Excerpt: WE SPEAK THROUGH THE MOUNTAIN by Premee Mohamed (ECW Press)

This week, ECW Press publishes the latest novel from Premee Mohamed! We Speak Through the Mountain returns to the post-apocalyptic society of the acclaimed The Annual Migration of Clouds. Check out the synopsis:

Traveling alone through the climate-crisis-ravaged wilds of Alberta’s Rocky Mountains, 19-year-old Reid Graham battles the elements and her lifelong chronic illness to reach the utopia of Howse University. But life in one of the storied “domes” — the last remnants of pre-collapse society — isn’t what she expected. Reid tries to excel in her classes and make connections with other students, but still grapples with guilt over what happened just before she left her community. And as she learns more about life at Howse, she begins to realize she can’t stand idly by as the people of the dome purposely withhold needed resources from the rest of humanity. When the worst of news comes from back home, Reid must make a choice between herself, her family, and the broken new world.

In this powerful follow-up to her award-winning novella The Annual Migration of Clouds, Premee Mohamed is at the top of her game as she explores the conflicts and complexities of this post-apocalyptic society and asks whether humanity is doomed to forever recreate its worst mistakes.

1.

We tell the kids, Never travel alone. We tell them, Go where you like. But don’t go alone. We start teaching it in preschool, before we expect them to learn anything else. This is the first thing we want them to take in. And now this.

I am alone. More alone than I have ever been in my life and simultaneously not alone. I travel with the adversary. I carry the infection like a weight and a conscience.

How long have I been climbing tonight? Four hours, five? I wish for numbness. Instead my entire body prickles with perception, as if I am one giant nerve ending, slithering up and up through the rocks. No snow falls but the wind grates and burns. I had this idea

(one of us had this idea)

that ascending would bring me to safety, because it is hard to pursue someone who has the higher ground. I hope I’m right.

I stopped shivering long ago, stopped feeling my bike chafe my shoulder long ago. In the darkness I sense more than see a plateau screened by a thin copse of dead larch, and I crawl into the meager shelter, luxurious because it is out of the wind. Time to stop for the day.

Tonight I must risk a small fire. For days my life has been this constant patter of mental calculation: this versus that, the dangers of doing and not-doing, the virtually imperceptible increase in safety or not… all the same, every few hours I think clearly, I am going to die out here.

No, I won’t. I can’t. I refuse. I refuse.

I’m going to die.

I can’t. I am a multitude.

Firelight dances on the grey stone around me, on the corrugated bark of the trees. I drink in its warmth, sit as close as I can, hungry for heat. It’s funny because I’m feverish and yet I still want more heat. Yes, I know I am. Mom always said you can’t feel a fever in yourself but I know. I feel.

I empty half of my canteen into my all-purpose metal mug so I can stew some dried pork and mushrooms. Usually my big meal is breakfast — fuelling strength to climb. But I threw up my breakfast this morning and climbed anyway. I’m lucid enough to know that was bad.And enough to watch the fire and to watch myself. Luckily.

Since we reached the mountains, the adversary wouldn’t let me climb down into the lakes and puddles to get water. Just would not. Sometimes it let me refill my canteen from a waterfall or a stream, even though these were few and far between compared to the still waters. I began rationally, trying to explain to it that those ponds and lakes were hardly algae- scummed deathtraps, and what if I ran out of water waiting for the next stream? Then I lost my temper. I screamed at it. I accused it of both homicide and suicide. When I left home, I thought we were coming to some kind of rapprochement; now I hate it more than I’ve ever hated anything in my life.

“Why?” says the dead boy across the fire. “It didn’t kill me.”

“Nobody asked you,” I tell him. He’s been showing up more often at night.Voice mushy through his crushed skull, scant bloodied blond hair sticking up like porcupine quills. “You hate what you want to hate, and I’llhate what I want

to hate.”

It’s okay. I know he’s dead. I know he died in the boar hunt that I was in, my first hunt, the one I thought would let me leave homewith a clear conscience — and I know the deaths and maimings weren’t my fault, but you’d never know it from the way he talks. He comes and — there he goes. Now it is just the flames again. I wait for bubbles to form in my mug, perched on the embers. You have to make sure it’s boiling for at least a couple of minutes to kill off whatever might be in there.

That’s the thing about being alone. That’s why we tell the kids not to go anywhere alone. Because if something happens, no one can helpyou. And no one can go for help. And no one will know.

What am I doing, for Christ’s sake. Why am I here. What was I thinking…

“You wanted an adventure,” my best friend says just behind my left shoulder, as if the stone itself were speaking. I feel it thrum against my back.

