The Undefeated

by Una McCormack

  But at the start of that summer they all still lived where Monica had always lived, in the big house along the road to the town by the lake. She had been Monnie then, not Monica, beloved only child, fiercely adored by her father, absently spoiled by her mother. She was young for her age, but nevertheless beginning to realise, dimly, that the life that she led on Torello was strange, pampered, and rather feral. Money was plentiful; structure less so. Her father, who would have been confident educating a boy, was vaguer on girls, but thought well of fresh air and self-direction. Monnie mostly kept herself occupied—walking, swimming, riding, reading—and occasionally submitting to her mother’s demands for a demure and decorative daughter. Once a week, perhaps, she was subjected to the attentions of a jenjer maid, to be combed, untangled, dolled up, and then sat quietly at dinner until her father bored of his wife’s conversation and went to his library.

  But rumours of change were already in the air. Since the winter, her mother had been talking about schools, off-world, preferably back in the Commonwealth, in the core. Her father, who could see only the child (Monica suspected that, had he lived, he would only ever have seen the child), wanted to keep her at home. Monnie herself had no desire to be anywhere else, and was willingly complicit in her own exclusion from the wider world. Later, she realised that her mother had been right (in the way that stopped clocks are sometimes right), and that having the run of a remote town (however luxurious) was no education for anyone. And it seemed that her father was beginning to be persuaded of the need for some constraints: he had, in the past few months, insisted she was home before sunset, and had finally agreed with her mother that Monnie should have a tracker put into her.

  Monnie, to give her some credit, had grasped that part of the reason for this was the presence in town of the Men. She capitalised them in her mind, and they remained the Men even when she grew older. The Men had arrived midwinter, taking up residence in the Grand Hotel. Her father, in a rare explicit instruction, had forbidden her from going anywhere near them. And yet Monnie knew (because she listened at doors and windows), that he was one of the people who had arranged for them to be here. She knew that her father and his friends were worried, that they had been worried for some time, at least since the death of Mayor Langley, and that these worries had led to these five Men, and their weapons, being installed in the hotel, where day by day, they looked out across Torello rather in the manner of robber barons considering a new demesne. One of them in particular, named Vincenze, stood out: tall, solid, with dark hair and an air of what she would recognise in later life as controlled brutality, waiting for its moment to unleash. He was their leader.

  Monnie, at nearly twelve, did not have the tools or knowledge to join the dots, but when Monica was older, writing from the front lines at the height of the Commonwealth’s expansion, she saw this pattern repeated many times on independent worlds. By fair means (economic sanctions) and foul (undercover operations), the Commonwealth would begin destabilising a small, independent world. Things would fray. Resources would be pulled back to the main cities, and the more distant towns and settlements were left to fend for themselves. The poor would give up and move on; the rich might pay for a while to be protected. At length, one of two things would happen. These outlying places became so unstable that the chaos would spread to the centre, or else the centre itself could no longer hold, and toppled, taking the townships with it. Either way, everything would crumble, and the Commonwealth moved in, for the good of everyone concerned. Monica saw this again and again, and wrote about it at length, but this time—here, at her home—was her first experience, and she did not see where it all inevitably led. Still, she knew something was not quite normal, and so she did not resist the tracker, although she did resent the intrusion.

  (The tracker was still beneath her skin, now, in her sixtieth year, and, standing once again by the empty pool of the Grand Hotel, she pressed her fingers against her left wrist, and found its small square. She wondered whether it was still transmitting, and, if so, who might be listening. She wondered how many others of her age were still out there, carrying the debris of parental paranoia, and whether the duty of care had been handed over, like an old debt passed on from collector to collector. She wondered if someone would come to investigate if her heart suddenly stopped beating, and she decided that, given her current location and the current climate, the answer was probably “no.”)

