But Silene’s and Lina’s were both dead too. Lina looked out of the window at clouds blossoming dark against the damson spectral sky. It was the season for storms, although only normal ones here against the mountains, blessedly not the super-storms that mauled the Atlantic States.
‘Power surge or something?’ Xander said behind her, but it wasn’t that, Lina thought, remembering her tag data mapping a shadow and noticing the strange amber-eyed boy below, looking up at them holding something small and red in one pale fist.
‘No,’ she said. ‘It must be something electromagnetic to affect the tablets as well.’ Lightning began an intermittent white tracery between the peaks, but this sort of storm would consume itself quickly and leave them alone. ‘Maybe from the lightning.’ Maybe a mystery travelling across the mountains like an inverse searchlight.
‘Oh dear, I hope your Mr Ferdinando can sort it out soon,’ Silene said, her reflection in the glass, still seated, lifting her wine to pale painted lips, her fingers unsteady. ‘We really are rather cut off here, aren’t we? Out on our own. I thought with Dev here, and with it being ESF...’ She looked at her son and put her wine glass down, the base of it rattling against the wood. ‘Xander, darling, why on earth did we decide to come here? We could have gone to Zurich, or gosh, it’s not even peak fire season so we could have gone to Italy.’
Lina studied the woman’s profile. There were shadows beneath her make-up, although you had to be looking to spot them. I will not pity you, she thought to Christopher Wiley’s widow. Her sons, perhaps, but not her.
Xander shrugged, still frowning. ‘Was your idea. ESF was safe, you said. Whatever, Dev’s going to get here and it’ll be fine.’ He wasn’t looking up from his screen, and Lina wondered what he was doing, just how clever those soft fingers were.
‘But darling, it really is quite important to know what is happening, don’t you think?’
Her son muttered something under his breath, his spine hunching. It ought to have looked like self-protection but did not. Below them her other son, the adopted, tokenist charity one, lifted the hand holding the red object like a salute and Lina gave him a small wave.
‘I should go and see if Thiago needs a hand,’ she said, wanting to get away, but also ... it was bad enough having rogue data errors across her networks, but here, at the station?
‘It’s rebooting,’ Xander said.
If it had been the shadow, then it had moved on. Lina sighed, turned away from the window, wavering. ‘I didn’t give you my condolences,’ she said eventually. What had Thiago said? One less. ‘It must be very hard to have to leave home just now.’
Silene had been reaching again for her glass but now she drew back, her eyes moving restlessly between Lina, Xander, the window, the stairs; then she rose, smoothing her perfect, slave-sewn blouse. ‘Yes, naturally, but it was necessary.’ She touched her son’s shoulder, seemingly unaware of his shrugging her away. ‘I think I will go to my room. I am rather tired after our journey. Xander darling?’ He looked at her, his eyes angry but the contours of his face lax and undefined, making him again very young. ‘Xander, darling, will you come down with me?’
It looked like he would refuse, but then they were both gone, and Lina was alone with the lamplight and the dark sky lit with distant flashes like celestial fireflies.
Chapter Seven
Night was fully settled over them by the time Lina and Thiago were done checking and rebooting all their electronics. It was a fair test in a way of exactly what the shadow did and didn’t do. Anything mechanical or not actively using electricity while the shadow passed was untouched, but everything else simply turned quietly off. Just a couple of fuses blown from a surge as the power came back on, and even if this issue paled compared to others, it was still an irritant in an evening full of them.
She had been good at reading people once, her life and that of others hanging on her ability to read faces, hands, habits. But there was something between the mother and her eldest boy that did not fit neatly into grief or a relationship foundering on emotional repression. She sighed and pushed the thought away. Neither one wanted to be here, so if they were having second thoughts, then perhaps they would leave once Devendra Kapoor arrived.
‘Done?’ Thiago said, turning off the barn light, the unlit dark slipping a little closer.
‘Yes. Solar panels okay?’ Lina tipped her head back against the wall of the old house, watching there-and-gone stars between clouds. Down on the low ground frogs were calling an alto note beneath the crickets and the grass.
