Tunnels 04, Closer

brekky's in order."
    Although Will felt like going back to sleep, his hunger got the better of him. He followed his father's lead and stumbled toward the Bergen, which Elliott had suspended by a single cord from an overhead branch in an effort to keep the food away from ants. Will and Dr. Burrows each helped themselves to a mango fruit from the crop that Elliott had gathered the day before. There was no sign of her of Bartleby, and Will assumed she'd gone off to do some hunting.
    Sitting cross-legged by the table, Dr. Burrows was scribbling in his journal as he bit into a hunk of mango. Will knew he was unlikely to get an answer if he asked what his father was working on, so instead he sat on the very edge of the platform. He looked over at the pyramid through the overhanging branches. In the intense sunshine, both the pyramid and the margin of grassland surrounding it glistened from the recent monsoon. The heat was already having an effect on the moisture, turning it into clouds of water vapor, which were whisked away by the occasional breeze.
    "It's funny how nothing ever changes here, isn't it?" Will said, still not yet fully awake and already perspiring from the heat. "I mean it's not always sunny... always the same weather, except for these thunderstorms, and there are no winters or seasons or anything. It's like the clock stopped in some baking hot summer."
    His mouth full, Dr. Burrows mumbled something unintelligible in response.
    Will began to kick his feet out, swinging them alternately. It reminded him so much of the outings to a rather basic adventure park in Highfield, when he'd been much younger. Covered in a film of sun block, he'd always made a beeline for the swings in the hope that they hadn't been vandalized. But even if they were in working order, Mrs. Burrows very rarely offered to push him, preferring to browse her glossy film and TV magazines on a nearby bench. So he'd had no alternative but to learn how to swing himself, or just sit there, while other children were pushed by their mothers or fathers.
    "I wonder how Mum is," Will began as he thought about the last time he'd seen her in the motorway cafe. "I wonder how she and Drake are getting on. I hope she's--"
    "Oh, do shut up," Dr. Burrows snapped. His face had turned puce, and Will noticed that he'd crushed the section of mango he'd been eating in his clenched fist. The juice dripped from his hand as he lurched to his feet. "Can't you live in the present? Can't you make the most of the incredible opportunity you've been given here? You're always harking back to the past, and that's not healthy, especially for someone your age." He stomped toward the large tree trunk they used to enter and leave the base, then paused. "In this world, none of us have shadows," he said, then began to climb down to the ground.
    "What does that mean?" Will mouthed at the space where Dr. Burrows had been, but he knew very well that he'd touched a raw nerve when he mentioned Mrs. Burrows. It was clearly painful for his father to think about the wife who had rejected him when he and Will had returned Topsoil. But there was no way Will was going to turn his back on his mother -- he's seen a new side to her, and she was constantly in his thoughts. The brief time he'd had with her had made him realize, deep down, just how much he loved her.
    Although these days he didn't go there as often as he would have liked, Will had found himself a secluded spot near a small spring where he'd set up crosses to honor the members of his family he'd lost. And while he was there, lying in the grass and remembering Uncle Tam, Sarah Jerome and Cal, he would also think about his mother, and pray that she was safe from the Styx. He had a permanent reminder of them nearby because, sealed inside an old medicine bottle to protect them from the damp, he'd buried the vials of Dominion virus and vaccine on the other side of the spring.
    So this spring was a place of contradiction for him -- on the one side all that had been good in his life, and on the other the lethal virus that the murderous Styx had been preparing to use to commit genocide, and decimate the Topsoil population.
    Unlike his father, Will didn't want to forget the past. He felt he owed the people who had lost their lives, possibly as a result of the chain of events that he'd put into motion when he'd first crashed through the door into the Colony with Chester at his side. Will mulled over whether to visit the spring now, but