  But even with these new intrusions, her everyday life continued much as it had ever done, with plenty of time left to her own devices to wander the woods and the lakeside, coming back to the house when she was tired or hungry to ask the jenjers for whatever she wanted. Most evenings were quiet, but every so often (less so this year), her mother would entertain, or go out to be entertained, and Monnie would watch the jenjers dress her, and listen to her running complaints that she was not in the capital, or, better still, the Commonwealth itself, the core worlds of her childhood and her youth. “Don’t make the mistake that I made, Monnie,” she would say. “Marry someone who will take you places, who’ll take you to see things.” (Which Monica did, although she didn’t realise she was obeying this injunction at the time; quite the opposite, in fact. Another reason to consider that whole business a mistake.) When the preparations were done, her mother would sweep out of her room, preparing to lay siege to Torello. Monnie would watch guests arrive—if the party was at home—and listen for a while to their laughter and chatter, and then slip out of her bedroom window and go up the hill to look out across the lake. (If the jenjer knew anything about her nighttime wandering, they never told.) It was a simple life, and Monnie, quite simply, was ripe for adventure.

  That morning—the morning when the visitor arrived—Monnie woke early and went to the kitchens. The jenjer were all there, eating, and someone found her breakfast, and lunch, and packed these up and sent her on her way. Her father was probably awake, but not yet up and about, and her mother did not usually rise before nine. Monnie took the opportunity available to slip away. The house was set a little way back from the lake, but she did not want to remain on their grounds, which were too tame, so she slipped through a hole in the fence that she kept open, and walked on up the hill. She took a well-worn if unofficial path that led steadily upwards, the lake to her right, dipping in and out of view as she walked. After about half an hour, she came to the top of the hill, where she sat and ate her breakfast, and looked out across the water.

  Here, Monnie could turn right and see her whole world—the town of Torello and its languid inhabitants—or turn left and see the empty vastness of the lake. Nothing lay beyond Torello, just water and the wilderness. But this morning, sitting looking out, she saw the impossible: a black dot on the horizon, coming closer.

  Monnie screwed up her eyes. A boat, yes, small and moving slowly but definitely. Monnie murmured to herself. Where had it come from? The road came into town and ended here, and then there was the lake, and then there was nothing. There was nowhere beyond here, nowhere to come from. But here it was, and it was heading for town.

  Monnie jumped to her feet. Visitors were not uncommon—although her mother would certainly welcome more—but that kind of visitor was familiar, and came and left by air. The Men were something new, that was true, but they had come by road, roaring into town in three huge trucks. This? This was entirely new.

  She jumped to her feet and began to scramble back down the hill. She caught glimpses of the boat, drawing ever closer to the shore, and from its rate of approach, she thought she could get there before it landed. She snuck through the grounds of the house, and came out onto the road that led into town. Then she ran like the wind, past the four big houses that lay between her father’s house and town, and out onto the esplanade, where she broke into a sprint, passing the town houses and the shops and the hotel. She reached the quay just in time to watch the boat make its final approach.

  At first Monnie mistook the single passenger for a man, since she had never met women who looked like this.
Her mother’s friends were on the whole more perfumed and idle, and she thought of the jenjer as sexless. This person was strong, and active, and capable, but undoubtedly a woman. A woman, travelling alone, in a boat of her own, and landing here, in Torello, without so much as a by your leave.

  By now, the visitor had attracted considerable attention, and a crowd of nearly a dozen had gathered near the quay, watching her secure the boat, whispering and muttering to each other. The visitor did not seem to care about the attention she was attracting (something else new, Monnie thought, as her mother, for example, cared more than anything else about the attention she attracted). The crowd, shifting around, began to block her view, and Monnie, slight and slender, slipped through to the front, until she could get a good look again at the visitor. Here she got her next, and her biggest, surprise. As the woman worked to secure the boat, Monnie saw flashes of indigo around her wrists, and, when she looked up, she saw the marks on her temples. This woman was jenjer.

