About The Scarlett Kite
Hi! I'm Scarlett Kiteway, I'm 20 years old, a journalism student in Perplex City and this is my blog all about the excitement over the search for the Cube. I'll be keeping track of what the media over there is saying about it, and maybe a little bit about my life as well!
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Friday, March 3, 2006
Signs of Life
Category: story, 04:17 PM
We could hardly believe what we were seeing. The tents looked so incongruous in this dead, decaying city that it almost seemed that we must be looking at a hologram or a movie. We hadn't seen any sign that human beings had been here in the last 200 years - no tracks, no garbage, nothing. And now, this.
Of course, we were excited. Claire Castille had led us all this way - perhaps she was inside one of these tents right now? But what if it was someone else? We felt grateful that the solemnity of the place, its haunting emptiness, had made us walk softly, speak quietly. There was no way to know who was inside those tents.
So, we waited. Allain signalled to me that we should take shelter under a collapsed balcony where we could sit relatively comfortably with a clear view of the entrance to the tents between some fallen slabs of marble. We waited. And waited. The sun was low in the sky. Some bats flew out of the awning of the colonnade opposite us. We waited some more. Darkness came. We wrapped our coats more tightly around us and took turns napping. Morning came. No one had come, and no one had gone. We shared some water and energy bars and talked, quietly, about what to do next.
At about 7am, we decided to creep quietly toward the tents, to listen and, if we heard nothing, to try to look inside. We crept. We waited. Three mice scuttled across the cracked bottom of the empty pool. We couldn't hear anything. We waited. Allain crept up to the entrance to one of the tents and looked inside. He beckoned to me. The tent was empty of people. We both slipped inside.
We looked around us. This tent was clearly someone's home. It was laid out very neatly, very precisely. An army cot was set up in one corner. Military-style fatigues were folded in a set of canvas shelves hanging from the centre of the tent. There were boots, a mirror, wash gear and a selection of survival supplies: about two years' worth of iron rations, we guessed, solar water collectors, first aid kits and useful-looking knives in multiple sizes. We thought about taking something but decided against - we didn't really need anything else, and we didn't want whoever was living here to come looking for the person who'd stolen their stuff.
Moving quickly, we checked that the second tent was empty too and then took a look around it. The second tent was more interesting. It looked like a centre of operations. An enormous plan was pinned to a table with pins stuck in it, shaded areas and printed notes on sticky flags. There were several trunks - locked and too heavy to lift, but on the evidence of some items we found in a small daypack there had been some serious collection of archaeological samples here. Each was neatly labelled with a printed tag. Fragment of vase, circa 45BC. Bowl of spoon, circa 20BC. Carved flower maze, circa 70BC. In one corner were tools, kept in excellent order.
Allain examined the plan. He looked up at me. I knew that he'd been hoping to find his mother, Claire, waiting here. It didn't make sense to me, though. Why would Allain's mother be here on an archaeological dig? When she was running from the army and some other mysterious threat, why would she take on such a task? And how could she have come here? We'd seen no sign of a vehicle - this looked to me more like a military operation; someone had been dropped here and would be picked up later. Still, Allain was smiling.
"Someone," he said, "is excavating. In a pattern. Very meticulously. This is a plan of the old city of Anjsbourg. I know where they are."
I looked at him. I wanted to tell him to be calm, to be reasonable. That he shouldn't expect to find his mother here, that it might just be a dead end.
"Let's go and see then," I said.
The site of the dig we were aiming for was about five miles away, around the circumference of the city. We could have walked straight across and made the journey a little shorter, but it wasn't worth it for the risk we'd be spotted. We walked quietly. By the time we arrived at the right location, it was almost midday.
At first, we couldn't see anything. A line of broken houses. A long high wall, still miraculously intact, overgrown with moss, with an archway through into a tangle of thorns which might once have been a garden. We almost missed it. But Allain made us stop and wait and listen. And we heard the quiet sound of digging, just behind the wall.
Moving slowly, we made our way to the arch in the wall and peeked round. A woman was digging, down in a long trench, working very carefully with a trowel, excavating what looked like a subterranean mosaic wall, brushing it with a paintbrush to remove loose dirt. As we watched, she stood back to admire her work and ran her upper arm across her forehead. Before we could move, she turned round.
It was Claire Castille.
She looked up, squinting against the noon sun and saw us, saw Allain. She started, as though an electric shock had run through her. And she held out her arms toward him, and he scrambled down the slope to embrace her.