Dark Eden

fresh meat. I’ll concentrate on all that for a bit, and then I’ll eat, and then I’ll start thinking about the next step. How to get across Dark. How to make wraps warm enough. What I’ll do for light. How to find my way through.’

19

Tina Spiketree

    Horrible Lucy Lu Redlantern went from group to group with her weepy eyes and her fake echoey voice, saying that she’d heard from Angela herself, the mother of all of us, and Angela had promised to help her pick out the stones at the bottom of the stream that came from Circle and put them back exactly where they were before. Council pretended to think about it carefully, and pretty soon the groups heard from their leaders that they’d all decided to accept Lucy Lu’s proposal and let her do it. Oldest had agreed as well, apparently, though how Council got any sense out of them I don’t know, what with them quivering and whimpering and weeping over by Circle Clearing, and old Stoop gulping and gasping to get enough air to breathe.
    So then Council got a bunch of newhairs together, one from each group, and a length of rope to make a circle, and Lucy Lu made a big thing out of reaching down into the water, and touching this stone and that stone, and shaking her head again and again, and then trembling and rolling her eyes and moaning when she sensed which stone was the ‘right’ one for each position in Circle. Afterwards everyone pretended they thought Circle was all mended and back to how it was before, but no one really believed it. It didn’t look the same, and I could tell for certain they weren’t the same stones, because when I was a kid I’d noticed that one of the stones on Blueside of Circle had a black line going right through it, like it was made of two halves, but now there wasn’t one stone there that wasn’t a pure white.
    It was a fake Circle and everything in Family felt fake. We went scavenging, we ate our meals round our fires, we pretended life was going on just like it normally did, but each of us secretly knew it would never go back to how it was, no matter how many times Lucy Lu came round rolling her eyes and speaking in that fake dreamy voice.
    ‘Mother Angela says we’ve done well. We’ve driven evil out of Family and made it whole whole again! Better even than it was before.’
    John
evil
? I could have hit that lying tubeslinker Lucy Lu. John was stupid and selfish, yes. But he’d done a braver thing than she had ever done in her life. In fact the braveness of what he’d done was so far beyond her reach, that she couldn’t even begin to
see
how brave it was. All she could see was an advantage to her in ganging up on him with the likes of Caroline and Council and David, and in helping them out by bringing precious dead Mother Angela in on their side. A lot of people are like that. They don’t think about what’s really true at all, only about what it would suit them best to say.
    ‘I thought Angela was the mother of
all
of us,’ I said to her. ‘I thought she was John’s mother as much as yours.’
    ‘Oh Tina, Tina, Tina Spiketree,’ she cried, rolling those bulgy weepy eyes, ‘you want to watch your ways, our sweet Mother says, or you’ll be the next to go. Bad John has filled you up with his juice and his poison, and Mother Angela weeps and weeps for the harm he’s done you, my darling, harm that you can’t even see.’
    She didn’t look at me whole time she was saying this. She was looking up at sky, to make us think she could see Angela looking down at her, but she kept peeping round at leader Liz and at the other people round the Spiketree fire, trying to work out if what she was saying was going down alright, or if she needed to swap it for something else.
    I spat on the ground and walked away. I missed John and I worried about him too. I didn’t like to think of him all alone out there. I wondered what that would be doing to his proud proud heart and, in a way, I felt bad that I hadn’t gone with him, like I’d let him down. But at the same time I was annoyed with myself for feeling that, because he was there by his own choice, and it was his own choice too that I hadn’t been a part of it.
    My little batface sister Jane came running after me. She took my hand and we walked together to Greatpool, and sat there side by side on the bank.
    ‘Don’t worry, Tina,’ she said, ‘none of us believes what Lucy Lu says.’
    Out on the water log boats were moving slowly through the shining fug, trailing