Eden, p.5
Eden, page 5
They took the opportunity to rehydrate, eat, and adjust any kit that might not be sitting quite right. Cove retied the laces on his trail shoes. Lucy retied her ponytail. Gee picked at his teeth with a pine needle. Dylan knew that they were excited at the prospect of Eden, and also now unsettled by the news that Kat and her team might still be somewhere in the Zone. The idea that another team might have beaten them across was only a part of that nervousness. Yet he could also sense their confidence. Individually they were all adept at what they did, and together they formed one of the best Virgin Zone adventure race teams in the world. In a scene that existed underground, they were respected and feted more than most.
Selina was already making notes. She was the only one amongst them who expressed continual doubts about what they were doing, because the Virgin Zones were precious, pristine places, and to invade them was not only a crime in the eyes of the law, but could also be seen as a foolish undertaking from the environmental standpoint. The Zones were set up to be completely devoid of humankind. Purity was vital to their success.
Scientific curiosity trumped her concerns. Any doubts they had were countered by their commitment to honouring Eden and its reasons for existing. They would leave no litter behind. They would bury their body waste. They carried plenty of food to fuel their expedition, in the form of high energy bars, gels and dehydrated meals designed for just this sort of endeavour. They would not hunt unless absolutely necessary, and would only forage for essential quantities of berries and nuts. They carried no electronic gadgets, in case signals or electrical fields disrupted or agitated any of the flora or fauna.
Teams illegally crossing Virgin Zones were by necessity stripped back to the basics, and in Dylan’s eyes that made this the purest, most human form of exploration there was left in the world.
It was also the most dangerous. If one of them fell and broke a limb, there was no calling in emergency evac. The others would have to carry them out. Injury and mortality rates were high, but Dylan prided himself on never having lost anyone. Though they spent the bulk of their lives apart, the more his team worked together, the more they acted like a single unit. Still, the potential of an accident haunted him. As team leader there was plenty of worry and stress to dilute the sheer enjoyment and wonder of what they were doing. Physically he was probably the fittest man of his age he knew, but in some ways he was old before his time.
A click, and his alertness snapped back. Poke held one hand up, and when they all looked at her she gestured through the treefall, then pushed her hand down towards the ground. They sank lower, as if forced beneath her palm.
Dylan heard the security team long before he saw them. They were talking, joking, laughing, and that was good because it meant they didn’t expect to be heard. The forest fell silent around them as birds ceased singing. He tried to see past the fallen trees and through the undergrowth, moving left and right until he had the best vantage point. As their voices grew louder, he caught the first signs of movement, flashes of colour between leaves and stalks, branches and trunks. They weren’t even wearing camouflage kit.
The Virgin Zone Protection Force was formed soon after the Accord was implemented. Centrally funded with input from every country that had signed, each area’s force—the security personnel became known almost universally as Zeds— soon took on its own distinct identity. In Wales close to the Green Valley Zone, Zeds patrolled the land border on horseback and rarely carried weapons, relying instead on community interaction to ensure the Zone’s peace and security. In the Jaguar Zone in central Brazil, there were early instances of Zeds supplementing their income with guided incursions into the area, but also alleged involvement from some of the big cartels that were still active back then. Early cases of border skirmishes and deaths worldwide led to an overhaul of their powers, and the funding was soon diverted to various countries’ militaries. Many Zeds were now ex-soldiers who’d served their time and were now earning better pay than ever before. Many opponents claimed they were little more than paramilitary forces, procuring illicit weapons to defend themselves as much as the Zones they were hired to protect.
Yet few could doubt their efficacy. Whatever their history, the Zeds around most Zones were dedicated to their cause, and highly experienced in fulfilling their purpose. Deaths amongst those attempting to infiltrate were at an all-time low, as were the numbers of people actually getting in. It had taken decades, but the Zeds had become an expert security force to be reckoned with.
