Read Landfall: Tales From the Flood/Ark Universe for Free Online

and leathery, layers of puffy city fat worn away. But as they had approached the site where he promised the Reef would be found, he had grown steadily more nervous. They had soon discovered that nobody alive from Ararat had visited the Reef, and nobody knew for sure if old travellers’ records were correct. ‘We should be there.’
    ‘Wrong,’ growled Teif. ‘We shouldn’t be here at all.’
    Xaia suppressed a sigh as he began his usual round of complaints.  
    The journey from Ararat had certainly been long and hard. Xaia had had two ships track the coast, while rotating parties hiked along the shore, and sometimes further inland. The country was mostly arid right down to the sea, but incised with huge, ancient valleys through which diminished rivers trickled. Every valley was a challenge to cross. Further inland the plain was broken by peculiar outcroppings of rock, layered and twisted, thrust out of the ground by antique geological violence and then eroded to fantastic forms.  
    The crews on land and sea shared the provisions they collected, fish and crustaceans from the sea, fresh water from the land. At first there were towns or villages where they could buy food - Xaia, not wishing to leave a trail of resentment along a track that she would have to retrace, had forbidden looting. But as they headed steadily north, the density of human settlements had grown sparser, and that option soon evaporated. Soon you barely even saw the glint of Earth green amid the ubiquitous purple. Xaia had grown up on a relatively small, relatively crowded island. Now she started to understand how few humans were on this planet, even after four centuries of expansion.  
    Meanwhile the crew, all islanders more used to the sea than ways of the land, were poor at hunting. Increasingly hungry, already exhausted from years of warfare, the crews had tired quickly, and progress had been doggedly slow.
    All the way Teif had kept up a slow barrage of complaints. ‘Over and over again I’ve said this. It’s already August, Xaia. Already the sun is setting again, the coolsummer ending -’
    ‘Oh, shut up, Teif. You pour the utterly obvious into my ear, day after day.’
    ‘This jaunt could kill us all if we’re not careful, Lady. You don’t like what I say because it’s the voice of your own conscience.’
    ‘The return trip will be easier,’ she insisted. ‘Down the long river.’ For many days they had tracked a mighty river that had flowed down the spine of the continent, before turning to wash through a huge delta system and out to sea. ‘We’ll raft!’
    ‘Not through those rapids – not me.’
    Exasperated, frustrated, Xaia turned again on Chan. ‘Well, if this addled boy hadn’t got his coordinates wrong we wouldn’t be having this argument in the first place.’
    ‘He didn’t get it wrong.’ Manda had come back from the ridge, breathing hard, her spyglass folded up in her hand. ‘It’s just over there. Come see.’
    Following Manda, Xaia, Teif and Chan hiked to the crest of the ridge. Here Manda pointed to a ledge of some blackish rock that protruded from worn, folded strata – and a cluster of lights that grew brighter as the daylight faded.  
    Chan, growing excited, pointed at the black stratum. ‘ That is the Reef, I think … Is that a fence around it?’
    Xaia snatched the spyglass from Manda’s hand to see better. All she saw was that black stripe in the rock. ‘Is that it?’
    Manda said, peering at the lights, ‘That’s a village. Not much, just a bunch of shacks and tents. As dusty and rust-coloured as the ground and the rocks. Hard to see in the daylight, until the lamps started glowing in the dusk.’
    Xaia, through the glass, saw something suspended over the village, glimmering in the last light of the sun, a square panel on a kind of stalk. ‘I can see where they get their power from.’
    Manda nodded. ‘A solar panel.’
    ‘Founder technology.’ Xaia lowered the glass, looking out over the