Chapter 9 Hazel
Hazel
STATION C, DATE UNKNOWN
Hazel lives in Tree for a month before it all goes wrong and the past comes for her.
It’s since become apparent that that night was a fluke, having nothing to do with Hazel’s lucid dreaming skills and everything to do with Echo’s hul gil consumption.
So, back to square one; all Hazel managed to say last night was, ‘I’m still here,’ and receive the brief reply, ‘So am I.’ It’s hard to improve, with her guidebook trapped in the Hab Dome.
The dreamscape leaches away but its sound lingers, the rustling current blending with Tree’s leaves shuffling outside.
The dark presses on her—Tree has no windows, and the lighting system is one of the many things the Tinys brought Hazel here to fix—but her watch says it’s morning.
‘Morning, Tree,’ Hazel whispers, but as usual Tree is silent. She wonders whether Tree will have a voice once she’s mended, like CHARL1E, or whether she’ll stay as quiet as a Tiny.
Still dozy, Hazel feels under the covers for the hard corners of the Eikos Muthos.
The pocket-sized book made its way to her feet in the night and she untangles it from her blanket, clutching it to her chest. She waves her hand in the air above the hammock until her fingers catch the light pull.
The pendulum LED illuminates the book’s tin-foil-and-acetate cover, reflecting a funhouse version of Hazel’s face.
She opens the recycled-pulp pages to the daily prayer.
Our collective, which art on this Earth, hallowed be thy aims: our kingdom healed and sins undone in seas and ground and skies.
They’re just words, but she can see how, through long isolation from a fading outside world, they became meaningful to the Keepers.
They’re even becoming an anchor for Hazel in this interminable dark and, amongst the religious claptrap, the book’s teaching her a lot about Station C.
Squeaking wheels under her hammock hail Robin’s arrival, and Hazel stuffs the Eikos Muthos under the covers and into her pocket as the Tiny’s lenses peek over the hammock edge. The parts of its broken hand jingle in the bag round its neck as it gestures for her to get up.
‘Yeah,’ Hazel says with a twinge of shame. ‘I’m coming.’
She pulls her dungarees on in her hammock, then flops onto one of the many walkways zigzagging Tree’s midsection.
Together, they make up the Keepers’ Treehouse, which contains two dozen empty hammocks and the only human-sized amenities.
Really, Tree is for the Tinys, Hazel’s just an inconvenience they’ve invited in for maintenance.
Robin thunks her flask of tea and bowl of not-quite-porridge on the walkway, then turns away with its lenses in the air.
The other Tinys send Robin to deliver her meals on purpose, thinking the guilt will goad her into mending Tree faster.
They’re right, but the Tiny is so unrelenting in the face of her entreaties, she’s given up on its forgiveness.
She sits on the edge of the walkway, legs dangling off and arms leaning on the handrail, drinking her tea as Robin conspicuously ignores her.
The two-hundred-foot drop used to bother her, but in the last month she’s learned to trust the walkways not to fail and her body not to jump.
There’s not much sense of distance in the dark anyway, just reverberations of depth, height, and width when she drops a tool or speaks too loudly.
Aside from her reading light, her torch, and the fluorescent tubes she works by—both of which are hooked up to old truck batteries—the only illumination is a bottle cap–sized spot far below on the ground, where the Tinys burn their sacred oil lamps.
The idea of their being religious is still bizarre, but the Eikos Muthos describes it repeatedly and it makes more sense than any other theory she’s got about what they’re up to.
Tree is their God, and their temple, and their home, the walls coated in hexagonal cells in which the Tinys sleep.
The cells start at ground level and continue well past the Keepers’ Treehouse, and if each one was inhabited, there’d be thousands of Tinys.
As it is, she’s only ever seen a couple of hundred attending prayers. Where the rest are is a mystery.
Hazel refills her cup from the flask, turning to Robin. ‘Why do you bother with the flask when it’s always cold anyway? It’s ridiculous, porridge can be hot, but tea somehow can’t?’
Robin doesn’t even turn.
‘Look, I’m fixing Tree, and I’ve said I’m sorry, there’s nothing more I can do. You have to forgive me sometime.’
Robin shakes its head, resolutely not looking at her.
‘I could fix you. You don’t have to wait for Tree.
