The Undefeated

by Una McCormack

  * * *

  Over the next few days, Monnie followed the visitor everywhere. Priding herself on how well she kept out of sight (how foolish children are, she would think later), she slipped from shadow to shadow, from hideaway to hideaway, watching as the visitor went from building to building. It wasn’t a game (she didn’t cast herself in the role of spy or private investigator); more the genuine obsession of an adolescent, caught in the blinding frenzy of a first passion. She studied how the visitor moved, unconsciously imitating her economy and precision, and the languid ease with which she treated everyone she met. Precisely what the visitor was doing as she went round town eluded Monnie: she understood from what she had heard that the visitor was “securing the town,” but what this might involve was unclear. Each day would start with the visitor walking the length of the esplanade, stopping to study each building, as if checking her memory of the contents and the occupants. After this she took a longer walk, to the edge of town, perhaps, along the road leading back to civilisation, or else down the narrow path that wound some distance around the lake. After this she ate lunch at the hotel, and in the afternoon she slept, by the pool, before a leisurely outdoor supper, and bed.

  On the fourth day of this routine, Monnie saw her father in conversation with the visitor (she couldn’t get close enough to hear without giving away her presence). Her father looked on the edge of anger; the visitor was relaxed and unperturbed. (Monnie mimicked her nonchalance to the mirror that night, but would never have dared perform it publicly.) After this meeting, the visitor began to visit each building in the town in turn, and various bits of pieces of hardware appeared: defences, Monnie assumed. She followed the visitor everywhere.

  She guessed, correctly, that her parents had no idea what she doing. Her father was preoccupied, and her mother had never kept a close watch, outsourcing those responsibilities to the jenjer. Later, however, after her mother died, and she released her companion, she wondered whether the jenjer knew. Were they watching her, this whole time? Did they ever think that she might be in danger from the visitor? Would they have intervened if they thought she was? Or, with her parents oblivious, were they simply curious to see how events would unfold? There was no way that Monica could know now; no way that she could guess what was in their minds at that time. Would she have blamed them maintaining a cool distance? She had been a child, after all. But they . . . Well, they had been jenjer. How must the visitor have seemed to them? What did she mean to them? What did she signify? What promise did she represent? They saw everything that happened in the house—that was their task, after all, that was why they were bonded and treated, to function at excellent levels, to observe and be ready to supply what was needed. Surely they had seen? But they had done nothing.

  For a few days, then, the visitor remained around the centre of the town, going from building to building to secure their defences. Then one morning Monnie went down to her usual spot on the esplanade and sat waiting for the visitor to emerge from the hotel. A quarter of an hour passed, and she didn’t make an appearance. As the hour drew on, Monnie found herself in a growing state of panic. Where was she? Where had she gone? Had something happened to her? There was nobody she could ask, of course, as questions would alert people to her interest. After almost two hours, Monnie gave up and headed miserably home. She was worried, of course, about the visitor’s safety, but for some reason she felt angry, too, as if some unspoken agreement between them had been violated. At the gates she stood looking towards her home. There was nothing to do but go back, she supposed, but then she felt suddenly angry at the new constraints on her. She kicked at the gate, and then broke into a run, sprinting along the road away from town.

  She was soon in open country. The trees grew thickly on both sides. After about half a mile, she came to a turnoff on the right, where a narrow road ran up towards the cliffs. She slowed to a walk and went this way. It was wide enough for a single vehicle, and the road was well kept but rarely used. The trees on each side hung over, creating a tunnel-like effect, their leaves and branches interlocking overhead. She had often come this way, pretending, when she was younger, this was a gateway to adventure in distant times and places, but today she could no longer access any of those old stories. This was a path she had often taken, and she knew that it did not lead to anywhere she had not visited before. She thought, briefly, that her father might not like her being so far away, but she had only promised to stay away from the hotel.

  She walked slowly, uphill. Eventually the trees thinned, and she came out onto the clifftop. It was a bare patch, functional; here stood the town’s main generator, and the town’s linkup to the communications grid. The visitor was there, examining this closely. As Monnie drew closer, she looked up.

