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The night after Tuuri and Lalli left, Onni trudged back to his quarters after he had finished work and collapsed fully clothed onto his bed.
It had been a terrible day. He had forced down a small bowl of porridge for breakfast but had felt too queasy with worry to eat anything else. It seemed that every few minutes another wave of fear and panic would crash though him, leaving him sweating despite the cold of the Finnish winter. They had barely been gone a day and already he was expecting to hear bad news every time someone called his name.
Not even the distraction of his work had been enough. He botched three spells that afternoon, including an important one he was supposed to help cast over the eastern walls that kept the base subtly hidden from any troll or giant that came looking. Fortunately he caught his mistakes and was able to re-cast them properly. He didn’t want to think about what might have happened if he hadn’t.
Now, he flopped back onto his mattress with a heavy sigh and stared up at his ceiling, his eyes idly following the curves and knots in the wood.
Did I do this? he wondered wretchedly. All this time I tried to keep her safe… was I just pushing her away? She had seemed so eager to leave, so happy to explore the nightmare world outside the walls so oblivious of the dangers that she was plunging headfirst into. Should I have told her? What it’s really like out there?
Should he have stopped her? Could he have stopped her? Is this all his fault?
He sat back up, resting his forearms on his knees, back bent, head bowed, the very picture of misery. What’s done is done, he tried to tell himself. There was nothing he could do now. The boat had sailed, Tuuri and Lalli were gone. By now, if he remember their travel itinerary right, they would be taking that Swedish train down to Denmark’s outpost. All he could do now was go to sleep and try and contact Lalli. He hoped his cousin would still be in range – he’d never tried communication over such a distance before.
He was just hanging up his overcoat on a hook on the wall, getting ready to go to bed, when he caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of his eye. A small screwed-up rag next to his sink. One of Tuuri’s spare facecloths that he’d borrowed a few days ago and completely forgotten to give back. He picked it up with trembling hands, turning it this way and that as if he thought he might find his sister hidden somewhere in its folds.
Before he could stop himself he burst into tears, great wracking sobs that seemed to come from somewhere so deep within him that they caused jolts of pain as they forced their way out. He squeezed his eyes shut but his tears flowed out all the same, wetting his cheeks and dripping down, staining the small cloth in his hands with dark splotches. His legs felt weak and he slumped to the floor, propping himself up against the wall, clutching the cloth to his chest and shuddering with grief and fear and a deep, gnawing self-loathing.
He sat there for a long time, collapsed against the hard wood like a child’s broken doll. Eventually, his sobs subsided and his tears dried and he was left staring, empty-eyed, gazing across his room at nothing at all.
How long he sat there, he didn’t know. It could have been five minutes, it could have been five hours. Slowly, gradually, he got to his feet and shuffled over to his sink. His reflection looked back at him from the mirror. Red eyes and puffy cheeks and, behind them, a cold expression that he almost didn’t recognise.
His voice was soft, not even a whisper, but there was an edge to it all the same.
“You promised. You promised you’d look after her, look after them both, but it’s you curled up in the warmth, tucked up safe behind the walls. Where will they be tomorrow night, or the night after that? Out there, that’s where, with nothing but the snow and the ghosts and the monsters for company. And you could have gone with them, you could have gone instead of them, but you stayed. Why, because you were cautious, because you remember eleven years ago better than they do? No. You stayed because you’re scared, you’re hiding, and you’re letting other people put themselves in danger so you don’t have to.”
Onni looked down at the cloth in his hand. He squeezed it tightly, then placed it almost reverently back down on the edge of the sink.
Ten minutes later he was digging through the paperwork scattered on his desk, hunting for old travel itineraries and bank balances, wondering if his meagre military salary would get him a one-way ticket to Sweden.
A few days later
Onni had tried to keep what he took to a minimum, but every time he did up the clasps and zips on his bag he suddenly remembered something else he might need. Eventually one bag became two, and then three, and then before he knew it he was going door-to-door around Keuruu trying to find someone who would lend him a backpack for a few months.