‘We’ll find out tomorrow.’ Thiago leaned against the doorframe to her left, facing her but looking up at the new house where one light remained on behind drawn curtains. Xander’s, Lina thought.
‘Oh, look what the boy gave me,’ she said, remembering, pulling a small figure from her pocket and handing it to Thiago. Kai had appeared silently beside her as she was checking the camera on the track and handed it to her without a word, wandering back out into the dark grass before she could think to tell him to get inside, before she could remember that it was nothing to do with her how Silene Wiley chose to parent her children.
‘A martenitsa,’ Thiago said slowly, tilting it into a sliver of light. It was a figure of a girl made from red and white wool, a simple thing, quickly made. This one looked a little mournful, bedraggled by the months that she must have been hung out in the forest.
‘Mmm.’ It was strange that neither she nor Thiago had noticed it before, if Kai had found it in the meadow. Perhaps Iva had hung it there in the spring on one of the flowering bushes, the blackthorn or greengages where only a small boy’s intent eyes would spot it. Still though... ‘He’s a little...’ fey, lost, familiar.
Thiago hung the martenitsa from an edge of stone in the wall and gave a short, low laugh. ‘The mother’s worse.’
The frogs in their pond fell silent, frightened by a fox maybe, a deer, something seeking a drink or seeking them. Lina said carefully, ‘You won’t do anything, will you? To make them leave?’
Thiago’s gaze shifted to her face, his attention like a touch. ‘Like what?’
‘Like ... Oh god, I don’t know, T.’ She smiled at him, his strong face made subtle by the shadows. ‘Like offend them, or look so fierce they fear for their lives.’ Those last few words hung in the air and she heard herself make a small sound at which Thiago jerked, then subsided against the wood again.
‘Would it be so bad?’ he said.
The frogs were still silent, and Lina had no idea what to say. No, if she were thinking only of herself, then no. But it was terrible enough fearing for her father and Jericho; she could not imagine what it had taken to make someone like Thiago hide away, and she couldn’t see him lose his sanctuary too.
‘Promise me, T,’ she said, without answering. ‘Don’t give them reason to fear you.’
He was still watching her, studying her face as moths wove patterns through the light. ‘I won’t,’ he said quietly. Then perhaps pointedly. ‘Where are they now?’
Lina closed her eyes. ‘Outside London,’ she said.
‘You’ll keep them away from here.’
Isla’s reassurance and Silene Wiley’s strange, hooded comment, Xander’s pale fingers. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Yes.’ The frogs began to call again. One, then another, summoning bravery.
She managed to largely avoid them for the next few days, doubling up on the small mammal transects so that she was out from before dawn and into the evening. But then they were done, all their data needing processing, and although she could have found reason to postpone it, a voice in her head was whispering be unremarkable.
Then, finally, there came the message she had been waiting for.
- Jaco. Meridian. Delivered to stage 4 with ESF papers. Good luck.
Her father and Jericho were in Gdansk. Tomorrow they would be on a train crossing Poland towards
... either Lviv or Slovakia. She didn’t know which route was safest, but Vitaly would. They had papers and a guide, and Thiago knew someone in Botevgrad who could keep them for a while without residency permits. The risks of staying somewhere unknown weighed against that of raising Silene or Xander’s curiosity. It was impossible to be sure, but she had chosen anyway.
So this morning she was in the kitchen helping Iva prepare breakfast and, due to Silene Wiley’s presence on the balcony, listening to an English language radio station. Xander was on the sofa, fitted solidly into a corner with a tablet propped on his thighs. Lina had seen Kai only as flashes of movement in the meadow or the edges of doorways, and he wasn’t here now, which made her want to say something out of pity and anger but she daren’t. She’d forgotten this; the moments of cowardice on which you built survival.
Iva handed her a plate of melon slices, the colours a soft spectrum from ivory to jade, and Lina set it on the table where sunlight cast a shortening line across the wood. Condensation was runnelling down the water jug, Iva brought over sliced bread still warm from the baker in the village, and neither Xander nor Silene had offered to help.
