This Is Our Undoing
Page 2
‘Come on, sweetie,’ Lina whispered to the forest edge where the bear would hopefully emerge. The telescope and the barrel of the rifle were cool beneath her hands and habit made her check the loaded syringe again. A black woodpecker called to her left and its heartbeat flight crossed the clearing in the corner of her eye. Two ravens passed overhead, painted by the sun when they turned their wings, and the dot on Lina’s tablet screen paused then moved forward again. The bear appeared between the trees, lifting its delicate muzzle into the air, tasting honey, the coming rain, probably her but hopefully not more than a trace.
She moved slowly, one steady swing so that the bear coming towards the waiting honey did not think to look up. It was favouring its left hind leg heavily, and although she couldn’t see it from here the tag had told her plenty. Fever, leucocyte count, hunger. Two things now: she only got one chance at a shot, and if it felt the needle hit it might run towards her. Unlikely, as she was uphill and the slope was strong. But it was a possibility you had to be aware of before you took the shot. Thiago was further behind her, waiting with a rifle that was loaded with a flare instead of antibiotics, and another loaded with neither, but he had never yet needed either.
The dim screen of her tablet lit with a message icon but Lina barely noticed, her hands steady and grass around her shoulders. The bear lifted its head again, turned a little, poised like time itself held still, and Lina fired.
Two partridge exploded from the grass just behind her and them, or the shot, made the bear spin her way, groaning anger and confusion and fear. Lina lay the rifle down, pressing her palms against the earth, aware of Thiago above her so strongly it was as if he had reached out to touch her. The bear came forward, growling again, swung its head and lifted its wounded paw from the ground. Honey, she thought to it, honey. Not sure if it was enticement or endearment. Her tablet flashed again beside her, but the bear when it growled again sounded only sad, its voice low and lonely in the quiet clearing and she knew it would turn before it did so. Knew it would go back to the honeycomb before it did so, the bright flash of the syringe already fallen from its dark fur.
‘Nice shot,’ Thiago murmured beside her and Lina jumped. The bear had gone only a minute or two ago and, despite listening for him, she had heard nothing until he spoke.
‘You bugger,’ she said without weight.
He laughed softly. ‘Ready?’ But she was already coming stiffly to her feet, feeling at last the cold that had crept into her legs. Above them, the mountains were an amber chiaroscuro as the sun slipped away, and it was a long walk back to the truck. But the bear was full of antibiotics now, the balance of anthropogenic harm a little redressed. Besides, it was always wondrous to see such an animal with her own eyes, to be beside it in the wide world. She smiled at Thiago and knew that he knew exactly how she felt.
They were down into the trees when she remembered the message. The ground underfoot was black mulch scattered with ferns and fungi, so she did not slow as she pulled the tablet out.
The message that had come while she waited in the grasses was from her father and only eight words long.
JH arrested. State investigating connections. Be careful, love.
JH? JH.
James Hanslow.
Lina didn’t realise she had come to a stop until Thiago’s voice reached her, repeating questions from some vast distance. Arrested. Investigating. Christ, she thought. Christ, oh fuck, oh Christ.
His smile, his hand on her thigh, his dark face in the dawn full of fear and courage.
‘Lina? Lina, what is it?’
It took an eternity to get the tablet back into her bag, to then look up at her friend without ... without screaming, without crying? She was not sure. She’d known this would happen eventually. She’d warned him. Jesus, she thought. Oh James. Jesus.
‘Yes,’ she said, the muscles of her mouth numb. ‘I’m fine. Just ... just my dad checking in.’ Shaking her head slowly. ‘It’s nothing.’
But it wasn’t nothing, and those eight words were so vast that it felt impossible to contain them. Thiago was watching her in the coffee-rich dark, and her mouth was opening to tell him, when she froze. State investigating connections, her father had said. She shut her mouth and stared at Thiago. She trusted him with everything, her life, her soul.