I don’t turn. “That wasn’t it.”

“Yes it was. You never had one at home and you thought: I want to be like the kids in the books. I want my own adventure.”

“Shut up.”

“How’s it going, anyway? Is it like the books?”

I’m watching my dinner. Tiny bits of foam are appearing on the flame side; I wrap my hand in the end of my scarf and rotate the mug so itheats evenly. “Yesterday I saw… or maybe it was the day before. You weren’t there. I was following my map and I stopped to look down at how much distance I had covered, at the highway down there — and for just a second I was so proud of myself. Because it was so far below me, because the view was so beautiful. And I saw… people. Ten or twelve people. I was trying to think of what was odd about them, and then I saw… it was all men. Walking along quietly. In a line. And in the middle of the line there was a cart on two wheels, like one of our handcarts but bigger — being pulled by two women. Naked. Bloody. And I stopped moving. I thought: What if I could become part of the rock. I thought if they saw me… you already know what was in the cart. You already know it was a cage. I don’t need to tell you that.”

Henryk’s voice says, “Maybe you didn’t see it, Reid.” “Maybe.”

“Because you’re hallucinating a lot now, you know.” “I know.”

The men didn’t see me. I waited for a full hour, sweating in motionless silence, feeling every particle of the stone under my fingertips where I had flattened myself to the ground. I hoped I would hear them if they circled around to get me. No one came. I went on. I felt like something had broken irreparably inside my head and I vowed not to think about it again. I fish my mug out of the fire and eat, pausing now and then to allow a tremor to run through my hands. No sense fighting it; have to let it pass.

“Funny you shouldn’t object to this,” I tell the adversary, which cannot speak. “You know. Letting me eat mushrooms. Isn’t that something like cannibalism? Close enough?”

Henryk’s not wrong about the hallucinations, anyway. I’ve been talking to him, Gabriel, Nadiya, Aldous Wong, the adversary. I hear my mother. I hear my father. I talk back to the birds that shout their alarm calls as I pass. Earlier I could stop myself. Now I can’t.

The thing is, I’ve gone too far to get back on my own, and realistically I can only go forward. The steam cart took me to the edge of Calgary — the fastest I’ve ever moved in my life, initially terrifying but good preparation for when I eventually got going on my bike — and I’ve been on my own from there, waiting for my tracker to go off at the zone marker. I followed every direction the university sent me in my acceptance letter. I can’t go home; it can’t exist for me any more. I mustn’t think of my past. And while I am here I don’t dare think of the future, either. I am trapped in a small, endless now of darkness and pain and fever and hunger.

Near my head, a whiskey jack cries out, a startled yelp, then darts across my clearing, for a moment gathering all the light of the flames as if it is a carelessly thrown shard of glass. I’ve never heard one at night before. I stare after it, stupefied in the restored silence. What… why…

When the rocks begin to patter around me, I still haven’t come to any conclusions, and it’s my body that rises to fight, left hand a fist, right holding my knife, the disease darkening suddenly on my exposed skin like ink, as if it too has gotten up and could simply burst through my skin in a spray of black and blue. For terrible moments we hang in the balance, something inside urging, Don’t, don’t. Lie down and let ithappen, and the rest of me shouting, Don’t touch me, don’t come near me, and if you touch my bike I’ll fucking kill you.

Lights fill my vision, but I’m ready for that, and I lunge — freeze — feel the disease lock my muscles in stasis, able only to snarl like a dog at the end of a leash, held in abeyance by some greater weight hauling back on the other end. Not now! Let go! Let me fight! I cannot make sense of the noises I hear, they dance on the edge of meaning but never quite reach it before dissolving into garbled syllables again.

My knife rebounds from something hard, then is snatched from my hand. Someone kicks out my fire. I release a cry, a brute and wordless sound echoing harshly from the rocks. Fire was my other weapon. Counting on it for animals. These are no animals. Are they. Unless up here they speak.

Something slaps the side of my neck, leaving a strange, cold burn, and my eyes begin to slide closed. Someone else pulls my tracker necklace up and over my head, the little orb sparkling past my face. My last thought as I am swarmed is how best, without aknife, I can solve the problem of my own existence if what I greatly feared has come to pass. If I didn’t outpace that gruesome caravan I saw; if they saw me and hungered for me and these are their hands on me.

Let me tell you. Let me. What we teach the kids if the worst happens. What we tell them about… what we… because we love them.

Premee Mohamed’s We Speak Through the Mountain is due to be published by ECW Press on June 16th, in Canada, the US, and the UK.

Also on CR: Annotated Excerpt from The Annual Migration of Birds; Guest post on Influences & Inspirations

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