors of concrete a
nd steel, on stilted metal legs. Like some spacecraft landed years ago to refuel but never managed to lift off again. The legs have been surrounded by seawater so many times during floods that they’re starting to corrode.

  Even the concrete’s cracking now, imploding from the inside. They built it cheap, Mum says. They didn’t reckon on the wind and the heat and the salt. They should have built it further back – it’s too close to the sea.

  “It’s not too late to change the plan,” Lucas continues, looking back at me. “Your mum won’t want extra points.”

  We’re standing under the board where all compound families are listed and where civil disobedience points go up against the names. For shirking shifts or missing quotas or going over the boundary, or a long list of other things Central deem impermissible.

  Even when everyone’s been compliant, peacekeepers still come from Central every so often to take away the top offender for the prison ship. It’s a deterrent and reminder. Never forget the rules.

  “Mischa better watch out,” Tal says, whistling. “His dad’s three off the top.”

  I hate that list. Our friends and neighbours, their names blur together when I look.

  “We won’t dare Mischa,” I say quickly. “Not this time.”

  “Or Eli,” Lucas cuts in. “His family’s not far behind.”

  Tal shakes her head. “Nah. Sara and Luna, that’s who we’ll pick. Their families barely have any points at all. Those girls know how not to get caught.”

  “We could always do fifth field instead. We haven’t done that in ages,” Lucas says. He’s still trying to give me an escape, but there’s no way I’m backing out now. Not in front of Tal.

  “Where’s the fun in that?” Tally’s already saying. “Fifth fieldis just like first field, and second and third.” She lets her voice drone on for emphasis.

  “No,” I say, determined. “It’s Billy Crier’s windmill. Just like we said.”

  “Cool,” Tally says breezily, and lifts her bike down the last few steps.

  The mirrored fields dazzle you when you come out from the compound’s shadow. Fields of silicon stretching away either side of Drylands Road, until everything becomes sky. There’s shortages of most things round here, but sky we have in abundance.

  Most people went inland during the floods. When the seawaters rose, they drowned whole villages and towns, sweeping people right off the edge of the earth, spreading disease and famine. But some people were brought back to the bay after, when the wind pumps were working again, draining seawater out of the land. Edible Uplands and the solar fields were built, and our compound, with its housing, service shops and school. Those are the things our district is known for. Them and the prison ship, brooding out on the horizon, representing everything bad about the sea.

  “Race you!” Tally calls, jumping on her bike, and Lucas and I ride after her, our bike tyres cartwheeling over the maintenance tracks.

  Even when there’s no wind, there’s something. Energy, from the ground maybe. It builds in the rotating wheels and passes up into you.

  We leave our bikes stashed under one of the panels in third field. We make sure they’re hidden, so no one recognizes them as ours.

  I used to love these fields. It was a novelty to be out of the compound at all and we’d spend whole days tramping through them. The fields felt alive – electrons bouncing round the silicon panels, taking sunlight, parcelling it up into electricity. It’s pretty miraculous. The shine just wears off after a bit.

  “Looks like we’re clear,” Tally says, scanning the field either side. We have to be careful. If you’re caught in the fields, it’s one civil disobedience point. Points for minors go up against your parents. You only get your own chart when you start your shifts. No one wants to risk their parents being sent to that ship, to spend the rest of their days at sea.

  We proceed on foot, single file between the panels. Tally first, then me, then Lucas.

  We’ve flagged most places there are to flag already. All around the harbour, Customs and Immigration and Edible Uplands. Last year a flag was left at the top of the growing tower and all the kids in the compound were grounded for a month. Every single one, because no one would break ranks and say who it was that had climbed the rickety ladder. Flag rivalries aside, growing up in the compound makes you pretty tight.

  Billy Crier’s windmill isn’t like the growing tower. The danger isn’t just in the climb.

  It’s older than the other wind pumps. It predates not only the floods and the Hunger Years, but the Decline, and even the Greedy Years before that. It’s from when the land was still healthy enough to farm, before the poisons and the saltwater got in.

  “It’s just a story. He was probably never even real,” Lucas says, as the windmill looms closer, black and broken.

  “Yeah?” I say, looking back.

  Lucas nods emphatically. “Dad says they only tell about Billy Crier to keep us out of the fields.”

