My Mother Divinity [Unedited]

Chapter Sixteen

The safe house is on the outskirts of an abandoned radio station. For obvious reasons, the place has fallen into ruins, and the towering metal gates that enclose the land have been torn down, the locks displaced, all connotations of 'safe' barely to be seen. There are shipping containers in a row along the other side of the gates, some busted open, some sealed shut, and inside the one right on the end is where a king-sized mattress has sank into the cold.

Isla is sleeping. The sun is almost all the way up in the sky but she usually doesn't fall asleep until the clouds turns orange in the early hours, constantly woken by a mixture of nightmares and freezing temperatures. Global warming is global cooling now. The last little while in particular has carried more frost, and if there's any snow in the winter months, it will come earlier, and sleep will come harder.

She and Sally took furniture from the radio station and split it across several containers; a desk for her adjacent to the mattress they share, and across it she has spread her sketchbooks. Mostly she draws the marks and tears out the pages so she can slip them under people's doors, but it's more difficult than it sounds because sometimes if you venture too close to a property, you get a shotgun aimed at your head. And if the marks do reach their targets, most won't understand what they mean or what they're doing under the doormat. You'd have to be as clued up on the superstitions as Isla is to make sense of it. She's just turned fourteen.

She managed to hand a page to someone in person on one occasion, spotting a boy about her own age a few weeks ago rubbing his hands together over a fire. He was burning a book, something old and especially flammable (the wood in the nearby vicinity was soaking from the rain). It was somewhere east of Stirling. When she and Sally rode closer to him on the horse, she recognised the fairytale illustrations you might recognise from a Folio Society collection.

"You can't burn those," she exclaimed. Her fathers had stacks of the things on their shelves back home - the Babylonians, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Hittites. The whole 'Ancient Empires' series.

"Don't have anything else," the boy scoffed. Whoever looked after him, they were nowhere to be seen. Maybe he was alone. It isn't uncommon to be on your own.

"I'll trade you," Isla offered, "Gatsby for my sketchbook."

"No," Sally interjected. The book looked heavy and they probably didn't need any more weight on their backs than was necessary, and the accumulated sketchbooks, half-filled, already pushed it. But Gatsby was a decent price, a short novel and a classic Isla had always been told to read by her neighbour. Sally said it was one of her daughter's favourites.

"Don't you have a house?" Isla asked as she leapt off the horse and began searching for one of her sketchbooks. She picked out one of the ones she had almost finished, random sketches of rolling valleys and sun-kissed pine trees. They didn't amount to much and she needed the blank pages more than she needs the useless scribbles of the past anyway.

The boy took it and gave her his copy of 'The Great Gatsby' in return. He was heavily scarred. "Sure I did. She burned it down because I knew too much."

She knew she made the right decision giving him the sketchbook, because inside the front cover was the mark. So far, nothing has come of it that she's aware of.

When Isla wakes up, she is used to the total darkness that covers the walls and floor of the cube-shaped space. The corrugated door has a thin lining around it that lets the sun peek through, like a crack in floorboards. She reaches around the mattress blindly, trying to find where she placed the candle last night. There are several dotted around the floor but her favourite one is an old Yankee, and the label is scratched off but she think it smells like soap. The matches are laid beside it and she strikes one to light it.