Brendan had a good view of the northwestern foothills from the elevated stop at the Crossroads mall, over the six lanes of the M2 motorway. He was not that far from Carleton. Their destination was in fact a straight shot up the M2, but Brendan decided that it would be better for them to take the scenic route.

It was a cold day. Not snowing anymore, but a cold wind was blowing, and there was a little flecks of rain in the breeze that stung his cheeks. Snow never really stayed around. The longest streak he remembered was two days. If you were lucky the temperature would stay low enough for some dirty chunks of snow to remain in the gutters for a week or so.

In the 1970s the steam hauled narrow gauge lines into the northern mountains had been converted to standard gauge, electrified and connected to the tram network. An unqualified success that had been progressively upgraded over the years. In 1975 this has been a level cross across a two lane road. Now it was unrecognisable.

The guided skateboard thing had been conceived as a feeder for this. It would have been a few stations down the line.

They stood on the platform with the other waiting passengers. There were not that many on a Sunday morning, a few days after full moon had come and gone. He guessed a lot of them like him, had come from the route 60 bus. In high school he had passed this point every day on his way to school, at the bus interchange underneath the ornate station building had been retained, and now it served as the waiting hall. He would get off here and change to the 68.

It arrived, having just travelled the long stretch along the M2 crossing the M2 on a sweeping viaduct. A typical consist, A 2700 coupled with a 2750 series. The third generation of rolling stock on the light rail lines. VVVF drives, 70% low floor and air suspension. The 2750 series were also equipped with toilets, and hence they were used on the longer distance services to Liarbey and New Brighton.

Being a weekend it was not heavily loaded and they found a seat easily. There were a lot of hikers heading into the hills. But the hangover from full moon was still in effect.

They left the northwestern suburbs behind and started climbing into the hills, along the contours of the river valley, following the meandering path of the river. 

Screeches and hisses emanated from the bogies underneath as they climbed ever higher into the mist. The tracks were too curvy for them to get up to any kind of speed, and he was able to process the scenery at a decent enough rate to truly appreciate the depth of the beauty. The craggy rockfaces, the knurled trunks of the ancient beech trees, the sheer drops of the valleys.

There was mist curled over the river valley down below. rivulets of water dripping from springs above. In some places the forest obscured the sky and only slivers of sunlight were able to fight their way through. At some places the cloud of mist came close enough to the window that he could see the individual droplets of water swirling in the air in streams and eddies.

Adrian was surprised to see that even on a weekend, the most remote halts were well patronised, with old ladies laden with bags of foraged vegetables and mushrooms destined for market. Carved into the sheer slopes were stairways disappearing into the undergrowth. Some of the halts were carved into faces of solid rock. Occasionally he could even see the windows of a house high up in the rock faces. He realised for the first time that people lived here. He had just assumed before that this was virgin forest. It had been pencilled in in his mind as the kind of generic forest hatching you saw on maps.

They reached Lisburn Junction, nearly the midpoint, several hundred metres up. the old wooden station buildings looked eerie shrouded in fog. This was where the Route 74 branched off. Brendan had ridden that line once, One of the steam locomotives from the previous age was plinthed at the side, a reminder of narrow-gauge steam train line which had once existed. It must have been magical, clouds of smoke hanging in the air.

The tracks merged into one as they entered the tunnel, with only the occasional illuminated cavern of an emergency exit punctuating the darkness. The roar of the rails reverberated off the tunnel walls.

They exited. Their eyes adjusted to the sudden onslaught of light. The mist had turned into a light drizzle now, falling slowly enough through the humid air that one could follow the droplets with the naked eye.

Tree ferns towered overhead. A stream tumbled into a crystal clear pool below. The tracks split into a passing loop. The sleepers were wet with mist. They were on a low trestle cutting at a thirty degree angle across it. There were several raincoat-clad figures on the platform, shouldering hiking packs. They stepped forward.

"It's a bit intrusive, don't you think?" Adrian said, when he had finally weaned himself from the thrall of the breathtaking view. "To build a train line over this bit. What were they thinking?"

Brendan raised his eyebrows very slightly. "Would you rather they built a road and a carpark here? And a hotel, for good measure?"

Adrian had no answer to that, as the tram entered another tunnel.

Ten minutes later, they were descending now, winding down slowly, following the path of a much faster-flowing river than the one they had followed up. The straight stretches grew longer and more frequent as they descended lower and lower into the bowels of the valley. They picked up speed. The driver was not shy to give it the beans when the opportunity presented itself.More signs of civilisation appeared. Level crossings. More houses peeking out of the trees. Cleared fields. 

The track straightened out even more. The river grew wider and became an estuary to their left as the tram stopped under the coastal stretch of the M2. Most of the old ladies alighted here, lugging their bags of mushrooms onto the ramp up to the bus interchange on the overpass above.

A few hundred metres south they took a sharp right to follow the coastline. He got a brief glimpse of the sea though the mouth of the river in the near-distance. They sped through reedbeds on a boardwalk, marshland blurring past, the water line barely a metre and a half below where they were sitting, sand dunes blocking their view of the ocean. This place flooded every odd year or so.

The tram dropped them off on a sparsely furnished wooden platform, just a shelter and a stop pole in the middle of the marsh, a place mostly frequented by birdwatchers when birds came to overwinter. It was the offseason for that now; all the birds were enjoying summer in the Old World, while the winter closed in on them. There was a path on a boardwalk, leading to the shore not far away.

