Edge of Extinction. Laura Martin
Actually –” he rolled his shoulder – “I thought you’d go for my face.”
“Don’t tempt me,” I muttered as I reread the letter. I was confused. After five years, I’d hoped for more than a few hastily scrawled sentences. I read it a third time. And then a fourth. My dad had put some kind of timed mechanism inside the compass, but the mechanism hadn’t sprung open on my eleventh birthday like he intended it to. And today was my twelfth birthday. If Shawn hadn’t decided to tinker with my compass, I wouldn’t have found the letter at all.
“Why didn’t the timer work?” I asked, looking up at Shawn.
He shrugged. “Something had to have come unlatched on the inside for me to be able to open it now.”
I glanced back at the note and then up at Shawn. “Who do you think the they is he talks about? Who was after him?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. He didn’t make them sound very friendly.”
I nodded, considering. Then I waved the piece of paper in his face. “Do you know what this means?”
“I have a feeling you’re going to tell me,” Shawn said, and there was something odd about his expression. I ignored it as a heavy weight eased off my aching heart.
“It means he left for a reason,” I whispered, brushing away the tears that clouded my vision. “He had to leave me behind.”
“You thought he wanted to leave you behind?” Shawn asked.
I shrugged. After five years of thinking and rethinking, dissecting every memory of my dad I could recall, of sitting through an assembly where he’d been declared a traitor, I wasn’t sure what I had thought any more.
I carefully unfolded the map. My dad had drawn a meandering path from the compound up to a small red circle located in the middle of Lake Michigan. North Compound was located in what used to be Indiana. I studied the route curiously. I knew the places on the map by name only. There had been a few history lessons in school on the surrounding topside landscape, but they were nothing but fuzzy memories now. What was the Colombe he’d mentioned? And what was a member of it doing in the middle of Lake Michigan? The note created way more questions than it answered, and I felt a surge of frustration.
I glanced at Shawn. “What port plug is he talking about?” Shawn took the working compass off the bed where I’d dropped it in my haste to read the notes. Pulling out a small screwdriver, he opened the back. I watched in amazement. I’d tried that same manoeuvre about a hundred times with no success. He handed me the back of the compass, and I looked inside.
My dad had used a piece of waterproof tape to adhere a port plug to the inside. Info plugs were used to store data outside of a port, and most of them were cylindrical, much like old-fashioned pills used to be. But this one was exceptionally tiny, no bigger than my thumbnail, and much too small to fit in a regular port screen. It seemed so fragile I was afraid to pry it off the cover.
After I examined the plug, I turned my attention back to Shawn. His face was pale and drawn.
“He wants me to leave North Compound,” I said, feeling stunned as this piece of information finally got past the pure adrenaline of reading my dad’s note.
Shawn shook his head. “You can’t do that. No way, no how.”
“That’s why you didn’t want to show it to me?” I realised. “Because you knew I’d want to leave?”
“No,” Shawn said carefully, as though he were explaining this to someone Shamus’s age, “because I didn’t want my best friend to get eaten alive. No one survives topside, Sky. You know that. What your dad asked you to do is crazy.”
I didn’t want to admit it to Shawn, but I thought it was crazy too. I picked the note back up and read it again. Why couldn’t he have included more details? Would it have killed him to tell me what I was up against?
I looked at Shawn. “Whether I go topside or not really isn’t your decision.”
A strange expression crossed his face, and he stared at the wall, deliberately avoiding eye contact. “You can’t leave.”
“I can.” I was already thinking of all the supplies I’d need to get my hands on in order to survive topside. There it was, that oxymoron again: surviving topside. I swallowed hard. Could I really leave the safety of North? I glanced back down at my dad’s familiar handwriting and squared my shoulders stubbornly. I’d spent the last five years of my life wishing for answers to my dad’s disappearance. Now that I had them, there was no way I was going to let my dad down just because I was scared of living without two feet of concrete above my head.
“Your dad’s not there, you know,” Shawn said, and I snapped my head up to look at him.
“What?”
“You think your dad’s there,” Shawn accused. “In the middle of Lake Michigan.” I stared at him a moment, stunned. I’d almost given up on the idea of ever seeing my dad again, and had told myself that I would be content if I just found out why he’d left. I realised now that I’d been lying to myself. Shawn had just called me out on a hope so deeply rooted in my soul that even I hadn’t realised it was there.
“It’s possible,” I whispered.
“That’s where you’re wrong.” Shawn snatched my dad’s letter from my hands. “If he’d made it, he’d have come back for you. It says so right here,” he said pointing.
“Even if my dad’s not there, whoever is there might have answers or an explanation for why he left.” I snatched the map and the note back from him. “If you want me to admit that my dad’s probably dead, you’re wasting your time,” I muttered.
“No,” Shawn said slowly, “I’m not trying to do that. You’ve been in orphan denial since the day we met. It’s just that, if he couldn’t do it, what makes you think you can?”
“Because I’m not going to let him down. Whatever is on that plug was worth abandoning me for, and I want to know – I need to know,” I corrected, “what’s on there.” When he didn’t say anything, I folded up the map and note and placed them in the back compartment of the compass, using my fingernail to screw it shut again. Realising that there was no way I was going to let this thing ride around in my journal any more, I looped one of my old shoelaces through the small ring at the top of the compass, creating a makeshift necklace.
“What you are suggesting is insane,” Shawn said, sounding a little defeated.
I slipped my compass over my head and tucked it in the front of my shirt. “I’m going, Shawn.”
“We’ll see,” Shawn said, and there was something about his tone that made me look at him sharply.
“Shawn, what do you know that I don’t?” Just then the bell rang, signalling that we were going to be late if we didn’t hurry.
“We need to go,” Shawn said, grabbing his bag and standing up. Everything in me wanted to skip the assembly. To stay back and reread my dad’s note again, to plan out how I was going to get my hands on the supplies I would need. It was going to take weeks of careful planning, a thought that made me itch with impatience. According to my dad’s note, I was already a year late delivering whatever was on that plug. But I dutifully picked up my own bag and followed Shawn out of the door. If I wasn’t at the assembly, a marine would investigate to find out why. And the last thing I needed right now was an investigation. As we hurried towards the assembly, I couldn’t help but replay Shawn’s words in my head. No one survived topside. I could only hope that I was about to prove him wrong.
If you