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Inez and Pol leave me alone to brood for a while, before slipping round the bend to nestle in the gloom beside me.
“Is there really no hope?” Inez asks.
“Not a shred,” I sigh, then explain about the extra work that’s gone into the lock.
“Then we have to find another way,” Inez says stubbornly.
“You have a backup plan?” I ask.
“No, but this will be a good time to develop one.”
I chuckle and stretch, my limbs stiff. “Could we cut out of this vine?” I ask Pol. “I’m sick of the dark.”
“I’ve got more gleam,” he says.
“I want fresh air too. It’s stifling in here.”
Pol looks confused – he’s so accustomed to the vines that he thinks this is fresh air – but checks with Inez to see if she thinks it’s safe to carve a hole.
“Your call,” she says. “You’ve a better idea of where we are in the tree.”
I watch Pol map it out inside his head, then he says, “Let’s backtrack to a spot where we should be out of sight.”
We follow him back. When he’s happy with our position, he cuts a chunk out of the vine and sticks his head through. He checks that we’re safe, then cuts a larger hole and signals for us to advance.
I climb out onto the vine and take a deep breath. Inez sits beside me, knees drawn up to her chest. Pol is lying down, staring at the inner bark of the giant tree, which is almost within touching distance. He takes off his cap and pockets it, and I follow suit, not needing the gleam out here.
I look around. This is a particularly twisty part of the vine, several loops bunched close together, shielding us from the gaze of anyone who might glance our way from a distance.
I lean up close to a gap between two vines and study the interior of Canadu. I spy a couple of staircases and a lift shaft. There’s a platform not far overhead, which runs round the rim, one of the defensive rings that Kurtis pointed out to me. That means there are dozens of armed guards just a few metres above us.
“Are you sure we’re safe?” I whisper to Pol, nodding at the platform.
“Yeah,” he says. “We’ll be fine as long as we don’t start dancing and shouting.”
“A good place to take stock and reassess,” Inez grunts.
Pol sits up. “Will we try another vine?”
Inez looks at me questioningly.
“I’m not sure we’d fare any better,” I mumble. “Even if I don’t run into the work of a mystery locksmith, it will take several hours to pick my way through.”
“Time we don’t have,” Inez sighs.
“I’ll give it a go if you want, but if you can think of another way...”
Inez growls thoughtfully. “We could try climbing the outside of this vine.”
“No way,” Pol snorts. “We’d be spotted by the guards, and there are more of them further up.”
“What about outside the tree?” I ask, staring at the inner bark. (It stirs a memory, but I can’t place it.) “Could we cut through and crawl up the trunk?”
“My knife couldn’t cut through that,” Pol says. “And, again, the guards would spot us.”
“Our best bet is to return to the ground,” Inez decides. “Pol can cut a hole in the vine and let us out in the lobby. We’ll try one of the other vines, in case that lock is easier to pick. If you decide it’s a no-go, we’ll target a staircase.”
“Just walk up there?” I ask sceptically.
Inez shrugs. “Maybe we can create a disturbance to distract the guards.” I arch an eyebrow and she grimaces. “I won’t lie. We’re on a hiding to nothing. But in the absence of any other plan, I’ve got to try. Are you with me, hopeless as it is?”
“Of course,” I reply.
“Not me,” Pol says. “I’m out of here.” Then, as I glare at him, he laughs softly. “You’re so easy to wind up. Nah, I’ll stick with you guys to the end, if only because Guido and Lena would beat me up if I quit on you before you call time.”
Inez flashes us a weak smile, then crawls into the vine, to head down for a final roll of the dice.
“Wait,” I stop her.
She pauses and looks back questioningly.
I’d been staring at the inner bark, trying to pin down the memory that had been bugging me since we crawled out onto the vine. I was on the verge of letting it go when one of Pol’s comments brought it into focus — Winston’s cryptic quip about a wise dog barking when it comes to the vine at the end of the line. Maybe that was nothing more than a joke, or maybe, just maybe, it was a subtle way of guiding me if I arrived at this juncture.
I study the bark again, and after a few seconds I spot something.
“There’s a lock,” I murmur.
“Where?” Inez frowns.
“In the bark.” I point. “A small green lock.”
Inez slides out of the vine and crouches beside me.
“I can’t see anything,” Pol says.
“That’s because you’re not a locksmith,” I tell him. “There are several others,” I add as I slowly look around, “all at points where vines pass close to the bark.”
“So what?” Pol asks.
“Why are they there?” I reply.
He can’t answer.
“What do you think they are?” Inez asks.
“I don’t know. Maybe boreholes to other zones, from the days when access in and out of Canadu was less restricted.”
“What good are they to us?” Pol asks.
“That depends on where they lead,” I say. “Maybe some of them hook up in a zone with a collection of Canadu-linked boreholes. If they do, one of those other boreholes might provide us with access to the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
“Is that likely?” Inez asks.
“I’ve no idea,” I answer honestly, “but it’s worth taking a few minutes to check.”