’ This time, it doesn’t even deign to gesture.
With a sigh, she slugs her second cup of tea.
Hot or cold, the stuff is, at best, only tea’s distant cousin.
As soon as she’s finished, Robin whips away the flask and empty bowl, whisking them into one of the cells, behind which the Tiny transport systems run all over Tree.
There’s just the one elevator for humans and it’s as piecemeal as everything else on Station C, whining all the way up to the Treehouse and creaking back to the ground.
Give we this day our resilience and strength, and let us lend support, as in turn we are supported.
Hauling herself up, Hazel heads to work.
Her torch beam pierces the dark, illuminating creaking walkways, rusted mechanical arms, and ‘The Keepers’ Treehouse’ graffitied in lime green near the youth-hostel-scent shower block.
She washes minimally, creeped out by the empty stalls at her back and her arms’ spidery shadows.
And let us endure this time of trial, and not resort to evil.
Hazel glances up on her way out, to where her torchlight disappears into the treetop.
She’s never been that high—the elevator stops at the Treehouse—but mechanical wheezes in the walls suggest the Tinys can go much farther.
She heads to work, passing a mechanical arm, paused mid-motion as it repairs a Tiny lens.
Another suspended arm clutches a whole Tiny, ready to reattach a wheel as soon as the power’s restored.
The silence and darkness press in, total and absolute in a way that shouldn’t ever exist in a factory.
‘You’d better fix Robin when I’ve mended you,’ Hazel mutters to Tree. ‘Maybe it’ll forgive me then.’
At the highest point of the Treehouse, Hazel reaches the critically failing circuit board the Tinys brought her to fix.
Black lever arch files, thick manuals, and well-thumbed electronics textbooks lie scattered among her multimeter, screwdrivers, and rolls of electrical tape.
The circuit itself runs from the walkway to head height, a tangle of wires interspersed with diodes, transistors, and capacitors.
In the top right-hand corner, switches and inductors indicate that the circuit is partly designed to send and receive radio waves—though where from and to whom is anyone’s guess.
The circuit failure’s epicentre is a spherical mirror, held out on two small arms where it once spun like a disco ball.
When Hazel arrived, a thin crack bisected the sphere’s equator, emitting a slim ray of golden light that the Tinys refused to look at.
The manuals are abstract about its purpose, just calling it an ‘elpis device,’ but Hazel’s spent long enough on Station C to know that mirrors usually mean time travel, so she figured it was the part to mend first. Using two torches on different settings, she slowly heated the glass, melting the split together and closing in the weird warm light.
She wrapped the device in blankets, cooling it as slowly as possible in situ, and by some miracle it didn’t shatter.
Then she turned to the other malfunctions sprawling outwards from the elpis device.
The coating on some wires is pale and peeling, as if decayed; on others it’s warm and garish, as if only just shrink-wrapped to the copper.
Some components have corroded metal teeth; others have developed residues of dirt and crystal.
One capacitor has short-circuited from dielectric breakdown; another has separated into its constituent parts.
It’s as if the circuit’s caught between prematurely aging and reversing into its origins as ore and oil.
Hazel’s never seen anything like it; she’s just replacing parts and crossing her fingers she’s getting it right.
For ours is the prospect and the power and the undoing of all.
At her soldering station, Hazel flicks on the fluorescent lights and rubs her eyes.
Another day of guesswork and troubleshooting.
At first, she tried explaining to the Tinys that she didn’t know anything about this kind of circuitry, but they stamped their wheels until she understood she didn’t have a choice.
For a couple of weeks, she dragged her feet, supplied with ancient tools and stacks of manuals.
Then, a fortnight ago, she’d opened a file box and, tucked between The Novice’s Guide to Arboreal Circuitry and a blueprint of Tree’s lightning-harvesting batteries, she found an object wrapped in an old workshop rag.
From its shape and feel it was just a little hardback book, but it fizzled with the electricity of an object she shouldn’t have—like getting into the medicine cabinet as a kid.
Checking Robin wasn’t about, she folded back the solder-spotted cloth, and a metallic cover gleamed beneath.
She shoved the book in her pocket and, over the ensuing nights, devoured the Eikos Muthos.
Through it, Hazel is beginning to realise how little she understands.