Right then, Dylan felt little threat from these six people. Even when he saw one of the women carrying a rifle over her shoulder, and one of the men with a heavy holster on his left hip, he was not afraid. They appeared so confident and casual that their patrol was little more than a stroll.
The Zeds passed by and moved down the gentle slope and into the forest, voices trailing behind them. Poke was staring at her watch, and just as the final burst of laughter faded away, she raised her hand and nodded.
She stood and they followed once more. They crossed the route the patrol had taken and headed across the hillside, negotiating a series of natural steps in the ground that required them to slip and slide down steep slopes. There was a wide stream at the base of the final step, and Poke started following it. Tall reeds grew close to the water, and she weaved her way through them, twisting left and right to avoid trampling any plants.
After half an hour following the stream, Poke called a halt. They crouched below reed level and squatted on the wet ground.
“What now?” Dylan asked.
“Couple of minutes ahead of schedule,” Poke said. “This next bit’s the riskiest.”
“You brought Kat and her group the same way?”
“Course not!” Poke said. “I never use the same route twice. Most of what I do is just get people in for a day and out again. I’d be stupid to use the same entry point.”
“You know the way well enough,” Cove said.
“I’ve recced it four times,” she said. “Enough to know it well, not enough to get noticed. One minute.”
“So why’s this next bit risky?” Jenn asked.
“Going to attract their attention,” Poke said. “You all ready to run?” She glanced them up and down, smiled. None of them needed to respond.
She moved away from the stream and they followed, and moments later she raised a hand warning them to stop. She was standing by a sawn-off tree, the thin stump ending two metres above the ground. Tied halfway up the stump was a dark brown box, the colour offering good camouflage unless you were close enough to see, or someone pointed it out. Dylan took a step closer and saw the wire just before Poke snipped it with a pair of clippers. Then she tugged something out of her backpack, unwrapped it, and dropped it close to the post. A dead chipmunk.
“That way,” she said, pointing back the way they’d come. “Across the stream. Follow me.”
“What have you just—?”
“Electric fence. Enough to give humans a bit of a jolt. They used to be all over the place, but a lot have fallen into disrepair over the years.”
“You think they’ll believe that?” He pointed at the dead creature.
“We’ve got maybe six minutes until the first robo-drone arrives,” she said over her shoulder as she started running. Dylan jogged after her. “And ten minutes after that before the first chopper. So save your breath.”
The stream was shallow enough to ford, and Poke had chosen a place where there were a few rocks for those nimble enough to leap from one to the other. Dylan heard a brief, quiet curse from Gee as he slipped and went in up to his thighs, but the others crossed and carried on without getting wet.
Poke ran for ten minutes along the valley floor, staying in cover as much as possible, aiming for folds in the land, an old stream bed, clumps of trees and shrubs, always on the move, always doing her best to keep them concealed. She set a good pace, and Dylan was impressed at her fitness. They kept up with ease, but by the time they stopped they were all perspiring and breathing heavily, and taking sips from their rucksack water bladders.
“Drawing their resources?” Dylan asked.
“Something like that.” Poke was concentrating on the time, and she made sure they were all together before signalling again. “That way. Along the valley floor, not far now, this is when we risk detection.”
“Isn’t Eden really close that way?” Lucy asked, pointing up at a heavily wooded slope to the north.
“You’re looking at it. But this is where they’ll now be expecting us to… Just come on. Time.”
Dylan nodded to Lucy and the others and they set out again. They were on the valley floor now, close to the river, and although he feared this might mean they would be visible from the air or from anyone watching from open areas on the hillsides, in reality they were well hidden. The river had changed paths many times through the aeons, twisting like a slow-motion sidewinder as it forged its way deeper through the valley bedrock. Those million-year twists and turns had left a ridged landscape of countless small ravines and outcroppings, and Poke knew her way through them.