  “Oh,” she said. “You.” Her lips were slightly apart, and Monnie observed that her teeth were small, precise, and very white. “I’ll say this for you, Monica, you’re persistent.”

  Her tone was careless and intensely patronising. Monnie felt the start of a deep and burning blush of shame. She thought she had been so clever and careful, stealing around town, following the visitor like a shadow. Had she known all along? Monnie guessed, from the languid smile on the woman’s face, that she had. Confronted with her own delusion, her own childishness, Monnie felt tears well up. Suddenly, she wanted her mother. She ran her thumb, unconsciously, along her wrist, where the tracker was implanted.

  She started. The gentle throb, which she had long since learned to ignore, was no longer there. Monnie frowned, and looked down at her wrist. She ran her fingers along the small square embedded there. She looked up, puzzled, and saw the visitor watching her. Then she looked past the visitor’s shoulder at the comms linkup. It was silent and unblinking; it wasn’t working either. But that would leave the town out of contact with the rest of the world . . . Monnie had an odd image in her mind, of a blanket smothering the town.

  The visitor moved closer. Monica looked at her, her mouth forming questions that died on her lips. She stared at the indigo marks around the woman’s throat. With a sudden flash of insight she knew that it must be as Patrice had said. This woman was free of the drugs. And a jenjer free of the drugs . . .

  Was a danger. Nobody had said this to Monnie, not explicitly, but she knew it as plainly as if it had been encoded some way in her genes. It was her inheritance, after all, the settlement under which she lived, in which jenjer served so that citizens might play. These were the conditions of her possibility, and for a brief second she saw all their workings, and how the safety was illusory.

  The visitor was taut as a cat about to leap. Monnie thought how far she was—not just from home, but from anybody whom she could call upon to help. She looked about, furtively at first, and then more desperately, as if she could by wish alone conjure up an escape route, a portal to somewhere else. But such things only happened in the kind of stories which Monnie had abandoned. This danger was real, it was present, and it was happening now.

  The visitor stepped forwards. Reaching out, she clasped Monnie’s arm, just above the wrist where the tracker was implanted. Monnie tried to shake her off, but the woman gripped harder. “Don’t be stupid,” she said. “And don’t move.”

  Monnie obeyed. The visitor stared at her. “You like to watch people, don’t you? You like to know what’s going on.”

  Monnie nodded.

  “Then keep on watching,” said the visitor. “There’s plenty more to come.”

  Monnie didn’t move. After a moment, the visitor released her arm. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll see you home.”

  They walked back down the hill, and soon Monnie felt the gentle familiar pulse of the tracker. She looked down at it, running the thumb of her other hand against it. The visitor didn’t miss the movement. “Safe and sound,” she said. “Safe as houses.”

  Eventually they reached the avenue of trees. Monnie said, “I can make my own way back now.”

  But the visitor said, “I said I’d see you home, and I wil
l.”

  They walked on. She heard the visitor humming, as if this were a pleasant walk in the countryside. At the gates to her father’s property, the visitor stopped, and she watched Monnie walk slowly up to the house.

  That evening, Monnie sat in the tree outside her bedroom window and thought, thought hard, perhaps for the first time in her life, but she did not have the resources to understand the depths of her unease. Only now, long after her father’s house had fallen to ruin, did she fully understand: in that moment, when the visitor had been considering her fate, she had known what it meant to be alive because of another person’s whim. To be entirely in someone else’s power.

  To be jenjer.

  A child cannot articulate these things. An adult can, and must.

  * * *

  The end came two days later. During this time the mood of the town became more and more anxious. Their worries were not alleviated by the fact that their guardian angel spent most of the time lying by the pool in the sunshine.

  Monnie, who kept to the house now, learned about this when her father’s friends convened in the library. “Now she’s the one taking us for a ride,” O’Reilly said. “Have you seen her bar bill?”