But you didn’t trust, even when you wanted to. That much of Lina’s old conditioning remained.
‘Lina,’ Thiago said, so quietly it was barely more than air.
She wanted to turn and walk into the forest until she was alone. Have time to separate out her father’s words from memories of love and from Thiago here, black-eyed and waiting. State investigating connections. Oh god, she thought again. Oh James, what have you done?
‘It’s nothing,’ she heard herself repeat, felt herself take one step and then another, felt Thiago follow just behind. He wouldn’t ask again, she thought. ‘Just my dad. I need to...’ to what? Become someone she had been long ago? ‘It was just about that assassination.’ Taking a breath, pine needles catching in her hair, Thiago steady and silent. ‘You know.’
There was movement in the trees downslope and another time Lina or Thiago might have checked their tablets for bear or boar or deer, wolf or jackal or just something smaller made large by the darkness. Neither of them did so.
‘Getting nasty, is it?’ Thiago said eventually, the forest quiet around them once more. He didn’t ask.
Oh James, she thought again, broken doorways and prison walls rearing up behind her eyes. Where are you from, she wanted to ask Thiago suddenly. Really from? Are you from hunger and Statelessness, from war or camp or just the insidious weight of fear? Have you ever had someone you love taken away?
If I tell you this, will you risk yourself to help me, or will you protect yourself and turn away? Could I bear it either way?
Instead, as if she was tearing herself into two people, she said steadily, ‘Just the usual, I guess.’
And then remembering that she did know where Thiago was from, some of it. He was from the PeaceKeepers. Keepers of the peace through strategic wars and political threat, who State Investigators turned to when their troubles crossed borders.
Be careful, her father had said and for a moment Lina feared she might be sick. She breathed deeply, an owl called hollowly from the opposite slope and neither of them spoke as the track dipped down to a stream cradled by mosses.
Be careful, he had said. But how? James Hanslow, her brave and stubborn James. Tears she could not shed scalded her lungs.
It was late when they got back to the station, but Iva had left a flask of tea on Lina’s desk and a pot of honey beside it. As Lina put the three guns away, secured the darts, flares and bullets and set her tablet to charge, Thiago made tea, holding one out to her when she was finished. Steam coiled over her face as she lifted her drink and she could smell the honey that Thiago had added to hers without needing to ask.
‘I love Iva,’ she said, thinking, please let us be normal.
Thiago laughed and the muscles of Lina’s stomach eased a little. He was massaging absently at the point where flesh met prosthesis on his leg, so it must be aching a little from the steepness of the climb.
James had not been like Thiago. Had never had the hardness nor the silence that Thiago held, nor, if she was honest, the ability to be so unspeakingly, unquestioningly there. He’d been beautiful and restless and sensitive and ... and she was already thinking of him in the past tense.
She held her breath and set her mug down so carefully it made no sound at all. There had been a moment long ago, cornered in an abandoned building awaiting either discovery or deliverance, when he had laid his fingers on her cheek, kissed her and said in a whisper, ‘We are unbreakable.’ It had been said from fear and fierce belief, but she remembered it now like he was in the room with her. Oh James, she thought.
‘Remember to breathe,’ someone
said and Lina was back again, James far beyond her reach and Thiago not quite watching her, drinking his tea.
‘Sorry,’ she said meaninglessly.
Thiago gave an abbreviated shrug. ‘You go so still sometimes I think you’ll stay that way.’ He grinned at her. ‘Good for darting bears. Not so good for drinking tea while it’s hot.’
Good for avoiding detection, bad for escaping it. Of course, she thought, realising what she needed to do. Her pulse pressed against the skin of her wrists, but it was steady and when she lifted her tea again, so were her hands. ‘Well then,’ she said. ‘I’m just going to see where our bear went afterwards, then shower and bed I think.’
Thiago looked at her slantwise but only nodded and pushed to his feet. ‘Goodnight then,’ he said from the doorway and she was surprised how easy it was to smile at him. How natural it felt to set his deadly past separate from the him, now, in this single moment.