‘Breakfast is–’ she stopped, Xander’s head coming up sharply.
‘The investigation into the assassination of Internal Security Minister Christopher Wiley is said to be progressing well. Several members of the immediate terrorist cell, and their associates, are in custody with further arrests expected. Reports of deaths in custody remain unconfirmed by the police. One government source has suggested that ultimate responsibility for the murder might lie closer to home, but was unwilling to say whether they thought there was a traitor within State.’
The news moved on to a bomb attack in Manchester and even though no-one had been talking before, and even though there was birdsong spilling in through the open doors, the room was silent.
‘I don’t understand,’ Silene whispered. She had risen and was standing in the balcony doorway, one hand braced against the frame and the other pressing into her cheek, painted nails like pink tears. ‘Xander darling, I don’t understand.’
‘It’s the terrorists, Mum,’ the boy said, frowning at his screen although Lina suspected he was watching his mother. ‘They’re just looking for more terrorists.’
‘Yes. The resistance. Yes, of course.’ Her fingers tightened on the frame briefly before she took a step into the room. ‘Do you know, I think I might go and sit in the sun for a little while.’
Iva turned back to the kitchen counter and Lina still hadn’t moved. Torn between wanting to say something, anything, and the words, Reports of deaths in custody. Silene went down the stairs quickly, unsteadily, and once she had gone Lina forced herself to come forward and perch on a chair facing Xander.
‘I’m sorry. We should have turned the radio off. I didn’t think.’
He shot a glance at her from beneath the fashionable tangle of his hair, and she wished she could separate out her heartache from her loathing.
‘It wouldn’t be on the news if they’d just fucking arrest everyone, would it?’
The breeze brought a whisper of ice from the peaks and Lina took a breath although her mind was scattering. ‘It sounds like they have everyone they think was actually involved.’ She added cautiously. ‘Will you have to go back to identify anyone, do you think?’
He laughed like it hurt. ‘You think they need anyone to actually check who they arrested?’ Lina stared at him, startled, and he added quickly, ducking his head, ‘I don’t care. As long as people stop spreading lies and they stop going on about it on the fucking news.’ But he was scrolling web pages that looked like news sites, as if torn between the need to know, and the need to forget.
‘They will soon, I’m sure,’ Lina said, although was that not almost as bad? She stood and said softly, remembering pity. ‘Will you come and eat something?’
He shrugged, made some noncommittal noise and she didn’t push, but as she turned, she saw something else appear on his screen. A window filled with scrolling code. What are you doing? she wanted to ask. Where are you looking? And what for? He curved over his screen again, the breadth of ribcage like a shield, and Lina left him.
‘Lina,’ Iva said very quietly as they sat eating melon, watching cloud shadows race the contours of the mountains. The data shadow had reappeared late last night in the valley near Beli Iskar. ‘When will they arrive, your family?’
‘I don’t know,’ Lina said, tilting her head a little towards Xander.
‘I hope it is soon then,’ Iva said, who did not know about James, lining up melon peel on her plate like ribs. They both flinched when Xander spoke.
‘Why’re your family coming here?’
Lina turned, aware that Iva did not, aware that swallows were alarm calling over the meadow, mobbing a passing sparrowhawk. The teenager was watching her with that same dark frown as earlier. ‘Holiday,’ she said, smiling, lifting one shoulder. ‘ESF agreed they could come, as they’ve never been.’ It was so implausible that her voice came close to wavering. But perhaps because it was the ESF, rather than a State, he would believe her.
‘They got permits?’
‘Yes.’
Iva picked up the plates; only she and Lina had eaten. Xander looked down at his screen then back up. ‘Where from? Not London?’
Oh god, she thought. ‘Yes, London. That’s where I grew up.’ The swallows had stopped calling, and clouds were gaining traction in the sky. She rose as if the conversation were over, picked up her mug.
‘Huh,’ she heard Xander say quietly, then a little louder, ‘you don’t sound it.’