  “She must have something in mind,” said her father. “She was busy all the time last week. If she needs to rest before they arrive, then—”

  “Arthur! She’s scamming us!”

  “What else can we do?” her father cried, and Monnie’s heart nearly broke to hear his distress. “There is no one else! If you’re scared, Michael, then get out of town. Go back to the capital—”

  “And get picked off by Vincenze on the road? No thank you—”

  “Then help. Get your rifle and be ready when she asks for your help.”

  “This is my point,” O’Reilly said. “I don’t think we’ll be asked. I think there’s something else going on.”

  “Then all the more reason to dust that rifle down.”

  Later, Monnie overheard her mother and her father. Her father, she realised, was trying to reassure her mother. And her mother laughed at him.

  “You don’t put your trust in jenjer, Arthur. And you certainly don’t pay them.” She shook her head. “I should never have let you bring me here. I should have gone back to the core years ago.”

  On the morning when everything changed, news reached the house that the visitor was nowhere to be found. Her room in the hotel was empty. Her boat was gone. Monnie, hearing this news, dashed down into town. It was happening. It was all happening, now, and she wasn’t going to miss it. She stood on the esplanade opposite the hotel, keeping her promise. Everyone else was out in the streets too, talking, worrying, trying to find out from each other what was going on. Monica’s father came out of the hotel and tried to speak, but he was shouted down.

  “We trusted you, Greatorex! We let that jenjer into our houses, our businesses!”

  “She’s had free room and board for a week!”

  “This wouldn’t have happened with Langley—”

  And then they heard it: the unmistakable roar of engines heading down the road into town. Someone screamed: They’re coming! And then there was chaos, as people dashed for cover. Monnie took cover in the alley beside the hotel, which was where she saw a big armoured truck power down the road. Two men were hanging out of the windows and firing into the air. One of them was Vincenze. As they passed the Palmer house, he called down to the driver. The truck slowed. Vincenze lowered his rifle, and strafed a line of fire across the shop front. The glass shattered, and then half a second later the whole building blew.

  “Sweet Jesus Christ!” Vinceze cried in delight. He had not expected this. He fired again, this time across the surgery. It blew too. With a whoop of joy, he sent the van off down the main road, he and his companion firing as they went.

  Monnie dived through a side door into the hotel. She rushed through, shouting, “Get out! Get out!” and rushed out onto the terrace to find her father. He was there, talking to Novelle.

  “She rigged the buildings,” Novelle said. “Explosives. So as soon as they shot—well. Here we are. She was meant to be helping us, Arthur!”

  “I know,” he said. “I know. I was wrong. Have you heard back from the capital?”

  “The comms are down,” Novelle said. “I can’t get through—”

  Her father’s eyes closed, for a moment. “All right,” he said. “We’re on our own. But we’ll see this through—”

  “Greatorex.”

  Her father turned. Vincenze was there, holding his rifle to him, caressing it like a lover. “How’s your day going, man?”

  “Go to hell, Vincenze.”

  “Not yet.”

  “What more do you want?”

  Vincenze smiled. “I want the jenjer girl.”

  “So do I,” her father said. “But she’s gone—she’s done your work for you. Why don’t you just go?”

  “Not liking how your town looks?” Vincenze laughed. “You’re finished, Greatorex. You, this town, Sienna. Finished!”

  Her father flushed red, and fumbled around for his pistol.

  “Daddy!” Monnie shouted. “Don’t!”

  Her father turned at the sound of her voice. Vincenze fired, once, twice, three times. Her father fell back into the pool, blood-water all around him.

  Monica screamed.

  A clear shot rang out, and Vincenze crumpled, dead. The other two men scrambled for cover, but too slow. They were both down in seconds, shot through the head.

  The visitor was standing on the step, cool as a cat. She walked, slowly, to the side of the pool, and paused to look down at the body of Arthur Greatorex, floating on his back with his eyes wide and startled. She turned her head to survey the scene, her day’s work, and she breathed out, and nodded, as if satisfied. And why should she not be satisfied? Vincenze and his band were dead. She had done what she’d said she would do, and more besides. She turned and walked into the hotel and out onto the main road. Monnie followed.