He watched the silhouette of the tram fading into the distance, the tangle of catenary and stainless-steel poles stretching into the horizon, towards the outline of New Brighton in the distance. It would cross the causeway to Liarbey, visible very faintly in the distance.  

***

They walked through the reeds. Water lapped at the supports of the boardwalk, showing between the reeds, their stems disappearing into the murky shallows. Tadpoles swam, flitting away as their shadows approached.

The boardwalk ended at a gravel track that snaked through the marsh on a causeway that crossed the tracks just south of the stop and led down to the beach, cutting a swathe through the sand dunes at the edge of the marsh. Fresh tyre marks indicated that some heavy machinery had passed through here quite recently.

Ahead of them was a gate across the path. Property of Carleton College, said the sign. Authorised entry only.

Brendan held out some crumpled, strongly medicinal-smelling leaves he had been keeping in his pocket.

"What's this?" Adrian looked at it curiously.

"Mugwort. It helps reduce your, uh, residue. I got it from my garden."

They both took a leaf of the mugwort and chewed. The taste was bitter, and Adrian almost gagged.

The Carleton College shield was emblazoned on the top of the sign. The site had been acquired as a school camp decades ago. He had been here many times on biology trips, camping trips, field trips. And later, under Beidzner's wing. He felt a tinge of apprehension, then they went through the sand dunes and onto the beach.

There were no reeds to shield them from the wind here, and it cut their cheeks like a knife-edge. The fine sand crunched underfoot as they made their way to the gently lapping waves. In the distance a container ship sounded its horn. A thin line of flotsam ringed the water's edge. It had been stormy recently.

He looked around. To the right in the distance the cliffs rose up, forming a formidable backdrop. He could hear the waves crashing. The vehicle tracks imprinted into the damp sand led to a pile of rocks at the water's edge. Someone was constructing a jetty.

"They picked a pretty good spot for it, I have to say," Adrian looked into the waves, the turbulent dark blue of the sea, the sweep of the coastline.

"The school had always had this site on the books." He cast an eye over the sand dunes, looking for any flit of movement that would betray surveillance. None was forthcoming. "But you know, it was just a campsite. We came here every year and camped around for a week. It was only after Beidzner arrived that they stopped using this as a campsite. We only ever came here once. Because he knew this was not the key to breaking the spell. He'd concluded that it was further up the coast. It wasn't really a job for him. It was more of a hobby. He wanted to see if he could do this thing that he had wanted to do for a long time, and it kind of took over his whole life. For a long time, that was all we worked on.

"Every day. We would be called out of class. We would practice spells, We nearly got there. You know, most of it is just maths and grammar. It requires very particular combinations of words. Enunciation is everything. People's way of saying things affects the spell. Clarity is one thing, but eloquence is also crucial. If you word your spell really clearly it'll work, but if you make the wording really elegant that pushes it to another level. Beidzner was always going crazy over that. He was making us read six hours a day to try and get our vocabularies up. We would have spelling tests every day. He would choose random words and force us to make sentences with them, on the spot." Brendan clicked his fingers. "Like that. Wording a good spell is a skill. You have to have it in you."

He really pushed us." Brendan seemed almost wistful. "He knew that just having merely good spells was not enough. When I dropped out, everything fell apart. He basically lost four years of work. I don't think he really hates me or anything, but he's had to build everything back up from scratch for the last few years, and surely that's taken a toll on him."

"You know, they're not going to come out." Adrian was looking pensively over the waves."Not with these conditions."

"They only come out at night."

Brendan nodded. "We never saw them. I've only ever seen one, and that was by accident." 

Over to the right a group of people had gathered. So much for the mugwort. Some of them were holding placards. It looked like a protest. As they came close Brendan saw that they were mostly older citizens. Brendan guessed they were local residents who had heard of the news.

"Are you here for the protest?" It was an old lady who spoke. She had a megaphone in her hand. "No, we're just tourists," Brendan said, half-truthfully. "We're just enjoying the view."

"This is one of the most important turtle nesting sites on this stretch of coast." She waved a hand at the shrubs at the base of the sand dunes. "There's going to be over 200 truck movements a day on this stretch of beach. It's bad enough with they come up onto the beach and steal the eggs." She cast a disapproving glance over the waves.

Brendan just nodded along, deciding not to mention the unspoken. Let the sleeping dogs lie. He saw that Adrian was twitching beside him.

"Are they all like that?" Adrian asked, as soon as the other group was out of earshot.

"It's not an uncommon view. The best you can hope for is an NGO with a few people who care. You know, our idea of welfare is floating a barge down and dumping a bunch of old shipping containers every now and then. It's so ironic that that's the only good use for shipping containers as housing. They have an actual charity movement. You order one container of stuff over our shipping line, we donate one container to house the merpeople. And by donate they mean they float it out on a barge, a dozen at a time, and dump them in the middle of the ocean, fuck the corals or whatever's down there."

What's bad about them on land?"

"Do you have any idea how hot a metal box with no windows can get in the summer on land?"

"Well, just fit air-conditioning."

"That's just a stupid waste of energy when the whole thing is metal. Like trying to put out an oil fire with water. It I had a uni professor whose favourite rant topic was these things. All it would take was one person mentioning this and that would set him off. Sometimes we would show him shipping container buildings on Designboom just to wind him up. We would work pictures into our pinups just to annoy him."

Brendan turned his attention to the protesters as they headed further up the coast. They had no idea what they were up against.