As the sound grew of a helicopter approaching along the valley, the fixer led them to an old dried oxbow lake where trees and bushes grew in abundance. They crouched down, motionless, and two minutes later the chopper passed overhead. Dylan worried that they’d have heat sensors on board, or other high-tech methods for detecting people hiding out in the wild landscape below, but they powered past without deviation. Heading, no doubt, for the place where the snipped tripwire had sounded the alarm.
Fifteen minutes later Poke signalled a change in direction and they approached the river. It was ten metres wide and smooth flowing, with no sign of any method of crossing over.
“Welcome to Eden,” she said, pointing to the other side.
“This is it?” Dylan asked.
“No fences or boundaries?” Jenn asked. Other Zones they’d entered often had distinct boundaries—fences, walls, even heavily advertised minefields.
“This is boundary enough, here at least,” Poke said, nodding at the river. “Fences tempt people to climb them.”
Dylan’s team were breathing hard but still looking strong, and all of them stared across the river wide-eyed. He followed their gaze.
Eden. Not the largest Virgin Zone in the world, but the oldest and most famous. No one had yet claimed a crossing. Many had attempted and failed. Some had disappeared completely. He’d been considering this expedition for over three years, and now Jenn had made it their time.
From here, the trees and grasses, shrubs and ferns, hillsides and forests didn’t look any different from anywhere else. But it felt different. Some of that was perception, because they all knew what this place was and what it meant. Some was excitement about what they were here to do, and now concern about Kat and her team, so recently vanished into this forgotten landscape. He felt a frisson of fear unlike any he’d felt before.
From this side of the river, Eden looked wild.
“How do we get over?” Dylan asked.
“Your problem,” Poke said, looking at her watch again. “I’ve drawn some of their attention with the broken wire, but you’ve got maybe ten minutes before they start an aerial sweep of the valley floor. I’m going now. If you’re not over there when they fly past, you’ll be caught. No cover here.”
“You’re supposed to get us into Eden, not close to it,” Selina said.
“You want a piggyback?” Poke asked.
“Guys,” Dylan said, because they didn’t have time for anger or argument, however justified it might be. “We’re good.”
“It’s not deep,” Poke said, and there was perhaps a hint of regret in her voice. At seeing them go? At not getting them across? Dylan couldn’t tell, and right then he didn’t care.
“Thank you,” he said. “You’ll send our kit on to our exit point?”
“Sure. Special delivery.” She placed a rollie in her mouth. It stuck to her lip and swung as she talked. “Just… take care. Look after yourselves. Nothing in there will.” She nodded past Dylan and across the river, and something in her eyes raised the hairs on his neck. Just for an instant, he’d never seen anyone look so scared.
He spun around to see what she had seen. There was only Eden.
When he turned back Poke was already jogging away, heading towards the low slopes leading up the valley sides.
“Eight minutes,” she called over her shoulder, a waft of smoke in the still air.
“Eight minutes, people,” he said. His team was already hustling to the river’s edge, assessing where best to enter in a controlled manner, closing their drinking tubes to prevent dirty water ingress, helping each other down the overgrown river bank.
None of them looked afraid.
Perhaps only he had seen the look in Poke’s eyes.
6
“Work? Of course it’s not going to work. You can’t just put a fence around a place and pretend it’s returned to the wild. That’s like putting a sign up on the border between two countries that says, No foreign weather allowed. But you’ve got to admire their balls for trying.”
Professor Marie Joyce, Aberystwyth University
The river felt colder on the Eden side. Poke had been right, it wasn’t deep, and they managed to wade across, leaning into the current and placing their feet carefully on the slippery bed. Jenn felt something brushing past her legs and snagging on her running tights, but when she reached down there was nothing there. Further across, the flow turned noticeably cooler. By the time she climbed onto the opposite bank, clasping at plants to pull herself up, her teeth were chattering and her toes were numb. The others had felt the effects too, and were clapping their hands together and running on the spot to generate heat.