  The fires were still blazing. The visitor walked on through the burning town, calmly, and nobody came after her. Nobody except Monnie, stumbling in her wake along the esplanade. She followed her down out of town along the lake path, coming at last to a quiet spot where the visitor’s boat was moored. Before she climbed on board, she turned to Monica.

  “What do you want, Monica?”

  “What do I want?” Monnie wiped tears away from her eyes. “What did we ever do to you? What did my father ever do to you?”

  The visitor did not reply.

  “Why?” Monica insisted. “What did you want?”

  “What do you think?” said the visitor. “What do you think I want? I want justice!”

  “And have you got it now? My daddy’s dead! Have you got your damn justice?”

  The visitor’s face was stern and cold. “We’ve barely started.”

  She got into her boat and slowly, slowly, slipped away across the lake into . . . nothing? No, Monica thought, nearly fifty years later, into the space where the jenjer were gathering, making ready to come back for restitution.

  Monnie stayed hidden in this place for some time. When she got back to town, there were men in uniform there, helping the wounded, stopping the fires, bringing aid. She didn’t recognise their uniforms, although she would know them well in later years. A unit from the Commonwealth, sent to clear up the mess.

  And that was it. A few weeks later, the Senate up in the capital admitted that it could no longer maintain law and order on Sienna, and more Commonwealth troops landed. It took two more years for the formalities to be completed, but that was the end of Sienna. What money that had not already been moved away drifted towards the core; the people who remained lived on handouts. The whole faded into memory. But of course by then Monnie and her mother were long gone.

  Monica, at sixty, walked away from the pool into the dead hotel. She had thought many times over the years whether, if she had warned her father about the visitor, he might still be aliv
e. She had tormented herself throughout her teenage years with guilt at his death, and then suppressed the thought, ruthlessly. Now, at this late date, she decided that she had been guilty of nothing more than youth and privilege, and could console herself that she was no longer guilty of one of those crimes.

  Three

  BARELY A MONTH LATER Monica and her mother were at the capital, taking their leave of Sienna. The estate would take a while to settle, at least as far as Monica understood these things at the time, but there was already money available to make the long journey to the core. Later—much later, in fact, after Monica had seen considerably more of the ways the worlds worked—she realised that this must have come from selling the bonds of their jenjer. Most of these had been her mother’s, indisputably, brought with her when she married and went from the core to the periphery, but only one made the trip back—Lucy, her longtime companion. There had been nearly a dozen others, but Monica did not think about them at the time, did not question why they were not coming and where they were going instead.

  The realisation came a long time later. A few months after the whole business with the famous writer was concluded (from her perspective at least), Monica found herself drinking shots late one night in the bar of a hotel. She fell to watching the bartender. He was very young and very handsome, and his eyes were the same shade of indigo as the marks on his flesh: a fairly standard adjustment, which naturalised what might otherwise seem like tattoos or a brand. She sat, lazily, rather drunk, chin on her hand, admiring him: his looks, his manner, the whole overall effect. After a little while, he became aware of her watching him, and he turned, slightly, and smiled at her before moving on. That movement did something . . . She remembered, suddenly, the young man who maintained their boat on the lake, with whom she might well have made a stupid mistake had she remained in Torello a year or two longer. She thought, What was his name? And before she could recall (she remembered only a few hours later, just before falling asleep, that he had been called Cory), she wondered, What happened to him? This made her think of the others—the small quiet army who had tended their house and their grounds and their whole way of life—and she pictured them one by one (even if she could not always think of what they had been called), and thought, What happened to them? And: Why did I never think of this before? Her answer came quickly, defensively: Because you were a child. (A child doesn’t ask these questions.) Monica finished her drink and went upstairs to bed, where the name returned at last and she fell into deep slumber. (An adult can, and must.)