  That was something else unheard of, something Monnie had never imagined possible—a jenjer travelling alone, under her own direction. Was that even possible? Their jenjer didn’t leave home often: that was where they were meant to be and, as her mother said, heaven knew there was enough for them to be doing. Sure, there were errands into town, but beyond the town? Her father, sometimes, took one with him when he went up to the capital, but to travel alone beyond town was unheard of. Monnie, if pressed, would have said that this was true for all the jenjer in town. But here this one was, alone. Monnie frowned. Who owned her bond? Where were they? This wasn’t right. Something would have to be done. Someone ought to be doing something about this.

  The crowd gathering along the esplanade seemed to agree with her. But the visitor, untroubled, jumped to shore, and began to walk along the quay. When she reached the esplanade, the crowd parted to let her through, but they were muttering, and whispering, and trying to come to a decision. The visitor barely seemed to notice them. She stopped, briefly, and pulled out a handheld device, clearly getting her bearings. When she was done, she put the device away and walked, with new purpose, along the esplanade. When the crowd realised that this jenjer—this jenjer—was heading towards the hotel, they reached their limit. Someone would have to be sent for. Something would have to be done. Monnie, pushing through, pressed her face against the glass window, and watched. Yes, there she was, at the desk, checking in . . .

  The transaction unfolded as if nothing untoward was happening, as if this were a person, a real person, checking into a hotel. (But she wasn’t a person, was she? She was jenjer. Jenjer weren’t people, not really, not quite.) Monica watched as a short conversation ensued, and the visitor handed over a credit chip, and then she nodded and walked into the hotel, disappearing down the corridor where the lifts would take her to her room. The crowd narrated this to each other: What’s she doing now? What’s happening? After a little while, the hotel manager came out, young Fabien, new to this game and anxious to make a success, facing the crowd’s questions with trepidation and bewilderment. What? No, she has money. I don’t know how she got it! But she’s got it. And what can I do? There’s no law to stop her staying here. There’s no law.

  The crowd did not like these answers, but they were the only ones available. Monnie, hearing their outrage turn into grumbling, slipped away. She was done here. But the visitor—this was entirely new. Free of the crowd, she skipped round the building, entering the hotel via a side door. Her mother wouldn’t like this, and she suspected that her father wouldn’t either, but they weren’t here, and, anyway, there was the stupid tracker, wasn’t there? They could find her, if they wanted her. But she wasn’t going to miss out on seeing any of this.

  In the next hour or so, everything changed, for the first time in Monica’s life.

  * * *

  The hotel jenjer paid Monnie no attention as she ghosted her way around the building. She was a familiar figure in the town, generally with access to all areas, in part because people were fond of her, in part because they were afraid of her father. To her great frustration, she could not guess the room where the visitor was staying, and even she didn’t dare to sit in a corner of the bar, so she slipped outside and went down to the pool. At the far end were some trees, and she climbed one, taking advantage of the shade and the cover to hide herself away and wait.

  She wasn’t there very long. After twenty minutes or so, the door leading from the bar swung open, and the visitor came out. She was still wearing her black clothes, but she had taken off the jacket, revealing her bare arms—bare, that is, apart from the distinctive marks around her wrists—bare, and muscled, and strong. Her left hand carried a drink. Her right hand was in her pocket. She stood on the threshold looking around. When her eye fell on the tree where Monnie was sitting, she seemed to pause in order to study the hideaway carefully. Monnie held her breath and didn’t move, so that the leaves didn’t rustle and give her away. After a moment or two, the visitor shook her head and moved on. She walked along one side of the pool, coming to a row of sun loungers. She lay down on one of these, started to sip her drink. It was orange, like a sunburst, full of ice, and with a rainbow umbrella stuck in it, and as she drank, her whole body seemed to relax.