  “Liar,” Tally pronounces, staring back at him defiantly.

  Lucas blushes. “Well, the ghost bit at least.”

  “I guess Nat’s going to find out,” Tally says, crooking her neck ghoulishly and making an eerie kind of cry.

  I laugh, to show I’m not bothered.

  Billy was the same age as us. He was a runner for the smuggling gang that operated in the bay in the Hunger Years. People were so desperate for food they were dragging eels out of the marshes. If customs officers were coming, runners got the windmill operators to stop their sails at a diagonal cross, so the smugglers knew to sink their goods. It was a throwback to another time – some ancient signalling system.

  The night Billy Crier was running, his dad was in the marshes, in one of the little wooden boats. There’d been a delivery from the next district and Billy’s dad was taking packages of food up to the old town.

  Billy got word customs officers were coming, but when he got to the windmill, the operator refused to go up. A summer storm was coming and the brakes for the sails weren’t working properly. It was too dangerous. Only Billy thought it wasn’t as dangerous as it would be for his dad to be caught out on the marshes, with a full shipment of food, so he climbed up himself to stop those sails.

  All the kids in the compound know the story. A freak gust of wind blowing in from the sea. Billy losing his footing. His necktie getting caught on the sail. They say he only wore that necktie to look older, like his dad.

  The storm meant it was three whole days before they could get his body down. Or so the story goes.

  Lucas glances across to me. “You don’t have to do it, you know.”

  I don’t say anything. We’re standing at the bottom of the windmill. It’s like you slip through to a different time here. No one comes, not even maintenance. Green straggly vegetation has grown up, and though the gulls barely bother with the land, sometimes they come here and sit at the top of the sails, watching.

  Lucas’s grandmother says the gulls are the souls of all the people that drowned in the floods.

  “Nat, mate, did you hear?” Lucas says, determined to give me the chance to back out. It doesn’t matter to him that Tally’s listening.

  The panels have started up with their whistling. It makes my heart skip a beat or two. There’s a film of sweat on the back of my neck. “Do you think Billy was scared?” I ask suddenly. “The night he climbed?”

  Tally’s gone ahead into the doorway. Her face is dim in the shadows. “You know Crier wasn’t his real name?” she says in a lower tone than usual. “It was ’cause of all his crying that night.”

  Lucas giggles nervously. “Well, he can’t have cried for long, can he? Not after a fall like that.” He does the same neck twist that Tally did earlier.

  A gull screams at the top of the windmill and flutters up into the sky. “Something scared it,” Tally says, looking at me intently.

  I push past her into the windmill. I want it done with. I want that flag up there and it to be someone else’s job to get it down.
>
  I peer up through the space in the ceiling where the steps used to be. Someone took them out years ago to deter climbers, but they didn’t do a great job ’cause the next set of steps is still there. And the set after that. More like a ladder than actual steps, but still there. You can see them all the way to the top, like snakes and ladders.

  The noise of the panels has got up outside. A pinging, like someone repeatedly twanging an elastic band.

  “You got the flag?” Lucas checks.

  “Course!” I show him a flash of red from my pocket.

  “You don’t have to climb out properly,” Lucas says, scared now. “As long as you can see it from the outside. The flag doesn’t have to be right out on the sails, does it, Tal?”

  Tally shakes her head. She looks scared too, just a tiny bit, and a shiver runs down my spine. Tally shrugs when she sees me looking. “It’s just a flag, isn’t it? We could even leave it down here. The others would still be too scared to come in.”

  We all nod. This place is taboo. There are no names sprayed on the walls like you get round the compound – bored kids, proving their existence. Billy’s windmill is totally empty. Just the few odd stinging plants – nettles and thistles. Sometimes the plants grow round Edible Uplands too, before maintenance get paranoid about pests or disease and rip them up. Nothing can jeopardize the growing tower. It’s what keeps us all alive.

  “Right, I’m going up. Catch me if I fall,” I say, stepping through the doorway.

  Lucas tuts disapprovingly, but comes forward to give me a leg up to the first floor. I scrabble on to the dusty floorboards above.

  It’s dark inside and there’s an odd creaking that sounds throughout the building. The sails don’t turn any more – they were permanently braked years ago – but it feels like they’re going round anyway.