One quick message to an account and a name that might have been abandoned years ago. Just an ‘Autumn, what’s happening?’ Three words, but enough to exhume things she’d thought gone for good. Then, after a moment of thought, one more on a site selling salvaged boat parts in Folkestone and a man who owed her and was honourable enough for that to matter. ‘Jaco, long time, how’s the wife?’ Codes and backup plans. Old habits.
There was Helda too for new IDs and travel permits, and Vitaly in Gdansk, if she could find them and if they were still alive. But she needed to hear from Autumn first, and contact head office to ask for permission to leave the reserve. But that would have to wait until tomorrow.
So, finally, her dad. This time the call rang several long seconds before he answered.
Quietly, because Thiago was out of the shower now, moving around his bedroom, ‘Dad, listen.’ Knowing that ESF’s encryption was the best there was, but also knowing that they might be listening, ‘I think you two should come visit. I’m–’
‘Lina love,’ he said, his voice granulated by the connection, ‘wait, don’t–’
‘No, Dad, listen, please. I think it’s a really good time, right now. You understand? I’m going to ask ESF for travel permits then meet you en route, okay? I don’t know the details yet, but it will be soon, hopefully a few days. Will you be ready?’
‘It is that bad?’ he said without accusation, but it felt like one regardless. What could she possibly say? Maybe not, maybe not at all; but how could they take that risk?
He watched her steadily but she couldn’t speak and finally he said, ‘Alright. Alright, if it comes to that, we’ll be ready.’ And the simple fact that he had acquiesced so easily made her heart skitter. ‘But Lina, stay on ESF land. You must. If we can come to you, then ... yes. But stay there. Please. Promise me.’
The call ended and Lina sat in the dark, the house quiet now aside from the subliminal sound of dormant machines and a low wind pressing against the windows. Her father would not go back to sleep immediately. He would rise quietly so as not to wake Jericho, Aristotle would wend around his ankles, and they would sit together to drink tea in the city-lit night. She pulled tangles and heather stems from her hair and sighed. The very best she could hope for James was that if he was not accused of direct involvement in the killing then he might sing them enough betrayals to earn a Stateless life. Exiled into transience or the lawless, unofficial shanty-camps. But at least not dead.
When she had been nine and ten, she’d liked to imagine her mother in one of those camps. Surviving miraculously, waiting for her.
Carefully, as if the memory lay within blown crystal, Lina shut the thought back away.
It might make no difference to her family whether he talked or not. Her name and his would be linked somewhere in old State files, her name would lead to her father’s, and neither of theirs would withstand too much scrutiny. And her father and Jericho in London...
She rose and went outside into the meadow clearing surrounding the station that in daylight was a universe of flowers and insects on the wing, but now was a dreaming sea silvered by a waning moon. There was a tree stump twenty paces out where a wagtail often kept watch, and she sat there with grasses whispering around her legs. The breeze tasted of rock and high places, ghosts of the mountains that had been her sanctuary for so long.
She did not know how much her father knew, beyond the simple fact that if James were part of that assassination then she would be suspected simply because they had once loved one another. It only touched at the truth, but he had agreed without arguing. That was good, and it was also terrible.
Chapter Three
Sheer habit got Lina up early despite a night of being hunted through her dreams. She dressed in field clothes stained by mosses and tiny smears of blood, mostly hers, and only standing in a misted dawn-light did she pause, turning from her bike to go up through the main house to the kitchen seeking something to chase half-remembered horrors from her head.
Over the kettle’s hiss, she heard the old house door open again and came to the balcony to see Thiago walking to the truck, pausing when he saw her bike. Then, as if feeling her gaze, he turned to look up at her. She raised a hand, said, ‘Coffee?’ and when he shook his head, added, ‘I’m doing the small mammal transects.’
Normality. It always seemed so solid, until it wasn’t.