Toothbrushes, toothpaste, changes of clothes, cooking utensils, bedding, a portable stove, books for the journey – flimsy modern books, tiny print overflowing across endlessly recycled paper, nothing like the old world’s sturdy tomes – all of it ended up crammed into three heavy holdalls that he lugged down to the docks a good hour before the boat to Pori was due to depart.
He reached the gangplank and set his bags down next to it with a heavy thud that made the wood of the pier creak in protest. The boat sat dark and silent in the water in front of him, its open portholes gaping like empty eyes. Onni returned its gaze, squinting suspiciously at it. There was something ominous about its dark bulk, he felt. Something sinister about how it just sat there like it was waiting for something.
He sighed and ran a hand over his mouth and chin, the stubble of a couple of days scratching against the material of his gloves. He was overthinking it again, he thought reproachfully to himself. It was just a boat. He’d get on it, like he’d promised himself. It would take him to Pori, and from there he’d get another boat to Björköfjärden, and from there a train to Mora. He had the timetables scribbled down on a piece of paper in his pocket and had spent the last two days poring over them, memorising every stop.
Nothing was going to go wrong. Nothing. The boats made these journeys twice every week, the train ran every day, the silent lands they travelled through were safer than they’d ever been. Hundreds of people made this journey every year.
It was safe.
Onni tilted his head back and let out a long breath, watching it billow and fade in the cold air. The faint sounds of Keuruu behind him seemed to call to him, invite him back. The rumble and clatter of hand-drawn carts, the quiet murmur of distant voices. The faint glow of the last few lights left on, reflected in the gleaming glass of the boat’s windows. It all spoke of comfort, warmth, safety.
Ahead of him, across the water, nothing shone and nothing stirred. The silent world was living up to its name tonight.
He remembered the horror stories some of the older soldiers had told him, of what the waterway had been like before the Swedes had helped them cleanse it a couple of decades ago. Onni had been a young boy in Saimaa when the cleanser regiments and arrived, but he had seen pictures from the archives and heard the tales in the mess halls. The brutal winter of 71, frostbite taking almost as many as the trolls. The creatures that the Swedes called draugen slithering out of the water and clawing at the boats. The charnel pits that the old world had peppered the ground with during its last desperate moments, filled to the brim with corpses, some home to lurking trolls that burst up from under the soldiers’ feet in sprays of dirt and bone. The giants the size of buildings that shrugged off gunfire like raindrops. The spirits that fell upon mages as they slept fitfully between battles and drowned them in the dreamworld’s endless oceans, their souls screaming and choking even as their bodies dozed uselessly.
Onni clenched his teeth. Just soldier’s stories. The waterway was safe, had been for decades. Nothing was going to come crawling out of the ruins just because he was on the boat.
His mind went back to what he had sensed recently in the dreams, the past prowling around his haven’s defences, calling the names of Lalli and Tuuri and himself, and suddenly regretted that last thought.
Onni was suddenly filled with the awful certainty that if he looked back, even so much as glanced over his shoulder at what he was leaving behind, there was every chance he would just pick his bags up and go back. Scurry back to his quarters, unpack his bags, crawl into bed and pull the covers over his head to put one more barrier between him and what lurked beyond Keuruu’s walls.
And if he did that, he’d never forgive himself.
So he stayed staring fixedly at the boat’s iron flank, glaring at its riveted skin like his life depended on it. He was so lost in keeping himself on the dock that he barely registered the captain sauntering up, or the faint hum as the boat’s electric engines were turned on, or even the footfalls of the other passengers squeezing past him to get up the gangplank.
He stayed there, still as a statue, torn almost perfectly in two by fear. On the one hand, his fear of the silent lands and all the things within that he had sworn he would never again have to contend with.
But on the other, an even greater fear, one for what was left of his family.
And as the engine’s roar and the captain’s shout dragged him out of his thoughts and he saw to his horror that the gangplank in front of him was slowly moving away from the dock, Onni took a deep breath, jumped forward, and made the right choice.