Inez considers it, then nods.
I shuffle forward, getting as close to the edge of the vine as I can. The lock is out of reach, but I dig the hooks on my feet into the vine, then lean forward. “Hold my trousers,” I tell Pol and Inez, and they grab on.
I use my left arm to steady myself against the bark, then slip a few fingers into the lock, which widens obligingly to accommodate my touch. I spend a couple of minutes on it before it clicks open to reveal a glowing green borehole. “Have you got a firm grip?” I ask.
“Yes,” they say.
I push my arms, head and shoulders through the panel of green light. A moment later I find myself not in another zone, but outside the giant tree, staring down at the ground far below. It’s dark – dawn hasn’t broken yet, which is a good thing for us – but I can see lots of people moving around, carrying torches or passing beneath street lanterns, the city far busier than it would normally be at this hour, due to the upcoming vote.
I rotate my neck, to see what’s above, and to my shock I catch sight of a guard in the defensive ring above us, looking straight at me.
I yelp and wait for the guard to roar and produce a weapon. I’m defenceless, frozen in place with fear, so it will be a simple matter for him to hurl a knife or spear at me. Horrified, I wait... and wait. Then the guard...
...yawns and looks away.
I blink stupidly. The rigor mortis fades but I don’t withdraw. Instead I crook my head and spot more guards. There’s one positioned every couple of metres, but even though some are staring directly at me, not a single one reacts.
Then I realise, they’re not staring at me.
They’re staring through me.
The guard who yawned stands and yawns again. “Right,” he says. “That’s me done. Time to hit the sack.”
A couple of the others murmur goodnight as he leaves, to be replaced by a woman who’s as steely-eyed as the rest. She settles into place, rests a bow and arrow beside her, and looks through me the way the others are doing.
Adjusting my feet on the vine, trusting Inez and Pol to keep their grip, I turn my body, splay my hands and bring them to rest on the bark. Which is when I realise it’s not bark.
It’s stone.
As well as being halfway up a massive tree, I’m also somehow halfway up a cliff. It’s the same height as the tree, but stretches off to my left and right. The two forms are overlapping.
“Wow,” I breathe, then snap my mouth shut, terrified that I’ll tip off the guards. But they didn’t hear me. They seem to be as deaf to me as they are blind.
I slip back inside the tree and Inez and Pol haul me in.
“Well?” Inez asks as I sit beside them and stare at the borehole.
“There’s an overlap,” I whisper.
“What do you mean?”
“Canadu overlaps with a cliff, the way the foot vine overlapped with the Empire State Building in New York.”
“He’s lost his marbles,” Pol laughs.
Inez is staring at me oddly.
“What?” I snap.
“There aren’t overlaps in the Merge,” Inez says. “That only happens in the Born.”
I start to argue with her, then stop and smile. “OK. Stick your head through the borehole and tell me what you see.”
Inez gets up, digs in the hooks on her feet and leans forward, Pol and I hurrying to grab hold. Her legs twitch when she sticks her head through the borehole and she draws back sharply. “Guards! They saw me! We have to –”
“Relax,” I chuckle. “Poke your head out again. Let them get a really good look. Sing a song. See if they notice.”
Inez chews her lip uncertainly, but pushes her head through the borehole again. This time she doesn’t rush, turning slowly the way that I did, before rejoining Pol and me on the vine.
“It’s impossible,” she mutters.
“Yet it’s there,” I crow.
“Let me see,” Pol says and sticks his head out. He pulls back a lot quicker than Inez or I did, and hunkers down beside us as if he’d woken from a nightmare. “I don’t like it,” he bleats. “It made me dizzy. What is it?”
“An overlap,” Inez says. “I don’t know how, but the tree overlaps a cliff, and the guards are unaware of it.”
“Do you think the other boreholes in the bark are the same as this one?” I ask.
“Probably,” she says. “It would be an incredible stroke of luck if we happened to find the only one of its kind.”
“The cliff goes all the way up to the Cuckoo’s Nest, doesn’t it?” I ask her.
“It seems to.”
“Do you think there are boreholes at the top, leading back into the tree?”
“I’d imagine so,” she says quietly, clearly thinking the same thing I am.
“Do your hooks work on stone?” I ask Pol.
“If it’s soft,” he says.
Inez leans through the borehole again. When she returns, slivers of gravel drip from the hooks on her hands, and her eyes are bright. “Sandstone or something similar. Soft enough to dig into, but firm enough to take our weight.”
“We couldn’t climb the tree because of the guards...” I murmur.
“But if they can’t see us...” Inez says.
We beam at each other like children who’ve figured out a way to trap Santa Claus.
Then Pol brings us crashing back to reality. “Climb that cliff?” he exclaims. “Are you crazy? What if you fall?”
My smile fades, and so does Inez’s, but our gazes stay locked, and I know in that moment that, crazy as it might be, regardless of the risk, even though we can’t be certain of access to the Cuckoo’s Nest even if we survive the daunting climb...
We’re doing it.