Insomnia

03: Mehmet

Southeastern Anatolia, July 2124

I tasted the thin, dry air, and licked my thinner, drier lips. Another drought. It was almost futile to draw a line between the successive spells of aridness, though they were punctuated by occasional showers of relief. Long weeks, months, and even the seasons had blurred into one, a perpetual summer which sapped the energy from time itself.

It was strange to think we had been frightened of a flood. When the waters had begun to rise, some had feared where they would stop. The new Tethys had gorged itself on Europe and North Africa, growing greater than any of the empires which had spanned it long ago. We had climbed to safety, ascending Judi as in the tale of Noah, but the waters had stopped far below. Fire rained from above instead, and I wondered if we'd simply climbed atop our funeral pyre. Those certainly aren't doves circling above.

The real flood had been of bodies. Those not drowned had been displaced, and they came searching for everything from a new life to their next meal. Waves of desperate mouths and grasping hands. We were fortunate they were too weak to climb, but the vagrant hordes had devoured fields and villages all along the newly established coast. We were too high up to watch the world below, but I imagined it would now be unrecognisable from the Turkey we had left.

"I can't believe we climbed all of that way for this." Azra joined me at my makeshift sentry post, looking down upon the dusty slopes. "To die with you, a little closer to a heaven we will never reach."

Azra's group had followed mine. Our village had taken all of its people and resources to this remote peak, to start a new community far from harm. Hers had come much later: a band of young survivors, they had been travelling from town to town until they found the ruins of ours. Overwhelmed by the crowds on the ground, they had chosen to stop running and to climb instead, searching for our sanctuary's embrace.

"I didn't ask you to." I felt the burden of a dozen fates, but only those belonging to my family and friends; one half of our village had persuaded the others of our plan to leave, and we would responsible for them if it failed. We owed nothing to these newcomers, who had sought us out without an invitation.

"You were a lighthouse, luring us onto these rocks." She kicked at one, and watched it tumble down. "Your village was stripped bare, and your mass exodus left a trail up here. We thought that you would have a plan."

I thought that once as well. I knew that Azra's bitterness was a front, forged in the fires of suffering below: anyone who wore their heart upon their sleeve would not have made it this far. She is grateful underneath. Many here had been reluctant to accept her group, worried that it would set a precedent, and they had thanked us for eventually ruling in their favour.

Her group's lead had not been followed, and so those fears had been baseless, but there was still some hostility towards the blunt outsiders; our resources were limited, and some who had worked hard to gather them resented that these strangers had now come to claim an equal share. The desperate human tide had overwhelmed old borders, with failed states powerless to stem the flow, but it had raised far sterner boundaries in people's hearts.

"A moth thinks that a candle lured it in," I told her. "You didn't come for us. If our mere presence is a guiding light, the world below outshines the sun; there are many more surviving there. You followed us, but I think you mostly came to get away from them."

"Surviving, and little more," she muttered. It was Azra and her friends who had told us all about the maelstrom below, a surge of people they compared to locust swarms consuming everything they found. Presumably some of us had seen them through a similar lens, but the group did not seem self-aware in their descriptions of the hordes they'd fled. They may have sought refuge with us, but they would deny it to those even less fortunate than themselves.

"Why are you here?" I'd voted to accept the newcomers when they had first arrived, and Azra's presence at my post concerned me more today than it had then. I have never been disturbed on watch before. I was barely halfway through my shift, and she was hardly one to seek out company. There must be news, the sort that cannot wait. I could only imagine that would mean the death of someone close.

"To get you," the aloof stranger said. "Your leaders have called for crisis talks; they want both of us to attend."

Crisis? I almost wanted to laugh. When did this crisis start? I had been part of this project from the start, when a group of us had met to discuss our concerns and options for defence against the imminent flood. It had begun with a crisis, and things had only worsened from the moment our new life on this mountain had begun.

I questioned what Azra had to do with our foundering attempt at salvation. From her phrasing, it seemed that she did not recognise our town's authorities as her own; she has retained her independence, and yet they invite her to our conference to decide our people's future. It was true our fates were most likely intertwined, although her band could leave again as many of our young and old could not, but it was my understanding we were nonetheless distinct: the newcomers made their own decisions, and we could expel them if a consensus ruled that they were not to our liking.

We are symbiotic, but our sovereignty remains whole. With no place in our long-established civic hierarchy, it seemed the village council had accommodated Azra separately: she would have a seat at the table as de facto leader of her own faction, and speak for them as we spoke for the rest. It seemed a reasonable attempt to unite the groups, but trouble could still come if those two voices disagreed.

"Shouldn't I wait to end my shift?" I asked. "If I go with you, there is no-one here to stop scavengers raiding our supplies."

"What supplies?" Azra's response was almost lost under her breath. I turned to ask her what she meant, but she was already heading back.