When Jenn examined her leg she found a tiny tear in her tights and a scratch on her shin, a single bubble of blood forming and dribbling away.
“We need to get away from the river,” her dad said. “There, into the tree cover at the base of that hill. Quick sprint will warm us up. Then we get our shit together and start the clock.” The clock was actually a waterproof stopwatch, secured in his rucksack and wrapped in protective layers of plastic. He would set it ticking when they commenced the journey and stop it when they reached Eden’s mountainous northern boundary. If everything went to plan, there would be another fixer waiting there to extract them.
Jenn worried about that. Poke’s obvious fear of this place might not be exclusive, and she hoped the other fixer her father had employed held up their side of the bargain.
He led the way and they broke into a fast jog to warm themselves up, and also to find cover quickly. No Zeds were allowed over the border and their choppers and robo-drones were also not permitted to cross into its airspace. But if they were spotted before they found cover, Jenn wasn’t sure how their incursion would be handled. The security forces at each Zone treated potential intruders differently. In the Deep Red Zone in Belarus, there were still occasional tales of summary executions.
There were more immediate worries, however. Like her mother being somewhere in here, and the tension that fact had forced between the team and her. The weight between her and her dad had always been there in some form, an unspoken shadow created by her limited contact with her mother, and her father’s suspicions about it. She should have told him, but she hadn’t known how he would react. He should have asked her, but she wasn’t sure she’d have come clean. The photographs were sent by phone only to her and felt very personal, even though her mother never wrote anything to accompany them— no subject heading, no messages, no notes, nothing personal or even impersonal. Jenn had discovered the meaning of the first picture soon after receiving it, hearing whispers about her mother and her team breaking a record for crossing the Jaguar Zone. The photos were a celebration of success, and they spoke all the words she wanted to say. That final text had been a statement of intent.
Perhaps she should have told them everything when she’d had the chance.
“We’re in,” Aaron said. “We’re in Eden!”
“It already feels…” Selina said, trailing off.
“Wild,” Cove said. “I like it already!” He was the wildest amongst them, and perhaps the most reckless. He’d joined her parents’ smaller team almost a decade ago, eager for adventure and with romantic ambitions to see the world. He’d drifted in and out of their lives, but over the past several years he’d become more focussed. He was now training for The Endless, a self-propelled round-the-world race conducted in secret, crossing some of the most inhospitable landscapes on the planet and passing through at least four war zones. The race had only been run three times before over the past two decades, and seventeen people had died taking part. Rumour had it next year’s race, and the one Cove was aiming for, was the biggest and hardest yet, designed to take competitors through each of the world’s thirteen Virgin Zones, even the Congolese Dead Zone.
They reached tree cover and began climbing a gentle slope, working their way deeper. Something troubled Jenn as they moved but she couldn’t put her finger on it. She listened for sounds of the drones or chopper, and expected at any minute to hear a loudhailer voice calling for them to withdraw.
She enjoyed the exertion of flowing uphill, moving like a small flock of birds, aware of each other and alert. There was no breeze this afternoon, and the humidity was uncomfortable. She took a sip of water and looked around, seeing Aaron doing the same beside her. He smiled around the water tube. Beyond him, Lucy and Gee moved together, smooth and fast.
“This’ll do,” her dad said, and they paused close to a rocky outcropping. The rocks sprouted scattered undergrowth, and plants grew up to their waists, a mix of ferns and a bramble-like bush she couldn’t identify.
Selina was looking around in wonder. She carried a small notebook in one hand, but she seemed to have forgotten it.
They sank down onto their haunches, only their heads and shoulders visible above the sea of plants. Above, the tree canopy flickered in a gentle breeze, leaves dancing in countless complex patterns. Jenn caught Lucy’s eye. Her teammate glared at her, so she looked away. Every one of these people was her friend, and she hated the idea that they were angry with her. She hoped they were close enough for that anger to abate.