Thiago gave his short, inverted nod. ‘I’m off to the east villages. Want a hand after?’
‘If they’re busy,’ she meant the traps, ‘I’ll let you know.’
He nodded, gave a gentle sort of salute and then was gone, the truck’s too-loud engine quickly swallowed by trees and layers of mist. With her coffee in the flask waiting, Lina ought to have gone too but instead sat on the balcony, tipping her head up to an amber and pearlescent sky, listening to the meadow’s susurrations and the very first cirl bunting singing from a solitary birch tree. Above her, Iva had recarved the god Perun’s circle symbol into the wooden lintel, protecting them, but Iva was not here yet and the house was empty.
There was no reply from Jaco, but there was a ping from Autumn. Simple code to let the sender know when the other person was online. Lina let it activate and waited, pressing the tips of her fingers against the very edge of the tablet until the nailbeds were bloodless.
An app opened on her screen, an unknown account but a familiar call sign.
- Gemini. Pole Star. You heard then. We’ll get your family out now. One hour. Bakerloo to port 2. Use this contact only.
Scrabbling to type, stunned, Lina replied, Will do. Is there news of-
The app deleted itself.
Lina stared at the space it had occupied. Fuck, she thought, running a hand through her hair. She hadn’t even needed to ask for help, had been expecting them to say, A week, maybe two. Say that there was no danger. Fuck.
The call to her dad went unanswered the first time, and Lina curved over the tablet like someone sheltering a flame. ‘Wake up,’ she whispered, pressing the call icon again.
‘Lina?’ The screen lighting his sleep-creased face ghoulishly.
‘Dad,’ she spoke fast. ‘Dad, pay attention. I have friends coming to get you and Jericho out now. Take a small bag with a change of clothes, meds and water. They’ll be there in an hour. They’ll say Autumn sent them, okay?’
‘What?’ He was pushing himself up to sitting, blinking, frowning.
‘Quickly, Dad.’ Her hands were cold, all her blood pooling in her heart. ‘They’ll keep you both safe. Autumn, remember that.’
‘Already? But there’s no need–’
‘I’m coming to you,’ she interrupted. ‘I’ll meet you further along the line, okay? Dad, you have to go. It might be the only chance we get.’
He looked away from her, then back again. It was happening too fast, she thought. Or was she only out of practice?
‘Alright. We’ll go. But Lina, stay there.’
‘Thank you. Don’t worry a
bout me. Go get ready. Be careful.’
‘Lina...’
‘Go, Dad.’
He went and she wanted immediately to call him back.
She sent a meeting request to her line manager in Zurich, mentioning leave and travel permits, not mentioning her family until she could do so face-to-face. Use this contact only, Autumn had said, so she didn’t message Helda and instead rose, needing the physical exertion now and the dawning forest.
After she had cycled as far as the old road allowed, she left her bike among the dark, dusty leaves of faded peonies to walk on through the upper margins of the fog, and because it did not do to startle some of the wildlife, she made no effort to be quiet. Humming snatches of song out of habit, allowing her feet to land on brittle branches, her mind drifting between prison cells and the Bakerloo route twisting out through the city walls down to Folkestone. They would move through London in daylight, wait for evening to slip around the barriers, then to a safe house in the drought country of the High Weald. The next night, or the night after, down to the coast where Jaco would be waiting, or his replacement if he was lost. She remembered the route vaguely, although it hadn’t been hers and it might have changed.
There was a stream off to her right; a dunnock and a mistle thrush were both singing, a squirrel chirred alarm and its claws skittered audibly as it climbed. The air smelled of dawn and water as she reached the point in the valley where a small electronic beacon marked the first trap in her first transect of the morning. The path forked here, and there was a stretch of mud full of last night’s footprints. Lina frowned at it. A badger, some small mustelid, men. Two of them passing upslope. And up here they could only be those nationalist rebels leaving home. She would mention it to Thiago, but soon it would not be enough simply to delete the camera captures.