No, she thought, I don’t. Or at least not like the Londoners you know. In another time and place she might have said so. Now, here, she only refilled her coffee, murmured about work waiting and slipped away down the stairs. She was on the ground floor, two paces from the door when she spotted the other son in a bedroom. He was curled beside the patio doors, his forehead against the glass, looking as breakable and abandoned as the bones of a bird.
‘Oh Kai,’ Lina whispered and went to kneel beside him. She hadn’t seen his mother even talk to him yet. ‘Are you okay, sweetie?’ Why did you ask such a thing when it was so obviously untrue? She thought of Jericho cradling the cat and even though she wished Kai’s family far away and forgotten, she was suddenly glad to be here, sitting beside a boy who could easily have become her adopted brother if the lists had fallen differently on that day.
Kai turned his head towards her without opening his eyes. His voice was quiet but very calm. ‘Is she sleeping? She was taking tablets. Is she sleeping or dying?’ Lina watched the curve of his eyelashes.
‘Sleeping,’ she guessed. ‘She’s not ill, she is just very sad and tired.’
‘She’s sad about him? Why?’
Lina saw again Xander’s bent back and rested the tips of her fingers on Kai’s shoulder. ‘I expect you’re all feeling sad, aren’t you? But you’re here now, and you have each other.’ The words tasted false and Kai shrugged beneath her touch.
‘What will happen to me?’
‘What do you mean, sweetie?’
The child looked up at her for the first time, his eyes golden. ‘Can I go outside?’
‘It’s raining,’ she said, because it had just begun, softly, ‘What did you mean?’
He seemed to take her words as consent because he pushed himself to sitting. ‘Nothing,’ he said.
Moving the hand that had touched his shoulder to take gentle hold of his fingers, Lina waited. Not stopping him moving, but also still asking. He sighed. ‘I thought she would want me afterwards, but she will send me away.’
‘No!’ Lina said, her whole body recoiling. ‘No, she wouldn’t. You belong with her.’ Kai’s expression was strange and yearning, then he walked past her and she let him go, kneeling on the floor with her head bent, motherlessness clamouring for space
in her heart.
Chapter Eight
Because the sun had cleared the sky and the very last of the snow was evanescing on the peaks, Lina went up to the kitchen to get coffee then sat on the balcony instead of returning to the lab. When her work was just on the tablet, she often did this, so she made herself do it now too. Besides, none of the Wileys were up here, and the rise and fall of Iva chatting with her niece made a calm songline in the hot air.
A roe deer, a young male, high-stepped delicately out from the trees. Lina touched her tablet with the innate urge to know if a number lay digitised beneath his fur, to see life in heart rate and hormones while she watched him choose between purple clovers and the tall, bright stars of chamomile flowers. But then he froze, one foreleg lifted and his ears forward, then pivoted on his rear legs and was gone, the grasses rippling in his wake. Heart rate elevated, borderline significant increase in adrenaline. Lina watched in the direction the deer had watched and, after a few seconds, saw Silene. She was walking slowly, looking from the tablet in her hand to the path in front of her, the thin material of her dress lifting on the breeze. Perhaps thirty metres from the house she stopped, studying the screen, and even though Lina could not make out her expression, something in the angle of head and arms spoke either outrage or fear.
News reports, perhaps. She had fled from the radio, but like Xander she might be unable to resist. Lina had been too young to do the same for her mother, but she remembered it from later, that compulsion to watch the reprisals on the news, to watch the trials of people she had known by names not their own, of people she had failed to save.
Silene pushed her tablet into the handbag she was, ridiculously, carrying, and took out something small. It must have been medicine because she shook it onto her palm, extracted a water bottle and swallowed whatever she held. Then she pressed the bottle against her cheek and stood there beneath the beating sun for a long moment before coming on towards the house, her steps just as slow as before but less certain. Lina listened to the front door open and close two floor below, sharp-heeled footsteps and then another door closing, the balcony door below Lina opening, silence.
This Is Our Undoing Page 6