  By this point, Monnie, in her hiding place, was experiencing many complicated and new ideas and emotions. First of all, she was thirsty, and the drink looked cool and nice. But chiefly (an older, more experienced Monica would blush to remember), she was outraged. Jenjer didn’t do this. Jenjer shouldn’t do this. Jenjer didn’t have rights—they had obligations. Their genetic enhancements gave them special gifts—cognition, strength, longevity, wakefulness—but they came at a cost. And citizens—real humans, proper ones, citizens, not genetically engineered—picked up the tab. They paid for the drugs that stopped the jenjer burning out in no time, and that gave them the rights. They owned jenjer. That’s what jenjer were. Property. Investment. Wealth. They existed to serve, and this woman sitting here, doing nothing, unowned, was wrong. Monnie couldn’t say why—she just knew, and her indignation nearly ran off the scale. She almost called out, Stop it! Who do you think you are! Don’t you have something to do? Get back inside! Older Monica, walking beside the dry pool fifty years later, would burn with shame at this memory, and try to console herself with the thought of the many suppers that she had shared with Gale, the many drinks she had mixed for him, icy and thirst-quenching.

  But Monnie didn’t shout out. Because as well as her outrage, she felt something else, a thrill at the sight of this woman sitting here. How ridiculous, she would realise later, much later (too late?), that she should be so amazed. Because what, after all, had happened? A woman had walked into a hotel, bought a drink at the bar, and then sat outside to enjoy it. Sat outside alone, and at leisure. Dimly, Monnie was connecting dots, and grasping that while her childhood had allowed many freedoms, the tracker presaged the approach of a new dispensation—an adolescence of being governed, observed, and never left alone. So she didn’t cry out in indignation. She simply sat and watched.

  She didn’t have to wait long for something to happen. The visitor’s drink was not even halfway finished when the Men arrived. Three of them, big and confident, as if they knew already how the next few minutes were going to unfold. (Vincenze wasn’t there, Monica recalled; he had sent his lieutenants, she guessed, to deal with this irritant.) They walked to where the visitor was sitting, and positioned themselves around her: one to each side, one at the foot of the lounger, like a screen erected to prevent witnesses. Monnie watched them, and looked at the visitor, whose hand, she noticed, was back in her pocket. A few words were exchanged, which Monnie could not hear. And then?

  And then.

  An inexperienced writer, when narrating a flurry of shocking and violent events, may simply resort to saying that they pass at a blur. Monica Greatorex, however, was arguably the war correspondent of her generation, specialising in taut prose that marshalled the telling detail and conveyed swift and bloody actio
n, and, even as a child hiding foolishly in a tree while murder took place in front of her, she had not lacked observational skills. Walking by the dry pool, half a century on, she found that even at this late date she easily recalled what happened next. One of the men drew a weapon. Monnie did not see the visitor draw her own weapon, but she heard its cool blaze. The man crumpled to the ground. A split second later, so did one of his colleagues. There was a short silence, and then someone inside the hotel began to scream. This stopped, suddenly and sharply, and silence fell.

  The visitor did not stand up. In a clear voice, raised so that spectators could hear, she said to the third man, “That’s two of you dealt. Now get out of here. You and the other two. Get out of town.”

  He backed away, slowly. She tracked his movement with her weapon. At the pool’s edge he turned and ran like hell. The visitor stood up. She looked into the hotel, her head cocked to one side as if inviting a response (it did not come). She put away her gun. She looked straight at Monnie and smiled, and then she picked up her drink and went inside.

  Monnie slid down from her tree, and she, too, ran like hell, back to the safety of her father’s house.

  * * *

  Not only fear sent Monnie dashing home. Chief amongst her concerns, she had to admit, was that if word got about of what she had seen, then her own freedom was at risk of being severely curtailed. Her parents must never know that she had been there and seen all, and she needed to cover her tracks. Something else sent her running too: she knew that whatever happened next would be decided in her father’s house, because that was where all the decisions about Torello were taken these days. Word of events would already have reached her father, and his friends would soon be calling. Monnie wanted to be tucked away where she could watch the action.